Tag: Historicity

Hans Blumenberg: Die ontologische Distanz

Die ontologische Distanz: Eine Untersuchung zur Krisis der philosophischen Grundlagen der Neuzeit Book Cover Die ontologische Distanz: Eine Untersuchung zur Krisis der philosophischen Grundlagen der Neuzeit
Hans Blumenberg. Edited by Nicola Zambon
Suhrkamp
2022
Hardback
378

Reviewed by: Pierre-Adrien Marciset,

The historicity of consciousness and the horizon of its thought

 

“His habilitation thesis is undoubtedly a step that sheds light on Blumenberg’s career…” Helmut Mayer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

 “He was [after all] the exemplary ascetic who had earned his lion. Working night after night, Blumenberg told himself proudly, the thanks had now come in the form of the lion.” Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Blumenberg (2011, Seagull Press 2017, for the English edition, p. 6)

I thank warmly Robert Savage for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this review, without which the review would not have reached such a degree of precision and clarity.

 

“Enjoy only with caution”

 

Hans Blumenberg (born July 13, 1920 and died March 28, 1996) could, despite everything, still be considered an “invisible” philosopher today, justifying the adjective with which Christoph Rüter’s documentary film refers to him (Hans Blumenberg – Der unsichtbare Philosoph, 2018). The German philosopher did not give interviews and did not allow himself to be photographed, nourishing, according to his current detractors, a certain staging of the reception of his texts, in particular those that are still inaccessible and have long remained so even for the German-speaking readership. This posthumously edited version of Die ontologische Distanz is the text edited by Nicola Zambon that Blumenberg presented in 1950 for his Habilitation thesis, accompanied by an “appendix” (“Anhang“, attachment) of the earlier versions, i.e. the one he proposed in 1949, immediately after his doctoral thesis, defended in 1948.

            This text belongs to the beginnings of Blumenberg’s production, corresponding to an important stage, in my opinion, in the anthropological practice of phenomenology – I will return to this. This anteriority, in relation to the works written later and which had a significant impact, could push potential readers to consider it as “outdated” insofar as it would be a “scaffolding”, a stage in the path of Blumenberg’s thought which could, in hindsight, be considered negligible. This is the premise often accepted by current research on Blumenberg. Indeed, since on the one hand Blumenberg himself did not authorize the publication (he wrote that he left it to his heirs to do what they wanted with it, decorating the manuscript with a drawing of a bottle of poiso labelled “enjoy only with caution”), and since on the other hand Blumenberg would go beyond some of the ideas proposed in Die ontologische Distanz while not following up on others, it would perhaps be fraudulent, from the point of view of the coherence of the philosopher’s thought, to resort to the elements of this text and perhaps even to speak of it.

            The German edition of Die ontologische Distanz nevertheless responds to certain works of contemporary phenomenology, such as the reflections of the French phenomenologist Renaud Barbaras (Introduction à une phénoménique de la vie, Vrin, 2012, for example) who poses in particular the need to return to the idea of ​​the correlational a priori raised in Ideas’s §49, according to which “between consciousness and reality there is a real abyss of meaning” (Hua III/1, § 49), on which Blumenberg comes frontally in Part. II, §3, notably pp. 73-75. This is how Blumenberg tackled the problem of what separates philosophizing from life, and the question of the possibility of existence in the subjectivity of successive beings.

            Certainly, I find in Die ontologische Distanz the first stirrings rather than the foundations of notions that I will see better and more extensively defended elsewhere in Blumenberg’s work – for example what will become the critique of the acme of history in theology in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, or again the critique of phenomenology that was deployed in several lost or transformed manuscripts, some sections of which ultimately constitute entire chapters of Beschreibung des Menschen. But I also find sketches which, even if better specified elsewhere, remain decisive from the point of view of the history of philosophy, and even from the point of view of the history of historical science, by shedding new light on the problems which he approached (this is the case for the whole question of the possibility of the self-assertion of reason, see second part, “§7 Die Selbstbehauptung der Vernunft for der Gewißheitsfrage”, pp. 113-126). To take yet another example, I find already in the defense version of Die ontologische Distanz the idea of ​​the “valences” of paradigmatic epochs which, from the idea of ​​a “morphology of ontological distance” become after 1961 the arguments of a “concept of reality” which he will study under various approaches, and on several occasions, under the first prism of a “consciousness of reality”. I’m thinking here of an article from 1964, “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel” (in: History, Metaphors, Fables, A Hans Blumenberg Reader, « Signale », Cornell University Press, 2020 for the English edition).

            Blumenberg abandoned many of his book projects, quickly tiring of the considerations related to the publication of his works and perhaps preferring to devote himself to writing, thus accumulating manuscripts in the drawers of his archives. Given this inclination, leaving aside or devaluing manuscripts that were not carried through to publication does not seem necessarily essential to us. If the young Blumenberg (thirty years old in 1950) later presented in more accomplished forms what he wrote by trial and error, in the heat of research, this does not seem to us to justify the elimination or reduction of these ideas, whether we assume that he returned to them later with a more mature and firmer eye or, conversely, that he preferred not to exploit the valences thus opened but left them in a state of a suspension. The extreme vitality of these twenty-six paragraphs spread over four parts  warrants their being given serious consideration, even if this vitality certainly sometimes suffers from confusion, contradictions, unfulfilled promises (notably in the fourth part), or breaks in the rhythm and the demonstration. As the “Habilitation dispute” attests (see below), Blumenberg perhaps also suffered from not having yet managed to find his own voice, sometimes ventriloquizing Heidegger at the same time as confronting him.

            I am convinced that if Blumenberg had wanted to simply to disown the work he had begun in the manuscript of Die ontologische Distanz, then he would not have isolated his text and allowed it to join his archives; to those who would justify this by sentimentality, I should defend myself by showing that some of Blumenberg’s great ideas are already, confusedly or not, expressed in this manuscript. Reading this text today perhaps allows us to understand the lineaments of a thought which was already emerging itself in his doctoral thesis (Hans Blumenberg, Beiträge zum Problem der Ursprünglichkeit der mittelalterlich-scholastischen Ontologie, Frankfurt, Verlag Suhrkamp, ​​2020). It therefore makes sense to approach this text today “with caution”, keeping in mind this reserve, that of the reasonable prudence that Blumenberg maintained with regard to the treatment of this text and which resisted until the end, both in the mind of its author and in the letter of his work. One of the major terms of the whole philosophy of Hans Blumenberg could well be that of the “horizon” – historical, of meaning, phenomenological, of consciousness, cultural, technical, etc. In this respect, Die ontologische Distanz could well be the “horizon” that forms both the starting point and the perspective of Hans Blumenberg’s philosophy.

 

            The rigor of Die ontologische Distanz

 

The publication of Die ontologische Distanz: Eine Untersuchung zur Krisis der philosophischen Grundlagen der Neuzeit in 2022 seems to us to be decisive for understanding the substance of Blumenberg’s overall work. It is also an opportunity for us to expose the homogeneity of a work always already contained in embryo in the Habilitation. To try to bring it together in a formula, this text deals with the phenomenological connection of the subject to the world through the structure of performance that is consciousness – consciousness of something, in accordance with Husserl’s identification of the connection of consciousness to the world. All of Blumenberg’s intellectual singularity is announced from this formidable ambition of the Habilitation.

            Hans Blumenberg’s first project aimed at nothing less than the restitution of philosophical “rigor” and anticipates the aims of his entire philosophy. Thanks to this first text, practically “genetic”, arriving immediately after his thesis on medieval ontology, the tools are now assembled that allow us to consider the system as a whole, by demonstrating the rigor of its logic, its outcomes and the necessity that presides over all the ramifications that were sometimes considered to have been scattered and disordered. However, it is possible today to discern the centers of gravity of this work. Jürgen Goldstein already named some of them in 2020, to which I can now add others thanks to the posthumous publications that have taken place since: “The central aspects of his philosophy require presentation in their respective context: the self-preservation of reason, the absolutism of reality, the phenomenology of history, for example.” (Jürgen Goldstein, Hans Blumenberg, Ein philosophisches Portrait, Berlin, Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2020, p. 11) I would add: genetic phenomenology; that is to say ontology and its conditions of possibility, the reflection on being in the wake of Aristotle as it was first pursued by Husserl, then defended by Blumenberg in Husserl against Heidegger while nevertheless integrating certain Heideggerian notions – without forgetting Landgrebe, whose Phänomenologie und Metaphysik (1949) is an essential text for Blumenberg — and especially for the Blumenber of the Habilitation thesis.

            The German term Strenge, rigor, is the keystone of one of the three versions of the subtitle of the Habilitation, as Nicola Zambon testifies on the first page of the afterword (Nicola Zambon, “Nachwort des Herausgebers”, p. 349). The central question of philosophical “rigor” is grasped by Blumenberg as having been the point on which the Cartesian project stumbled, justifying Husserl’s resumption of that project (see on this subject the introduction to Paradigms for a Metaphorology which opens precisely with the recognition of this unresolved debt in the history of philosophy), and the failure, in Husserl’s own eyes, of what he concentrates in the formula of the “universality of the coincidence of language and thought” (Husserl, Formal Logic and Transcendental Logic, Halle, 1929, p. 22, here expanding the Husserlian idea of ​​§49 of the Ideas). This is how Blumenberg justifies in his introduction the perspective of this “investigation” that he is conducting on this subject, in his Habilitation thesis:

 

This breakthrough through traditional ontology does not take place in the claim of methodological freedom, in the name of a new attitude towards thought. Rather, it can be characterized as the persistence of a historical situation until it is interpreted. This situation represents the critical turning point that the understanding of being in modern times has taken as a whole. The turning point is succinctly marked by the crisis of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, from which Martin Heidegger’s thought emerges. The presentation, classification and interpretation of this crisis constitute the main theme of the investigation. (Blumenberg, p. 11, which he extended p. 51 in the problematization of the historical context of the performance of intentionality)

 

Therefore, the gesture of the Habilitation proposed to restore through the “rigor” of the homogeneity of phenomenology, thanks to which the crisis irremediably separating the subject from the world of objects would be resolved. It is with the study of the conditions of mediation of the distance of this separation, as a source of ontogenesis, that the Habilitation is concerned; that is to say, Die ontologische Distanz aims to explain what is expressed in the phenomenon of ontological distance, but also to describe the mode of this expression.

            I will therefore discuss this work as if I was progressing on the cartography of the future complete philosophical work, naming different points of his radiancy’s philosophic activity, in order to underline its dynamic arcs (the famous “metakinetics of being” thanks to the work of which “the realities in which we live replace being“, Zambon, p. 372) and show their radiation from the focus that would have been Die ontologische Distanz. What could be considered as the problem of the distance of the subject from the world would be what would stand between the conscious activity of the interiority of the subject on the one hand and its consciousness of the world on the other, the latter understood here in the sense of the subject’s “consciousness cast” on the world. It seems to us that this denomination of “ontological distance” designates, simultaneously with this first problem, the ontological activity required by the need to connect with the world, which is active in and made active by the subject.

            For Blumenberg, and this is yet another justification of the relationship by “radiation” and “concretions” that I was talking about, the entire history of the world of thought is a succession of manifestations of this “metakinetics of thought as a whole” (Blumenberg, p. 18) that springs from an internal and fundamental encounter between two regimes of the activity of the mind. Later, after the publication of his book on metaphorology in 1960, Blumenberg would be more radical and would integrate into the Husserlian concept of the lifeworld the importance of the role of aesthetics in ontogenetic activity, through a “return” to the contributions of Ernst Cassirer. Thus when the support of ontogenetic certainty of the paradigmatic era wavers, the ontological distance comes into action:

 

Aristotelian scholasticism arises from the need for a scientific theology in an intellectual environment that wants to be convinced. It is an articulation of ontological distance that is no longer understood only in terms of possibility, but has its own objective horizon, in which there is a search and a doubt, a discussion of positions, an affection and a rejection. (Blumenberg, pp. 104-105)

 

Here, at the heart of the exercise of ontological distance, the reader can already grasp the terminology that would not be fully deployed until about ten years later. We also see the spirit, but also the letter, of a paradigm shift that is systematically identified in The Genesis of the Copernican World (1975, 1987, MIT Press for the English edition), but also in the first edition of the book published in 1966, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (3rd ed. 1997, 1985, MIT Press for the English edition). All this contributes to a demonstrable homogeneity.

 

As a metakinesis of historical horizons — and in anticipation of the dynamics of repositioning that Blumenberg introduces in Die Legitimität der Neuzeit and that will be refined in the Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt — it is appropriate to examine why distance has taken the forms that it has. The analysis amounts to affirming that the Cartesian configuration of distance — the contraposition between subject and object — is a historical form, which means at the same time that it is only a historical form (among many others possible). The historical modes of distance were possibilities, they were neither destiny nor chance, but: contingency. The crisis of modern times was therefore not a necessity. The Cartesian understanding of the subject and the object that gave rise to the crisis was not inevitable, nor natural, but was in turn a contingent historical constellation whose evidence must be questioned in order to find a way out of the diagnosed epochal impasse. (Zambon, p. 355)

 

Zambon seems to support here this idea of ​​a shift from the “history of being” to what I could establish as a “history of the paradigmatics of being” that would ultimately be consummated. However, writing it this way would run the risk of mixing up what is announced by the Habilitation and what would only be methodically materialized later on. However, it should not be overlooked that the Habilitation is a work of a man in his late twenties, and as such contains the entire extremely rich intuitive arsenal of intuitions that he would spend the next forty years developing. It seems to us that, beyond the effective radicalization of his break with Heidegger, Blumenberg never changed his trajectory, even assimilating Heidegger over time.

            Hans Blumenberg constructed his entire work in perfect metaphorological adequacy with what he wanted to demonstrate (Goldstein, 2020, p. 28), always illustrating the object in the theorization of a demonstration which is homogeneous with the other perspectives of its theory. But this is not so much an irony, or a paradox, as the very mode of synthetic understanding by which we must always read Blumenberg if we want to understand him: we must read by accepting that erudition, and education with it, is a horizon, and not an arsenal (or not only).

            The content (the product) and the container (the production space, the work space, Arbeit) of his system overlap and coincide. Another of Blumenberg’s monumental works, Work on Myth (1979, 1985, MIT Press for the English edition), follows an identical pattern: it is a work on myth as what is on the author’s loom, but at the same time it is a study of the ways of working on myth, of the conditions of possibility and necessity of its production. The work of Die ontologische Distanz now available is the focus from which the other works can be understood as the materializations (Blumenberg uses the metaphor of “onion skins” in Die nackte Wahrheit, 2020) of the formal conditions of which Die ontologische Distanz was or would have been the archistructure and the turn from which Blumenberg rose to another dimension of philosophy. In other words, the Habilitation seems to us to have been the germ of a decisive stage in the genesis of the progression of what, thanks to it, we understand today as the crisis of the subject. In the same way, for the subject, the internal formal phenomenon of ontological distance is the focus from which the other aspects of its capacity to be a subject can be understood and interpreted – I will return this again below.

 

            The ontological crisis as a sine qua non condition for the possibility of the subject’s cognition

 

Since Die ontologische Distanz, or soon after, Blumenberg’s philosophy can consider that the very notion of crisis is intrinsic to the subject. Just as truth is the metaphor of the infinite aim of knowledge by the human being, and not its essentialization, the crisis would thus be the phenomenological experience that is at the very foundation of the conditions of possibility of what, particularly since Freud, is covered by the terminology of the different states of consciousness. Die ontologische Distanz, as already written, announces in our sense that of which Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960, 2010, Cornell University Press for the English edition) are the practical case and the illustration, if not even that of which they are the demonstration of the efficiency and the progress. The balance sheet of the internal crisis of any subject is both production and product of what is formally manifested in the two simultaneous regimes of the activity of the mind, and constitutes the plurality of the conditions of possibility of what is called the world of thought. These two regimes of the activity of the mind, conceptual and “nonconceptual”, are materialized in the thought of Hans Blumenberg in several works and in particular in his Theorie der Unbegrifflichkreit (Theorie der Unbegrifflichkreit, Aus dem Nachlaß herausgegeben und mit einem Nachwort von Anselm Haverkamp, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007, 2019).

            What philosophical content does Die ontologische Distanz proposes? It already started from the principle of ambivalence, still foreign to Blumenberg in 1948: contrary to the idea of ​​a progression of history that would be linear and progressive, on the Hegelian model, and in which humanity would have passed, in the eyes of Cassirer for example, from the age of substance to that of the understanding of function, it is for Blumenberg two simultaneous aptitudes that are both expressed in the regimes of the activity of the mind and that the need of each era pushes the subject to invest or not according to the paradigmatic prevalence. From this perspective, substance and function correspond not to two historical stages of the mind, but to two paradigmatic modalities (Blumenberg evokes “potentiality” in the sense of Aristotelian ontology, p. 137) of the mode of relation of the subject to the world, in language, in science, or in myth. The past, writes Blumenberg,

 

is “decided” from all possible pasts, which are always causally present: for example as literature, as vocabulary, philosophical doctrines, museum objects, etc. (Blumenberg, p. 138)

 

It is therefore a revolution in the relationship to history that is announced: no longer a history of being, but a history of “paradigmatic eras” reproducing and themselves culturally while producing the conditions of possibility of the subject’s self-constitution.

            In other words, individuals who establish themselves in the distance that separates them from the world of objects as transcendental subjects proceed from an epochal focus that polarizes the mediation of this distance, from the tools that are available. They do not follow a historical progression dependent on their relationship to belief or their relationship to science, they depend on the availability of tools that allow them to react to the internal crisis, and which leads them to organize themselves by instituting the conditions of possibility of ontogenesis as it is established in the epochal paradigm as resolution of the distance to the world. Because the transcendental subject is above all the process of the affirmation of its own autonomy in its use of the principle of determinability, this would be a phenomenology that wants to be existential (or existential) – the influences of Landgrebe, Freud but also Heidegger himself on Blumenberg are known. The subject, for Blumenberg (but not yet explicitly in the Habilitation), is capable of returning to the conditions of materialization of its own principle of determinability, starting from this fundamental crisis of which he identifies the work (and not the origin) in the quantitative differential of the regimes of the synthetic activity a priori of the cognition.

            From then on, this “ambivalence” (a term that is not already present in the paths pursued during the Habilitation, despite several titles exposing an ambivalence, such as §1 of the second part) is expressed as a paradigm, or as a principle, of a simultaneous double tension external to each individual in his relationship to the world, and internal to each individual in the relationship of his faculties between them, between finitude and imagination, and which materializes on the phenomenological level in the use of his own process of determinability as a transcendental subject through the historical availabilities in each era.

 

            The formal content of the text

 

In addition to the philosophers of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Blumenberg’s doctrinal trajectory crosses several of the philosophical edifices that are contemporary with him. The borrowings that he makes from them and the critical props with which he modifies them are, however, often the occasion for a questioning of the foundations of their structures, sometimes without having named them. This is his obsession with the « paradigm” (see his 1971 article: “Paradigma, grammatisch”, in op. cit., 2001). What can thus pass for an infinite heterodoxy (to Husserl, Heidegger and Landgrebe himself, to cite the names that are most often found, but one could add Cassirer, Kant, Thomas Aquinas or Plotinus), or for a dispersion whose center one could not locate, would exacerbate a certain annoyance, a fortiori in the event of disagreements on the conclusions or the practicality of the concepts deployed. His writings on phenomenology (from 1981 to 1988, edited by Nicola Zambon) and his writings on literature (from 1945 to 1958, edited by Alexander Schmitz and Bernd Stiegler) are known, both of which were published by Suhrkamp. By its proliferation, which nevertheless designates a center of gravity, certainly invisible to those who approach it without conjectures on the horizon, Blumenberg irritates.

            And still! The elements considered by Blumenberg in Die ontologische Distanz find their vein in the diffusion of everything that touches on ontology: both from the point of view of ontogenesis as production and at the same time from the idea of ​​ontogenesis as product. In doing so, he reflects both on the expression of the morphology of ontological distance in the ambivalence between mythos and logos (II §1) which contains in its seminal state what is in 1971 the surer gesture of “Wirklichkeitsbergiff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos”, then also instructs a part of The Readability of the World (1981, Cornell University Press, 2022 for the English edition), as well as on the form that the exteriority of the guarantee of reason can take (II §7), as well as on history as an investment of ontological valences (III §1), but it is unthinkable to render exhaustively the content of the list of “historical-philosophical practical cases” which constitute the four parts of this text. Here and there, each paragraph could and should be discussed in order to be ideally presented; here is a loosely translated list which allows us to grasp the dynamics at work in the text:

 

Part I: Explanation and development of the problem of distance

  • 1. The questioning of the scientific character of philosophy
  • 2. The origin of the scientific self-interpretation of philosophy
  • 3. The decisive ontological character of the scientific concept of certainty
  • 4. The radicalization of the scientific concept of certainty in phenomenology
  • 5. The problem of the distance of the phenomenological reduction
  • 6. The inversion of the Cartesian-phenomenological approach

 

Part II: Insights into the Historical Morphology of Ontological Distance

  • 1. “Mythos” and “Logos”
  • 2. The Socratic Situation and the Logos
  • 3. The Metaphysical Definition of Theoretical Distance
  • 4. The Disempowerment of the Cosmic Logos
  • 5. Seeing and Hearing
  • 6. The Double Truth and the Origin of the Crisis of Certainties
  • 7. The Self-Assertion of Reason in the Face of the Question of Certainty
  • 8. The Decisive Ontological Character of the Enlightenment and the Awakening of the Historical Sense

 

Part III: Objectivity and Independence as Terms of Ontological Distance

  • 1. Historical Past and Historical Present
  • 2. The Original Form of the Philosophical Question
  • 3. The Genesis of Historical Consciousness as the Original Formation of Objects
  • 4. World and Object
  • 5. The World as Intellectual Achievement
  • 6. The Foundations of the Phenomenological World of Science in Its Problems of Originality
  • 7. The Yield of the Phenomenological Concept of “Horizon” for the Theme of the “World”.
  • 8. The Passive Genesis of the World Horizon

 

Part IV: The Finitude of Thought

  • 1. The Infinite Project of Phenomenology as a Claim to Historical Impartiality
  • 2. The Collapse of the Universal Familiarity Structure of the World
  • 3. The Destruction of the Ontological Foundations of the Project of Infinite Certainty
  • 4. The Reduction of the Forgetting of Being and the New Thought of Being

 

The editorial content of the 2022 work therefore includes the 1950 version, which is the one used for the defense and is spread over 276 pages (9-285), the framework of which I have just outlined, but it also contains the first, more concentrated version from 1949, containing 56 pages (287-249) including the bibliography, as an “attachment” to the 1950 manuscript. This is the file established by Blumenberg himself on the cover of which he had drawn a skull, thereby ensuring highly toxic, pirated or at least poisoned content – ​​hence the “caution” I was talking about earlier.

            Let us write it again with the help of this new argument: when consulting this skeleton, it’s possible to see clearly how, later, Blumenberg’s philosophy was able to envelop and integrate into pre-existing concerns the position of a philosopher of myth and culture such as Ernst Cassirer. Similarly, I could envisage what was already preparing the philosopher from Lübeck for the position that is his own regarding the Davos quarrel opposing Cassirer to Heidegger, notably on the level of the destination of the human being with regard to his finitude: as a source or as an impasse – even announcing, in fact, his response to the positions taken by Wittgenstein and Russell on this subject, and ultimately his position regarding the outcomes of the “cleavage” that fractured philosophy between continental philosophy and analytic philosophy.

            Some would say that Blumenberg is involved in too many quarrels, wants to lead too many struggles simultaneously on the same front, and these titles give a paradoxical insight into the rigorous homogeneity of his approach, which radiates from the problem of ontological distance, that is, as I have already written, from the phenomenological connection of the subject to the world through the performance structure that is consciousness — consciousness of something, in accordance with Husserl’s identification of the connection of consciousness to the world. It should not be forgotten that the 1950 text of Die ontologische Distanz is not a testament but, on the contrary, a burst frozen in its energy, some of whose repercussions are only subsequently dealt with. Systematizing the idea of ​​a “thought of crisis”, Blumenberg even went, late in life (that is to say, not directly in the text which concerns us here), to the limit of the functionality of the activity of thinking.

 

            The Habilitation Quarrel

 

As early as 1949, Blumenberg was ready to submit the text of his habilitation thesis. One of the three jurors, Walter Bröcker, wrote the equivalent of a completely devastating preliminary jury report on the 1949 version. It is possible that Bröcker simply did not find the question posed by Blumenberg relevant, nor did he find a sensible solution to the problem he claimed to provide. There is no real explanation other than the speculations of commentators who do not allow us to understand this conflict, apart from, perhaps, a certain defense of the orthodoxy of Heidegger’s reading.[1]

            As Zambon writes, Bröcker’s exact motives are still unknown today, but it seems that the third assessor, whose name and the content of his intervention are still unknown to this day, ultimately “saved” Blumenberg (Zambon, p. 367). In any case, the candidate experienced the content of this preliminary report as a casus belli, and Nicola Zambon speaks of a “slap in the face” in the afterword. Blumenberg considered this preliminary report as a personal attack, aimed either at the Catholic tradition of his intellectual training, or at the heterodoxy of his Heideggerian reading, or even at the divergence of Heidegger’s reading of Husserl on the one hand, whose doctoral student Bröcker was until 1928, and those of Husserl read by Landgrebe on the other hand. Thus, rather than hearing it as a questioning of a possible immaturity of all or part of the doctrinal positions of this demonstration that would become the Habilitation, Blumenberg made it a personal matter, over which he sometimes put Landgrebe in a situation of emotional blackmail. Simultaneously and because he had no choice, intellectually speaking, Blumenberg took up the manuscript in its entirety to the point of “completely reorganizing [it]” (Zambon, p. 368). With his other “fathers”, the same Bröcker would validate the text of the Habilitation in its definitive form in 1950.

            In addition to a certain tendency towards exaggeration or dramatic and definitive statements—which his mentor mostly appeases—one must therefore take into account Blumenberg’s resentment towards what could have been the objective reality of his environment. At this stage, any researcher who is particularly invested in his work and identifies with the success of his ideas can only feel boundless empathy for the Blumenberg who was just thirty years old. However, without this failure, without what he experienced as the humiliation of his first Habilitation project, “because of its majestic pretensions, to measure modernity by the horizon and its crisis” (p. 372), Nicola Zambon suggests that Blumenberg might never have written his major works—which can perhaps pass for belated responses to some of the lapidary remarks in Bröcker’s provisional report.

            Perhaps, for archaeological reasons, readers should go back to his doctoral thesis to understand the extent to which the germ of what would later happen was to be found in his entire work, but I believe at this stage that the work of reworking the text of the Habilitation, after the failure of the first (too hasty) submission, between 1948 and 1950, truly “determined” the direction that Blumenberg would take in his entire philosophical stance. For example, I find in the Contribution (his doctoral thesis) the famous intuition, later taken up and systematically deployed, of the “paradigmatic epochs”, which Blumenberg will associate with the materializations of that by which the history of consciousness treats the test of ontological distance, and which recalls certain elements of the posture of the still Privatdozent Heidegger, and accessible in his courses of the winter semester 1921-1922, published in English under the title Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, Initiation into Phenomenological Research (Indiana University Press, 2001) – edition whose German version was precisely directed by Walter Bröcker (1902-1992) and his wife Käte Oltmanns, both former students of Heidegger. The content of the relationship between paradigmatic eras under the pen of Heidegge corresponds to what Blumenberg develops here for exemple in III, §1, pp. 135-149, “Historische Vergangenheit und geschichtliche Gegenwart” (Volume 61 of the Complete Works of Heidegger, 1985). Going in the same direction as this first Heidegger, the very history of consciousness becomes for Blumenberg a historicity of the modes of resolution of the ontological distance throughout the succession of paradigmatic epochs, investing the “potential” of yet-unconscious influences. Blumenberg then has to distance himself from Heidegger in his own eyes and he chooses to defend Husserl – although Husserl’s name does not appear in the final title.

 

            The project of a reflection mixing metaphysics and phenomenology

 

Ultimately, he attempted to propose nothing less than a reflection extending the Krisis of the subject, as identified by Husserl, in his Habilitation thesis. To quote the presentation on the publishing house’s website:

 

[…] a monumental project that seeks nothing less than to measure the philosophical horizon of modernity against a backdrop of crisis. Although Die ontologische Distanz does not entirely live up to this claim, the combination of historical-philosophical interests and the phenomenological method of the study lays the foundations on which Blumenberg’s major research on the history of consciousness would flourish in the following decades to come.

 

Indeed, I observe the ramifications of the continuation of Die ontologische Distanz taken as a construction site in the publications that occurred between 1950 and 1996 — and even beyond due to a very intense posthumous editorial activity. The Husserlian transcendental subject (then increasingly Kantian, as Blumenberg progressed) has a reserve of resources to institute the choices that he will make in the course of his principle of determinability (Die Sorge geht über den Fluß, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987): and to describe the subject himself (Beschreibung des Menschen) and to describe the readability of the world (Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, ); this reserve materializing in the possibility of resorting to the elements constituting the history of culture. The management of the internal crisis, fundamental to any subject conscious of the availability of the principle of determinability, makes culture the destination and the origin of the uses that the subject will make of it[2]: culture is the container of all the frozen traces of the historicization of reactions to the fundamental economy of fear (Schrecken) that all human beings experience. These frozen forms are available in culture and can be seized by subsequent generations for their management of this same internal crisis, similar in motive and reason, but dissimilar in historical influence. The conditions of possibility of the subject establish, in this new configuration of the morphology of ontological distance, a new concept of reality, establishing the conditions of the shift from one “epochal paradigm”, or “paradigmatic epoch” to another (for example pp. 135-137). In the dynamic balance between “ritual texts” (texts that establish a paradigmatic era) and the “poeticization” of these texts, ontological distance is the primordial paradigm of the activity from which the possibility of the self-decomposition of the historicization of the subject progresses.

            This primordial, incontestable paradigm is therefore manifested in the mediation by which the subject resolves the distance to the world (of factuality, of finitude) and is expressed at the level of the subject in the quantitative distance between the two regimes of the activity of the mind: the regime of the logico-formal, already identified by Kant, and the regime of intuitions, the hypothesis of which we have put forward elsewhere, under the name of an “aesthetico-formal regime” (Marciset, op. cit., 2023). In other words, and to attach it to the Heideggerian trajectory of the history of being, just as being conscious always depends with Husserl on a consciousness of something, like an activity carried out on an object, being always means being in the world, and this is the meaning of the syntagm Dasein. So that these are two different and complementary ways of speaking of one and the same structure of performance, which the doxa calls consciousness or being: by being (there, in the world) or by consciousness (of the object, of the world).

            For Die ontologische Distanz, read through the lens of Blumenberg’s later work, being might not be the depository of an essence or a truth, but the focus of a permanent enactment of the conditions of possibility of the structure of performance at the foundation of the possibility of the transcendental subject which actualizes, since the inclusion of the principle of crisis at the very heart of its faculties, the valences of the current paradigmatic epoch and state of permanent mutability. The crisis is thus neither a promise nor a threat but the agent of the ontological dynamic and the guarantee of the perseverance of consciousness as an activity — whether one chooses, at this stage, to support this activity in an understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason as proposed by the neo-Kantians, on the side of theories of knowledge, or whether one seeks, as Heidegger does, the restitution of the historicity of Dasein. Husserlian indifference or Heideggerian anxiety, it doesn’t matter: the history of consciousness is always one historical morphology (a punctual being, one of its events) of ontological distance, which is the activity of what it is to be in the world.

            There is no simplification in a return to essentialization in Blumenberg’s theory: it is not a question of considering that his theory, however functional it may be, would rest on the idea of ​​a “truth” of human nature and this is precisely what pushes Blumenberg towards Cassirer and simultaneously leads him to keep a certain distance from him[3]. No more than there would be a “truth” of the modes of application of Kantian theories, in Blumenberg’s prism, there is no ameliorative conception of the history of the mind. The superposition of the exteriority of the model as it can be theorized with the internal economy of the subject is due to a constructivist product and is not concerned with a destination or a prefiguration of what happens in history (Blumenberg, Präfiguration, Frankfurt, Surkhamp Verlag, 2014). In other words, Blumenberg’s theory is a theory of the “paradigmatic epoch” presiding over the metakinetic portion of the period thus presented, much more than a “history of being ».

 

            Conclusion

 

What is the ontological distance that Hans Blumenberg deals with in his habilitation thesis? Two things, both of which arise from the relationship between the distance of the subject and the world, and from the conditions of possibility of materialization and polarization of this distance. It is in this distance, for Blumenberg, that the historicity of science is established. The first of these two implications concerns the repercussions of the evolution of this distance throughout history (the question of historicity being at the center of the problem, depending on whether the notion is considered as a phenomenon or as a cause) and then joins Husserl. “”For Husserl,”” writes Blumenberg, “method” is rather “the organon by which the scientific spirit frees itself from the contingency and finiteness of the researching individuals and escapes from the constraints of factual historical existence” (Blumenberg, p. 248). “The infinite implication of the phenomenological method, which here represents modern science, banishes humans from philosophical thought. It contains the functionalization of the individual and his sacrifice for a task indifferent to man and his finitude.” (Zambon, p. 358)

            The second links the metakinetics of the subject, or practical being (Die Zweckmäßigkeit des Dasein) taken as a paradigmatic epoch (paradigmatische Epoche), to this problem and reinjects — or attempts to reinject — the method specific to phenomenology into the study of historicity, leading to a restoration of the history of being (Seinsgeschichte), but this time, against any risk of essentialization and through the historically metakinetic mobility of the subject.

            I find here the motif of the homogeneity of the work of the “invisible” philosopher. Blumenberg’s inspiration for his Habilitation thesis comes from a phenomenological generalization of the specific work that occupied him in his thesis and related to the problem of the crisis of the subject in modern European sciences. Thus, returning to the common conception of scholasticism on the ontological level, not “only [as] mediation and [as] passage for the heritage of Antiquity”, but also having a “distinct and original contribution of its own” (Blumenberg, Beiträge, 2020, p. 24), he begins to perceive the shifts of epochs as signs of the metakinetic activity of being, thereby opposing Heidegger’s understanding of the history of being. History is a manifestation of the metakinetics of being, and not the direct relationship of being to history, and it is the status of the distance of being to history, through the mediation of this metakinetics, which constitutes the originality of Blumenberg’s phenomenological (and de facto anthropological) posture.

 

[1] Nicola Zambon, “Nachwort des Herausgebers” in op. cit., 2022, pp. 366-367 and p. 370. It seems that the only argument that is still alive today concerns the lack of recourse to texts that are not strictly derived from Husserl, and which could imply different readings of Kant, as well as the Habilitation’s supposed failure to resolve anything genuine. For a more exhaustive exposition of the quarrel, see Rüdiger Zill, Der absolute Leser. Hans Blumenberg: Eine intellektuelle Biographie, Berlin, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020, pp. 146-156.

[2] Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos,” (1971) in op. cit., 2001; already outlined in op. cit., 2022, pp. 61-66, II, §1. “Mythos” and “Logos.”

[3] Read about this in Haverkamp, ​​op. cit., Paradigm, 2017, pp. 53-56.

 

 

David Roberts: History of the Present: The Contemporary and its Culture






History of the Present: The Contemporary and its Culture Book Cover




History of the Present: The Contemporary and its Culture




Morality, Society and Culture





David Roberts




Routledge




2022




Paperback




152

Reviewed by: Moritz v. Kalckreuth

In current philosophical discussions, the concept of historicity is rather problematic: Most of analytical (and also some phenomenological) views do not mention history at all, assuming that an analysis of concepts or phenomena would automatically lead to universality. This seems rather odd, keeping in mind that there are many phenomena with a historical dimension, especially those related to culture. However, trying to grasp this dimension by referring to “causal powers” or to “functions” does not seem an extremely promising way for it suggests an analogy to physical and biological matters that is difficult to defend. On the other hand, there are influential traditions focused on the history and genealogy of modern society – for instance Critical Theory and different views often labelled as ‘postmodern thought’ or ‘French Theory’. Apart from the fact that these traditions come along with a vast field of research-literature and their own classical canon (what makes a reception from ‘outside’ quite difficult), they do also apply a horizon of key narratives such as ‘alienation’ and ‘objectification’ which many scholars – more interested in specific questions than in the deconstruction of modernity – would hesitate to accept.

In History of the Present, David Roberts discusses notions of the historicity of the present and how it is coined in literature, cultural practices and institutions (like the museum). Though being clearly influenced by the latter tradition (referring to thinkers like Walter Benjamin, György Márkus and Agnes Heller) his discussion is very focused on the problem in question, what makes it insightful and stimulating for readers who are interested in cultural theory and cultural philosophy, even though they might remain rather skeptical about critical movements and deconstructivist campaigns. According to Roberts, our current notion of the present as “the contemporary” is problematic because of isolating us from adequate relations to the past and the future (1): Whereas the reference to the past is primarily focused on the present itself recognizing only what fits into our current structure of needs, the relation to the future is characterized by seeing it as a threat that has to be avoided by lengthening the present (2).

Most chapters of the book do explore the change of our relation to present, past and future to a mere reduction of the present to the contemporary – a perspective that is called “presentism”. This critical analysis includes also the different consequences regarding various cultural phenomena. The first step of Roberts’ discussion is to provide an understanding of the consciousness of present, past and future corresponding to modernity. He argues that the modern approach to historicity is shaped by “scientization” (16), i. e. the expansion of a scientific attitude towards non-scientific forms of our lifeworld, then “aestheticization”, (16) by which is meant an understanding of relics and artefacts as artwork combined with a view on art as the new “absolute spirit” (22), and finally “musealization”, i. e. the creation of institutions that guard artworks and lore of the past (2, 16, 21). These features go along with a strong faith in progress and in the realization of universal ends in the future (18). Following thinkers like Lukács, however, Roberts does not hesitate to add that this modern perspective is in many ways problematic and suffers from alienation (16–21).

After that, he reconstructs the view of Walter Benjamin that (in the intellectually fruitful time after World War I) stands somehow between modernism and presentism by referring to the present as being pregnant of traumatic images of the past (33). Since Benjamin is strongly influenced by Marcel Proust and his famous figure of an involuntary experience of the past (29), Roberts discusses their relation over some pages. This chapter is clearly to be considered a highlight of the book, succeeding to explore the work of these quite enigmatic authors briefly and yet in an appropriate and informative way. At the very end of the book, he will return to some insights of Benjamin stressing their potential for an alternative view.

In the following chapters, Roberts explores how the modern view on the present, past and future is replaced by what is called “presentism” (22), pointing out the various implications that concern our cultural lifeworld. In presentism, the present is understood as “the contemporary” (23) which is no longer standing in historical traditions but does constantly repeat “the spectacle of […] the eternal return of the new” (21) looking at itself “as on history” (47). Roberts writes: “Precisely this loss of a historical relation to the past is the mirror of a present that celebrates itself in the endless now of a consumer society” (48). After formulating this general problem, he describes different phenomena that might be interpreted in the light of this problematic development. For the purpose of this review, I feel compelled to summarize his comprehensive analyses ‘in a nutshell’.

As regarding art, it is argued that there is no longer a ‘definition’ or self-understanding somehow connected to a (national or international) art history. Even the self-understanding of being progressive, that would still presuppose a relation to the past, is replaced by a multiplicity of styles and self-citations (101–103). Furthermore, art does no longer come to us from the past: In fact, anything may count as contemporary art, at least if its form of presentation fits with the need of “spectacle” and “experience” (53, 55). Another field that is explored is that of literature, which is discussed from different perspectives: First, it is analyzed how various novels after World War I begin to depict dystopian, threatening views on the present and the future, showing the danger of “anonymization in mass”, the “disintegration” of value-attachments and reason or a “imprisonment in the self” (65–70). Then, Roberts argues that the change from modernity to presentism includes the shift from “world literature” to “global ubiquity” (83). Here it is shown that the modern historicity is compatible with different views on literature: World literature does not necessarily mean that there is some sort of world-canon (a notion that is contaminated by the idea of a western domination), but as a “form of circulation”, making parts of different national literary history accessible to others by means of translation (91). The presentist perspective, though, does understand contemporary literature as “global”, which means that it is no longer part of literary history (87).

As pointed out above, one cultural phenomenon repeatedly emphasized by Roberts is the museum. According to him, the idea of an institution for the collection and preservation of relics and artwork from the past is clearly connected to modernity and universalism. The contemporary museum, however, has become a place of a spectacular “encounter” (107), in which fashion (109), everyday objects or digital simulations may become artwork (110), often presented in the context of new temporary exhibitions (110). Being globalist and “transhistorical”, a museum of contemporary art can be located everywhere and has no need to be connected to local history (108), but to tourism and cultural industry (54). A quite similar case is that of heritage: Roberts points out that the notion of heritage applied in presentism is post-historical by being limited to our experience in the present (48). As an example, he mentions the restoration of historical city centers, offering just facades meant to satisfy a certain demand of aesthetic experience in terms of a highly commercialized “heritage-industry” (51). To put it bluntly, the history of sites and monuments is not relevant, as long as they can be made fruitful for spectacle ore leisure, for instance as a setting for concerts, festivals or other events (51). Roberts’ claim, that the emergence of this whole industrial complex cannot simply be explained referring to “the cheapness of travel” (58), is very persuasive: Today, every bookshop provides numerous books that tell us which 999 places are worth a visit ‘before you die’ – not to mention podcasts, blogs and videos and reels on social media. One reason why the “culture industry” critically described by Roberts is so successful is its correspondence to a certain notion of a meaningful life: Today, leading a good and successful life means accumulating a remarkable quantity of experiences by having seen and visited this and that.

There are some categories that return more or less clearly in all of these mentioned fields: a problematic isolation of contemporary culture from its historical context, their potential for commercialization and finally their aestheticization. From a philosophical (and phenomenological) point of view, especially the last feature is interesting: In current neo-phenomenology (for instance the works of Gernot Böhme or Hermann Schmitz), there is a clear affirmation of our bodily experience of the present, which is taken to be the source of authentic life and self-understanding. Following Roberts, we may lay bare a weak point of such an argumentation: A philosophical account of our (cultural) life should be able to reflect the rather obvious possibility of manipulated experiences and the misuse of an aestheticization of the lifeworld.

On the last pages of the final chapter, Roberts sketches his own alternative to the problematic ‘presentism’ (and, of course, also to the forever blocked path back to the great narratives). Following a reading of Benjamin and Agnes Heller, he argues for a historical consciousness that performs a constantly repeated “discovery, recovery and revaluation of the past” (137). Although this past is partly “our creation”, it is a creation in the non-problematic (i. e. not self-centered) sense of an “outcome of endless labour of interpretation” (137). This historical consciousness has to be combined with the idea of “contemporaneity”, i. e. the “togetherness” of past, present and future from the perspective of an “absolute present”, that is “capable of integrating dynamic change and continuity (137). Instead of an arbitrary relation to heritage that is vulnerable to commercialist misuse, Roberts advocates  a notion of world heritage that is related to the idea of the freedom of mankind and civilization (138).

It is a good sign if a book does not simply provoke approval or disapproval (depending on the constellation of intellectual traditions of author and reader), but honest questions and reactions for a further discussion. In this sense, I would like to formulate some questions and comments. Firstly, I have asked myself if Roberts’ account could also provide an understanding for the historical consciousness of philosophy itself, though this topic is not clearly addressed in the book. In our current debates and systematics, there are many distinctions that are taken to be ‘timeless’ and universal, though they are an evident product of the development of different traditions – for instance the distinction of mental states and bodily feelings in the philosophy of mind, the reduction of practical philosophy to ethics (and thus to individual choices and their justification, ruling our political and social matters) and finally the distinction of doing either theoretical or practical philosophy. Then, analog to art and museums, mainstream-philosophy has become transnational, for it does not longer matter if an analytic philosopher works at a British, a German or a Brazilian university: the debates and the literature are mostly the same, while differences concern rather the funding and the e-literature packages that the institutional libraries may afford.

The second point does concern Roberts’ thoughts on heritage: Though I do fully accept his description of the problematic constellation of heritage, commercialization and tourism (in fact, I write this review being visiting-scholar in a city overrun by tourists after having gained the UNESCO-status), I am not sure if the concept of heritage itself is – so to speak – fatally contaminated by presentism. Actually, Roberts himself does imply that a non-problematic notion of heritage is possible, using the term “world heritage” at the end of his book. However, if we understand heritage as something that comes to us unbidden (!) from the past, that we cannot change but that we have to deal and live with, this does not seem to far from the notion of involuntary memory and remembrance proposed by Roberts referring to Benjamin. Putting it in that way, heritage may also provide a ground for a hermeneutical relation to history, interpreting why we have the heritage we have and how we should deal with it. Perhaps, this whole point does arise because of a certain lack of examples apart from the restoration of historical city centers for aesthetic purposes.

The last point concerns the range of theories discussed by Roberts: It is clear that the brevity and the very focused character of his book make it difficult to pay attention to all possibly relevant approaches. Nevertheless, since he does himself include some sort of “hermeneutics” in his view, it would be quite interesting to know how his position relates to the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, that was (from Dilthey to Taylor) always concerned with historical relations and interpretation. The same applies for culture critique: Roberts is mostly inspired by Marxist and deconstructivist views, mentioning also conservative counter-positions like that of Ludwig Klages and Heidegger. Nevertheless, there seem to be various alternatives ‘in between’, for instance the approaches of Helmuth Plessner or Hannah Arendt, formulating critiques that are grounded on the idea that there are certain conditions of the possibility of personhood (including a historical dimension) that are challenged and thus have to be defended.

Putting into question our notion of the present and its relations to the past and the future, David Roberts elaborates a highly plausible background for the description and normative interpretation of various cultural phenomena and issues. The brief, but precise and focused chapters do also provide a remarkable overview on philosophical accounts on historicity and their reception in terms of cultural theory. Combining these two efforts, History of the Present is to consider an highly insightful and stimulating work for scholars of philosophy and cultural studies.

Karl Kraatz: Die Methodologie von Martin Heideggers Philosophie






Die Methodologie von Martin Heideggers Philosophie. Über die Grenzen der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft und die Möglichkeiten der Philosophie Book Cover




Die Methodologie von Martin Heideggers Philosophie. Über die Grenzen der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft und die Möglichkeiten der Philosophie





Karl Kraatz




Königshausen & Neumann




2020




Paperback 68,00 €




474

Reviewed by: Nikolaus Schneider (Kingston University, London)

In a recently published very short introduction to philosophical method, a British philosopher recounts an Italian continental colleague wondering about the Anglo-Saxon’s understanding of philosophy not being primarily confined to historical research and conduct. His line of thought proceeds as follows: “I am sometimes asked which philosopher I work on, as though that is what any philosopher must do. I reply Oxford-style: I work on philosophical problems, not on philosophers.” (Williamson, 2020, 103)

With regard to philosophical methodology, however, one’s understanding need not be confined to the exclusivity of either the formation of a problem or a purely reconstructive-historical approach. Rather, how problems and historicity are interwoven and, in particular, what counts as a contemporary problem is more often than not determined by a particular understanding of historical conjectures or, at a more abstract level, of historicity itself. A case in point is the work of Martin Heidegger, whose understanding of the relation between historicity and philosophical methodology is put to the test in the recently published dissertation of Karl Kraatz, Die Methodologie von Martin Heideggers Philosophie. Über die Grenzen der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft und die Möglichkeiten der Philosophie. This work constitutes an exciting case in quarrels concerning the alleged irrationality of Heidegger’s work and questions over the absence of methodology. This discussion, arguably in place ever since the publication of Being and Time in 1927, becomes much more pronounced with the idiosyncratic later philosophy and culminate in Heidegger’s complicity, it is argued, with National-Socialism and his status as a main inspiration for the alleged ‘postmodern‘ destruction of reason and the legacy of the enlightenment. Notwithstanding the constructed character of some of these allegations, Kraatz’s work serves as a defense of Heideggerian philosophy against its harsher critics by offering a walkthrough of selected texts and lectures of the German philosopher’s oeuvre tied together by the questions of truth, justifiability, and cognition. Kraatz’s underlying premise is the ongoing continuity of Heidegger’s work, whose transition from Heidegger 1 to Heidegger 2 is less motivated by a fundamental ‘turn’ than by a deepening and radicalization of previous concerns. Die Methodologie von Martin Heideggers Philosophie serves, in this sense, as a reminder to envision the radicality and uncompromising – though by no means impeccable – impetus of its protagonist, all the while offering a compelling interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy. To demonstrate the continuing allegiance of Heideggerian philosophy to justifiability, it is Kraatz’s aim to show its necessary thematization of the philosophizing I, something that he terms the “methodological necessity for the experience of individuation” (17, [methodische Notwendigkeit der Vereinzelungserfahrung]). The Heideggerian ontologization of the I and the connection of world to I constitute, for Kraatz, the fundamental thread running through the work of the German philosopher. In particular, it is the I’s avoidance of the full responsibility that is thereby conferred upon it that leads to the formation of various ‘defense mechanisms’, whose negativity is to be overcome to drive the process of philosophizing further (19). It is this thesis that will guide the author’s reconstruction of Heideggerian method throughout the book. Die Methodologie von Martin Heideggers Philosophie is comprised of four parts, with part two being further partitioned into a and b, and accordingly, they don’t amount to equal argumentative importance. I will provide a summary of each of the parts before going to comment more on the composition of Kraatz’s book and his reconstruction of Heidegger’s methodology.

Chapter one acts as an introduction to Kraatz’s thesis, the individual’s retreat of being by way of various mechanisms of delusion or typification so as to yield a ‘happy consciousness’. This is developed primarily through a historical reconstruction of Heidegger’s early lectures and culminates with Being and Time. These reflections are ignited through the central problem of phenomenology: the self-reflective exploration of to what extent cognition is structured by its origin in factual life (30f). Tying together transcendental philosophy with an investigation of the structures of experience it is the question of the scientific nature of this enterprise that proved pathbreaking for the young Heidegger. Phenomenology’s primary subject matter, factical life, preserves character traits that are irreducible to conceptions of modern scientific rationality, for which, in conjunction with the reifying character of science and the corresponding mediocrity of the everyday, a particular method is necessary to philosophize adequately (38). Heidegger proposes an equivalence between the tendencies for typification (or the reification of daily life through routine and mundane monotony) and the continuous prevalence of the theoretical in life. Both cause the suppression of the I. This deadlock can be broken through the merger of a hermeneutic of facticity, or factical life, and a hermeneutic of the self so as to methodologically ground cognition and non-reified objectivity (47). It is the motivational character of the hermeneutic of facticity that elaborates the next step in the argument. Having located the common denominator in the suppression of the I, of which the aforementioned tendencies are examples, these typifications need to be removed to arrive at a true conception of self – a methodological requisite (54f). ‘Something’- as of yet unobtainable – causes the self to seek the bios theoretikos and to avoid self-knowledge, which, in this tradition, amounts to a proper knowledge of the world altogether (68). One can anticipate the central method of Heidegger in its relation toward recovering the I: destruction. Phenomenologically, destruction is accomplished by removing the layers of typification, which are of one common origin, and are the condition of possibility for reencountering the I. What initially sounds like armchair psychology becomes, however, more elaborated upon over the course of Heidegger’s philosophical development and it is to Kraatz’s credit that he pushes the texts for an actual rationale that ties the hermeneutic of the self and of facticity together in a convincing manner (106). It is the conception of the self’s relation to being that eventually enables the German philosopher to merge the hermeneutic of facticity with the self and, subsequently, the further identification of the tendencies for the suppression of the I with the reified status of life as antecedents to the suppressed I (108). The world’s dependence upon the being of the I accounts for the former’s transformation in terms of the configuration of the latter. In Being and Time, where these concerns are most explicitly developed, the method of destruction becomes initiated through the function of care, which drives the investigation further to the negativity of anxiety and being-towards-death (112). Anxiety’s undirected negativity reverses into a positive function, once Dasein grasps its individuation from das Man and can be authentically. This existential is, however, nothing more than the further realization of one’s being as being-towards-death (141). Kraatz puts this into perspective with the consciousness of Dasein’s empty groundlessness. The lack of Dasein is the fact that its thrownness amounts to nothing more than being-towards-death. Inauthentic Dasein takes flight from this realization through the described tendencies of typification, which constitutes its culpability (154).  Conversely, if realized, these characteristics function as modes of foundation in the double sense for Heidegger. Because the world is functionally dependent upon the being of the self, whose access is phenomenologically obstructed, it has to be recovered by realizing its lack, which accomplishes destruction and sets the self free to found the disclosure of the world. In turn, the task is set for Dasein after accomplishing destruction to answer to being’s groundlessness through an authentic grounding of being, letting-be. Only the authentic realization of this relation can ground a true opening of sociality, justifiability for being and, in turn, community.

Kraatz’s reconstruction of Being and Time makes the case to conceive of uncanniness, anxiety and being-towards-death as inhabiting a productive negativity and is, in this sense, of quintessential methodological importance. It is, however, rather negligent of the role of temporality in this process. Insofar as being is time the inversion of the self is to be accompanied by the temporal ecstasies whose elaboration takes place at the end of the book. The precise role of Dasein’s temporal self-differentiation for the role of methodology are, given Kraatz’s concerns regarding his thesis of flight, however, underdeveloped. This significance has been elaborated upon in relation to methodological issues brilliantly by Karin de Boer’s Thinking in the Light of Time. Whereas Kraatz views the counter-ruinant tendency of anxiety and being-towards-death as experiences, de Boer manages to address the temporality of these functions as the opening up of the horizon through which the formal indications of these concepts can be attained (De Boer, 2000, 106ff). For instance, once destruction is initiated through the realization of being-towards-death, Dasein has already entered a mode of ecstatic temporality, being-ahead-of-oneself (De Boer, 2000, 110). This thematic focus notwithstanding, Kraatz’s account of the methodological position of these paragraphs is convincing. The ensuing manifold of conceptions of being is termed Seinsrelativität (being’s relativity), establishing Being and Time as the metaontological fundamental ontology, comprising different regional ontologies (165). Through it, beings remain relative to respective conceptions of the I. This is the methodological function granted to the self-knowledge, which is preceded by the yet ahistorical enforcement of destruction, the removal of the layers of typification, yielding disclosure.

The avoidance of potential misunderstandings and the overall cohesion of the first chapter is the aim of the second. To do so, the need of the Heideggerian account of the relativity of being and his conception of the I to others is underscored. Clearly, the constitution of Dasein is not to be understood as a Tathandlung but binds the conception of a ground of being sui generis together with the concrete engagement of phenomenology. Kraatz deploys the notion of an originary synthesis so as to render intelligible the constitution of the self through being (173). The danger of circularity is managed through the notion of thrownness, which acts as an anchor towards facticity and responsibility. Keeping the original insight of transcendental philosophy, Dasein entertains a ‘theoretical’ and an ethical side to it. Kraatz subsequently draws on the work of fellow Heidegger scholar Steven Crowell to demonstrate Dasein’s sociality and the justifiability constitutive of normative claims, a characteristic allegedly lacking from Being and Time and one taken to be missing from Heidegger’s work generally. The being of the self is taken to be an essentially normative one, leading to the cultivation of a true ethical life and an ideally well-founded community on responsible conceptions of being and self by way of the truthful character of letting-be as disclosure (183ff). Because the I is the ground of the world in the sense of fundamental ontology, Dasein bears responsibility for the being of others, which Kraatz circumscribes, citing Crowell, with the dictum that care is prior to reason (182). Attention is drawn to the similarity of Adorno’s conceptions of a non-instrumental rationality and the interplay between contemplation and normativity and it is in this sense that responsibility functions as the properly a priori foundation for any rational discourse – at least as Kraatz, following Crowell, develops it (195). Against claims for the incoherent character of Heidegger’s work, Kraatz rather demonstrates that it renders legible the constitutive aspects of rationality and normativity altogether. This line of thought, again very much inspired by Crowell, appears almost Brandomian in intention as the making explicit of the conditions of possibility of normativity and rationality.

Part b of the second chapter elucidates on the notion of the relativity of being more broadly conceived and takes the published writings after Being and Time into account. Kraatz summarizes its content aptly by the “fact that the being of the world is dependent on the being of the I,” a move attainable through the ontologization of the I (165). Letting-be functions as a stand-in for the Heideggerian notion of truth as disclosure and ties the ethical and temporal-existential (‘theoretical’) sides together. In passing, Kraatz addresses the frequent strawman that labels Heidegger as a fatal relativist by both sketching out the merely potentially disagreeable properties of relativism and demonstrating how the transcendental approach avoids them. Through the accountability of Dasein, the Heideggerian self is rather the precise opposite of the threat the relativist bogeyman is supposed to embody. Rather, morality and rationality are jointly implicated in this fundamental approach (203). The remainder of the second part of chapter two is devoted to Heidegger’s philosophical development from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, where the relation of the grounding self and the historicity of factical life is expounded. This is further developed through the metaphysical ontic, metontology, which asks fundamentally – ontologically after beings (221). Dasein’s self founds its own thrownness. So as to further thematize Dasein’s relation to thrownness, the modalities of ground take center stage. Sketching a theory of ontological constitution leaves Dasein as the placeholder for the responsibility of ground that is conferred upon it. This decision is described in inherently voluntaristic terms, as one toward transcendental freedom and ground. Hence, responsibility functions as a methodological concept, as it ties the decision towards freedom and the grounding function together (254ff.). As fundamentally tied to facticity this decision takes, however, not place in pure sphere of principles, but in the historical realm of freedom, leading to the formation of a “transcendental-ontological genealogy” (224). The thesis of the flight remains intact, largely unaltered. The tension between thrownness and transcendentality remains constitutive of the ensuing reflections, in particular the three-fold modality of ground or grounding. Part two is concluded with the transition to beyng-historical thought, wherein primary thrownness is attained by way of the event of beyng (283ff.). Accordingly, the responsibility and the concomitant culpability that is conferred upon Dasein is only potentialized: “It is now localized in the ontological dimension, which deals with the possibility of letting-be logical spaces of modalities” (286, [Sie wird nun in der ontologischen Dimension verortet, in der es um das Seinlassen und Nichtseinlassen von Möglichkeitsspielräumen geht].)

Part three carries this walkthrough almost seamlessly forward. Kraatz’s reconstruction commences until Contributions to Philosophy, where these issues are elaborated in a new manner. Relatively little attention is devoted to Heidegger’s second major work regarding its composition and re-formulation of older investigations. The distinction between the ontological and historical dimension of the event, so central to Contributions to Philosophy, appears somewhat flimsy and neither the terminological shift from Dasein to Da-sein is mentioned or explained. (Heidegger, 2012, passim) Rather, convinced to have demonstrated the possibility to move past these shifts and accentuations, Kraatz devotes his attention almost exclusively to the diagnostical parts in Heidegger’s book. Clearly, paragraphs on machination serve more than a cursory function, something that Kraatz acknowledges when he speaks of them as methodological (294).  Subsequently, Dasein is stripped of its (however weak) voluntarism and the relativity of being reconfigured as the release of beyng in historical epochs or conceptions. This later conception aims at filling out all possible onto-logical spaces while itself remaining mostly obscured or, as Heidegger would say, withdrawn. Kraatz devotes comparatively little attention to the historicization of truth this conception accomplishes, other than by way of invoking the transcendental ontological genealogy, but no attention is devoted to whether this undertaking might be in need of new methodological underpinnings other than remaining relative to the self. Taking only Heidegger’s ‘critical accomplishments’ into account, the fourfold or the later seminars in Thor and Zähringen are not mentioned at all. Having conceptualized beyng as the totality of all logical spaces of possibility he continues his critique of the tendencies of typification, the now historical configuration of modernity, to prove the continuity of destruction and its relevance for the self as method (286). Individuation, which the aforementioned process is to accomplish, pushes forward into the concrete, historical situation which can then, presumably, be transformed (288ff.). Kraatz follows Heidegger in declaring modern science as the best possible option for Dasein to conduct its flight successfully. The method deployed mirrors in this respect the one already used beforehand: demonstrating that an otherwise merely negative aspect of analysis is, in fact, crucial to an elaborated issue or could not have been adequately theorized at all were it not to be counter-posed through its negation

Having demonstrated the need for the self to take flight from the ontological responsibility the ground (beyng) confers upon it, modern science and modernity, whose essence the former is supposed to constitute, come into the picture. The ground of all regional ontological spaces – beyng – and the accompanying culpability and responsibility are too much for the lacking being that the I is and, accordingly, invents a mode of worldmaking that obscures this characteristic (278). Kraatz terms this product the ‘implicit ontology’ that underlies modern science and that becomes further obscured as it progresses (308). While the author admirably demonstrates the overall cohesion of said critique in the greater context of the Nietzsche lectures and attempts to relate enframing to the formation of data-science as the pinnacle of that process, the chapter appears rather tame in comparison to its precursors both in terms of significance for the book’s overall topic and contribution to scholarship (385ff). It acts, rather, as an exemplary demonstration of the possibility of this beyng-historical destruction, tying together the critique of technology or machination with the reading of Nietzsche as the closure of metaphysics and the advent of modern science. Though admirable in depth and rigor, it does rather little in comparison to push the investigation of methodology further in thematic terms.

Chapter four ties the aforementioned questions over methodology and justifiability together. Refuting the influential claims of the irrational character of Heideggerian philosophy made by Habermas in the Philosophical discourse of modernity acts as the threshold for setting Heidegger’s philosophy and functions as a summary and conclusion of the survey – something that is achieved thoroughly and convincingly. To recap, Heidegger’s method is conceptualized as a process of individuation through the mechanism of an experience of destruction which aims at removing layers of said experience and enables a formal indication of different concepts. The conceptuality of philosophical cognitions is thus not abandoned; Heidegger merely transforms the concept sufficiently so as to yield a different understanding of experience and of itself. What it achieves is a conceptual demonstration of the freedom of Dasein. Kraatz frames this as individuation and the struggle of a self toward existential orientation or, more negatively, the avoidance of that experience. The later Heidegger’s chief merit lies in historicizing that experience or relation between Dasein and its ontological epistemology by making recourse to an inaccessible origin or absolute ground, beyng. As has been mentioned, the different ‘negative’ instances of typification drive the analysis itself forward as ‘obstacles’ to be overcome and are, in this sense, themselves of methodological relevance, as Kraatz repeatedly insists with regard to, for instance, modern science. For the author, the innovation and radicality of the German philosopher lie thus in the possibility to provide justification of both practical and theoretical instances while avoiding the counter-intuitiveness and abstraction of more traditional framings of transcendental philosophy. Against what might be perceived as an all-too sympathetic approach, Kraatz does lament the tendency of Heidegger to largely abstain from clarifying these methodological and grounding theoretical attitudes as well as his continuing denial to expose oneself to criticism from other philosophical positions. While this abstinence is philosophical it does make for appearance of esotericism and a secret doctrine.

While Kraatz’s book is admirable for its insistence for justification towards and competence of Heideggerian philosophy, what remains missing, however, is an explicit reconstruction of the Heideggerian methodology within the greater context of historical approaches to the subject. Although a brief paragraph addresses the “historio-philosophical place of Heidegger’s philosophy” (416) this glance refers only to Husserl and, given the similar thematic of a critique of reified life, developments from the Frankfurt school. This is all the more surprising given the title of the chapter. In the following one, Kraatz once again reiterates the basic concepts of Heidegger’s philosophical methodology cognition, truth and justifiability. An elaboration of the extent to which the method of the German philosopher is to be conceived of as a radicalized version of neo-Kantianism, phenomenology or existentialism would have shed light on its novelty. This would involve a negotiation of these different forms of philosophy and their respective methods, read with recourse to Heidegger’s engagement with the former two and how he remains potentially indebted to them. Despite the fact the Heidegger’s philosophical development marked of course decisive breaks with both Neo-Kantianism and phenomenology it would have been interesting to see the extent to which his attempt of releasing himself from the metaphysical tradition was eventually reflected in his approach to methodology. This concerns in particular the Neo-Kantian notion of a history of problems whose similarity to the ‘history of beyng’ is rather apparent. This omission is all the more unfortunate given the various programmatic titles of Heidegger’s lecture courses and publications such as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and the frequent invocation of philosophy as ‘questioning’. This reflects in the last instance Kraatz’s own concept of methodology, which, although frequently invoking the triad of justifiability, cognition and truth, does not seem to take this aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy worthy of further investigation. Hence, terms such as ‘problem’ or even the more Heideggerian ‘question’ are largely absent in terms of thematic concern.[1] Guiseppe Bianco contraposes this difference and similarity succinctly:

Heidegger’s philosophy started to be dominated by a series of structuring oppositions: he juxtaposed the Neo-Kantian conception of the history of problems (Problemgeschichte) with his history of being (Seinsgeschick), and philosophical “problems” (Problemen) with a set of ontological “questions” (Fragen). In a regressive series he related the “guiding question” (Leitfrage) proper to philosophy qua metaphysics (“what is the being of entities?”) to a “basic question” (Grundfrage) concerning the ground of metaphysics (“what is the meaning of being?”), which he then related to a final “ontological question” (Seinsfrage) concerning being (“what does it mean to be?”). […] Heidegger’s dual operation of the “repetition” (Wiederholung) of problems and “destruction” (Destruktion) of concepts inherited from the philosophical tradition consisted in the syncretism of religious hermeneutics and philology, resulting in an erudite but mostly uncontrolled appeal to etymology. This method attempted to remove (from the Latin de-struere) layers (or strues) that, through time, ossified as concepts, in order to return to “original experiences” and “grounding questions.” (Bianco, 2018, 20f.)

While it would seem unfair to demand a properly historical recontextualization of Heideggerian method in the overarching trajectory of early twentieth century philosophy from a book whose primary concerns are exegetical, such an undertaking would perhaps, with the advantage of hindsight, make of Heidegger a more conventional and, in turn, more a comprehensible author. While Kraatz does achieve an eventual tying of the philosophy of Heidegger with the themes of rationality and reasonability it remains open whether historicizing him would not have been the more fruitful approach rather than to provide textual coherence. This circumstance is reflected in the literature the author draws primarily on: with the few exceptions of avowed names of Heidegger scholars or pupils the book makes reference primarily to the quasi-analytical reconstruing of Heidegger in certain places of Germany and the United States. Crowell is a case in point here. This fact is not necessarily one to be lamented – it just puts Heidegger closer to someone like Brandom than, say, Derrida.

This criticism notwithstanding, Kraatz’s study is remarkable in its rigor, clarity and cogency. Whether one concurs with Kraatz’s central thesis that Heideggerian philosophy ultimately occupies a therapeutic, almost ‘eudaimonic’ relevance for the self or not, his reading is remarkably coherent in terms of exegesis and formulates a new approach in Heidegger scholarship. Although the later part of the oeuvre is put in second place pursuing the outlined approach and devoting an independent study of it might shed even more light on the constructive part of Heidegger’s work and Kraatz’s reconstruction. While the aspect of methodology proper is primarily viewed in the purview of destruction and its relation to the negativity of the tendencies of typification, or their methodological position, the account exposes various options for developing its approach further and in different directions. The book constitutes a valuable resource concerning the legacy and continuing relevance of its subject and puts a challenge to all those negligent approaches and readers who dismiss Heideggerian philosophy out of hand because of its mere appearance.

Bibliography

Bianco, Guiseppe. 2018. ‘The Misadventures of the “Problem” in “Philosophy.” Angelaki 23 (2): 8-30.

De Boer, Karin. 2000. Thinking in the Light of Time. Heidegger’s Encounter with Hegel. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Feher, Istvan M. 1997. ‘Die Hermeneutik der Faktizität als Destruktion der Philosophiegeschichte als Problemgeschichte. Zu Heideggers und Gadamers Kritik der Problembegriffes.’ Heidegger Studies 13: 47-68.

Heidegger, Martin. 2012. Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Kraatz, Karl. 2020. Die Methodologie von Martin Heideggers Philosophie. Über die Grenzen der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft und die Möglichkeiten der Philosophie. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.

Williamson, Timothy. 2020. Philosophical Method. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[1] Feher provides an elaboration of the preference of questions over problem for Heidegger’s methodology, although this issue would need to be configured differently for the later philosophy.

Hans-Georg Gadamer: Hermeneutics Between History and Philosophy: The Selected Works of Hans-Georg Gadamer: Volume I






Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy: The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer: Volume I Book Cover




Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy: The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer: Volume I




The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer





Hans-Georg Gadamer. Edited and translated by Pol Vandevelde and Arun Iyer




Bloomsbury




2016




Hardcover $207.00




348

Reviewed by: Christopher Noble (Villanova University)

Hermeneutics Between History and Philosophy: The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Volume 1, edited and translated by Pol Vandevelde and Arun Iyer, collects eighteen essays by Gadamer on the topic of the philosophy of history. Of these sixteen essays, two have previously appeared in English (“Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity, Subject and Person,” Gadamer 2000; “Hermeneutics on the Trail,” Gadamer 2007). This volume on the philosophy of history is the first of a projected three of Gadamer’s selected works, and will be followed by volumes on ethics and aesthetics. By providing these materials in English translation, the editors aim to contribute to our understanding of Gadamer’s philosophy and its evolution, as well as provide new context through which to understand his views:

“When it comes to a major philosopher like Gadamer a strong case can be made that scholars need to have all available essays in order to assess the different components of the philosopher’s theses, to measure the evolution of his thought through time, and to grasp all the intricacies of his views in the different contexts of their application. This is the aim of this edition.” (viii)

Note that this project is not meant to collect Gadamer’s most significant works on the philosophy of history. Rather, it supplements what is currently available in other locations in English. It also excludes short speeches and book reviews, as well as essays the editors deem not to add anything of philosophical significance to what is already available. This project is commendable, and although Gadamer develops many of the themes of this volume in books and essays already available in English, it constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, and more broadly, the overall nature, context, and development of German philosophy in the twentieth-century. This volume should therefore be of interest to readers of Gadamer, continental philosophy more generally, and indeed anyone concerned with the relation between philosophy and its history.

Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, which involves a vision of human life as continuously interpreting the world, attempts to show that thought and language bear an essential relation to the past. For Gadamer, what we are able to think and the questions that we are able to ask in the present emerge on the basis of historical tradition. Famously, in his magnum opus Truth and Method [Wahrheit und Methode], first published in 1960, Gadamer sought to rehabilitate the notion of “prejudice” [Vorurteil] that he thought had been unfairly maligned as a result of the Enlightenment rejection of external authority (Gadamer 2004, 268-83). Although Gadamer does not think that we should uncritically accept the judgments and ideas that have been handed down to us by tradition, he maintains that the judgments that we find pre-given as part of our cultural heritage and experience provide the positive basis for our intellectual horizons in the present. On this view, philosophy unfolds as a dialogue with the past, where we both uncover and interpret what is implicit in how we already think about the world, and in which we take up and renew what still speaks to us from across temporal distance.

From the standpoint of the historiography of philosophy, Gadamer’s position thus carves a path between approaches to philosophical history that see themselves as working to understand the past on its own terms without reference to present day philosophical concerns, and those approaches that mine the history of philosophy for arguments and solutions that can provide insight into contemporary problems without taking into account the historical genesis of these philosophical problems themselves. From a Gadamerian perspective, both of these types of approach sever the living connection between the philosophical past and the present at the heart of any genuine philosophical project. For Gadamer, the history of philosophy should not only be the province of self-described historians of philosophy; rather, every working philosopher is responding to philosophical tradition, whether they realize it or not.

The essays collected in this volume span the years of 1964-94, the period after the 1960 publication of Truth and Method, and thus represent a period in he was recognized as a major philosophical voice both in Germany and internationally. Many of the essays develop and explicate themes from Truth and Method, as well as provide Gadamer space to reflect upon his own philosophical development. Most prominently in this latter regard, ample space is given to the respective roles of Wilhelm Dilthey and Martin Heidegger (Gadamer’s teacher in the 1920s, and whose reputation Gadamer helped restore in the post-World War II period) in the development of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Whereas Dilthey’s historicism, philosophy of life, and hermeneutics played a major role in shaping the “hermeneutical situation” of Gadamer’s youth, Heidegger’s influence lent shape to Gadamer’s views of language, scientific objectivity and the role that the history of philosophy plays in determining our philosophical horizons.

The editors divide the volume into four parts. Part one includes six essays covering the general topic of history, and develop Gadamer’s distinctive notion of human life as “historically affected.” Part two features three essays on Dilthey’s historicist philosophy of life, and how Gadamer viewed it as an impetus for his own philosophical hermeneutics. The third part collects five essays on the works of European philosophers and intellectuals including Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Derrida. The material on Bourdieu, Habermas, and Derrida is particularly illuminating as it presents Gadamer’s responses to contemporaries, each of whom, in their own way, represent direct challenges to Gadamer’s phenomenological, linguistic, and hermeneutical positions. Part Four includes four essays on Heidegger from the mid-1980s, consisting of reminiscences of Gadamer’s experiences as a student of Heidegger, Gadamer’s interpretation of Heidegger’s so-called Kehre as a “return” [“Ruck-kehre”], and his account of Heidegger’s interpretations of ancient Greek philosophy. In light of the recent revival of controversy over Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism, spurred by the publication of the Black Notebooks (Heidegger 2014/2016), it may be of note that these essays give little insight into Gadamer’s knowledge of, or perspective on, Heidegger’s political engagements (Gadamer himself worked to maintain distance and intellectual independence from the National Socialist regime. See Grondin 2003, 150-230). Perhaps an editors’ note with clarification, or that points the reader to independent discussion of these issues would have been of use.

In addition to translating Gadamer’s essays, the editors contribute a preface and introduction, as well as notes and glossaries of German, Latin, and Greek expressions used by Gadamer. The preface introduces the contents of the volume and characterizes Gadamer’s philosophical and rhetorical style. The introduction provides a general introduction to Gadamer’s philosophical project, focusing on the role of history within it. In addition to treating Gadamerian themes including interpretation, dialogue, the speaking voice, and philosophical praxis, the introduction examines Gadamer’s philosophical influences and interlocutors such as Plato, Aristotle, Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. This reader found especially helpful the editors’ account of how Gadamer’s philosophy of history relates to his philosophy of language.

In approaching this volume, I have adopted the perspective of a historian of philosophy concerned with the methodological question of how to understand the relation between the philosophical past and present. For this reason, as well as in the interest of space, the review will focus more on Gadamer’s philosophy of history, and less on the details of Gadamer’s interpretations of other philosophers that are found in this volume. This philosophy of history is directly developed in the first part of the volume. These essays include reflections on themes including historical causality, the relation between historicity and truth, the relation between human history and the natural history of the universe, what it would mean to try to separate oneself from all history, the meaning of the terms “old” and “new”, and death. Together, they provide an overarching account of Gadamer’s understanding of human life as embedded within history.

In the first essay, “Is there a Causality in History?” (1964), Gadamer argues that history is a network of events that determines our lives and that can never be reduced to a “causal analysis.” Neither naturalistic explanation in the form of efficient causality, nor a Kantian analysis of historical causality as the realm of human freedom, can capture the way that history determines human life and possibilities:

“Investigating the deeper reasons for the historical course of things is absolutely not an attempt at a ‘causal’ explanation, which would only ask for the causa efficiens. When we discern historical connections, we have not discovered a web of causal factors – of nature and freedom – whose threads we isolate only to be able to get our hands on them for the future – history never repeats itself. It is precisely in this that the reality of history consists: to be and to determine us, without ever being able to be mastered through a causal analysis.” (12)

We are embedded within history, and can never extricate ourselves from it such that we can provide an exhaustive causal account of the past and future. For Gadamer, the hermeneutic task becomes understanding that the past constrains our possibilities for action while remaining open to the contingencies of the future.

The second essay, “Historicity and Truth”, from 1991, concerns itself with the question of historical relativism. Against the view that the truth-claims found in history are relative to their times and places, Gadamer argues that this belief assumes a notion of objective knowledge as that which aims to control and master. Under this regime, we would reduce truth-claims to their specific position within history, thereby eliminating their capacity to attain a form of truth that transcends mere circumstance. If we resist this assumption, not only can we treat past philosophers as potential interlocutors, but we can understand how their ideas are capable of attaining universal application with respect to the understanding of human life and its possibilities:

“Objectivity means objectification. It signifies a constricting prejudice everywhere in that realm where breaking resistance and achieving control are not actually paramount, but rather being together and participating in the hermeneutic universe in which we live with one another. In this regard, I could show how Platonism, in addition to Aristotelianism, makes itself repeatedly relevant for the exegesis of Christian mystery and, altogether, how in the time of the enlightenment the pronouncements of art reach deep into the life of individuals and peoples, beyond all historical distances and differences as well as beyond practical and political decisions.” (23)

For Gadamer, the relevance of history and historical knowledge lies in the way that ideas may continue to speak to us across time. In taking up old ideas, we may of course translate them in applying them to our own contexts. However, this mode of application is not a distortion of the original idea; rather, it reveals what was true and therefore universal within it.

In the third essay, “The History of the Universe and the History of Things,” written in 1998, Gadamer argues that human history represents a sphere distinct from the progression of natural events or facts. Gadamer distinguishes between what he calls the “history of the universe” and “the history of the world”:

“Obviously, there also belongs to the history of the universe the question as to when humanity first appeared on this planet, which we call the Earth, and how the human species evolved – and perhaps also whether and when to expect the extinction of this species. Human beings would then be recorded like key fossils in a chapter of the history of the universe. Yet, this historical past, which we awaken through what monuments and tradition give us as hints, means something else. ‘World history’ is not a phase in the history of the universe, but is a whole in its own right. It is not primarily through the so-called ‘facts’, which can be established in objective research with the methods of the natural sciences, that we have a knowledge of this history that we call world history.” (30)

Although the history of the human world unfolds within the temporal arc of natural history of the universe, and its components can be analyzed as facts from the perspective of universal history, qua features of the history of the human world, they are not reducible to natural facts. Unlike the fossilized remains of natural history, that which belongs to the history of the human world is, for Gadamer, what is retained in living memory in the form of monuments and traditions. This history is that which provides significance for our lives, as well as what gives us an inkling of our specifically human possibilities in the future.

Whereas the “history of the universe” is the object of the natural sciences [Naturwissenschaften], the “history of the world” is the domain of the human sciences. Gadamer argues that we do not know the truths pertaining to the human sciences with certitude or in an objective manner. Rather, the human sciences such as philosophy, anthropology, or art history, participate in the very cultural practices that they study, helping to open up new human possibilities through their modes of reflection:

“Human sciences rather belong to orders that constantly configure and reconfigure themselves through our own concrete participation in them and thereby contribute to our knowledge about the human possibilities and normative commonalities that affect us […] There are no certainties here like the guarantees of the theoretical and ‘scientific’ kind and here we always need to consider the other side – not only what we have in mind, but also what others think.” (41)

One upshot of all of this, for Gadamer, is that the human sciences have an important role to play in moving our multicultural, global world into the future. Not only do the human sciences have the potential to create dialogue between disparate groups around the world, but Gadamer maintains that they have a further potential to help resist the global domination of technology insofar as they eschew objectifying forms of knowledge:

“In our pluralistic world, the other also includes foreign cultures and distant inhabitants of this earth. We will have to learn all this more and more in the future. Our human goal cannot be to use a technological civilization in order to stifle everything that has been handed out to us or to others and has shaped us all in the forms our life has taken. Only when we put the capacities of understanding and mutual acceptance to use in the new tasks that bring and hold the world in equilibrium, will we be able to create new forms of organization. Of all the sciences, it is especially the so-called human sciences that contribute the most to the nurturing of these capacities. They force us to confront constantly in all its richness the entire scale of what is human and all too human.” (41)

The fourth essay, a lecture given in 1969 entitled “A World without History?”, defends the importance of the art of reading and specifically historical knowledge against what Gadamer characterizes as “the omnipresence of a constant flood of information” (48) in the modern world. Together with the view that all knowledge should be modeled on the knowledge proper to the natural sciences, Gadamer suggests that this flow of information from the media threatens to produce thoughtless conformity and manufactured opinion. Within this situation, Gadamer advocates for a recognition of the importance of playful reading and historical knowledge. Here, Gadamer is less concerned with history in the sense of the objective facts of what took place at what time, and more with what is handed down in the living memory of the past:

“Without knowledge and without reflecting on our own proper possibilities, there is for us no future. However, this means, not without history. History does not mean an evasion into the past, but is a memoria vitae, a memory of life, as Cicero calls historiography. History, the world of history, is not a second world of the past alongside the natural world that surrounds us. History is a completely inexhaustible system of all the worlds that are out there, which are closer to us than the nearby satellite orbiting our earth. For, history is the world of human beings. To study history is to keep open the entire range of what it means to be human. Thanks to history we are not confined to what we know or think by ourselves. History describes all our possibilities. As for what kind of future we will have, it will depend on how broadly we preserve and increase the heritage of the historical tradition from which we all originate and which unifies us all more and more.” (49)

Within the context of the social criticism of this essay, we recognize the larger significance, for Gadamer, of history for human life. Beings historically affected means that there is no gap between the historical world of the past and our world in the present. Nevertheless, the ubiquity of information threatens to cut us off from this living history, trapping us in the present and constraining our ability to genuinely think. Thus, Gadamer fears that a “world without history” is a world in which human beings are servile and manipulable.

The fifth essay, “The Old and the New” (1981), presents a phenomenological analysis of the categories of the “old” and the “new.” Here Gadamer argues that, in a strict sense, the “old” is that which appears as so familiar as to be irrelevant. We may indeed become interested in things that are “old” in the sense of being from the past, but insofar as we do, we have discovered new possibilities for their application, thereby making them “new” again.

“‘Always after the new.’ The expression betrays us: it is not the old and the new that are up for choice, but this or that, what promises something and because it promises something. It can also be something old. It is in fact never the choice between the old and the new. The old is never up for choice as something old. To the extent that it is old, it has reached the obviousness of what is familiar. Only in light of new possibilities can it be put up for choice at all as a counterpossibility and elicit our attention.” (54)

Gadamer then takes occasion to reflect upon our phenomenological experience of time, which is split between the dimensions of the past, present, and future. What is truly past or old, is what is no longer possible. The future, by contrast, Gadamer conceives of as that which stands before us, and in this sense may include “past” possibilities that have been made new:

“This is precisely the experience that time is for us: its two dimensions, future and past, are never the present. However, this means that they do not stand in front of us like two equal possibilities. One is the possible, the past is well and truly gone. Even a god cannot make unhappen what has happened. What stands before us [was vor uns steht] is what may await us [was uns bevorstehen mag]. Even when it is something well-known that awaits us, it is no longer what is usual and known, but appears in a new light.” (54)

For Gadamer, the category of the “new” — as that which awaits for us in the future — will always include elements of the [temporal] past for which we have found new applications and possibilities.

The final essay of the first part, a philosophical reflection upon death from 1975 entitled “Death as a Question”, presents a formulation of the philosophical activity that connects it to tradition. For Gadamer, the universality of hermeneutics means that we are always interpreting ourselves and our world. In this sense, philosophy becomes a knowledge of the already known, which Gadamer associates with the Platonic theory of recollection or anamnēsis:

“These are questions to which philosophy must devote itself in its own way because the task of philosophy is to want to know what we know without knowing that we know it. This is a precise definition of what philosophy is and an [164] apt description of what Plato first recognized: the knowledge with which we are dealing here, anamnēsis, is a bringing out of the interior and a raising to consciousness. Let us, thus, ask what one knows without knowing it when one knows about death. What does the philosophical tradition we inhabit have to say about it? Should we also ask about these attempts at thinking whether they are attempts to know or whether they are yet again ways of not wanting to know what we know?” (62)

Insofar as human life and philosophizing is embedded within history, Gadamer argues that philosophical reflection is one of recollection. Specifically, we are attempting to make present to ourselves that which, by virtue of the traditions in which we stand, we have always already known.

From a review of the philosophy of history sketched in Part 1, we learn that, for Gadamer, human life is embedded within history, which provides the horizon of our future possibilities. Not only is our human history distinct from the natural history of the universe, but we cannot avoid the way that it determines and constrains what is possible for us. The hermeneutical task becomes one of surveying the past, [re]-discovering that which continues to speak to us across time, and making it new again in applying it to the present.

If this is Gadamer’s general view of the place and role of history in human life, in the remainder of this review, I wish to apply this philosophy of history to the particular view of the history of philosophy that Gadamer presents in this volume. In so doing, I aim to test the limits of Gadamer’s account in order to pose the question of whether or not present-day readers should take up Gadamer’s hermeneutics as part of the “philosophical new,” or if they ought to, rather, consign it to a place in the history of philosophy with the “philosophical old.”

As is clear in this volume, and especially in the essays on Heidegger in part four, Gadamer himself understood his own philosophy as part of a larger Western/European tradition stretching back to Greek antiquity. For Gadamer, this Greek beginning of philosophy, and its subsequent effects, enable us to form a principled distinction between philosophy as it has been practiced in Europe and the Western world more broadly, and what we might think of, for instance, under the rubric of “Eastern philosophy.” As Gadamer describes the Heideggerian theme of the “end of philosophy” in the lecture “On the Beginning of Thought” in 1986:

“When Heidegger speaks of the end of philosophy, we immediately understand that we can only talk like this from the Western perspective. Elsewhere, there was no philosophy that set itself apart so much from poetry or religion or science, neither in East Asia nor in India nor in the unknown parts of the earth. ‘Philosophy’ is an expression of the trajectory of Western destiny. To speak with Heidegger: it is a destiny of being that has in fact become our destiny. The civilization of today, as it appears, finds its fulfilment in this destiny.” (229-30)

Following the “history of being” traced by Heidegger, the Greek beginning of philosophy is decisive insofar as its echoes shape the subsequent development of Western thinking. In Gadamer’s view, philosophical thinking as it descends from Greece self-consciously differentiates itself from religion. Further, philosophy aims for theoretical knowledge of nature, and as becomes evident in the Modern period and its separation of philosophy from the natural sciences, it attempts to produce methodological justification for the epistemic activity carried out in the natural sciences. These features of Greek-inspired Western philosophy may be found in such historical instances as the codification of Greek metaphysics in the Latin tradition, the emergence of Cartesian subjectivity and method in the seventeenth-century, the Kantian critique of metaphysics, the great philosophical systems of German idealism, and the ongoing technological domination of the natural world. Thus, Gadamer does seem to affirm a distinction between philosophy as a specifically “Western” intellectual tradition and forms of intellectual activity carried out in other coordinates in the human world:

“When we hear about the end of philosophy, we understand it from such a situation. We realize that the separation between religion, art, and philosophy, and perhaps even the separation between science and philosophy, are not originally common to all cultures, but precisely shaped the particular history of the Western world. One can ask oneself what kind of destiny this is. Where does it come from? How is it that technology could develop into such an autonomous force of necessity that it has become the hallmark of human culture nowadays? When we question in this manner, Heidegger’s surprising and apparently paradoxical thesis suddenly appears to be disturbingly plausible: it is Greek science and metaphysics, whose effects in today’s global civilization dominate our present.” (230)

On the basis of this account of the history of philosophy, it becomes natural to identify the philosophical task as one of interpreting and making explicit one’s own philosophical heritage. Indeed, we have seen that this task corresponds to Gadamer’s own philosophy of history as outlined in Part 1 of this volume: only by these means can one understand the linguistic and conceptual influences that shape one’s philosophical horizons, and indeed thereby have any hope of breaking free or of thinking something genuinely new.

However, what if one does not identify with this particular tradition of philosophy? Or, for that matter, what if one rejects the particular Gadamerian narrative of the history of philosophy? On this score, readers may be skeptical, for instance, of the distinction that Gadamer, following Heidegger, draws between “philosophy” [i.e. “Western philosophy”] and the rich traditions of metaphysical, ethical, and social-political thinking found in other parts of the human world. Though this distinction is drawn on the basis of a substantive claim regarding the existence of a distinct tradition of philosophical thinking originating in Classical Greek antiquity, one may contest the historical, linguistic, or theoretical continuity and integrity of such a tradition as set apart from the rest of global intellectual history. Further, if we assume its existence, we may worry that reserving the name “philosophy” for it alone might permit philosophers to disregard the contributions of thinkers from other parts of the world, insofar as those not in dialogue with the Western tradition were, by definition, not engaging in “philosophy.”

For readers skeptical on these grounds, the measure of Gadamer’s continuing philosophical relevance or “newness” may well be the degree to which one is willing to separate Gadamer’s broader philosophy of history from the history of philosophy as he himself conceived of it. Indeed, in Gadamer’s defense, one could imagine him replying that all genuine human questioning unfolds upon the backdrop of some tradition, and that it would therefore be a mistake to reject this insight and its consequences as a result of a disagreement over the facts of philosophical history. In any case, he would very likely agree that the task of delineating the true scope, meaning, nature of philosophy is one that must be continuously renewed, not least in the course of interacting with those from outside of the particular traditions one may call home.

As this volume of essays on Gadamer’s philosophy of history makes clear, the significance of Gadamer’s hermeneutics for us today is dependent upon our willingness and ability to apply it within our own philosophical situation and questions. In this regard, I could not escape the impression that the editors could have done more to provide guidance regarding how Gadamer’s hermeneutics could productively contribute to ongoing philosophical projects. Though they indicate, for instance, Gadamer’s critical relationship with Derridean deconstruction (xviii-xix), or that the philosopher John McDowell has acknowledged a Gadamerian inspiration present in his 1994 book Mind and World (xiii), are there more recent, active philosophical projects that are being carried out in what we might think of as a Gadamerian spirit? Does Gadamer’s critique of the objectivizing methodology of the natural sciences hit its mark, or may he find sympathetic ears in contemporary post-positivist practitioners of the philosophy of science? In this reviewer’s view, areas in which Gadamer’s philosophy of history may prove relevant and fruitful include methodological discussions in philosophical historiography (e.g. Catana 2008, 299-304), and comparative philosophy aiming for cross-cultural dialogue (Berger et al. 2017). In light of Gadamer’s insistence that philosophical truth emerges in the application of ideas from the history of philosophy to the present, the editors may have missed an opportunity to test Gadamer’s applicability today and lend further support to the continuing relevance of his philosophical hermeneutics.

References

Berger, Douglas L., Hans-Georg Moeller, A. Raghuramaraju, and Paul A. Roth. 2017. “Symposium: Does Cross-Cultural Philosophy Stand in Need of a Hermeneutic Expansion?” Journal of World Philosophies 2: 121–43.
Catana, Leo. 2008. The Historiographical Concept “System of Philosophy”: Its Origin, Nature, Influence and Legitimacy. Leiden: Brill.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2000. “Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity, Subject and Person.” Translated by Peter Adamson and David Vessey. Continental Philosophy Review 33: 275–87.
———. 2004. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. 2nd, Revised Edition ed. London; New York: Continuum.
———. 2007. “Hermeneutics Tracking the Trace [On Derrida].” In The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of Later Writings, edited by Richard E. Palmer, 372–406. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Grondin, Jean. 2003. Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer. New Haven; London: Yale University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 2014. Uberlegungen II-VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938). Edited by Peter Trawny. Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 94. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
———. 2016. Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Dan Zahavi (Ed.): The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, Oxford University Press, 2018






The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology Book Cover




The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology





Dan Zahavi (Ed.)




Oxford University Press




2018




Hardback £110.00




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