After the Death of God: Secularization as a Philosophical Challenge from Kant to Nietzsche
Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka
Reviewed by: Peter Shum (University of Warwick)
Introduction
Lorenzo Girardi’s wide ranging and highly informative book, Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka, explains the origins and nature of Europe’s contemporary “crisis”, and conducts its own enquiry into the significance of the catastrophes that befell Europe in the twentieth century. It investigates the limitations of rationality in the political sphere, and is sympathetic to the insights of agonistic political theory.
Girardi ends the introduction to his book on the same note on which he concludes the book itself, namely by warning us not to forget about the unprecedented catastrophes that befell Europe in the twentieth century. The admonition is apposite, since the book’s entire train of thought turns out to be, in a certain way, haunted by the hecatombs of the first and second world wars. It alludes not only to a peril associated with a fading of our collective memory, but also to a philosophical danger of failing to comprehend what it was that transpired in the first place, in the traumas that we now denote with terms like “The Great War” the “The Holocaust”. Indeed, I suspect that many readers will be prompted in the course of this book to wonder if the term “war” itself is due a metaphysical clarification.
Edmund Husserl predeceased those whose lives were cut short by the Holocaust, but by the time of his death in 1938 he was, to say the least, more cognizant than most of the nature of the crisis that seemed to be engulfing Europe. Husserl thought Europe was in crisis on the grounds that a naturalistic conception of the world cannot account for or support humanity’s existential needs. He saw rational discourse as a reliable path towards the reconciliation or convergence of opposing views, and wanted conflicting nations to embark on a political journey from their respective cultural life-worlds to a more universal life-world.
Girardi elaborates an important counterpoint to Husserl’s rationalist teleology, by introducing the thought of the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. Girardi explores Patočka’s concerns about Husserl’s understanding of the root of Europe’s crisis, and about Husserl’s proposal to restore the ideal of reason in political philosophy. This turns out to be connected to potential philosophical problems that can arise when one tries to attribute a final or transcendent meaning to the world as a whole. This, in turn, is connected to phenomenological questions pertaining to how one attributes significance to experiences, and how one responds to situations of apparent meaninglessness. All of these considerations inform Patočka’s concept of problematicity, which is really the central theme of the three final chapters. Girardi goes on to consider the implications of Patočka’s notion of problematicity for the discussion about the future of politics in Europe, and how this discussion has been taken up by certain post-structuralist political thinkers. The interconnectedness of the topics of Patočka, problematicity, and politics will incline me to review the book’s final three chapters as a unit, in place of the chapter by chapter approach that I shall adopt for the rest of the book. Toward the end of this book review I shall offer three discussion points that I hope readers will find constructive.
The Idea of Europe and the Ideal of Reason
The main discussion of the book opens by drawing attention to the centrality of rationality in Europe’s sense of its own self-identity, and of its own relation to the rest of the world. The very notion of “Europe”, as something other than simply a geographical designation, advanced when “Europe” began to replace “Christendom” in diplomatic language to signify a collection of cooperating coordinate sovereign states with a shared heritage from Christendom. The distinguishing feature of this European civilisation was that it saw itself as based squarely and fundamentally on reason.
This European civilisation saw itself as superior to all others, and the capacity for reason was held to be constitutive of our humanity. Importantly, this involved seeing reason not only as a mode of enquiry but as a way of resolving disputes. According to the rationalist perspective, all fields of human life, including morality, and the organisation of society, were to be grounded in reason. Grounding everything in reason had the consequence that the world became “disenchanted”, since in principle everything could be mastered by means of calculation.
However, by the end of the nineteenth century, there were concerns that rationalism was undermining community and social cohesion. Weber observed that for all of rationalism’s successes, it didn’t seem to have much success in answering questions about the ultimate meaning of human existence. In a rationalist discourse concerning how to organise society, there isn’t typically much emphasis on accommodating a plurality of views. Sociologists like Ferdinand Tönnies regarded rationalist society as a complete inversion of community. Later in the twentieth century, the idea was put forward, by the Frankfurt School of critical theory amongst others, that rationalism contributed to, facilitated, or made possible the atrocities of the first and second world wars. Girardi points out that the extent of rationalism’s responsibility for these horrors remains a matter of dispute.
A Philosophical Sketch of the Contemporary Situation
Chapter 2 begins to explore some of the different currents in the ongoing contemporary debate concerning the philosophical direction that European political thought ought to be taking, and in particular how entangled with rationalism this direction ought to be. One pole of the contemporary debate argues that Europe needs to revert and reconnect to its Christian heritage. This view gained ground after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, when there was a resurgence of Christianity in many Eastern European countries. This became an important part of their national identity. At a European level, this reinforces the centrality of Christianity to contemporary European identity. Today, sceptics of the EU project are often proposing a culturally Christian Europe. They regard reviving Europe’s Christian heritage as a way of counteracting the disenchantment of the world that rationalism seemed to usher in, and re-enchant the world with some transcendent spiritual values. This position is not so much about completely rejecting rationality as keeping it in check and making space for a re-enchantment of the world. Girardi points out that Novalis (1772-1801) was a very early proponent of a version of this view, and that, more recently, Gianni Vattimo (2002) argues that European identity is inextricably enmeshed with Christianity.
A different pole of the contemporary debate argues that the way forward for Europe is to double down on rationalism. Proponents of this view argue that rationalism could have enabled us to rise above our small-minded human disputes over territory, natural resources, and cultural differences, and that if only Europe had been more rational, it would have avoided both world wars completely. In the rationalist’s view, the world wars were not a case of rationalism taking Europe in the wrong direction, but instead a bursting forth of an incomprehensible and lethal irrationalism.
The cogency of the pro-rationalism pole of the debate is difficult to deny, but Girardi observes that the main drawback is that it now seems to be leading us toward a bureaucratic European Union devoid of human existential meaning. The idea that rationalism was supposed to enable us to rise above our cultural differences seems to have been conflated with the view that it is improper to rate one culture more highly than another. This is to say that cultural relativism has acquired a strong foothold in political circles. This view informs the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We now run into the problem where there is a tension between respecting what we deem to be universal human rights and respecting a foreign culture.
A second drawback stems from the fact that, understandably, those backing the EU project like to use the Holocaust for symbolic purposes. Yet Eastern European countries, and the UK, for instance, tend to be less willing than Germany to accept culpability for the Holocaust. For such nations, Holocaust culpability is not part of their national identity. In the end, observers of the contemporary debate about the future of Europe need to be cognizant of the fact that those who wish Europe to revert to its Christian heritage are liable to hold up the Holocaust as an admonishment against the dangers of unchecked rationalism, whilst their opponents hold up the Holocaust as an admonishment against the dangers of neglecting rationalism.
Rational Politics, the Liberal Consensus, and the Agonistic Critique
Girardi observes that it seems to be a characteristic of a purely rational or “universalist” rationalist discourse concerning how to organise society that there isn’t typically much emphasis on accommodating a plurality of views. After all, in a strictly rational society (if such a society were ever to exist) the function of reason would be to optimally redesign and reorganise society. This gives rise to concerns that this way of going about things is conducive toward totalitarianism.
Pluralist rationalism (as opposed to universalist rationalism) aims to address this concern by introducing a process of reconciliation between diverse attitudes and opinions. The two-fold aim of a pluralist rationalist society is mutual safety and individual freedom. Under pluralist rationalism, the state is neutral with respect to worldview. Liberal democracy has much in common with pluralist rationalism, but is not completely neutral with respect to worldview. Sometimes democratic procedure restricts individual rights. This is the tension between democracy and liberalism. This leaves room for a wide variety of versions of liberal democracy, and Rawls and Habermas each develop their own.
One of the features of a liberal democracy is the requirement that there should be a general consensus across all citizens about democratic procedure. This is called the liberal consensus. In searching for the liberal consensus, Rawls and Habermas both want to strike the right balance between universalism and pluralism. Habermas doesn’t want secularism to dominate public debate, and this means affording traditional worldviews the opportunity to participate in public political debate. Consonantly, people should have the right, in Habermas’s view, to contribute to public debate in their own religious language. This means Habermas could be said to be a post-secularist, something that Rawls is not.
After the discussion of Rawls and Habermas, Girardi turns his attention to the topic of the agonistic critique of rationalist political theory. Proponents of the agonistic critique advance a battery of objections stemming from the suspicion that the idealised conceptions that rationalist political theory employs do not correspond to reality. They tend to argue that rationalist political theory has invented a fictional political model using idealised conceptions of discourse, discussants, citizens, consensus, deliberation, and the discursive environment. Agonists are concerned that rationalist political theory ignores the possibility that some problems may be irresolvable in principle. They typically believe that (a) there is an irreducible plurality of values; and (b) when values come into conflict, it is a mistake to assume that the conflict can be resolved, or that it is necessarily possible to devise a comprehensive or overarching reconciliation procedure. They maintain that there is no political framework that can be devised a priori, that rationalist political theory marginalises people critical of the liberal consensus, and that it curtails the plurality of views.
Girardi proceeds to examine in more detail the respective positions of various agonistic thinkers, including Honig, Mouffe, Gray, and Connolly. In the course of this discussion, Girardi explores how they advocate resisting and disrupting the liberal consensus. Agonists like Gray and Connolly are proponents of a radical and ever-changing pluralism, which can involve a plurality of possible political frameworks. According to this kind of agonistic stance, illiberal views and illiberal political frameworks cannot be ruled out.
Husserl’s Europe as a Philosophical Project
Girardi draws attention to the important distinction between Husserl’s “idea” of Europe and his “absolute idea” of Europe. Husserl’s “idea” of Europe is a conception of European culture. It is so broad that it can be taken to refer to Western civilisation in general, including the colonial expansion of the British Empire, and the migration of European peoples to North America. It excludes, however, itinerant peoples such as the Roma. This “idea” of Europe is formed eidetically based on what is given in concrete empirical instances. Every culture or civilisation will have an equivalent “idea” or “spiritual shape” of this kind.
By contrast, Husserl’s “absolute idea” of Europe is not constituted eidetically on the basis of empirical instances. Instead, it is a self-standing ideal concept grounded in rationality itself. It is independent of, and in that sense transcends, actual human experiences. According to Husserl, the “birthplace” of this “absolute idea” of Europe was Ancient Greece. It is the idea of a completely rational human civilisation.
When Husserl speaks of a European “crisis”, he essentially means that Western civilisation has fallen short of, or fallen away from, its rational ideal, that is, its “absolute idea”. More specifically, Husserl believes that we have become so enthralled by scientific discoveries and technological developments that our understanding of the true remit of rationality has become impoverished and truncated. In the first part of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl scrutinises and critiques the way many people, including some scientists, tend to think about the hard sciences. He says they “take for being what is actually method”. By this he means that they think the idealised scientific world is the actual real world. Science has been so successful that one begins to think of the idealised mathematical world that the scientific method works with as the real world. The trouble is that we have forgotten that the sciences presuppose the world as we ordinarily experience it. Husserl observes that we still require philosophy to ground science, on pain of committing ourselves to the erroneous position of naturalism, which is the view that the only possible objects of knowledge are the objects of the natural sciences. Naturalism subtracts cultural properties from objects, and excludes all matters pertaining to value. Those caught up in naturalism overlook or ignore the fact that we still require philosophy to investigate the existential meaning of life and its value. Another way of looking at this is to realise that philosophy, for whatever reason, has failed to be a satisfactory foundation for the sciences. This amounts to a falling short of rationalism as a whole.
For Husserl, the fundamental distinction in political thought has to be between rationality and irrationality. Europe’s failure to understand the remit of rationality has led some citizens to seek existential meaning in irrational areas, such as ethno-nationalist politics, or develop an hostility to reason, and has led some European governments to pursue irrational foreign policies. Husserl believes that the catastrophe of the first world war revealed the irrationality, the “inner untruth, the meaninglessness” that had befallen European civilisation.
We have found, then, that philosophy itself is implicated in, and entangled with, the crisis that Husserl is describing. It is only when philosophers can understand the nature of the crisis that has engulfed them, and for which they are partly responsible, that they can begin to find a way out of it. The first step is to reassess what rationality really is, and what its remit is. Rationality should include what Girardi calls “existentially relevant questions”. Once we have revised our understanding of rationality, we must then recommit ourselves to it.
Husserl’s Reestablishment of the Ideal of Reason
Husserl believes that, in response to Europe’s “crisis”, there are a number of pressing reasons for exploring the “life-world”, which is constituted in one’s pre-scientific experience of the world. One of these reasons is the overcoming of naturalism, and the provision of a proper epistemological foundation for the sciences. Another reason is to investigate what Girardi calls “existentially relevant questions”, which includes enquiry into moral values. The life-world can disclose to us things that we pre-theoretically intuit to be morally right. An example of this is that when a group of people live in proximity to one another, we often find it morally appropriate to come together in a community of love, in which individuals are valued and loved in all of their uniqueness and particularity. Phenomenologically, it is an intrinsic property of moral values that they transcend time and space: they are applicable at all times and in all places. This brings us to the idea that an important reason to investigate the life-world is to uncover a universal sense of the world. Finding a world valid for everyone is relevant to the field of reconciliation between conflicting parties and nations. Indeed, chapter 5’s main concern is the problem of finding a universal life-world.
One and the same perceptual object may be understood to be amenable to being apprehended in separate acts located across a set of perspectival and temporal positions. The set of perspectival and temporal positions may be said to form an intentional horizon, and this is sometimes referred to as the object’s internal horizon. Yet in addition to an internal horizon, perceptual objects are also found to be embedded within an external horizon. Husserl describes the external horizon as “the openness of the world as an indeterminate horizon against which things can become determinate.” The internal and external horizons are both regulative principles ordering experience.
Every life-world partially “fills in” the indeterminate external horizon. The external horizon is pre-given and implicit in every life-world. Husserl calls this universal horizon the world in general. The world in general is the world in its universal sense. We find that objects belonging to the world in its universal sense are not only given horizonally (internally and externally) but also carry the sense “experienceable by everyone”, or “meant for all”.
It is important to note that in the life-world, perceptual objects belong to a wider cultural world of values that exceeds them. The life-world is always already embedded in one’s culture. So there is in this sense a plurality of life-worlds across the population of the world, since there is a plurality of cultures. Or to put it another way, the life-world of someone aware of the existence of other cultures is a plurality of cultural worlds.
This would seem to raise the aspiration of finding a universal culture. It is to this end that Husserl tries to find an account of the life-world that is consistent with rationality, and hence valid for everyone. Husserl seeks the rationalisation of culture, but not its deletion. This leads Husserl to consider the possibility that perhaps philosophy could take certain traditional beliefs and somehow restate them philosophically. We might cautiously draw some encouragement from the observation that there is already some commonality discernible between the various life-worlds. One reason for this is common biological needs across all humans. Another reason is sharing the same planet.
In the course of chapter 5, also Girardi raises some doubts about the prospects for Husserl’s rationalist teleology, and mentions a number of possible objections to it, including the agonistic critique.
Patočka, Problematicity, and Politics
Patočka’s relation to Husserl is a complex one, and ultimately ambivalent. Whilst Patočka agrees with Husserl that the life-world and the scientific interpretation of the world very often seem to be at odds with each other, he is doubtful on the question of whether such conflict can always be resolved. Husserl finds grounds for believing in the possibility of the resolution of such conflict in what he sees as the intrinsically teleological structure of experience. However, Patočka argues that there is no absolute grounding for the meaning of the objects that appear to us. The world as a whole is implicit in the meaning of the objects that appear to us, but it doesn’t make sense to ascribe a final meaning to the world as a whole. The world as a whole doesn’t have a meaning, but instead should be understood to be the horizon of all meaning.
Patočka’s criticism of Husserl suggests that we ought to look more carefully at the phenomenology of the life-world and how we go about attributing meaning to the objects we encounter there. Patočka thinks Husserl makes the mistake of striving for a philosophy that will be capable of deciding, or eventually converging upon, the final meaning of the world. By contrast, Patočka thinks the world as a whole has significance but not a final meaning. In fact, he maintains that significance precludes the possibility of a final meaning. So we must distinguish between significance and signification. The act of intuiting significance, for Patočka, means grasping the potential for a system of possible significations. Interestingly, this leads Patočka to the view that instances of apparent meaninglessness can have significance, on the grounds that they might harbour the possibility of finding meanings.
This brings us to Patočka’s concept of problematicity. Problematicity refers to an absolute indeterminacy in the meaning of an event or an experience. Patočka’s concepts of significance and problematicity can therefore be regarded as two sides of the same coin. Problematicity is always in relation to a fundamental moment of significance. Events and experiences that strike us as significant always seem to refuse a final meaning. We experience problematicity when we run up against the limits of meaning. The experience of problematicity subverts the sense of the world passed down by tradition, myth, ideology, and religion. Patočka thinks religions tend to make the mistake of bestowing a signification on certain instances of significance. According to Patočka, problematicity has always been part of human experience. The history of mankind is one of shaking the certitude of a pre-given meaning. Every life-world is intrinsically problematical. The disenchanted scientific world that rationalism ushers in is problematical, because there is a loss of transcendent meaning. In general, Patočka wants to postulate a problematical relationship, or an incongruence, between the empirical and the ideal. Patočka thinks we have in the end to regard problematicity as an objective insight, that is, that problematicity is to be regarded as a structural characteristic of human existence and the world in general. It is to be thought of as a feature of the world, not a deficiency in our understanding of it. Patočka’s account of problematicity renders his philosophy incompatible with both Husserlian phenomenology and Christianity. It precludes a rationalist teleology toward a unitary universal life-world.
Understanding Patočka’s concept of problematicity is one thing, but understanding its phenomenology is another. It makes sense to suppose that if one wished to explore the phenomenology of problematicity, then it would become most salient in situations involving a pronounced or unequivocal incongruence between the empirical and the ideal. This explains why Patočka finds encounters with meaninglessness to be particularly illuminating of the phenomenology of problematicity. Patočka wants to suggest that in the encounter with an instance of meaninglessness, one can be moved to bring meaning into the encounter oneself, by sacrificing oneself in some sense. One decides spontaneously to put oneself on the line, so to speak, without concern for, or clear knowledge of, the consequences for oneself or for others. Patočka’s “sacrifice” is an existential refusal of nihilism. It manages to eschew or stave off the Nietzschean response to the problem of nihilism, according to which the only way to produce meaning is through force, strength, and power. In Patočka’s sacrifice, then, we seem to have an experience of transcendence without a metaphysical positing of that transcendence. Patočka calls this Negative Platonism. It seems to be about demonstrating how strongly you are choosing to commit yourself to certain values. One experiences an absolute freedom in doing so.
This idea of discovering a meaning to life that reaches beyond one’s own survival, the satisfaction of one’s own appetites, and the mere perpetuation of human life is consonant with the Ancient Greek philosophical project of the “care for the soul”, which Patočka himself seeks to adopt and incorporate into his own philosophy. Patočka thinks freedom is crucial to the care of the soul. One chooses, in a free act of the will, a project or a cause whose scope transcends the immediate parameters of one’s own life. Adopting such a project places one in a position to live a free, responsible, and thoughtful life in which one’s thoughts and actions should be in harmony with the project. Instead of constantly reacting to circumstances, one begins to think and act meaningfully and coherently in the world. In the confrontation with instances of apparent meaninglessness, Patočka’s notions of sacrifice and the care of the soul offer a way of escaping what he sees as an excessive reliance on rationality, and is conducive toward an existentially responsible shaping of one’s life. It is a path toward a deepening of the soul.
Committing to a cause that you have chosen for yourself motivates you to enquire, research, and work things out for yourself, instead of relying on pre-given answers that have been passed down by religion or tradition. This is why, for Patočka, the care of the soul is fundamental to politics. Part of Patočka’s politics is aimed at forging new forms of community outside of the traditional community. Such communities should always comprise diverse views and opinions. They prioritise debate, dissidence, and dialogue over the survival of the community. Patočka sees a parallel between a society’s dissidents and Plato’s “guardian class”. They demonstrate model characteristics for everyone else: public spirited, community minded, ascetic, sincere, admonishing, speaking inconvenient truths, self-sacrificing. Because of their integrity, they are well suited to running stable institutions for a society. We find, then, that Patočka’s political philosophy takes its inspiration from Plato’s notions of the care of the soul, and the just state.
Patočka’s ambivalent relation to Husserl therefore turns out to be highly relevant to the contemporary debate surrounding the theory of the state and the question of finding the right architecture for a pluralist political framework. The philosophical rationale behind such an architecture is multi-faceted. Firstly, just as the polis of Ancient Greece provided a framework for dissent and debate, Patočka desires a respectful political space in which conflicting views can be aired, scrutinised, and reflected upon. Patočka, together with other agonistic political thinkers who have taken up his thought, want to find ways of incorporating dissidence and problematicity into our political institutions. Yet Patočka also wants his philosophy to inform a constructive politics – a politics that is capable of effectuating change, as well as facilitating dissent and debate. The framework and space for such debate and discussion is what Patočka calls the sphere of the political. For Patočka, the sphere of the political is distinct from politics. The sphere of the political is essentially indeterminate with respect to ideology, because it is grounded in the concept of problematicity. Such a political sphere will be more likely to forestall tendencies toward totalitarianism, and make twentieth century atrocities such as the Holocaust less likely to recur.
Furthermore, Patočka wants to find a middle way between rationalism and relativism. Pluralism cannot be allowed to become pure relativism, on the grounds that activity within the polis must be subject to certain norms of conduct and procedure. On the other hand, Patočka also wants to avoid pure rationalism, because he believes pure rationalism can lead to a kind of intellectual cul-de-sac that neglects the care of the soul. One of the attributes of a just state is that it is possible for the one who cares for his soul to flourish. This is connected to a concern of Patočka’s that liberal democracies can be conducive to a kind of moral vacuity, and don’t sufficiently nurture human freedom.
Part of the task lies in navigating the inherent tension between freedom, as Patočka conceives it, and the state’s institutions. A step in the right direction has been taken by some liberal democracies to the extent that they have a separation of powers between different institutions. They separate powers between the government of the day, the law-makers, the judiciary, law enforcement, and so on. This is what is meant when it is said that democracy is an institutionalisation of conflict, and that a healthy democracy will have an absolute indeterminacy at its foundation. Additionally, state institutions can have an important role in protecting certain basic freedoms, such as those of petition, association, publication, assembly, and speech. Subject to certain conditions, a healthy liberal democracy will actively encourage the expression of a diversity of views.
The desire to forestall relativism raises the question of whether there should be hurdles or entry criteria to the sphere of the political. The successful operation of Patočka’s political framework would not depend upon the possibility of a reconciliation between conflicting parties, but merely a mutual recognition of the essentially problematic nature of human existence. All parties should subscribe to a shared view of problematicity. Conflicting parties find themselves sharing a space of significance. One “prays for the enemy”, or at least tolerates him as a valid participant in the debate. This kind of tolerance is known as agonistic respect. Patočka calls it the “solidarity of the shaken”.
Patočka himself is pessimistic about the prospects for a widespread spiritual conversion to his doctrine of problematicity. It would require a transformation of political culture, a collective conversion to a new “civil religion”. But a new civil religion of problematicity, Patočka believes, would give modern human existence a meaning that it currently lacks.
Discussion Point 1 – Two Kinds of Optimism
One of this book’s key topics is reconciliation. This could mean reconciling the worldviews of two different cultures, reconciling two warring nations, or reconciling the agendas of two political parties. In this context there are two relevant senses of the term “optimism” (and similarly “pessimism”) in relation to the prospects for such a reconciliation. In some places, it is clear which sense Girardi has in mind, but in other places it is not always entirely clear.
Firstly, there is a teleological sense. For instance, one might believe that it belongs to the nature of rational discourse to arrive, sooner or later, at an agreement. Husserl believes that Western culture has an inborn teleology, a striving toward rationality and a life of reflective self-responsibility. When Girardi refers to “optimistic rationalism”, I infer that he is using “optimistic” in this teleological sense.
Secondly, there is a practical sense. For instance, one might believe, purely on the basis of what one knows about the world, human nature, and our political realities, that there are grounds for hope in relation to the prospects for reconciliation in certain areas. As Girardi points out, in this practical sense, Husserl himself is not entirely optimistic about our prospects. Husserl acknowledges that often history seems to be resisting and frustrating his goal. This is why Husserl describes his infinite task as “a struggle between awakened reason and the powers of historical reality.”
Two examples of where it is not entirely clear which sense is being used are: “Overall, however, Patočka is certainly less optimistic about Europe’s trajectory and the capacities of reason than Husserl was.” [94]; and “Although the possibility of a positive appropriation of problematicity is indicated here, Patočka is also pessimistic of the possibility of such a metanoia on a grand scale.” [122].
Discussion Point 2 – Habermas’s Shift to Post-secularism
Towards the end of chapter 5, Girardi points out some commonality and complementarity between Husserl’s and Habermas’s political philosophies, in that they both exhibit a faith in the process of reconciliation between different views. Girardi points out that Habermas “[…] attempt[s] a purely procedural approach to reconciliation”, and has “a faith in the rational transformation of particular views with an eye on their reconciliation” [89]. Girardi indicates that, according to Habermas, “all relevant views can meaningfully by reconciled with each other” [90]. Girardi argues that it is debatable whether Husserl’s and Habermas’s optimism with respect to the possibility of reconciliation between diverse views is justified, and that we need to consider the possibility that some views are not amenable to a process of rational reconciliation.
My concern here is that this particular discussion in chapter 5 doesn’t distinguish between Habermas’s earlier and later work. We have already learned in chapter 3 that “[i]n his later work, [Habermas] is no longer as committed to the secularisation thesis as he was in his earlier work” [39], and that in his later work Habermas sees liberal democracy as “a rationalisation, of communicative practices already present in more traditional worldviews, even if he no longer believes that these traditional worldviews can fully be replaced” [39]. Girardi also suggests in chapter 3 that when Habermas says he will not impose the condition of reflexivity on the worldviews of others, he comes close to “problematic relativism” [39].
Discussion Point 3 – The Holocaust
The Holocaust is pertinent to this book in a number of ways. Firstly, references to the Holocaust have an admonitory function. They serve to remind participants in the discussion about Europe’s political future of the imperative to avert a recurrence of something like the atrocities of the second world war. Indeed, the book’s closing sentence warns about the importance of not forgetting about them.
Secondly, the book is also concerned with enquiring into the complex web of causation behind the Holocaust. Girardi rightly points out that the extent of rationalism’s causal role behind the Holocaust remains a matter of controversy. [13] Yet the Holocaust would not have been possible without either advances in military and industrial technology, or systematic planning. So rationalism is certainly implicated in the web of causation, and Girardi is inclined to endorse Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of a “structural connection between the Holocaust and modernity” [19]. My observation about the phrase “structural connection” is that it could be taken to imply that modernity was somehow always going to entail something like the Holocaust. Perhaps such an implicit claim requires more justification than Girardi provides.
Thirdly, considerations about the web of causation behind the Holocaust lead on to questions about culpability. The egregious nature of the immorality of the Holocaust leads Girardi to believe that European civilisation itself bears some culpability for even making it possible. [150] It seems to me that laying a portion of blame at the door of European civilisation itself raises the following potential problem. What is to be said in this regard to Eastern European countries, for example, who tend to be less willing than Germany to accept culpability for the Holocaust? For them, Holocaust culpability is not part of their national identity. [26]
Fourthly, Girardi is also interested in how the Holocaust has affected our understanding of the broad sweep of European history, and the extent to which the Holocaust has dispelled a “Grand Narrative” of European cultural progress. There is no escaping the force of the observation that it would be a very strange “Grand Narrative” indeed that led up to something like the Holocaust. Yet Girardi also recognises that, after the Holocaust, the “Grand Narrative” did not disappear completely from the way historians thought about European history. [170]
As I reflect on the various ways in which the Holocaust haunts Girardi’s book, I find myself wondering if it might have been fitting for him to have said more about Patočka’s account of war contained in the sixth of his Heretical Essays. It is relevant to the question of causation, and, by implication, to the question of culpability, and provides an original metaphysical perspective on how we might understand the hecatombs of the first and second world wars.
Conclusion
As its title indicates, Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka is broad in scope, and covers a lot of historical and philosophical ground. What stood out for me was the way it raised and explored the question of the limitations of rationality, and the unsettling possibility that the worthy aspiration to eliminate conflict and hostility in world affairs could turn out to be metaphysically mistaken and futile. In that respect, I found the chapters engaging with the thought of Jan Patočka particularly valuable. In those chapters I was impressed by Girardi’s elucidation of the ways in which Patočka’s philosophy is informed by subtle echoes and motifs from Christianity, such as the ideas of sacrifice and praying for the enemy.
In addition to becoming acquainted with the philosophy of Jan Patočka, and agonistic political thought more generally, there are many other good reasons for studying this book. Some readers will be seeking to find out more about the diverse roots of European culture. Other readers will be aiming to improve their understanding of the philosophical motivations behind rationalist pluralism and liberal democracy. Yet others will be interested in Edmund Husserl’s account of Europe’s “crisis”, and how his concerns about Europe motivate his phenomenological project. Girardi’s fascinating book is a thorough enquiry into the main currents that inform the contemporary debate about the direction of European politics. It is an absorbing read from start to finish, and contains a treasure trove of insights for anybody interested in the intersection between philosophy and politics.
What Do We Mean When We Talk about Meaning
Oxford University Press
2022
Hardback $32.99
224
Reviewed by: Jacob Rump (Creighton University)
As Steven Cassedy notes in the introduction to this fascinating, wide-ranging, and unique book, meaning is everywhere, and yet it seems no one ever stops to define it (1)[1]. Through a series of chapters tracing the history of “meaning” from ancient Greek and Hebrew sources to contemporary English usage, Cassedy tells a story in which notions of meaning were originally limited to words, signs, and interpretation, but usage gradually expanded to a present-day context in which meaning means… well… almost everything. The book succeeds in something that, in my view, is not often enough done in contemporary philosophy or intellectual history: connecting past philosophical ideas—in broad, easy-to-understand brushstrokes—to popular culture and the popular uptake of those ideas in the present and recent past.
The book is, indeed, more appropriately considered a work in intellectual history than in philosophy in a narrow academic sense. Cassedy works in comparative literature, and the primary method of the work is close reading rather than philosophical argument. His overarching claims are developed via helpful etymological discussions and readings of texts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Russian, French, German, and Danish, as well as selective attention to secondary literature on these figures and associated key texts. These treatments, taken as a whole, offer an extremely helpful overview of the evolution of the notion of meaning over the longue durée of Western intellectual history, with some fascinating (if necessarily selective) detailed accounts of key ideas and authors.
I begin with a chapter-by-chapter overview of the more broadly historical Chapters One through Five, then turn to more detailed critical treatment of some major themes, where I also survey Chapters Six through Nine, which are devoted to more recent and popular treatments of meaning.
I.
The concept of meaning as we have come to know it in contemporary English is more recent than we might expect, and does not, on Cassedy’s reading, have an exact equivalent in ancient writings. Chapter One, as its title suggests, argues that the ancient world “got along without” meaning “until the rise of Christianity.” Cassedy surveys Hebrew and Aramaic terms appearing in the Hebrew Bible and concludes that there is simply no word corresponding to our “meaning” to be found there, though there is some interesting discussion of translations of Ecclesiastes using “meaning” in an attempt to get at the sense of value or “meaning in life” that Cassedy is interested in (14-15).
Cassedy then turns to ancient Greece, where he finds significant semantic commonality with regard to the English verb to mean, and ample evidence of diverse theories of signification, signs, interpretation, and the function of language in authors like Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, and as far back as Heraclitan fragments about the Delphic Oracle. But the focus remains on the verb, and on the notion of signification: Cassedy finds little evidence of a noun form of “meaning,” and little attention paid to the “something that gets signified” corresponding to a sign (19). Cassedy also insists, with regard to Platonic forms (ideai) that “nowhere are they likened to a meaning that we retrieve as we do from words in a written text” (23).
It is only in Chapter Two, with Latin-language authors of early Christianity, that we “first find meaning used as the object of a metaphysical interpretive quest into a mysterious, invisible realm separate from the realm of direct experience” and where the meaning of “meaning” begins to expand beyond the literal. The key notion here is “the readability the world,” and Cassedy largely follows the work of Hans Blumenberg and New Testament scholar Harry Gamble in his extended analysis of meaning in Augustine. Here, helpfully, we find an early touchstone for the distinction between natural and conventional (“given”) signs (30)—a distinction that would be important in twentieth-century accounts from Husserl (2001, I.§2) to Grice (1957, 378-79). Divine scripture for Augustine consists of given signs with authorial intent, but the interpretation of those signs involves usage of “ideas/thoughts/meanings (sensa) by means of signs, and those signs relate to our various senses (sensūs)” (31). This anticipates the idea—central to Cassedy’s interpretation of the German Sinn as discussed below—of a close relationship and intermingling between meaning and sensation. It also introduces the important distinction, central to Augustine, on Cassedy’s interpretation, between the actual reading of books, such as the scriptures, and the figurative “reading” of the world or nature, and ultimately of heaven, whose signs are—at least for human beings— “shrouded in mystery and subject to interpretive acts that can never be guaranteed to reveal an absolute truth” (33). This for Cassedy is the central step that clears the way for the contemporary usage of meaning in phrases like “meaning in life.”
Cassedy then notes a shift from the medieval idea of reading the “text of the world” as well as written passages to the later idea—which Cassedy argues, following the historian of science Peter Harrison, arises as a result of the Protestant Reformation—of reading as applying to passages only: “under the older conception, both words (in Scripture) and things (in the world of nature) had meanings. Under the new, Protestant conception, only words had meaning; objects didn’t” (37). The result, according to Harrison, was that “The natural world, once the indispensable medium between words and eternal truths, lost its meanings, and became opaque to those hermeneutical procedures which had once elucidated it. It was left to an emerging natural science to reinvest the created order with intelligibility” (Harrison, qtd. in Cassedy, 37).
The notion that the world itself contains meaning is reasserted, Cassedy argues, in Berkeley’s work on perception. Following Kenneth Winkler, Cassedy finds in Berkley a “semiotic theory of vision,” “founded on the notion that seeing is a matter of recovering meanings from signs whose connections with those meanings are purely conventional and arbitrary” (39). This notion is reminiscent of medieval “book of nature” ideas, but with the crucial difference provided by Berkley’s (in)famous immaterialism, which, Cassedy argues, sets the stage for idealism and romanticism.
Chapter Three, “Idealism and Romanticism,” was for me the most intriguing and the most helpful of the book. It begins from an extended discussion of Johan Georg Hamann, who “embedded language in the very fabric of the world itself, which he viewed as God’s text” (44). This leads a naturally to the idea of a close connection between the perceptual senses (die Sinne) and sense (Sinn), an idea which Cassedy takes up in the next subsection of the chapter. His short history of the German Sinn invokes its early connotations of movement, change of place, and direction, and traces its development through to a more modern conception that builds in a certain “fuzziness” or indeterminacy.
Chapter Three focuses especially on one of the twenty four definitions of Sinn provided in the Grimm Brothers’ mid-nineteenth-century Deutsches Wörterbuch, which notes that “[i]n modern times, Sinn is customarily and commonly [used] for the meaning [Bedeutung], the opinion [Meinung], the spiritual content, the intention [Tendenz] of an expression, a work, or (more rarely) an action, as distinguished from its wording [Wortlaut] or its outward appearance” (qtd. in Cassedy, 49). In this later usage, Cassedy notes, Sinn is most often connotative, whereas the German bedeuten and Bedeutung—like the English meaning—is more likely to be denotative. This of course tracks both the well-known distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung as marked by Frege in the essay of that name (Frege 1892), and also discussions of denotation and connotation in English from, e.g., Mill (1843, I.2.§5). Puzzlingly, there is no treatment of these obvious touchstones in this chapter or elsewhere in the text, despite the fact that Frege’s is concerned with precisely the same German terms, and Mill falls into precisely the same historical period as the German authors discussed in Chapter Three.
Chapter Three then further traces the notion of Sinn in Kant, through pre-Critical writings such as Dreams of a Spirit-seer and into the first Critique, where “Like the Latin sensum/sensus/ sentientia, Sinn conveys both the receiving, sentient mind and the properties of objects that the mind cognizes and interprets” (56-7). Kant’s use of the term stands in stark contrast, Cassedy reports, to that of later romantic-era figures such as Novalis (whose “grand, mysterious statements” about meaning are treated by Cassedy at great and somewhat puzzling length), Goethe, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Herder. It is in these romantic-era figures that we first encounter sustained engagement with the German phrase “Sinn des Lebens,” the philosophical and intellectual precursor to contemporary English’s “meaning of life,” and with the call to rediscover the original sense or meaning of the world by re-enchanting or romanticizing it (64). Herder’s 1772 Treatise on the Origin of Language is given strikingly brief treatment—especially in contrast to the expansive discussion of Novalis—and is discussed only in the context of its influence on Schleiermacher.
Chapter Four begins with a brief treatment of Kierkegaard, due to his explicit invocations of the “meaning of,” and sometimes “in” “life” (74-75), but his usage of these phrases is dismissed as relatively “uneventful.” (The influence of broader themes in Kierkegaard’s work on twentieth-century writers, due to the appearance of English translations of his work, is returned to in more detail in Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight). The bulk of Chapter Four consists of extensive discussions of Thomas Carlyle, including Carlyle’s engagement with Novalis, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Carlyle’s work represents for Cassedy the movement of German culture into British culture over the course of the nineteenth century (77), and in his partly satirical novel Sartor Resartus we find what Cassedy suspects to be the first use of the phrase “the meaning of life” in English, “where the phrase refers not to the meaning, or definition, of the word life but to the meaning of life itself” (82).
Emerson brought Carlyle’s novel to the United States, where it was influential for the American Transendentalists. Emerson was also influenced directly by earlier German mystics such as Novalis, as well as by the uptake of German romanticism in Coleridge, from whom he took the notion of the “book of nature” that would be influential in Emerson’s extended engagements with the theme of nature and humankind’s place in it. Emerson, Cassedy plausibly argues, “envisages a world in which we ‘read’ (metaphorically speaking) and interpret not just actual books but, well, that world itself, which he implicitly represents as yielding up meaning, significance, sense to our acts of interpretation” (90). This amounts to a form of idealism reminiscent of Berkeley and Kant, but in which “the mind or consciousness always bleeds over into a mysterious spiritual realm that appears to be simultaneously coextensive with and hidden from it” (92). For Cassedy, such a mystical, book-of-nature connotation of “meaning” in English is a major component of our contemporary usage and understanding of the term.
Chapter Five turns to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, including some intriguing comparison of the Russian smysl and the German Sinn (95). From Tolstoy’s increasingly religious writings—especially due to their popularity with readers of English-language translations appearing in the early twentieth century—and in references to Tolstoy in well-known works such as James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, we first get the close connection between meaning and purpose that is also part of our contemporary understanding of the word. Due to Dostoevsky’s existentialism and the centrality of mortality for so many of his characters, Cassedy suggests, readers find in his works a more secular treatment of meaning in life than in Tolstoy, despite Dostoevsky’s frequent association of the phrase “meaning of life” with the immortality of the soul. “‘The meaning of life,’ with its enormous potential for ambiguity, is a phrase that allows the secularist to form at least a partial understanding of what a person of putatively pure religious faith actually believes” (118).
II.
As the above overview suggests, the real focus of Cassedy’s book is not the notion of meaning as such, but the way in which the word has come to be associated with concepts like value and purpose, as in the phrase “the meaning of life,” which would seem to be quite far from the ancient Greek usage of the verb “to mean” and from its later European-language verbal and nominal relatives. In all these earlier cases, “meaning” is primarily a matter of signification, of what signs, words, and language do (15). Cassedy thus seeks to understand the relationship between what we might call the semiotic or semantic connotation of “meaning” and its more recent purposive or axiological connotation. In this regard, the book is both original and important: he is one of very few recent authors who appears to have thought carefully and extensively about the relationship between meaning in these two senses. As Cassedy puts it, in a glib criticism of a passage from Charles Taylor, “telling us first that meaning means ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’ and next that it means the same thing that it means in the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ doesn’t really narrow things down very much” (2).
Even in contemporary academic philosophy, discussions of these semantic and axiological conceptions of meaning continue to be worlds apart, with discussion of the former located in particular sub-domains of the analytic philosophy of language or (post-?) post-structuralist pontifications about signs and signifiers, whereas discussion of the latter is located primarily among philosophers writing in the domains of ethics, social-political philosophy, and related areas of value theory. The fact that philosophical treatments of meaning have become so divergent is intriguing and alarming, at least if Cassedy is right that these notions are related in more than merely homophonic ways. In this sense, I think the book can be read as a kind of call to action for the reintegration of philosophical (and not merely pop-cultural) investigations of meaning. This call to action is to be applauded, in my view, and indeed is one I have tried to take some small steps toward in my own work. I return to this theme toward the end of this review.
Unfortunately, Cassedy’s treatment of this issue is limited to a more-or-less genealogical account of how the change came about: the book answers the question, “How does a word that fundamentally has to do with signs, words, stories, and other things that, well, mean or signify something come to mean ‘purpose’ and ‘value’? How does it come to mean all the other things it appears to mean, apart from ‘signify’?” (4). While Cassedy offers us a detailed (if not always balanced, as I note below) historical account of the emergence of these additional connotations of the word, he doesn’t offer much beyond that genealogical account as to why this divergence occurred.
But perhaps this is part of his point: that there is really nothing ultimately beyond the genealogical account—there is no deep reason, at least none available to human beings—for why meaning came to have the meaning that it now, in Western popular culture, has. There is, perhaps, only something like the Nietzschean revaluation of values that it signifies (I’m putting words in Cassedy’s mouth here; there is actually strikingly little engagement with Nietzsche in the book, given its theme, and that minor engagement is only indirect, appearing in the context of discussions of Paul Tillich). This claim would seem to fit with Cassedy’s explicit thesis about the ambiguity of the contemporary usage of “meaning”: “what we mean when we talk about meaning” is ultimately, necessarily, “polyvalent” (8, 33, 182). “It’s the very fluidity that gives meaning its peculiar resonance and mystique and that allows it to live with equal comfort in the writings of secular scientists and the official decrees of Catholic popes. That’s the ambiguity that lends this word its peculiar and characteristic power—what makes it the quintessentially modern word” (10). The power of this polyvalence is that it allows meaning to refer to whatever it is that fills a void in the existential dimension of our contemporary lives, just as philosophical-religious figures like Tillich and Ulrich Barth suggested it should.
Hence the book’s extensive focus, in the twentieth-century portion of its historical genealogy, on such popularizing philosophical-religious figures—a treatment that turns increasing toward the popularizing, and increasingly away from the philosophical, with its coverage of each subsequent decade. For Cassedy, the meaning of “meaning” began to fracture in the twentieth century alongside (and perhaps because of) its more popular uptake. The fracturing begins, as discussed in Chapters Six and Seven, with the extensive employment of the term in the English-language writings of Tillich, Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and increases in the oft-announced “age of anxiety” in American culture—a term that Cassedy traces to W.H. Auden’s poem with that name published in the U.S. in 1947, and a term which was firmly entrenched in popular discourse by the early 1960s. “Meaning” has by this time come to serve an increasingly therapeutic purpose, a panacea for a variety of existential woes characteristic of modern American life in the post-war period. With regard to the source of these woes, Cassedy has much to say about contemporaneous changes in mainstream religious belief, but relatively little to say about the effects of the second World War, the Holocaust, or an increasingly capitalist, consumerist American society. In any case, in the post-war period, the term “anxiety,” like the “meaning” that is popularly believed to contain its cure, has come “to denote a remarkably wide range of things” (131).
In Chapter Eight, Cassedy documents a shift from religious to more popular, scientistic, and therapeutic conceptions of meaning, and a corresponding expansion of its usage as both cure-all and catch-all term. This change is tracked via an account of the development of existential psychotherapy in figures such as Victor Frankl and Rollo May (Frankl is singled out for particularly extensive and trenchant criticism, about which I am not qualified to comment), through treatments of recent biochemical approaches to meaning such as the work of Barbara Fredrickson (approaches about which I am skeptical, but again not qualified to comment), and in the contemporary proliferation of works that give center-stage to the notion of meaning, while hardly ever defining it, in the contemporary self-help movement (about which I think no additional comment necessary). Thus, Cassedy argues, from the late 1960s to the present, at least in mainstrem American society, meaning increasingly becomes “a suggestive term, undefined, unspecific, and preponderantly secular, designed to conjure in our minds the idea of something grand, mysterious, and unnamed that, owing to our particular life circumstances, we must strive for” (140).
In this light, Cassedy’s polyvalence thesis is both unique and refreshing, and certainly speaks to the era of human social and intellectual history that we find ourselves in today—an era which, Cassedy convincingly argues, has been presaged by the enormous uptick of concern with anxiety and meaninglessness beginning in the early twentieth century. However, there are points in the book where Cassedy’s polyvalence thesis comes off like the hasty conclusion of a student who has closely read the relevant texts, but not moved much beyond a survey of positions (with requisite fascination and awe) to the analytical work of crafting an original and nuanced thesis about them: the thesis is simply that they differ. The overarching claim that the meaning of meaning is ambiguous because it has to be thus comes off—at least to this reader—sometimes as thoughtful and sometimes as glib.
At some points, the book reads like a collection of essays held together loosely by their relation to meaning and more generally by the fact that the author happened to want to write and reflect on the texts they interpret. There is nothing wrong with this in principle, of course—all academics do this to some degree—but in this case it results in a book whose treatment appears uneven. While the entire period of Western thought from Augustine to Bishop Berkeley is surveyed in a single chapter, the period from the end of the second World War to the present takes up approximately one third of the book. This is natural, of course, given that things are often more interesting to us as we get closer to the present, but what is less natural is the change in focus as the book moves chronologically. Up through its treatment of the “Russian Titans” Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, in Chapter Five, the book deals entirely with what we might call “high intellectual culture” figures, from the worlds of theology, literature, and philosophy. But beginning in Chapter Seven, and even to some degree in the first treatment of Tillich in Chapter Six, Cassedy’s chronological narrative turns almost exclusively to a more “popular culture” orientation, discussing sources like self-help books, popular psychology, references to “meaning” in Time magazine, etc. This, in part, reflects Cassedy’s thesis: that in the later twentieth century, the obsession with meaning became a mainstream phenomenon, making its way, in light of growing existential concern in the “age of anxiety,” into popular culture and even into the marketplace via the contemporary self-help industry.
But the book almost entirely neglects the fact that meaning never diminished as a topic of conversation in more “high culture” domains in the twentieth century. There is no mention of, e.g., the linguistic turn in philosophy or the resultant projects of linguistic or conceptual analysis in the analytic tradition,[2] and no substantial account of the consideration of meaning in late nineteenth and twentieth-century continental figures such as Dilthey, Nietzsche, or Heidegger, except as minor precursors to the thought of Tillich and Barth. There is, by contrast, extensive treatment of Tillich, and especially of his more popular writings, including his article in the 1966 issue of Time magazine with the iconic “Is God Dead?” cover, despite its status as, in Cassedy’s words, “quite possibly, in the history of American popular periodical literature, the most famous article that no one actually read—or remembers having read” (119). We are told that, by the time of the appearance of Tillich’s article in 1966, the word “meaning” “has traveled a winding path, in its guise as the German Sinn, from the nineteenth-century German philosophy and theology that we’ve examined so far, through such twentieth- century German and French thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Camus, and Sartre” (128-9). But little further treatment of these figures is offered, except, occasionally, in the footnotes.
Indeed, there is only the briefest mention and quick dismissal of Sinn-analysis among phenomenologists and neo-Kantians: in a discussion of German philosophical accounts of Sinn as influences on Tillich, Cassedy assures us that “[w]e can safely set aside the philosophical genealogy of the concept (it stems from Edmund Husserl and an obscure philosopher named Emil Lask), whose details need not concern us” (122). It’s not clear why this dismissal is “safe.” Why needn’t these details concern us, and in what sense are figures such as Lask too obscure to merit discussion? Given that earlier chapters of the book discuss historical philosophical figures—even less well-known ones such as Hugh of St. Victor (34)—in some depth, the decision to gloss over large swaths of late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth-century philosophical work that would seem relevant for Cassedy’s overall thesis and aims in the book seems to stem more from the whims of the author’s own reading than from any serious scholarly research strategy. It’s as if the robust and highly influential discussions of meaning in the twentieth-century analytic and phenomenological traditions never happened. This omission would be understandable in a book devoted to popular, rather than academic-philosophical conceptions of meaning throughout Western intellectual history, but given its extensive discussions of figures such as Augustine, Berkley, and Kant in earlier chapters, the sudden shift to exclusively popular conceptions of meaning in the twentieth century is quite jarring. Even if Cassedy’s point is to show how meaning in the twentieth century went mainstream, it seems odd for an academic monograph to downplay the persisting deeper academic undercurrents.
I do not doubt that there is much to learn from the way that the term meaning has functioning in the popular American imagination in recent decades. Indeed, I found the treatment of this theme in the last four chapters of the book to be both enjoyable and edifying. But earlier chapters are not limited to the American context, and do not offer extensive accounts of the usage of meaning in the popular imagination of, e.g., the farmer of the Middle Ages or the industrial worker of the nineteenth century. If the “we” in What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning? refers to popular rather than academic culture in the later decades of the twentieth century, it’s not clear why Cassedy addresses it with regard to the latter rather than the former in his treatment of previous centuries.
Cassedy returns to academic (as opposed to popular) work on meaning, to some degree, in Chapter Nine, “Meaning Bridges the Secular and the Sacred.” The chapter focuses primarily on appeals to meaning in the contemporary faith traditions of Catholics, Evangelicals, and Hasidic Jews (171-180), focusing on texts from Popes John Paul II and Francis, evangelical Pastor and popular author Rick Warren, and Rabbi Simon Jacobson, director of the Meaningful Life Center in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. As a philosopher and not a theologian or scholar of religions, I will not comment on these discussions, except to note that this chapter provides a nice bookend to the treatment of meaning in medieval theology in Chapter Two, and seems largely interested in exploring the relation between the secular and the sacred for its own sake, rather than primarily as a point of confluence in recent popular discussions of meaning.
Chapter Nine also includes some discussion of Charles Taylor (163-171), including a helpful tracing of Taylor’s diagnosis of contemporary “disenchantment” to the usage of that term in Max Weber’s 1919 “Science as Vocation” (166-168), and brief discussion of Phillip Kitcher’s recent work on secular humanism (169-171). At this point in the book, the reader might expect a return to the focus on philosophical and theological treatments present in the first few historical chapters, but this time from a contemporary academic perspective, and perhaps a more detailed treatment of the relation between the semantic and axiological senses of “meaning” noted above. Surprisingly, however, there is very little detailed treatment of the upswing in recent decades in philosophical literature on the meaning of/in life (e.g., Richard Taylor, Thomas Nagel, John Kekes, Susan Wolf, Terry Eagleton, Thaddeus Metz, John Cottingham, etc.). Metz, Cottingham, and Eagleton are discussed briefly in the introduction, where Cassedy admits that they have written whole books on the concept of meaning and living a meaningful life, but they are quickly dismissed for not offering summary definitions of the word “meaning,” whereas recent popular treatments are discussed at great length, even though the definitions on offer from these sources are often found to be “not helpful” (144, 179) or completely lacking (154, 158, 161, 169).
Throughout the book, Cassedy is laser-focused on definitions of the word “meaning,” and on which words (e.g., “purpose,” “goal,” “value,” “significance”) various authors appear consider synonyms.[3] This is the primary form of evidence given in support of his polyvalence thesis, and perhaps this focus stems naturally from his training and orientation as a scholar of comparative literature. But Cassedy seems to neglect the possibility that—excluding the more popular treatments featured in the final few chapters, in which cases ambiguous usage is perhaps more permissible— “meaning” is not given a simple, easily quotable definition in the works modern philosophical or theological figures not because it is ambiguous but because it is complicated or beyond words.
III.
This is, indeed, a central lesson of twentieth-century phenomenological treatments of meaning. Allow me to dwell on this point in concluding, given the venue of this review. Unlike their analytic counterparts, phenomenologists (especially, e.g., Husserl and Merleau-Ponty),
refused to limit their conceptions of meaning to simple definitions or even to accounts of linguistic meaning. This broader, phenomenological approach to meaning is a central component of the philosophical genealogy of Sinn that Cassedy assures us—as noted above— “we can safely set aside,” and “whose details need not concern us” (122). By refusing to treat meaning exclusively within the confines of a philosophy of language, phenomenologists such as Husserl indeed presage, in an intellectually more rigorous, if necessarily more complicated way, the very move to consider meaning as the antidote to existential crises in the later part of the twentieth century that Cassedy presents in painstaking detail in the second half of the book. What is Husserl’s Crisis, if not a call to recover the level of meaning that belongs originally not to our language or our systems of scientific abstraction but most fundamentally to the lifeworld of everyday experience, the “general ‘ground’ of human world-life” (1970, 155).
For Husserl, it is through the ongoing synthesis of sensory givens arising from individual perspectives that we uncover—and make—law-governed determinations of meaning:
[A]s bearers of ‘sense [Sinn]’ in each phase, as meaning something [Etwas meinende], the perspectives combine in an advancing enrichment of meaning [Sinnbereicherung] and a continuing development of meaning [Sinnfortbildung], such that what no longer appears is still valid as retained and such that the prior meaning which anticipates a continuous flow, the expectation of ‘what is to come,’ is straightaway fulfilled and more closely determined. (1970, 158)
In its focus on the concrete details of lived experience, phenomenology interrogates precisely the point of intersection Cassedy emphasizes in Augustine and later idealism and romanticism between sense (Sinn, sens) as the modality or content of perception (sensation), and sense as the basic unit of meaning or meaningfulness. Without simply equating meaning with sensory givenness, and thus avoiding the dreaded “myth of the given,”[4] phenomenology insists on interrogating their complex and difficult connection. Seen in this light, phenomenology appears to be the ultimate return to the readability of the world, rather than just of the text, if ever there was one!
Indeed, in this light, classical phenomenology can also be interpreted as offering the last great attempt—prior to the hyper-specialization of philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century that made such attempts almost impossible—to theorize the relation between the axiological and semantic or semiotic dimensions of meaning. Meaning pertains both to language and to the value in living a life not simply because our experience is often mediated by language and concepts (though of course it is), but because lived experiences are themselves enactions of meaningfulness and value or “axiological nuance” (Scheler 1973, 18). Human beings are not just language-animals (Taylor 2016), concept-mongerers (Brandom 1994, 8, 620) or meaning-users, but meaning-makers. Our making sense of the world is a necessary component of our life projects. If sense (meaning) were not made, but simply found, our lives could not be meaningful—could not even, ultimately, make sense—for we could have no life projects. This point of connection between the axiological and semantic or semiotic is obscured when we think of meaning-making exclusively via models such as defining, naming, reading, writing or conceptualizing. It becomes much clearer when we include models of meaning-making that more fully reflect our ways of being in the world, such as ritual, dance, or everyday embodied movements like the blind man navigating the world via his cane, which is for him not merely a “sensitive zone” but also the “primary sphere” in which “the sense of all significations [le sens de tout les significations]” is given (Merleau-Ponty 2013, 143-44).
I do not mean to suggest that the phenomenological tradition has definitively explained this connection—I don’t think it has—but it may well be the last major movement in Western philosophy that seriously tried, without defaulting to the comfort of more isolated problems limited to examination in the domain of value theory or the philosophy of language. Cassedy’s neglect of this thread of the history of what we mean when we talk about meaning thus seems to me most regrettable, if perhaps understandable given the enormous ambition and historical scope of the book.
Conclusion
These criticisms aside, What Do We Mean when We Talk About Meaning? is an original, thoughtful, well-written, and wide-ranging examination a theme of major importance both for academic philosophy and for understanding our wider contemporary lifeworld. It should have broad appeal to philosophers, intellectual historians, students of comparative literature, and even theologians and sociologists. It helpfully synthesizes a wide breadth of historical and contemporary sources and is a welcome contribution for all of us interested in the perennial question of the meaning of meaning.
Bibliography:
Brandom, Robert. 1994. Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment Harvard University Press.
De Santis, Daniele and Danilo Manca, eds. forthcoming. Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology: Intersections, Encounters, Oppositions. Series in Continental Thought. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Frege, Gottlob. 1892. “Uber Sinn Und Bedeutung.” Zeitschrift für Philosophie Und Philosophische Kritik 100 (1): 25-50.
Grice, Herbert Paul. 1957. “Meaning.” Philosophical Review 66 (3): 377-388.
Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 2001. Logical Investigations. Translated by J. N. Findlay, edited by Dermot Moran. Paperback ed. Vol. I. New York: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Mill, John Stuart. 1843. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. University of Toronto Press.
Ogden, C. K., and I. A. Richards. 1923. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and the Science of Symbolism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.
Taylor, Charles. 2016. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Harvard University Press.
[1] All parenthetical citations are to the reviewed text unless otherwise noted.
[2] Especially pertinent, given the Cassedy’s titular focus, is Ogden and Richards (1923).
[3] Along related lines, another issue that merits mention—this is not a shortcoming of the book by any means, but a necessary limitation—is that Cassedy’s treatment, while it focuses on historical precursors in a variety of Western languages, is ultimately focused on the English-language word “meaning.” The book is clearly intended primarily for an Anglophone readership, and while there are some helpful treatments of various senses of, for instance, the French sens and the German Bedeutung and Sinn (though, as already noted, no discussion of Frege’s important account, and only passing treatment of Husserl’s), these are offered as part of the historical-genealogical story rather than as standalone treatments of contemporary French and German authors and usages. And there is no comparative treatment of terms similar to meaning (historical or contemporary) in non-Western languages. In this sense, Cassedy’s treatment is necessarily (and, again, excusably) incomplete.
[4] On this important challenge to phenomenological approaches meaning, perception, and knowledge, see especially the essays collected in De Santis and Manca, forthcoming.
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‘Being Towards Death’: Heidegger and the Orthodox Theology of the East
Volume 191 in the series Theologische Bibliothek Töpelmann
De Gruyter
2021
Hardback 89,95 € Ebook 89,95 €
331
Reviewed by: Vanessa Freerks (St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia)
Overview
In “Being Towards Death: Heidegger and the Orthodox Theology of the East”, Sylvie Avakian (19) considers Martin Heidegger’s thought in relation to Orthodox Christianity by dealing with the “early Fathers of the Church”, as well as the “religious existentialism” of Nikolai Berdyaev (19).
Heidegger’s most central themes of “being, openness to the Mystery, freedom, the human being, the human condition, death, letting be, authenticity, existential falsehood” are all compatible, according to Avakian (17), with central theological concerns and especially with the works of Berdyaev and the Orthodox theological heritage. Avakian emphasises also that methodically, Heidegger and Berdyaev share a style of writing that “challenges the abstract-speculative constructions of most philosophical and theological enterprises and aspires to attain meaning and inner (spiritual) freedom” (1).
Indeed, Berdyaev’s strong focus on personal freedom and human creativity made him a very “unorthodox” Christian thinker. In a footnote (49) that should perhaps be in the main text (19) of her “Introduction”, Avakian states that Berdyaev was a critic of conservative approaches in Orthodoxy. For Berdyaev, no institution (secular or sacred) and no fact (psychological, sociological, scientific or historical) can grasp or explain the unique mystery of the human personality. As a personalist philosopher, Berdyaev had an intense belief in the unique and absolute value of every person, which is the cornerstone of his philosophy. In Berdyaev’s work, we see the inextricable link between truth and personal experience. Berdyaev saw personal involvement as crucial to theology and philosophy (4).
In her attempt to solidify the relation between Heidegger and Berdyaev, and in a ‘personalist’ vein, Avakian refers to Heidegger’s own close relation to Christianity with the support of a quote drawn from Heidegger’s “Mein Bisheriger Weg” (1937/38). Despite being part of the intricate fabric of his youth and upbringing, Heidegger simultaneously sought to free himself from Christianity (18). Heidegger’s struggle against the dogmas of religion led him to an interminable quest to find an absent God.
On the relation between Heidegger and Berdyaev, Avakian (13) starts by making the following preliminary remarks and assumptions (13):
Like the thinkers she tackles, Avakian (32) aims to represent theological claims in a way that is free of the dogmas of religion, the ideologies of politics and the systematisations of science. The main title of Avakian’s own book indicates a resistance to ‘orthodox’ perspectives, considering that Orthodox Christianity is centred on “rebirth” and “resurrection” rather than the crucifixion of Christ. Specifically, the book seeks to open dialogue in contemporary theology by arguing that Heidegger’s phrase “‘being towards death’ is the core and true nature of the Christian faith” (20).
Avakian associates ‘being towards death’ with “becoming”; as a bridge between “temporality and eternity”; a unification of the material and immaterial worlds (2). As Avakian rehearses in her “Introduction”, the Heideggerian phrase ‘being towards death’ is not to be regarded as a journey to a final static destination (2-3). Life and death are intertwined, as phenomena. In addition, ‘being with others’ and ‘being towards death’ are inextricably linked. The human acquires an openness towards others as well as itself, by ‘being towards death’. Avakian says that
“[t]he human being who experiences ‘care’ in the world necessarily experiences ‘being towards death’ and only then does one truly comport oneself towards one’s inner reality” (2).
The person who cares has an increased awareness of human finitude by anticipating threats and recognising the fragility of human existence. According to Avakian’s relational emphasis on Heidegger’s notion of ‘being towards death’, human beings are never alone in dealing with mortality. In addition, ‘care’ and openness to others are important conflictual dimensions of the human being’s trajectory towards authenticity and “inner reality” (2; 181-184).
Central to Avakian’s book is the connection she sees between Heidegger’s ‘being towards death’ and Berdyaev’s path to ‘spiritual freedom’ (303). ‘Being towards death’ is ‘being towards freedom’. Both involve the movement of the self to the unknown, to the Other (God or the other person), or being as such, and then, the return to the free, genuine self. ‘Being towards death’ enables a twofold movement: a mutually dependent move involving the divine and the human (304).
In her conclusion, Avakian takes the liberty of adapting William J. Richardson’s (1962, 75)[1] neologism (“mittence”) for her theological purposes:
“the journey that ‘being towards death’ entails is, then, essentially a mittence, a sending to an Other, which being, or God, conveys to the person as it bestows itself/Godself on him/her. And yet, in order for the journey to occur, the human subject must let him/herself be seized by being, or God, as by offering itself, being, or God, entrusts the person with guarding the Mystery which it itself is” (306).
For Avakian, being a Christian does not mean looking to ‘God’ for stability; it does not involve a purely intellectual endeavour of abstract theorising; it is a gift. ‘God’ is mysteriously and immanently found in the depths of historical life. Avakian claims that the nature of ‘God’ can only be caught sight of in a historical journey of self-disclosure.
Most significantly, throughout her book, Avakian places much emphasis on poetry (also by originally composing her own to close all chapters). She takes care to highlight the importance of the German poets Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke on Heidegger’s thought. Thanks to Hölderlin, Heidegger understood that it is only through “letting-be – that is through death – that one can allow being as such to come to presence through beings” (31). Poetry can express what Avakian calls ‘divine Mystery’, or the non-objective, non-empirical presence of God in faith (1). Heidegger saw poetry as a potentially powerful resource for the theoretical project of articulating Christian faith from ‘within’.
Overall, Avakian’s project aims to overcome the rift between religious fundamentalism and what she (32) calls a “fear of religiosity”. Where can the Christian of today stand when faced with the “popular religiosity of the pre-modern – or anti-modern – era and the implicit religiosity of a ‘religious-less’, secular age” (17). The author seeks to find a balance between apparent extremes and to bring
“philosophy and theology together, the West and the East, Europe, Russia and the Middle East, as well as Christianity in its relationship with other religious traditions, so that the Christian is addressed as a free spirit – in the world – and Christianity is perceived as authenticity and freedom” (20).
She wishes to promote dialogue in contemporary theology through an existential focus, symbolic perception and an openness to the “divine Mystery” (20).
Throughout her book, Avakian equates philosophy and theology, as they both, in her view, lack a direct object of inquiry. Neither ‘being’ nor ‘God’ can be scrutinised ‘as such’, and both must accept their own inadequacy regarding the attainment of absolute or certain knowledge (12).
In her first chapter “Openness to the Mystery” (34-78), Avakian starts by sketching how Berdyaev conceives “true theology as mystical and apophatic, as it is about the spiritual perception of divine Mystery” (35). The apophatic view is that God is not objectifiable, because God is the ultimate mystery with no possible rational concept. Apophatic theology accepts that theological language is unable to demonstrate divine truth. Maintaining the analogical-symbolic nature of all theological assertions, it claims that absolute mystery is beyond human grasp (15). Unlike cataphatic theology, apophatic theology “requires the abandonment of all knowledge of beings, so that the divine is truly beyond every affirmative description, namely it is the nothing” (21).
Avakian links the apophatic-mystical approach of Eastern theology to Heidegger’s view regarding the incomprehensible nature of being as such. For Heidegger, the “human being remains incapable of any knowledge of its essence, maintaining that the true path is a mystical path” (36). Avakian emphasises that in Heidegger’s work, ‘pure thinking’ is conceived as openness to mystery and astonishment (52-58), which involves passion, suffering (54-55) and inwardness (57) – this is because things or beings “emerge from their own ground” (73). ‘Being’ or ‘truth’ in Heidegger is necessarily related to an ongoing process of “revelation” or becoming unhidden (45).
In the final section of the first chapter, “The Mystery and the Necessity of the Leap” (71-80), Avakian scrutinises Heidegger’s quest to find a realm free from modern science and reason. With regards to Heidegger‘s reformulation of Leibniz’s “Principle of Sufficient Reason” (“Der Satz vom Grund”), Avakian discusses Heidegger’s play on the German word Grund (which can either mean reason/justification or ground/foundation). According to Avakian (74-5), Heidegger subverts Leibniz’s Principle by claiming that:
“being as such is the ground of every being, and things carry within themselves their own grounds and reasons, without their need to supply any reasons for their existence. Thus, the basic question for philosophy – and theology – is the question of being (or God), which is simultaneously the same as the question of truth. This basic question is, however, of a particular kind, since it has to be approached ‘without why’” (74).
In chapter two, Avakian goes on to delineate Heidegger’s view that a “true understanding of technology, science and art” belongs essentially to the poetic way of being in the world rather than the mere objective perception of the world (83).
Furthermore, regarding especially the question of technology, Avakian says “Heidegger resorted to particular theological language and terminologies, though through an abstruse and veiled framework” (106). The themes of science and technology enable Heidegger to address major theological questions: “God the Creator, the whole of creation as a gift, the human being – the creature – in his/her relation to the Creator, and the question of salvation” (106).
Taking a clear position with regards to Heidegger, Avakian (103) says that his critique of technology is not altogether satisfying. Berdyaev went further than Heidegger, because he saw that when technology is used unreflectively it conceals and distorts the real, and brings “the human being into an illusionary world and forged relations” (104). What Avakian means by “forged relations” becomes clearer thanks to a quote by Berdyaev pertaining to how (104) “the mechanization of life” results in an artificial “collective reality” which inaugurates the end of individual existence (104). For Berdyaev, man now comes second to technology.
Technology does not enable the real (or ‘being as such’) to manifest itself; it does not merely allow the human to control nature. Technology permits humans now to have power over people’s lives. Avakian (104) says that Berdyaev understood the crisis of his day as being a matter of technology, and he saw this as a “primarily spiritual crisis”. Berdyaev calls on Christian theology to wake up to the new human reality by intensifying “the inner spiritual power of the human being” so that the spirit does not “become a tool used for the purposes of technical organizations” (104). In contrast to Berdyaev’s clear verdict on technology, Avakian suggests that several statements by Heidegger seem to be too optimistic (104).
In addition to dealing with Berdyaev and Heidegger’s views on technology (98-106), their critiques of rationality and science (88-98), Avakian also dedicates chapter two to a discussion of art (106-111), freedom (130-5) and poetry (142-6).
Chapter three (“The Human Spirit and the Divine”) goes on to deal with the role of “spirit” in Berdyaev and Heidegger, a notion which Avakian (176) claims permeates all of Heidegger’s work even when not directly referred to. Berdyaev’s immanent conception of the divine also collapses the opposition between the divine and the human, the spiritual and physical world (161). In addition, religious revelation is conceived in his work as an interactive, rather than a passive, top-down experience (166).
While considering the relation between theological language and the poetic, Avakian discusses the distinction between symbols, allegory, signs (168-171), with the overall aim of bringing to light the relation between revelation, art, meaning and spirit.
Avakian concludes (181) chapter three by linking Berdyaev and Heidegger’s analysis on the “fallenness” of the human being (which is defined as the failure to know the self as spirit). Avakian regards “fallenness” as a comparable but a highly preferable alternative to the problematic notion of sin, which she claims in a footnote (129) has a “disadvantageous history” (184).
The subsection “Spirit and Human Consciousness as Care and Resoluteness” (190-201) starts with an important discussion of “care” in Heidegger’s work and reconstructs its Kierkegaardian lineage (191-2). Avakian explains that the “human being in the world is necessarily there for an Other, and, hence, his being is actualized in and though care in relation to that Other” (192). In this respect, Avakian raises the distinction between care and humanism: unlike humanism, care does not simply focus on the “objective existence of the human subject”, it draws persons towards their “essence” (193) As opposed to care, humanism “fails to realize the appropriate dignity of the human being” (193).
Both care and freedom are based upon experiencing life as openness (194). It is in this context that Avakian goes on to discuss how care in Berdyaev is expressed through “the biblical notion of love” (194) – for him, it signifies, also in a Kierkegaardian vein, “carrying within oneself the pain and the injustice that the whole of mankind goes through” (194).
The subsection “The Call of Conscience” (194-199) explores how “guilt” is key to understanding the notion of the “spirit” in Berdyaev. Similarly in Heidegger, the call of conscience is the call to the realisation of guilt (199) which in turn leads to the authentic self. In addition, an authentic being in the world and being-with-the-Other requires a process of resolutely being ready for anxiety. In this resoluteness, “one takes upon oneself one’s utmost potentiality for being, that is one’s ‘being towards death’” (200).
This smoothly inaugurates the next chapter four, entitled “Christianity as Authenticity”, in which Avakian turns specifically to her main theme (and the title of her book) ‘being towards death’, before relating it directly to the central concerns of Christian theology, including the meaning of creation, incarnation and resurrection.
Avakian recapitulates the link between ‘being towards death’, care and authenticity, (203-4) all of which are based upon the importance of the existential acceptance and inner consciousness of one’s death and of the temporality of being. Avakian links Heidegger’s notion of ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ with Berdyaev’s notion of ‘spiritual development’ (205), which both involve a resolve to progress to that which is still outstanding (death). This is the “responsibility of the inner self and the free and creative nature of one’s spirit” (205).
Chapter five (“Temporality and Eternity”) (253) deals with how “movement, repetition, temporality, finitude and eternity – lie in (sic) the foundations of ‘being towards death’”. Avakian starts the chapter with a discussion of how Berdyaev’s work conceives of “eternity” as the guarantor of meaning. Eternity, emphasises Avakian on two consecutive occasions, does not refer to a “natural” realm and cannot be “objectified” (254; 255). Neither is eternity a separate otherworldly dimension, outside of time as it “has its past in every moment…It has its present and future elements in like manner” (255).
Berdyaev’s sense of eternity is Kierkegaardian in Avakian’s eyes as it is not based upon the denial of change and becoming. In the subsection on “Movement and Repetition” (256-265), after a short overview of time and motion in Plato and Aristotle (257-8), Avakian thus goes on to provide an exposé of Kierkegaard’s notion of “becoming and continuous movement” (258-264). Importantly for the purposes of the book, Avakian notes that “Kierkegaard’s thought and philosophical concerns correspond significantly to the spiritual theology of Eastern Orthodoxy, which has the early Greek Fathers of the Church as its foundation” (259).
Avakian makes special references to Clare Carlisle’s work on Kierkegaard’s “philosophy of becoming” (257-8; 260-3) in order to conclude that “Kierkegaard set existential and spiritual becoming in sharp contrast to pure metaphysical speculation, and thereby overturned the dominating philosophical-metaphysical project and gave room for introspection and spiritual passion” (263).
As mentioned above, Avakian dedicates sections of her book to presenting and reconstructing how Kierkegaardian elements are mobilised in the works of Heidegger and Berdyaev, especially with regards to the concept of care and temporality. This is because, as Avakian rightly states (31) in her “Introduction”, Heidegger and Berdyaev’s works do not sufficiently acknowledge the influence of other thinkers, such as Kierkegaard, Eckart and Nietzsche, on their philosophy (see also footnote 18, on page 151). In her “Conclusion”, Avakian again mentions that both Heidegger and Berdyaev do not make the ‘origins’ of their thinking clear. References to previous thinkers are minimised and their importance reduced (301).
As the Kierkegaardian notion of “movement and repetition” discussed by Avakian attests to however, and although it is indeed important to clarify influence (one might even reveal how a work is merely derivative or the effect of an original cause) – this does not say anything of the unity and strength of the work at hand. The character of all significant thought after all is that in repeating the influences upon it, it makes something else of them. As Avakian herself puts it: “after repetition the being no longer remains the same, but becomes another” (271).
Via Kierkegaard’s sense of “movement and repetition”, Avakian links Berdyaev’s notion of ‘eternity’ with Heidegger’s concept of ‘authenticity’, both of which involve the present, past and future. In Berdyaev, when one encounters death without fear or anxiety one “is given to experience eternity” (254). “[I]t is through the willingness of the person to take upon oneself his/her own death that he/she conquers death itself” (255).
Similarly, in Heidegger, “it is only through such being towards one’s end that the human subject exists as ‘authentically whole’, and it is this perception of the self that makes ‘being towards death’, or ‘care’ possible” (274). Authenticity (like ‘eternity’ in Berdyaev) hinges on the resolute acceptance of one’s ‘being towards death’ and nothingness. Ontologically speaking, death is the possibility of no-longer-being-there, and at the same time, it is what makes our being-in-the-world possible. Being towards death opens up possibilities ontically for Dasein because it is the projection to what lies beyond actuality and what is positively there. The human being moves from the past towards his/her self as “authentically futural” (274). This also implies that any understanding or discovery of the self aspires repeatedly to approach otherness.
Concluding Remarks
“Being Towards Death: Heidegger and the Orthodox Theology of the East” is a post-doctoral degree (Habilitationsschrift) completed in January 2018 for the Protestant faculty of the University of Tübingen. In Germany, most candidates qualify for a university professorship by means of such a habilitation process – and this includes writing a habilitation treatise to certify the ability to teach in an academic subject.
In the spirit of ‘personalist philosophy’, Avakian begins her work by emphasising her personal background, involvement and justification for the project (20) and she occasionally intersperses contextual paragraphs appealing to the practical fallout of her work, e.g., regarding her aim of addressing and bridging the divide between what she calls a fear of religiosity vs fundamentalism (17; 190).
The habilitation-turned-book (published by de Gruyter) was not however conceived with a wide audience in mind or even scholars in general. The research is of a tightly knit scope. The insular style intertwines thematic interconnections between Berdyaev and Heidegger, makes explicit the influence of key figures such a Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and establishes original in-depth links between Heidegger and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the 5th century Christian theologian and “father of mysticism” (21-2; 29; 60; 242; 306). Since mysticism is a major theme of her study, Avakian could also have widened her contextual scope by referring to commentators who draw parallels and differences between Heidegger and Asian mysticism.
Bibliography
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[1] William J. Richardson’s (1962, 75) writes: “Being is conceived as sending itself unto its There. We may speak of this self-sending as proceeding from Being and call it a ‘self-emitting’ , or if we may be permitted a neologism to designate a completely new concept, a ‘mittence’ (Geschick) of Being” .
