Frege: A Philosophical Biography
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Phänomenologie als Platonismus: Zu den Platonischen Wesensmomenten der Philosophie Edmund Husserls
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Hermeneutic Philosophies of Social Science
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Filosofia e scienze nel primo Husserl. Per una interpretazione strutturalista delle Ricerche logiche
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Conscience et Représentation: Introduction aux théories representationnelles de l’esprit
]Reviewed by: Marta Benenti (University of Turin)
The collection of papers edited by Arnaud Dewalque and Charlotte Gauvry aims to give an insight into the broad landscape of representationalist theories of mind in contemporary philosophy, doing justice to its variety and richness. Besides providing a wide selection of texts belonging to the representationalist tradition, some examples of critical perspectives are also available. Thanks to this volume, pivotal works in philosophy of mind and perception are made available to a French audience, offering an extremely useful tool to non-English speakers who approach the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition. More than an introduction to one of the most relevant issues in philosophy and one of the liveliest and most stimulating debates in these recent years, this book provides a thought-out perspective on representationalism, supported by very accurate references and a rich bibliography.
The volume is organized into four sections, three of which contain the translations of several book chapters and papers, representative of three variants of representationalism put forward during the last 20 years. According to the proposed taxonomy – which is faithful to the historical and chronological development of this debate – such macro-perspectives are: (I) First Order Representationalism, (II) Higher Order Representationalism, and (III) Self-Representationalism. The concluding section (IV) is devoted to positions that are critical towards representationalism.
The structure and richness of the volume is duly presented and supported by an Introduction where the editors trace the relationships between the different kinds of representationalism, both along an historical and a conceptual axis. Which is not an easy task, given the intersections that have characterized the debate so far. Since several reviews of the books from which the translated chapters are drawn are already available, this review will focus on the introductory section of the volume, so as to provide an exhaustive overview of the discussion, rather than a set of brief abstracts.
The ongoing debate about the representational status of experience came recently to constitute a “new orthodoxy” in the philosophy of mind. The pivotal thesis of representationalist perspectives is that the human mind is essentially characterized by its capacity to represent objects or states of affairs as being in a certain way. The attempt to clarify the notion of consciousness in connection with this conception of the mind, brings the reader straight into the core of the debate: the complex relations between mind, intentionality and consciousness. And if the need for a satisfactory account of the qualitative aspects of experiences led by philosophers like Thomas Nagel and Franck Jackson to distinguish between first person and third person experiences, it also opens the door to reductivism and the so-called “mind-body problem” (8-13). The reference to this issue allows the editors to introduce one of the fundamental reasons animating representationalism, say, the attempt to preserve, by means of a descriptive approach, the qualitative aspect of experience from the reduction to its physical components. And it is precisely such a need that is believed to have been the impulse for representational theories to analyse consciousness and mental states in terms of representations and intentionality (14).
The possible relations connecting what is mental to what is intentional and conscious are analysed by Dewalque and Gauvry along the sides of a triangle having such notions as vertexes. Indeed, taking the mental to be bi-dimensional, that is, constituted both by intentionality and by consciousness, is a thesis that traces back to early phenomenology. According to Brentano, for something to be mental is for it to be intentional, showing the characters of directedness and aboutness. Husserl, however, had already called into question this view, claiming that there are at least some affective states that, despite being mental, are devoid of intentionality. Such original disagreement on the alleged identity between what is mental and what is intentional, is the symptom of another, more general one, that is: how can we class mental states and distinguish them from one another? Needless to say, this issue is still much debated among representationalist philosophers, called to take a stance on the legitimacy of the distinction between the content of mental states (what they are about) and their qualitative phenomenal character (19).
The second side of the triangle corresponds to the question whether consciousness is coextensive to the mental. Given that the word “consciousness” is employed in several different ways to indicate different states and properties, the concern is whether for a state to be mental, is for it to be conscious, or rather there exist mental states that need not be conscious (in one of the many senses of the word).
All these issues are to be considered in light of the wider theoretical aim to put forward a complete and unified theory of human consciousness. On the one hand, the need for completeness has to do with accounting at once for all the alleged components of human consciousness, while, on the other, aiming at unification implies providing a theory that is both descriptively and explanatorily satisfying. But, as the editors suggest, it seems that philosophers face a sort of dilemma when trying to fulfil both requirements: if mind is bi-dimensional in the just sketched sense, then a complete theory of the mental implies accounting both for its intentional and its conscious component. In case the two notions were not coextensive, this obviously would turn out to be problematic. On the ‘flipside’, a unified theory of mind should be either a theory of consciousness or a theory of intentionality, preventing it from being complete (25).
Representationalist theories of mind can be conceived as successful attempts to face this challenge. Indeed, rather than focusing on the two distinct axes: mental-intentional and mental-conscious, representationalism develops along the third side of the triangle, that is the one having as its vertexes, consciousness and intentionality. The main concern becomes finding a way to either ground consciousness in intentionality or, conversely, to ground intentionality in consciousness. Representationalist theories and theories of phenomenal intentionality (or phenomenal intentionalism) are the headings of the two groups of theories trying to apply one of the two strategies respectively (this is why representationalism is sometimes referred to as intentionalism). In other words, neither according to the former nor to the latter, a radical separation between intentionality and consciousness is viable. Philosophy should instead look for the relation connecting such components to appropriately describe and consistently explain our mental life (30).
Depending on how this grounding is intended, representational theories can be categorised as follows:
– First Order Representationalism (FOR), is well interpreted by the works of Fred Dretske and Michael Tye (namely, the volume contains the translated versions of Dretske’s «The Representational Character of Sense Experience», Ch.1 of Naturalizing the Mind, 1995, and Tye’s «The Intentionality of Feelings and Experiences», Ch. 4 of Ten Problems of Consciousness, 1995). Generally speaking, FOR claims that a mental state is conscious if it represents something. This amounts to say that the phenomenal character of a mental state (the way it is like to undergo it) is exhausted by its content. Accordingly, what identifies a mental state and distinguishes it from other mental states is precisely what is presented in its content. More precisely, according to both Dretske and Tye, a representational relation consists in the causal co-variation involving a representation and its content: if the content varies, then also what represents such content changes. Despite being evocative and able to capture a fundamental aspect of representational relations, this view requires further refinements. In fact, it is not always simple to individuate the relevant causal relations within a chain. Dretske replies that this difficulty of claiming that which actually fixes the content of a mental state is the function of such a state within the system of the organism. Subsequently, a mental state consists in an informational content plus a certain causal or functional role. The main argument in favour of this view is the well known “argument from transparency”, which insists on the fact that every descriptive effort concerning our experience leads nowhere but to the properties of its content. In a certain sense, we look through our experience, which presents us its objects as a transparent medium. In their sum up to the most relevant and influential representationalist theories, the editors of this volume do not neglect an important consequence of what has been also called strong representationalism: accounting for experiences in terms of their intentional content paves the way to naturalistic reductionism insofar as it allows for a reduction of the properties instantiated by experience to causally connected natural properties. This consequence clearly applies less straightforwardly to weaker versions of representationalism, that hold the phenomenal character to supervene on the representational (or intentional) content. Finally, one of the main and most controversial issues of strong representationalism (reducing the phenomenal character of experiences to their intentional content) concerns the typical case of moods and the analogous affective states that seem quite far from being directed towards something (see 36 and Tye’s essay, 97-133).
– Higher Order Representationalism (HOR) is the approach that can be attributed to philosophers like David Rosenthal, Peter Carruthers, Rocco Gennaro, and William Lycan. The volume contains both a translation of Rosenthal’s «Explaining Consciousness» (belonging to the collection edited by David Chalmers Philosophy of Mind. Classical and Contemporary Readings, 2002) and the one of Carruthers’s «HOP over FOR, HOT theory» (Ch.4 of his Consciousness. Essays from a higher-order perspective, 2005). Such thinkers generally believe that FOR does not account for the possibility to represent P without being aware to represent P. Thus, supporters of HOR claim that there must be something more that characterizes conscious mental states, distinguishing them from non-conscious ones. Their view implies the existence of second order intentional states, having as their intentional content, other – per se non conscious – intentional states. Armstrong and Lycan characterise such second order states as Higher Order Perceptions capable of providing information about our (first order) mental states (39). On the contrary, Rosenthal famously claimed that Higher Order Thoughts characterise our conscious states (his notorious argument against the perceptual view is nicely presented in the Introduction (39-40). Alternatively, one may endorse, with Carruthers, a dispositional view, according to which conscious states are those mental states that are available as contents for a second order thought (40 and his paper, 171-197).
– Self-Representationalism is represented in the collection by two works: the first is Uriah Kriegel’s «The Self-Representational Theory of Consciousness» Ch. 1 of his Subjective Consciousness. A Self-Representational Theory (2009), while the second is «Consciousness and Intentionality» by George Graham, Terence Horgan and John Tienson (originally included in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, 2007). Self-Representationalism holds against HOR that the awareness we have to have in a certain mental state comes immediately with such mental states, and it is not a matter of higher order representations (42). Conscious states are at the same time representing and represented by themselves. More importantly, Self-Representationalism is a clear variant of phenomenal intentionalism inasmuch as it values the phenomenal character of experience as being the ineludible starting point of any theory of mental states. Needless to say, such a perspective refers to the phenomenological tradition that standard representationalism had originally taken as its target.
– Naïf Realism is instead radically critical towards representationalist theories of mind. John Hinton, Bill Brewer and Mike Martin share the view that perceiving the world means being in direct contact with it and, at the same time, being conscious of its independence from our experiences. Naïf or empirical (the reference to Berkeleyan empiricism is explicit) realists argue against representationalism and theories of content, that they cannot account for the phenomenal character of our perceptual experiences and that they rely on false presuppositions. Namely, the representationalist’s reference to content implies that every experience is evaluable in terms of truth values, and this – according for instance to Brewer’s translated paper «Perception and Content» (European Journal of Philosophy, 2006) – is both phenomenally and epistemologically unacceptable, while additionally misinterpreting the singularity that is essential to each perceptual experience (52).
– Concluding the section dedicated to critical perspectives is the paper which exemplifies Contextualism. In his «Is Seeing Intentional?» (published in Perception. Essays after Frege, 2013) Charles Travis not only rejects the notion of content, but also the view that perception is a relation between a subject who represents the world as being in a certain way, and the content of such representation. Contextualism considers this view radically misleading, insofar as it takes perceptions to be evaluations about the world, just like judgements are. Instead, supporters of contextualism, mostly relying on philosophy of ordinary language, claim that our perception is always situated within a network of relationships most of which are conventional. This should prevent philosophy of mind from reducing perceptions to relations between subjects and (allegedly physically reducible) contents.
Revisionen der Zeitlichkeit: Zur Phänomenologie des Bildes nach Husserl, Derrida und Merleau-Ponty
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Being, Relation and the Reworlding of Intentionality
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The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem
Reviewed by: Michael Deckard (Lenoir-Rhyne University)
There is something slightly mysterious about reading this book, like finding a notebook in a desk in the attic in a drawer full of cobwebs. Or searching the archives for something you only have an inkling of what you might find (see below for a further description of the Patočka archives in Prague). Even though everything in this book besides the Translator’s Note has previously been published before in other languages, this collection of texts provides in English an insight into a thinker’s life hitherto inaccessible, or at least forgotten. Hence, the mystery. Erazim Kohák’s work in the 1980s brought forth a life story and a philosopher, but focused on the phenomenological and Czech thinker. The dates of the texts from The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem are fascinating in themselves. The main text is Patočka’s habilitation from 1936, Přirozený svét jako filosofický problém, first translated into French forty years later in 1976 (a year before he died), Le monde naturel comme problème philosophique, and then in German in 1990 as Die natürliche Welt als philosophisches Problem. Now the English in 2016, some eighty years after the original publication and forty years after his death. I mention these three translations because the nature of the natural world, for Patočka, is at issue: why is this a philosophical problem, and not an historical or scientific one? What has become of this problem in the intervening eighty years since he wrote the text? Normally, one does not review a book published eighty years earlier, but besides the main text, there is a “remeditated” supplement to it written 33 years later (1970), and then an afterword to the first French translation (1976). But that still leaves a mystery: what can be recalled anew about such texts?
The mystery begins with the foreword, written by a close friend of over forty years, who speaks to the life of the man himself and not just his thought: “our conversations were never purely philosophical,” and that these took place “for nights on end in my Prague years between 1933 and 1939”, Ludwig Landgrebe writes. These years seem to haunt this book, and perhaps the life and country if not all of Europe itself. Experiencing these years in “a kind of exile” in Prague, Landgrebe says, “Talk of personal life, family, comments on the alarming political situation in Europe, common concern for the future of Germany…For me, the development of Patočka’s philosophy is inseparably linked with the history of a friendship.” (ix) This is not a normal foreword. In fact, it was written as memories right after Patočka’s death in 1977. In being guided through the homeland and Prague in particular, “History came alive on these occasions in its interwovenness with art and literature” (x). The foreword is a document in history concerning a time “near and far, familiar and alien,” (xv) and according to Landgrebe, it was the first book on the problem of the life-world (Lebenswelt) (xiv). And yet, the title of the work is not the lifeworld as a philosophical problem, but the natural world. Is this only a problem of translation? Should this 1936 book be interpreted as truly a book about the problem of the lifeworld, or rather as one regarding the natural world, which is a broader problem in philosophy and science than the “well-nigh uncatalogable” literature on the life-world problem. (See the recent review on this site by Philipp Berghofer of The Phenomenological Critique of Mathematisation and the Question of Responsibility: Formalisation and the Life-World).[1]
The introduction to the main text begins thus: “Modern man has no unified worldview. He lives in a double world, at once in his own naturally given environment and in a world created for him by modern natural science, based on the principle of mathematical laws governing nature. The disunion that has thus pervaded the whole of human life is the true source of our present spiritual crisis.” (3) The one philosopher mentioned in this introduction is Descartes—but isn’t Descartes himself a kind of founder of phenomenology as well as science? In a certain sense, then, this book is about “the history of the development of modern science” (113) for which he points to “Leonardo the engineer, Bacon the insatiable political practitioner and visionary, Descartes the mechanistic physician, and even Galileo himself” in the conclusion. Instead of calling it a disenchantment of the world, it is a “dehumanization of the world.”
Chapter 1, “Stating the Problem,” expands upon this fundamental “disanthropomorphization” (6), speaking to how one can philosophise again not just “through mere wonder (thaumazein), but rather on account of the inner difficulties of his spiritual life.” (7) The problem is simply that humans who have experienced modern science “no longer live simply in the naïve natural world; the habitus of his overall relationship to reality is not the natural worldview.” (8) If this book is considered a debate with the founders of modern philosophy, then after stating the problem, Patočka poses some answers: a return to the feeling of life (9-11), an historical typology of possible solutions (11-19), and Patočka’s own proposed solution (19-22). To put it as simply as possible, “to state what we expect from this philosophical anamnesis and why we look upon the subjective orientation as a way to reestablish the world’s unity, the breaking of which threatens modern man in that which, according to Dostoyevsky, is most precious to him: his own self.” (19) There are thus three parts to his solution: subjectivity, the natural world (through history), and language. All of these are meant to unify the self from its fractured nature.
Chapter 2, “The Question of the Essence of Subjectivity and Its Methodical Exploitation,” begins from Descartes, and follows a trajectory of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and finally the method of phenomenology as recapturing subjectivity. Several guiding clues are given as to this method, reduction and time consciousness being two of the most important. Regarding the first,
“the reductive procedure applies, of course, to each and every particular thesis, but above all to the so to say general theses, which are already presupposed in singular judgments, and so on, e.g., the thesis that the world exists with its specific real structures. The reduction applies thus not only to propositions about what is but also to propositions about the structure of what is: not only to ontic but also to ontological propositions. Reduction should not be regarded, as is sometimes the case, as a method for acquiring a priori knowledge.” (38)
By means of this guiding clue, both subjectivity and knowledge are saved through “abstaining” (Epoche), and thus purifying experience of sedimentation in order to achieve some singularity in “pure givenness” or “pure consciousness” as “lived-experience.” (41) It is worth pointing out here that occasionally an endnote by the editors mentions the “recently discovered personal copy of his habilitation thesis” in which there is a penciled note. (201n52) Part of Patočka’s thesis of this chapter is thus to show similarities between phenomenology and the “Platonic-Aristotelian noesis.” (203n71) Due to ideation’s relationship to time-consciousness, the human is intersubjectively constituted. Differentiating this view from Fichte, Schelling, Kant, and Descartes, to go in reverse historical order, nevertheless allows a “passage through phenomenological reflection.” (51)
Chapter 3, “The Natural World,” the heart of the book, entails that subjectivity is not enough, but rather that man is in relation to a world. Erazim Kohák has already written of this work in his 1989 collection of Patočka’s writings, touching upon the difference between přirozený svét and English or German or French: “the world of nature, the entire realm of animate being, including humans in their mundane dimension, with its vital order and natural teleology…the world—now in the sense of the coherent, intelligible context of our being rather than as a sum of existents—which comes ‘naturally’ to us, the prereflective, prepredicative coherence of our context which we take so much for granted.” (Kohák 1989: 23) The point, going back to Patočka’s text, is a conscious co-living with others, with regard to them, and common to all. Criticisms of his 1936 conception, even mentioned 33 years later in his French afterword, is that it was too human-centric. The references are to “home”, “refuge”, “alien”, but he is still aware of the human and the extrahuman dimension. While animals are mentioned within “living nature,” as well as “generations,” “traditions,” and even “myth,” there seems to be no references to fossils. minerals, or flora as part of this natural world. The historical development of the problem accentuates this absence in which something of German idealism is still too stuck in human sensibility, despite mentions of biologists like von Baer and Uexküll or philosophers like Bergson.
Chapter 4, “A Sketch of a Philosophy of Language and Speech,” takes up the third aspect of his proposal, basing language in sensibility, history, and acoustics. While using insights from the Czech school of linguistics, as Landgrebe says in his foreword, “the whole chapter can be read as echo of the discussions that took place in the 1930s in the Prague Linguistic Circle. Many issues of fundamental philosophical import discussed at that time have disappeared from current linguistics under the influence of the nominalist tradition.” (xvii)
When Patočka added a supplement to this main text 33 years later (115-180), he later wrote about that supplement, “Written in haste, under the pressure of circumstances, the added text falls short to this aim, i.e. to clarify and update our view of the problem.” (182) The main problem is thus whether to listen to him or not. If we did, we would only read the afterword, some nine pages long (181-190) Most Patočka scholars ignore this, as did the German edition as well as the editors and translator of this book “despite his openly stated criticism of the first of the two and its omission from the 1976 French edition.” (191) Now, in reviewing this whole text from the perspective of eighty-years later, the sense of mystery returns. The translator’s note, then, should really be read first, or at least at the same time, as Landgrebe’s foreword, since she concludes that “the two afterwords are mutually complementary.” (192) Remembering that for most of Patočka’s life he was under great scrutiny, Kohák points out: “Altogether, of the forty-six years of his active life as a philosopher, Jan Patočka lived only eight years free of censorship.” (Kohák, 1989: 27) This is not an arbitrary point of history. “Man is not only thrown into the world but also accepted. Acceptance is an integral part of throwness, so much so that being-at-home in the world is made possible only through the warmth of acceptance by others,” Landgrebe writes (xvii). It is not without irony and a sense of sadness that Patočka died, having been arrested and interrogated for over eleven hours, forty years ago this year and that we can now read his earliest book for the first time in English.
My own experience, having spent a few days this year in the Patočka archive, was remarkable. Upon discovering a 200+ page manuscript on Ficino with pages and pages of drawings, astrological and artistic, hidden in the 1940s in the Strahov Library in Prague, the content of the archive can truly astonish and surprise one. A few pages of this ms. have been translated into German in Andere Wege in die Moderne: Studien zur europäischen Ideengeschichte von der Renaissance bis zur Romantik by Ludger Hagedorn. The amount of time Patočka spent studying and researching this period from the Renaissance to Romanticism is incredible. Any good phenomenologist or historian wanting to understand the richness of Patočka should visit the archive. The mystery of the text mentioned at the beginning of this review concerns the prophetic style of the philosopher, and how such a text brings out a renewal of thought. Once the cobwebs are blown off, and the archive uncovered, thought and even resistance can begin anew.
[1] Philipp Berghofer. Review of The Phenomenological Critique of Mathematisation and the Question of Responsibility: Formalisation and the Life-World by Ľubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík, Anita Williams (Eds.), Springer, 2015.
Nature et esprit: Leçons du semestre d’été 1927
Déconstruction et phénoménologie: Derrida en débat avec Husserl et Heidegger
Reviewed by: Innocenzo Sergio Genovesi (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn)
Derrida ha sempre presentato la sua filosofia come una scrittura a margine. Questo margine non corrisponde soltanto ai limiti della logica e della metafisica occidentale, che il filosofo francese cerca di destabilizzare dall’interno mettendo alla prova le strutture piú antiche e consolidate del pensiero. I “margini della filosofia” sui quali Derrida scrive sono i margini tangibili dei volumi dei classici filosofici: si tratta degli spazi bianchi non coperti dal testo stampato, della spaziatura tra le righe e le lettere, la quale apre nuove possibilità per una scrittura della disseminazione e per un pensiero della differenza rimasto ancora “inaudito”. Lo studioso di Derrida che si sia cimentato a sufficienza nella decifrazione di queste note a margine avrà senza ombra di dubbio compreso che la scrittura derridiana è sempre scrittura sopra e a partire da un testo. In questo modo, per Derrida la lettura di un autore va a coincidere fin da subito con un’operazione di scrittura. Cercare di enumerare tutti gli autori nei quali è possibile imbattersi all’interno della sterminata produzione derridiana sarebbe un’impresa filologica molto ambiziosa. Tuttavia, è noto che Derrida abbia nutrito una certa predilezione per alcuni autori le cui opere sono al centro degli scritti più conosciuti del filosofo francese: si pensi a Nietzsche, Levinas, Platone o Blanchot, solo a titolo d’esempio.
Nel suo libro Déconstruction et phénoménologie. Derrida en débat avec Husserl et Heidegger Françoise Dastur prende in considerazione due tra i filosofi che maggiormente hanno influito sul pensiero derridiano, se non addirittura le colonne portanti su cui si è sviluppato il pensiero della différance. Questi pensatori hanno segnato il debutto filosofico di Derrida come fenomenologo e hanno accompagnato il suo percorso fino alla fase di produzione più tarda, rimanendo rintracciabili in maniera più o meno esplicita anche nei suoi ultimi testi. Il lavoro della Dastur si prefigge di indagare il rapporto tra Derrida e questi due autori e di capire in che misura egli si sia allontanato dal loro pensiero nella sua operazione di riscrittura. L’investigazione è condotta con una raffinatezza analitica e una precisione filologica lodevoli. Grazie alla sua profonda conoscenza delle opere dei tre autori Françoise Dastur ci offre l’opportunità non solo di rintracciare con precisione nei testi dei filosofi tedeschi i luoghi di nascita delle future intuizioni derridiane, ma anche di comprendere se e quanto Derrida abbia ricostruito con fedeltà le idee dei suoi maestri nel momento in cui le ha presentate nei suoi testi. La decostruzione delle principali idee husserliane e heideggeriane è spesso dipinta come una specie di parricidio nel quale Derrida sovverte i sistemi filosofici dei suoi maestri servendosi dei mezzi teorici che questi stessi gli hanno dato. L’opera di Dastur ci mostra adesso che questo parricidio potrebbe in realtà non essere mai avvenuto e Husserl e Heidegger siano più vicini di quanto si creda al pensiero della différance.
Il libro si divide in tre parti. La prima e l’ultima sono dedicate rispettivamente al dialogo con Husserl e Heidegger. La parte centrale si propone invece come un terreno comune di confronto tra i tre filosofi. Il principale motivo di interesse di Derrida per Husserl è rintracciato nella discussione delle tematiche riguardanti la finitudine, la ripetizione e la presenza. Françoise Dastur sostiene infatti che il dibattito tra Derrida e Husserl corrisponda al dibattito generale tra la filosofia della presenza e il pensiero della non presenza (p. 37). L’accusa ben nota che Derrida rivolge a Husserl è di essere incapace di pensare la possibilità della propria sparizione e della propria morte. In altre parole, di non saper concepire la differenza originaria che si cela dietro alla presenza in generale; differenza che Derrida ha messo in relazione con la diacronicità della ritenzione e della ripresentazione in La voce e il fenomeno. Sono proprio queste strutture della costituzione temporale husserliana che catturano l’attenzione dell’autrice. In un’attenta analisi di La voce e il fenomeno, la studiosa osserva che l’idea derridiana di ritenzione e ripresentazione si basa proprio su una concezione discontinua del tempo come diacronia. Questa concezione non è tuttavia condivisa da Husserl, che ha piuttosto pensato la temporalità come un processo di autodifferenziazione continuo. Dastur evidenzia questo fatto richiamandosi alle Lezioni del 1905, dove Husserl sviluppa una concezione del tempo basata sulla differenza tra l’adesso – l’istante immediato – e il presente vivente, che comprende anche il passato appena trascorso e il futuro prossimo. Questa teoria della temporalità era stata utilizzata da Derrida contro Husserl in La voce e il fenomeno per criticare la sua teoria dell’idealità dei significati e per affermare l’originarietá della différance. Dastur rimarca con impegno che anche per lo stesso Husserl il presente vivente rinvia a un’alterità che si insinua nell’identità a sé del soggetto (p. 88 sg.), senza però che egli adotti una concezione discontinua del tempo: Husserl parla infatti di una modificazione continua della stessa impressione originaria nella coscienza. Françoise Dastur ci mette così di fronte al fatto che per decostruire la fenomenolgia in quanto “metafisica della presenza” Derrida deve uscire da essa, o per lo meno porsi al suo margine, e servirsi di un pensiero dell’alterità che viene assimilato alla “metafisica dell’esteriorità” levinassiana: è proprio l’alterità, vale a dire l’esteriorità, che costituisce la struttura diacronica dell’esperienza che non può mai essere totalizzata (p. 90).
Venendo al rapporto tra Heidegger e Derrida, il punto di contatto e di scontro più significativo è riconosciuto nel concetto di differenza nelle sue più svariate accezioni. Derrida ha illustrato in numerosi testi il suo debito nei confronti di Heidegger nel momento in cui ha coniato i due termini chiave della sua filosofia: decostruzione e differenza. La parola decostruzione vuole infatti tradurre l’Ab-bau heideggeriano, mentre la différance si pone fin da subito come un ampliamento della differenza ontologica. Dastur richiama all’attenzione che è proprio per via di questo pensiero della differenza come distinzione dell’essente in rapporto all’essere che Heidegger ricade, agli occhi di Derrida, nella metafisica della presenza e rimane più un pensatore dell’essere che della differenza (p. 116). Come è noto, le discordanze in fatto di differenza non si limitano soltanto all’ontologia. Anche i casi della differenza tra uomo e animale e della differenza sessuale, a cui Derrida ha dedicato svariati saggi a partire dagli anni ’80, sono riportati con grande accuratezza e l’esposizione è impreziosita dalla testimonianza personale dell’autrice, che era presente al convegno Reading Heidegger tenutosi nel 1986 a Colchester, dove Derrida tenne un lungo intervento. La domanda fondamentale che porta all’allontanamento di Derrida rispetto a Heidegger può essere generalizzata in questo modo: se vi è un primato dell’essere (ontologia), o della comprensione dell’essere da parte del Dasein umano (umanismo) o della neturalità del Dasein (differenza sessuale), in che momento e come può instillarsi una differenza in questo elemento primordiale? Come è successo nel dialogo con Husserl, anche qui sorge un problema genetico che porta Derrida a rifiutare la priorità di un pensiero dell’essere. La conseguenze di questo gesto risiedono da una parte nella negazione di unadistinzione tra uomo e animale basata sulla comprensione dell’essere da parte del primo, dall’altro nella rinuncia all’estromissione della sessualità dalla struttura essenziale del Dasein.
Sebbene la trattazione di questo problema teorico mantenga la sua ragion d’essere anche al di là del rispetto filologico del testo heideggeriano, Dastur ci mostra che la relegazione di Heidegger nel territorio della metafisica della presenza che opera Derrida è probabilmente troppo drastica e non tiene sufficientemente in considerazione gli sviluppi della filosofia heideggeriana dopo la Kehre. Facendo riferimento al testo Identità e differenza, apparso in tedesco nel 1957, l’autrice suggerisce che Heidegger, utilizzando gli strumenti offerti dalla lingua tedesca, voglia compiere un’operazione simile alla sostituzione derridiana della lettera e con la a nella parola différance: ridefinendo la differenza come entbergend-bergender Austrag e come Unter-schied egli fornisce infatti una nozione dinamica e processuale della differenza, secondo la quale essa non trova più origine nella trascendenza del Dasein, ma si presenta in maniera più originaria come una doppia piega dell’essere e dell’essente che li rende inseparabili l’uno dall’altro (pp. 129-130). Questa differenza non è più la relazione tra due termini dati, ma è l’accadere simultaneo della loro separazione e messa in relazione. In altre parole, anche nel secondo Heidegger, proprio come in Derrida, una differenza giace alla base dell’essere e della sua presentazione. Questo fatto risulta chiaro anche dallo sviluppo parallelo dei concetti di Ereignis ed Enteignis, per cui l’evento come coappartenenza di uomo ed essere si configura non solo come un’appropriazione, ma anche come espropriazione e privazione. L’elemento che in ogni caso distingue i due filosofi è il loro rapporto con la presenza: Heidegger non ha mai formulato un differimento all’infinito della presenza e non ha intenzione di mettere in questione il primato della presenza, che è la forma del darsi dell’essere nell’essente. Per questo motivo Dastur definisce Derrida come «il pensatore dell’assenza della presenza, di una presenza indefinitamente differita» e Heidegger come quello della «presenza dell’assenza, dell’estraneità dell’essente che emerge dal niente ed è portato dal niente» (p. 132).
La sezione del libro dedicata al confronto comune tra Husserl, Heidegger e Derrida mette bene in luce le sfide che il Derrida fenomenologo ha dovuto affrontare e i punti di distacco del suo pensiero rispetto all’impostazione fenomenologica in generale. Le questioni più controverse riguardano, com’è naturale aspettarsi, i problemi dell’origine e della temporalità, che trasposti su un terreno di studio più concreto corrispondono ai problemi della teologia e della storicità. Dastur evidenzia in maniera molto chiara che la differenza fondamentale tra Derrida e i due pensatori tedeschi risiede nel dato di fatto che la decostruzione non è un’analisi, ossia una regressione che porta a un’origine indecomponibile (p. 86). Non si cerca quindi di arrivare a un’elemento primo della nostra esperienza del mondo, cosa che il tardo Husserl vuole fare riabilitando l’esperienza antipredicativa della doxa e Heidegger ritornando alle esperienze originarie a partire dalle quali sono state definite le prime determinazioni dell’essere. Dal punto di vista del discorso sulla deità, questa rinuncia all’origine e alla validità fondamentale di un principio dei principi ha portato ad assimilare il pensiero derridiano della traccia e della differenza a una teologia negativa, cosa che in Husserl e Heidegger non può trovare luogo: da una parte infatti nella fenomenologia trascendentale la forma irriducibile di tutta l’esperienza, vale a dire l’egoità, precede anche la deità; dall’altra anche l’ontologia heideggeriana mostra di pensare la divinità al di là della totalità dell’essente, ma non dell’essere. Analogamente, trasponendo questo procedimento sul campo della storicità, Dastur ci fa vedere come il rifiuto di un’origine trascendentale e di una concezione ermeneutica e totalizzante dell’essere portano Derrida a respingere sia la proposta husserliana di una “storia trascendentale”, intesa come storia di ciò che rimane identico e può essere indefinitamente ripetuto, sia l’idea heideggeriana di una storia dell’essere, ossia della comprensione e riappropriazione dell’essere da parte del Dasein e del suo ritorno ad esso. Rinunciando a ogni originarietà, Derrida concepisce piuttosto la storia come gioco e scrittura della disseminazione: «Se ogni segno è una marca e quindi una ri-marca nella misura in cui essa non è originaria, se non vi sono che delle marche derivate, allora non è possibile stabilire tra di loro una gerarchia, né pensare la storia nella forma di un flusso continuo di tempo» (p. 105).
Déconstruction et phénoménologie. Derrida en débat avec Husserl et Heidegger è un’opera illuminante che ci offre la possibilità di ripensare il rapporto di Derrida con i suoi maestri e delinea una specie di map of misreading, o meglio una mappa della disseminazione che il filosofo della différance ha operato sul testo di Husserl e Heidegger. Se infatti la filosofia derridiana non può darsi che come scrittura della disseminazione, bisogna tener conto che ogni sua lettura e ogni sua scrittura a margine sono in una certa misura un misreading e un miswriting. Françoise Dastur evidenzia senza possibilità di fraintendimento quali sono a suo avviso i punti in cui Derrida si è tenuto fedele al testo e quali quelli dove un certo détournement è avvenuto, restituendoci le idee dei filosofi tedeschi al di qua della loro ricostruzione e decostruzione derridiana. Così facendo, l’autrice ci mostra come certe contrapposizioni teoriche siano state spesso esagerate o forzate e suggerisce che Husserl e Heidegger siano più vicini al pensiero della differenza di quanto si possa pensare. Ciò nonostante, anche i punti di distacco sono presentati con precisione inequivocabile, evitando di ricondurre i tre autori a un unico pensiero della differenza e salvaguardando l’originalità di ognuno.
Questa restituzione del pensiero di Husserl e Heidegger è sicuramente il punto di pregio più apprezzabile dell’opera, che in generale si presenta come uno studio rigoroso e accurato. Ciò che avrebbe potuto essere sottolineato con maggiore chiarezza e vigore è il passo in avanti che Derrida ha compiuto rispetto ai suoi predecessori attraverso la decostruzione e il pensiero dell’evento e che lo ha reso, come ha scritto giustamente Dastur, un pensatore dell’«assenza della presenza». Derrida riconosce con grande onestà intellettuale e con una certa ironia (che ha spesso portato al fraintendimento dei suoi testi) la paradossalità fondamentale di qualunque fenomenlogia genetica dell’origine e di ogni pensiero ermeneutico della riappropriazione e della riconduzione dell’altro al medesimo. Per questo motivo Derrida si distacca dalla concezione heideggeriana dell’Ereignis come coappartenenza di uomo ed essere e rappresenta l’événement come una venuta impossibile dell’Altro che non riusciamo a comprendere. È proprio questo messianismo senza messianismo o messianismo deserto di cui Derrida parla in Marx and Sons e in altri testi della sua produzione più tarda che rappresenta il motivo di allontanamento più pronunciato rispetto ai suoi maestri. Su questo punto cercare una comunicazione e un’apertura verso i suoi predecessori si rivela un compito difficilmente sostenibile, perché è proprio attraverso l’idea di una differenza e di un evento indecostruibili che Derrida vuole inaugurare un pensiero della (quasi-) origine e del (quasi-) trascendentale che rinunci definitivamente a una fondazione nell’egoità o nel Dasein.