Silvia Benso: Viva Voce: Conversations with Italian Philosophers

Viva Voce: Conversations with Italian Philosophers Book Cover Viva Voce: Conversations with Italian Philosophers
SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy
Silvia Benso
SUNY Press
2017
Paperback $25.95
318

Reviewed by: Flaminia Incecchi (St. Andrews University)

In recent years there has been a palpable growth of interest in Italian thought. Perhaps, one could claim that the popularity of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Gianni Vattimo, and (more recently) Adriana Cavarero, has invited the Anglophone gaze towards the Italian intellectual panorama. The scholarship’s focus has been twofold: on the conceptual roots of the Italian philosophical tradition, as well as its contemporary trends. As far as the first segment is concerned, a number of works are worth mentioning: Giorgio Pinton’s translation of Eugenio Garin’s History of Italian Philosophy (2008) – a monumental guide which in two volumes covers Italian thinkers from Boethius to Emanuele Severino; Zakiya Hanafi’s translation of Roberto Esposito’s ‘The Return of Italian Philosophy’ (2009), a short piece that aims at tracing parallels between contemporary debates in continental philosophy – biopolitics among those – and the Italian philosophical tradition; Rocco Rubini’s The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger (2012), a lucid and erudite exploration of the reaction of Italian intellectuals to the Renaissance, analysing how and why Italian thinkers have historically experienced a sense of ‘Renaissance shame’; Brian and Rebecca Copenhaver’s From Kant to Croce: Modern Philosophy in Italy 1800-1950 (2012), in which the authors offer several translations of some thinkers who were previously unknown and unaccessible to Anglophone readers. The range covered by the book quite impressive, extending from severely understudied figures such as Pasquale Galluppi and Bertrando Spaventa, but also covering Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci.

The other front on which the scholarship is growing steadily was inaugurated by Giovanna Borradori, with Recoding Metaphysics: The New Italian Philosophy (1988), a collection of essays by high profile Italian thinkers, such as Umberto Eco, Gianni Vattimo, and Emanuele Severino. Today, the translation of Roberto Esposito’s Living Thought: Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy (2012), as well as the forthcoming Journal of Italian Philosophy, make access to the Italian intellectual front easier than ever before. That said, the medium through which Anglophone readers can gain familiarity with contemporary Italian thought, is SUNY’s excellent book series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (2007 – ) edited by Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, of which Viva Voce: Conversations with Italian Philosophers is a part of. The series features several translations from the Italian. Among them, Luigi Payerson’s Truth and Interpretation (2013), Carlo Sini’s Ethics of Writing (2009), and Gianni Vattimo’s Weak Thought (2012), just to name a few. The first book in the series, Contemporary Italian Philosophy (2007) is a collection of essays written by leading Italian philosophers, which in Benso’s words “added some new Italian voices to the continental philosophical tradition as known in the English-speaking countries, that is, a tradition deeply focused on French and German contributions” (Benso: 2017:1).

The aim of Viva Voce: Conversations with Italian Philosophers is in close conversation with, if not a continuation of, the project begun by Benso and Schroeder in 2007 with Contemporary Italian Philosophy. Similarly, Viva Voce presents readers a snapshot over the work of twenty-three contemporary Italian thinkers working within different fields of philosophy, both in the continental and the analytic tradition. Thus, Viva Voce furthers the scope of perspectives it wishes to introduce to the Anglophone world in bringing Italian analytic voices to the fore – an element that was absent in Contemporary Italian Philosophy, which was dealing with the continental tradition specifically. Benso writes:

“Despite the recent increase in attention and recognition paid to contemporary Italian philosophy, a volume that provides a contextualisation – that is, a tracing of the general interconnections, threads, and fabrics that nourish the emergence of contemporary Italian thinkers in their magnificent individualities and enable them to be the thresholds … is still missing from the Anglo-American philosophical landscape. Albeit in a minimalist format, the goal of the present volume is precisely to work toward filling of minimising such a lack” (Benso: 2016:9).

Viva Voce pledges no thematic allegiance. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the thinkers interviewed have different philosophical orientations, and work within different areas of the philosophical landscape. For navigation purposes, Benso has grouped thinkers along six thematic lines: (1) Ethics, Passions, Practices: Remo Bodei, Eugenio Lecaldano, Salvatore Natoli, Carlo Sini, Carmelo Vigna; (2) History, Justice, Communities: Adriana Cavarero, Giacomo Marramao, Fulvio Tessitore, Gianni Vattimo, Salvatore Vacca; (3) Imagination, Art, Technology: Mario Costa, Sergio Givone, Mario Perniola; (4) Rationality, Sciences, Experience: Evandro Agazzi, Giulio Giorello, Paolo Parrini; (5) Being, Nothing, Temporality, Place: Enrico Berti, Virgilio Melchiorre, Ugo Perone, Emanuele Severino, Vincenzo Vitiello; (6) Human Beings, Evil and Transcendence: Giovanni Ferretti, Giuseppe Riconda. Having excluded the thematic selection, the criteria informing the array of thinkers is marked by two principal factors: the “theoretical vigour that thinkers have displayed in terms of making meaningful and lasting contributions to the Italian philosophical landscape” (Benso: 2016:9), and that all were born before 1948. As the title suggests, the book format is highly innovative. Thinkers recount themselves in their own terms by answering a set of questions Benso posed over email. The motivation behind such stylistic choice is explained by Benso in the following way:

“the practices of historicism, hermeneutics, and deconstruction have taught us how all historical accounts bespeak the perspective of the narrator. In light of such considerations, it has been the more modest choice of this editor to let the story be told not by a grand narrative but by those who, through their scholarly writings as well as their academic lectures, public conferences, and performances of various kinds, have contributed to delineate such a history. Thus, the format of the interview as been chosen as the most appropriate mode of narration for the volume.” (Benso: 2016:7)

The questions are formulated adopting a “zoom-in/zoom-out technique” (Benso: 2016:8). The result is an interesting temporal movement: the first set of question asks the author about their intellectual past, in terms of their provenance, as well as the external influences and traditions they subscribed to; the second set is geared towards the present of the thinker as they envisage it, here they are asked to outline the basic tenets of their philosophical positions, the originality of their contributions, and the timelessness thereof; finally, thinkers are asked to voice their opinion about the future of philosophy given the current world, as well as offering some conclusive thoughts for philosophers and non-philosophers alike. As Benso puts it:

“The interviews follow a three-step cadence. First, they star with more general questions that address issues of provenance, external (domestic and foreign) influences, and lineages. Next, they move to a self-description offered by each interviewed philosopher and aimed at highlighting the main tenets, theoretical originality, and timeliness of each individual position. Finally, the interviews dare to glance toward the future by asking for possible ways, suggestions, and advice through which philosophy can contribute to the delineation of such a future” (Benso: 2016:8).

In the Introduction: ‘Italian Philosophy – Threshold between Cultures’, Benso raises the issue of consonance between nationality and philosophy as a potential problematic, she notes: “One question that lurks behind the denomination ‘Italian thinkers’ is, understandably, the appropriateness or even desirability of framing philosophy within national borders and identities” (Benso: 2016:2). Benso escapes the impasse by referring to the notion of geographical specificity which entails a particular “socio-politcal-economic-historic-cultural landscape” and in virtue of these factors, “Italian philosophy retains its own specificity and individuality – its own uniqueness and difference” (Benso: 2016:3). Although Benso raises a valid point by appealing to the notion of specificity, it is this reviewer’s belief that the Introduction would have acquired a greater depth had the author addressed the contested nature of Italian philosophy, from Italian philosopher’s own perspectives. The history of Italian philosophy is constellated by thinkers reflecting on the link between philosophy and national borders in two interconnected ways: the very validity of ascribing a national qualifier to philosophy, and the nature of Italian philosophy as such. Perhaps the most explicit debate in this direction was Luigi Palmieri and Bertrando Spaventa’s post-Risorgimento tête-à-tête, where the former insisted on the national character of philosophy, and the latter on its universal nature, which by definition excludes the question of nationality. Thus, integrating the question of national philosophy with the testament from Italy’s own past of contestation, would have given Anglophone readers an even deeper grasp of the Italian difference, and exorcised Benso’s veiled, but nonetheless present, fear of ‘nationalism’:

“There is an Italian language and thus an Italian literature, philosophy, and culture based on such a language much earlier than Italy becomes a sovereign state in the modern sense. In this sense, Italian philosophy as a cultural event based on language precedes the formation of all possibilities of an Italian nationalism based on geographical borders. Being Italian is a cultural event ahead of all belonging to a territory, a soil, a nation (or even a blood lineage).” (Benso: 2016:5-6).

On a related note, Benso underlines another significant aspect of Italian thought connected with its interaction with the ‘foreign’ philosophical world, namely, that of porosity. Ascribing to Dante the merit highlighting this characteristic of Italian philosophy, Benso notes: “a fundamental aspect of Italian philosophy has nevertheless to do with a peculiar penetrability, permeability, and fluidity with respect to the possibility of infiltration by foreign elements – in the specific, the influence of non-Italian philosophies and thinkers on the Italian philosophical landscape” (Benso: 2016:4). Further on Benso elaborates the notion of porosity, and describes the Italian philosophical model as “osmotic”, in the sense that it resembles:

“An alchemist’s or magician’s laboratory where experiments of fusions, amalgams, and transformations happen and new configurations are creates as a result. To be an Italian philosopher might precisely mean to be such an alchemic, magic, perhaps kaleidoscopic threshold – an opening and a door onto the outside through which inside and outside enter in contact, communicate, and open up to new visions rather than a gate that ultimately defensively closes on itself in a nationalistic move” (Benso: 2016:6-7).

Through the interviews, readers learn about the turbulent philosophical climate of post-war Italy. The demise of Fascism brought Idealism along with it, and most thinkers interviewed reflect on the opening frontiers of the philosophical horizon after decades of idealist ‘hegemony’. This is nicely put by Vattimo, as he reflects on his university experience begun in 1941: “those were the years just after the post-World War II reconstruction. They were also the years after Fascism. A common idea was the need to get out of the cultural isolation Fascism created. That meant no more focusing on Croce and Gentile, no more idealism […]” (Benso: 2016:108). The voluntary act of forgetting Idealism lead to an exponential interest in ‘imported ideas’, in engagement with outlooks that had been developed and circulated abroad while Italy was preoccupied with its own philosophy. From existentialism to analytic philosophy, new currents of thought started occupying the minds of young Italian intellectuals. An emblematic testimony of the scarce appeal of Idealism on the new generation of Italian intellectuals is that of the interviewed. Among them, only Enrico Berti (Benso: 2016:203) and Emanuele Severino (Benso: 2016:234) list Gentile among their influences. The case of the Italian post-War philosophical climate was that of a nascent pluriverse, a fertile soil where imported ideas mixed and grew following unpredictable way, much like what Benso describes as the ‘osmotic’ model of Italian thought. Of course Viva Voce cannot by definition be an all-encompassing collection, but it serves as a good indicator of the heterogeneity of philosophical orientations Italy opened up to, the variety of fields those interviewed are active in is remarkable: from feminism (Adriana Cavarero), to the aesthetics of communication and the technological sublime (Mario Costa), to Historismus (Fulvio Tessitore), the philosophy of logic, mathematics, and empirical sciences (Evandro Agazzi), just to name a few. The very diversity of schools of thought and areas of enquiry, makes it almost daunting to find a fil rouge binding the thinkers, which leads to a further difficulty: what constitutes the Italian difference? It is this reviewer’s modest opinion, that its essence is not so much rooted in content, but in methodology. What thinkers share is the approach to the discipline: the degree of philological attention and detail, which instead of suffocating their philosophical voice, makes it all the more alluring.

Overall, Benso’s Viva Voce makes an elegant contribution to the growing field of Italian thought in a number of ways. Firstly, it widens the horizon of the discipline by presenting new voices and perspectives previously unknown to the Anglophone world. Secondly, in doing so and by adopting the format it does, readers get a vivid picture of post-war philosophical climate in Italy, characterised by its reaction to Idealism as well as the profound cleavage between secular and Catholic thinkers. Thirdly, that Benso does not comment the interviews either at the beginning or at the end of the work, which amplifies the feeling of ‘encounter’ the reader experiences with the interviewed. That also leaves it at the discretion of the reader to form an opinion of the contested Italian difference, as well as identifying possible synergies between those interviewed and thinkers of the reader’s own tradition. Aside from contributing to the spread of Italian thought, Benso’s work also opens a wide array of possibilities for scholarship more generally. That those interviewed are relatively unknown in the Anglophone world, coupled with the dialogical structure of Benso’s book allows a self-presentation on the thinkers’s past that is a sort of mis a nu, quite befitting considering that the audience is not acquainted with them. This presentation style might be an interesting format for future works with a similar aim.

References:

Benso, Silvia. Viva Voce: Conversations with Italian Philosophers. New York: State University of New York Press. 2017. Print.

Benso, Silvia, and Schroeder, Brian. Contemporary Italian Philosophy: Crossing the Borders of Ethics, Politics, and Religion. New York: State University of New York Press. 2007. Print.

Borradori, Giovanna. “Recoding Metaphysics.” Recoding Metaphysics: The New Italian Philosophy. Ed. Borradori, Giovanna. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. 1 – 26. Print.

Copenhaver, Brian., and Rebecca. Copenhaver. From Kant to Croce: Modern Philosophy in Italy 1800-1950. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Print.

Esposito, Roberto. Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy. Pensiero vivente: Origine e attualità della filosofia italiana. Trans. Hanafi, Zakiya. Cultural Memory in the Present. Ed. Vries, Mieke Bal and Hent de. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012. Print.

—. “The Return of Italian Philosophy (translated by Zakiya Hanafi).” Diacritics 39.3 (2009): 55 – 61. Print.

Garin, Eugenio. History of Italian Philosophy. Trans. Pinton, Giorgio. Vol. II: From Enlightenment to Risorgimento. II vols. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Print.
—. History of Italian Philosophy. Trans. Pinton, Giorgio. Vol. I. II vols. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Print.

Rubini, Rocco. The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Print.

 

Mark Rowlands: Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography

Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography Book Cover Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography
Mark Rowlands
Oxford University Press
2016
Hardback £41.49
224

Reviewed by: Marina Trakas (Académie de Caen)

Memory and the Self (2017), authored by Mark Rowlands, is a fascinating book that has all the qualities of good philosophical writing. It deals with a topic, memory, that has not received too much attention in philosophy of mind. It inquires about specific issues of memory that have received no attention at all, and it makes use of ideas from different philosophical traditions. Additionally it appeals to a various range of arguments, including experimental and introspective evidence to justify his claims. What is more, this delicious “combo” for the mind comes in a lucid and elegant prose, extremely clear and fluid, even for non-professional philosophers—and also for non-native English speakers— which at times achieves a literary style characteristic of fiction authors; a style that nowadays has unfortunately become more and more rare in academic philosophical writing.

The main aim of Rowland’s book is to give a better account of the key role played by memories in the constitution of personal identity and the explanation of the unity of a person. Probably the reader is familiar with the psychological-continuity views of personal identity that privileges memory as the essential factor for personhood: as Locke (1690) explained, as long as an individual possesses memories, the one remembering and the one remembered are the same person. Nonetheless, this quite intuitive conceptualization of personal identity presents some problems widely known in philosophical literature, such as the problem of circularity: how can memory explain personal identity if it presupposes personal identity? Besides these more metaphysical questions that go beyond the scope of the book, there are other common sense considerations that cast doubt on the explanatory role of the memory criterion for accounting for personal identity. The anthropologist Jannelle Taylor, writing about his mother who developed dementia, considers that despite the massive loss of memories and “all the changes she has been through, my mother ‘still’ is in many ways the cheerful affectionate person I have always known her to be. Mom still enjoys gentle joking and teasing, as she always has. She still enjoys being around people, still beams radiantly at small children when she sees them, still enjoys the give and take of conversation.” (2008, p. 316). Rowlands is of the same opinion as Taylor: regardless of the Alzheimer of Patsy Hasset, his wife’s grandfather, he felt that Patsy was still there, not simply as a human being or a biological organism, but as a person, as a psychological entity with some defining personality traits. And in fact, this opinion seems to be shared by most of us: according to an empirical study done by Jesse Prinz and Shaun Nichols (2016), people in general consider that the loss of memories does not threaten the identity of a person, in comparison with a change of moral values that is considered to have a devastating impact on it.

So our ordinary understanding of the basis of the continuity and unity of our identity over time gives us two ideas that in principle are contradictory. On the one hand, we think that the loss of memories of past experiences does not undermine personal identity; but on the other hand, we also have the intuition that memories play a certain important role in making us who we are. In Memory and the Self, Rowlands provides a clever, original—and also poetic—response that makes these two ideas compatible: memory makes us who we are even if, like Patsy Hasset, we have lost our memories, because memories of past experiences can persist and continue to shape our personhood when these past experiences have been forgotten, that is, when the content of our memories has disappeared. Rowlands calls “Rilkean memories” these mutated memories that do not have content. The origin of the name is due to the inspiration drawn from a passage of the only novel written by Rainer Maria Rilke that makes reference to memories that have been forgotten and are thus “nameless” but return in a new form: “they have changed into our very blood into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves” (Rowlands, 2017, p. 53). As we shall see later, Rilkean memories refer to behavioural and bodily dispositions, feelings, moods and sensations, which have arisen from episodic memories but which have lost their contents and have become pure mental acts.

The characterisation of Rilkean memories and the investigation of its role in the construction and continuity of personal identity over time led Rowlands to accomplish another important task: to reconfigure our understanding of the structure of memory. Whereas a traditional analytical philosopher understands a memory as a mental representation with a tripartite structure composed of an act, an object and a mode of presentation, Rowlands proposes a four-constituent model of memory, in which (a) the act of remembering is of fundamental importance to understand the structure of a memory experience; (b) the intentional object, that is, the episode remembered (that exists independently of the act of remembering), is different from the content of a memory; and (c) the act, the content and the mode of presentation are conceptually distinguishable but inseparable: the content of a memory exists when the act of remembering operates certain transformations on the episode remembered and presents it in a certain mode. The mineness is one essential mode in which the episode remembered is presented, and this is what explains the undeniable presence of the self in every memory of our past experiences.

Therefore, a novel explanation of the way that memories make us who we are as well as a novel explanation of the structure of memory are the two major accomplishments that Rowlands intends to achieve in Memory and the Self. It remains to be seen (and evaluated) how the author develops these explanations through his book and how both of them are linked together.

Phenomenology, and the autobiographical self

But first, a remark about Rowlands’ methodology. Rowlands’ writings have been widely influenced by the phenomenological tradition, and this book is not an exception.

On one hand, Rowlands remarks (chapter 1) that whereas analytical philosophy and cognitive science have always privileged the mental content over the mental act to account for cognitive states, the phenomenological tradition has done exactly the contrary: it has privileged the study of mental acts as acts without objectifying them, in order to understand the preconditions of our experiences. Mental content, appearences in phenomenological terms, are only studied to get to the act. And this phenomenological method is exactly what Rowlands adopts: he begins with general intuitive ideas of the type of “memories makes us who we are although their lost does not undermine personal identity”, and “there are some behaviours and moods that connect the person to his past and that are thus relevant to the continuity of identity through time”, ideas that could be understood as appearences, and then he works backwards from them in order to identify the features of the act of remembering in virtue of which memories, behaviours and moods, can appear this way. Rowlands considers essential the recovery and privileged role of the act of remembering in order to understand memory, develop a workable conception of memory content and make sense of the idea that memories make us who we are.

On the other hand, Rowlands makes another use of the phenomenological method to delineate his conceptualization of the notion of self. Whereas in philosophy most concerns about the self are part of a metaphysical project that tries to understand the nature of personhood, its essential properties, its persistence through time, etc., Rowlands proposes to bracket these metaphysical questions and examine the way the self presents itself to us. If someone asks us how we would define our own self, we would probably answer her by describing our beliefs about ourselves, our values, our attitudes, our desires, etc. This description would probably be different if we were asked the same question at a different time. The idea that there are multiple selves and that each of them refers to a particular configuration of our self-knowledge at a particular time is not new. In psychology, this is a common conception of a self. The psychologist Martin Conway, for example, considers that the self refers to conceptual self-structures that are not temporally specified, such as self-schemas, self-scripts, possible selves, self-images, self-with-other units, relational schemas, attitudes, values and other self-beliefs (2005, 2009). These configurations of abstract self-knowledge, that Conway calls “the conceptual self”, are formed and ultimately grounded in episodic memories of specific experiences, and can change through time. This conception of the self constitutes a good workable notion—and a good strategy—that allows any theorist to make use of a notion of self and at the same time to set aside all the metaphysical questions related to the self (that would require an entirely different kind of research). I used it myself for this purpose. I considered that the different selves (past selves, present self, future selves) are just many and different configurations of self-knowledge, different conceptual selves in Conway’s terminology, that constitute parts of the same human being who perdures through time (Trakas, 2014, pp. 131-132). Nonetheless, Rowlands goes beyond this idea and supposes that there is a self that transcends these empirical and multiple configurations of the self. He defines this self, called “autobiographical self”, as the principles of the network of these concrete episodes of self-understanding; their laws of appearance. I have trouble understanding how this notion of autobiographical self, which is in certain way a sort of Kantian self, and thus a transcendental self, can explain the unity of the self and its distinctness from other selves (Rowlands, 2017, p. 84) without being similar to the notion of metaphysical self. I think that the practical solution to avoid a metaphysical inquiry, would be to just state (as I did) that these episodes of self-understanding or configurations of self-knowledge constitute parts of the same human being, and that they are interconnected between them because the physical continuity of the human being assures some degree of psychological continuity. This strategy does not suggest, as Rowlands does, that the principle or structure from which all the different episodes of understanding emerge is itself a self. Rowlands should have said more about the autobiographical self to prevent their readers from thinking that he is actually engaged in a metaphysical explanation of the self (even if he explicitly denies it).

Maybe Rowlands introduced this unitary notion of self in order to account for the unfolding characteristic of memory between a self who remembers what a former self experienced. Rowlands mentions the two “selves” involved in memory while discussing the differences between the notions of autobiographical self and narrative self. According to Rowlands, the autobiographical self is not the same as the narrative self and entirely rescinds from the question of whether the self has a narrative structure (Rowlands, 2017, pp. 85-87). Nonetheless, the autobiographical self is compatible with narrative accounts of self-understanding that conceive that the self who remembers adopts the position of narrator with respect to the self that originally experienced. Rowlands calls them R-self and W-self respectively. Both of them are conceptually distinguishable but not ultimately separable, because both of them—the self that is written and the self who reads what is written—form the autobiographical self. But once again, we do not need to suppose a transcendental self to explain the essential unfolding of the self that characterizes memory. Neither do we need to understand this unfolding of the self in narrative terms. We can forget about narrative and about any transcendental conception of the self, and simply state that a present self, that is nothing more than a particular configuration of self-knowledge at a given time, can have access to previous selves and their experiences because they all belong to the same human being. The numerical continuity and the degree of psychological continuity implied in the fact of belonging to the same human being would guarantee the access (to some extent) to past configurations of self-knowledge and past experiences, and thus the unfolding of the self and the possibility of self-reflection through time that are characteristic of memory.

Rilkean memories (and episodic and autobiographical memories)

The disquisition about the nature of the self implied in the claim that “memories make us who we are” is not presented at the beginning of the book but in chapter 4. After a first chapter that constitutes a condensed summary of all the ideas developed in the book—which deserves a second reading after finishing the book, in order to get a better picture of the whole—, the next two chapters (2 and 3) are focused on the characterization of Rilkean memories.

Rowlands does not intend to directly prove the existence of Rilkean memories: “Rilkean memories are theoretical posits whose existential credentials will be established by the sort of explanatory work they do” (Rowlands, 2017, p. 55). But further on: “if they are to play an explanatory role of certain sort [explaining how memories make us who we are], they must have certain features”.  In a certain way, Rowlands forces the readers to accept the existence of Rilkean memories: how will the explanatory work they do establish their existence if their characterization is conceived in a way that they could successfully accomplish this explanatory work? In any case, this tricky argument is not so relevant; readers avid of understanding embodied and affective phenomena neglected in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, will become immediately sympathetic to the idea of Rilkean memories.

Furthermore, there are examples of Rilkean memories in literature and poetry, and it is also easy to think of everyday cases. Embodied Rilkean memories refer to patterns of behavioural as well as bodily dispositions inscribed in the body that originated in the past: a curvature of the spine and a consequent back pain that originated in successive episodes of bad posture while writing as a child, a tendency to talk in a very loud voice during a normal conversation originated in successive episodes of conversation with parents who speak too loudly, are (personal) examples of embodied Rilkean memories. Affective Rilkean memories make reference to sensations, feelings and moods strongly environmentally embedded, which have a very low probability of occurring without the requisite environment. The famous episode of la madeleine de Proust, the nostalgia that arises when walking around our hometown left a long time ago, are cases of Rilkean affective memories. These behaviours, bodily dispositions, moods, feelings and sensations can appear when the initial episodic memories have vanished, can coexist with them, or can exist shortly before the onset of them (like Proust’s madeleine).

Rilkean memories can exclusively arise from memories that are person specific in order to play a role in the constitution of the person and, as Rowlands argues, only episodic memories are sufficiently specific to their subject. The same procedural memories, semantic memories, even semantic autobiographical memories, could be in principle possessed by two different people. So Rilkean memories, Rowlands concludes, can only arise from episodic memories.

While reflecting on the characterization of Rilkean memories, Rowlands introduces a new and original conceptualization of episodic memory. Episodic memories are neither memories of episodes—this will render them indistinguishable from some semantic memories that are also memories of episodes—nor memories of experiences—this will entail the falseness of most of our memories due to the fact that memory’s visual, emotional and evaluative perspectives can and often change over time. Episodic memories cannot either be understood as an adverbial modification of the act of remembering: relocating the experiential qualities of episodic memory to the act of remembering threatens the distinction between episodic memory and semantic memory (I can remember a fact angrily) and cannot explain the contradictory experiential qualities that may exist between the act of remembering and what is remembered (I can remember with joy a sad episode). According to Rowlands, episodic memories are best defined as memories of an episode that is subsumed under a specific mode of presentation: beside the rich experiential-emotional complexes that are characteristic of episodic memories, what is essential to the mode of presentation of episodic memories is that the episode remembered is remembered as one that has formerly witnessed, orchestrated or otherwise encountered by the rememberer, and that this “as” is built into the content of the memory (and not on the act of remembering).

I am quite sympathetic to both ideas: that Rilkean memories arise from episodic memories and that the self-involvement or the presence of the self in the content of memories is what makes memories episodic. Nonetheless, I have some doubts about the effectiveness of Rowlands’ arguments. First of all, he dismisses semantic autobiographical memories as a starting point of Rilkean memories because even if unlikely, it is perfectly conceivable that two different people could possess the same semantic autobiographical memories and have forgotten the other ones that would distinguish one person from the other. So because this situation is possible, semantic autobiographical memories are not considered to be sufficiently specific to the subject. The problem with the use of this kind of hypothetical scenario is that we could easily conceive of a similar scenario about episodic memories and thus come to the conclusion that episodic memories are not sufficiently specific. We could think about identical twins—who in general have a significant amount of experiences in common—who exclusively remember the episodes experienced together. In this hypothetical case, episodic memories would not be sufficiently specific to distinguish the two identical twins. This scenario is as unlikely but as possible as the scenario concerning semantic autobiographical memories, especially when we take into consideration that a lot of semantic autobiographical memories are the result of a process of semantization of episodic memories over time (Piolino, & al., 2009). In the hypothetical episodic memory scenario, what would be sufficiently person specific and would allow us to distinguish the identical twins is not the fact that these episodes are remembered as formerly witnessed, orchestrated or encountered by the rememberer, but the fact that they are remembered as episodes that formerly affected the rememberer in terms of harms, benefits, morality or self-image, and that this affection of the event—which is person specific—is part of the content of the memory (see Trakas, 2014). There is less unlikely that identical twins could only remember the events that both have witnessed, orchestrated and encountered, than they could remember these same events under the same affective tone. And this remark leads me to the second point I wanted to make concerning Rowlands’ conceptualization of episodic memory. Episodic memory is a controversial notion, very much used in psychological research, but not very well defined. Endel Tulving, the “father” of the distinction between episodic and semantic memory systems, has defined episodic memory first in terms of its content, then in terms of its phenomenology (which arise out of its mode; see for example McCormack, 2001), but in certain way the debate has just started, with the growing interest that this notion has aroused in the philosophical community in recent years. The point that Rowlands makes about the specificity of episodic memory indubitably marks a novel way of thinking about the nature of episodic memory that is very promising. But it needs further development. Semantic autobiographical memories that are originated from a process of semantization of episodic memories (very characteristic of older adults), differ from episodic memories at least in the neural substrates and mechanisms and in their phenomenology, but they are also remembered as episodes formerly witnessed, orchestrated or encountered by the rememberer. I previously suggested that in an episodic memory we remember episodes (or people, or places, etc.) as episodes that affected me in a specific way (or that stills affect me), and it is through this affection that the self is present in the content of memory. This affection can explicitly be attended to as the intentional object of my memory, or we can be aware of it in a pre-attentive or pre-reflective way; it can take the form of interoceptive bodily sensations, action tendencies or language, and it can refer to a past affection or to a present and occurrent one. According to my view, it is this affection that makes of memories episodic memories—and that is at the origin of the metacognitive phenomenology that is characteristic of episodic memory—and it is this affection that makes of my episodic memories uniquely mine. More should be explored in this line, because it clearly seems that the presence of the self is an excellent alternative to the current views to characterize the specificity of episodic memory.

In chapter 8, Rowlands argues that the presence of the self is a necessary and sufficient condition for a memory to count as an episodic. I have tried to explain before, through the example of semantic autobiographical memories that are the product of a process of semantization of episodic memories, why the presence of the self characterized as a mode of presentation where the episode is remembered as one that the rememberer has formerly witnessed, orchestrated or otherwise encountered, does not seem sufficient for a memory to qualify as episodic. Nonetheless, the arguments that Rowlands presents to defend the necessity of the presence of the self in an episodic memory are very convincing. First, we could think that the presence of the self is not necessary because non-human animals have episodic memories but neither engage in self-reflective thought nor have a self-concept. Rowlands argues that none of them is necessary for the self to be present in a memory, and that a feeling of familiarity could perfectly account for it. In fact, the thesis that non-human animals have episodic memories is quite controversial, and Rowlands should have mentioned it to reinforce his point. It could have also been argued that the semantic / episodic distinction is also present in non-humans animals, but that its characterization is slightly different from one proper to human animals (and this makes sense considering the importance of the influence of human language in the phylogenetic development of our cognitive capabilities). Second, the case of a patient named RB (mentioned by Klein & Nichols, 2012), who seems to have episodic memories that do not present a sense of ownership, could also be used as a counterexample of the necessity of the presence of the self in episodic memories. But it is not the case: or this is an example of attenuation and not of loss of the sense of ownership, argues Rowlands, or else these memories are not episodic. As he correctly points out, in the absence of the presence of the self in episodic memory, there is nothing to distinguish episodic memories from semantic memories. Therefore, Rowlands gives compelling arguments to assert the necessity of the presence of the self in episodic memories, whereas his arguments for its sufficiency in a certain way fail, because his interpretation of the meaning of the presence of the self in episodic memories is not sufficient to distinguish them from semantic (autobiographical) memories.

Before coming back to the characterization of Rilkean memories, I would like to mention an interesting distinction that Rowlands draws concerning autobiographical memory, which should be considered while theorizing about this notion. Autobiographical memory is another notion very much used in psychological research, but again not very well defined. Broadly understood, it refers to a subsystem that includes some episodic memories and different facts about the self (including semantic memories). Rowlands proposes to distinguish three types of autobiographical memories according to their intentional objects: (a) strongly autobiographical memories: the memory contains the rememberer as the intentional object of the memory, and is thus about something that happened to the rememberer (I remember I travelled to Greece or I remember I was born the 15th February 1983), (b) weakly autobiographical memories: the rememberer is not the intentional object, but is implicated in the mode of presentation of the intentional object of the memory, and is thus about something that she witnessed or encountered (I remember the flight to Greece took off 5 hours later than scheduled); (c) minimally autobiographical memories: these memories, which have no intentional object, are autobiographical because they are the descendant of a memory that is at least weakly autobiographical. While episodic and semantic memories can be strongly autobiographical, only episodic memories can be weakly autobiographical—only episodic memories can include the self in their mode of presentation—and only Rilkean memories can be minimally autobiographical. The common characteristic between all these subtypes of autobiographical memory is that all of them ultimately refer to the rememberer, and it is in this sense that all of them receive the epithet “autobiographical”.

This distinction allows Rowlands to give a minimal definition of embodied and affective Rilkean memories: Rilkean memories are involuntary memories that have no intentional content and are minimally autobiographical because they derive from episodic memories, when their content has been forgotten and only the act of remembering persists. This definition is given in chapter 3, after a series of arguments that (convincingly) show why Rilkean memories cannot be conceived as Freudian memories, nor procedural memories, nor declarative memories, nor semantic memories, nor episodic memories, nor explicit memories, nor implicit memories.

More about episodic memories: their structure

In the next section, I will come back to Rilkean memories, and to their importance for the unity and identity of the self. In this section, I will focus on the characterisation of the structure of episodic memory developed by Rowlands in chapters 8 and 9.

In the introduction, I already anticipated that Rowlands reconfigures the traditional understanding of the structure of memory by proposing a four-constituent model of episodic memory: intentional object, content, mode of presentation and act. In his model, the intentional object is different from the content, and the mode of presentation and act of remembering are conceptually distinguishable but inseparable. These two ideas are the key theses defended by Rowlands in order to change the traditional conceptualization of episodic memory that is characterized by the standard tripartite model of intentionality and the two-model of meaning.

The two-model of meaning (which, according to Rowlands, would be at the origin of Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox) supposes that items are intrinsically semantically inert and only get meaning and reference by an act of interpretation. This model is useful to account for the semantics of photographs, and because we tend to consider episodic memories as “pictures” of past episodes, we think mistakenly that this model is also useful to understand the structure of episodic memories, when really it is not. Although I have some doubts about the intrinsically semantical inertia of photographs (a specific photograph is ambiguous but cannot “be about anything”), Rowlands makes a good point: photographs exist independently of any act of interpretation whereas episodic memories do not; and photographs need an act of interpretation at least to remove their intrinsic semantic ambiguity, whereas episodic memories do not. The list of differences could be developed (episodic memories can essentially change over time whereas photographs do not, etc.), and this would be an interesting project to finally abandon the photographic model of memories, but this is not Rowlands’ purpose in this book: he only wants to state that, unlike photographs, the contents of our episodic memories are never pure objects, unadulterated by the interpretative activities implicated in my awareness of them. The content of our episodic memories is always presented to us as something, under a mode of presentation, and this mode of presentation is not externally attached to the content, but is essentially built into it. When I remember the face of my father, I remember this face as the face of my father, and not as a visual image of a face whose appearance needs a subsequent act of interpretation to determine that it is a memory and that it is the face of my father. It may be the case that I cannot remember whose face it is, but if I have a memory experience I remember the face at least as a face that belongs to someone I previously saw. For Rowlands, in an episodic memory, meaning and reference are thus not added in a subsequent phase to the presentation of the content to the mind, but are an intrinsic part of it, entangled with it. The meaning and reference includes not only the meaning and reference that is specific to a particular memory content, but also the meaning and reference that is given in every episodic memory: the pastness and the presence of the self who remembers. The meaning and reference is given to the episode remembered, which is not inherently interpreted, when the act of remembering performs on it certain operations of transformation that present the episode remembered under different modes of presentation. These modes of presentation (which are characterized by Rowlands as complex combinations of perception, cognition, emotion and sensation) not only individuate the memory and, more importantly, render the presence of the self a necessary feature of it, but also give rise to memory content. The content of an episodic memory is thus created by the act of remembering.

And this leads us to Rowlands’ four-constituent model of episodic memory and his revision of the standard tripartite model of intentionality. Whereas the standard model considers that the intentional object of an episodic memory is equal to its content, and that this object / content is an episode—defined as a state-of-affairs—that is independent of the act of remembering and propositional in form, Rowlands not only denies the necessarily propositional nature of episodes, but also the identification between the object and the content of a memory. Whereas the intentional object of memory, that is, the episode remembered, is a state-of-affairs independent of the act of remembering, which only plays a passive causal role in the origin of our memories, the memory content is what is available to our consciousness. It is what one can discern and have access to when one remembers, and it is the product of a constructive and active process of remembering.

This later distinction is not new, but has a long tradition—recently recovered but neglected for many years— that goes back at least to the introduction of the notion of intentionality in contemporary philosophy made by Franz Brentano. The distinction between object and content was explicitly formulated by Kazimierz Twardowski (Brentano’s student) in his book On the Content and Object of Presentations (1894) and later endorsed and developed by Alexius Meinong (1899), another one of Brentano’s students. It was also more explicitly applied to the understanding of memory phenomena by Bertrand Russell (1921) and Charlie Broad (1925). All of them, in different ways and with different terminology, defended the existence of a difference between the object of a mental act and its content. I personally got back to this rich tradition and proposed a representationalist account of personal memories based on this distinction (Trakas 2014). I found it a bit disappointing that Rowlands did not mention the origin of this distinction in his book, although I understand that historical references sometimes may cut the argumentative fluidity. Nonetheless, a small footnote would not have done any harm, and it would have been a nice initiative to recognize the often forgotten rich ideas that precede us and still influence us in many ways.

Rowlands justifies the need of this distinction by means of three convincing arguments. If the memory content were identical with the episode remembered:

(a) the idea of mental content should be abandoned (there is nothing “mental” in a state-of-affairs; a state-of-affairs would be mental and non-mental at the same time), or the mentality should exclusively be placed on the act of remembering. The only way to assure the mentality of the content is to distinguish the state-of-affairs from the content and adopt the view that the content is brought into existence by a process of transformation operated by the mental act on the state-of-affairs;

(b) it would be impossible to explain why two states-of-affairs can be identical (such as Oedipus marring Jocasta and Oedipus marrying his mother) whereas the memories of them are not (Oedipus remembers marrying Jocasta but not his mother). States-of-affairs and memory content must be different because their standards of individuation are different: a mental act narrows the standard of individuation of mental content by subsuming one or more constituents of a state-of-affairs (object, property) under different modes of presentation;

(c) the presence of the self would not be essential to the memory, and thus the episode would not appear to the rememberer as one that she formerly experienced. The only way to render necessary the presence of the self and thus episodically remember an episode is to impose on that episode one or more modes of presentation. This process of transformation creates mental content, which is different from the episode.

I have also given some arguments in favour of the distinction between object and content (even if I used different terms), focused on the possible discrepancies between the content and the object of the same personal memory (Trakas, 2014, p. 32-35). The arguments that Rowlands gives are nonetheless persuasive and sufficient by themselves to convince the readers of the need for this conceptual distinction. What is more, his explanation along these two chapters shows the inseparability that is characteristic of the act of remembering, the memory content and the mode of presentation, as well as the key role played by the act of remembering in the construction of our episodic memories: it is finally the act of remembering which is responsible for the mentality, the individuation and the ownership of the remembered content.

Before coming back to Rilkean memories, I would like to make a comment about a remark made by Rowlands. According to our author, his conception of content must not be understood as something that stands between the subject and the episode, but simply as a way or mode of remembering an episode. Because the content is nothing more than the episode transformed in certain ways, Rowlands concludes that while remembering “content” we are in direct contact with the past. Like other authors, Rowlands couples a representationalist conceptualization of memory to a direct realism theory of memory. I profoundly believe not only in the incompatibility of these two conceptions of memory, but also in the impossibility of defending a direct realist view of memory. Direct realist accounts of memory cannot accommodate the existence of memory traces and fail to explain the fallibility and change that characterize our memory representations. They also fail to give a criterion to distinguish between immediate acquaintance in perception and immediate acquaintance in memory (Trakas, 2014, pp. 10-17). Memory researchers would do better to abandon the idea that memory allows us to be in direct and immediate contact with the past and to ask, instead, how a capacity that does not allow us to be in direct contact with the past can nevertheless produce reliable representations of the past.

Forgetting, endemic inaccuracy and a person’s unity and identity (for her and for the others)

In this last section I focus on chapters 5, 6, 7 and 10, chapters where Rowlands develops the role that Rilkean memories—these memories that have no content and are pure act—play in making us who we are.

As I already mentioned, episodic memories are in general considered to give an answer to the metaphysical problem of the self’s unity and identity through time (what makes a person at a time t2 a unified individual identical to a person at a time t1?). Nonetheless, the endemic inaccuracy and the forgetting of episodic memories compromise the identity of the person over time and thus threatens the role played by episodic memory in the explanation of the unity and identity of the metaphysical self. On the contrary, the endemic inaccuracy and the forgetting of memories is not a threat for the autobiographical self, neither from a first person point of view (that is, the self-experience of unity and identity) nor from a third person point of view (the recognition of the unity and identity of another self). Rowlands considers them as self-constructing opportunities that can play a positive role in the constitution of a person.

I will come back in a few lines to Rowlands’ idea of the positive role played by the inaccuracy and the forgetting of episodic memories in the constitution of the autobiographical self. I would now like to make a brief comment about Rowlands’ arguments to state the endemic unreliability of memory. Rowlands asserts the endemic unreliability of memory based on empirical studies on false memories (like studies on flashbulb memories) as well as on memory reconsolidation that, according to our author, would explain why most of our memories are unreliable: every time we access a memory trace, it returns to the unstable and labile state characteristic of short-term memory, and becomes thus sensitive to change. The idea that most of our memories are “false” is not new and has been advocated by psychologists like Elizabeth Loftus: “in essence, all memory is false to some degree” (Bernstein & Loftus, 2009, p. 373). Rowlands rightly recognizes that the notions of accuracy and inaccuracy (conceived as a spectrum) are better suited to characterize memories than the notion of truth and falsity, but he still holds that inaccuracy is endemic to memory. I believe first, that Rowlands misunderstands the notion of change during the process of reconsolidation: “change” does not necessarily mean “distortion” (a term that he explicitly uses), and several times, a change of a memory trace is necessary to render a memory more accurate (for example, when we acquire new information that allows us to better understand a past experience). Secondly, Rowlands—and Loftus—present radical and extremist conceptions of the notions of truth / falsity and accuracy / inaccuracy: all memory representations that are different (even slightly different) from a past representation would be false or inaccurate, and that is why inaccuracy (or falsity) is endemic to episodic memories. This is a surprising conceptualization for someone who proposed to conceive the epistemic values of memories in terms of a spectrum of accuracy versus inaccuracy. Third, I do believe that people who think that memory is endemically unreliable are wrong. Instead of looking at empirical studies on false memories, we would do better to look at our everyday functioning and the way it would be affected if a large number of our memories would be unreliable: not only could we not successfully navigate the physical and social world, but probably we could not even have evolved as we did. Most of our everyday actions are guided by semantic as well as episodic memories, and a human being with an unreliable memory system would be very different from what we are; maybe she will not even be human. Anthropological studies take time and are not often practiced to study psychological phenomena, but they would be of great help to provide empirical data on the reliability of the human memory system(s).

In any case, it remains to be seen how the endemic inaccuracy and the forgetting of memories can be self-constructive for the autobiographical self. Rowlands does not give an explanation of the positive role that endemic inaccuracy plays; he only states that “for an autobiographical project, false memories can be just as self-constructive as real memories” (Rowlands, 2017, p. 115). If confabulations can present some benefits for the confabulator (at least she has a story to tell to herself about who she is), it remains an open question as to whether confabulations are as self-constructive as real memories. The case of forgetting is analysed with more detail, in a specific and interesting chapter about this notion (chapter 5). Passive forgetting (memory decay over time) compromise the memory-based version of the metaphysical explanation of the self and also plays a negative role in the construction of the autobiographical self (by unbalancing the story of who we are, or making us repeat old mistakes). Nonetheless, active forgetting, that is, the conscious and unconscious engagement in a process of forgetting, plays a positive role in the construction of the autobiographical self: it allows us to forget the useless—in order to release cognitive resources—and to forget the pernicious. Furthermore, active projects of forgetting, which can include the explicit manipulation of the environment in order to facilitate or scaffold the process of forgetting (like destroying photographs), say a lot about the person you are. But there is a more pervasive and primitive process of forgetting than active forgetting, which does not require the existence of an autobiographical self who conducts the forgetting, but plays a significant role in the development and preservation of the autobiographical self. This primitive, passive but positive process of forgetting memory content refers to the process that originates in Rilkean memories. Rilkean memories play a positive role in holding the identity and the unity of the autobiographical self through time, in the face of the lost and inaccuracy of episodic memories, and more especially when the self is no longer capable of engaging in remembering (or forgetting), like the cases of Patsy Hasset or Taylor’s mother.

Rowlands compares Rilkean memories to literary style (to understand this analogy, it is worth mentioning that Rilkean memories are pure acts of remembering, without content). If we find a couple of disconnected pages of a book, the style of these pages combined with the remaining content can be sufficient to establish or at least suggest the identity of the author. The same applies to Rilkean memories. Embodied Rilkean memories, that is, the tendency to do things in certain ways in certain circumstances, and affective Rilkean memories, that is, the disposition to have certain moods and feelings in certain environmental circumstances, are part of a person’s existential style. Rilkean memories connect the person to her past and provides a form of continuity between the person who has the Rilkean memories and the person who had their episodic ancestor. Rilkean memories, as part of a person’s existential style, allow an outsider observer to distinguish and recognize individuals on their basis. That is why Rilkean memories play a key role in the recognition of the unity and identity of a person made by a third party. That is why Rowlands is still able to recognize his wife’s grandfather Patsy as the same person he used to be before developing Alzheimer’s disease and thus losing all his episodic memories. This is the right time to remember Taylor’s description of her mother quoted at the beginning of this review. For Taylor, her mother was the same person as before, because she could still recognize her existential style, that is, her particular way of being, acting and feeling: her mother was still a cheerful and affectionate person, who still enjoyed gentle joking and teasing, being around people and having a conversation, and who also still beamed radiantly at small children. Rilkean memories are finally what justify third person recognition judgements.

Rilkean memories solve then the puzzle of the unity and identity of a person from a third point of view, that is, the puzzle of the recognition of another person. But there is a still another puzzle: the problem of explaining the self-experience of unity and identity, that is, the way in which the present self (R-self) experiences a past self (W-self) as a unified individual, identical with herself. According to Rowlands, Rilkean memories are also the key to solve this puzzle, but they do not feature as what they are—Rilkean memories—but as what they were before becoming Rilkean memories: as episodic memories. The necessary presence of the self in episodic memories is the key to first-person recognition: “The person who remembers is, therefore, in her memories even when those memories are not about her. She is in her memories not simply because she has carved or shaped them from the block of the episode. Rather, it is because she had to do this in order to make them something that could be remembered. The content of memory is always infused with the person who remembered and where she is in her life. The content of memory is, in this sense, infused with style. It is infused with, and therefore shaped by, the act of remembering (…) Style and content may eventually go their separate ways—this is what happens when a Rilkean memory is formed. But before this happens, the two are entangled. The style of a person is always there, in the midst of content” (Rowlands, 2017, pp. 194-195). Therefore, because the autobiographical self is present in each and every one of the episodic memories that collectively form the record of her life, the self who remembers (R-self) experiences herself as a unified individual identical with any of her past selves (W-self). This means that Patsy and Taylor’s mother, as well as other people with dementia, could still experience their unity and identity through time if they have at least one episodic memory that remains accessible to their consciousness.

Final thoughts

Memory and the Self is an excellent book on memory, with a highly sophisticated dose of philosophical content and literary style. However, I must admit that at the end of the book I was slightly disappointed. The main purpose of the book is to introduce the notion of Rilkean memories and explain the key role they play in maintaining the unity and identity of the (autobiographical) self. Nonetheless, from the first-person recognition perspective, Rilkean memories finally do not play any role; episodic memories do all the work. Saying, as Rowlands does, that Rilkean memories play such an important role because they were episodic memories before becoming Rilkean memories, does not help to assign a real role to Rilkean memories in the self-experience of identity and unity. Although one derives from the other, Rilkean memories and episodic memories are very different. Furthermore, episodic memories do not necessarily become Rilkean memories. The truth is that Rilkean memories do not play any explanatory role in first-person recognition, and that episodic memories are the key to understand how we experience our autobiographical selves as a unified individual, identical to itself through time, despite Rowlands denying this in chapter 6: “these two facts [inaccuracy and forgetting] present a problem for the idea that our episodic memories play a major role in the construction of the autobiographical self” (Rowlands, 2017, p. 122). Moreover, in this section I would have expected more discussion with Stan Klein’s view—an author who is known and mentioned by Rowlands in this book—for whom the unity that we attribute ourselves as persons can be interpreted as a pre-reflective feeling of personal continuity that would permeate all our experiences (for evidence of an amnesic patient who maintains a sense of personal identity despite being unable to retrieve episodic and semantic personal memories, see Klein, 2014).

Rilkean memories do play a key role from the third-person recognition perspective. However, when analysing these cases, we realize that what allows us to recognize someone as the same unified individual identical through time is nothing more than different kinds of habits and character traits. Rilkean memories are finally nothing more than environmental embedded habits and character traits. Rowlands is aware that Rilkean memories may not be a new, non-standard form of memory, but just the product of a process of transformation of episodic memories (Rowlands, 2017, p. 54). This is nonetheless unimportant to him, and maybe it should also be unimportant to the reader in order to get Rowlands’ message: the recognition of these habits and character traits as states that carry in them a trace of the personal past and that allow the personal past to live in the subject in a different way than memories (understood in a familiar sense).

In spite of this small disappointment that other readers may share with me, Memory and the Self is a very pleasant book to read that truly deserves to be read, reread, and discussed by those interested in philosophy of mind and in memory.

 

Bibliography

Bernstein D. & Loftus E. (2009). How to tell if a particular memory is true or false. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4(4), 370-374.

Broad, C. D. (1925). The mind and its place in nature. Londres, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.

Conway, M. (2005). Memory and the self. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 594-628.

Conway, M. (2009). Episodic memories. Neuropsychologia, 47, 2305-2313.

Conway M. A., & Loveday C. (2015). Remembering, Imagining, False Memories and Meaning. Consciousness and Cognition, 33, 574-581.

Klein, S. & Nichols, S. (2012). Memory and the sense of personal identity. Mind, 121, 677-702.

Klein, S. (2014). The two selves: Their metaphysical commitments and functional independence. New York, Oxford University Press.

Locke, J. (1690). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. [electronic version]. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/locke1690book1.pdf

McCormack, T. (2001). Attributing episodic memory to animals and children. In T. McCormack & C. Hoerl (Ed.), Time and Memory. New York, Oxford University Press, 285-313.

Meinong, A. (1899). On Objects of Higher Order and their Relationship to Internal Perception. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, vol. XXI, 181-271.

Piolino, P., Desgranges, B, & Eustache F. (2009). Episodic autobiographical memories over the course of time: Cognitive, neuropsychological and neuroimagining findings. Neuropsychologia, 47, 2314-2329.

Prinz, J. J., & Nichols, S. (2017). Diachronic Identity and the Moral Self. In J. Kiverstein (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind. New York, Routledge, 449-464.

Russell, B. (1921). The Analysis of mind [electronic version]. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2529/2529-h/2529-h.htm

Taylor, J. S. (2008). On Recognition, Caring, and Dementia. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 22(4), 313-335.

Trakas, M. (2014). Personal Memories. PhD thesis, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & Macquarie University.

Twardowski, K. (1894). On the Content and Object of Presentations. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff (1977).

 

Alexandru Dragomir: The World We Live In

The World We Live In Book Cover The World We Live In
Phaenomenologica, 220
Alexandru Dragomir, Gabriel Liiceanu (Ed.) & Catalin Partenie (Ed.)
Springer International Publishing
2017
xiii + 167

Reviewed by: Corinna Lagemann (Freie Universität Berlin)

Bei dem Band The World We Live In, herausgegeben von Gabriel Liiceanu und Catalin Partenie, handelt es sich um eine posthum erschienene Sammlung von Aufsätzen, Vorlesungsmitschriften und Textrekonstruktionen des rumänischen Phänomenologen Alexandru Dragomir (1916 – 2002), dem Zeit seines Lebens aufgrund widriger Umstände die verdiente Aufmerksamkeit verwehrt blieb und der bis zu seinem Tod nicht einen einzigen Text veröffentlichte.

Vor diesem Hintergrund besticht der vorliegende Band bereits durch seine Methode und seinen Aufbau: einem recht ausführlichen biographischen Teil, der etwa ein Drittel des schmalen Buches ausmacht, folgt die in drei Sektionen gegliederte Sammlung von Aufsätzen, wobei die Aufsätze in sehr unterschiedlicher Form vorliegen. Jedem Text geht eine kurze Erläuterung seiner Herkunft und Bearbeitungsweise voraus, und so finden sich Rekonstruktionen aus Vorlesungsmitschriften, Transkripte von Tonbandaufnahmen und allerlei fragmentarisches Material, das nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen und sehr akribisch und präzise angefertigt wurde.

Die Herausgeber äußern sich zur Methode und zum Status des Werks wie folgt:

 „The present volume brings together all that has been preserved of these lectures and that could serve as raw material for subsequent working up. By working up, we mean that neither the existing notes, nor the audio recordings have been reproduced exactly“ (ix)

Vielmehr ist man um eine verständliche Darstellung bemüht, als um die ganz exakte Rekonstruktion des vorliegenden Materials.

Der ausführliche biographische Teil gibt Aufschluss darüber, wie es zu Dragomirs hohem Stellenwert in der phänomenologischen Theoriebildung und seiner regen Unterrichtstätigkeit gänzlich ohne Publikationen kam, und weshalb er trotzdem so wenig wahrgenommen wurde und bis heute wird.

Dragomir wird als brillanter Schüler Heideggers dargestellt, als Denker nach Heideggers Vorbild, der das Denken weit höher bewertet als das Schreiben, dem aber der zweite Weltkrieg und die enge Verbundenheit mit Martin Heidegger zum Verhängnis wird. Der zweite Weltkrieg wird hier als zentrales Ereignis beschrieben, welches Dragomirs Karriere beendete, bevor sie wirklich begonnen hatte.

So äußern sich denn auch die Herausgeber:

„As I write today for the first time about Alexandru Dragomir, I am inclined to explain him as the product of a microclimate of history, a cultural ab-erration, a ‘wandering’, a derivation from the mould in which culture takes shape in normal ages and worlds.“ (S.12)

Besondere Beachtung finden die Notizbücher Dragomirs, die 2002 gefunden wurden, aus denen ein Schwerpunkt seines Denkens hervorgeht: geprägt durch Heidegger beschäftigte sich Dragomir intensiv mit der Frage nach der Zeit; diesem Nachlass widmet sich bereits ein Band mit dem Titel Chronos. Bei aller Nähe zu Heidegger darf aber Dragomirs Kritik an seinem Lehrer nicht verschwiegen werden: Heidegger habe die Frage nach der Zeit nicht beantwortet; so fügt er der Zeit noch weitere Strukturmomente hinzu, die bei Heidegger unterbelichtet bleiben und die die Rede von der Zeit weiter ausdifferenzieren. Nicht nur präzisiert er den Begriff des ‘Jetzt’, er beschreibt auch die Struktur des Zukünftigen präziser als Heidegger es getan hat, indem er den Entwurfscharakter des Daseins als ein Zusammenspiel von tatsächlichen Möglichkeiten, Plänen sowie Träumen und Phantasien beschreibt, wie im Folgenden weiter ausgeführt wird. Die Abhandlung über die Zeit verdient es also sicherlich ebenfalls, neu entdeckt und rezipiert zu werden.

Der Aufsatzteil ist in zwei große Abschnitte gegliedert. Der erste widmet sich analytischen Fragen, immer mit großer Nähe zur griechischen Antike. So findet sich eine Abhandlung über Frage und Antwort, den sokratischen Dialog und die Frage, was eigentlich Wissen bedeutet, welches Wissen möglich ist, etc. In seiner Nähe zu Sokrates – „Ich weiß, dass ich nichts weiß“ – manifestiert sich erneut Dragomirs Auffassung, dass das reine Denken dem Schreiben überlegen sei. Dieser Standpunkt zieht sich durch alle Beiträge.

Der zweite Text, die Transkription eines Vortrags vom September 1987, beschäftigt sich mit Fragen der Selbsttäuschung und greift die wesentlichen Schwerpunkte Dragomirs’ Schaffen auf: es geht um Zeit; um die Selbsttäuschung aufgrund von Träumen, Erinnerungen, Vorstellungen von Zukünftigem, um Selbstbilder und darum, wie diese korrumpiert werden können. Die Grundlage seiner Überlegungen bildet Heideggers Begriff vom Seinkönnen, die Idee, dass wir uns selbst auf Basis von Projektionen, Wünschen, Vorstellungen, aber auch von bereits Erlebtem selbst entwerfen. Dragomirs entscheidende Pointe besteht in der Idee eines Spielraums, „a space that is not yet occupied by anything, a niche of the possible in which we can install ourselves and freely settle into one direction or another of our lives“ (S.45). In diesem Spielraum liegt die Möglichkeit, sich anders zu entscheiden, anders ‘abzubiegen’, als die Projektionen und Vorstellungen es vorgeben und gleichzeitig das große Potential der Selbsttäuschung. Hier liegt nämlich der Punkt, an dem Selbstbild und tatsächliches Selbst sich voneinander trennen. Indem dieser Text die wesentlichen Punkte aus Dragomirs Konzeption verbindet – das Wissen um das eigene Nicht-Wissen sowie großartige Einsichten ins Wesen der Zeit und in die Lücken in Heideggers Zeitanalyse – kann er als einer der zentralen Texte des Bandes angesehen werden.

Die darauf folgenden Beiträge behandeln Raum und Zeit in ihren unterschiedlichen Facetten. Nach den phänomenologischen Betrachtungen von Raum und Zeit im menschlichen Selbstverhältnis geht es um die Konstitution von Lebenswelt („Utter Metaphysical Banalities“), um geographische und politische Räume („Nations“) sowie um die Transzendenz und Selbstüberschätzung des Menschen, der das Maß für sich selbst verliert. Der Text behandelt den Menschen in seiner Sozialität sowie sein Verhältnis zum Göttlichen und zur Natur und die Möglichkeit, dass diese Bezüge sich als nicht haltbar erweisen und sich die Suche nach dem Sinn als aussichtslos erweist. Auch hier zeigt sich die große Nähe zu Heidegger.

Insgesamt zeigt dieser erste Abschnitt eine Bewegung vom Kleinen ins Große, vom individuellen Menschen in seinem Selbstverhältnis hin zum Weltverhältnis, zur Umgebung und darüber hinaus, immer mit deutlichem Bezug zu Heidegger und zur griechischen Antike, sowie zur Verbindung zwischen Sokrates und der phänomenologischen Theoriebildung des 20. Jahrhunderts. In dieser Verknüpfung und dem sinnvollen Aufbau liegt der besondere Verdienst nicht nur des unterrepräsentierten Denkers Dragomir, sondern auch der sorgfältigen Herausgeberschaft Liiceanus und Catalins.

Der zweite Teil des Aufsatzteils basiert auf einer Vorlesungsreihe zu Platons Apologie und beschäftigt sich dementsprechend schwerpunktmäßig mit der Person Sokrates und mit seiner Philosophie und seinen Methoden. Den Aufsätzen ist ein ausführlicher Teil zu den Quellen der Methode ihrer Aufbereitung vorangestellt.

Die Aufsätze selbst behandeln neben den historischen Betrachtungen die großen Fragen der Philosophie; die Nähe Dragomirs zu Heidegger scheint immer wieder durch. Diese wird beispielsweise dort offenkundig, wo er die Philosophie mit der Stadt kontrastiert, wobei die Stadt als Ort der öffentlichen Meinung und damit in direkter Nähe zu Heideggers Man verstanden wird. Außerdem werden die Themen des guten Lebens, des Wissens sowie einige logische Betrachtungen und die sokratische Methode erörtert.

Der letzte Abschnitt dieses zweiten Teils ist der titelgebende Text „The World We Live In“, der auf einer Vortragsreihe gründet, die Dragomir im Zeitraum von September 1986 bis Mai 1988 gab. Inhaltlicher Schwerpunkt dieses Textes ist eine Technik- und Wissenschaftskritik, die stark an Heidegger anschließt. Ausgangspunkt der Überlegungen bildet ein Nietzsche-Zitat, in dem es um die Entfremdung des Menschen von seinen Grundinstinkten geht, welche die Lebenswelt und die Gesellschaft seiner Zeit charakterisiere. Ein Problem der Menschen sei, dass sie sich im Zuge der fortschreitenden Abstraktion zu sehr von sich selbst und ihren Bedürfnissen entfernen und sich die Welt dementsprechend einrichten. Ausgehend von dieser Bestandsaufnahme untersucht Dragomir die Begriffe des Denkens, Wissens und der Wissenschaft nach Aristoteles; auch hier wird wieder ein starker Schwerpunkt auf das Denken im Unterschied zu Wissen und Technologie gelegt. Nur der denkende Mensch könne frei und autonom sein, so betont Dragomir, und begründet damit seine Kritik an der gegenwärtigen hoch technisierten Kultur, die den Menschen von seinem Menschsein und seinen Möglichkeiten entfremde.

Insgesamt gelingt mit The World We Live In ein sehr konziser und informativer Einblick in das Schaffen eines zu Unrecht vernachlässigten Philosophen der jüngeren Geschichte. Neben wertvollen historischen Einsichten vermittelt der Band spannende philosophische Gedankengänge, die gleichzeitig zentrale phänomenologische Begriffe des 20. Jahrhunderts weiterdenken, die Verbindung zu anderen Positionen vermitteln und ein interessantes Licht insbesondere auf Martin Heideggers Schaffen werfen.

Den Herausgebern gelingt ein sehr empfehlenswertes Buch, das sowohl für den interessierten Laien geeignet ist als auch neue Einsichten für Kenner der aktuellen Forschungslage bereithält.

 

Simone Aurora: Filosofia e scienze nel primo Husserl: Per una interpretazione strutturalista delle Ricerche logiche

Filosofia e science nel primo Husserl: Per una interpretazione strutturalista delle Ricerche ogiche Book Cover Filosofia e science nel primo Husserl: Per una interpretazione strutturalista delle Ricerche ogiche
La filosofia e il suo passato 62
Simone Aurora
CLEUP
2017
376

Reviewed by: Nicola Spinelli (Faculty of Mathematics, Hertswood Academy / Research Associate, King's College London)

This is a good book – and, on the Italian market, a much-needed one. Simone Aurora’s declared aim is to show that Husserl’s Logical Investigations belong to the history and conceptual horizon of structuralism, and in a prominent position at that. The whole book builds up to a defense of the view in the last chapter. Aurora’s case is set up well from the beginning and thoroughly argued at the end. That is why the book is good. The reason why the book is much needed on the Italian market is that it is also an introduction to Husserl’s early philosophy – from On the Concept of Number (1886) to the Investigations (1900-1901) – as it should be written: starting from 19th-century developments in psychology and, importantly, mathematics. To my knowledge, there are no published works in Italian that do so, or do so extensively. Aurora satisfactorily fills the gap.

Chapter 1 is about Husserl’s beginnings – a story Aurora does a good job of telling. A mathematics, physics, and astronomy student in Leipzig in 1876, Husserl would end up, in 1883, writing a doctoral thesis on the calculus of variations with Leo Königsberger in Vienna. He was then briefly Weierstrass’s assistant in Berlin. In 1884 Husserl came across Brentano’s work and lectures; as a result, he steered towards philosophy. By 1887, Husserl’s first philosophical work – his Habilitationsschrift under the supervision of Carl Stumpf in Halle – was complete. Crucial to On the Concept of Number are both the mathematical and the philosophical strands of Husserl’s academic life. The eponymous problem is inherited from Weierstrass, Kronecker, and in general, the whole debate on the foundations of mathematics, which at the time was soaring in Europe. The method with which Husserl tackled it – and this is where the originality of the work lies – was Brentano’s descriptive psychology. Both these backgrounds, their developments and Husserl’s own take on them are well expounded by Aurora.

Chapter 2 is about 1891’s Philosophy of Arithmetic (PA). Overall, Aurora’s presentation is clear and, I believe, effective. The relations with the earlier work are explained and the architecture of the book is clearly laid out. Overall, the main notions (‘collective connection’, ‘something in general’, and so forth) and arguments are satisfactorily presented. Let me mention a couple of worries.

One problem is that Aurora highlights relatively few connections between points discussed in PA on the one hand, and the larger debates and their recent developments on the other. For example, at that stage Husserl, like e.g. Cantor, held a version of the abstraction theory of numbers. That, for example, is where the notion of ‘something in general’ (Etwas überhaupt) comes in. The theory had already been severely criticised by Frege in The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), a criticism, importantly, that fed into Husserl’s work (as well as into Cantor’s). See ortiz Hill 1997. This might have deserved a few lines. Also, although for most of the twentieth century the abstraction theory was forsaken if not forgotten, in the late 1990s Kit Fine attempted a rescue, sparking some debate (Fine 1998). Again, a quick pointer might have been helpful.

Here is a second worry. Some scholars (A. Altobrando and G. Rang are Aurora’s references) believe they can discern the first traces of the development of Husserl’s notions of eidetic intuition and phenomenological epoché in PA. Aurora is among them, and in particular he reckons abstraction is the place to look: for, according to Husserl, in abstraction one disregards all qualitative (and to some extent relational) aspects of the relevant objects, and is only interested in the latter as empty ‘something in general’. The view is put forward at p. 71. Now, there is no denying that both eidetic intuition and the phenomenological epoché involve some sort of heavy disregarding or bracketing. But surely the philosophical literature is crammed with similar methods and theories – not least the British empiricists’ accounts of abstraction, which is as far as it gets from Husserl’s Ideation or Wesensanschauung. Prima facie similarities, then, are in fact rather thin. Terminology as well as theoretical contexts and functions, Aurora admits, are also very different. We may wonder, at this point, what is left for the interpretation to be based on. I suspect very little if anything.

Chapter 3 is about the transition, in the 1890s, from PA to the Investigations. Two conceptual pairs begin to emerge in this period that will end up being paramount in the later work. The first pair, abstract/concrete, is the subject (or one of the subjects) of the third Investigation; the second, intuition/representation, is one of the main characters of the sixth. Aurora describes well their first appearance in an 1894 essay entitled Psychologischen Studien zur elementaren Logik. Developments in Husserl’s view of intentional objects are also discussed in some detail. The main references in this case are manuscript K I 56 and Husserl’s review of Twardowski’s Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellung, both from 1894.

Chapter 4 is about the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, the first part of the Logical Investigations. Aurora does a good job of expounding both Husserl’s arguments against psychologism and his concept of a pure logic and theory of science – the two main themes of the work. As it can and should be expected of an introductory exposition, a few details are at some points glossed over. Yet the main idea, i.e., that there is a basic dimension to science which is called ‘pure logic’ and which is ideal (or, as people tend to say these days, ‘abstract’), objective, and to all appearances, independent of human thought or language, comes across very clearly. There is, however, one distinction that, it seems to me, Aurora fails to recognise (or to report). It is not a major issue for what, after all, is an introductory chapter – but nonetheless a point worth raising. It is the distinction between deduction and grounding.

Between the Prolegomena and the Investigations Husserl defines (or uses) two to four related concepts: on the one hand, deduction or inference (Schluß, or sometimes an unqualified Begründung, in Husserl’s German) and explanatory grounding (the relation between an erklärender Grund and what it is the ground of), both operative in the Prolegomena; on the other hand, foundation (Fundierung), introduced in the third Investigation and operative in the subsequent ones. Now, foundation may (Nenon 1997) or may not have two models, one ontological and one epistemological; and one of these two models, the ontological, may or may not be identical to the explanatory grounding of the Prolegomena – a view for which, I believe, there is something to be said. Your count here will depend on your views on foundation. But whatever these are, there is no doubt at least that deduction and explanatory grounding are distinct in the Prolegomena. That is what does not come across in the book.

Indeed, as far as I can see, in Aurora’s presentation the two concepts from the Prolegomena collapse into one. While explaining what, for Husserl, constitutes the ‘unity of science’, Aurora introduces the concept of Begründung and says that it ‘substantially refers to the notion of inference or logical deduction’ (p. 134). Yet this is something that Husserl explicitly denies. To see this, look at Prolegomena, §63. Here, a distinction is made between explanatory and non-explanatory Begründung, and the former, not the latter, is deemed essential to (the unity of) science. Indeed for Husserl, as for Bolzano (from whom he inherits the notion), what secures the unity of science is an explanatory relation (erklärende Zusammenhang) between true propositions. And while ‘all grounds are premises’ – so that if proposition A grounds proposition B then there is an inference from A to B – ‘not all premises are grounds’. It is not the case, that is, that if there is an inference from A to B then A grounds B. In other words, ‘every explanatory relation is deductive (deduktive), but not every deductive relation is explanatory’.

While Husserl is very explicit in drawing the distinction, he is not so helpful in justifying it. He devotes a few remarks to the task, right after the passage I quoted; but they do not make an argument. Here is how one may be extracted. (Bolzano’s arguments are also available from the Wissenschaftslehre, around §200.)

Let us stipulate deducibility as the modern notion of (classical) logical consequence. If grounding were just logical consequence, the latter would be an explanatory relation (because the former is). But it isn’t: there are cases of valid and sound arguments in which the premises fail to explain the conclusion. For example, p p, or p & q ╞ p. Indeed, it is hard to see how a proposition, even though it can be inferred from itself, can also ground (explain) itself: it is raining, therefore it is raining – but is it raining because it is raining? Things are even worse with the second case: does the truth of a conjunction ground the truth of one of its conjuncts? It is probably the other way round. To derive a conclusion from a set of premises is not, in and of itself, to explain the former in terms of the latter. But then grounding and deducibility must be distinct.

(I should mention that in an extended footnote at p. 133 Aurora does discuss Husserl’s notion of Begründung vis-à-vis Bolzano’s. So he is definitely aware of the theoretical background, the significance and the facets of the concept. So much so, that the footnote seems to contradict, rather than explain, the main text.)

Chapter 5 is possibly the most felicitous of the whole book, partly because, due to the topic, Aurora’s background in linguistics shines through. We are now past the Prolegomena and into the Investigations proper. Having established in the former that logical and mathematical objects do not, by all appearances, belong to the spatio-temporal world, Husserl is left with the question as to how we can know anything about them – in fact, relate to them at all. Short of an answer, Husserl thinks, the existence of logic and therefore of science in general, as human enterprises, must remain a mystery. And for Husserl the starting point is language, because it is primarily in language – in the meanings of words and sentences – that logical objects make their spatio-temporal appearance. The main result of the first two Investigations are the following: meanings are ideal (non-spatio-temporal) and akin to universals; and universals are genuine objects, irreducible to their instances, to thought, or to language. (It is a substantive question whether this amounts to full-blown Platonism; Aurora believes it doesn’t, and some remarks of Husserl’s certainly point that way.)

The first two sections of the chapter, on the first Investigation, are nearly flawless. The remaining sections, on the second Investigation, are also effective but, I believe, raise at least one worry. Aurora thinks that, for Husserl, meanings are ‘ideal classes of objects’ (203). Now, he may well not be using ‘class’ in its fully technical sense. But the fact remains that classes, among other things, are (like sets, their close relatives) extensional mathematical constructs. However, in the 1890s, when most of the Investigations were thought out, Husserl was an adamant intensionalist. See for example his review of Schröder’s Vorlesungen as well as The Deductive Calculus and the Logic of Contents, both from 1891. For evidence that Husserl did not change his mind afterwards, see the 1903 review of Palágy’s Der Streit der Psychologisten und Formalisten in der modernen Logik. Aurora’s reading, therefore, if taken literally, is probably incorrect. If we take it charitably, it is misleading.

Despite this, Aurora is completely right in pointing out (204) the indispensability of ideal objects, particularly species (universals), for Husserl’s phenomenological project in the Investigations: if the former go, the latter goes with them.

Chapter 6 is about the third and fourth Investigations. The latter deals with matters of ‘pure grammar’, as Husserl calls it, and here Aurora’s linguistic background is once again both tangible and helpful. Yet it is the first sections, on the third Investigation, that are particularly important. In fact, they are the crux of the whole book. The reason is that the third Investigation is about parts, wholes and the relations between them – and (without going into detail, I will return to it later) the very concept of structure, central to the book for obvious reasons, is defined, in the last chapter, in mereological terms.

To say something of significance on Aurora’s interpretation of the third Investigation I would have to write more than my allowance permits. I will therefore only mention what is at least a presentational flaw. Despite insisting throughout the book and in the chapter on the relevance of the formal sciences in the development of Husserl’s philosophy, Aurora never engages with the several formalizations of the Husserlian theory of parts and wholes. He does mention the first of such contributions, Simons 1982 (334). But we also have Simons 1987, Fine 1995, Casari 2000, and Correia 2004 – which, moreover, all extend Husserl’s theory in many different ways. This, to me, is the only genuinely disappointing feature of, or absence from, the book. All the more so, because the capacity to be mathematized or formalized is one of the definitional traits of structures as set out in the final discussion (310).

Chapter 7 outlines the properly phenomenological parts of the Investigations, namely, the fifth and sixth Investigations. This is where Husserl puts to work all the notions he previously set up and sketches a phenomenological theory of consciousness (especially of intentional consciousness) and knowledge. Aurora’s exposition is careful and effective, with more than one passage I found particularly felicitous.

Chapter 8 is where Aurora lays out and defends his view. These are the main claims:

  1. Husserl’s philosophy in the Logical Investigations is a structuralist philosophy;
  1. Some of the aspects of Husserl’s philosophy that make it structuralist are ideally suited to characterise structuralism as such;
  1. Husserl’s subsequent, transcendental work deals with one of the central problems of structuralism: the origin of structures.

Section 1 is about structuralism in general. The first thing to sort out is, obviously, what a structure is. Borrowing from a number of authors, Aurora characterises structure in terms of two things: part-whole relations, and mathematizability. A structure is ‘a particular type of multiplicity’ whose elements obey laws ‘that confer properties to the whole as such which are distinct from those of the elements’ (309, half-quoting J. Piaget). Moreover, a structure ‘must always be formalizable’ (310). On the basis of this, Aurora characterises structuralism as follows:

Structuralism aims at studying the latent structures within classes of objects…by creating models, i.e. formal descriptions that make the immanent relations between objects of the relevant class predictable and intelligible (311).

It is worth noting that the given definition of structure does not necessitate that of structuralism. It is even more worth noting that this is a good thing. The reason is that, while Aurora wants to argue that the philosophy of the Investigations is structuralist, it is dubious that Husserl’s project in 1900-1901 involved the idea that the phenomenology of the fifth and sixth Investigations should be formalized. True, Husserl did have in mind a formalization of his theory of wholes and parts, and that theory is operative in the phenomenology. But that doesn’t entail that Husserl’s early phenomenology was ever meant to be entirely formalizable – much less that its aim was to ‘make predictions’ about consciousness and knowledge possible. The upshot is that Aurora’s definitions allow for a Husserl who deals in structures but not, strictly speaking, for a structuralist Husserl. This is too underwhelming a conclusion for what is otherwise, as I said at the outset, a well-constructed case. A looser definition of structuralism might perhaps have been suitable.

Another (minor) unclarity is Aurora’s appeal to mereology throughout the book. In and of itself, this appeal is perfectly fine. Yet not all mereologies admit of the sort of relations between parts that structuralists require. For example, and in stark contrast with the structuralist’s mantra, in classical mereology there is a sense in which the whole is just the sum (fusion) of its parts! Yet Aurora never engages with the distinction between classical and non-classical mereologies in any significant way. Moreover, it is unclear why formalizations of structures should be mereological rather than, say, algebraic (like most of Aurora’s examples of formal structures) or order-theoretic.

Be that as it may, Aurora is entirely correct when he points out that, if part-whole discourse is crucial to structuralism, then Husserl’s theory is ideally suited to form the core of any structuralist system: it is (or can be made) robust, it is philosophically profound, and, importantly, being a non-classical mereology, it is strong enough to describe the right sort of relations the structuralist needs.

At the very end, Aurora points out that one of the distinctive features of Husserl’s structuralism is its engagement with the problem of the origin of structures. In particular, Husserl is interested in understanding the relations between the subjects who come to be aware of structures and the structures themselves. This is indeed what the Investigations are all about. It is also one of the threads of Husserl’s whole philosophical career. As Aurora puts it (effectively, I believe), ‘this attempt at conciliating genesis and structure, first carried out in the Logical Investigations, is peculiar to Husserlian structuralism, and it is the question that Husserl will try to answer – through an ever more complex philosophical elaboration – in all his subsequent works.’

References

Casari, E. 2000. “On Husserl’s Theory of Wholes and Parts.” History and Philosophy of Logic 21 (1): 1-43.

Correia, F. 2004. “Husserl on Foundation.” Dialectica 58 (3): 349-367.

Fine, K. 1995. “Part-whole”. In Smith, B. and Woodruff Smith, D. (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (Cambridge: CUP), pp. 463-486.

Fine, K. 1998. “Cantorian Abstraction: A Reconstruction and Defense.” Journal of Philosophy 95 (12): 599-634.

Nenon, T. 1997. “Two Models of Foundation in the Logical Investigations.” In Hopkins, B. (ed). Husserl in the Contemporary Context: Prospects and Projects for Transcendental Phenomenology (Dodrecht: Kluwer), pp. 159-177.

Ortiz Hill, C. 1997. “Did Georg Cantor Influence Edmund Husserl?” Synthese 113 (1): 145-170.

Simons, P. 1982. “Three Essays in Formal Ontology.” In B. Smith (ed.). Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology (Philosophia Verlag: München-Wien), pp. 111-260.

Simons, P. 1987. Parts. A Study in Ontology (Oxford: OUP).

 

 

Emmanuel Alloa: Resistance of the Sensible World: An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty

Resistance of the Sensible World: An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty Book Cover Resistance of the Sensible World: An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty
Emmanuel Alloa, Translated by Jane Marie Todd, Foreword by Renaud Barbaras
Fordham University Press
2017
Paperback $28.00
152

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

This book is the first English-language translation of Alloa’s 2008 text, which originally appeared in French under the title La résistance du sensible: Merleau-Ponty critique de la transparence. Emmanuel Alloa is a student of the prominent Merleau-Ponty scholar Renaud Barbaras, and an occasional editor of Chiasmi, the leading journal for Merleau-Ponty studies.  Although the length of its body chapters comes in under 100 pages, this book is less of a standard introduction to Merleau-Ponty than a dense thematic, historical study of key issues figuring into the philosopher’s development from the early works up the unfinished texts in progress at the time of his death. The three principal chapters analyze the transformation and interior narrative of Merleau-Ponty’s thought across the three subjects that figure foremost in his legacy.  Chapter One examines the notion of perception in the context of the early texts The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception. The second chapter takes up Merleau-Ponty’s conception of language, with particular attention to the essays in the middle-period Signs and the abandoned work The Prose of the World. The third chapter, entitled “Ontology of the Visible,” studies Merleau-Ponty’s late attempts to formulate a phenomenological ontology centered in the visible and sensible. The book does not cover any aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s political or social philosophy. Throughout, Alloa discusses in depth the philosopher’s engagement with numerous influences and contemporaries including Husserl, Sartre, Fink, and Saussure. Methodological emphasis is likewise placed on the genesis behind Merleau-Ponty’s shaping of central concepts and terms.

Alloa’s statements in the Introduction of the book provide an overview of how he understands the core idea of Merleau-Ponty’s thought: while perception is ultimately the philosophical concept that overtly engaged Merleau-Ponty, it is the resistance of the sensible that the philosopher actually grappled with. By this notion of resistance, Alloa indicates that the sensible is what is obvious to perception, yet which cannot be penetrated by analysis (5-7). In highlighting the concept of the “obvious,” (or ob-vious) Alloa refers to what is in front of one and standing against one. For the sensible characterizes not merely what perception encounters, but also the experiential world as a whole (7). In Alloa’s view, this is decisive for Merleau-Ponty’s work because it provides a more focused approach than Husserl’s epistemological project of uncovering the conditions of knowledge. As Alloa sees it, Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental insight in this regard is recognizing that what is sensible, what is in front of one, resists; it is not transparent and never will be so. (In making this observation, Alloa is cueing upon the important difference Merleau-Ponty demonstrated from Husserl early in his career: the view, contra Husserl, that a complete reduction is never possible.) As Alloa observes on this score, treating the sensible as the entry point for philosophy is a more tangible and direct method than Husserl’s approach of beginning phenomenological description with the structures of consciousness. Moreover, Alloa suggests that for Merleau-Ponty, the perspectival limit of perception characterizes the essence of philosophizing as well, viz., to philosophize means to grapple with what resists and refuses transparency. This consequence results because thought is by nature also conditioned by the sensible; thinking is permeated by vision, and vice versa.  Therefore, to return to the things themselves, as is phenomenology’s mantra, entails thought becoming sensible (9, 11).

In the book’s first chapter, Alloa sets up the premises of Merleau-Ponty’s early studies on perception. He suggests that the first two major works, The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, are of a piece insofar as the former attempts to show why a phenomenological account of experience cannot be reduced to a behavioral psychology, while the latter describes the phenomenology of sense experience in a positive fashion (16-17).  Structure describes human perception critically, from the outside looking in, whereas the Phenomenology is written with an emphasis on the first-person perspective of sense experience.  Alloa sees here not so much a tension in approaches as much as Merleau-Ponty’s developing recognition of a conflict between body and soul; the concept of behavior comprises the locus for Merleau-Ponty’s insight that sense experience is contingent on the milieu of the living being, which Alloa later identifies as the body (24). The phenomenon of behavior reveals an unnoticed synthesis of inner and outer, mind and body, such that this concept is seen as operative prior to any sort of dualism, yet not transparent to perception either. To parse Alloa’s claim here just a bit, the notion is perhaps not unlike Heidegger’s observation in Being and Time that to be a Dasein entails already existing in a world of immediate surroundings where things have their essence in their use; Dasein is neither an inner nor outer, but instead projective being-in-the-world.  Alloa sees a link between Structure and the Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty’s implicit emphasis on the opacification of perception, or the notion that perception is underwritten by a lack of transparency.

Alloa similarly regards Merleau-Ponty’s career-long dialogue with Gestalt psychology as having its seeds in these early works.  For Merleau-Ponty, the concept of Gestalt is decisive for highlighting the world’s very appearing as structured (20), where perceptual consciousness is the “site” of this emergence.  The forms of the ready-made world of experience are not merely in the world, but emerge with the world.  For similar reasons, the mind-body relationship is not an instrumental one.  This observation brings to the fore the concept of “milieu”, which Alloa regards as a cornerstone of Merleau-Ponty’s early development.  The mind-body relation is founded on embeddedness in a milieu, where phenomenology entails describing an inventory of that milieu (20).  Yet Alloa highlights that Gestalt psychology in its traditional guise is insufficient for Merleau-Ponty because it fails to adopt a way of thinking about life; Gestalt psychology overlooks the dialectic between the living thing and its milieu, failing to recognize the dynamic identity of the physical and mental structures of experience (22-23).  The milieu comprised by embodiment functions as Merleau-Ponty’s corrective to the shortcomings of Gestalt psychology and scientific mechanism, for embodiment comprises the union of life and environment.

The topic of transcendence takes Alloa into Chapter Two.  Alloa suggests that Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with language during and after the early works epitomizes his effort to describe the unity of bodily movement and creative freedom (38).  “When the subject is collapsed to its corporeal condition alone, there is no longer any possibility of explaining how one moves beyond oneself” (33).  Transcendence, Alloa writes, is for Merleau-Ponty less important in the manner of establishing a new notion of epistemological or metaphysical foundation; more important in Merleau-Ponty’s view is the very act of transcending.  The act of transcending is coextensive with the opacity of the world (33).  Citing the Phenomenology, Alloa observes that an a priori ecstasy of the human subject orients one fundamentally toward this opacity, toward what one is not (33).  The first section of Chapter Two, entitled “Expression,” suggests that human expression for Merleau-Ponty comprises the extension of idealization or intellect into the embodied state.  Human movement is not merely a bodily activity but includes gesture (35).  In this light, following the Phenomenology, the body is the actuality of expression and represents the movement of expression (35).  As a result, language for Merleau-Ponty is forever to be subordinated to the phenomenon of expression as bodily act (39), which is to say, Merleau-Ponty does not endorse a pure grammar or universal linguistics.  Whereas, these are notions that for instance would be familiar to readers of Husserl’s Logical Investigations.  Moreover, Alloa highlights that the diacritical character of language, which Merleau-Ponty adopts from Saussure, further justifies the claim that language can never be made pure or universal.  Citing the abandoned text The Prose of the World, Alloa highlights that this character of language means signs, morphemes, and words only convey meaning in their assembly; language constitutes the practice of discriminating signs from one another.  And given language’s origin in the embodied state, these features have a coextension with the sensible.  Language’s diacritical character “will acquire the value of a perceptible interval forming a pattern on the sensible fabric itself” (45).  Yet, the transparency of language in human experience also reveals its resistance, echoing Alloa’s leading claim at the book’s start.  Namely, like the sensible, language’s character is to efface itself through its very transparency (51).

Alloa finishes this chapter by taking up the lines of questioning that permeate Merleau-Ponty’s middle works, especially Signs, Prose of the World, and the Nature lectures, on the issue of exactly where language resides.  Language does not reside in mere signs, symbols, or words, nor does it reside in meaning.  Where does language have its being?  Alloa sketches Merleau-Ponty’s position this way: “We must place ourselves at the very site of language in the process of making itself – between the given and what makes possible the act of giving – without conceiving of Saying on the basis of the already Said but also without relegating language to a sphere of pure potentiality, without isolating an abstract linguistic structure of yielding entirely to a completed embodiment in a concrete signifying formula” (53).  In brief, as Alloa describes it, the meeting of embodiment and linguistic signs requires one to describe the immaterial but not simply ideal birth of sense-making (53).  Alloa finds that painting for Merleau-Ponty provides one such avenue, to the extent that it comprises a “silent” form of expression, originative in the bodily gesture of the hand, yet also indicative of a verbal lack of mastery of the world and the world’s means of expression.  As such, painting exemplifies the birth of sense-making.  “The painter’s canvas becomes the site of an experience of relinquishment, an exposure to an outside where the protective envelope of everyday language disintegrates” (55-56).

The third and final chapter offers a focused account of the genesis leading to Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy, particularly his interest in developing an “ontology of the visible.”  Texts of especial importance are the philosopher’s final published work “Eye and Mind” and the posthumously edited Visible and Invisible.  In Alloa’s description, this late period of the philosopher engages the question of how something can be given to one as visible, and of how words can function to describe this occurrence (60).  Merleau-Ponty’s task during this period is to uncover the roots of the visible. Again, painting is decisive because the thought-process shown in work of masters such as Cezanne reveals the visible as resistance to transparency.  Alloa characterizes the philosopher’s stance this way: “Thinking as a painter means submitting to the laws of resistance and experiencing feelings within the limits of the sensible” (61).  The ontology of painting consequently affords Merleau-Ponty an entry point into the ontology of the visible not by way of what is seen, but by way of what is becoming-seen, becoming-visible (64).  This last brings Alloa to the crux of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “flesh.”  Because art has its essence not in works but rather in realizing the sensible bonds of experience and world, art helps to instantiate the “flesh” binding the world and human being (65).  Given that “flesh” is an obscure concept in Merleau-Ponty, difficult to pin down precisely, Alloa devotes significant discussion to it.  Flesh is not a physical or atomistic substantial presence (which may be implied in Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of it in Visible as an element) but it is materially immanent in the sensible (65).  Yet flesh is not to be understood as a Leibnizian monad, transposing the principles of life onto nonliving materiality.  Alloa cites an unpublished note written by the philosopher in 1960 to the effect that the flesh of the world is not derivative from an understanding of the flesh of the body (67).  Rather, the human body we know is made of this very flesh of the world.  But again, one can ask, what is flesh and where does it come from?  Alloa concedes that Merleau-Ponty’s position on this issue could be ambivalent at best, given that the philosopher was still exploring this question at the time of his death.  One compromise, Alloa suggests, is to follow a clue from the Nature lectures, namely Merleau-Ponty’s remark that the sensible is the flesh of the world.  In other words, the sensible is the bond uniting experience and world, inner and outer, just insofar as it emerges in the interstices of the subjective and objective, not lying in just one or the other.  On the other hand, Alloa also suggests that the more ambiguous “flesh” perhaps better expresses what is neither subjective nor objective, but beyond these, that through which something sensible is sensed (68).  Alloa’s meaning seems to be something like the following: the sensation I experience through touching an object such as a pine cone is not merely fostered through my hand’s affectivity nor through the pine cone’s sensible characteristics (e.g. prickly, resinous, woody).  Rather, this experience have of the sensible is fostered by a “between” that allows sensible and sensing to meet.  I find Alloa’s discussion of flesh to be especially helpful and an illuminating part of the book.

Alloa rounds out the final chapter with some reflections on the underlying commitments of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the sensible.  Alloa writes that Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception must become an ontology of the sensible because this is the only way to obviate dualism.  And conversely, the sensible must be the seat of ontology because the sensible is the ultimate ground of experience, the medium in which being inheres without needing to be posited (80).  Here, Alloa’s characterization of the sensible is not unlike Heidegger’s observations that being in its guise of ereignis comprises the groundless ground.  For Merleau-Ponty, the sensible is the ultimate, yet ungrounded given.

In summary, this short but dense book by Emmanuel Alloa is a challenging read. It is also a rewarding one for those willing to do the work to digest carefully his many insightful observations on Merleau-Ponty’s thought and development. Alloa makes a very good case for the notion that despite Merleau-Ponty’s stops and starts with various issues, there is nonetheless a guiding thread to his thought’s development.  To be truthful, however, there is an aspect in which this book is frustrating to use as an “introduction” to the philosopher, just because it is written at an astute historiographical level, not one for beginners.  One might wonder why the book’s title was altered for this English-language edition.  Alloa does not provide extensive exegetical readings of any specific books of Merleau-Ponty, opting instead for frequent citations of one or two lines of text, whose meaning Alloa typically takes as self-evident.  There is a measure in which these frequent citations seem taken out of context or otherwise lacking in justification for the lay reader. There is also a noticeable dearth of examples that might help to illustrate for a novice what is at stake in crucial distinctions. This is a book that will much better serve those who are already decently versed in Merleau-Ponty and who possess a workable understanding of at least some of Merleau-Ponty’s key themes. To that end, Alloa’s book will offer potential as a guide for connecting the various topics in Merleau-Ponty’s works and establishing a beginning-to-end narrative.