Метка: Husserl
Cologne-Leuven Summer School of Phenomenology 2016 “Genetic Phenomenology”: A Report
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Since 2008 the Cologne-Leuven Summer School for phenomenology has been a hallmark within the landscape of the phenomenological summer schools of philosophy. Moreover, it is the only school which deals specifically with Edmund Husserl, and, as such, it is a must for anybody interested in the founder of the phenomenological movement.
This year’s topic was genetic phenomenology. Related issues, such as pre-predicative experience, the lived body, the relation of phenomenology to psychology, the access to other persons, intersubjective constitution, history, phantasy and the life-world, were also touched upon by a series of presentations carried out by internationally renowned Husserl scholars.
In the morning sessions, professors and post-graduates presented accessible lectures which unraveled particular topics related to Husserl’s thought. The afternoon sessions were devoted to either textual discussions or presentations by graduate students.
Dieter Lohmar (Cologne, Germany): “Static and Genetic Phenomenology”
Dieter Lohmar’s talk during the first day of the summer school focused on the distinction between static and genetic phenomenology. His aim was to show the continuity rather than the discontinuity between these two methods of phenomenological investigation. Lohmar stressed the fact that, thanks to the new critical edition of Ideas II, we can now place the date of the beginning of the genetic phenomenology between 1912 and 1915, i.e. the time when Husserl was working on his drafts of the publication of Ideas II. According to Lohmar, both different topics as well as different methods distinguish genetic from static phenomenology. Static phenomenology takes into account the structure of isolated complex acts, whereas it does not investigate the dynamics of the experiential history, which is rather a characteristic topic for the late genetic phenomenology.
It is possible to mention at least two paradigms or dogmas that broadly characterize static phenomenology. Phenomenology generally starts as an investigation of the essential structures of consciousness. From the point of view of static phenomenology, we can pursue this investigation only by focusing on singular acts (Lohmar baptizes this trait, the “one-act-paradigm” of static phenomenology). Furthermore, static phenomenology relies on the so-called “one-way-foundation-paradigm” related to the general direction of constitutive effects: doing phenomenology, we have to start from the lowest levels of constitution and then work from the bottom up. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl understands the relation between acts primarily in terms of the notion of “foundation” (Fundierung). For instance, the act of feeling is regarded as a complex whole made out of two different acts. The founding act is an act intending a single object: in order to feel something, we need first to have a consciousness of the particular object of our feeling. On the other hand, the founded act is the feeling itself. High level objectivities like states of affair, essences are also grounded on a given cluster of simple acts. From this perspective, however, there is no room for a consideration of the constitutive effects that go the other way around, i.e. from the higher back to the lower levels of constitution. According to Lohmar, the latter is namely more a concern for genetic phenomenology, which focuses on the history of experience and the temporal succession and intertwining of multiple acts.
Diverse topics can be solved or addressed only by going into the genetic history of experience – for instance, the phenomena of language, consciousness, and especially the constitution of experiential “types”.
Types are regarded by Husserl as a product of the process that brings about the sedimentation of experience. They function actively in guiding and determining our perceptual as well as our practical life. Lohmar points out that any sedimented experience does not rest calmly and unknown in an alleged obscure soil, as the metaphor of sedimentation at first glance suggests; rather it influences our further perceptual and practical life. In fact, the term “sedimentation” should not be misunderstood: It does not imply that experiences are simply stocked and rest calm without effecting the life of consciousness; quite the opposite, they determine in a crucial way our experience of the present and likewise our expectations towards the future.
A characteristic example of genetic analysis is given by the experiential, pre-predicative origin of the sense of negation set forth in Experience and Judgment (cf. EU § 21). Husserl’s level of investigation here is well before full-blown cognition, that is, before the sphere of predicative judgment. The sense of negation needing to be addressed in the first place by the genetic phenomenologist belongs to the pre-predicative perceptual dynamics itself. Consider the perception of a tomato. At the beginning, I can just see the front-side of the tomato and notice that it is red. I am therefore motivated to make the experiential judgment that the tomato is red. However, I may afterwards turn the tomato in my hands and see the other side: I then realize that the other side is green. It is still one and the same tomato, but it is an unripe tomato that can no longer be considered fully red: my expectations on the level of perception have been disappointed, or more precisely, my expectation concerning the redness of the tomato was frustrated. This points to the fact that we have usual expectations concerning certain types of objects, but these expectations may undergo a complete or partial delusion. This experience of delusion is illustrated by Husserl with the model of a “fight” (Kampf) between evidences. A kind of evidence is already there before actual perception takes place: It is the evidence of expectation that I already have before I am going to directly perceive the object itself or the currently unperceived side of the object. The evidence of expectation “fights” with the evidence of perception. Yet, after the fight, the looser is still there, i.e. the evidence of anticipation is still alive and forceful, but its force undergoes now a modulation. Thus, a negation of the type “S is not p” is, in Lohmar’s own words, an “historiographic information”. I believed this object be red, but it revealed itself to be green. This information is sedimented in my experience, as “we are historical creatures”: everything that I experience speaks about what I was expecting before and, in this way, it speaks about me, my subjective view and attachment to the world with all its practical expectations, desires, values, etc.
Andrea Staiti (Cologne, Germany/Boston, USA): “The Late Conception of the Eidetic Method”
Andrea Staiti’s lecture focused on a further aspect of Husserl’s phenomenological method, namely eidetics. In the first part of his talk, Staiti investigated the notion of essence within Ideas I. Although Ideas offer the first substantial presentation of the notion of essence, anticipations of this method can be found in the Logical Investigations, for instance in the Second Investigation where Husserl introduces the concept of species or in the Sixth Investigation with the reference to the phenomenological structure of categorial intuition. In Ideas I, however, Husserl explicitly puts forth his theory of essences. Staiti noticed that the backdrop of the introduction of essences in Ideas I is “wissenschaftstheoretisch”. Husserl is introducing here a new kind of sciences, the so called Wesenswissenschaften as opposed to the Tatsachenwissenschaften. Essences fundamentally are the object of investigation for the first type of sciences, to which phenomenology also belongs.
In this way, Husserl is contrasting the idea that philosophy should be considered solely as a second order discipline that is a mere appendage of the empirical sciences. According to this view, philosophy does not have a subject matter, but is rather a reflection on the procedure of other sciences. This is the (Neo-Kantian) picture that Husserl precisely seeks to overcome in Ideas I.
The second part of Staiti’s talk dealt with the method of eidetic variation in Experience and Judgment. In this work, Husserl undertakes an analysis of the condition of possibility for experiencing and cognizing generalities. Staiti maintained that generality is already an ingredient of our direct experience of things, not a byproduct of intellectual procedures. We do in fact encounter a sort of generality in experience. However, this kind of generality is not the same generality of concepts or essences. This is a line of thought that goes back to Hermann Lotze, who introduces for the first time the notion of “first generality” (erste Allgemeinheit). Both Lotze and Husserl argue that this generality is grounded in the experience of similarity or syntheses of coincidence (Deckungssynthese): passive syntheses of associations which are at work in every experience without any active engagement or performance (Leistung) on the side of the subject. Anything we experience evokes certain expectations related to a generality called “type”. Types are, thus, a result of the fundamental cumulative aspect of our experience.
Staiti introduced then a fundamental distinction within the realm of generalities between essences, empirical concepts, and types. Empirical concepts, unlike types, do not depend on experience. An empirical concept opens up the extension of the type to infinity. It is not bound to that which I have seen. Differently from essences, however, empirical concepts are tied to the contingency of the world, since the method of attaining them does not get rid of the aspect of contingency and thus bounds the validity of the concept to the existence of the world. In order to purify our concepts, we need a different method, i.e. the method of free variation. This method enables us to discover, as Staiti put it, “what is not negotiable in the properties of an object in order for the object to count as that particular object”. This also means that we do not harvest essences which are already given in perception, but eidetic intuition or experience of essences is a process through which we try to get clear of our cognitive commitments. Staiti ultimately noticed a fundamental difference between type and stereotype. The latter may be characterized in terms of an upshot of the petrification of types. Experiential types, then, are intrinsically fluid and open to change and rectification on the basis of further experience.
Christian Ferentz-Flatz (Cologne, Germany/Bucharest, Romania): “Geschichte in der Sicht der genetischen Phänomenologie”
Christian Ferentz-FlaTZ’s talk developed in three sections. In the first part, he engaged with the objection concerning the absence of the historical dimension within the Husserlian phenomenology. This absence has been first justified with Husserl’s own critique of historicism in the Logos article of 1911, where Husserl was contraposing its biased method to the radical method of phenomenology based on direct intuition and the grasping of essences. This led many interpreters to consider phenomenology and history as fundamentally incompatible. The transcendental standpoint Husserl develops from the years in Göttingen onwards has also been regarded as a departure from the dimensions of historicity and facticity towards a focusing of the performances of a pure I completely bereft of any content and consequently of history. Furthermore, the eidetic method has been alleged to abstract from the dimension of history due to its prevailing interest on timeless eidetic truths (cf. especially Adorno’s critique of Husserl).
Especially two authors, Lembeck and Landgrebe, sought to provide an answer to this everlasting objection. They both pinpoint to the founding function that phenomenology, due to its eidetic method, can provide with respect to historical sciences.
Heidegger, on the other hand, sets forth with his own conception of phenomenology developed in lectures during the Twenties a new understanding of the relationship between systematic method and historicity. According to him, historicity does not necessarily imply the loss of objective, systematic knowledge. This is possible, however, only by adopting a hermeneutic standpoint, which Heidegger fundamentally misses in Husserl’s own methodology.
In the second part of the talk, Ferentz-Flatz considered a series of sources in which Husserl himself poses the question of historicity and its relationship to the phenomenological method. For example, in a letter to Cornelius from 1906 Husserl draws a distinction that he did not mention in the Logical Investigations: namely, the distinction between causal-explanatory psychology (kausal-erklärende Psychologie) and genetic psychology. The first type of psychology provides causal explanations by making reference to transcendent causes, whereby the second type opens up the possibility of a genetic consideration of experience which is not based upon external causation. Thus, Ferentz-Flatz concludes that a new concept of genesis begins to take hold in Husserl already during the 1910s.
The very breakthrough of the genetic phenomenology is however firstly documented in the appendix XLV of Husserliana XIII, which is dated 1916-17. Here Husserl provides four different meanings of the term “originality” (Ursprünglichkeit): 1) original givenness as opposed to indirect givenness, 2) founding as opposed to founded, 3) prior as opposed to posterior (temporal succession), 4) unmodified as opposed to modified (reproductive modification).
In Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), Husserl will apply the genetic method in order to clarify the origin of judgments. This implies the consideration of the history of sense (Sinngeschichte) that pertains to each judgment as such as well as to each form of judgment. Further, Experience and Judgment (1939) purports to follow a similar undertaking, whereby the Cartesian Meditations contain a treatment of the experience of others that does not completely get rid of genetic explanations. Especially in this case, as Ferentz-Flatz underlined, Husserl makes a methodical use of the concept of genesis: he simulates a “fictive genesis” in order to discover new layers of experience – as when in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation one is requested to abstract from others and from any intentional implication that refers to others in order to discover a primordial sphere from which to begin the phenomenological analyses of the intersubjective experience. In this sense, a parallelism between genetic phenomenology and developmental psychology becomes evident. This is, however, only a parallelism, Ferentz-Flatz points out, since psychology has to do with empirical laws of the succession of stages of development, whereas phenomenology is concerned with eidetic laws of succession that strive for being universally valid.
The third and last section of Ferentz-Flatz‘s talk was devoted to a clarification of the third appendix of Husserl’s Crisis. His reading of the Husserlian reconstruction of the origin of geometry points to the fact that we are confronting here not a historical investigation devoted to rendering the objective truth about how things really happened. On the contrary, Husserl is here rather keen to show how things should have developed, how geometry should be born of conscious accomplishments. Genesis in this sense does not refer to the factual, objective history. As Rudolf Bernet points out in his preface to the German edition of the introduction to Husserl’s appendix written by Derrida, the history of consciousness has nothing to do with the factual history.
Emanuele Caminada (Cologne, Germany): “Lebenswelt in Ideen II”
Emanuele Caminada tackled the problem of tracing the historical genesis of the problem of the lifeworld in Husserl from Ideas II onward as well as engaged with its late systematic account in Husserl’s philosophy. At the core of Husserl’s idea there is the constitutive function of attitudes (Einstellungen). In Ideas II, Husserl distinguishes between the phenomenological attitude, the naïve attitude, the naturalistic attitude, the personalistic attitude, and the so called “geisteswissenschaftliche Einstellung”, i.e. the attitude proper to the humanities. Caminada characterized the notion of attitude in general as a form of perspectivity, a habit, a mindset.
Phenomenology defines itself in the first place as an attitude, namely the phenomenological attitude. In order to perform phenomenological analyses, one is required to adopt a new attitude that allow her to grasp phenomena in their richness beyond any scientific bias and prejudices. The natural attitude and the naturalistic are, according to Caminada, “absolute attitudes”: they provide us with a complete vision of the world. On the other hand, the attitude of the humanities and the personalistic attitude are attentive to the role that the fundamental correlation between subject and the world plays in every experience; these latter two are thus more committed to a form of relativism.
The phenomenological attitude can help us to distinguish the different attitudes, that is, it makes us sensitive towards the grasping of changes between attitudes. In fact, the phenomenological task is not only to pursue a classification of the different attitudes, but to investigate the correlation and transition from one attitude to another, as well as the way they interplay in concrete experience.
Jagna Brudzinska (Cologne, Germany/Warsaw, Poland): “Genetische Phänomenologie und Psychologie”
Jagna Brudzinska delves into the much debated question of the relation between phenomenology and psychology. Phenomenology characterizes itself as a descriptive science of experience and, under this perspective, it shares the descriptive character of its method with psychology. However, unlike empirical psychology phenomenology deals with eidetic laws and truths concerning the essential structures of experience. Its method is therefore not deductive and empirical, as in the case of psychology. Brudzisnka underlined further that one of Husserl’s main goals was to lay the foundations for a new kind of psychology as an a priori discipline. In this sense, one can speak of a parallel development of phenomenology and a pure, a priori psychology in Husserl’s thinking. The difference between the two derives from the transcendental character of the former, i.e. its attempt to unravel the constitution of being by the transcendental subject.
A topic further addressed by Brudzinska’s talk was the character of motivation as opposed to proper causation. According to her, it is important not to conflate motivation with a weak form of causality, as the former has a totally different structure of relation with respect to the latter.
The genetic turn in Husserl’s phenomenology means a turning point in the analysis of the life of consciousness. If in static phenomenology the singular act was the primary focus of the phenomenological investigation, with total abstraction from the temporal dimension of experience, genetic phenomenology instead points at illustrating the meaningful connections that join experiences together. One of these connections is the temporal succession which is far from being a mere “one-after-the-other” (Nacheinander), but which is more better described as a “one-upon-the-other” (Aufeinander) or “one-in-the-other” (Ineinander) relationship. Thus, there is a dynamic structure underlying the succession of experiences; one that cannot be seized upon by static phenomenology alone. The genetic method permits precisely the singling out of this structure and makes it the object of a phenomenological, a priori analysis.
Dieter Lohmar (Cologne, Germany): “Prepredicative Experience, Negation, Explication”
In his second talk, Lohmar tackled the topic of pre-predicative experience in the late Husserl by introducing a number of examples from everyday life. Pre-predicative experience is a knowledge each individual has about the properties and practical usefulness of determinate objects. This knowledge is not propositional; ratherit is founded in the past experiences the subject has of this or that object. Furthermore, the way that this specific kind of knowledge appears in phenomenological terms is a phantasmatic anticipation of the distinctive characteristics that individuate an object as that particular object. This phantasmatic anticipation is a form of evidence that Lohmar contrasts to impressive evidence. In the case of disappointment, a pre-predicative experience Husserl poses as the basis of the predicative form of negation, anticipative and impressive evidences clash together giving rise to a conflict of evidences in which impressive evidence usually has the upper hand.
According to Lohmar, pre-predicative experience functions primarily in an unconscious way. Whether the subject can find out what she already knew in advance depends on the particular situation in which she finds herself, and it is pre-predicatively functioning by shaping her experience of a determinate object and of the world in general. Methodically, we need to make a conscious repetition of the situation, and then we may gain insight into the knowledge and pieces of information that were operative in it.
Lohmar emphasized once more the fact that we have an historiographic knowledge of past experiences. Our present situation is informed by what we have lived in the past. This holds true also for predicative formations like negation, addition, and subject-object predication. They all have their origin in experience or, more specifically, in the history of experience. This is the main idea Husserl advocates, for instance, in Formal and Transcendental Logic, in which he argues that logic needs a theory of experience in order to become understandable and justified from a phenomenological perspective.
Sebastian Luft (Marquette University, USA/Padeborn, Germany): “Husserl’s Mature Phenomenology of the Life-World and His Critique of the Sciences”
Sebastian Luft offered a survey of Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world from its beginnings in Ideas II to its extensive development in the Crisis-work. Husserl envisioned the task of describing the intuitive lifeworld in its concrete typicality especially in the lecture on Nature and Spirit from 1919. In Ideas I (1913), this project is not yet fully developed, although one can find there a description of the natural attitude, i.e. the way in which human beings naturally live and are conscious of a world that is intuitively given in experience. Therefore, Luft argues that the theme of the life-world was introduced in 1913 whereas the concept only in 1919. The first time both the theme and the concept were set forth in a published work was in the first volume of the Crisis in 1936. For this reason, the theme of the life-world was usually understood as a result of Heidegger’s influence on Husserl’s later work. This is, however, far from being true, as the unpublished Husserl’s reflections on this particular topic from the 1910s and 1920s unmistakably prove.
Luft discussed the concept of the natural attitude as the horizon within which the theme of the life-world gradually emerged in Husserl’s thought. The natural attitude is the normal attitude underpinning our everyday activities and opinions. Most importantly, we do not know that we are in the natural attitude as long as we are in it. The main thesis of the natural attitude is that the world exists and more precisely does so independently of any experiencing consciousness. Thus, according to Luft the correlation between the subject and the object of experience remains absolutely concealed in the natural attitude. Only phenomenology and its proper methodology can reveal that everything objectively existent is the correlate of a subjective “doing”. In this sense, science is deemed to be a specific doing guided by the intention of gaining objective (subject-independent) knowledge. This doing is further characterized by a proper form of attitude that Husserl calls “naturalistic attitude,” which distinguishes itself from the natural attitude through the epistemological goal informing its activity. This primarily consists in the task of de-perspectivizing the perspectival view on the world proper to the natural attitude and achieving thereby a “view from nowhere”. The world of the natural attitude is therefore prior to science and to the naturalistic world that is a product of the objectivizing and de-perspectivizing standpoint the natural sciences assume with respect to the given, intuitive world.
The world of the natural attitude, which Husserl lately baptizes as the life-world, is not a pre-linguistic world, but rather a world of opinions, musings, projects, and interests. Luft provided the following definition of the life-world: “The life-world is the product of constitution on the part of transcendental subjectivity, living in the mode of the natural attitude”.
In the Crisis Husserl explicitly carries out the project of a phenomenological description of the a priori of the life-world as it is given to us prior to science. This world is eminently a social world, and the naturalistic attitude of the positive sciences has concealed this fundamental worldly dimension by identifying the world with (material) nature. Hence, Husserl’s project amounts to the attempt to develop a science of the “despised doxa”, i.e. of the subjective-relative that characterizes the natural attitude and the experience within the original dimension of the life-world. This experience is at the same time the starting point of every scientific endeavor, and the life-world can thus lay the “meaning-foundation” of and for every kind of science. Sciences “cover up” the life-world with a “shroud of ideas” and take the result of this operation, which is the world according to the science, as the real world while relegating the life-world to an illusion. But this is the reverse of the truth, according to Husserl. Science reverses the natural order of things or, to put it in Cassirer’s terms, science is the one symbolic form of meaning that has become the measure of all others. This position characterizes the so-called naturalistic reductionism against which Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world wants to take over. This implies the development of a new science able to describe and to conceptually fix the structure of a world that is most known and familiar to us, and in that way most distant. This world contains a material a priori structure – spatially, temporally, and genetically. A science of the life-world, Luft finally remarked, is precisely a transcendental science of the subjective, i.e. of the conditions of the possibility for the subjective access to the world.
Alice Pugliese (Palermo, Italy): “Intersubjectivity in Late Genetic Phenomenology”
Alice Pugliese provided in her talk an overview of Husserl’s understanding of intersubjectivity. In particular, she questioned the method through which Husserl intended to illustrate the experience of the other in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. In this work, the analysis carried out by Husserl boosts a static account of intersubjectivity in which the individualities of the encountering subjects are already constituted and pre-given. Pugliese argues that this is certainly one aspect of the intersubjective encounter, but it does not exhaust all of the dimensions and facets in which intersubjectivity may appear. The face-to-face encounter that Husserl has in mind in describing intersubjectivity within the Fifth Meditation presupposes that each person has already a history of experiences that constitute her individuality and make her a full-blown subject. There may be, however, encounters with subjects at different levels of genetic development, for instance the relation between the mother and child, which has also been object of scrutiny in Husserl’s posthumously published manuscripts. According to Pugliese, it is precisely the static account characterizing Husserl’s most known theory of intersubjectivity that poses the problem of the accessibility of the other’s consciousness life. In this view, the subjects are mutually inaccessible, they are opaque to each other. This depends, at least partly, on the fact that the already constituted subjects do not share the same experiential history. This represents, however, both a term of differentiation as well as a term of continuity between the subjects. In fact, Pugliese stressed that the individuation of the subject through a lived history means that they are profoundly different, but this is at the same time the basis for their mutual recognition. A single experience is by definition not sharable; and, therefore, the other is given to me in this regard in the mode of the accessible inaccessibility. Yet, if one puts the single experience in the web of a continuous flow of experiences, the identification with the other subject can take place, since we both share the structure of a meaningful life spreading over a number of different, successive experiences. This general structure is what links us together and gives evidence of our commonality, which is then the basis for the mutual recognition of the other as a subject like me, that is as an alter ego.
Pugliese continued by saying that a specific kind of individuation takes place in the experience of the other. There is a process that Husserl labeled with the term “communalization” (Vergemeinschaftung) that means the process of becoming subjects within a given community of other subjects – what the sociologists nowadays probably would call “socialization”. Through this process of becoming intersubjectively recognized by other subjects, everyone achieves a characteristic individuation as a social subject. Everyone becomes an individual for a community and thus identifies herself with specific social roles and values.
Saulius Geniusas (Hong Kong, China): “Phantasy in Late Phenomenology”
Saulius Geniusas undertook a discussion of Husserl’s phenomenology of phantasy. He focused in particular on the question about productive imagination and sought to answer this on the basis of Husserl’s reflections on the phenomenon of phantasy. The issue regarding productive imagination is a critical one and concerns the alleged absence of a treatment of this phenomenon within the Husserlian phenomenology. According to Geniusas, this represents a bias of post-Husserlian phenomenologists, according to whom Husserl ultimately never recognizes productive imagination as a proper object of investigation. Geniusas’ talk provided an argument against this bias.
The talk was divided into four sections. First, Geniusas elucidated the meaning of the concept of “reproductive phantasy”, with which Husserlian phenomenology is particularly concerned. According to a widespread view, the reproductive character of phantasy derives from the fact that it replicates copies of actual objects given in actual experience. This however does not exhaust the meaning of the reproductive character in phantasy experiences. In addition to this Geniusas identifies two other forms of phantasy reproduction: namely, the reproduction of the experience (Erfahrung), e.g. the act of seeing Peter, and the reproduction of experiencing (Erlebnis), e.g. the act of seeing as such without its intentional object. This should allow us to draw a distinction between memory, as a reproduction of experience in the first sense, and phantasy, which has the freedom to reproduce the act of experiencing in isolation from the object of experience.
Second, Geniusas tackled the question of whether phantasy can be regarded as an immanent component of perception. With the help of the example of cross-modal illusions, he showed how the transfigurative function of phantasy does not go smoothly together with the fundamental capacity of perception for presentingthe given in its own pure givenness. Hence, phantasy cannot be taken to be an ingredient of the perceptual experience. This does not mean, however, that phantasy is completely disconnected from perception. As Geniusas pinpoints, in fact, the function of phantasy in perception has to be found on the objective side of the experience, i.e. in the internal and external horizon that surrounds the object as perceived. Every perception is, according to Husserl, an apperception. This entails that the perception of the front side of an object is always at the same time accompanied by the givenness of the back side and of the other objects that physically surround the first object. In this sense, Geniusas sees a function of phantasy in providing an experience of these horizons of the objects that cannot be grasped in immediate perception.
Third, Geniusas discussed three fundamental senses on which one can speak of productive phantasy in the framework of Husserl’s phenomenology. In the first place, productive phantasy may be intended as referring to the capacity to intend original fictive objects, such as centaurs, round squares, etc. Secondly, productive phantasy is associated with the activity of opening up the field of pure possibilities. This sense is employed by Husserl in his discussion of the eidetic method and the function of phantasy as one of its pre-conditions. Ultimately, productive phantasy intends configurations of sense in the sphere of inactuality with the practical purpose of transferring them into the sphere of actuality. This latter sense has been then the topic of the last part of Geniusas’ talk.
In the fourth section, Geniusas argued for an understanding of the constitution of the cultural world in terms of a product of phantasy. His argument began with addressing the question of meaning that is at the core of Husserl’s philosophical enterprise. Namely, all philosophical questions represent for Husserl questions of meaning. The actual reality, and in particular the reality of the cultural world, is in this view also a particular configuration of meaning. The problem of constituting a cultural world equals, therefore, the problem of constituting a new sphere of meaning that is shared by a plurality of subjects. The main question here amounts to asking how a subject can participate in and gain access to a particular cultural world. A first answer would be simply communication: the subject apprehends the culture in question through communication with the ones who belong to that particular cultural world. This, however, begs the initial question according to Geniusas. Communication does not make me intuitively present the sense that is communicated; rather, it points towards this sense and its correlative intuition. An empty intention of the sense and meaning contained in a cultural practice does not allow the actor to fully understand what she is doing while performing this or that practice. There must be an intuitive access to the content of sense conveyed by the cultural practice. Now, the question turns out to be, what kind of experience can provide us with an intuitive access to this content? Geniusas’ answer is that only phantasy can and must play a role here by furnishing an intuitive experience of a sense that would otherwise be inaccessible and concealed.
Dieter Lohmar (Cologne, Germany): “Kritik und Begründung von Wissenschaften im Spätwerk Husserls“
Lohmar’s last talk addressed the issue of Husserl’s foundation of sciences. Hereby, one intends three kinds of scientific inquiry: humanities, formal sciences (like mathematics and logic), and natural sciences. Husserl attempted, on the one hand, to provide a critique of those sciences as they are historically handed down by the Western tradition and, on the other hand, to found them on the basis of a phenomenological investigation into their a priori conditions. Probably taking up a concern which Dilthey expresse before him, Husserl especially aimed at establishing a foundation of the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), and this is attested by a series of lectures he gave in 1913, 1915, 1919, and 1927 that bear the title “Natur und Geist” as well as the lectures on Phenomenological Psychology from 1925 and, ultimately, the Crisis (1936). Ideen II (1912-15) is also informed by this project, since is displays analyses concerning the intersubjective constitution of cultural sense as well as a consideration of the development of habitual, spiritual meaning and the “teleological” dynamics of sinking-down and re-actualization of cultural formations.
In the discussion of the constitution of a cultural world, the body (Leib) plays a prominent role. This is so, according to Lohmar, because the communication between subjects takes place first and foremost at a bodily level rather than a merely linguistic one. There is a huge number of conversational patterns that are possible and are actually performed only through body movements and behaviors. The body is an organ of communication and also is the principal path allowing us to discover the other as another subjectivity like us, as the well-known analyses of the experience of the other in the Cartesian Meditations suggest. The activity of interpreting or re-enacting (Nachvollziehen) in one’s mind what the other thinks, feels and judges relies on the direct experience of the other’s body in analogy with our own.
In the Crisis Husserl pinpoints the role played by the evidences of the life-world in laying the foundation for the natural sciences. He shows how everyday evidences supervise and ultimately render possible every step of the scientific inquiry, starting from the bare handling with experiment devices to the communication of scientific results within a community of trusted co-researchers.
Reviewed by: Marco Cavallaro (PhD Fellow at a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne; Department Member of the Husserl-Archive Cologne; Visiting Researcher at Boston College)
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Hardcover $95.00
xviii+249
Reviewed by: Jason J. Howard (Viterbo University)
One indication that a book deserves to be read is that it opens up a new way of looking at a problem or person. Adam Berg’s book, which compares the theories of Mach, Husserl and Boltzmann on the nature of scientific description and observation, especially the manifold difficulties that emerge in trying to describe the phenomenon of time, accomplishes such a feat. Berg takes us back to the turn of the twentieth century and places us in the middle of some of the most complicated and compelling debates of the day on the nature of scientific description and the capacity of science to conceptually represent the inner workings of reality. In tracing the distinct contributions of Mach, Husserl and Boltzmann to these debates, exploring the cross-fertilization of their thoughts on observation, sensation, causality and time, Berg manages to reinvigorate our appreciation for the resourcefulness of these three thinkers and their continuing relevance for understanding some of the most perplexing problems in science and philosophy.
My review will highlight what I take to be Berg’s three most important contributions; first, charting the overlap and gradual differentiation of phenomenology from phenomenalism as forms of observation and description; second, explaining the key insights of Mach, Husserl and Boltzmann on the question of time, particularly its asymmetry, and third, whether Husserl’s account of internal time-consciousness can incorporate a naturalistic (evolutionary/computational) interpretation while still retaining its core insights. I draw my review to a close by pointing out some organizational shortcomings of the book; in particular, the text’s peculiar outcome of having provided a rich exegesis of three distinct positions on time without clearly indicating to what extent these positions move us forward in understanding the larger phenomenon of time.
As Berg mentions, although there has been active interest in Husserl’s development as it relates to the rise of analytic philosophy and positivism, less attention has been paid to understanding how the notion of phenomenology comes into clarification through contrast with phenomenalism and the latter’s focus on precise observation and description. (2-3) Given that Husserl, like Mach, Boltzmann, and Brentano, shared a similar formal education, were interested in understanding perceptual observation and its link to sensation, and all employed the terms phenomenology or phenomenological to describe their investigative efforts, unpacking the differences between phenomenalism and phenomenology is more nuanced than many scholars typically note. Berg cites Spiegelberg’s influential The Phenomenological Movement as an example of someone who assumes the differences between Husserl’s notion of phenomenology and the term’s use by Mach, Stumpf, and Boltzmann, at least circa 1900, is more clear-cut than is actually the case. (36)
Although it is true from the standpoint of terminology that these thinkers did clarify the sense in which they employed the term, Berg is more interested in the shared conceptual heritage of phenomenalism and phenomenology as two intertwined trajectories at odds over the nature of scientific description and the basic elements of sensation. According to Berg, the tension and overlap between these two methodologies comes into its fullest focus when seen against the on-going efforts of Mach, Husserl and Boltzmann to adequately describe the apparent unidirectional flow of time.
Already in the Logical Investigations Husserl criticized Mach for misunderstanding the self-evidentiary character of logical concepts. Like Mach, Husserl wanted to focus on description and exclude metaphysical hypotheses from getting in the way, but from early on Husserl came to realize no account of perceptual experience could be epistemologically informative if it remained tied to describing sensation alone. In a similar vein, Mach’s attempts to show the dependence of concepts on sensory elements, through a kind of parallelism, only postpones the problem of how knowledge is generated because the level of descriptive analysis is confined to seeing everything in terms of external relations. (36-48) Such a position can tell us little about the reciprocity between concepts (what solidifies meaning), and sensation, which for Husserl requires a specific notion of intentionality to be comprehensible.
Although coming at the problem from a different direction, Boltzmann had similar reservations with Mach’s “phenomenological physics.” Berg explains that Boltzmann employed the term “phenomenology” in at least three distinct ways, all of them in contrast to Mach’s belief that phenomenological description follows the complexity of sensations, their types and continuity (49-64.) Boltzmann believed such a narrow view of scientific description conflates what is “fact-like” with what is “law-like” and pushes many of the more recent types of scientific explanation, like that of statistical mechanics, which relies on probability, outside the domain of scientific description. (64)
What distinguishes Berg’s book is the patient exegesis he provides of how the respective notions of phenomenological description embraced by Mach, Husserl and Boltzmann shape their accounts of time: how the flow of time is intuited, the extent of its causal dependence on sensation, and, most importantly, why it appears asymmetric or irreversible. The problem of time’s irreversibility, Berg notes, is the key perplexity that unites the work of Mach, Husserl and Boltzmann as each one struggled to find an adequate description that could capture the dynamic processes at work in the phenomenon of time. Berg formulates the difficulties as follows:
«The problem of irreversibility in relation to time can be understood in two principle ways. The first in connection with the apparent contradiction between scientific descriptions of time-symmetry in physics and biological and thermodynamical process which are time-asymmetric. The second arises when we attempt to account for the experiential and phenomenological perception of time which place time in subjectivity in contrast to the ontological objectivity of time.» (xii)
Mach’s account of time, with his strict focus on sensation, appears at first glance to follow the methodological tenets of his phenomenalism. He insists that understanding the asymmetric character of time, which allows past, present and future to be differentiated, rests, in part, with the physiological order of sensations themselves. Although this approach would seem to follow his phenomenalism, Berg points out the complexity of Mach’s view, which embraces physical, physiological, and psychological aspects. Similar to Husserl, Mach recognizes memory or the internal consciousness of time as a crucial part of our concept of time but derives the irreversible and unidirectional force of time “not from any relational or causal, necessary conditions, but from the ‘principle of continuity’.” (101) Berg argues that even Mach himself is not that clear on what precisely is meant by reference to such a principle. What is clear, however, is that for Mach the experience of time is ultimately derived from, or reducible to, raw sensations, which themselves are atemporal, and it is the physiological internalization of these sensations within a living organism that gives rise to the asymmetric character of time. (102)
Rather than set up Mach’s account as simply a poor cousin to Husserl and Boltzmann, Berg provides a considerate and patient reading of his contributions and aptly shows how Mach’s position does not readily fit the traditional characterizations of time; it is not causal, relational, or physicalist, and parts with Newton’s view of time and space as “absolute” features of the universe. Thematically, Berg locates the challenges posed by Mach’s phenomenalistic account of time, and the many irresolvable perplexities it creates, as the foil for Husserl’s and Boltzmann’s views. Although both approached the question of time with different pressing problems foremost in mind, Mach’s insistence that the analysis of time restrict itself to sensations themselves and their consequent physiological transformations in biological organisms, was perceived by Husserl and Boltzmann as an explanation that had to be challenged and reworked.
Berg explains that Boltzmann’s reflections on time centered on the problem of entropy, thermodynamics, and the so-called “arrow of time”. From a cosmological standpoint, the development of physical structures (complicated states of matter) requires that time is both “(ir)-reversible” and (ir)-recoverable (that physical processes cannot be rewound). For Boltzmann and his interest in statistical mechanics, the underlying explanatory matrix of explanation is thermal equilibrium and the disequilibrium that gives rise to complicated (organized) states of matter. Thus, the difficulty is one of aligning micro-state and macro-state changes in order to explain the fundamental ordering principles of nature. Describing micro-states changes is impossible, since the direct observation of these states and the second-tier order they create contain so many variables that any direct description (from moment to moment) is ruled out, and thus probability theory must be employed to bridge the gap. As a result, any account of time that limits itself to the description of sensations alone and their continuity will completely gloss over the larger natural processes that generate physical materiality in the first place. For Boltzmann, the asymmetry of time is not something we impose thanks to our biology, but an ontological component of the universe and its cosmological dynamics of expansion.
Now it would seem that Boltzmann and Husserl share little in common in their respective approaches to time; one begins from the horizon of cosmology and the dynamics of physical systems, and the latter from subjectivity. Arguably the most novel aspect of Berg’s book is his facility for showing the overlapping connections between Boltzmann’s and Husserl’s descriptions of time, in particular, their concern for understanding the asymmetry of time as a defining component of its objectivity. Like Boltzmann, Husserl’s account shows the different levels or sediments that structure our experience of time, moving from the micro-level (sensations –primary impressions– and their organization through intentionality) to the macro-level (persisting objectivities and the absolute flow of time). From Husserl’s perspective, what is required to understand time is an account that explains not only how a multiplicity of discrete objects maintain distinctive, while nevertheless changing, identities throughout our experience within any given period, but also how we can access those self-same objects (via memory); and such “dual-intentionality” must be explained without reducing our experience of time to a causal dependency on physical sensation. (116-134)
It is precisely when we look to an account like Husserl’s, and his attempts to articulate the multifarious levels of synthesis that must be noted if one is to adequately explain the phenomenon of time, that the limits of phenomenalism become progressively clearer. Berg explains that Husserl’s approach, in line with his phenomenological methodology, relocates the analysis outside the metaphysical terminology of what aspects are “real” and which “ideal,” and configures the process through the lens of noetic-noematic constitution, where intentional acts work to unify manifold elements into one cohesive, on-going experience. (119) Berg deftly shows how this approach avoids the most common pitfalls of temporal analysis: reducing time to nothing but language, positing the now-point as the only reality, anchoring continuity of perception to casual association of sensations, assuming time is only a construction of the mind, or hypothesizing time as an intuition of pure duration.
As Berg sees it, Husserl’s breakthrough comes in his discovery that the riddle of time lies in the capacity of consciousness to constitute stable objectivities at multiple levels. First, the intentional acts of retention and protention describe how objects within our field of attention keep their identity within a distinct horizon of change; consider the experience of listening to a melody. It is not the sensation or content that establishes we are listening to the same melody, since that content changes from moment to moment, but the type of continuous alteration the melody expresses. There would be no such “continuity of change” without constant intentional activity (retentions and protentions). (127) Husserl distinguishes the type of continuity objects establish in direct perception, where primary impressions are given, from acts of memory. The capacity to retrieve the object, once it is no longer directly given in perceptual consciousness, is yet another type of temporal objectification. Rather than stop the analysis here, however, Husserl sees both levels of intentionality as encompassed within the temporalizing character of consciousness itself, that consciousness continually frames all of its intentional acts within one all-embracing flow. Berg formulates the advance this way:
«Husserl’s conception of time does not follow either a reduction to “experienced time” (either as sensation in the phenomenalistic sense or duration, or intuition in Bergson’s phenomenological sense) or to “objective time” as an illusion or logical fiction (McTaggart’s refutation of time). Instead, Husserl’s phenomenology undertakes a radical approach in explaining “time-consciousness” through “levels of objectivity.” (128)
Berg stresses Husserl’s reluctance to admit definitive claims about the nature of time “as such” and so in reference to the unidirectional flow of time, its asymmetric character, Husserl does not posit a concept of the Now or assume an ineradicable principle of becoming to explain our experience of temporality. Time is unidirectional, and so asymmetric, but the explanation for this is to be found with the intentional supplementation of “primary impressions,” whether as an “adumbrative continuum” that continually fills out the parameters of given identities through “retentions” and “protentions” or as hyletic content in which “recollections,” “perceptions,” “anticipations” are sufficiently internally differentiated to constitute an intersubjective world of a shared time-order. (152) As far the irreversibility or irrecoverability of time, Berg points out that Husserl would deny both claims as blanket descriptions; first, because fantasy allows us to reverse any order of events and, second, because memory allows us to access time past.
Berg closes his book by pursuing the intriguing question of the extent to which Husserl’s approach can fit into contemporary, more naturalized models, of time, especially work done in cognitive science that uses probability, computation and cognitive modeling to explain our experience of time (for example, the work of Varela, Petitot and Van Gelder). Similarly, can Husserl’s investigations into internal time-consciousness help us understand why time is asymmetric at the macro level, (the arrow of cosmological time) while symmetric at the micro level (the level of particle interaction)? Berg has an extensive grasp of the debates in this field and considers a variety of models, most of them very appreciative of Husserl’s work on time. Yet as Berg explains, it is unclear how the explanatory primacy of intentionality could remain in these new models coming out of cognitive science and evolutionary biology. Similarly, first-person experience is an indelible part of our consciousness of time and there remains a qualitative component to the constitution of temporal objectivities that resists any physicalist-causal explanation. Berg finishes his book considering whether there might not be some way of tying in Husserl’s phenomenological approach with scientific theories like that exemplified in the work of Boltzmann on probability and thermodynamics, perhaps through developing a more expansive notion of causality.
Much of my review has been spent explicating some of the highpoints of Berg’s discussion, and on this score the book is an embarrassment of riches. His familiarity with the literature, not just on Husserl but also the manifold lines of contact Husserl’s work has established within the larger scientific community is impressive. Moreover, the direction his explication takes, putting Husserl in dialogue with Mach, Boltzmann and others in contemporary cognitive science, as opposed to the usual cohort of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, etc., is certainly one of the more commendable, and timely, features of the book. His treatment of Mach, Husserl and Boltzmann is measured and patient and shows the manifold conceptual resources each thinker still brings to the most pressing questions about time. The accessibility of this account, however, is a different story. As a theme, time is notoriously difficult to discuss and neither Husserl, nor Mach nor Boltzmann are celebrated for their clarity on these topics. One would hope the exegesis of such matters would make understanding them easier but Berg’s convoluted prose does little to aid the reader on that score. I think I can say with some confidence that if one is not already quite familiar with Husserl or at least had some extensive exposure to work on time from different perspectives, making headway with the text will be very difficult; brilliant as Berg’s exegesis is, it is not a text for undergraduate students.
In a similar vein, although there is no denying Berg’s extensive intellectual engagement with the problems and people he discusses, so many different positions are canvassed and at such levels of abstraction, that discerning a cohesive argument that ties the whole endeavor together never really manifests itself. It is not that Berg does not continually renew connections with earlier problems, because he does, but it’s not always clear which of these contributions opens up the discussion, which closes it off, what should be kept, and what should be let go. I can understand from a phenomenological perspective that one is tracking and describing varying contributions and so the point is not to demonstrate which account is the only one that works as much as it is to unfold the complexity of the contributions and see where they stick. At times this seems like Berg’s strategy, but at other times Boltzmann and Husserl are presented as two alternative explanations, that must be reconcilable to some degree at the end of the day. This too is an intriguing point, but one that requires much more explicit argument than Berg gives it. And so if one wants to cut their teeth on grappling with some of the most perplexing aspects of time, then please do read Berg’s book; just don’t expect it to be any easier to grasp than Mach’s, Husserl’s or Boltzmann’s own contributions to the topic.
Pierre-Jean Renaudie: Husserl et les catégories
Husserl et les catégories. Langage, pensée et perception
Bibliothèque d’Histoire de la Philosophie
Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin
2015
Paperback 24.00 €
256
Reviewed by: Eric Clémençon (Université Aix Marseille/Ceperc)
On peut distinguer de manière très schématique trois étapes de l’histoire, en France, de la compréhension de l’œuvre de Husserl : Dans un premier temps, les interprètes parlèrent d’un « tournant transcendantal » pour décrire ce qu’ils concevaient comme une rupture entre les recherches mathématiques et logiques de Husserl et la phénoménologie proprement dite ; pour cette lecture, il y avait « deux » Husserl, un épistémologue et théoricien de la connaissance, puis un philosophe idéaliste se perdant dans une forme de solipsisme. Ensuite, des exégètes plus rigoureux, comme René Schérer, relirent les Recherches logiques (désormais RL) et surent y trouver les éléments méthodologiques et ontologiques fondamentaux que l’inventeur de la phénoménologie, loin de les renier ou de s’en détourner, développa jusque dans ses derniers écrits majeurs. Cette relecture, qui attribuait une plus grande cohérence à l’œuvre de Husserl que celle du « tournant », évitait cependant de se confronter à la Philosophie de l’arithmétique (désormais PA) qui, condamnée très tôt par Frege et dont Husserl lui-même avait renié le psychologisme, était en quelque sorte sortie du « véritable » Husserl, qui commençait avec les RL et s’achevait avec la Krisis. C’est au début du XXIème siècle que des chercheurs tels que Denis Fisette ou Guillaume Fréchette surent combler le fossé apparent entre la PA (1891) et les RL, en montrant en particulier que l’une des motivations cardinales de celles-ci se trouvait dans l’un des problèmes avec lesquels Husserl s’était débattu sans pouvoir le résoudre dans PA, à savoir celui du statut logique des nombres imaginaires et des difficultés ontologiques qu’ils soulevaient. C’est à cette troisième étape de l’interprétation de l’œuvre de Husserl qu’appartient l’étude de Pierre-Jean Renaudie, Husserl et les catégories : les « deux objectifs principaux et complémentaires » que vise cet auteur sont, d’une part, « de retracer la genèse de la question catégoriale dans la période qui précède l’écriture des Recherches logiques », d’autre part de faire la démonstration de la cohérence du travail de Husserl depuis la PA jusque dans la constitution de la phénoménologie proprement dite ; en effet, Renaudie cherche à montrer que « la théorie husserlienne des catégories » ou « la problématique du catégorial » qu’il dégage des écrits de 1891 à 1921 « occupe une place stratégique et décisive eu égard à la définition de la phénoménologie, à la mise en place de sa méthode et à la délimitation de ses buts » (p. 13 et 29). Autrement dit, la thématique choisie par cette interprétation, celle des catégories au sens canonique mais cependant renouvelé du terme, serait ce qui permet d’établir que la phénoménologie se constitue dès les tout premiers textes de Husserl, par suite que le problème du catégorial confère son unité à l’ensemble de son œuvre. J’ignore s’il est légitime d’aller jusque-là, mais Renaudie justifie son axe d’interprétation par l’§ 67 des Prolégomènes, où Husserl présente la fixation et l’élucidation des concepts primitifs de la connaissance, c’est-à-dire des catégories, comme la première des « taches de la logique pure ».
La démonstration de Renaudie suit de manière précise et attentive la chronologie des textes de Husserl, depuis la PA aux RL (dont les différences entre les deux éditions sont relevées et expliquées quand il y a lieu). Elle s’enracine dans le bref rappel de la double origine, platonicienne puis aristotélicienne, du concept et de la problématique des catégories, à savoir le thème de la prédication en tant qu’articulation des formes du discours sur ce qui est avec ce qui est (p. 12), mais c’est avec le débat serré avec la théorie kantienne que, si l’on peut dire, « les choses sérieuses » commencent. La première étape de cette démonstration est assurée par les deux premiers chapitres de l’ouvrage. Le premier, consacré à « la question de la synthèse », explique rigoureusement et très clairement où se situe la différence majeure entre les deux traitements, kantien et husserlien, de la question des catégories. Aux yeux de Kant, il ne saurait y avoir de « pensée » au sens strict, c’est-à-dire de jugement, c’est-à-dire encore de liaison entre des contenus (intuitions ou concepts), qu’à condition qu’il y ait un quelconque « acte de l’esprit ». Toute synthèse renvoie nécessairement à un acte de la spontanéité du sujet, et ne saurait provenir de la seule sensibilité, par définition passive. C’est ce point précisément que Husserl rejette dans la PA, en arguant que Kant « manque » l’expérience qu’il cherchait précisément à analyser, parce que celui-ci, du fait de sa métaphysique et en particulier de la doctrine des facultés, est incapable de « reconnaître l’existence de liaisons dans la chose même » (p. 38). Là contre, Husserl construit une théorie des « multiplicités sensibles », dont Renaudie montre dans le second chapitre qu’elle constitue la solution que Husserl a apporté à un débat important à la fin du XIXème siècle, qui ressortit à la « psychologie descriptive » et a impliqué des auteurs comme Mach, Stumpf, Von Ehrenfels ou encore Meinong. On ne peut que louer Renaudie de reconstituer ces débats techniques et aujourd’hui oubliés, et de montrer qu’ils cherchaient à répondre à la question simple : Qu’est-ce que saisir une multiplicité ou une diversité (d’objets) en tant qu’unité d’un divers ? La position de Husserl est on peut plus claire : il n’est nul besoin d’un acte de l’entendement, et c’est l’intuition sensible qui nous donne des contenus déjà liés, déjà organisés. Contre le postulat kantien d’un divers inorganisé, « rhapsodique », Husserl affirme que le donné est déjà lié dans des touts sensibles possédant une organisation immanente. Ce premier moment de l’analyse, s’il est décisif, présente aussi, si l’on peut dire, le versant négatif de la question catégoriale : en 1891, Husserl explique, grâce aux outils de la psychologie descriptive de son temps (les concepts de « fusion », de « qualités de forme » ou de « moments de Gestalt »), que « l’unification du divers permettant de saisir des totalités » pouvait se faire « en deçà de toute activité catégoriale » (p. 77). Autrement dit, les premier et second chapitres montrent surtout que l’organisation des multiplicités et des totalités sensibles n’ont aucun besoin d’un acte de l’entendement, par suite que ce n’est pas à ce niveau qu’il convient de chercher la mise en œuvre des catégories (d’unité, de pluralité, etc.) par les fonctions du jugement, mais dans les actes de colligation secondaires quoique fondés sur la saisie intuitive des multiplicités, qui sont à l’origine des nombres. La grande qualité du premier chapitre nous conduit à regretter que sa conclusion, portant sur les « moments figuraux » qui précisément constituent les indices grâce auxquels nous saisissons les multiplicités comme telles, est trop imprécise et allusive : alors que ces moments figuraux parcourent tout le second chapitre, ils ne sont pas définis clairement, mais seulement assimilés à d’autres termes (« signes indicatifs » renvoyant aux « signes locaux » de Lotze, ou encore « marques sensibles », pp. 60-63) fonctionnant implicitement comme des synonymes, mais s’avérant incapables de dire précisément ce que sont ces « moments figuraux ». Or, des études récentes et, surtout, antérieures à l’ouvrage de Renaudie, ont montré de façon convaincante que Husserl a choisi cette expression pour éviter une confusion avec les « Gestaltmomente » de von Ehrenfels. Il semble que, en 1890, Husserl appelait ce qui nous permet d’avoir l’intuition immédiate des quantités comme quantités, des « Gestaltmomente » et que ce n’est qu’en rédigeant la PA qu’il préféra l’expression des « moments figuraux » (C. Ierna, « Husserl et Stumpf sur la Gestalt et la fusion », Philosophiques, vol. 36, 2009, sp. pp. 491-494). Cette critique serait un point de détail si cette indétermination des moments figuraux à la fin du premier chapitre ne rejaillissait pas sur le second chapitre, qui fait certes état de la psychologie de la Gestalt qui les a inspirés, mais un peu tard (pp. 91-92, on finit par apprendre que, « durant les dix ans qui précédèrent la rédaction des RL » Husserl s’est débattu avec « une analyse de type gestaltiste de la perception, dont [il] reconnaît pourtant la valeur », cf. aussi p. 95). Mais peut-être ce flottement conceptuel a-t-il pour origine le souci de Renaudie de suivre strictement la chronologie, ce qui peut se faire aux dépens de la logique des concepts ? Un mot rapide sur le second chapitre : l’auteur y montre deux choses surtout : d’une part que, de la PA à la première édition des RL, Husserl se dégage des analyses et des outils de la psychologie et cherche à résoudre les problèmes qu’elle pose au niveau de « la logique du sensible » (p. 70, et pp. 93-103) ; d’autre part, que c’est bien « la théorie des multiplicités sensibles [qui] constitue… le point de départ génétique du questionnement qui sous-tend l’analyse des catégories que proposera Husserl dans les RL » (pp. 78-79). Ce second point est important dans la mesure où il constitue, à mon avis, la thèse exégétique de l’auteur dans sa démonstration de l’unité et de la cohérence de la philosophie de Husserl de 1891 à 1901 (et 1921). Renaudie nous convainc de la justesse de son hypothèse en rattachant rigoureusement les « moments figuraux » de la PA à la théorie des touts et des parties de la troisième RL. Alors que le premier chapitre établissait que l’intuition des touts se situait à un niveau infra-catégorial, le second reconstitue la genèse du passage de la psychologie à l’onto-logique, de la factualité de la pensée à sa légalité idéale. C’est dans ce cadre, explique Renaudie, que Husserl va réinvestir de manière originale la question traditionnelle des catégories.
C’est dans le chapitre III que Renaudie établit, par une lecture des 3ème et 6ème RL, d’une part la distinction entre ces deux ordres que sont le sensible et le catégorial et leur spécificité, d’autre part la fondation des actes catégoriaux sur les actes sensibles indépendants, on l’a vu, de toute synthèse catégoriale. Par exemple « l’identification de l’unité de l’objet », qui fait intervenir des catégories au sens canonique du terme, repose sur un « objet perçu [qui] n’a en aucune façon besoin d’être affublé d’un prédicat catégorial pour être un » (p. 111). Cette fondation est déterminante pour comprendre le statut que Husserl attribue au catégorial, à savoir de résider dans des actes qui s’édifient toujours sur des perceptions, et n’ont de sens que « sur le terrain de la perception » (p. 123-124). L’un des résultats importants de ces analyses consiste à mettre en évidence « ces deux niveaux phénoménologiques d’analyse que sont les actes intentionnels d’un côté, et les contenus de l’autre » (p. 118), les premiers seuls impliquant des catégories, alors que les seconds dépendent des relations matérielles entre des contenus qui sont données en même temps que ces contenus sensibles eux-mêmes. Cette distinction entre les deux ordres du sensible et du catégorial aboutit dans un premier temps à la mise en évidence de leur légalité respective : les lois constitutives des touts sensibles « doivent être caractérisées comme des lois matérielles, auxquelles la seconde édition [des RL] donnera le nom de « lois synthétiques a priori » », alors que « les lois qui se rapportent aux formes catégoriales sont des lois analytiques a priori » (pp. 119-120) ; ces dernières ne sont rien de moins que les lois que les Ideen, I (sp. § 9-11) attribueront à l’ontologie formelle, les « lois de l’objectivité en général ». Dans un second temps, cette opposition logique (et non psychologique) entre « des formes matérielles d’un côté, et catégoriales de l’autre » – formes qui, toutes ensemble, fournissent le cadre de toute connaissance – se traduit par une « division phénoménologique entre deux types d’actes correspondant : actes sensibles d’un côté, catégoriaux de l’autre » (p. 126). Et ces actes, nous explique Renaudie, s’articulent à la fois à deux sortes d’a priori et à deux sortes de lois. C’est là que le sens du projet exégétique de l’auteur s’accomplit : il explique en effet que ces distinctions, en particulier entre les lois matérielles et catégoriales sont ce qui structure la phénoménologie parce qu’elles en « définissent les limites, inférieures et supérieures » (p. 126). La phénoménologie ne peut ni « s’enfoncer au-delà des limites fixées par cet a priori matériel » sauf à se transformer en une psychologie des profondeurs rejetée par Husserl, ni « s’étendre au-delà des lois analytiques de structuration des formes catégoriales » au risque de produire, comme Meinong, une ontologie statuant directement sur l’ameublement du monde (p. 127). C’est à ce point précisément que la thèse exégétique de l’auteur est justifiée : la problématique du catégorial et le traitement original qu’en propose Husserl contribuent de façon décisive à la délimitation des buts de la phénoménologie.
Tout comme le premier chapitre s’enracinait sur un débat entre Husserl et Kant à propos de la synthèse, le chapitre IV prend appui sur les remises en question de Brentano par Husserl à propos des concepts fondamentaux de représentation et de vécu intentionnel et en particulier du statut de la perception. Le matériau utilisé est constitué par les retranscriptions de cours de Husserl de 1902 à 1907, comparés systématiquement aux RL. Les deux thèses brentaniennes discutées sont, primo, que les jugements et les représentations constituent deux classes d’actes distinctes, secundo que toute perception est un jugement impliquant une croyance dans la réalité de la chose perçue, autrement dit qu’elle est un acte positionnel. Ce chapitre apparaît comme une sorte d’application des analyses des actes sensibles et catégoriaux du précédent chapitre à ces questions de la psychologie empirique brentanienne. Renaudie y montre en effet que c’est la distinction entre ces deux types d’actes, ainsi que l’établissement de la perception comme acte catégorial, qui permettent à Husserl de critiquer le statut positionnel de la perception (p. 141). Mais Renaudie introduit aussi un concept phénoménologique nouveau, celui des « actes objectivants », dont il montre l’importance dans la critique husserlienne de la classification des actes psychiques de son maître. En effet, pour Husserl, aussi bien la représentation que le jugement et la perception appartiennent à cette classe des actes objectivants, dans la mesure où, en chacun d’eux, un objet est donné à la conscience. Ce qui caractérise une perception ou un jugement, c’est « qu’ils donnent par eux-mêmes des objets à la conscience et font apparaître quelque chose d’objectif » (p. 142). Renaudie montre de façon convaincante, en confrontant les cours de Husserl avec la 5ème RL, que le concept d’acte objectivant est un élément décisif de la conception husserlienne de l’objectivité, qui apparaît comme le terme d’un processus de constitution interne à la vie et aux actes de la conscience. Le parallèle entre le débat de Husserl avec Kant et celui entre Husserl et Brentano peut semble-t-il être approfondi : de la même façon que Husserl rejetait l’idée qu’un acte de l’entendement est nécessaire pour organiser le divers donné à l’intuition, de même rejette-t-il la thèse d’un jugement (d’un acte intellectuel) interne à la perception ; ce qu’il y a de commun aux deux critiques, c’est l’autonomie de la perception à l’égard des fonctions intellectuelles « supérieures ». Dès 1907, dans les cours sur Chose et espace (P.U.F., 1989), la spécificité de la perception, où la « présence-en-chair-et-en-os » de l’objet était posée comme immanente au vécu de perception comme tel, permet d’évacuer une quelconque activité judicative ou positionnelle des vécus perceptifs. Bref, « la perception n’est pas par elle-même une forme embryonnaire de pensée ou une modalité du jugement » (p. 150). Ces analyses, pour intéressantes qu’elles soient, ne sont encore que des préliminaires dans l’interprétation de la question du catégorial : Renaudie montre en effet, dans la seconde partie de ce chapitre, comment Husserl démontre que les actes catégoriaux appartiennent à la classe des actes objectivants. Le cœur de cette démonstration réside dans un « élargissement phénoménologique de la perception qui permet de différencier la perception sensible d’objets simples ou individuels de la perception catégoriale d’objets complexes ou généraux », mais de telle sorte que le terme de « perception » s’applique légitimement à l’une comme à l’autre (p. 150). La reconstitution de Renaudie est d’autant plus intéressante qu’elle fait enfin intervenir le premier élément du sous-titre de son ouvrage, « Langage, pensée et perception » ; jusqu’alors, le lecteur se demandait où et dans quelle mesure l’auteur allait parler du langage, qui n’était abordé que dans l’Introduction, pour la raison que les catégories, depuis Aristote, sont autant les genres primitifs de l’être que les façons que nous avons de dire l’être (point sur lequel, à mon sens, Renaudie est trop allusif). Il se livre pour ce faire à une étude de la sixième RL et reconstitue les ambiguïtés et les paradoxes de la relation que Husserl cherche à élucider entre les perceptions et les énoncés par lesquels nous exprimons nos perceptions. Car c’est bien du côté de ces derniers que Husserl va situer le voir ou l’intuition catégoriale, et c’est là qu’il va renouer avec le concept aristotélicien de la catégorie, ce concept où « être » et « être-vrai », l’être et la vérité sur l’être coïncident. Ce qui permet à Husserl de parler d’un voir catégorial, selon Renaudie, résiderait dans l’ambiguïté de formules du type « je vois que 1 + 1 = 2 » ou « je vois avec évidence que a +b = b + a » (p. 154), mais cette ambiguïté, loin de pouvoir être interprétée comme un abus de langage, « va apparaître comme structurante pour la sphère … des actes catégoriaux » (Id.) : elle rend nécessaire l’élargissement de l’intuition sensible à l’intuition catégoriale. L’un des enjeux de cette interprétation est d’établir que Husserl remplace l’opposition classique entre sensibilité et entendement par celle entre le sensible et le catégorial ; un second enjeu, historique celui-là, est de servir de base à « une histoire critique de la philosophie », à un rejet dos à dos du naturalisme et de la métaphysique des facultés, tout spécialement de la distinction entre la sensibilité et l’entendement (p. 157). La conclusion de ce chapitre, dont il serait trop long de reconstituer le détail de l’argumentation tant il implique des concepts majeurs de la phénoménologie et emprunte des méandres parfois éloignés de l’essentiel (comme le retour sur « la fondation du catégorial sur le sensible » déjà développée précédemment (pp. 158-162)), porte sur la spécificité et le statut des corrélats du voir ou de l’intuition catégoriale, à savoir les « objets catégoriaux » et les « objectivités catégoriales ». A la question : « Que sont ces « nouveaux » objets ? » (p. 164), Renaudie peine à mon sens à nous en proposer une réponse « claire » ; plus précisément, une réponse plus claire que celle qu’on trouve sous la plume de Husserl. Ce manque de clarté tient peut-être à la direction de la question, qui se transforme trop vite en celle sur le « statut » des objectivités catégoriales (p. 165), puis en celle portant sur l’acte catégorial lui-même (p. 167). Certes, nous (ré)apprenons que l’objet catégorial dépend d’un objet sensible qui le précède nécessairement et, surtout, que l’objet catégorial n’est pas tant un « nouvel objet » au sens de l’ontologie meinongienne qu’une « nouvelle façon, pour l’objet sensible, de se présenter (p. 169), mais on pourra regretter que Renaudie n’utilise pas les éléments de réponse donnés par Husserl, et qu’il cite, pour amener à la clarté les expressions d’ « état-de-choses », d’ « objet formé logiquement » ou encore d’ « objet général ».
Le cinquième et dernier chapitre part du rejet de la thèse de Brentano : « Percevoir n’est pas juger » (p. 179) et de la distinction entre la perception intuitive et la perception catégoriale établies dans le chapitre précédent, pour approfondir la relation entre l’intuition et la signification. Les quelques pages du chapitre précédent sur le rapport entre les perceptions et les énoncés les exprimant sont réinvesties et articulées à l’idée de grammaire pure logique de la 4ème RL, mais le point fondamental concerne l’inversion du rapport fondationnel que l’intuition jouait jusque-là relativement aux vécus signitifs : Renaudie montre que, à mesure que Husserl accomplit l’analyse des degrés de la connaissance, il attribue une priorité à la structure syntaxique des énoncés de perception sur l’organisation matérielle du donné sensible (p. 189). Corrélativement, les « catégories de la signification » prennent, dans l’ordre de la connaissance, une autonomie relativement aux lois matérielles de l’intuition ; autrement dit, la pensée se libère de l’intuitivité. Elle peut, dès lors qu’elle observe les lois de la signification et ne devient pas non-sens, se réaliser sans avoir à reposer sur du donné sensible. Ce sont les lois idéales de la pensée, et non plus le matériau donné selon la légalité de l’intuition sensible, qui déterminent quelles sont les variations de formes catégoriales qui sont possibles. L’un des intérêts de ce chapitre est de reprendre à nouveaux frais le débat de Husserl avec Kant à propos de la synthèse. Ce retour au point de départ, qui tient compte des acquis des interprétations des chapitres intermédiaires, constitue l’une des qualités architectoniques, quasi esthétique, de l’ouvrage de Renaudie. Ce chapitre se conclut en discutant la question, cruciale depuis Aristote pour le statut et la valeur des catégories, de savoir ce qu’il en est des rapports entre l’ordre logique et l’ordre du « monde réel » : le cours du monde pourrait-il réfuter les lois logiques ? au rebours, l’expérience pourrait-elle fonder ces mêmes lois ? Renaudie explique avec force la position de Husserl sur cette double question : non seulement la recherche d’une concordance entre le cours du monde avec une législation de l’entendement est-elle une tâche absurde et vaine, mais la phénoménologie fait du renoncement à ce genre de perplexité l’un de ses principes (p. 214). Renaudie ne le dit pas, mais cette « réponse » de Husserl sera celle aussi celle de Carnap puis de Quine.
Cet ouvrage, d’une grande richesse de matériaux, pêche parfois au niveau de l’ordre et de l’unité démonstrative, compensés sans doute par la finesse de ses analyses. Nous regretterons pour notre part que le thème annoncé du « langage » soit ici réduit aux quelques pages, trop rares et éparses, que Renaudie consacre aux énoncés exprimant des perceptions, à la grammaire pure logique et aux catégories de signification. Ces pages sont tout à la fois importantes et trop rares. Même s’il montre bien que la réflexion husserlienne sur l’expression des perceptions participe bien d’une réflexion de la phénoménologie sur sa méthode dans la mesure où la description des vécus en est constitutive, Renaudie ne parvient pas à construire une interprétation unifiée sur le rôle éminent du langage dans les RL ; le fait que pas un mot n’ait été consacré à la 1ère RL (qui pourtant établit le concept d’ « acte conférant la signification » utilisé dans la sixième Recherche et qui occupe une place importante dans le travail de Renaudie) et que les cours de 1908 Sur la théorie de la signification ne soient évoqués qu’à la marge alors même qu’ils relèvent de la période étudiée par Renaudie, est à cet égard à tout le moins problématique ; après tout, ce n’est quand même pas par fantaisie ou par hasard que les Recherches logiques prennent pour point de départ une analyse du langage. Autant l’ouvrage de Renaudie est d’une grande valeur pour comprendre la genèse de la pensée de Husserl sur la perception et la pensée (le catégorial), autant elle laisse le lecteur sur sa faim pour ce qui concerne le rôle de l’analyse du langage dans la constitution de la phénoménologie. En soi, cette « lacune » n’en est pas une, mais elle en devient une lorsqu’on sous-intitule sa lecture de Husserl « Langage, pensée et perception ». Enfin, mais ce n’est certes pas à reprocher à l’auteur, ses pages remarquables de précision et de rigueur consacrées à la discussion du concept de synthèse chez Kant et Husserl nous font d’autant plus éprouver le manque d’une confrontation d’ensemble des œuvres des deux fondateurs de la philosophie transcendantale. Souhaitons qu’un jeune étudiant de philosophie lise Husserl et les catégories et, stimulé par son intérêt s’attèle enfin à cette tâche enthousiasmante.
Jean-Luc Marion: Givenness and Revelation
Givenness and Revelation
Oxford University Press
2016
Hardcover $40.00
224
Reviewed by: Adrian Razvan Sandru (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)
Jean-Luc Marion’s new book Givenness and Revelation is a collection of the four Gifford Lectures Marion delivered in 2014. The book reiterates the concept of a saturated phenomenon as a pure given, which has been a recurrent theme of Marion’s works since God without Being. In Givenness and Revelation, however, the saturated phenomenon is analysed in its tight connection to revelation thought as Trinity and thus provides us with a powerful insight into Marion’s religious thought.
Givenness and Revelation, translated by Stephen E. Lewis, is divided into four main parts, preceded by an Introduction, which describes the guiding thread of the four sections according to the following outline: 1) The Aporia of the Concept of Revelation, which looks into the pre-modern epistemological limitation of the concept of revelation; 2) An Attempt at a Phenomenal Re-Appropriation of Revelation, in which Marion continues the analysis of the epistemological limitations of revelation in its modern understanding and sets the stage for its reinterpretation; 3) Christ as Saturated Phenomenon: The Icon of the Invisible, a section that serves to uncover a new phenomenal logic inspired by the iconic figure of Christ and His Trinitarian manifestation; and 4) A Logic of Manifestation: The Trinity. This final section further develops the Trinitarian aspect of revelation by emphasizing the role of the Holy Spirit in the manifestation of God.
These four parts structure the book in accordance with Marion’s usual method. He begins with a critique, or better yet, a deconstruction of the historical understanding of the concept to be analysed, in this case revelation. Through this deconstruction, the line of thought against which Marion shall argue is identified. At the same time, the historical analysis will pinpoint the possibilities of going beyond metaphysics in order to pave the way for a re-interpretation of the said concept in terms of pure givenness. This propaedeutic part is then followed by a revision of said concept, which grounds itself in a counter-experience. This counter-experience overturns metaphysics in order to assert the priority of a counter-intentionality, i.e. an intentionality which originates in the given and suspends the constitutive power of the subject. In Givenness and Revelation this amounts to the following thesis: God reveals itself through the Son, who gives himself as an Icon. As an icon and through the agency of the Holy Spirit, he completely refers to the Father. God reveals Godself in a Trinitarian way as Trinity. Thus, that which gives itself (Trinity) completely accords with the way of its giving.
This review will adhere to this structure and will analyse first, Marion’s critique of philosophy, and second, his reinterpretation of revelation. Prior to this, however, we shall give an account of the phenomenological considerations that lead to the question concerning revelation.
Setting the Stage
The concept of a counter-experience already makes an appearance in the Introduction, where Marion distinguishes between revealed and natural theology. The former, in opposition to the latter, will accept the logos of the revelation from elsewhere, i.e. from God, and does not impose its own logic on the revelatory phenomenon. This view plays a major role in Givenness and Revelation. In order to avoid an illusionary experience of revelations, Marion introduces the concept of conflict or resistance as a condition for the reception of revelation, albeit not a sufficient condition. Through this conflictual character of revelation, Marion bridges the link between the theological concept of revelation and the phenomenological one of givenness.
Givenness is received as a counter-experience, this being the thesis of both Being Given as well as Negative Certainties. In Givenness and Revelation, however, the very authenticity of revelation depends on a resistance from the one who witnesses it. If revelation turns out to be inauthentic, the resistance and the conflict are resolved within immanence; if, however, the revelation is authentic, resistance will increase to the point at which a resistance from elsewhere is recognized that cannot be subsumed under concepts. Through this resistance coming from elsewhere the counter-experience is received as authentic. This conflictual character is thus inherent to the witnessing of revelation.
This helps Marion to avoid both an idolatrous as well as a fanatical understanding of revelation. Marion argues that revelation retains its revelatory character only as a paradox: “[it is] the visibility of the invisible as such, and which remains so in its very visibility” (5). This highlights the two main lines of thought discussed in Givenness and Revelation: 1) as a paradox, revelation cannot be resolved by our logic and is thus not part of the wisdom of the world; 2) even though not resolved by our logic it still gives itself to reason as pure (non-objectifiable) givenness and imposes its own counter-logic, i.e. the wisdom of God.
Wisdom of the World
Marion begins by analysing the epistemological limitation of revelation through Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of theology. According to Marion, Thomas tries to ground theology as a science of God. In doing so he distinguishes between two kinds of theologies: philosophical theology, which deals with divine things only inasmuch as it infers them as the principles of their mundane and immanent effects, and sacra doctrina, which has revelation or divinity as its immediate object. This would imply, according to Marion, an epistemological hierarchy, in which philosophical theology and sacra doctrina differentiate themselves based solely on the degree in which they know God. Consequently, the sacra doctrina is reduced to the principles of natural reason and loses its revelatory character. Marion states that alternately, in Summa contra Gentiles Thomas introduces a new kind of knowledge to this hierarchy by subordinating sacra doctrina to “the science of the blessed,” i.e. an eschatological knowledge of God, which should provide the required principles to make the sacra doctrina a scientia dei. These principles, however, remain inaccessible due to the eschatological character of the blessed science. Thus the scientific character of sacra doctrina remains unfounded.
Marion draws from this consequence not that Thomas was wrong in his evaluation of revealed theology, but that he brings to light the aporia of theology understood as science. Philosophy has tried to resolve this aporia by emphasizing the epistemological understanding of revelation, while Vatican I and II provide an alternate interpretation of revelation based on biblical texts. Through Suarez, revelation was reduced to a sufficiens propositio and thus Thomas’ hierarchy was inverted, the epistemological account gaining primacy. This line of thought was to be continued and emphasized during the Enlightenment. According to Marion, the epistemological understanding subjects apokalypsis (revelation) to aletheia (truth), which is to be understood in its modern meaning as clear and distinct knowledge. In order to bring revelation to presence as clear and distinct it must be subjected to the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason, which for Marion are the basic principles of metaphysics. This critique is present throughout Marion’s works, stating that through the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason philosophy becomes dependent on ipseity. The entirety of phenomenality is reduced to the constitutive power of the subject.
Against this metaphysical view, Marion invokes Pascal in order to suggest that the will is not preceded by reason, as Descartes argues, but conditions knowing. This reversal of the relation between will and understanding concerns revelation when understood in connection to Augustine. Augustine states that only charity, which has been poured into our souls by the Holy Spirit, can lead us to truth (De trinitate). This is the turning point in Marion’s re-interpreting of revelation, which relies on two main arguments. First, the will to be willing is conditioned and sparked by revelation as the attraction to see the Father in the Son. And second, the will to be willing consists in faith, which conditions and precedes seeing. Only by accepting Jesus as the Son of the Father can we see the Father in the Son. What is at stake here is the conversion of intentionality and knowing the Father starting from the Father, which is only possible if we will the Father by being attracted to the Father through the Son. This is consistent with what Marion calls the logic of love: the hermeneutics of love is received from love itself, thus from elsewhere, and consequently not subjected to a sufficiens proposition (Marion, 1991).
From these considerations Marion draws three conclusions: 1) we can only see revelation through faith, i.e. if we believe; 2) in order to believe we need to will it. The will, however, is “put in operation” by the fact of being drawn by God’s love. Therefore, 3) we can will something only inasmuch as we love said something. Here the will is equated with love, and revelation becomes possible only inasmuch as it is freed from the logic of natural reason and able to impose its own logic, which must start with the will and end up in love again. Marion thus uncovers a new kind of logic in theology, which is not subdued by the logic of natural reason. In order for philosophical logic to come to terms with the logic of love it must turn to phenomenology, as Marion argues. Through phenomenology, phenomena are perceived inasmuch as they give themselves (Marion, 2002). This would allow us to see them based on their own logic of manifestation. This way of giving itself is made apparent in saturated phenomena and all the more so in the figure of Christ, who gives himself in an exceptional way. Christ, as a saturated phenomenon, gives himself from himself and does not abide by the epistemological conditions of experience. He thus contradicts these conditions and is received or seen as non-objectifiable. He therefore gives himself as a paradox, a paradox that neither excludes logic nor is outside logic, but instead extends to the possibility of describing the impossible as a counter-experience.
Wisdom of God
This reversed hermeneutics of the counter-experience is further explained in the case of mysterion, which can be uncovered only by the Father through His giving of Jesus as Son. The reception of such a phenomenon cannot be known or seen directly. In order to see a mysterion the reversal of intentionality is necessary, which implies that the mysterion is seen through the gaze of the Father and not transcendentally constituted as an object. The reversal of intentionality, however, is possible only through the Holy Spirit, who accomplishes the anamorphosis, i.e. a phenomenon becomes visible once we accept its own perspective. Through this acceptance of the perspective from elsewhere the mysterion shall not be known or unveiled but rather will show itself from itself in its uncovering (apokalypsis).
In order to emphasize charity’s coming from elsewhere, Marion relies on a Paulinian description of the power of God as hyperbolic (Eph. 3:18-19). Here the power of God is described as having four dimensions (height, depth, length, breadth), which for Marion signifies that charity cannot manifest itself within our space, as it exceeds it. Instead, it constitutes a “milieu” where we are absorbed in order to be saturated by the power of God: “I must allow myself to be situated in the midst of it, to be encompassed by it to the point of losing myself in it” (71). This losing of myself indicates nothing else than the loss of ipseity or I-intentionality, because our gaze, which constitutes objects in a three-dimensional space, cannot conceive a four-dimensional phenomenon. Therefore, charity or revelation is to be seen through a gaze which is not finite. The only gaze that is not finite, but still part of the world, is that of Christ. The mysterion uncovers itself in the gaze of Christ, who acts as the icon of the Father. He exhausts the invisibility of the Father and brings it to light in the flesh.
This relation between Christ, apokalypsis, and mysterion announces a phenomenological principle — “so much mysterion, so much revelation” – which for Marion fulfils the goal of phenomenology, namely that something gives itself from itself as itself without a doubled representation. Reinterpreting Husserl’s principle of principles, Marion explains this relation as follows: “the phenomenon shows itself in itself and through himself only in as much as it gives itself in and through Himself” (76). In short, the mode of appearance coincides with the mode of givenness. The only phenomenon which lives up to this principle and actualizes it is Christ, as he shows himself absolutely. This, however, is also dependent on the subject becoming a witness, i.e. on accepting the infinite gaze of the Son, which in its turn relies on being drawn by revelation. This appears to be a hermeneutic circle, which Marion recognizes and embraces as it leads to a Trinitarian manifestation of God. This is the turning point for understanding the Trinitarian manifestation of God, which alone can account for the revelation of the Father in the Son, the latter of which acts as the absolute icon based on two hermeneutical steps. The Father is the ground and condition for the giving of Jesus as Christ, i.e. as the Son of the Father. And this implies that Jesus can be seen as the Son of the Father only from the perspective of the Father.
These two steps make way for a conclusion: if we know Jesus as the Son of the Father, we also know the Father, as only from His perspective can Jesus be seen as the Christ. Consequently, and holding true to his status as icon, Jesus never refers to himself but to an Other, which is also the ground for the revelation. This is a first step in constituting a Trinitarian phenomenality. The second step connects tightly to the characteristic of the icon of letting the gaze of the other target the one who witnesses it. The fact that Jesus is given as the Son of the Father to mankind implies that mankind feels itself intended by the intentionality of the Father via the agency of the gift: “In this way the putting of Christ into an icon is accomplished, which properly defines the work of the Spirit” (86). The Spirit is consequently part of the unity of God. According to Marion the very phenomenal function of the Spirit is the accomplishing of the anamorphosis. This is to say, the finite intentionality is replaced by an infinite intentionality, which can in its turn only occur through the grace of the Father. Thus understood, the Spirit is the very act of giving, of the putting into operation of revelation, staying invisible but within visibility.
Having established revelation as a saturated phenomenon which gives itself in a Trinitarian way, Marion can now tackle the problem of Trinity by resorting to phenomenology, in order to show how the inner logic of Trinity is the logic of its manifestation.
Marion seeks to distance himself from the traditional understanding of Trinity, where substance is of priority and relation is secondary, accepting instead the relational shift proposed by Karl Barth and Karl Rahner. Based on their considerations that Trinity and its revelation constitute the basis of the unity and essence of God, Marion seeks to show how the phenomenological manifestation of God, or revelation, entails the primacy of love and communion concerning the essence of God. The phenomenological description of revelation as a saturated phenomenon would support this shift, as it implies that God is to be seen only as He gives Himself. Here, the thesis of the book is clearly formulated: “the Trinity offers not only the content of the uncovering, but also its mode of manifestation” (99). Because God gives Himself in a hyperbolic way, which saturates and surpasses our conceptual experience, and because such a given can only be seen through its own logic, God should be known only as He gives Himself. Considering that He gives Himself as a Trinity or communion, Trinity has primacy in the knowing of God. This is further sustained by Marion’s argument that Trinity reveals itself through Christ as an icon, which means that Christ never refers to himself but to another, and completely to another. This implies that the more he refers to another, i.e. to the Father, the more he appears as an icon and as the Son of God. This further entails that the stronger the communion between Father and Son is, the stronger the unity of God is.
Concluding Remarks
Marion’s Givenness and Revelation provides a Trinitarian account of revelation, which, though based mainly on biblical texts, ends up both redefining theology as revealed theology and realizing the principles of his phenomenology of givenness. This account is consistent with Marion’s earlier description of Christ as the icon of the Father in which the logic of love is accomplished in a Trinitarian way (Marion, 1991: 139-56). Furthermore, the coherence of Givenness and Revelation is also sustained by Marion’s phenomenological developments of the figure Christ as the highest degree of givenness (Marion, 2002). This being said, we turn our attention to three possible inconsistencies of Givenness and Revelation.
Even though Marion’s critique of metaphysics retains the same aspects of going against egology, beingness, and objectivity (Gschwandtner, 2007: 194), one can notice several revisions made to his understanding of Husserl. Whereas in Being Given Husserl’s principle of principles is seen as the limitation of givenness, conditioning it based on a foreseeable indeterminacy, Givenness and Revelation describes revelation as the fulfilment of the same principle. It must then follow either that Marion’s understanding of said principle is inconsistent or that revelation itself is limited. Two additional points may be raised against Marion’s investigation of revelation. First, the question concerning the violation of Husserl’s principle of neutrality – already highlighted by Jones (Jones, 2011) – can also be posed here. Against this, one can argue based on Marion (Marion, 2000) that theology acts purely as an inspiration for phenomenology in constructing a christological philosophy. Second, the reception of revelation and its imposed logic without requiring a hermeneutics coming from the subject may be questioned, as already observed by Shane Mackinlay (Mackinlay, 2010). Against this point one can interpret the constitution of the subject as a witness together with Thomas Alferi (Alferi, 2007: 297), who states that this constitution is a pre-phenomenal one, the phenomenal subject being thus already inscribed within the Trinitarian hermeneutic circle. This latter description of the subject seems to be more consistent with Givenness and Revelation. Furthermore, Marion’s introduction of the concept of resistance in experiencing revelation might provide a further solution to the issue of the subject being too passive.
Bibliography
Alferi, T. (2007). «Worüber hinaus Grösseres nicht ‘gegeben’ werden kann…» Phänomenologie und Offenbarung nach Jean-Luc Marion. Freiburg: Alber.
Gschwandtner, C. M. (2007). Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Jones, T. (2011). A Genealogy of Marion’s Philosophy of Religion: Apparent Darkness. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mackinlay, S. (2010). Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics. New York: Fordham University Press.
Marion, J. (1991). God Without Being: Hors-texte. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Marion, J. (2000). “Eine andere ‘Erste Philosophie’ und die Frage der Gegebenheit.” In Ruf und Gabe: Zum Verhältnis von Phänomenologie und Theologie. Her. J. Marion, J. Wohlmuth. Bonn: Alfter: Borengässer.
Marion, J. (2002). Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press.
Marion, J. (2015). Negative Certainties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Marion, J. (2016). Givenness and Revelation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Panos Theodorou: Husserl and Heidegger on Reduction, Primordiality, and the Categorial
Husserl and Heidegger on Reduction, Primordiality, and the Categorial: Phenomenology Beyond its Original Divide
Contributions To Phenomenology, Vol. 83
Springer
2015
Hardcover: $199.00 / eBook: 149.00
vii-xxxvi, 381
Adolf Reinach. La fenomenologia, il realismo
Adolf Reinach. La fenomenologia, il realismo
Quodlibet Studio/Discipline filosofiche
Quodlibet
july 2015
Paperback
168
http://www.quodlibet.it/schedap.php?id=2311#.V5ZKp_nyiUk
Ángel Xolocotzi, Ricardo Gibu (coords.): Fenomenología del cuerpo y hermenéutica de la corporeidad
Fenomenología del cuerpo y hermenéutica de la corporeidad
Filosofía
Filosofía
Plaza y Valdés
2014
Tapa blanda 16,50 €
279
Reviewed by: Jean Orejarena Torres (Universidad Autónoma de Puebla)
El cuerpo como cosa misma
Descrito por Platón como “la cárcel del alma”, el cuerpo ha ocupado en la filosofía un lugar secundario respecto a la investigación acerca la verdad, a tal punto que se dice en el diálogo Fedón –en referencia a una sentencia órfica– que dicha investigación consiste en “el separar al máximo el alma del cuerpo” (67c). Sin embargo, y tal vez con una clara inspiración nietzscheana, el cuerpo, interpretado como un ‘fenómeno’, ha despertado en los últimos años la atención de gran parte de la filosofía contemporánea. En este sentido, el libro Fenomenología del cuerpo y hermenéutica de la corporeidad recoge una serie de investigaciones dedicadas a examinar las distintas interpretaciones de la noción de ‘cuerpo’ en el ámbito de los recientes estudios fenomenológicos y hermenéuticos. Este libro, editado por Ángel Xolocotzi y Ricardo Gibu, agrupa un total de catorce investigaciones en donde se da una revaloración y una resignificación del cuerpo como concepto filosófico fundamental, a partir de la conocida diferenciación entre los términos alemanes Leib y Körper.
A grandes rasgos, una tesis compartida por un conjunto amplio de fenomenológos consiste en diferenciar al cuerpo (Leib) como un fenómeno vivo –como “cuerpo vivido como propio”– frente a la concepción meramente parametral del cuerpo (Körper) en las ciencias físicas, donde es tomado como cosa con extensión, volumen, masa, etc. (cf., p. 15). En la primera determinación del cuerpo, fenomenológos y filósofos como Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Nancy, entre otros, han observado el cuerpo como un concepto directriz en la configuración articulada de la comprensión del mundo, a partir de una recepción creativa de la obra de Edmund Husserl, especialmente de Ideas II. En esta peculiar recepción francesa de la fenomenología husserliana, el fenómeno de la ‘carne’ (chair) –enunciado por M. Merleau-Ponty, y profundizado por M. Henry– ha desempeñado un papel fundamental. Hasta podría decirse que, con dicha división terminológica –y con la primacía fenomenológica del Leib frente al Körper–, se ha abierto el camino para una retórica de la corporeidad. Si se revisa con detalle la construcción sobre la que descansan varios de los presupuestos del análisis de la corporeidad, se evidencia –a grandes rasgos– la inclusión de una narrativa acerca del cuerpo, en donde el tocar y la tactilidad emergen como conceptos fundamentales desde los que se ancla una comprensión intrínseca, vivida, del mundo.
Una de las notables ausencias que, en opinión de Sartre, caracterizó a Ser y tiempo fue la de un análisis del fenómeno del cuerpo. En efecto, Heidegger no se presenta –como sí sucede con los filósofos franceses– como un fenomenólogo que trata la comprensión del mundo a partir del anclaje al cuerpo; antes que eso, y como menciona el mismo Heidegger en los Zollikoner Seminare, el análisis de la Leiblichkeit es lo más díficil. Incluso, frente a la anotación nietzscheana que dice que “el fenómeno del cuerpo es el más rico, más claro, más comprensible (…)”, Heidegger objeta que el cuerpo no es ni lo más comprensible ni lo más claro; en su opinión, se lograría más, si contempláramos dicho fenómeno como un problema (cf., p. 9).
Esta ‘modestia’ heideggeriana –o mejor dicho este ‘escepticismo’– resulta bastante significativa frente a una serie de explicaciones valorativas expuestas, a veces libremente, en los análisis fenomenológicos “post-husserlianos”. En efecto, esta actitud restrictiva, si se observa con detalle, proporciona un aspecto metódico adecuado desde el que se pueden poner entre paréntesis algunas de las construcciones conceptuales alrededor del fenómeno del cuerpo; del mismo modo, uno puede preguntarse aquí si acaso la división tajante entre Leib y Körper es lo suficientemente conclusiva hasta el punto de quedarnos con una serie de descripciones de un cuerpo supuestamente vivo, y supuestamente encarnado, en donde el punto focal de la constitución de nuestra experiencia del mundo proviene de una noción de cuerpo (Leib) que pasa por alto al cuerpo físico (Körper). Sucede, en este caso, aquello mismo que sucede en una serie de interpretaciones heideggerianas que postulan una división radical y una concentración focal de lo ‘ontológico’ frente a lo ‘óntico’, pasando por alto que el mismo Heidegger postuló las raices innegables de lo primero en lo segundo. Los breves comentarios expresados así en los Zollikoner Seminare se dirigen, en este punto, a aclarar en qué sentido el anclaje de la apertura y la comprensión del Dasein no se realiza solamente desde un aspecto ‘mental’, sino que el Dasein mismo es de naturaleza corporal (leiblicher Natur). Sin embargo, a diferencia de la tradición puramente fenomenológica (aquí Heidegger parece aportar la nota disonante), lo verdaderamente importante consiste en obtener adecuadamente el acceso a dicho fenómeno, antes que aceptar de manera acrítica algunas construcciones conceptuales que sobre él se hacen.
¿Cómo logra esta reciente publicación una articulación adecuada entre los distintos enfoques fenomenológicos y hermenéuticos? ¿Cómo se da cuenta de la riqueza conceptual que se auna en el análisis del cuerpo? Conforme a estos interrogantes, la división capitular de la presente obra cumple satisfactoriamente con la intención de congregar una serie de estudios que se dirigen a analizar los diversos enfoques que tematizan el cuerpo. Las partes del libro “El cuerpo propio”, “El cuerpo mundo” y “El cuerpo otro” procuran abordar temáticamente los mencionados enfoques. En la primera parte se enmarcan las siguientes investigaciones de María Dolores Illescas Nájera: “La vivencia del cuerpo propio en la fenomenología de Edmund Husserl”, María del Carmen López Sáenz: “De Husserl a Merleau-Ponty: del cuerpo propio como localización de sensaciones al movimiento de la chair”, Eduardo González di Pierro: “Michel Henry lector de Husserl; del cuerpo propio al cuerpo encarnado, Ideas II en Encarnación”, Ricardo Gibu Shimabukuro: “Sensibilidad, corporeidad y significación en Levinas”, y Claudia Tame Domínguez: “¿Qué puede un cuerpo? Spinoza en Michel Henry”.
En la segunda parte del libro, “El cuerpo mundo”, se enmarcan las investigaciones de Ángel Xolocotzi Yáñez: “Dasein, cuerpo y diferencia ontológica”, Fernando Huesca Ramón: “Schelling en Heidegger: cuerpo y vida, fundamento y libertad”, Luis Tamayo Pérez: “El cuerpo mundo. Reflexiones sobre ontología, topología y psicosomática” y Rubén Mendoza Valdéz: “Bios y ethos: una fenomenología del cuerpo humano desde el horizonte del pensamiento heideggeriano”. En la tercera parte, “El cuerpo otro”, se enmarcan las investigaciones de Alberto Constante: “Escrito en el cuerpo mío, cuerpo extraño”, Arturo Aguirre: “Este cuerpo y esta su violencia. Meditaciones sobre el espaciamiento”, Ricardo Horneffer: “Cuerpo como símbolo”, Víctor Gerardo Rivas López: “De la afinidad ontológica entre corporalidad y cine. Y de la insubstancialidad contemporánea de la existencia” y Noé Héctor Esquivel Estrada: “Fenomenología de la medicina moderna y hermenéutica de la salud”.
Desde una perspectiva general, el enfoque fenomenológico y hermenéutico acerca del cuerpo es un intento sólido por explicitar la autonomía conceptual que exige dicho fenómeno a partir de su redescubrimiento como objeto temático. Con ello, se hace frente metódicamente al carácter reductivo (físico-biológico) que la ciencia actual plantea a partir de la tendencia cosificante frente al cuerpo y, a su vez, se abre un cuestionamiento hacia el primado de ciertos enfoques puramente psicológicos (derivados de la psyché) y mentales en el marco de la historia de la filosofía occidental. Este redescubrimiento cuestiona, en este sentido, el primado del ‘alma’ en la filosofía, a partir del olvido del cuerpo. No obstante, en la tradición fenomenológica ‘post-husserliana’ se echa de menos, por ejemplo, la importante labor metódica histórico-crítica, o arqueológica, de presentar y evaluar lo que se ha dicho sobre el cuerpo (aquello que Aristóteles metódicamente llamó “salvar tá phainómena” o “tá legómena”) en el marco de la filosofía occidental. Esta tarea –que ha sido suplida en parte por la investigación especializada– es supremamente importante para cuestionar o afirmar la univocidad de la tesis que trata de enunciar el hecho de que en la filosofía haya existido un olvido en torno al cuerpo. Sin embargo, en sus logros y en sus méritos, el enfoque fenomenológico y la hermenéutico ha supuesto una verdadera renovación del panorama filosófico occidental.
El libro Fenomenología del cuerpo y hermenéutica de la corporeidad es una valiosa compilación de investigaciones escritas –casi en su totalidad– a partir de la recepción francesa de la obra de Husserl y a partir del enfoque heideggeriano. El valor de este libro consiste, no obstante, en saber leer entre lineas, en ejercer la pasión del preguntar. Sólo, en ese sentido, podríamos observar al cuerpo como lo que principalmente debe ser: antes de ser visto como un tema que, por ejemplo, ha sido agotado por la tradición ‘post-husserliana’, su verdadera naturaleza reside en ser visto como un auténtico problema. Así, sólo desde esa pespectiva, se abrirá el preguntar por el cuerpo como un preguntar por la cosa misma.