Phenomenological Reviews

The Preface to Claude Romano’s There Is: The Event and the Finitude of Appearing positions his project at the heart of contemporary philosophy. He raises the question of the contemporary legacy of Kant and transcendental philosophy. This has concerned Speculative Realists for whom a fundamental re-orientation to the perspective of pre-critical or pre-Kantian philosophy is necessary today. For Romano we must look to phenomenology to respond to the problems of Kant’s legacy. Rather than drawing energy from natural science as a way of overcoming this approach, as Ray Brassier amongst others has done (see Brassier’s Nihil Unbound, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Romano seeks to dig deeper into the human science that is phenomenology. His first sentence and inaugural gesture is therefore: ‘Does phenomenology have to be presented as a transcendental discipline?’ (xi)

The guiding concept of this project is the event. Romano’s thinking of the event invites comparisons with other thinkers of this elusive term. Rather than locating the event in an inhuman ontological landscape of subtractive mathematics (Badiou) or Becoming-Other (Deleuze), Romano situates the event firmly in the human and personal world of meaning and project. This is the finitude that faces us all and is here deepened by considering aspects of human existence that, according to Romano, have been neglected by phenomenology.

Romano outlines a distinction established in his previous work that is fundamental to this book and to his whole philosophy. The event as a domain of meaning is to be distinguished from the neutral fact and its causes (13). The understanding of a situation by an agent is at stake when they encounter an event. Crucially, an event happens to someone personally, while facts do not, and this forces them to make ‘ … a personal decision about who it is he [or she] will be’ (13). Romano rejects the opposition between free will and determinism that is often assumed in philosophy. Aristotle is credited with overcoming this opposition thanks to his interest in tragedy (15). Rather than an opposition between human acts and natural necessity we have a historical conception of an agent tasked with being open to the events they encounter in the world.

Romano’s book is structured by encounters with a number of thinkers and offers clear assessments of each one. The first two chapters engage with Heidegger’s early philosophy as a thinking of Being which analyses human existence. Yet a critical assessment of this existential analytic finds certain blind spots within a ‘forgetfulness of the event’ (20). For Romano birth is a dimension of finite human existence which is neglected and obscured by Heidegger’s overriding focus upon being-towards-death in Being and Time. For Romano we must fully situate human existence in-between birth and death. Birth is understood as a ‘bottomlessness’ (Ungrund) as Schelling uses the term (49). This enables it to be the source of genuine novelty and the transformation of people and their worlds. Birth is said to draw upon a temporality more original than the one Heidegger describes within his analytic of Dasein’s being-towards-death. The influence of religious thought, and of Kierkegaard in particular, is identified as a further limitation of Heidegger’s early work. Whilst Aristotle’s role is acknowledged as introducing concrete aspects of existence into the thinking of Being, religious models of human existence bring abstraction. According to Romano’s reading, the absolute decision of Dasein between authenticity and inauthenticity echoes Kierkegaard’s ‘either-or’ which is the source of this privileging of Dasein over wider dimensions of being (21-22). This concern with the transparency and absoluteness of the choice of this privileged entity insulates Dasein from the concrete world of events. We might wonder if Heidegger’s middle period work on the event could offer avenues for addressing the concerns raised here. We are not offered a consideration of the event as Ereignis which de-centres Dasein and takes away its privileged position in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event (Indiana University Press, 2012).

We move, in the third chapter, to Henri Bergson for a thinking of time as the source of novelty. This is to be an antidote to Heidegger’s abstract, formal time without events. Romano outlines Bergson’s critique of metaphysics which rejects the attempt to make time into an analogon of space (73). This is fruitful for Romano’s project because Bergson aims to restore to time its essential role of permanently creating novelty. After Heidegger empties time by investing in the privilege of Dasein and its absolute decision as the source of meaning, Bergson makes temporality the condition of the possibility of novelty (84). There is no further we can go with Bergson because his thinking of time, as duration, assumes cosmic dimensions as it develops through his work. For Romano we must get back ‘down to earth’, to the human situation and the events that concern it.

An engagement with Jean Paul Sartre in chapter 4 brings us back to the human situation from the inhuman, cosmic dimensions of Bergsonian duration. Yet Romano offers a highly critical reading of Sartre’s inversion or subversion of theology (88). He argues that when human beings replace God in Sartre’s ontology this is not a break with theology but ‘a parody-like inversion of it’ within which human freedom cancels itself out (88). Romano sets out Sartre’s conception of freedom as invoking an originary choice that is self-causing and unconditioned (100). Sartre calls this choice ‘absurd’ and Romano asks whether we can still call this ‘freedom’. The charge of this critical reading is that freedom is undermined by its total affirmation in Sartre. What about the constancy I can observe in the choices I make and the values I hold? For Romano freedom cannot have meaning for us if it is based upon an arbitrary and irrational choice since human freedom only makes sense if it relates to human concerns. Romano talks about the need to ‘reinject some being’ into the originary nothingness that makes this choice incomprehensible to us (101). The formal emptiness that we diagnosed in Heidegger’s temporality of human existence and remedied in Bergson threatens again in Sartre. The absoluteness and infinity of freedom mean that it escapes human power (105).

We encounter Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh in chapter 5. This is traced back to Husserl’s uncovering of flesh. Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty seeks to bring abstract Husserlian concepts ‘down to earth’ by putting them in touch with concrete human projects, but this endeavour is compromised once again. If flesh is between the ego and the world as an interface in Husserl, it is not constitutive (120). Rather, this concept emerges in Husserl’s thought as a breach in his abstract transcendental idealism which cannot then be closed (120). While Husserl’s flesh belongs to my transcendental ego, implicating it in idealism and even solipsism, for Merleau-Ponty the subject and object are blurred by my body and in all worldly things. This is because the thing is woven into the ‘same intentional fabric’ as my body (129; Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964, 167). However, in this ontology of the flesh Romano identifies a new form of idealism. This is a carnal idealism where the body is privileged as the entity which must be woven into the world and whose self-reflection gives rise to this process (the experience of double touching). Furthermore, Romano finds that concrete, meaningful distinctions which mark out human existence and make it possible are subsumed in a common flesh. If Heidegger gave us an empty time, Merleau-Ponty gives us an empty space where we cannot maintain the distinctions that make life full of meaning, such as between a self and an other whose indiscernibility in a common flesh is now overwhelming. We cannot pick out the distinction between what is mine and what belongs to an other because flesh transcends these partitions (131). To carnal idealism we add carnal solipsism (130). With an ontology of the flesh Merleau-Ponty fails to extricate himself from idealism: ‘To think of flesh as the origin of the world is still to think of it as not being of the world, to confer a status of origin on it, and thus retain the main features of the transcendental attitude’ (140).

Chapter 6 turns to J. J. Gibson’s psychology and interprets it as an ‘ecological phenomenology’ which has the potential to remedy the limitations of phenomenology diagnosed in the preceding chapters. Romano argues that Husserl’s phenomenological deduction failed to bracket the basic concepts of Cartesian and transcendental philosophy and this is the legacy that later phenomenologists have failed to overcome (168). Gibson shared with Husserl a rejection of the methods of natural science while going further and avoiding a dualism of subject and object. This he achieved by understanding perception through the involvement of living beings in their environment. We must focus on the behaviour of livings beings and structural invariants in the world that shape and develop this behaviour (158-9). Rather than a cognitive model, where sensory input must be assembled, Gibson offers an ecological model where perception is fully involved in its environment. This involvement makes perception self-reliant rather than having recourse to cognitive processes. Rather than needing to be ordered, perception possesses an order of its own because it is always already involved or embedded in the world as a structured exteriority or space (161). It is the continuous encounter of living beings with their environment that is the event in this model (150). We are able to encounter solidity and distinctions in the world rather than finding these undermined by an ontology of the flesh where such things are submerged. Romano’s criticisms of Gibson centre on his focus on animal life. Animal life becomes the paradigm and specifically human perception is not distinguished (174). How does the world have the rich meanings that humans experience through our ongoing encounters within it? This order of meaning must not depend on a privileged subject but neither can it emerge from the realm of animal life where human meaning is absent. For Romano the ability of the event to shock us with an ‘unforeseeable becoming’ (174) in the meanings we experience is now at stake.

The challenge of thinking about nothing is considered in chapter 7. The context is Heidegger’s rejection of any attempt to circumscribe thought by logic (178). Rudolf Carnap’s attack on metaphysics as a ‘meaningless set of pseudo-propositions’ (181) is related to his disputation with Heidegger. Carnap advocates a logical formalisation of thought where meaningless propositions are identified and rejected. Romano finds confusion and misreading in Carnap’s critique of Heidegger’s engagement with nothingness. For Carnap Heidegger is both deluded by grammar when he talks of nothing and rejecting logical formulation in order to think differently (190). Either Heidegger’s thought can be formalised logically, and thus be in error when he uses terms illogically, or it exists outside of this paradigm. Heidegger rejects logical formulation, as demonstrated by his lecture What is Metaphysics? Romano argues that Heidegger draws upon the temporal nature of existence to show the inadequacy of atemporal formal concepts in thinkers like Carnap and Frege. This reveals the limitations of a logical formalism that fails to examine its philosophical presuppositions. It also reveals the positive role of nothing in a temporal process, as ‘… the condition of the appearing of the world …’ (206). Nothing is understood as ‘… the withdrawal or absence constitutive of all coming to presence as such…’ (208).

The final chapter sets out a conception of the event as the appearing of appearance. Heraclitus is identified ‘the very first phenomenologist’ for his engagement with this elusive event (215). Phenomenology returns again and again to this ontological difference, this event it continually seeks to capture but always misses (216). Phenomenology’s inadequacies have been diagnosed throughout this book and here the antidote is identified in emptiness. This emptiness involves not having expectations, not imposing Dasein’s closed project or any transcendental structures on the world. The result is openness to events in the midst of situations which are not at all transparent to us and which we do not chose. This gives rise to new definitions. Freedom is ‘… the ability to be [oneself] in the face of what happens to [us]’ (230). It is an ability to be open to events rather than a model of decision like those criticised by Romano in earlier chapters. Rather than Dasein we have the ‘advenant’ who is defined as the capacity to ‘… undergo the unsubstitutable experience of what happens to him or her’ (219). The advenant, as the ‘very humanity of the human being’, does not involve the closed project of being-towards-death but the exposure to events that results from being born into a finite existence (219). This brings Romano to the openness that dispenses with expectations in order to have the capacity to undergo events that are transformative of the worlds we inhabit.

This book gives us a clear and coherent engagement with the history of phenomenology while drawing upon figures outside of this tradition, such as Bergson and Gibson, in order to inject new concepts. This allows Romano to enact a critique of ontological structures that fail to draw upon the events that are vital for human existence. This project contributes more widely to critiques of philosophies that fail to account for human concerns, for the actual situations such beings find themselves in. Critiques of the work of Gilles Deleuze have also alleged a neglect of the actual, human dimensions of existence (see, for example, Peter Hallward, Out of This World, Verso, 2006). Romano seeks to populate human landscapes with events in order to realise the transformative potential of these encounters in specifically human ways. He has to answer the challenge that the novelty of events is undermined by tethering them to worlds that are perhaps human, all too human. In seeking to define what is specifically human, he runs the risk of putting such beings too far away from the event that constitutes a transformative break with what is already the case. There is a tension between Romano’s critique of idealism and the privileging of a particular entity (such as Dasein), and his own emphasis upon humanity (such as when he questions Gibson’s focus upon animal life). Might this preserve the human side of existence at the expense of what exceeds it? Might we understand humanity better through what exceeds it? This crucial debate is ongoing and Romano’s engagement with it represents an insightful, rigorous and provocative contribution.

It is unfortunate but probable that even in the era of the “new Husserl” very many philosophers who are not Husserl scholars still view Husserl’s philosophy through the lens of his logicism, his idealism, his self-styled neo-Cartesianism, and other contentious Husserlian tendencies. It will come as a surprise to many that Husserl dabbled in ethics at all, let alone published essays and prepared book-length manuscripts on the subject. There is still a good deal of work to be done to communicate the intriguingly multi-faceted character of Husserl’s thought to a broader philosophical audience. It is also the case that several volumes of Husserl’s lectures and manuscripts have appeared in recent years with substantial material on the subject of ethics. And given the rise in importance of ethical theory in recent decades, paying greater attention to this side of Husserl’s work only seems fitting. So Susi Ferrarello new book, Husserl’s Ethics and Practical Intentionality, is a very timely contribution to the relatively small literature on Husserl’s ethics. Her discussion tackles the subject by presenting in detail Husserl’s understanding of value, practical intentionality, and ethics. She sets out to paint a picture of a plausible and well-ordered theory that encompasses all of those topics and is consistently elaborated across Husserl’s many and varied philosophical works. In what follows I’ll first recapitulate chapter-by-chapter the arc of Ferrarello’s narrative and then appraise the book with more specific and detailed reference to certain of its rich and varied contents.

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Chapters 1 and 2 appropriately get things started by spelling out Husserl’s theory of value. Ferrarello first introduces Husserl’s view on the a priori, which is pertinent not only because Husserl takes his phenomenological method generally to trade in a priori insights, but also because he is a staunch realist about value and therefore situates that category within the framework of his overarching project of constructing an ontology of material essences. Ferrarello stresses the importance of analyzing value in terms of both its material and formal a priori or essential properties and also that there are a variety of parallelisms (although dualisms would be more apt, as she treats them) that hold between logical and the practical phenomena (both construed broadly).

The discussion of value is followed by treatments of the notions of normativity (Chapter 3) and evidence (Chapter 4). While an ontology of value informs us about the nature of values and the a priori laws of essence that govern them, such analysis does not yet tell us how values have a grip on valuing subjects. That is, it doesn’t tell us about the validity or normativity of values. It is in this context that Ferrarello introduces Husserl’s novel rendering of a categorical imperative and engages with Steven Crowell’s recent work on normativity in phenomenology. Although Ferrarello could have been clearer on the point, the notion of evidence is pertinent to the theory of action and ethics inasmuch as both involve decisions and because the theory of evidence, among other things, provides a way of explaining how decisions are grounded phenomenologically.

We are then introduced, in Chapters 5 and 6, respectively, to full-fledged practical intentionality and embodied ethical agency. Ferrarello runs through the major points of Husserl’s theory of intentionality, from the Logical Investigations and on to Ideas I and the Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, engaging select interpretive quandaries along the way, in order to locate practical intentionality (broadly construed), surprisingly, between so-called active and passive forms of intentionality. To shed light on Husserl’s theory of an embodied ethical agency, Ferrarello reminds us of the many constitutive layers that belong to “the” body. She is then able to specify in what sense the body is bearer of motivations and issuer of ethical decisions.

The culminating three chapters complete Ferrarello’s project by giving a broad-ranging and complex account of the will (Chapter 7), from whence she pivots to tackle the ethical aspects of intersubjectivity (Chapter 8) and of the interrelation of the phenomena of social ethics, teleology, and god (Chapter 9). The chapter on willing is perhaps the richest. It clarifies Husserl’s dichotomous view of spirit (Geist), understood as having a “lower,” non-rational domain as well as with a “higher,” genuinely rational one. In it Ferrarello also touches on the issues of freedom, happiness, and the link between the will, love, and community as they figure together in Husserl’s later ethics. Continuing with the focus on interpersonal phenomena, Chapter 8 reviews the basics of Husserl’s theories of intentionality and empathy, and their relations to the theories of Franz Brentano and Edith Stein, respectively. (I’ll note, in passing, that the need for this chapter’s inclusion in the book is not apparent, since previous chapters already provide detailed accounts of both intentionality and intersubjectivity. Bringing Brentano and Stein into the discussion does not add anything crucial, either.) That discussion serves as a brief segue into the book’s final chapter, which fills out the conception of happiness in Husserl’s later ethics by explaining its teleological character, i.e., its trajectory toward an ideal fulfillment which takes place, as Ferrarello shows, only in a broader social setting and with the divine life ultimately serving as its model and ideal standard.

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Ferrarello’s book is commendable for stressing, against certain other commentators, the overall continuity in Husserl’s thought on ethics. Rather than giving an Early Husserl/Late Husserl narrative, she tells one coherent story about Husserl’s understanding of value, practical intentionality, and ethics. Ferrarello weaves her account of the theory of value and the categorical imperative associated with Husserl’s early work on ethics seamlessly into that of the notions of vocation, love, and community as Husserl treats them largely in his later work. Her book also has the virtue of highlighting the systematicity of Husserl’s thinking, drawing connections to ethics from many other areas in his thought, including the theory of parts and wholes, intentionality, evidence, passive/active synthesis, among many others.

The book is also distinctive in its consistent insistence on the distinction Husserl makes between norms and values. Understanding Husserl as maintaining a dual and equal emphasis on value and the deontic makes for an interesting contrast with the tendencies of certain other prominent ethical theories to one-sidedly emphasize value (e.g., consequentialism) or the deontic (e.g., Kantian deontology). Ferrarello puts the distinction to work in attempting to resolve a debate among Husserl scholars about whether love, according to Husserl, targets others in their “propertiless Ipseity” or through their personal attributes (p. 180).

Ferrarello’s book also has its weaknesses. There are the relatively minor in importance but still frustratingly numerous occurrences of typographical, grammatical, formatting, and citation-related errors in the text. Those, of course, should not all be attributed to Ferrarello. There are also the somewhat more significant problems it has of a lack of focus and inclusion of digressions into related but inessential areas of Husserl’s thought. The entirety of Chapter 8 exemplifies this. And there are deeper and more significant concerns about the overall value of the book in contributing to the improvement and sharpening of our grasp of Husserl’s thoughts on ethics. I shall focus on the latter.

A major deficiency in Ferrarello’s book is its failure to suitably contextualize Husserl’s idiosyncratic approach to ethics in the broader field of ethics, whether viewed from a historical or contemporary vantage point.

She notes early on that Husserl breaks down ethics into a “threefold framework [of] theoretical ethics, normative ethics and technical ethics” (p. 16). That is a promising start. It suggests that even if Husserl’s thought does not at all times easily connect up with other approaches to ethics, they at least share this basic picture of ethicists’ division of labor. Husserl is trying to answer the same sorts of questions as others, and so it should not be too difficult to identify points of convergence or divergence. One wouldn’t necessarily expect a book canvasing major topics in Husserl’s ethics, like Ferrarello’s, to give a complete account of all these broad subtopics. It would be understandable to leave out the applied aspect, to be brief in addressing the theoretical, and to devote the greatest amount of attention to explaining Husserl’s normative ethics. Ferrarello, apart from noting the tripartite division of ethical labor, otherwise neglects to present Husserl’s ethics in this natural and approachable way.

Others have certainly already made progress on the question of how to relate Husserl’s ethics to the predominant trends in thinking about normative ethics. And, as a matter of fact, Husserl himself is not shy about his take on extant ethical theories. He engages many heavyweight figures in the history of ethics like Hobbes, Hume, and Kant and tackles classic ethical themes like moral skepticism, hedonism, ethical egoism, utilitarianism, and rationalism in considerable detail (Hua XXXVII). There is so much to be said here, and even if others had said much of it already, one would still expect at least a summary treatment of such things in a book like Ferrarello’s. No such discussion is to be found there. Perhaps Ferrarello has reservations about the familiar approaches to normative ethics and thinks it would be inapt in some way to relate Husserl’s ethical thought to them. If so, the reader interested in ethics but not already invested in the project of (Husserlian) phenomenology will want to know why – as, I suspect, will most readers.

Despite a significant lack of engagement outside of Husserl’s universe of discourse, it is no doubt possible to present Husserl’s ideas on their own terms in an informative way. Ferrarello, though, does not do this. Her work is replete with fine conceptual distinctions and related subtleties. It tells us how to connect the dots between various concepts in Husserl’s theoretical repertoire. It does not tell us, on the other hand, many of the things one would hope to learn from an account of value, action, and ethics. Readers will be left with little concrete grasp of these phenomena or any clear idea about how their associated theories actually work. Let me explain why.

Many of her formulations of Husserl’s ideas are simply uninformative. Consider, for example, how Ferrarello describes the ethical: “It is this encounter that characterizes ethics: the meeting of hyletic content of the now-point with the Leib as generating a volitional body” (p. 155). Or take this closely related statement: “One of the most basic ethical laws follows from this: acts always aim at realization” (p. 155). The idea, very roughly, is that sensory elements in experience spur one to make choices (the first claim), and that an agent’s choices are good (possess value) when they aim to realize something (the second claim). These may be necessary or essential features of properly ethical phenomena, but they don’t appear to be sufficient by themselves to qualify an act as ethical or to give it a peculiarly ethical character, Ferrarello’s verbiage notwithstanding.

The first statement characterizes how choices or decisions arise. But could they not be decisions of any sort, responding to non-moral motivations? Surely they could. So perhaps Ferrarello would have more accurately phrased the first claim as one about practical intentionality (broadly understood). The second claim, too, about the value of realizing something, is too generically stated and is susceptible to objections similar to the first. It can’t be that any realizing activity whatsoever is valuable or good. Evil is realized as much as good, and so is what is morally neutral, or what has some form of value besides moral goodness. In subsequent pages she clarifies that what is attainable should be good, even the best of attainable goods (p. 157). But, as we will see momentarily, that clarification is ultimately only apparent.

These vagaries could be compensated for in the further course of elaborating on the nature of value and the categorical imperative. Ferrarello does not follow through in this way. To begin with, take the relatively basic topic of value. We do not learn from Ferrarello’s discussion how to identify values, except the obvious point that they are supposed to be derivable by eidetic analysis. In the discussion dedicated to value (Chapters 1-3) the only candidate moral value mentioned is the categorical imperative that Husserl formulates (Chapter 3, §5), which can provide little guidance for us as Ferrarello presents it (more on that in a moment). Maybe there is only the semblance of a lacunae here. For Kant, at least, it is possible to identify a single intrinsic moral value (i.e., “humanity,” as conceived in the second formulation of his categorical imperative). Whether we should understand Husserl to be doing likewise – which would be very interesting – Ferrarello does not say. She does not explore this line of thought, and subsequent claims she makes cast doubt on it.

She later introduces Husserl’s notion of love, which is conceived of as a value (p. 178).  The reader will appreciate that Ferrarello thus pinpoints a putative moral value. There are nevertheless two severe limitations in her treatment of love that undermine any significant gains that would come with its introduction. First, love is a specifically interpersonal value, so we are left without any values (besides the categorical imperative – again, more on that shortly) pertaining to the individual moral agent. Second, the precise content of the value love embodies remains unclear. As Ferrarello reports, the law (which is equivalent to “value” in the Husserlian lexicon) of love requires us “to respect other human beings and live in harmony with them” (p. 179). It would be tempting to read the sense of Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative into this remark. We cannot do so, however, if we suppose with Ferrarello that love is unlike the categorical imperative in that it is not a “norm,” i.e., a duty (p. 183).

So what in a person as such is the relevant bearer of value? Not their “humanity” (in Kant’s sense). That is because love is a feeling that exceeds reason (p. 180). Ferrarello sides with John Drummond’s proposal that love targets persons by virtue of their personal qualities, and that these are stratified (p. 182). Whether that stratification entails an axiological ranking or whether all the stratified values are properly moral values, Ferrarello does not say. Presumably agapic love involves a moral value, but all we learn about it is that it is an “admiration that we feel for the way in which a person lives” (p. 182). One will want to know, of course, what about a way of life makes it worthy of admiration.

Another basic point about Husserl’s theory of value one might reasonably expect to learn from Ferrarello’s book is how Husserl differentiates kinds of values, i.e., as expressed in practical, aesthetic, and ethical predicates (the paradigmatic generic formulations being, respectively, “is useful,” “is beautiful,” and “is good”). Ferrarello suggests that responsibility, reflection, rationality, and universality are features definitive of the ethical (p. 157). It’s unclear whether these are supposed to demarcate moral value as such, though. And one might be inclined to think not, since they are often understood as deontic categories pertaining to moral obligation, i.e., “normativity” in the Husserlian vernacular. They are the very features that deontologists like Kant single out to explain what makes an action right. Yet Ferrarello claims that value is not reducible to deontic categories (i.e., norms). Husserl preserves both, she insists, as irreducible to one another, and defining moral values in deontic terms would seem to threaten to collapse this distinction.

Were we to identify value with apparently deontic categories like reason, reflection, responsibility, and the like, it’s not obvious that doing so would bring about any real gain. All of these categories apply to the ethical and the non-ethical alike. There are purely practical (i.e., involving means-end purposiveness) or aesthetic instances exhibiting all of these categories. One can reason and reflect about what means will most efficiently lead to a desired end, and one can be responsible for any errors, as the author of the associated actions. The idea of practical or aesthetic responsibility may sound odd, but it shouldn’t. Let me expand on this point, since together with rationality, responsibility is a key feature of our moral existence in Ferrarello’s reading of Husserl. If there are such things as purely practical/aesthetic errors attributable to their corresponding practical/aesthetic agents, and if other practical/aesthetic agents can call them out on their errors and engage in disputes about them, then a kind of practical/aesthetic responsibility seems to be in play here. The disputes wouldn’t be over whether one acted wrongly in a moral sense, but in a distinctively practical/aesthetic sense. These very basic considerations do not seem to have occurred to Ferrarello at all.

One might hope to get a foothold on Husserl’s ethics from Ferrarello’s account of the categorical imperative in Husserl. Unfortunately, that account is all too brief (just four pages of dedicated discussion, with scattered references in the remainder of the work), and she is less than forthcoming about how to use Husserl’s platitudinous formulation(s) of it – “‘Do the best! Do your best!’ (Hua XLII, 389) or ‘Be the best!’ (XXVII, 272)” (p. 69; p. 39). To get a sense of my concern here, think, by comparison, of how readily Kant’s difficult formulations of the categorical imperative lend themselves to the task of evaluating morally problematic situations, and how this fact is emphasized in standard introductory accounts of it. She tells us that this imperative is a “call” demanding us to conform to a “moral law” (pp. 70-71), a law that specifies some value we could discern in eidetic analysis. Since we have little clue about what values look like, we remain in the dark about how to abide by this imperative.

It would be less than helpful at this point to observe that Ferrarello describes the categorical imperative itself as a value. It would only allow us to draw the consequence that the categorical imperative is a call to abide by the categorical imperative, which gets us nowhere. Ferrarello’s treatment of ethical vocation and happiness, which could potentially shed light on the function of Husserl’s categorical imperative, are equally broad, bordering on vacuous. For a moral agent to take on their distinctly ethical vocation or calling entails that it must be that their “[s]elf-reflecting and self-regulative life can become habitual acts” (p. 176), and that we as moral agents perform “an essential reflection on all that we are” (p. 177). As I’ve observed, such appeals to reflection unilluminating unless accompanied by further qualifications, and Ferrarello offers us none.

Now, as far as happiness, “we mean the fulfillment of vocational life” or “being loyal to ourselves” (p. 170). I am sympathetic to this suggestion. I only wish Ferrarello had done more to convey what it is that makes vocational life or self-loyalty ethical. She does no more than identify as our true vocation the development of our rational capacities (pp. 175-177), and, as I said above, she does not let us in on what a distinctively ethical form of rationality would look like or, I should add, what makes the cultivation of rationality the paramount human aspiration.

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Based on the above, I think many of those seeking guidance about Husserl’s views on value, practical intentionality, and ethics will be disappointed with Ferrarello’s book. If my complaints are accurate, then the book will be of little benefit to a general audience not attuned to the nuances of contemporary Husserl scholarship. Husserl scholars will find some value in it. That will lie primarily in Ferrarello’s systematic approach. We get a better picture from Ferrarello about how everything fits together in Husserl’s theoretical framework when it comes to the topics of value, practical intentionality, and ethics. But that value is significantly offset by the overall paucity of detail about those main topics themselves. Even Husserl scholars will, I think, want to learn more about the core features of Husserl’s ethics. They too will want a picture of Husserl not at a distance, as a historical artefact, but as a thinker whose ideas have a place in the bigger picture of ethical theory and can thus be situated within both contemporary and historical trends of ethical thinking. It won’t profit them much to be guided once more through the well-trodden terrain to which Ferrarello would lead them in so many pages of her book containing lengthy forays about Husserl’s views on intentionality, psychologism, naturalism, empathy, founding (Fundierung), and many other subjects.

References

Hua XXXVII. E. Husserl (2004). Einleitung in die Ethik 1920/1924. H. Peucker (ed.). Dordrecht: Springer.

Key developments in contemporary mathematics are not commonly rated among the decisive factors responsible for shaping the French reception of phenomenology. In the critical uptake of phenomenological concerns, for instance, in the works of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and others collated in the Anglosphere under the banner of ‘French Theory,’ questions concerning the nature and ontological primacy of lived experience, and the related success or otherwise of phenomenology’s attempts at self-grounding, tend to crowd out concerns with the ability of the Husserlian and Heideggerian projects to accommodate the philosophical implications of specifically new mathematical developments. This, however, was far from the case with the French philosopher and mathematician Jean Cavaillès—an attendee of both Husserl’s “Cartesian Meditations” at the Sorbonne in 1928-29, and Heidegger’s ‘Davos encounter’ with the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer—wherein we find an early critique of phenomenology’s prospects of accommodating the philosophical implications of the “new infinite” in Georg Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers. For Cavaillès, such developments exposed the limitations of the phenomenological grounding of “the forms of the understanding in the empirical forms of experience,” insofar as “the viability of [such] mathematical objects … transgressed the structural criteria of the transcendental ego” (49). A Spinozist “disparagement of the ‘lived’” and “distrust of originary foundations” (42) would find contemporary expression in Cavaillès’ equally Spinozist defence of the immanent rather than derived nature of the rational—a point presented in Knox Peden’s Spinoza Contra Phenomenology as “a decisive moment in French intellectual history in that the fundamentals of Spinozist rationalism were for the first time posited against those of phenomenology” (61).

Peden’s outstanding intellectual history traces the aftermath of this pitting of the concept against consciousness, the deployment of a Spinozist rationalism against phenomenology, in the 30 years that followed, filling in the philosophical, political, institutional and biographical backgrounds of the better known Althusserian and Deleuzian varieties of Spinozism that the study closes with. Spinoza Contra Phenomenology offers a detailed contextualisation and nuanced explication of the projects of key figures responsible for adding meat to Cavaillès’ rationalist bone, and influencing both Althusser and Deleuze in often heretofore-undocumented ways. Peden shows a fidelity to the majority of his objects of study, neither entertaining their reduction to well-defined contextual factors, nor overstating the strength of the ‘contra’ of his title.

Seven chapters present “two moments in French Spinozism”: the epistemological deployment of Spinozist rationalism as “a question of philosophical method,” and the subsequent explication of “the full range of its ontological implications” (105). The first chapter draws attention to Cavaillès’ concerns with both Husserl and Heidegger regarding their compromising of the immanent nature of rationality, be it in Husserl’s Kantian forsaking of such immanence for that of transcendental subjectivity, or Heidegger’s forsaking of the rational in his critique of the transcendental ego (28). On Cavaillès’ reading, Husserl’s employment of the Cogito “meant that phenomenology was either spinning its wheels in Kantianism or escaping the trap only with [an unconscionable] Heideggerian recourse to irrationalism” (29).

The second chapter demonstrates how “the operative alternative between rationalism and phenomenology in Cavaillès’s project would come to be institutionally codified in France as an opposition between Spinozism and Cartesianism” (61). Peden examines the protracted debate between Ferdinand Alquié, Sorbonne professor (and instructor of Gilles Deleuze), and Martial Gueroult of the Collège de France. Alquié was responsible for the phenomenologisation of Descartes and “something of an institutionally domesticated surrogate for Heidegger’s influence in France” (195); Gueroult for “one of the most ambitious assessments of Spinoza’s rationalism anywhere in the twentieth century” (65-6). These two irreconcilable Spinozisms—a “naturalist theology” in Alquié’s case, and “a rationalist pluralism” in Gueroult’s—are shown in the following chapter to be entertained equally in Jean-Toussaint Desanti’s resumption of Cavaillès’s rationalist project. Desanti is shown “affrming Spinoza’s rationalism though hesitating to draw out the full range of its ontological implications” (105), exhibiting a tempered fidelity to Husserl while still praising “science as the supreme source of epistemological criteria” (108). Desanti’s case is thus doubly significant in that it constitutes “less of a complete break with Husserl than a recalibration of Husserl’s method into something that might allow it so speak to the experience of rationalist necessity at the heart of mathematical discourse” (92), and acts as the point of pivot for Peden between the epistemological and ontological moments of French Spinozism.

Desanti’s valorisation of ‘science’ finds supreme expression in the work of Althusser in the following decade. Peden’s fourth and fifth chapters offer a masterful overview of Althusser’s proferring of a Spinozist rationalism as the philosophical “means through which … to recuperate science from what he viewed as its twice-over degradation in the hands of Stalinist ideology and phenomenological philosophy” (143), and the specific forms the aforementioned Spinozist disparagement of the lived and originary take in this highly influential and often divisive figure. The phases constituting Althusserian Spinozism are convincingly shown to be held together by a “progressive eradication of the contents of lived experience as a viable object of philosophical purchase of reflection” (132), and an attempt to replace the misguided approach of the origin in the eidetic reduction with science as a immanent operation irreducible to the experience of the lived—an operation realised, on Althusser’s reading, by Marx in the form of historical materialism. Althusser’s “critique of ‘origins,’ and the illusions produced by recourse to origins, was one component of a philosophical effort that viewed the insights of modern science not as problems for philosophy to circumvent but as conditions themselves for philosophical activity” (187). Importantly, this utility did not entirely extend towards that of the political, as Althusser’s attempts to put Spinozist rationalism to political use are shown by Peden to remain subservient to a fidelity to the philosophical imperative, presaging a broader problem of deducing political instruction from Spinoza’s ontology that Peden will come to present as a defining character of twenty-first century appropriations of Spinoza.

The sixth and seventh chapters, devoted to the “strange,” post-Heideggerian Spinozism of Deleuze, draws similar lessons with respect to these contemporary attempts, albeit via a drastically different approach towards the tension between Spinozist rationalism and phenomenology. Deleuze offers in Peden’s view “a fantastic attempt at a synthesis of the phenomenological and Spinozist lines of French thought” (133), where Spinozism offered “the means for working through the phenomenological tradition in order to produce philosophical conclusions that could not be reached with either Spinozism or phenomenology alone” (219-20). Deleuze’s absolute rationalism is shown to recall Desanti’s efforts (and so distinguish itself most noticeably from Althusser) in its attempt to strike a “compromise with phenomenology” (133). But, to be sure, Deleuze’s efforts do not depart from the dissatisfaction with the phenomenological recourse to origins particularly prominent in Cavaillès and Althusser, as his ontological evacuation of the category of possibility is shown to constitute an extension of Althusser’s dismissal of phenomenological reliance on the originary towards that of “phenomenological ontology” (230), wherein creation is, in good Spinozist fashion, “[n]o longer located at an origin,” but is rather “deemed coextensive with existence itself” (247).

Yet the transformative nature of Deleuze’s absolute rationalism for French Spinozism can neither be dissociated from its central Heideggerian components, to the very extent that the “contemporary political thought” directly informed by Deleuze’s Spinozism—Peden focuses on the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri here—“often draws more on the Heideggerian elements that Deleuze brings to Spinozism than on the formal, subtractive, in a word rationalist, elements of Spinozism whose critical relation to phenomenology has been explored in the preceding chapters” (197). The ultimate significance of this apprehension of the contemporary is indexed to the final picture of Spinozism that Peden’s study arrives at; ““the most valuable element of the Deleuzean legacy in its hybrid Heideggerian/Spinozistic form […] is the notion that the best a philosophical ontology can do is to seek to induce alternate and hopefully more beneficent ways of perceiving and conceiving the world. A deductive politics is out of the question” (258). The crowning achievement of Peden’s intellectual history is thus to show any “investment in what the fundamental relations of Spinoza’s formal ontology might “mean” in any given situation, political or otherwise, is a gesture that is arguably contrary to the critical essence of Spinoza’s rationalism” (260). The Althusserian and Deleuzian instances of French Spinozist rationalism are, on Peden’s reading, both thus exemplary in constituting “a critique of the attempt, widespread in the phenomenological tradition and beyond, to make politics a derivative specimen of a more foundational ontology” (262).

Peden’s clear preferences for the integrity of the concept—perhaps best encapsulated in the statement “The commitment to thought’s own insights against all the evidence of one’s lived experience … is radical in the extreme” (230)—are thus by no means hidden by the close of his study. Yet it must be emphasised that Peden maintains a welcome distance throughout from both overblown polemic and toothless intellectual contextualisation, offering considered and concise statements drawn from the clearly staged nuances of the various projects he outlines, and inviting in turn equally considered application to aspects of the period and subject matter in question that are not covered in his study (the most noticeable absence of the work of Pierre Macherey is justified early on). Spinoza Contra Phenomenology is compelling in the presentation of its engrossing content, and deeply instructive in its method. It should be necessary reading for anyone with an interest in the myriad afterlives and broader potential of the Husserlian and Heideggerian projects.