Susan Gottlöber (Ed.): Max Scheler in Dialogue, Springer, 2022

Max Scheler in Dialogue Book Cover Max Scheler in Dialogue
Contributions to Phenomenology, Vol. 113
Susan Gottlöber (Ed.)
Springer
2022
Hardback 49,00 €
XIV, 272

Roman Ingarden: Ce que nous ne savons pas des valeurs

Ce que nous ne savons pas des valeurs Book Cover Ce que nous ne savons pas des valeurs
Roman Ingarden. Translated by Patricia Limido
Éditions Mimésis
2021
Paperback 14,00€
152

Reviewed by: Noëlle Miller (University of Vienna)

Dans sa préface intitulée « L’énigme des valeurs » la traductrice Patricia Limido contextualise cet essai dans l’œuvre de Roman Ingarden et résume son raisonnement avant d’en proposer la première traduction française. Bien qu’il développe sa théorie des valeurs à partir et souvent à l’aide d’exemples tirés du domaine esthétique (une de ses premières œuvres majeures est L’œuvre d’art littéraire) elle s’attache à juste titre à montrer que le réel enjeu de recherche d’Ingarden est toujours d’ordre ontologique. En effet Roman Ingarden se propose de démontrer que les conditions de possibilité des valeurs – esthétiques, morales, intellectuelles – existent objectivement. Car des valeurs dépendent la responsabilité morale de l’homme et ses exigences. Avant de qualifier les valeurs plus avant, trois problèmes se posent à une théorie des valeurs qui expliquent le titre Ce que nous ne savons pas des valeurs. D’abord il faut identifier les différents domaines de valeur pour en dégager des rapports de hiérarchie ou de conditionnement, ensuite leur structure ontologique, sont-elles rattachées à des objets porteurs telles des propriétés, auquel cas les valeurs seraient objectivement fondées et sinon troisièmement sont-elles objectives ou subjectives, c’est-à-dire relatives. Limido regrette qu’Ingarden réduise finalement les valeurs à deux domaines : les valeurs vitales et culturelles. Dans cet essai il se limite même aux valeurs esthétiques et morales et cherche à déterminer leur forme, leur matière et leur mode d’être. En particulier les valeurs possèdent « une valence » (Wertigkeit) qui excède la forme et la matière, et qui fait que la valeur a une pertinence et n’est pas une illusion ou une apparence. À côté des limites de l’analyse ontologique, la valeur est exposée au jugement et à la reconnaissance subjective. C’est pourquoi il commence d’abord par essayer de les identifier, à qualifier plus avant leur mode d’être spécifique. Les valeurs ne sont pas des objets, « mais des « quelque chose » individuels, plutôt apparentés à l’ordre des qualités individuelles »[1]. Pourtant elles ne sont pas des propriétés ni des caractéristiques, car elles sont inséparables d’un tout (unselbständig) qui rend possible leur survenance. Elles ne peuvent pas non plus être des propriétés dérivées, car c’est précisément sa nature ou son essence même qui en fait une valeur. Elles ne dépendent pas non plus des récepteurs, puisqu’elles valent en soi et pour soi. La valeur des yeux par exemple sera variable pour un musicien ou pour un automobiliste qui n’en font respectivement pas le même usage, pourtant la valeur des yeux est véritable. Ainsi y a-t-il des valeurs non perçues, mais qui conserve quand même leur réalité. Finalement il les qualifie de superstructure (Überbau), ni propriétés complètement indépendantes des objets, ni réductible à l’objet sensible lui-même. Elles apparaissent « sur la base d’un fondement dont elle dérive et qu’en même temps elle dépasse »[2]. Patricia Limido rapproche ce concept ingardien des philosophes Donald Davidson pour la notion équivoque de survenance. Comme Ingarden le philosophe analytique Eddy Zemach a la volonté de fonder objectivement les valeurs et conclue que « les propriétés esthétiques surviennent ou émergent des propriétés non-esthétiques »[3]. Elles sont donc réelles parce qu’elles dépendent de traits qui caractérisent objectivement des objets mais non réductibles à ceux-là. Le passage de la perception phénoménale au jugement esthétique ou moral s’opère par le désir ou tout autre relation intentionnelle telles les croyances et les émotions. Si les conditions d’observation sont les mêmes pour tous, alors cette relation intentionnelle est également objective pour Zemach. Ces conditions peuvent être l’apprentissage scientifique ou des connaissances spécifiques pour pouvoir juger d’une œuvre. Or Ingarden doute de cette relation invariante et attribue aux valeurs un mode d’être inédit.

Finalement c’est un rapport dialectique que Patricia Limido expose et souligne chez Ingarden : les valeurs sont des phénomènes observables, matériels et sont en même conditionné ontologiquement, des conditions de possibilité que nous constituons aussi, « la part d’activité et de passivité du récepteur »[4].

Ce que nous ne savons pas des valeurs

Dans son premier chapitre « multiplicité et contrariété des valeurs », Ingarden se pose le problème de la diversité des valeurs et choisit de les catégoriser en valeurs vitales et valeurs culturelles. Il soulève aussi dès le départ la difficulté de délimitation : une valeur morale comme le courage ou l’héroïsme peut être considérée une valeur esthétique et vice-versa. Il nous manque un principium divisionis qui nous permettrait de diviser les valeurs fondamentalement esthétiques de celles fondamentalement morales. C’est la détermination qualitative qui distingue généralement les valeurs. Intuitivement nous pouvons ordonner les valeurs apparentées, mais quant à ce qui constitue cette parenté, il est difficile d’en donner une définition conceptuelle. De plus, à l’intérieur même d’une qualité telle la « beauté », il existe différents types fondamentaux, telle la grâce ou la perfection et différentes significations. « Bon » n’a pas une signification morale dans tous les contextes. Les valeurs positives se délimitent aussi de leur corollaire négatif, qui a aussi une qualité spécifique. Ces contradictions font qu’il faut déterminer les conditions d’apparition des valeurs : un homme libre et psychiquement sain sont des conditions nécessaires mais pas suffisantes. Mais même si on arrivait à déterminer « la totalité des conditions nécessaires et éventuellement suffisantes pour la réalisation de telles valeurs »[5] rien ne peut remplacer l’intuition selon Ingarden. « Rien ne peut nous libérer du devoir scientifique qui nous incombe d’exercer la vision intuitive [der intuitive Erschauung] de la spécificité des valeurs, tout comme de l’effort spirituel qui lui est lié »[6]. Repérer la qualité d’une valeur est un moment indispensable, mais ne nous éclaire pas encore sur ce qui la détermine constitutivement. On peut encore chercher à déterminer les valeurs par rapport aux comportements qu’elle suscite, mais là aussi elle ne remplace pas l’appréhension conceptuelle d’une valeur. Car réduire une valeur à son vécu ou à l’attitude adoptée revient à dire qu’en réalité il n’existe que des ressentis subjectifs. C’est la conception des positivistes tel Leon Petrazycki qui n’autorisent aucune métaphysique des valeurs et rejette leur objectivité. Par rapport à une œuvre d’art par exemple il y aura autant d’états de plaisir que de récepteurs est pourtant la valeur unique de ce tableau existe bel et bien, indépendamment des admirateurs ou de ceux qui seront insensibles à sa beauté.

Malgré les difficultés donc Roman Ingarden refuse de capituler à définir les valeurs comme le fait Max Scheler par exemple[7] et tient au contraire à en démontrer leur scientificité. Il retient donc pour ce premier chapitre que ce qui distingue les valeurs sont leur matière, moment qualitatif qui se laissent abstraire, dont il existe deux cas de figures : A est inséparable unilatéralement de B, alors A ne se rencontrera qu’en présence de B. Ou alors A est dépendant de B équivoquement et apparaîtra avec un apparenté de B, Bn. Toute valeur individuelle présentant une qualité Bn appartiendra à l’espèce de valeur A. Les moments abstraits d’une valeur peuvent donc servir de principe de répartition à la formation de ses types individuels. Mais un principe qui distingue les types fondamentaux de valeurs reste encore ouvert.  La matière peut donc servir à différencier des types subordonnés de valeurs.

Quant à ce qui distingue les valeurs fondamentales, il semblerait que ce soit leur forme, dont traite le deuxième chapitre « La forme de la valeur ». Au premier abord il semble que la valeur soit la propriété d’un objet, elle est toujours valeur de l’objet auquel elle appartient. Cependant beaucoup d’objet, processus et choses physiques, ne sont pas doués de valeur, mais seulement de propriétés physiques, forme spatiale, densité etc… Il faut donc différencier les valeurs des « propriétés chosales de l’objet »[8], leurs caractéristiques physiques. Il existe alors deux éventualités : soit la valeur est une propriété secondaire, soit elle provient de la relation entre l’objet et la personne qui entre en contact avec lui. C’est parce qu’une chose a une certaine forme qu’elle est belle : la valeur « belle » tient à sa propriété physique de la forme. Dans ce cas la valeur serait une propriété dérivée, secondaire de la première, qui est sa caractéristique physique. Une autre manière de déterminer la valeur d’un objet serait de l’organiser selon l’utilité, les sentiments ou les désirs qu’il suscite pour la personne. Encore faudrait-il pouvoir retenir les propriétés qui entrent en ligne de compte pour constituer la valeur : Ce n’est pas parce qu’une lampe a une lumière utile à l’homme que cette utilité constitue la valeur de la lampe. L’utilité serait à son tour dérivée d’une autre valeur, accomplir un travail à l’aide de la lumière par exemple. Une autre conception constitue à dire que l’objet n’a de valeur que lorsqu’il est reconnu comme tel par l’homme ou la communauté humaine. Or toutes les valeurs ne sont pas relatives à quelque chose, telle que la « maturité » ou la « grâce ». Que la valeur viendrait de la relation reste donc très obscure.

Ainsi toutes les tentatives de donner une forme a la valeur soulèvent des doutes et ne permettent pas de la définir positivement. La valence d’un objet est son essence et semble être un mode d’être complètement nouveau, incomparable à une caractéristique. Ingarden met donc en doute l’identité selon laquelle les valeurs seraient des propriétés des objets, car c’est la valence qui fait qu’on privilégie la réalisation d’une valeur plutôt qu’une autre. Sa forme, appelée objectité [Gegenstandlichkeit], est structurellement différente de l’objet[9]. La valence excède la forme est la matière et constitue le mode d’être spécifique de la valeur. C’est elle qui exprime l’essence de la valeur et qui lui donne sa dignité. Elle n’est pas rajoutée de l’extérieur, sinon elle ne serait pas véritablement, authentiquement une valeur, mais émerge de l’objet auquel elle revient, elle est l’expression de son essence. Il appelle qualité-de-valeur ce qui détermine la hauteur, la négativité ou positivité et le mode d’être de la valeur.

Il va ensuite chercher à déterminer « le mode d’être de la valeur ». Les valeurs d’utilité et esthétique dépendent respectivement de l’outil et de l’œuvre d’art qui les portent. Le mode d’être des valeurs morales est complètement différent : elles n’existent pas réellement à la manière d’un événement ou d’un processus dans le temps, mais elles sont inséparables de leur porteur ou dérivées de leurs propriétés. Elles ne sont donc ni objet idéal, immuable, puisqu’elles peuvent se réaliser dans l’action d’un homme, ni objet réel, ni intentionnel. Les valeurs valent, c’est-à-dire qu’elles ont la forme du « devoir-être », qui peut ou non se réaliser. Quant aux critères des valeurs, lesquelles doivent ou non être, ceux-ci nécessitent un nouveau terrain de recherche. Ceci dépend en partie de la hauteur des valeurs.

Ce qu’Ingarden entend par « la hauteur » des valeurs signifie sa supériorité hiérarchique. Beardsley affirme qu’elle n’a de sens qu’à l’intérieur d’un type fondamental de valeur, à savoir qu’on ne peut comparer une valeur esthétique à une valeur morale, mais seulement des valeurs esthétiques entre elles par exemple. Qu’est-ce qui nous permet d’affirmer qu’une valeur morale est toujours plus haute qu’une valeur esthétique, même très haute ? Là aussi nous ne savons pas en quoi consiste exactement cette valeur, s’agit-il de son mode d’être, de sa qualité-de-valeur ou de son devoir-être. Les théories absolutistes affirment que la valeur d’un objet doit être strictement distinguée de son prix. « La hauteur de la valeur, au contraire, est déterminée de manière univoque et invariable par sa matière et seulement par elle, et elle reste indépendante des variations de prix »[10]. La hauteur relative résulte de la comparaison des objets doués de valeur entre eux, mais présuppose la valeur absolue. Les théories relativistes affirment que la valeur d’un objet dépend des circonstances, de la loi de l’offre et de la demande comme des innovations sur le marché qui font qu’une valeur devient « plus mauvaise ». Il n’existe donc pas encore de « critère » bien défini de la hauteur de la valeur.

Dans le prochain chapitre il s’attaque au problème de « l’autonomie des valeurs ». Lorsqu’Ingarden parle d’autonomie, il entend par là la séparabilité des valeurs entre elles, puisqu’on a vu que les valeurs étaient inséparables des objets auxquels elles appartenaient.  Si une valeur n’apparait sur un objet qu’en présence d’une autre valeur du même ou d’un autre type alors elle est « non-autonome ». Cette distinction entraîne aussi des conséquences sur la théorie de l’art, car pour nombre de théoricien et Platon lui-même l’Idée la plus haute est celle de l’identité du Bien, du Beau et du Vrai. C’est-à-dire qu’il ne suffit pas à une œuvre d’art d’être « belle », encore faut-il qu’elle serve des valeurs morales et la vérité soit en montrant des hommes moraux, soit au contraire en dépeignant des valeurs négatives comme le fait le courant réaliste. Ce formalisme repose justement sur le fait qu’il ne reconnaît pas, contrairement à la théorie de « l’art pour l’art », de valeurs esthétiques intrinsèques à l’art. Cette querelle est dû à l’insuffisance de distinction sur le caractère spécifique des valeurs. Une autre source de confusion entre les types de valeurs, leur dépendance ou indépendance sur un objet, est dû à notre expérience et sensibilité faussée. Ceci est dû aux modifications que les valeurs subissent mutuellement de manière bilatérale ou unilatérale. Dans une œuvre architecturale par exemple la symétrie peut apparaître sur fond d’asymétrie ou dans une œuvre littéraire le lyrique après le tragique. Ces valences peuvent s’harmoniser comme elles peuvent annuler leur effet et partant ne pas être perçues.  C’est pour cela que l’étude de l’autonomie et de l’indépendance des valeurs est d’une grande importance pour l’analyse des objets esthétiques.

Le dernier chapitre « La fondation des valeurs » interroge le problème de l’objectivité des valeurs à proprement parler. Quelle est la relation entre la valeur et son objet et comment celle-ci est-elle fondée dans celui-là ? Il expose alors les deux positions opposées qu’il qualifie chacune de dogmatique. Soit on admet une coordination nécessaire des propriétés qui permettent l’apparition d’une valeur dans un objet, soit on la réfute et décide par-là que les valeurs se montrent de manière tout à fait contingente. Pourtant les valeurs se montrent sur le « visage » des œuvres d’art et on est porté à croire qu’il existe des fondements théoriques à une science de l’art, comme à une science de la morale.

En conclusion, Ingarden, on l’aura vu, définit les valeurs presque entièrement de manière négative, par ce qui nous manque et ce qui nous reste à savoir quant à leur nature, ce faisant déployant en même temps un vocabulaire susceptible d’en rendre compte et toujours mû par la conviction intrinsèque à son intuition, que les valeurs, ou leur possibilité, existent. C’est ce rappel justement qui, pour la traductrice, fait la « valence », pour reprendre ses termes, de cet essai aujourd’hui. Nous saluons la traduction française de cet essai, paru d’abord en polonais puis en allemand, pour avoir trouvé des équivalents adéquats à la terminologie très technique d’Ingarden et du courant phénoménologique en général.


[1] Roman Ingarden. 2021. Ce que nous ne savons pas des valeurs, préface et traduction française par Patricia Limido, p. 26. Sesto S. Giovanni: Editions Mimesis.

[2] Ibid, 32.

[3] Ibid, 35.

[4] Ibid, 43.

[5] Ibid, 58.

[6] Ibid, 60.

[7] Ibid, 66.

[8] Ibid, 74.

[9] Ibid, 81.

[10] Ibid, 116.

Anthony J. Steinbock: Knowing by Heart: Loving as Participation and Critique, Northwestern University Press, 2021

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Karol Wojtyla: Person and Act and Related Essays, The Catholic University of America Press, 2021

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Edward Baring: Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy

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Is Catholicism a Religion?

Over the last decades, scholars have increasingly called into question the universal validity of the category “religion” as referring to a supposed ahistorical constant domain of all human mind and civilization, the domain of faith. The claim has characteristically been that, even though nowadays we often speak and think of religion this way, both in everyday life and in scholarship, in fact our notion of religion is a historical construct. This conceptual construct, so the claim, is fashioned after a specific cultural tradition, the Christian West, which, as part of obtaining or preserving its global epistemic hegemony, has asserted its own culture – Christianity – as a universal and superior feature of human nature as such: religion. Consequently, all cultures would have their religions: the Jewish, the Greek, the Chinese, the Indian, the Aztec, which could therefore be compared and evaluated in view of the underlying paradigm – and ultimate paragon – of religion, Christianity.

This sort of critique of religion is commonly deployed in postcolonial-like discourses, which confront the Christian West with its non-Christian others. Could the same critique apply within Christianity itself (West vs. East) or even within the Western? Wouldn’t the construct “religion” arise not only from a geo-political bias, i.e. the West, but also from a chrono-political bias, i.e. Modernity? And if so, wouldn’t it give effect and perpetuate a bias within the Christian West, namely in favor of modern Christianity, marked by Protestantism and Secularism, so as to undermine premodern, Catholic forms of Christian civilization? Is Catholicism a religion?

There is much in Baring’s intriguing new book to suggest that Catholicism is in fact not primarily a religion, but a philosophy, or even – philosophy. The main theme of the book is continental philosophy, whose center according to Baring is phenomenology. Its explicit concern is intellectual and institutional genealogy, “the Making of Continental Philosophy”, namely how a specific direction in 20th century philosophy, phenomenology, has been able to transform “from a provincial philosophy in southwest Germany into a movement that spanned Europe” (2), and so to become “continental”. Here and elsewhere in the book, Baring highlights the political significance of epistemic constellations, underlying the transnational, pan-European character of phenomenology as “continental” philosophy. His own historiography performatively turns away from national narratives (phenomenology in France, Husserl in Spain, Heidegger in Italy etc.) in search of a more transnational, universal ground. The movement that spread Husserl’s word among the nations (“the single most important explanation for the international success of phenomenology in the twentieth century”, 5), Baring suggests, is the one that goes under the name of the universal itself, the catholicos, Catholicism. Catholicism is the principal agent in this continental, transnational, catholic historiography of philosophy.

It is somewhat paradoxical that Baring’s professed transnational perspective nonetheless preliminary features phenomenology as belonging to “southwest Germany”, namely as originally particular, which accordingly begs the question of its continental success. According to this logic, this transnational success can only be accounted for by something beyond phenomenology itself, something more European, more universal, which would be Catholicism. However, in what sense would phenomenological philosophy itself not be sufficiently universal to account for its own universal spread? In what sense is Catholicism more obviously universal, and what explains its own international success, beyond the province of Rome?

Be that as it may, the notion of success, namely the ability of philosophy or thought, the ability of ideas, to obtain and expand their hold on the world, on reality, is central to Baring’s project. The primary transnational feature of Catholicism that the book foregrounds is its global institutional presence. Next to the transnational and universal, “catholic” historiographic perspective, Baring’s study accommodates Catholicism also in focusing on the worldly reality of the Church. The Catholicism that, as the book suggests, carried phenomenology across the continent is first and foremost a “network of philosophers and theologians that stretched across Europe” (7); “we can speak of ‘continental philosophy’ because phenomenology could tap into the networks of a Church that already operated on a continental scale” (11).

The story of “making” continental philosophy, as told in the book, is indeed concerned less with conceptual genealogy of ideas and more with how they spread. It’s a story of thought as an inter-personal, inter-institutional happening, where events of thinking take place between works, between thinkers. The great individual names of phenomenology – Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, the “phenomenological trinity” Baring calls them (6) – are there, but they function as basic coordinates for describing the real plot, which is scholarship. Primary and secondary literatures switch here places. The main protagonists of this book are neither the great names nor the great book, but their less known scholarly recipients, the clerics, who read, translate, introduce, interpret, discuss and institutionalize ideas, convene conferences and found archives, journals and schools. Most importantly, and this is one of the great achievements of this book, the history of thought is told through formative debates, such that polemics – and with it politics – is posited at the heart of epistemology, a real at the heart of the ideal. Could polemics too – next to transnationalism and institutionalism – count as Catholic heritage?

At any event, Baring tells continental philosophy’s church history, and according to him the early church of phenomenology was Catholic. To quote some impressive facts:

“self-professed Catholic philosophers produced more than 40 percent of all books and articles on Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler written in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch in the period before World War II, making Catholic phenomenology by far the largest constituent part of the early European reception” (8-9);

“Within Europe, phenomenology has been most successful in Catholic countries, while tending to skip, at least at first, the Protestant strongholds of Scandinavia and the United Kingdom. Across the Atlantic, it has flourished in Latin America and at Catholic universities in the United States, such as Notre Dame, Boston College, DePaul, and Duquesne. The geography of phenomenology is best described, not by the contours of mainland Europe, but by the reach of the ‘universal Church’.” (11).

What is certain, in Baring’s account Catholicism does not just function as a contingent carrier of phenomenological philosophy, a vessel which would remain external to the content that it spreads. The Church is not simply a vehicle for Husserl’s word. The network of catholic intellectuals and institutions does not feature in this book as a mere logistical structure, but as the institutional embodiment of its intellectual content, of thought. Is Catholicism a religion? In this book, the Catholic emerges primarily as a philosophy. Insofar as Catholicism accounts for making phenomenology the philosophy of the European continent, Baring argues, it is because “before existentialism and before phenomenology, the first continental philosophy of the twentieth century was Catholic.” (19)

What is Catholic philosophy? This question is not really developed in the book, which has a very clear answer: medieval scholastic philosophy as it has been oriented by the works of Thomas Aquinas, namely Thomism. In the relevant period for the book, the first decades of the 20th century, Catholic philosophy consisted in the attempt to renew Thomism, namely in neo-Thomism or neo-scholasticism, which according to Baring was in these decades “the largest and most influential philosophical movement in the world” (8). Neo-Thomism was global philosophy, which makes one wonder about the reason it was only able to turn phenomenology “continental”, but no more than that. Neo-Thomism, as Baring portrays it, had set to itself a daring task. It translated medieval philosophy into modern terms not in order to modernize this philosophy, but, on the contrary, in order to effect “a philosophical conversion of modernity, a movement from modern to medieval metaphysics” (14). Neo-Thomism was the Catholic mission to the Moderns, aiming to reconvert modernity “back to Catholicism” (ibid.).

“Conversion” is a key word in Baring’s book. It is the basic description of the intellectual event that it portrays, and the plot is articulated by the personal conversions – official or not – of the protagonists. What was the nature of the conversion “back to Catholicism”, which neo-Thomists were trying to generate? The answer to this question lies at the heart of Baring’s historiographic thesis: it designates the ultimate purpose of Catholic, neo-Thomist philosophy, explains why phenomenology was deemed useful for Catholic intellectuals to pursue this purpose and so would account for why Catholicism helped phenomenology to its continental and international success.

Were neo-Thomists interested in converting modernity, modern thought and philosophy, from secularism or atheism back to religion? Obviously, as already indicated, neo-scholasticism was not looking to promote “religion” in its modern, paradigmatically Protestant or secular sense. But furthermore, Baring most often does not describe Catholic thought in terms of religion or what is commonly – in modern discourse – associated with religion as a special domain, of faith, transcendent God, holiness, spirituality etc., in short, as a different domain than secular, atheological or even atheistic philosophy.

On the contrary: neo-Thomism was looking to renew Thomism, for which, as described by Baring, theology implied worldly thought. Catholic thinkers “were convinced that the world incarnated a divine order, and that the institution of the Catholic Church was the worldly locus of redemption” (14); God is present in “His effects in the world” (30), such that faith is deemed “the perfection of natural knowledge” (29). The goal of Neo-Thomists was accordingly, among others, to connect Catholicism to science, natural science: by going back to Aquinas they were trying to reconnect with Aristotle. In other words, whether or not Catholicism was interested, in the first decades of the 20th century, in renewing something like religion, in Baring’s book Catholic philosophy emerges as a powerful agent for the renewal of Aristotelian philosophy, which historically speaking is perhaps nothing but Western philosophy, or philosophy tout court. Just as philosophy’s first and ultimate concern is with Being, Baring’s Catholicism is concerned with “the Real”.

“The Real” is the central concept of Baring’s narrative, which thus connects the contemporary discourse on philosophy and religion with the contemporary philosophical conversation on realism. Explicating this connection may have been a useful way for Baring to provide a more precise explanation of what he understands by “the Real”. Considering the pivotal centrality of this concept for the book’s argument, it remains rather vague and sometimes ambivalent. In fact, its basic significance in this book seems to be above all polemic, in that it designates what neo-scholasticism, seeking to renew medieval, premodern philosophy, was asserting against modern thought. Indeed, throughout the book, Catholic positions are characterized in various ways as opposing the negation of realism by modern philosophy, namely as opposition to the idealism, relativism and subjectivism that would characterize modern thought.

That non-realism (a negation of or distance from the Real) is constitutive to modern philosophy, is a decisive presupposition of Baring’s project. The exact significance of this presupposed non-realism or idealism remains as much an open question as the exact meaning of “the Real”. If the supposed non-realism of modern philosophy means detachment from the worldly and natural order, in favor of some dimension of transcendence, of some supernatural or transcendental subjectivity, will or spirit, this would mean that modern thought, far from being secular and “worldly”, has rather become closer to religion, as a relation to the unworldly. This kind of analysis no doubt sits well with accounts of modernity, such as Hans Jonas’, as arising from man’s liberation from and subsequent domination of nature (NB: not against but precisely through modern, technological science), which would resemble or even be the avatar of ancient Gnosticism, religion of the Alien God. Neo-Thomism, working to effect on modernity a – as the title of Baring’s book reads – “Conversion to the Real”, which is actually a re-conversion, a movement back to the world, would accordingly be the modern permutation of the same anti-heresiological movement that for someone like Hans Blumenberg, for instance, accounted for the emergence of Christian doctrine. This movement may be described less as a conversion from philosophy to religion than as a conversion from religion back to philosophy, from faith back to reason.

Converting modern philosophy to the Real was in any case, so Baring, the missionary goal of neo-scholasticism in the first decades of the 20th century. It is for this mission that Catholic networks identified phenomenology as suitable and for this purpose they “made” it continental. The reason that phenomenology was found by neo-Thomist to be such a suitable discourse for deploying the conversion of non-realist modern philosophy to realism, Baring argues, is that phenomenological thought, to begin with Husserl’s notion of intentionality (consciousness is always of an object), was identified as an anti-idealist movement back to the Real within modern philosophy itself, so to speak a spontaneous movement of self-conversion: “phenomenological intentionality seemed to bypass the distortions of idealism and provide access to the mind-independent real. For neo-scholastics, phenomenology could help secular thinkers recognize God’s order in the world.” (14) How exactly neo-scholastic thinkers and institutions tried to achieve this goal, their more or less successful negotiations – and debates – among themselves, with phenomenology, as well as vis-à-vis other Catholic, Protestant and non-religious intellectual currents, and how all this contributed to the making of continental philosophy – this is the story told by Baring’s rich book.

One basic and far-reaching insight of Baring concerns the ambivalent nature of conversion: the shift from one conception to another at the same time connects both conceptions and thus opens the way to a counter-conversion, from the second conception to the first. Conversions work “in both directions” (16). This insight may be deemed as a structural principle that regulates – and complicates – basic dynamics in the history of thought, something like the Third Law of Intellectual Motion. It seems to be particularly significant in conversions that are not just spontaneous, but induced, namely in conversion projects, in missionary movements.With respect to the neo-Thomist mission to convert modern philosophy “back to Catholicism”, in order to do so it established “the Real” as a connection between modern phenomenology and medieval scholasticism, which would serve as a passage from the former to the latter. As Baring shows, however, this passage also facilitated the inverse movement, to the effect that the bridge built between Thomism and phenomenology also served Catholic thinkers to cross to the other side and to “break with Roman Catholicism” (15). The paradigmatic example discussed by Baring is Heidegger.

What is however the meaning of this counter-conversion, away from Catholicism, which according to Baring has become so prevalent in post-WWII phenomenology so as to completely obliterate its early Catholic years? Would it be that phenomenology, and continental philosophy, was moving away from religion, towards secular and atheistic thought? Is Catholicism religion? The question of religion, as already noted, interestingly does not explicitly frame the narrative of the book, which foregrounds instead the debate of realism vs. idealism. Catholicism is realism, but is it therefore more or less a religion?

It is only in the Epilog that Baring directly addresses the question of religion. “Continental philosophy today is haunted by religion” (343): the famous return to religion, a contemporary conversion – or perhaps even a contemporary mission? By whom – to whom? Is Baring’s book a part of this project, namely facilitating the passage from contemporary continental philosophy to religion by recalling how it was Catholicism that originally “made” phenomenology into continental philosophy? The “religious specters” that “haunt” continental philosophy today, Baring argues, indeed arise from its “family history”, namely phenomenology’s transmission to the world as it was “passed down through Catholic scholars” (344), so to speak phenomenology’s Catholic womb. The current return to religion in continental philosophy is connected to its Catholic heritage.

However, according to Baring’s further insight into the Third Law of Intellectual Movement, just as conversion is not only unidirectional, inheritance too is not simply linear. He points out that intellectual inheritance may pass on not just positive, affirmative doctrines, but also negative positions, what he terms “negative inheritance” (347). According to Baring’s analysis, it is by way of “negative inheritance” that phenomenology’s Catholic past, namely neo-Thomism, continues to operate within continental philosophy’s return to religion. In other words, Catholicism, as portrayed in Baring’s book, is present in this contemporary return to religion not as the positive agent, not as the agent of religion, but on the contrary in the negative, anti-religious positions – more specifically in their realism.

He brings the example of Quentin Meillassoux, who “presents himself as a rationalist ally to the natural sciences, seeking to reinvigorate realism after a period of idealist hegemony. Meillassoux is aware of his proximity to Thomism, which he defines as ‘the progressive rationalization of Judeo-Christianity under the influence of Greek philosophy’”. (348) Baring’s conclusion: “The atheist scourge of much contemporary continental philosophy appears as the inverted image of those Catholic thinkers who helped make philosophy continental in the first place.” (ibid.)  It is not in the return to religion but rather in the resistance to this return that current continental philosophy would be inspired by Catholicism, which consequently operates, at least in this context, not as a religion, but as anti-religion.

***

Synopsis of the Book:

Baring’s story is told in three chronological parts, which concern three different periods in the early history of phenomenology in its reception by Catholic scholars: 1900-1930, 1930-1940 and 1940-1950. The narrative is organized by another triad, three main figures of early German phenomenology, the “phenomenological trinity”: Husserl, Heidegger and Scheler, and the debates around them.

Part I, “Neo-Scholastic Conversion. 1900-1930” deals with the immediate Catholic reception of German phenomenology. Baring traces back the initial reception to a specific current within neo-Thomism, “progressive Thomism”, promoted by the Louvain School of Léon Noël, head of the Institut supérieur de Philosophie. Progressive Thomism was oriented by the work of Cardinal Désiré Mercier (Critériologie), who translated Thomist realism into the discourse of epistemology. This anti-Kantian epistemology was the site of early Catholic reception of Husserl, as told in Chapters 1 and 2. The first reception referred to The Logical Investigations of 1900-1901 and was enthusiastic, as Husserl’s anti-psychological notions, such as intentionality (which goes back through Brentano to scholasticism) and categorical intuition, appeared to secure epistemic access to “the objective order of the world” (40). “For Catholics around Europe, reading Husserl’s Logical Investigations was a revelation”, Baring writes (48). Modern philosophy’s “conversion to the Real” was celebrated by scholars such as Jospeh Geyser, Erich Przywara and the Milan School’s Agostino Gemelli, and even existentially performed through a personal conversion, such as by Edith Stein, to whom phenomenology has showen “the way into ‘the majestic temple of scholastic thought’” (75). All the more disappointing was Husserl’s return to the transcendental consciousness in his Ideen of 1913. The second reception identified in Husserl a second, reversed conversion, from realism back to idealism, which “was experienced by neo-scholastics as a betrayal— both of Husserl’s earlier work and, by implication, of their own project” (61).

Chapter 3 follows the intellectual development of early Heidegger, a phenomenological convert away from Catholicism. Influenced by Joseph Geyser, young Heidegger, “a progressive scholastic” (88), in his 1913 dissertation embraced Husserl’s anti-Psychologism, and in his 1916 Habilitaiton on Dun Scotus, the “pinnacle of Heidegger’s neo-scholastic period” (97), formulated a meaning-based realism. The disengagement is signaled in 1917, as Heidegger stated that Catholicism “forgot religion for theology and dogma” and looked for religious experience in Christian mysticism, Augustine and Protestants from Luther, Otto, Overbeck, Kierkegaard, Dilthey and Schleiermacher. Being and Time of 1927, so Baring’s perceptive analysis, features a curious atheism based on “two confessional strands” (113): Catholic ontology, but no longer perennis, and Protestant Dasein-analysis, but indifferent to faith.

Chapter 4 traces a similar dynamic with respect to Max Scheler, extending the plot from theory to ethics and politics. Scheler’s 1913 Formalism in Ethics provided a phenomenological access (Wert-nehmen, axiological intuition) to an “objective order of value” (140) and his personalism, the notion of Gesamtperson, gave this ethics a socio-political embodiment. Both combined offered practical philosophy to Catholic social revival and anti-liberal, anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist corporatism. Carl Muth’s influential Catholic magazine Hochland celebrated Scheler as “Black Nietzsche” (124) and intellectuals followed him in his early WWI patriotism, growing distance from nationalism and anti-republicanism in Weimar, such as Paul-Ludwig Landsberg’s “conservative revolution” (137). Disenchantment manifested itself, on the Catholic side, in doubts raised by neo-scholastics, such as Przywara, as to Scheler’s too heavy reliance on human intuition and emotional intentionality, and on Scheler’s side, in the pantheistic turn of his late work (1928, The Human Place in the Cosmos).

Part II, “Existential Journeys 1930-1940”, describes how, beyond its initial reception by neo-scholasticism, phenomenology “became a privileged battlefield in intra-Christian debates” (152). The central intra-Christian tension in Baring’s narrative is between neo-scholastics and existentialists. Chapter 5 tells about the rise of “Christian Existentialism across Europe” by portraying the tension between two converts to Catholicism, Gabriel Marcel and Jacques Maritain. Marcel (Metaphysical Journal, 1927; Being and Having, 1935), influence and mentor to existentialists such as Nicolai Berdyaev, René Le Senne, Jean Wahl as well as Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Paul Sartre, criticized neo-Thomist intellectualism as “hubris”, and insisted on the “unintelligibility of existence”, its embodiment and “mystery”. Maritain claimed “existential philosophy” describes rather Thomism itself, which deals with esse and acknowledges its mystery, deems it nevertheless “open to intellectual understanding” (163).

Chapter 6 goes back to the Catholic reception of Husserl and how during the 1930s it was shaped by a division within neo-scholasticism, between progressive and strict Thomists. Baring portrays this division through the “Critical Realism Debate”, concerning the attempt of the Louvain School’s progressives, such as Léon Noël and René Kremer, to base realism on epistemology, namely on critique of subjective knowledge (leading to post-WII “transcendental Thomism”). “Strict” Thomists such as Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain rejected the notion of “critical” – Cartesian or Kantian – realism as self-contradictory, insisting on the primacy of metaphysics over epistemology. Baring shows how this debate pressed progressive intellectuals, such as Kremer, Kurt Reinhart and Sofia Vanni Rovighi, who initially embraced Husserl’s phenomenology, to reject and rectify his perceived idealistic tendencies, especially as manifested in the Cartesian Meditations of 1931.

Chapter 7 presents the 1930s’ reception of Heidegger as the battleground for the inter-confessional debate between neo-Scholastics (such as Przywara, Alfred Delp and Hans Urs von Balthasar) and Protestants, in particular Karl Barth’s Kierkegaard-inspired Dialectical Theology. Baring describes this debate as arising from “two diametrically opposed, if symmetrical, accounts of Heidegger’s atheism: Thomists explained it by the restrictions placed upon Heidegger’s ontology by his (Protestant) prioritization of human subjectivity; Protestant theologians understood it through his attempt to ground the analysis of human finitude in an ontology, which arose from an excessive and Catholic faith in our rational capacities.” (213) In other words, both (dialectical theology’s) emphasis on the unintelligible and (neo-Thomist) emphasis on intelligibility could be construed, from the opposite  perspective, as subjectivist and so proto-atheistic. This leads Baring to the brilliant observation whereby “religious notes” of atheistic conceptions (he speaks of existentialism) may arise not from “uncomplicated inheritance of a believing antecedent, but rather as the reflection of a more distant voice, directed toward and bouncing of a common religious foe” (240), i.e. “negative inheritance”.

Chapter 8 returns to the reception of Scheler, “The Black Nietzsche”, in Catholic political thought. Baring shows how the Schelerian notion of social corpora as embodying spiritual order of values could support to conflicting conceptions of Catholic anti-liberal politics. Luigi Stefanini drew on Scheler to affirm a “hierarchical order of values” enacted by an authoritarian and totalitarian state, which led him to collaborate with the Fascist regime and even acknowledge “racial defense” as “an act of the sovereignty and transcendence of the spirit” (259). In contrast, for Paul-Louis Landsberg, as Paul Ludwig Landsberg was known in his French exile and anti-Fascist resistance, “the divine order is always to come and can never be fully worked out. For that reason, authoritarianism runs the risk of shutting down the process by which the true order is revealed” (263), which led him to reject Nazism and Communism. Baring exemplifies the same ambivalence in Scheler in the development of Emmanuel Mounier’s Catholic-Nietzschean magazine Esprit, from support of Vichy to Resistance and post-WII negotiations of Thomism and Marxism.

Part III, “Catholic Legacies 1940-1950”, discusses how after “the Catholics who had helped promote phenomenological ideas around Europe withdrew from the stage”, “[t[he script that they had written […] persisted, to be picked up and adapted by new actors.” (276) Chapter 9 is dedicated to the story of the Husserl Archives, famously smuggled from Germany to Belgium by the young Franciscan Herman Leo Van Breda, to be institutionalized within Louvain’s Institut Supérieur de Philosophie. According to Baring, after WWII Van Breda, who was looking for means to secure the archives’ further existence (which he obtained at last from UNESCO), realized that “the archives would flourish only if they became independent of the Church” (297). Catholicism, which made phenomenology continental, was now required, in order to prefect its own making, to retreat. Like the truth of Heidegger’s Beyng, the appearance of neo-Thomism in phenomenology was completed by the concealment of neo-Thomism in phenomenology’s Veröffentlichung. It is thus that the first volume of the Husserliana was dedicated to the Cartesian Meditations, “the text where Husserl distinguished his work most clearly from scholasticism” (300).

Chapter 10, the last one, indicates traces of neo-scholasticism in “Postwar Phenomenology”, once again through an intellectual tension, this time between the secular Merleau-Ponty and the Protestant Paul Ricoeur. Both of “Marcelian bent”, affirming embodiment and existence versus idealism, their diverging interpretations of Marcel reproduced the debate between Thomism and Existentialism, inasmuch as Merleau-Ponty emphasized the intentional order of perception and Ricoeur the mystery and the “fault”. The disagreement on Marcel was intertwined with a disagreement on Husserl, which reproduced the debate between progressive and strict Thomism: whereas Merleau-Ponty, like the Louvain School, strove to protect Husserl’s realism from his transcendentalism, Ricoeur, like Maritain, read Husserl as an idealist. Commenting on the Protestant philosopher’s surprising affinity to strict Thomism, Baring provides a precious polemic triangulation, which is perhaps the real glory of scholastic sophistication: “Against the Thomists, Ricoeur denied that Christians could use philosophy to defend religious dogmas. Against the Barthians, Ricoeur did think philosophy retained an important role. It could challenge the pretension of science to have provided ‘a final solution.’ Christian philosophy would thus be a ‘science of limits, an essentially Socratic, ironic position [. . .] forbidding all thought to be totalitarian’.” (327)

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Three Concluding Reflections:

  1. The key concept of the book’s argument is “the Real”. Catholicism promoted phenomenology for the sake of converting modern philosophy to the Real. As noted above, however, realism signifies in this book primarily polemically, in contrast to the alleged idealism of modern thought. However, as Baring insightfully shows with respect to “atheism”, polemic meanings are unstable and easily turned around. Just like criticism of “atheism” can be found in any religious position against any other religious position, isn’t criticism of “idealism” as detached from the real, i.e. as false, inherent to the disagreement of any philosophical position against all the others? Wasn’t metaphysical dogmatism for Kant too disconnected from reality, as the Ptolemaic system for Copernicus? For Hegel, an arche-idealist, the real was the reasonable. Baring shows how neo-Thomism too deemed the real intelligible, whereas existentialism and dialectical theology experienced reality in unintelligibility.
  2. It seems that ultimately “the Real” for Baring signifies the limit of human autonomy and power, where reason means intelligibility of – and subjection to – the given, eternal, cosmic order (Thomism), in contrast to modern “self-affirmation of reason” (Blumenberg). Conversion to the Real means something like undoing modern hubris, disempowering the human. Baring portrays at least two divergent ways of doing so in Catholic thought, rationalism and existentialism, both inspired by Husserl’s phenomenology. One may wonder, however, whether both modes of “the Real” are equally defining for continental philosophy. The very term “continental” philosophy, determines reason by existence, i.e. actual geography, politics, history, which arguably condition more continental than analytic thought. It is rather Anglo-American philosophy that may be said to represent anti-idealist, positive rationalism, where reason is limited qua “analytic”. Wouldn’t this modern philosophy – which is closer to natural sciences, and arises from phenomenology only within its alliance with logical positivism against psychologism – be a more suitable ally for neo-scholasticism?
  3. There seems to be a third way of limiting or determining reason, which is very present in Baring’s study, albeit unthematized as such. Next to rationalism (reason determined by given logical order) and existentialism (reason determined by given non-logical being), his narrative centrally features also the determination of reason through the inter-personal plurality of thought: thought as a school, the institution that gave scholasticism its name. As such, scholasticism determines reason neither by the given intelligible, nor by the unintelligible, but by the overintelligible, namely by the open excess of thought as polemics. By choosing the debate as a primary figure of thought, Baring’s book manifests perhaps scholarship itself, next to analytic and continental philosophies, as a third post-modern manifestation of scholastic realism, and perhaps of philosophy überhaupt.

Balázs M. Mezei, Matthew Z. Vale (Eds.): Philosophies of Christianity, Springer, 2019

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Eva Reyes-Gacitúa, Antonio Calcagno (Eds.): Edith Stein’s An Investigation Concerning the State, Springer, 2020

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