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

History of the Present: The Contemporary and its Culture Book Cover History of the Present: The Contemporary and its Culture
Morality, Society and Culture
David Roberts
Routledge
2022
Paperback
152

Reviewed by: Moritz v. Kalckreuth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andreea Smaranda Aldea, David Carr, Sara Heinämaa (Eds.): Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters

Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters Book Cover Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters
Routledge Research in Phenomenology
Andreea Smaranda Aldea, David Carr, Sara Heinämaa (Eds.)
Routledge
2022
Ebook
292

Reviewed by: Matt Burch, Niclas Rautenberg, and Diego Martínez-Zarazúa

Routledge Research in Phenomenology promises cutting-edge, historically informed phenomenological research that enlivens contemporary debates. Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters—edited by Andreea Smaranda Aldea, David Carr, and Sara Heinämaa—delivers on that promise. After a helpful introduction, its 15 original chapters showcase phenomenology’s critical potential across diverse domains, with special emphasis on the tradition’s rich methodological resources.

The volume is a timely contribution with treasures in store for everyone from the verdant novice to the veteran phenomenological researcher. Since we cannot capture its full content in the space available here, we try something else. Dividing the chapters evenly between us (Burch: 2–6; Rautenberg 7–11; and Martínez-Zarazúa 12–16), each of us briefly summarizes their respective section and then explores an important theme, problem, or debate engaged therein. While far from comprehensive, we hope the approach reflects the volume’s potential to enrich, recast, and transform contemporary debates both within and beyond the borders of phenomenological research.

Chapters 2–6: Classical Phenomenology and the Problem(s) of History

Although chapters 2–6 raise many important issues, I will focus on how they contribute to the longstanding debate about the problems history poses for phenomenological research. But first, a brief summary of their contents: David Carr kicks things off in chapter 2 with a characteristically clear and scholarly case that phenomenology is best understood as a critical method designed to answer not the question of metaphysics (What exists?), nor the question of epistemology (How can we know what exists?), but rather a distinctive question staked out by Husserl, namely, Of what exists, or may exist, how is it given, and what are the conditions of the possibility of its being so given? In chapter 3, Michela Summa explores the important and under-researched topic of the epistemic function of exemplarity in critical philosophy, highlighting important parallels between Kant and Husserl’s respective approaches. Julia Jansen follows this up in chapter 4 with a lucid account of Husserl’s phenomenological method, showing how it enables four fundamental types of critique, which, she argues, could enrich an array of critical and normative projects. In chapter 5, Andreea Smaranda Aldea makes the case that Husserl’s mature phenomenology is radically critical, and she endeavors to clarify the conditions for the possibility of its distinctive critical character, namely, a “self-reflexive thinking of a specific kind: imagining reflection” (62).  Finally, in chapter 6, Mirja Hartimo argues that, with the practice of Besinnung, Husserl furnishes us with a hermeneutic method that we can use in conjunction with transcendental phenomenology to critique contemporary practices.

So, what is the debate about history to which these chapters contribute? In truth, it’s a cluster of related debates. Critics have argued that history throws up a host of problems that classical phenomenological methods cannot handle or, in many cases, even detect. For a non-exhaustive but representative list of such problems, critics argue that classical phenomenology:

  • Is blind to the socio-historical preconditions of its own activity (Horkheimer 1972 [1937], 190).
  • Lacks resources to criticize historical practices and “world-disclosures” (Tugendhat 2011 [1970]).
  • Fails to appreciate how inquirers find themselves “in medias res,” caught in history’s sway, interpreting phenomena, rather than grasping them in complete evidential fulfillment (Ricoeur 1975, 91).
  • Tends to elide the material, empirical, and historical conditions of experience (Alcoff 2000, 39).
  • Often illegitimately assumes that “we can separate out what is empirical from what is transcendental in the mixture of experience” (Al-Saji 2017, 146).
  • Fails to tackle the “quasi-transcendental, historically-grounded study of particular lifeworlds” (Guenther 2021, 5).
  • Cannot reliably bring deep-seated historical biases into view (Cerbone 2022).

Since most of these criticisms target Husserl’s phenomenology, a reader who took them at face value would be forgiven for believing that phenomenology’s inventor was borderline oblivious to the challenges posed by history.

Dispelling that belief is one of the major goals of Phenomenology as Critique. According to its editors, the belief that Husserl’s phenomenology is fundamentally ahistorical is one of several “widespread misconceptions” that “classical- and existential-phenomenological authors have already discussed in detail and patiently corrected” (7). Husserl was profoundly preoccupied with the problems history posed for phenomenological research. If meaning is historically transmitted, he worried, then reflecting on the pre-given world with the epoché and reduction would never deliver a complete account of meaning-constitution, because our reflective standpoint is saturated with sedimented historical meanings that rarely come to explicit awareness. Thus, as scholars have discussed for decades now (e.g., see Aguirre 1970; Carr 1974; Welton 1983), in his writings from 1917–1921, Husserl distinguished between “static” and “genetic” methods: static phenomenology consisted of synchronic constitutive analyses of how phenomena are given, while genetic phenomenology studied individual subjectivity’s concrete diachronic self-temporalization by analyzing developmental, associative phenomena like habit formation. What’s more, in the 1930s, Husserl pioneered another methodological approach that Anthony Steinbock (1995a; 1995b; 2017) has dubbed “generative phenomenology.” The method is “generative” in the sense that it studies the “constitution of normatively significant lifeworlds” over the course of generations, thereby uncovering “the dimension of sense-constitution which takes place historically, geologically and intersubjectively” (Steinbock 1995b, 59).

For the editors’ of Phenomenology as Critique, then, the apparent problems mentioned above stem not from Husserl’s failure to come to terms with history, but rather from his critics’ failure to appreciate the historical development of his thought in depth and detail. Of course, many of Husserl’s critics have studied this dimension of his work closely; they just think it lacks critical import in some important respect(s). Thus, the volume aims to challenge that belief too.

Carr’s contribution helps undercut the belief that Husserl’s phenomenology is fundamentally ahistorical. Towards the end of chapter 2, he notes a fundamental ambiguity in the Crisis’s portrayal of Galileo’s impact: on the one hand, Husserl maintains that, although Galileo changed the way we think about the world, we still live in the same world as our forebears; on the other hand, Husserl implies that Galileo’s thought in fact changed the pre-given world, and so we are not in the exact same world as our forebears. In other words, the “lifeworld varies historically” (Carr 23). “So,” Carr writes, “if phenomenology is a critique of everyday experience […] then it would seem appropriate to ask: whose ordinary experience, and when? That is, in what historical context?” (ibid.; Carr’s emphasis). From this perspective, the belief that Husserl was insensitive to the historical dimension of meaning-constitution loses credibility.

What about the second belief, namely, that the way Husserl handles history lacks critical bite? In the chapters I covered, Aldea and Hartimo do the most to challenge this belief. Building on some of their earlier work (Aldea 2016; Hartimo 2018), they argue that Husserl’s method of Besinnung makes classical phenomenology capable of radical historical critique. I cannot cover every aspect of their complex accounts here; nor can I trace the parallels between their work and the wider scholarly literature on Husserl’s genetic and generative methods; instead, I try to synthesize what I see as the compatible aspects of their accounts into a rough picture of Husserl’s method for historical critique.

In that picture, Besinnung is a method designed to reflect on, critically evaluate, and revise our practices. Hartimo recommends that we think of Besinnung as one of the various attitudes identified by Husserl. Just as the naturalistic and personalistic attitudes enable us to see the world from a determinate cognitive standpoint, Besinnung gives us access to “a teleological-historical world” (Hartimo 80). In this attitude, the inquirer begins with a target practice in its “present-day form,” and then looks “back at its development,” moving “forward and backward in a zigzag pattern” (Hua VI 59/58 cited by Aldea 57). The “zigzag” here refers to the method’s recursive character. Looking back to the beginnings of the practice, the inquirer attempts to discern its original goals and purposes, not just as a matter of intellectual history but also through an act of empathy with its original practitioners; then the inquirer considers their interpretations of the practice’s past against the reality of its present; and they repeat this process recursively across the practice’s historical development. In this way, the inquirer works through the “layers of sedimented meanings, values, norms, commitments, and goals […] that condition our experience of the lifeworld as well as our own theoretical work” (Aldea 57).

This teleological-historical inquiry becomes radically critical in conjunction with transcendental phenomenology. Besinnung reveals the goals and purposes of a practice that typically remain sedimented in consciousness as habitual beliefs; and transcendental phenomenology allows us to evaluate the “genuineness” of “the normative commitments, goals, and values […] inherited from the previous generations” (Hartimo 91). Thus, the approach puts the phenomenologist in position to recommend revisions to contemporary practice.

Although it paints a promising picture of classical phenomenology’s resources for historical critique, it would be premature, I think, to say that this line of research can defuse the diverse criticisms highlighted above. What’s more, in addition to disagreements with classical phenomenology’s critics, I think Aldea and Hartimo should expect pushback from phenomenologists who find Husserl’s historical methods unappealing. Specifically, although Aldea assures us that the “self-reflective reflection [of Besinnung] […] remains transcendental-eidetic through and through” (62), and Hartimo concurs (81), others might demur.

Is Besinnung consistent with Husserl’s claim that the epoché rules out speculation, construction, and guesswork? Can it satisfy his demand that every phenomenological claim rest on evidence that the inquirer and their interlocutors can redeem for themselves from the first person-perspective? Can the phenomenologist first-personally grasp the sub-psychic genesis of sedimented meanings and the cultural-historical transmission of generational meaning, or do such analyses invariably rely on conjecture?

Perhaps more importantly, is Besinnung consistent with what contemporary practitioners think phenomenology ought to be? Some phenomenologists might think Besinnung sounds too much like armchair social science. And rather than speculating about the historical development of social practices and sedimented generational meaning, they might prefer to collaborate with researchers in the human sciences, or at least to draw heavily on their work. In other words, they might prefer to tackle the tasks identified by Aldea and Hartimo with a division of labor more like the one Jansen describes in her contribution. Building on a distinction I draw between core phenomenology and applied phenomenology (Burch 2021), Jansen describes critical phenomenological work as “a mode of applied phenomenology that focuses on problems that require interdisciplinary research (mostly, but not exclusively, in the human sciences)” (54). Why prefer Besinnung to this kind of interdisciplinary approach?

Although Steinbock’s contribution does not occur in my section, he offers a powerful answer to this question that should be mentioned here. Phenomenologists should prefer Besinnung, because “phenomenology—as Selbstbesinnung (first-person singular or plural) and as generative—takes subjective and intersubjective experience as the touchstone for clarifying the meaning of social praxis and the norms generated within that human activity”; thus, it “describe[s] human crises critically in terms of political, cultural, psychic, sub-psychic, emotional, and aesthetic relations, etc., as they are lived through and not only as externally generated in a particular domain” (157, Steinbock’s emphasis). If true, this is indeed an excellent reason to prefer a thoroughgoingly phenomenological approach.

But is it true? Some will argue that Husserl’s historical methods target phenomena that lie beyond the reach of first-person reflection, and so they run afoul of his own demand for first-person evidence, morphing instead into a kind of a quasi-Hegelian project of rational reconstruction.

I will not pretend to settle such complicated matters here; instead, I will simply conclude by saying that this volume offers rich resources to help us think them through. It will no doubt enliven and enrich the ongoing debates about these issues for years to come.

Chapters 7–11: Critical Phenomenology vs. Classical Phenomenology: Between Redundancy and Revolution

The second section—as drawn by us in this review—follows naturally from the first. The authors pick up the discussion on phenomenology’s capacity to critically address the socio-historical and political dimension of the lifeworld. Connected to this matter, though chapters 7–11 also discuss topics that merit their own discussion, we find a common thread uniting all of them: i.e., an exciting—and fruitful—dialogue on the merits and distinct features of “critical phenomenology” (CrP hereafter) compared to “classical phenomenology” (ClP).

While a consensus definition of CrP is still missing (see discussion below), we can identify some core commitments of the project: (1) it signals dissatisfaction with ClP’s transcendental techniques of inquiry and (2) champions a move to a quasi-transcendental analysis of particular lifeworlds situated in malleable, but relatively stable socio-historical structures; (3) its target are structures of power and oppression (e.g., white supremacy, heteronormativity, capitalism); and (4) it has the political impetus to dismantle these structures (e.g., Guenther 2021; Weiss, Murphy & Salamon 2020). In a recent paper, Lisa Guenther argues that these features, among others, render CrP a distinct enterprise (Guenther 2021, 5–6). In chapters 7–11, we see this claim of CrP’s status critically addressed in various ways. In the following, I will reiterate them not in the order they appear in the book, but along a spectrum that leads from a more reserved attitude towards CrP to a more assertive one.

In chapter 7, Lanei M. Rodemeyer argues that CrP is distinct neither in method nor in content from ClP. On the former, albeit targeting the quasi-transcendental instead of the transcendental, CrP still applies a method starting out from experience and revealing the structures that enable that experience (Rodemeyer 103). Regarding its subject matter, Rodemeyer holds that classical phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, or Merleau-Ponty were already invested in revealing the ego’s socio-historical embeddedness and employed these inquiries to effect social change (103–5). Rodemeyer closes her chapter with a historical analysis of Husserl reception, which she deems to fall prey to misconceptions thwarting a clearer view on the critical potential of Husserlian phenomenology (106ff.).

In a similar vein, Steinbock’s chapter 10 highlights the transformative aspects already operative in ClP. In understanding the ego as a sense-maker that takes part in the constitution of meaning, ClP reveals the inherent responsibility of the self in this social process (Steinbock 155–6). Following this insight, Steinbock sketches the motivation to move beyond the natural attitude and towards phenomenological critique, locating it in a (qualified) free thinking founded in a “mindful discernment of the heart” (162–6). Phenomenological investigation is here not understood as concerned with static objects, but as generative, engaged in an “attentive reflexion within experiencing, while this experience is ongoing” (165).

Alice Pugliese’s chapter 11 marks a transition from “pure” phenomenological debate towards dialogue with other schools of thought and methodologies. Debunking the common prejudice that Husserl’s oeuvre lacks the resources to tackle ethical and socio-political issues (Pugliese 170–1), she provides an interesting reading of phenomenology that could serve as a complementary position in ethics and political theory alongside the likes of deontology, utilitarianism, and critical theory. Introducing a “critical phenomenological public ethics,” she demonstrates how noetic and genetic analysis can contribute to the understanding of trust in the public sphere.

Chapter 8 presents a noticeable shift; instead of arguing for the superfluousness of CrP, Sara Heinämaa defends the tools of ClP—the epoché, eidetic and phenomenological-transcendental reduction, and the first-person approach—from critique by CrP and post-phenomenology. Heinämaa identifies two interpretations of this criticism (Heinämaa 115–6): either they mean to say that we need to move beyond (some of) ClP’s techniques in individual investigations; or these techniques are dispensable tout court. Leaving aside—and somewhat accepting—the first reading (116), Heinämaa provides a brief but informative recap on the debate on (particularly Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian) theories of embodiment, in which she convincingly argues for the value and necessity of “traditional” forms of phenomenological inquiry.

Finally, in chapter 9, Depraz sketches a view that is arguably furthest away from Rodemeyer’s, claiming that phenomenology should be subject to constant transformation. She distinguishes a conservative, “archivistic” self-understanding of phenomenology that merely maintains secured knowledge, from a “creative-constructive” attitude that moves towards the new and risky, at the cost of the researcher’s vulnerability and the provisionality of findings (Depraz 148). Claiming that phenomenology could only be neutral, unsituated, and apolitical in the “mythical mind of a child” (ibid.), she urges phenomenologists to embrace this circumstance and consider new avenues of thought. Two of these are CrP and micro-phenomenology, i.e., the analysis of the experience of specific subjects in a given moment in time and space (141), with Depraz arguing that both in conjunction provide a fruitful progression from ClP.

If there is one conclusion we can draw from this discussion, it is this: CrP’s project is yet to be determined.[1] Chapters 7–11 provide nuanced and varied positions on a debate that is at the time of this review still riddled with mutual misconceptions and, at times, staunchly extreme positions. One such misconception seems to rest on the role of transcendental phenomenology in CrP: while many critical phenomenologists do not deny its value (e.g., Guenther 2018, 49; 2021, 10, 20; Salamon 2018), much of the current debate seems to suggest that the quasi-transcendental is the only or true center of its methodology. I already noted that Heinämaa’s contribution to this volume presents a powerful antidote to this misconstrual. Similarly, Rodemeyer shows that the work of ClP can provide a valuable methodological foundation for critical investigations (Rodemeyer 105–6). Yet, when it comes to the target of CrP, i.e., the quasi-transcendental, socio-historical structures forming and formed by praxes of power, we might want to ask, pace Rodemeyer, if these nonetheless constitute a feature rendering CrP methodologically distinct from ClP?

In this vein, we can also ask what the status of CrP is or will be in the philosophical and wider academic landscape; will it be an updated and modified phenomenology (reparative reading); a decided break from phenomenology (abolitionist reading);[2] will it prove to be superfluous (conservative reading); or will it in fact be recognized as an inter­-disciplinary project (collaborative reading)?[3] The latter seems particularly enticing, as it offers venues for mutual critique and stimulation, without thereby questioning the raison d’être of either side. Hence, phenomenology would not only support other disciplines, as Steinbock suggests (Steinbock 157); it would remain open to be interrogated by them, challenged, as Depraz notes in her chapter (Depraz 142). For instance, other disciplines can put phenomenology to the test whether its formulation of a structure really is universal, or only a situated and incomplete description.[4] This image does away with phenomenology’s old aspiration, as we can find it in Husserl’s Crisis, of grounding all other sciences. Rather, it champions a pluralist view that regards phenomenology as part of a horizontal academic fabric geared towards understanding the human condition.[5]

Another question surrounds the meaning of critique that CrP envisions.[6] Is ClP really critical enough? We might ask, for instance, if Husserl’s goal to change the sciences, Heidegger’s remarks on historicity, or Merleau-Ponty’s interventions in psychology and psychiatry, as listed by Rodemeyer (104), reach the ramifications of social critique that is integral to CrP—expressed in an activist and emancipatory impetus to wholesale dismantle systemic injustice? (In a way, Rodemeyer answers this question herself when she, for instance, talks of Husserl’s quite patriarchal discussion of the family [106].) Or does this way of thinking rest on a conflation of the political and the methodological—despite critical theory’s insistence on the impossibility of such a separation?

Finally, what about the works of authors such as Simone de Beauvoir? Are these really exemplary of ClP, as Rodemeyer writes (104), or rather testimony to a CrP avant la lettre? Depraz’s discussion of Beauvoir’s work on gender (145)—one would also have to mention Fanon’s work on racism and colonialism—suggests the latter.

While these questions can be settled neither by this review nor by the volume it discusses, the chapters I had the pleasure to read provide valuable impulses to this debate and beyond.

Chapters 12–16: Phenomenology in Dialogue with Social Philosophy

In this last set of chapters, all but one (that of Timo Miettinen, who concentrates exclusively on Husserl) attempt to open a dialogue between the Husserlian figure of phenomenology and two authors not often associated with it, but prevalent in the critical discourse of social philosophies: Marx (or Marxian-inspired thinkers) and Foucault.

In chapter 12, Nicolas de Warren directs our attention to how much—or rather how little—criticism actually assumes worldliness and thus “a common horizon with that which it seeks to critique” (de Warren 189), all the more so when the current situation is defined by what might be referred to as a loss of worldliness (Weltverlust), which results from what, following Guy Debord, he calls the society of the spectacle. De Warren thus expounds the societal conditions upon which critique would have to be developed in the first place (or, rather, where it might have just become impossible), drawing from a wide range of sources and examples, from Edgar Madison Welch’s notorious case of paranoia and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men to the Marxian dialectics of the commodity-form. Then comes Christian Lotz in chapter 13 with an inquiry into the best hermeneutical strategy to approach Marx’s oeuvre, especially Capital. Lotz claims to find such a strategy in the phenomenological approach, rather than in the Hegelian interpretations of Marx, which he in turn subjects to a thorough critical assessment. He concludes that “critique,” in Marx’s project of a Critique of Political Economy, must be understood in the Kantian or phenomenological—and thus non-Hegelian—sense of defining the inner limits of its object, in this case the capitalist society.

Next, we have Timo Miettinen’s chapter; as I mentioned, the only one in this set of chapters that discusses Husserlian thought exclusively. In his piece Miettinen describes the later Husserl’s dealings with tradition, and how phenomenological reflection must grasp its historical belonging if it is to become radical, rather than trying to overcome or eliminate it. Miettinen thus describes the “transition from the critique of the present moment to a teleological understanding of philosophy” (Miettinen 225), a shift that doubtlessly influenced generations of phenomenologists and post-phenomenological thinkers alike.

Finally, the book closes with two chapters that deal in their own way with questions concerning Foucault’s relation to phenomenology and its critical potential. Chapter 15, by Sophie Loidolt, outlines different forms of critique and shows how these are prevalent in both Foucault and a handful of representatives of phenomenology, especially Husserl, but also Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Arendt. She does this by taking as a point of departure three paradigmatic forms of critique: the “presupposition/justification” model (traditionally exemplified by Plato or Kant, as well as by Husserl), the “immanent tensions” model (Hegel-type, but later also present in French existentialism), and the “genealogical” model (as developed by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault). The closing chapter of the book, by Maren Wehrle, consists of a comparative reading of Husserl and Foucault that seeks to underscore their shared goal: “to strengthen the human capacity for reason as a critical means of theoretical and practical reflection” (Wehrle 252). Wehrle convincingly presents some interesting parallels between the two philosophers, who are often seen to pursue conflicting goals. But Husserl and Foucault, Wehrle argues, fundamentally target the same issue, albeit from opposite but complementary perspectives: “the problem of subjectivity, which is both constituting,” as Husserl stresses, “and constituted,” as Foucault does for his part (Wehrle 259).

It is to some of the issues touched upon in the chapters of Miettinen, de Warren, and Lotz that I would like to devote the remaining lines of our book review.

As I mentioned, Miettinen’s chapter sets out to understand Husserl’s relation to history and tradition. In the later stages of his thinking, Husserl subscribed to the idea that radical phenomenological reflection, rather than attempting to do away with historical embeddedness—as though it were a burden one would do well to leave behind in favor of an absolute beginning, as it appears to have been for the early Husserl—must instead, if it is to be truly radical, gain its ground by “taking possession of the whole of the tradition” through a “critical ‘questioning back’ (rückfragen) of the present moment” (Miettinen 228–229). Miettinen thus shows us the itinerary through which Husserl passes, if I may use philosophical clichés, from being a philosopher of Cartesian inspiration to being one of Diltheyan inspiration. The author does so by pointing to a shift in Husserl’s own intentions, namely, from establishing a starting point free of presuppositions (Voraussetzungslosigkeit) to assuming presuppositions (i.e., tradition and history) as the inescapable task for a radical philosophy. It would be the itinerary, I am inclined to think, through which Husserl blazed the trail for the philosophical generation to come—the names of Heidegger and Gadamer come forcibly to mind—very much in keeping with his idea of philosophy as a generational undertaking. Miettinen’s chapter thus contributes to the understanding of the more general relationship between phenomenology (certainly not only in its Husserlian figure) with history and tradition.

Now, if Miettinen’s suggestion is that philosophical thought must take root in the historical lifeworld, Nicolas de Warren’s piece would show why such an effort is bound to fail given the current societal condition of spectacle. The spectacle is defined as “the commodity form of the image” (de Warren 192). And nothing is real, de Warren writes, “until it has become commodified into an image, which, as the original form of objectivity, not only structures the interaction between objects and subjects but also subjects in relation to each other” (de Warren 193). However, submitting to the conditions of “the spectacle” comes at a cost. I would say it is precisely the cost that Marx had already described as the contradiction in the commodity-form, that is, the fact that the real is denied because (abstract) exchange value always comes at the expense of a (concrete) use value. Likewise, the spectacle would consist in a farce and is therefore something unreal (much like the value-form, “a phantom-like objectivity”). However, in a society of the spectacle, all that is is precisely as spectacle, which means that it attains its being insofar as it falsifies itself. Thus, the social dynamics described by de Warren work in such a way that—similarly to the dialectical negation of use value by exchange value—real and phenomenological experience “becomes displaced by the anti-phenomenology of the spectacle” (de Warren 192). Hence the “loss of worldliness” that de Warren mentions, which elsewhere I have referred to as “the impoverishment of the lifeworld” (Martínez-Zarazúa 2022).

It seems to me that some of the issues addressed in Miettinen’s and de Warren’s chapters illustrate well why a phenomenological interpretation of Capital is called for. And that is precisely what Christian Lotz, here as elsewhere (2022, 2013), has set out to do, indeed, as have several scholars in recent years (to name just a few: Angus 2022, 2021; Martínez-Zarazúa 2022; Westerman 2019; Martínez-Marzoa 2018; Martínez-Matías 2014. It would appear that we Martínez are prone to this line of questioning). Lotz intends to show that, according to his own words, “a renewed, thorough, and sober phenomenological reading of Marx’s philosophy […] can be done best through 1) moving Marx away from a Hegelian framework, 2) understanding the concept of critique as an attempt to de-naturalize social phenomena and as disclosure, and 3) showing that Marx’s concept of philosophy, his method, as well as his understanding of technology, are forms of ‘disclosure’” (Lotz 208). I believe that Lotz makes a convincing case for all three points—moreover, the idea of Marx’s philosophy as a form of disclosure is a key finding that goes rather unnoticed in English-speaking scholarship—but I disagree somewhat with the first point.

Lotz seeks to disengage his reading of Marx from Hegel because of what he takes to be Hegel’s attempt to transcend finitude. In turn, he appears to find Kantian sobriety more promising when interpreting Marx’s work, as Marx himself pursued his scientific endeavors with such an attitude. And so Lotz seems to believe that associating Marx with Hegel would make Marxian thought as unrestrained as Hegel’s, something that would certainly contravene the very limits Marx imposed on his analyses in Capital as well as the phenomenological tenets by which Lotz wants to interpret that work. However, dismissing Hegel outright strikes me as a bit excessive. To approach Marx from a Hegelian standpoint does not necessarily mean raising Marxian thought to an absolute standpoint. One may recognize, for example, the influence of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in the theory of value presented in Capital, and even resort to the former to offer new perspectives on the latter—especially with regard to the type of sociality involved by the presence of the commodity-thing (cfr. Martínez-Marzoa 2018)—, without having to take on the task of transcending finitude, as Hegel does, for example, in the Phenomenology of Spirit or the Science of Logic. That would be my only reservation about Lotz’s otherwise sound text and his contribution to the project of a phenomenological Marxism.

Conclusion

As we said at the outset, this volume has more to offer than we could cover in a review of this length. We sketched its rich contributions to debates about 1) the problems history poses for phenomenology, 2) the contested status and prospects of critical phenomenology, and 3) the relationship between phenomenology and Foucauldian and Marxist social philosophy; but this really only scratches the surface of its contents. For anyone interested in classical phenomenology’s critical resources, Phenomenology as Critique is required reading.

Bibliography

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Angus, I. 2021. Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism. Lanham: Lexington Books.

———. 2022. “The Problem of the Form: Recovery of the Concrete in Contemporary Phenomenological Marxism.” In Marxism and Phenomenology, ed. by B. Smyth and R. Westerman. Lanham: Lexington Books: 31–52.

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Guenther, L. 2018. “Critical Phenomenology of Solidarity and Resistance in the 2013 California Prison Hunger Strikes.” In BODY/SELF/OTHER: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters., ed. by L. Dolezal and D. Petherbridge, 47–73. New York: SUNY Press.

———. 2021. “Six Senses of Critique for Critical Phenomenology.” Puncta 4 (2): 5–23. https://doi.org/10.5399/PJCP.v4i2.2

———. 2022. ‘Abolish the World as We Know It: Notes for a Praxis of Phenomenology Beyond Critique’. Puncta 5 (2): 28–44. https://doi.org/10.5399/PJCP.v5i2.3

Hartimo, M. 2018. “Radical Besinnung in Formale Und Transzendentale Logik (1929)”. Husserl Studies 34 (3): 247–66. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-018-9228-5

Horkheimer, M. 1972. Critical Theory: Selected Essays. Trans. by M.J. O’Connell. New York: Herder and Herder.

Husserl, E. Hua VI. 1954. Die Krisis de Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie, edited by Walter Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970.

Lotz, C. 2013. “Reification through Commodity Form or Technology? From Honneth Back to Heidegger and Marx.” Rethinking Marxism 25 (2): 184–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2013.769353

———. 2022. “Capital as Enframing: On Marx and Heidegger.” In Marxism and Phenomenology, ed. by B. Smyth and R. Westerman. Lanham: Lexington Books: 151–170.

Martínez-Marzoa, F. (1983) 2018. La filosofía de “El capital”. Madrid: Abada.

Martínez-Matías, P. 2014. “Producto y mercancía: sobre la constitución ontológica de la modernidad a partir de Heidegger y Marx.” Logos. Anales Del Seminario De Metafísica 47: 199–225. https://doi.org/10.5209/rev_ASEM.2014.v47.45808

Martínez-Zarazúa, D. 2022. “When Things Impoverish: An Approach to Marx’s Analysis of Capitalism in Conjunction with Heidegger’s Concern over Technology.” Rethinking Marxism 34 (1): 6–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2026750

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Salamon, G. 2018. “What’s Critical about Critical Phenomenology?” Journal of Critical Phenomenology 1 (1): 8–17.

Steinbock, A. J. 1995a. Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology After Husserl. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

———. 1995b. “Generativity and Generative Phenomenology.” Husserl Studies 12 (1): 55–79. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01324160

———. 2017. Limit-Phenomena and Phenomenology in Husserl. USA: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Waldenfels, B. 1985. In den Netzen der Lebenswelt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Weiss, G., A. V. Murphy, and G. Salamon. 2020. “Introduction: Transformative Descriptions.” In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, ed. by G. Weiss, A. V. Murphy, and G. Salamon, xiii–xiv. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Welton, D. 1983. The Origins of Meaning: A Critical Study of the Thresholds of Husserlian Phenomenology. The Hague: Nijhoff.

Westerman, R. 2019. Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism: Reification Revalued. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.


[1] CrP agrees; e.g., see Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020, xiv.

[2] Both interpretations are discussed in Guenther (2022).

[3] It is in the latter sense—i.e., in the interdisciplinary wedding of phenomenology and critical theory—that Gayle Salamon’s claim that “what is critical about critical phenomenology turns out to have been there all along,” should be understood. In other words, she does not argue that ClP already harnesses all that CrP purports to add to the debate. See Salamon 2018, 12; see also 13.

[4] As already mentioned in Matt Burch’s section above, Jansen argues in this volume that this would render CrP a variant of applied phenomenology (54).

[5] E.g., see Waldenfels 1985.

[6] For a detailed discussion, see Guenther 2021.

Wojciech Kaftanski: Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity

Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity: A Study of Imitation, Existence, and Affect Book Cover Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity: A Study of Imitation, Existence, and Affect
Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
Wojciech Kaftanski
Routledge
2021
Hardback £120.00
264

Reviewed by:  Steven DeLay (Research Fellow, Global Centre for Advanced Studies)

The concept of mimesis has a rich, complicated career in the history of aesthetics, philosophy, and theology. Plato and Aristotle both make much of it. Later, Lessing, Kant, and the Romantics draw heavily upon it as well. More recently, so too have René Girard and Heidegger. The term’s power to compel widespread attention is due in part to its fascinating ambivalence. As the existentialists noted famously, imitation (a core notion at the heart of mimesis) can be pernicious, “a mysterious force animating masses of people to uncoordinated collective common action,” a source of “dissolution of differences leading to normative uniformity,” a “spontaneous reflexive process” responsible for “marginalizing the value of human individuality, the meaning of subjective experience, and the role of passion and faith” (1). At the same time, imitation is fundamental to the artistic representation of beauty, the creative and ethical tasks of grappling with ideality, and, of course, the theological notion of imitatio Christi. In the human search for meaning, mimesis is thus both fundamental and inescapable. And to be sure, modernity’s “way of thinking about […] the role of authority and institutions in humanity’s orientation in the world” (2), entails a reconceptualization of mimesis itself, and how in turn it shapes the distinctly modern pursuit of an authentic human existence. According to Wojciech Kaftanski’s study Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity, it is Søren Kierkegaard who “offer[s] us one of the most comprehensive and profound accounts of modernity” (1). “What, then,” Kaftanski naturally asks, “are we to make of Kierkegaard’s understanding and use of mimesis?” (7).

Mimesis can be variously defined, as Kaftanski observes. It can designate “emulation, mimicry, dissimulation, doubling, theatricality, realism, identification, correspondence, depiction, verisimilitude, resemblance” (7). In the classical world, it typically denoted “faithful imitation of a model” (7). In the modern context, it is has come to be associated with creativity, “as originality, genius, individuality, imagination” (7). It is thus “ambivalent, inconspicuous, and in many ways blurry” (7). For as Kaftanski notes, mimesis also admits of a “pharmacological” meaning—it is “both a problem and a cure for the maladies of the modern individual” (7). Realizing it is futile to give the term any single concrete and exhaustive definition, it is better to approach the term by treating its cluster of concepts along the lines of Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblance.

This polyvalence of mimesis is apparent in Kierkegaard’s own handling of the term. Contrary, then, to what one might initially expect from a study of Kierkegaard, Kaftanski’s interest in the term extends beyond “simply imitation, or the imitation of Christ” (7). As he notes, Danish does not provide “a direct translation of the Greek mimesis into a noun” (9). The key term is Efterfølgelse (which can be literally translated into English as “following after”), a translation of the Latin term imitatio, itself the translation of mimesis (9). But Kierkegaard’s linguistic repertoire for mimesis is expansive and multi-layered, an “impressive and far wider” vocabulary than has been acknowledged (9). As Kaftanski says,

Kierkegaard uses a variety of terms to refer to the broad mimetic sphere in his corpus, such as Gjentagelsen (repetition), Ligne (likeness, and to liken, to resemble), Lighed (similarity and equality), Sammengligning (comparison), Eftergjøre (going and doing after), Efterabelse (aping or parroting), mimisk (mimic or mimical), but also Fordoblelse (redoubling), Reduplikation (reduplication), Dobbelt-Reflexion (double-reflection), Dobbelthed (doubleness or duplexity), Dobbelt-Bevoegelse (double-movement), Billede (image or picture), and Forbillede (prototype, model, tyfpe, pattern) (9).

In addition to the linguistic complexity of the phenomenon, there is the further fact that mimesis also reflects the multifaceted aesthetic, scholastic, economic, political, social, and religious context in which Kierkegaard was living and writing. Human beings orient themselves in place. And in the modern period, the city is central to that place. As Kaftanski says, the reinvention of Kierkegaard’s own Copenhagen was itself undertaken in mimetic fashion, by architecturally and culturally emulating Belin, Paris, and London (3). According to Kaftanski, the becoming of the modern city is a “macro-representation of the becoming of the individual […] the city and its inhabitants mirror one another” (4). How so? Part of it is that “mimesis entails both retaining the old and assimilating the new” (4). Copenhagen accordingly transformed itself into something new by reworking its past. But such reworking was not so banal, but in many ways radical. At the time, nineteenth-century Copenhagen was a city indelibly shaped by the formation of mass society, as well as class struggle. Consequently, a tendency emerged among its lower-classes to attempt to “imitate and appropriate” the standards, values, and tastes of the bourgeoisie (6). However, dissatisfied with their economic and political conditions, “an age of revolution” (2) quickly swept across Europe beginning in France and Germany, eventually finding its way to Copenhagen too. This “revolutionary mass action” exhibited a “mimetic-affective crowd behavior” (6)—a force of “mimetic magnetism, fascination, somnambulism, scapegoating, and violence” (12), which Kierkegaard himself was keen to resist, and led him to coin the pejorative terms “the public” and “the crowd.” Thus, as a modern critic of modernity, Kierkegaard’s account of becoming a single individual was deeply responsive to the interlocking mimetic structures of his economic, social, political, and religious milieu. Assuming a countercultural role resembling his philosophical hero Socrates, in this way the “gadfly of Copenhagen” was born.

As Kaftanski explains, Kierkegaard’s literary output reconceptualizes mimesis by creatively appropriating a variety of both classical and modern sources. At stake in doing so, is a conception of mimesis that shifts from “the ideal of representation characterizing pre-modern and the early modern” to an understanding that sees “humans as radically imitative creatures” (5). Mimesis, in short, is not simply an aesthetic phenomenon pertaining to the realm of artistic representation, but a fundamental feature of human existence as such. As Kaftanski says, “Representation is among the three fundamental meanings of mimesis conceptualized in classical Greece. The other two are ‘imitation’ and ‘expression’” (15). On such a view, mimesis is a process of “making present,” one guided by the goal of achieving “similarity and truth”—an artwork sets its vision on replicating “morally desirable objects,” aiming to reproduce something guided by “normativity and correspondence, form and mode” (15).

But whereas for classical art mimesis is “about representing some original, hence producing copies” (19), modern artists sought instead to create “new originals” (19). For the moderns, art should not merely seek to copy reality, but instead express something original or novel. Art, so the thought goes, “should not serve any other purpose but itself” (20). Here Lessing’s influential theory of aesthetics proves illustrative. “Lessing,” says Kaftanski, “asserts that the goal of art is to display beauty; hence, art is irreconcilable with suffering. Second, aesthetics is its own goal; it does not serve other ends” (21). Indeed, according to Lessing, art and religion have their distinct and largely “irreconcilable territories” (20). As is well-known, the Romantics consequently “tended to consecrate art as a religion” (19). Kierkegaard seizes on Lessing’s view, turning it to his own purposes. For according to Kierkegaard, if art and religion are in some way incompatible, this underscores the essential fact that art is said to be unable to express the religious dimension of suffering (15) which so interests Kierkegaard. Religious suffering, as Kaftanski says, is something Kierkegaard sometimes appears to maintain cannot be represented in the arts (20). If the goal of art is depicting beauty, then the ugliness and horror of the crucified Christ eludes its power of portrayal. For Kierkegaard, that art is unable to capture the inner truth of religious suffering in turn suggests that the religious life is itself irreducible to, and indeed higher than, the aesthetic life. For whereas a strictly aesthetic existence remains characterized by “human indecisiveness and a sensuous and disinterested attitude toward the world” (16), religious striving concerns “the pursuit of […] absolute fulfillment that the world cannot provide” (17), a “becoming an individual before God” (17). If art is undertaken simply for its own sake, it would appear to be irrelevant to the kind of authentic human existence Kierkegaard is so interested in expressing.

And yet, as Kaftanski notes, some of Kierkegaard’s own writings indicate a more ambivalent relationship to the value and function of both art and aesthetics. This becomes apparent when one considers the concept of ekphrasis important to Lessing himself—as Kaftanski says, “Ekphrasis is at work when a physical object of art, such as a painting or a sculpture, gets its written account” (21). Because ekphrasis uniquely “engages the subjectivity of the recipient” (21), it has the power to transform the viewer in ways that have implications for religious transformation. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author Anti-Climacus says as much. “The synergy of word and image,” Kaftanski writes, “can be seen in cases where Anti-Climacus refers to the activity of telling a picture, or describing what is represented in the picture, hence following the classical definition of ekphrasis, of re-presenting in words what already has a visual representation” (24). “Anti-Climacus,” says Kaftanski, “believes that if one can ‘be’ moved by the image of the suffering Christ to the imitation of His sufferings into one’s life, then one is becoming a genuine Christian” (25). In short, the experience of viewing the picture has an existential and mimetic dimension (27). Although, then, for Lessing, “the guiding task of aesthetics is to represent what is beautiful and harmonious, ‘the image of the crucified Christ’ is ugly and represents violence and chaos” (27), in Kierkegaard, because an artwork is not reserved to one particular medium, but instead consists of various media, it is possible to create a “spoken picture or, one could argue, a visualized narrative” (27). Such a work could in principle serve a mimetic function, by in effect calling the viewer to change.

Kierkegaard, thus, is neither a classical nor a full-fledged modern thinker (40), as his idiosyncratic view of the relationship between art and religion attests. For one thing, Kierkegaard is deeply suspicious of the modern ideal of human autonomy. Whereas the Enlightenment was wholly critical of classical mimesis, which it viewed as incompatible with the values of originality and creativity, Kierkegaard finds certain aspects of the modern conception of mimesis objectionable. For Kierkegaard, the modern ideal of an anti-mimetic, self-sufficient existence is a myth to be rejected (28). And yet, although the Enlightenment ideal of self-sufficiency is primarily hostile to mimesis, Kaftanski notes that it is actually Kant who in a way formulates a number of mimetic concepts that are relevant to Kierkegaard’s own attempt to work out a mimetic account of human existence. For Kant, the open-endedness of artistic production entails that aesthetics becomes a “judgment of taste” (30). Central to aesthetic production and valuation are four concepts of imitation: “copying [Nachmachung], aping [Nachäffung], imitation [Nachahmung], and emulation or following [Nachfolge]” (30). For Kant (and the Romantics too) who “cherished the ideal of mimesis understood as originality and criticized forms of art that aim to represent reality and hence were related to a pre-given existing model” (37), this modern criticism of classical mimesis led to the rejection of the mimesis-imitation of an artist to the elevation of the creativity of a genius (32). If for Kant, “genius cannot be taught and learned” (129), previous works of great art serve as exemplars “not for imitation” but “for emulation”—in encountering such a work, “another genius is thereby awakened to the feeling of his own originality, to exercise freedom from coercion in his art in such a way that the latter thereby itself acquires a new rule, by which the talent shows itself as exemplary” (127). Kierkegaard follows the Romantics in valuing originality over realistic representation of a model, but he “maintains that the Christian existential creation is in fact in relation to a model […] the model is transcendent” (37)—namely, Christ the prototype. Romantic anthropology, which takes autonomous agency to mark the human essentially, fails to provide the conceptual resources necessary to depict “the representational dimension of Kierkegaard’s own presentation of the ideal self” (33). As Kaftanski explains, “the aesthetic-religious puzzle of the representation of the suffering of the crucified Christ” (39) in turn leads Kierkegaard to formulate philosophical and literary works whose mimetic idioms seek to present an adequate picture of ideal Christian existence.

To do so, Kierkegaard begins by taking up existence in its “time-oriented and concrete, but also mundane, ordinary, and recurrent” everydayness (44). It is here that a pair of key Kierkegaardian notions, repetition and recollection, enter the picture. “Repetition—this is actuality and earnestness of existence,” says Kierkegaard (50). Repetition’s experiential task is to “recognize continuity in time” (45). In thinking about the drudgery of modern factory work and life, for instance, it is easy to understand how the banality of such an existence could lead to despair. One way it might do so is by leading those crushed beneath the weight of existence’s apparent absurdity and emptiness into substituting reality for a realm of ideality, of imagination. This is what happens in the aesthetic life, as Kierkegaard understands it. In this “hyper-reflective existence fueled by and lived in imagination” (51), there is a “lack of commitment to one’s life possibilities” (51). For the aesthete, “life splits up into a boundless multiplicity [held] within the sphere of reflection” (61). “Devoid of the ethical component,” the aesthete’s reflective “system” is not a life-view (61). The danger of imaginary dispersion in hyper-reflection is manifestly apparent in the theatrical. When producing or viewing a performance in the theater, one “entertain[s] a number of self-representations, which [Kierkegaard] calls ‘possible variations’” (52). The trouble is that, by doing so, one fails to actually be oneself, and instead loses oneself in imaginary characters and situations that have no real bearing on one’s real life. “This mimetic mirroring of the theater,” says Kaftanski, “constitutes a type of a private laboratory where one can fragment oneself” (52). Suffice it to say, if the dangers of idle escapism attending aesthetic enjoyment and diversion were already pressing with nineteenth-century forms of entertainment such as the theater and the newspaper, today that is only more so the case, given the advent of television, film, and the Internet.

According to Kierkegaard, however, the aesthete’s fragmentary response to existence is not the only possible form a response to the spectacles of the modern milieu may take. The key to appreciating the alternative Kierkegaard envisions lies in the concept of mimesis itself, which, according to Kaftanski, Kierkegaard himself sees “as embodied and performative” (44). Repetition as a mimetic concept entails “movement, imagination, and time” (45). And if this mimetic process is put in the service of a model truly worthy of imitation (60), then instead of remaining trapped in an imaginary world of ideality, ethical transformation and religious awakening is achievable.

If “life emulates art,” such emulation should “contribute to the becoming of a self in actual existence” (72). Here Kierkegaard exploits the mimetic power of texts themselves. For according to Kaftanski, Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition is a forerunner of Ricoeur’s refiguration. “The textual extension of real life,” says Kaftanski, “becomes mimetically re-appropriated back into real life and, essentially, becomes a part of it” (73). In a word, “the self emerges from the text. In effect, the text contributes to the creation of the self” (74). It is possible to actualize the ideality contained in a text. In this way, a text can function as a mirror of one’s existence, as a basis through which to pattern one’s own life. This becomes particularly salient in cases in which a text serves as a form of self-examination, not for any reader only, but especially for the author himself. Like Rousseau, whose Confessions were meant to be an exercise in self-judgment, so too Kierkegaard’s own partly autobiographical texts become an occasion for narrative self-examination (78). As Kaftanski says, “Kierkegaard’s autobiographical narratives participate in a formative process of the self—hence, the formation of the self—through a continuous and repetitive procedure of self-recognition, self-interpretation, self-understanding, and self-creation” (78). Writing becomes an extension of life, by enacting a process of “life-development,” through which Kierkegaard reworks himself “in and through his own literary production” (81). Rather than remaining a merely aesthetic pursuit, literary and philosophical production perform an ethical, even religious, function. “Autobiography,” so Kaftanski concludes, “is a peculiar mirror that allows the author to see oneself as another, to correct oneself, and, paradoxically, to correct the mirror” (82).

Central to this mimetic interplay between text and life is what Kierkegaard calls a “psychologiske Experiment” (82). The author invents various characters (which may or may not be versions of one’s actual self) that in turn serve as a source of ethical and religious self-assessment. Far from aesthetic production serving as an escape from reality, it can thus serve as a means of perfecting it, by cultivating an “authentic existence” (82). It does so by individuating the author (and its other readers) from the pernicious influence of social contagion and conformism. Due to the sociality of mimetic desire, “herd behaviors in humans include panic and rioting” (83), as such mimesis involves “affective and visceral mood-sharing” (84). While Plato’s conception of mimesis was focused on representing objects, and Aristotle’s at representing action (88), Kierkegaard’s coordination of action and fiction is not then simply about realistic representation, but demands an authentic existence—providing “templates of existence” (90), the resulting literary figurations are designed to be taken as existential prescriptions (90). Kierkegaard recognizes that stories needn’t be mere fictions, for poetic depictions of life can serve to perfect human life and transform it (89). By means of the text, mimesis effects a transition from literary representation to representation in action in real life. Informing us “about the world as it is and as it could be, or even sometimes as it should be” (90), they are not “simply fantasy or, for that matter, corrective mirrors” (91). They issue “blueprints” for existence, prescriptions for selfhood (91). These literary “experiments” (91) are exercises in life itself, for “writing and reading is a process of self-understanding, encapsulating oneself, and self-formation that is stretched between two worlds: the actual and the fictive” (91).

In Kierkegaard’s own case, the highest “poetic possibility of himself” (92) is to be a genuine Christian. At stake in his literary production is expressing a self-ideal of himself (“Kierkegaard the martyr”) and hence a “picture of the ideal Christian” (91). Thus, as Kaftanski notes, “Following Ricoeur’s mimetic arc, we can understand Kierkegaard’s ‘real’ life as dependent upon, or mediated through, a textual representation of himself” (91), and it is this tension between poetic and actual existence and the issue of translating a prescribed ideal of life into reality, that constitutes “the conundrum running through his authorship” (92).

How, then, can an “imaginary construction”[1] (94) assist the process of becoming a single individual, an authentic human before God? It is necessary to reduplicate, through action, the ideality embodied by Christ. Whereas the aesthete is one for whom his “life has no history, no unity, and no continuity to it,” the life of genuine faith “has a beginning, is organized around a unifying idea or a goal, and has a telos” (93). In reading Kierkegaard’s portrayal of such a life, one is called to undertake the task of becoming an individual, a form of existence itself “represented in descriptions of the imaginary characters’ wrestling with suffering, love, death, finitude, freedom, and time—but also with God, despair, and sin” (95). If the ideal expressed in the text is ever to be truly understood, it must be appropriated by a reduplication in the actual existence of the reader. When it comes to faith, this reduplication requires a far more earnest and serious effort than what in Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen was taken to suffice. As Kierkegaard says,

No, Christ has not appointed assistant-professors—but imitators or followers. When Christianity (precisely because it is not a doctrine) does not reduplicate itself in the one who presents it, he does not present Christianity; for Christianity is an existential-communication and can only be presented—by existing. Basically, to exist therein, to express it in one’s existence etc.—this is what it means to reduplicate (99).

Imitation, we see, is an experiential imperative for Kierkegaard’s account of the development of a life-view. As Kaftanski notes, a cluster of concepts—Eftergjøre, Efterligne, Lighed, and Ligne—are operative in the Dane’s account of existential redoubling and reduplication (113). “Eftergjøre,” Kaftanski explains, “refers primarily to a sophisticated human capacity for imitation that is has mostly secular application” (114). When, then, writing of the ideal of “Being like Christ, or resembling Him” (115), Kierkegaard sometimes uses the term Ligne, which, like Efterfølgelse (“following after”), is to be contrasted with Eftergiore and Efterligne, meaning “to counterfeit, to mimic” (118). He chooses Efterfølgelse to account for this task. While Kierkegaard frequently contrasts Efterfølgelse with Efterabelse (“mimicking” “aping”), towards the end of his literary production he attributes pejorative connotations to Eftergjøre and Efterligne. In any case, the point for Kierkegaard is that the individual ought to find a way to incorporate the ideality of authenticity into actuality. For in doing so, the authentic human being, which Kierkegaard names “the single individual” (122), transcends mundane “social expectations” (120), and, overcoming the tug of conformism and mediocrity characterized by a kind of “levelling” rooted in a pernicious perfectibility entailing a “certain plasticity, malleability, or moldability of human nature” (121), instead emulates the image of Christ genuinely, in what Kaftanski terms Kierkegaard’s “existential mimesis” (123). Here again, Kaftanski finds it fruitful to turn to Kant. Kant notes four types of imitation in the Critique of the Power of Judgment—“Nachäffung, Nachmachung, Nachahmung, and Nachfolge” (125).

The first word has been translated into English as ‘aping’ or ‘parroting’; Nachmachung has been translated as ‘copying;’ ‘imitation’ is the usual translation of Nachahmung; Nachfolge has been translated as ‘emulating,’ ‘following,’ but also as ‘succeeding’ (125-26).

Reworking Kant’s own conception of “exemplary originality” (127), Kierkegaard articulates a form of existential emulation whose ideal entails an “interpretive duty [with] an individual and subjective character, in contrast to imitation that follows a preset standardizing pattern that can be adhered to on a mass scale” (130). Whereas patterning oneself on societal everydayness “produces in individuals the feelings of estrangement and alienation, who then seek the remedy to these negative feelings in mimetic collective behavior” (130), Kierkegaard’s imitatio Christi is meant to produce an integrated, authentic individuality. In doing so, such existential mimesis “does not place the imitator in an elevated position based on their functions and education, as it is in Plato and Aristotle, nor based on their extraordinary skills or moral merits, as in Kant” (130). Rather, Kierkegaard’s existential mimesis is an egalitarian project (130), for everyone is able, if he is so willing, to follow after the pattern of Christ.

Of course, this is not to say that doing so is easy. As Kierkegaard himself notes repeatedly, many people fail to do so successfully. What particularly interests Kaftanski is the complex mimetic imagery Kierkegaard develops in the course of developing an account of how this process of becoming a single individual is supposed to work itself out in actual existence. As Kaftanski says, “Kierkegaard’s Forbillede denotes that which represents an idealized and hence ‘prototypical’ quality of someone or something. The Danish Forbillede, also translated into English as ‘pattern,’ comes from Billede, which stands for ‘image’” (133). These terms are roughly Danish equivalents to the classical notions of “figura and exemplum” (133). “Forbillede,” says Kaftanski, “the prototype—plays an important role in Kierkegaard’s Efterfølgelse—imitation” (133). At stake is a “movement from the ideal to the actual” (134), a “creation in reference to a model” (133) that captures for Kierkegaard what it “means to be and become a genuine Christian” (134). Because “figura denotes something material and visual, but also formal and structural” (135), not only does such a figure “already embody and determine modes of interpretation, appropriation, and representation” (135), it sets “an ideal that an individual should internalize” (137). It is an ideal that many fail to ever internalize—negative models, for Kierkegaard, include “pastors, assistant professors, journalists” (137). But there are examples of those who do accomplish it (or come close)—Abraham, Job, the sinful woman, even the lilies and the birds! Job, for instance, represents the “ideality” (151) of the biblical criterion for being human as a single individual—for in the “existential redoubling” (152) by which Job enacts the ideal of faithfulness to God, by “actually relating himself to the ideal” (153), he finds himself persecuted by all of those he knows, including his friends. Job becomes an offense. Unlike the hero who achieves the admiration of others, Job is scorned and hated. As Kaftanski recounts, “What follows is the public condemnation of Job, disapproval of his person, mockery, insults, and ostracism. This social phenomenon of universal punishment represents ‘the scapegoat mechanism,’ and Job is the scapegoat” (144); “The friends contribute to the suffering he experiences. Instead of soothing his pain, they condemn him and amplify his misery” (147). Depicting the suffering of Job, Kierkegaard expresses his own ideal of Christian martyrdom, of the idea that to be a true Christian is to suffer. Recollecting the life of Job in literary form in turn serves as an injunction to reduplicate that same suffering in one’s own life. As Kierkegaard says, “My entire work as an author has also been my own development” (141).

But as Kaftanski notes, if “Forbillede designates a perfected or ideal representation of someone or something” (150), for Kierkegaard, existential reduplication in the case of ideal Christianity is impossible. The Christian is always “a being in becoming” (155). This means that the typical view of Kierkegaard, which interprets him as straightforwardly recommending the imitation of Christ as prototype for human existence, must be modified. Kaftanski, rather audaciously, claims that, for Kierkegaard, “Christ as the prototype is not sufficient with respect to guiding would-be Christians to successfully imitating Him” (154). This is so, says Kaftanski, because according to Kierkegaard, “[Christ] is not a human being as we are” (157), but is rather “a God-man” (158). Paradoxically, then, Kierkegaard’s “ideal picture of being a Christian” (158) requires acknowledging that Christ himself is not a Christian. “Jesus Christ,” says Kierkegaard, “it is true, is himself the prototype, and will continue to be that, unchanged, until the end. But Christ is also much more than the prototype; he is the object of faith” (156).[2] In depicting the ideal picture of being a Christian, Kierkegaard intends to show others, particularly his complacent fellow Danes, that exposing “themselves to the mirror of the Word” (162) involves “perpetual self-accusation” (161).

Consequently, “an authentic Christian existence, which demands from Christians not admiration but imitation” of Christ (179), must navigate the reality of human frailty. This means, first, recognizing the pitfalls of admiration itself. As Kaftanski observes, “admiration is collective and contagious” (179), “is not powerful enough to motivate us to do the good” (182), and “is suspiciously like an evasion” (182). As an affective phenomenon, admiration is subject to “magnetism” and “prestige” (185), the “power of opinion” (186), a morass of “shared feelings, emotions, passions, and affects” (186), which, typified by the “readership of a newspaper” (188) only forms a contemptible “collective identity” (189) that stunts the individual’s becoming. That alone would be bad enough! Yet admiration, which lies at the root of social conformism, is also prone to violence and irrational upheaval. Here Kaftanski exploits the insights of Girard. For if, as Kierkegaard would say, “the public is a phantom” (192), this is because the “deindividualization created by mass media and public opinion” (193) is susceptible to dynamics of “social pressure, human collectivity, and affective contagion” (204) which for Girard culminates in violence and scapegoating. This is powerfully apparent in the horrific death of Christ himself, who the crowd turns upon. The Messiah, who was initially hailed as a King upon entering Jerusalem, is shortly thereafter handed over to the Romans in lieu of Barabbas—“crucify him!” As Kaftanski says, “The quickness and the spontaneity of this altering reaction of the crowd suggests a kind of affective independence of that swing of valences on the pendulum of affectivity” (196).

Given the fraught nature of such mimetic behavior, there is an admitted oddity in “Presenting mimesis as a remedy to the problems caused by mimesis” (215). But this is precisely what Kierkegaard’s account of existential mimesis aims to do. The important difference between good and bad mimesis, Kaftanski notes, lies in the “non-comparing” and “nonimitative” nature of the former. Here, “indirect prototypes” can be useful—as Kaftanski observes, “one can become a Christian by living as the lily and the bird live” (222). Such “icons” or “middle terms” are necessary in the process of becoming an authentic self, argues Kaftanski. For again, if “Christ is a God-man,” and thus “not a Christian” (227),[3] this means that the ideal of being like Christ is one for which we will always fall short. In some sense, emulating Christ entails being left to one’s own self—“In walking alone, one is deprived of the direct resource of the visible model” (229). I should note that, although Kierkegaard was highly critical of what he perceived to be the superficiality, insincerity, and hypocrisy of the Danish Lutheran Church, his attack on Christendom often remained largely beholden to the theological dogma inherited from Augustine and Luther. Kierkegaard for much of his career, like Luther, labors under the idea that human depravity essentially prevents one from ever measuring up adequately to the ideal of authentic Christian existence. In effect, one is never truly a Christian, because being a Christian involves a kind of perpetual incompletion, or, better, imperfection. However, it should be noted that, in his very last journal entries, Kierkegaard at times expresses discontent with this Augustinian and Lutheran conception of human depravity and weakness. Such an anthropology, Kierkegaard notes, unintentionally leads to the same mere admiration of Christ he criticized so adamantly, for it eliminates the sort of “primitivity” Kierkegaard comes to view as essential to New Testament Christianity. This is all to say that some of Kierkegaard’s more pessimistic remarks concerning the supposed impossibility of ever emulating Christ genuinely should perhaps be tempered by his own later comments on the subject—remarks which, abandoning Lutheran orthodoxy, underscore the legitimate possibility of emulation. Such a view, as it happens, would be more in line with a strand of optimism apparent in the New Testament itself, which frequently mentions the possibility of obeying God, insofar as God’s commandments are not burdensome and provide joy, peace, and rest.

Having traced the various shades of mimesis, their pertinence to modernity, and their relevance for the project of human authenticity, Kaftanski at the work’s conclusion can rightly conclude that, “Just as Kierkegaard is not perceived as an important theoretician or critic of mimesis, so Kierkegaardians do not seem to find mimesis to be of much importance to Kierkegaard’s thought and authorship” (238). Kaftanski’s book corrects both these errors by convincingly (and engrossingly!) reconstructing Kierkegaard as a thinker “contributing to the modern shift in appraising mimesis from artistic representation based on the ideals of similarity to mimesis as a human condition underpinning the individual and social aspects of human existence” (239).

Needless to say, philosophers of religion, readers of Kierkegaard, and scholars of post-Kantian European philosophy more generally, will benefit from Kaftanski’s text immensely. Everyone knows that reading somehow changes us. Kaftanski in effect provides us with a powerful account of how exactly the art of reading does so, by shaping and transforming the individual who authentically encounters a text. Of course, no work is flawless. Others will object to some of the things Kaftanski says. At this stage of the review, it would be customary to list the potential objections. Instead, however, I should like to emphasize that Kaftanski’s work is an important contribution to an influential body of works that has taken up the issues of authenticity and identity in modernity—to wit, Charles Larmore’s The Practices of the Self, Stephen Mulhall’s Inheritance and Originality, Claude Romano’s Être soi-même, and Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self. While reading this text, one’s mind frequently will inevitably turn to Heidegger, a figure who looms large in such a context. Fitting, then, that Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity’s very last line should mention Heidegger by name. The concluding reference to Heidegger proves timely. It is no small thing that, by the work’s end, Kaftanski has shown how it is Kierkegaard, not Heidegger, from whom we have the most to gain when reflecting upon what it means to live an authentic human existence. As for the significance of Kaftanski’s own text’s contribution to that task, it bears returning to an earlier moment in the text, in which Kaftanski examines Kierkegaard’s remarks from a book review of the nineteenth-century Danish novelist Thomasine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvard. In his review, Kierkegaard is very complimentary of her work for many reasons. As Kaftanski says, chief among them is the fact that Kierkegaard found writing the review of Gyllembourg-Ehrensvard’s book to not only serve as an exercise in recollecting what the book contained. More importantly, Kierkegaard found himself “changed in the repetition” (57) of writing it. I have had a similar experience in writing this review. Having thought about what Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity gives to think in the course of writing this review of it, I have been reminded of what an extraordinary gift existence is, and how invigorating it is to feel the possibility of being able to continue the task of actualizing the ideal of becoming a single individual through Christ. No doubt other readers will have the same experience. For, more than just a theoretical meditation on existential mimesis, Kaftanski’s account is a call to it.


[1] The clear resonance between Kierkegaard’s notions of “imaginary construction” and “psychological experiments” and Husserl’s phenomenological technique of eidetic variation is not coincidental. As Shestov reported, Husserl once confided to him that a secret inspiration for his phenomenological method was Kierkegaard.

[2] According to Kierkegaard, in the New Testament, Christ is represented strictly in the mode of being, rather than becoming. For this reason, any strict emulation of Christ is rendered impossible for us, since as mere human beings we find ourselves in a contrasting process of incessant becoming. Without at all meaning to suggest that Kierkegaard is wrong for emphasizing the uniqueness of Christ as the God-man, I do think it is worth noting that there are apparent traces of Christ’s own process of becoming in the Gospels, a becoming that accentuates the humanity of Christ. For example: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man” (Luke 2:52).

[3] Interestingly, Nietzsche says exactly the opposite: “There has only been one Christian, and he died on the Cross,” The Anti-Christ, §39.

Felix Ó Murchadha: The Formation of the Modern Self, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

The Formation of the Modern Self: Reason, Happiness and the Passions from Montaigne to Kant Book Cover The Formation of the Modern Self: Reason, Happiness and the Passions from Montaigne to Kant
Felix Ó Murchadha
Bloomsbury Academic
2022
Hardback $103.50
264

Hartmut Rosa: The Uncontrollability of the World

The Uncontrollability of the World Book Cover The Uncontrollability of the World
Hartmut Rosa. James Wagner (Translator)
Polity
2020
Paperback €18.10
140

Reviewed by: Andrei-Valentin Bacrău (former graduate researcher at the University of Zurich)

Rosa’s “Uncontrollability of the World” is an accessible read, regardless of philosophical background and training. The minimal use of jargon and social analysis remain engaging through the text, while providing a fresh outlook towards what it means to be an individual in the 21st century, surrounded by constant notions of “progress”, which we do not sufficiently examine towards our well-being. As consumers of goods, we often engage with financially unreliable planning and aspirations. Simultaneously, even the notion and strategy of being a good parent is undergoing significant transitions (64-65). The growing concern of parents has changed from trying to offer children what is best, to at least ensuring that they are not falling behind in terms of financial security and professional success.

The initial German for “uncotrollability” is translated from “unverfügbar”. Rosa clearly acknowledges the peculiarities and minimal use in the German language of such concept. He begins the book with a nomological investigation about “unverfügbar”. Although the translation of “unpredictability” has also been considered, Rosa eventually defers to “uncontrollability”, for thematic reasons:

This is exactly what this book is about: modernity’s incessant desire to make the world engineerable, predictable, available, accessible, disposable (i.e. verfügbar) in all its aspects (viii).

Additionally, Rosa is also examining the extent to which we enjoy unpredictability and uncontrollability as well. If we look at sports or board games, it seems that part of the reason why we continuously practice and engage in these activities, is because we do not know who the winner is eventually going to be (3). The randomness involved in all combinatorial possibilities, strategies and moves by a team or individuals within a game, are unpredictable: and that is what instigates our curiosity and desire for continuous re-construction of such playful events.

Although the book is strictly discussing our modern age, these notions of predictability, engineering and disposability have been within the minds of Western Europeans since the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, respectively. The constant desire to manipulate nature, events and our social ecosystem has resulted in a change of how our families, work space and countries interact. Rosa does not specifically address the aforementioned events and their relationship to modernity. However, he does mention that our resultant modern ecosystem has been emerging for the past three centuries, due to our human nature’s disposition to expand relentlessly (8). Rosa’s transition into his central arguments is the position of a realist in political science: regardless of boundaries, walls and other political aspirations, the international world remains anarchic, uncontrollable and unpredictable (20).

Prior to explaining the five main theses of the book, there is a secondary, auxillary concept evoked almost as often as uncontrollability itself. The notoin of resonance plays a significant role in showing the instrumental limits of control, as well as how we socially cope with the uncontrollable aspects of our experiences in the world. “Resonance” itself does uptake multiple meanings, and in some points it could be as easily substituted with the use of “uncontrollability”. However, it seems that the primary role of “resonance” is to evidentiate what makes our experiences “uncontrollable”, and which features of these can become, eventually, within our reach and hence “semi-controllable” (44). Resonance is not as elusive as uncontrollability (4), so it rather behaves as some sort of intersubjective dynamic that enhances our experience of the world.

Gradually, the concept of resonance also uptakes an existentialist baggage. By evoking Merleau-Ponty (31), we as subjects mainly respond and react to experiences, others and events. Rosa further extends this responsiveness as an outcome of resonance. Resonance is a necessary precondition of experience, for an individual to have the reactionary capacity Merleau-Ponty is describing. Consequently, Rosa frames the notion of resonance as a “mode of relation”, which displays the following four features (32-36):

  1. Being Affected: Primarily explained as some inward, aesthetic experience- a song can have such capacity.
  2. Self-Efficacy: An emotoinal and outward movement or reaction. The exchanges of gaze, or a warm dialogue would satisfy such denotation.
  3. Adaptive Transformation: There are numerous examples illustrated under this particular denotation. In summary, it can have something to do either with the gap between expectations and satisfying one’s desires, or the typical imprint we think of when we are changed or influenced by someone.
  4. Uncontrollability: Rosa uptakes the rather conventional use of uncontrollability in this case. It is the dynamic itself of experiencing a change from knowing someone or a particular event. The uncontrollable aspect of it is not only epistemic, in the sense of often not knowing what the experiential outcome is of the transition, but also the difficulties and novelties of adjusting to the particular change.

There are segments, as exemplified by the fourth denotation, where it can be unclear whether or not Rosa evokes uncontrollability as a denotation of resonance or not. It seems that in most uses, “uncontrollability” is unexplainable without some entailment relationship to “resonance”. Both of these concepts, however interchangeable they might be through Rosa’s book, definitely attempt to guide us through the same social phenomena. The more we try to engage in meaningful discussions about predictions, control and the satisfaction of our desires (however these dispositions themselves might in turn be controlled by the invisible hand of the market), our experiences as consumers and beings in the world are not fully satisfied- simply said, unhappy. To further elucidate the relationship between “uncontrollability”, “resonance” and our human experience, Rosa advances five primary arguments through the book:

§1 The inherent uncontrollability of resonance and the fundamental controllability of things do not constitute a contradiction per se (41).

In this passage we can notice additional clarification between the two main concepts of the book. We have a human disposition to react towards what we are affected by, a sensorial experience which is mediated by resonance. Rosa argues that both other subjects, as well as objects (in themselves) have such embedded property of “somehow” projecting “resonance” towards us. Although it is not quite clear how or why other features of the world beyond us have this “resonance” to them, the conclusive remarks of the unit is that there is some sort of relationship towards an “inherent uncontrollability” both in ourselves, as well as in the external world. This thesis becomes slightly difficult to really grasp, especially since the verbatim of the first assertion is that there is no contradiction between the uncontrollability of resonance and the controllability of things. We may uncontrollably become attracted to a wonderful piece of music, wich we eventually resonate to. Afterwards, we can play the song whenever we desire, which does seem to be in our control. Hopefully this elucidates what Rosa was trying to convey with the first thesis.

§2 Things we can completely control in all four dimensions lose their resonant quality. Resonance thus implies semicontrollability (44).

Once we obtain some sense of controllability over what we resonate with, it becomes “semicontrollable”. This is quite a fascinating approach for balancing between the things that are and are not within our control. Therefore, the external world with subjects, objects and events, do possess this feature of resonating with us. Once we correctly internalize this experience and resonate with it, both the external manifestations, as well as resonance itself, becomes semicontrollable. According to Rosa, there are conditions for response from our own subjective side via the sensorial mediation of resonance, and once we have gained some mastery over these phenomena, resonance transforms its features from uncontrollable to semicontrollable. This outcome would also suggest that there is some feature of the external world and others, which will remain uncontrollable, despite any potential conditions of transforming resonance into something semicontrollable.

§3 Resonance demands a form of uncontrollability that “speaks,” that is more than just contingency (48).

Now Rosa is guiding us through the aspects of resonance which remain uncontrollable, despite any transformative conditions. Rosa himself admits this is the most difficult one to demonstrate. He further elaborates on some feeling that we establish towards a song or natural sight (49). The terms chose to describe such relationship, however unexplainable, include “harmony and beauty”. By deferring to Erich Fromm, during the contact phase with natural beauty, for example, the modes of existence shift from “being” to “having” (51).

§4 An attitude aimed at taking hold of a segment of world, mastering it, and making it controllable is incompatible with an orientation toward resonance. Such an attitude destroys any experience of resonance by paralyzing its intrinsic dynamism (52).

Although §2 was emphasizing that eventually, we can obtain some mastery over resonance which leads to a semicontrollable relationship to the external world, §4 has a normative reading to it. Firstly, Rosa introduces a mechanism through which this intrinsic dynamism happens: subjective dimension, object dimension and process dimension (53). This was surely an interest addition to his work, and it would have been helpful to understand what he had in mind with the dynamics of resonance, controllability and uncontrollability via this particular explanation. Rosa does guide us through some fundamentals. The subject dimension is our willingness (and perhaps, openness) to be touched or changed in unpredictable ways. This argument could have been further explored to understand what Rosa thought about the limits of our self-control and autonomy, in relationship to the extent to which we ourselves can transform the external uncontrollable circumstances into semicontrollable ones. At the same time, §4 suggests that once we do obtain that state of semicontrollability, resonance changes its functional applications and interaction with us, thus overall, the entire dynamic of mind and world experiences something else.

Additionally, resonance here is argued as “vulnerability and a willingness to make ourselves vulnerable” (53). We must exercise our autonomy in such a way that we allow ourselves to be opened to vulnerabilities and unpredictable, uncontrollable changes from the external world. The object process seems quite difficult to understand, though hopefully the readers see it as an invitation to further explore Rosa’s work for themselves:

On the object side, uncontrollability means that what we encounter must resist us in at least one of the four dimensions of calculation and control. There must be at least one “obstinate remainder” that has something to say to us, that is meaningful to us in the sense of a strong evaluation (53).

What makes resonance dynamic, is that we cannot control it either with our beliefs or desires. Wanting to be happy on Christmas, or excited for a first date, are not attitudes within our reach or control (56). Now we turn to the fifth thesis:

§5 Resonance requires a world that can be reached, not one that can be limitlessly controlled. The confusion between reachability and controllability lies at the root of the muting of the world in modernity (58).

For the rest of the book, this fifth thesis becomes the most significant one. Rosa argues that Hermann Dueser initially coined the term “Unverfügbarkeit(uncontrollability), by looking at Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy, while attempting to show an opposition to humanity’s complete technological takeover (58). The book continues to be filled with numerous sociological examples about the implications for resonance theory in our daily activities, work, family lives, and religion. The readers should also be wary that in the religious context, Rosa uses “uncontrollability” and “inaccessibility” interchangeably. Whereas inaccessibility can denote the same kind of “unreachability” or “unavailability” that “uncontrollability” does, “unreachability” could also denote that it is not resonant at all, since it is completly beyond our reach or comprehension. Two other significant examples are about modern medical and political practices. Our methodology to any disease is to control it, subdue it and overcome it as quickly as possible (76). In the political ecosystem, however, voters become quite surprised when policies do not go their way. We expect our institutions to control and correctly predict the outcome of political events, in such a way that there are not any unwanted surprises and everyone achieves their respective agenda (91).

The rest of the book is filled with daily, relatable examples of how these dynamics of resonance and uncontrollability affect aspects of our lives. I would highly suggest this book to anyone that wants to further understand some difficult predicaments about modernity, whether at the individual or collective level. The smoothness and approachable language of the text is quite clear and engaging.

Hartmut Rosa: The Uncontrollability of the World

The Uncontrollability of the World Book Cover The Uncontrollability of the World
Hartmut Rosa. James Wagner (Translator)
Polity
2020
Paperback €18.10
140

Reviewed by: Rein Raud

This slim volume provides the Anglophone reader with a perfect introduction to Hartmut Rosa’s thought. Written in a lucid and engaging style, it summarizes much of what Rosa has been arguing at more length in his previous work, notably Social Acceleration (2013) and Resonance (2019), but also for those already familiar with it, he also adds a few new nuances.

Rosa’s point of departure is a precise and merciless diagnosis of the current state of affairs, or late modernity, which, according to him, compounds four strivings or attitudes (15-17): first, to make everything knowable and to map it, second, to make it reachable or accessible, third, to make it manageable, and finally, to put it to good use. These four strivings correspond to science, technology, economy and politics respectively: science provides the knowledge, technology the access, economy tackles the causal handles of the process and politics subjugates the entire domain to administrative procedures that are supposed to ensure that all that happens serves some articulated goals. This, Rosa says, has defined our relationship with the world as an ongoing mutual aggression, with all our daily actions atomized into goal-oriented miniprojects oriented towards certain goals and reduced to checkboxes on an ever-growing to-do list (6-7). Importantly, the endpoint of such activities is not a definable state of satisfaction, but merely “dynamic stability” (9), in which constant growth, acceleration and innovation are needed merely to maintain the status quo, and “what generates this will to escalation is not the promise of improvement in our quality of life, but the unbridled threat that we will lose what we have already attained” (ibid.). As a result, we perceive ourselves as embedded in a hostile reality, a world that threatens us and needs to be contained, countered, subdued, controlled, or else it will do this to us. But we will not prevail. In chapter 3 of the book, Rosa traces a common thread through the works of Marx, Weber, Simmel and Durkheim and onwards to Arendt, Camus and Beckett, deploring the effects of the loss of a meaningful relation with the world on the mind and a person as a whole. (One could easily add more names, beginning with Heidegger, on this list.)

One of the main contributions of Rosa’s work to contemporary debate is an original elaboration of how such a meaningful relation to the world could be described — his theory of “resonance”. “The basic mode of vibrant human existence consists not in exerting control over things but in resonating with them, making them respond to us—thus experiencing self-efficacy—and responding to them in turn,” he says (31, italics in the original). Resonance, as he defines it, has four basic characteristics (32-38): it results from something described as a “call” or “appeal”, a feeling of being affected by a thing or an aspect of the world; this needs to be followed by a response, a movement within us; we need to feel transformed by the encounter, this movement; we need to accept that this resonance is not something we can control, plan, or produce, or even predict what kind of transformation it will bring about in us. Therefore, for example, planning a “perfect evening” or 100% quality time will not necessarily result in the desired outcome, combined, as it often is, with stress about whether everything is going according to the plan — and even if nothing unpredictable has intervened, there is much less joy in the flawless execution of a plan than there might be in the jazz of circumstances and unexpected, yet pleasurable turns and twists along the way.

Next, Rosa proceeds to investigate the balance between our striving to control and our ability to resonate with the world, because, as he admits, “we are able to resonate with other people or things only when they are in a way “semicontrollable,” when they move between complete controllability and total uncontrollability” (40) — in other words, what is deplored is not any need to feel confident about things, but an excessive desire to control things in which things themselves are forgotten, their meaningfulness erased. What is therefore needed is a balance between control and uncontrollability. He presents five theses on the topic (41-59), evoking “a relation of dynamic openness” (52) as the precondition of “semicontrollability”, or reaching out to things without trying to subjugate them or incorporate them completely in one’s own schemes: the basic mistake of modernity, he says, is the confusion of reachability and controllability resulting in an effort to always convert the former into the latter (57).

The next two chapters test the theory by mapping it onto practical realities: chapter 6 is dedicated to what Rosa calls the six stages of life (birth, education, career-planning,  adulthood, aging and death), chapter 7 to institutional realities such as the optimization drive, bureaucracy, quantified accountability, legalistic procedures and so on, showing in all cases how the striving for excessive control may result in overregulation and the complete opposite of the goals initially proclaimed by the ideologues of control (common happiness, justice, responsibility and so on). The last two chapters are essays on the topics of how resonance relates to desire and on how excessive control produces more, not less uncontrollability into the lifeworlds of people in the late modern world.

All in all, this compact book provides a sound, insightful and sharp socio-philosophical theory that connects very well with the daily experience of the prospective readers of the book, and provides a succinct introduction to Rosa’s theory of resonance for those intimidated by the 576 pages of his principal book on the subject. It can therefore be wholeheartedly recommended for any reader interested in phenomenological social theory.

There are nonetheless a few questions that can be asked of Rosa’s theory. First, what is the actual target of Rosa’s critique? In the book he has used the words “modernity” and “capitalism” almost as if they were synonymous. Rosa makes the equation explicitly on page 10 and repeats it throughout the book, in particular, through highlighting the strategy of commodity capitalism to translate the thirst for resonance into the desire for the acquisition of objects (38, 78, 107). But such usage limits the range of validity for his observations quite remarkably (as well as unnecessarily), making it a bit of a first-world problem. Nonetheless, history also knows other forms of modernity than that of the liberal capitalist West. For example, the Bolshevik project in Russia and the Maoist project in China both manifest clear characteristics of the accelerationist time regime that Rosa has outlined in Social Acceleration: the cult of over-completing “the plan” in Soviet Russia on the one hand and Mao’s Great Leap Forward on the other are both efforts at imposing a voluntaristically constructed time regime on the fabric of society, and the tendency of both these regimes to control the minds of its subjectively atomized citizens and to outroot all kind of resonance with their inherited past have been, if anything, much more vicious and damaging to these societies than the anonymizing effects of commercializiation and the replacement of organically grown personal identities with factory-made lifestyles that capitalist market economy has been so successful at. It would thus help to clarify the issue by specifying which, if any, of the alienating processes are specifically caused by capitalism, which have possibly only been enhanced by it and which are generally characteristic of the modern time-regime and its intrinsic drive for acceleration.

Another question that remained with me throughout this book is that of the status of “resonance” — is this a characteristic of the way in which I would be experiencing my life-world if there would be nothing interfering with my relation with it, or is it a quality that my relation with it acquires in special cases, depending on both my own state of mind and the nature of the things I am interacting with? Is it something learned or something lost in life? There are passages in the book that suggest both. On page 31, he writes that the capacity for resonance is “in a way, the “essence” not only of human existence, but of all possible manners of relating to the world; it is the necessary precondition of our ability to place the world at a distance and bring it under our control”, which seems to indicate that resonating with the world is the primary core of any experience, and later in the book Rosa talks about losing capability for resonance as a pathological condition; on the other hand, he also talks about the axes of resonance (44ff.) implying that certain things, but not others, are able to evoke resonance in a particular person, and that certain circumstances may be necessary for resonance to occur (53). This may empirically be so (a heartless administrator may occasionally have a meaningful relationship with, and only with, their cactus), but, taken more generally, intoduces a (to my mind unnecessary) bifurcation into the theory, dividing the things of the world into the potentially resonant and the rest. Arguably the theory would gain in explanatory power, were it to credit the entire world with the potentiality to resonate ceaselessly, for example, in the mind of a child, and to look at how this capacity is diminished and potentially lost as a result of certain misconceived socio-cultural practices of modernity.

This leads us to the next question: Rosa seems to programmatically oppose anything synthetic and technological to the natural and organic aspects of our environment, so that seemingly only the latter are those we can successfully resonate with, while the former are the source of losing touch with the rhythms of reality and the resulting alienation. This is an important issue in need of more argument. For example, studies in social psychology have indeed indicated a correlation between too much screen time and mental and physical health problems, especially for younger people, but the question remains whether this is a unidirectional issue — it has also been suggested that only excessive screen time has negative effects, while a certain (controlled!) amount of it is actually beneficial, and that children are more likely to engage with gadgets are those already in risk groups according to other indicators. It is also often the case that bonding with others is technologically mediated, for example, in watching a film together.

Thus, though intuitively plausible and supported by the Heideggerian view of technology as the soulless enforcer of inauthentic relations with the environment, the opposition of the technological to the organic is not necessarily warranted and also not a cultural universal: for example, in Shintō, the Japanese traditional worldview, no such qualitative difference is made between natural and technological aspects of the environment and they can both be perceived as sacred. The problem lies with the perceiver: after all, it is quite possible to develop an alienated, utilitarian and profit-driven gaze of the organic environment as well. Therefore, the question that possibly needs to be asked is whether resonance is not, after all, a human capacity or talent that needs to be fostered and cherished, and while some clearly beautiful and awe-inspiring aspects of the world may have more potential for eliciting it from any given individual than others, we cannot generalize about these aspects and correlate them with the physical provenance of particular things — at least not without further argument.

All that said, “The Uncontrollability of the World” is a remarkable book, packing a lot of insightful theory as well as analyses of its practical validity into a slim volume that, I hope, will find its way to the reading lists of many courses on social philosophy as well as the tables of fellow academics throughout the world.

Yohanan Friedmann, Christoph Markschies (Eds.): Religious Responses to Modernity, De Gruyer, 2021

Religious Responses to Modernity Book Cover Religious Responses to Modernity
Yohanan Friedmann and Christoph Markschies (Eds.)
De Gruyter
2021
Hardback 77,95 €
141

Agata Bielik-Robson, Daniel Whistler (Eds.): Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg

Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg Book Cover Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose
Agata Bielik-Robson, Daniel Whistler (Eds.)
Palgrave Macmillan
2020
Hardback 96,29 €
XXV, 277

Reviewed by: Bruce J. Krajewski (University of Texas at Arlington)

In a recent review, Kate Hayles praises Catherine Malabou for admitting in Morphing Intelligence that she was “dead wrong” about some scholarly matter. While not begrudging Malabou her applause, most academics would have to admit the low cost of such an admission for a full professor invited to speak across the globe, and treated as a “celebrity,” as Malabou is. More praiseworthy is for younger academics, and those with unsubsidized careers in higher education’s hierarchy, to write that some prominent author is wrong. Those assertions can mean banishment from conferences, withdrawal of speaking invitations, and the like, since professional societies devoted (in the questionable sense) to major authors are understandably controlled almost always by an author’s fans, disciples, and sometimes family members. Speaking truth to yourself (a confession) and speaking truth to power is a distance similar to being winged in a Twitterstorm for your views and being “canceled.” None of this should be compared to the kind of courage, say, Alexey Navalny exhibits. That’s a different realm, but needs to be part of the context, lest academics damaged by schoolhouse politics slip into masochism.

The contributors to Interrogating Modernity demonstrate an inspiring irreverence and willingness to declare that the volume’s star, Hans Blumenberg, has gotten things wrong. That virtue makes for an admirable collection worthy of its subtitle. At this early stage—Blumenberg’s ashes were scattered only a quarter century ago—the scholarly work on Blumenberg has been uncritical, making Interrogating Modernity a refreshing novelty on the Blumenbergiana shelf.

Blumenberg’s followers have fashioned a mythic Blumenberg, portraying him as a mysterious intellectual Colossus, adopting Blumenberg’s own tendency later in his life toward self-aggrandizement. Thus, we have the film The Invisible Philosopher, for example. The followers’ strategy has upped the stakes for anyone who might question or criticize the great philosopher.

Willing to be heretical, the contributors to this volume refuse to be intimidated by The Wizard of Oz scenario fabricated by Blumenberg’s fans to promote knee-bending as opposed to scholarly spinefulness. The volume’s editors charged the authors with “putting [Legitimacy of the Modern Age, the book that arguably launched Blumenberg’s international reputation] into dialogue with later versions of modernity” (vii). The editors insisted on rethinking issues Blumenberg raises in Legitimacy, and the contributors frequently exceed expectations in responding to the call for rethinking.

The first essay out the gate encapsulates all that is good about this book. It’s not a head-on meeting with Blumenberg’s Legitimacy. It’s creative. It takes risks. It could have failed. Here’s a taste of Bielik-Robson’s experimentation: “Although it does not mention Job explicitly, Hans Blumenberg’s reading of Descartes suggests this affinity very strongly” (4). Bielik-Robson resurrects an old-fashioned scholarly recipe: rub any two things together and see what sparks fly.

Bielik-Robson recognizes Job as a figure of “self-assertion,” a topos in Blumenberg. Unable to tie Blumenberg directly to Job, Bielik-Robson uses a side door. Blumenberg’s research counterpart in the Hermeneutik und Poetik group, Hans Robert Jauss, views “Job as the first hero of self-assertion” in his essay “Job’s Questions and Their Distant Reply” (6). This clever move allows Bielik-Robson the opportunity to demonstrate an incompleteness in Blumenberg’s attention to Descartes. In Legitimacy, Blumenberg acknowledges the importance of Descartes: “Descartes appear[s] not so much as the founding figure of the epoch as rather the thinker who clarified the medieval concept of reality all the way to its absurd consequences and thus made it ripe for destruction.” Blumenberg wants to downplay “the founding figure,” the singular Descartes,” in order to promote “the thinker,” synonymous with anyone who employs the method Descartes used to bring about the old reality’s destruction.

The new reality Descartes advocates post-destruction appeals to Blumenberg, because it involves principles of construction to philosophize. That is, Descartes emphasizes the form and conditions of thinking rather than the contingent content. Like Descartes, Blumenberg wants “reoocupation” to function as a transcendental model untainted by historical events, a point fleshed out in the last chapter by Whistler. Historical changes are to be explained by Blumenberg’s ahistorical model.

Descartes studies his “own self” in a room of his own, where it occurs to him “that frequently there is less perfection in a work produced by several persons than in one produced by a single hand.” The primacy of the individual thinker is Job redux. Bielik-Robson describes Job’s situation in memorable prose. Job’s story becomes important when “the anthropological minimum [Job] asserted itself for the first time against … the theological maximum [God]” (15). In a schoolbook, this might be described as individuality versus omnipotence.

Job becomes a synonym for “enough is enough!” (16). For Bielik-Robson, Job’s story is the journey of a patient moving toward health. “According to [Jonathan] Lear, the patient reaches the point of relative health when she is able to exclaim: ‘Oh, this is crap!’—which very nicely corresponds with Blumenberg’s take on Descartes, who may be said to have reacted in a similar way, by simply deciding to cut himself off emotionally from the theological morass and call deus fallax a ‘metaphysical fable’—basically, a very crappy story” (16). Unfortunately, Blumenberg’s focus on the meta-analysis instead of the patient means the trauma of being fed up is not given its due as a revolutionary catalyst (18).

Elad Lapidot’s “Legitimacy of Nihilism” juxtaposes Hans Jonas and Blumenberg. Lapidot argues that Blumenberg rejects Jonas’s critique of modernity as “the return of Gnosticism” (45). For Blumenberg’s taste, that would leave modernity without as radical a break as he wants. Blumenberg needs a way past the logic that “legitimacy enters the world through negation, through illegitimacy” (48). Modernity establishes its own legitimacy apart from the previous historical epoch. According to Lapidot, the New itself “is a category of entitlement and legitimation.”

Opposing not only Jonas but also Martin Heidegger, Blumenberg seeks to jettison a notion of continuity attached to a substance. Lapidot writes, “This original constant substance is the basic assumption of all critiques against any historical age” (45). Blumenberg is uninterested in substantialism. He is after something more radical. “The new has no other foundation but itself, and so its specific form of legitimacy is self-legitimization” (47). This antifoundationalism is partly what attracted Richard Rorty to Blumenberg (Rorty was an early Anglophone reviewer of Blumenberg’s Legitimacy book).

Lapidot’s essay pairs well with Daniel Whistler’s “Modernizing Blumenberg.” Whistler begins boldly: “[Blumenberg] gets modernity wrong” (257). According to Whistler, Blumenberg supplements modernist figures’ arguments for modernity’s legitimation, fashioning a case that the modernist figures themselves did not make.

Like Lapidot, Whistler reports that the continuity between the middle ages and modernity Blumenberg emphasizes is functional, but not substantive. In a way, it’s the old form versus content argument. Rather than seeing the two as dependent on other, Blumenberg elevates form over content, since that’s the airplane ticket out of any historical ruptures at ground level. Forms fly above temporality’s constraints. From such a height, anyone might have anticipated Blumenberg to look down on things. Thus, Whistler writes, “[I]t is hard not to discern a slight tone of condescension in Blumenberg’s narrative of modernity” (259).

By siding with form and functionality, Blumenberg asserts that his account offers a novel stability. Whistler: “[W]henever the content of history changes, the forms stay the same. Forms may themselves be changing slowly, but their inertia is sufficient for them to remain a stable reference point by which to make sense of any novelty in history” (263). Blumenberg is not content with the messiness of mere history. “Like Kant, Blumenberg considers his transcendental apparatus to be immutable, to exist outside of the frame of historical change and epochal transformation” (264). Whistler concludes that this viewpoint makes Blumenberg a “right Aristotelian” (268). Given Blumenberg’s allegiances to far-right ideas linked to Latinate Catholicism, Whistler’s “right Aristotelian” designation rings true. Blumneberg is a “conservative” (267).

In the chapter contrasting Bruno Latour and Blumenberg, Willem Styfhals understands Blumenberg as an “apologist” (77) for the ecological mess we are in, and decides Latour offers better options for the predicted apocalypse. “The apocalypse is an unstable, unbearable position that might be conceptually appealing but not practically endurable. This is what Blumenberg made crystal clear in Lebenszeit und Weltzeit as well as in Legitimacy. The apocalypse is so attractive because it allows us to see the world in a radically different perspective, liberates us from the old world for a moment. But this moment does not give rise to a stable and durable position in the world” (77). Syfhals has missed Frederic Jameson’s insight, cited in Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times, that calls for distinguishing among apocalypses: “[I]t is easier to imagine a total catastrophe which ends all life on earth than it is to imagine a real change to capitalist relations” (334).

Latour does not see capitalism as the problem; it’s religion: “If modernity were not so deeply religious, the call to adjust oneself to the Earth would be easily heard.” (71). Thus, Styfhals says, “[W]e should develop a political theology of the environmental apocalypse” (61).

While Blumenberg published at least one book specifically about technology, it’s difficult to categorize any other of his major writings as confronting environmental issues in the way Styfhals does with his focus on Latour and the Anthropocene. No one would think of Blumenberg as a stand-in for Rachel Carson.

The fourth chapter by Joseph Albernaz and Kirill Chepurin also addresses the theme of political theology. Styfhals’s use of apocalypse in the previous chapter has its place in the fourth chapter. For anyone acquainted with televangelism, the continual announcement of forthcoming apocalypses is a staple of populist Christianity. No matter that a specific date for the rapture is given and then passes. That failure is overlooked while a new date for the end is announced. The misreading of signs can be chalked up to human fallibility rather than an indication of a flaw in “God’s plan.” Albernaz and Chepurin recognize that what becomes important for Christianity is not that the world didn’t end as predicted, but that it continues: “But as Christianity found itself needing to explain the world’s continued existence, it was also establishing itself … as a [worldly] power. As a result, it needed to justify not the end of the world, but its prolongation” (86). The Christian Church sets itself up “as the institution of the not-yet that is the world – as the institution ‘stabilizing’ this not-yet” (86).

Within this context of an ever-delayed apocalypse, Christians fashioned a God with unlimited sovereignty and omnipotence. However, by the late medieval period God’s characteristics became incomprehensible, “alien to consciousness,” according to Albernaz and Chepurin (88). In response to this affront to consciousness, human beings develop their own rationality to give themselves security that is comprehensible (91-92).

The deleterious effects of Christianity’s global power as explored by Albernaz and Chepurin also concern Lissa McCullough. Her essay makes the case that if you thought Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt were harmful, then you need to take a second look at John Locke (124). “Locke founded a new religion focused around the sacrality of proprietas in The Second Treatise on Government, while retaining in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) as much as was reasonably salvageable of the trappings of Christian faith to give the new religion a respectable pedigree, hitching it to . . . the authority of an apparent continuity with Jewish-Christian tradition (122). If you wonder why some people feel it legitimate to kill others for stealing, you can thank Locke for valorizing property over human lives. McCullough writes that Locke and his advocates managed to persuade numerous capitalists that the individual’s only incentive to consent to “join” society is to protect the property he has” (122).

McCullough sifts through Blumenberg to demonstrate Blumenberg’s allegiance to Locke’s valorization of property, despite Blumenberg’s efforts to make Locke seem insignificant to the massive scholarly buttresses Blumenberg uses to build his cases. Vital matters pivot on a reference to Locke in a footnote, for example. “[A]n extended footnote in Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960) … proves a vein of gold when mined for its immense implications. This footnote expands on the notion of truth as a product of labour. In it, Blumenberg remarks that this sort of produced [constructed?] truth is truth that is legitimately one’s own. The possession to be taken” (110). McCullough’s hermeneutical attention shows Blumenberg’s participation in Locke’s scheme. Blumenberg contributes to overturning the Horatian view that what is natural is not something one can own: “Nor he, nor I, nor any man, is made/by Nature private owner of the soil” (111).

In addition to articles that confront Blumenberg’s arguments and politics, the collection features authors who affirm Blumenberg’s positions. Zeynep Talay Turner’s “Political Legitimacy and Founding Myths” corroborates Blumenberg’s criticism of Hannah Arendt in Blumenberg’s “Moses the Egyptian,” written around 1978. Turner writes, “As Freud took Moses the man from his people [Blumenberg says Freud “damaged” his people’s “self-confidence”], so Hannah Arendt took Adolf Eichmann from the State of Israel.” Blumenberg does not hide his “indignation” towards this “stealing” (129).

Turner captures the salient features of “Moses the Egyptian” and presents an effective précis of Blumenberg’s use of the term “prefiguration.” Even though Turner seems ultimately to agree with Blumenberg about Eichmann in Jerusalem, Turner notes in his conclusion that Blumenberg may have been venturing outside his area of expertise in taking up the question of “what a Jewish state should do with someone who had sought to destroy the Jews” (146).

According to Turner and Blumenberg, Israel needed Eichmann to take on a mythic role at his trial in order to solidify Israeli nationhood. It’s not clear whether anyone ever laid that task at Arendt’s feet during the trial, since she was writing in the moment, as events unfolded. Unlike Blumenberg, Arendt did not have the luxury of hindsight, nor was she alive in 1978 to respond to such criticism. Furthermore, Turner and Blumenberg do not provide details of how Arendt’s book on Eichmann undermined Israel, then or since. Conceptual damage is of a different order from “stealing” a nation’s legitimacy.

In Chapter 7, Robert Buch concentrates on a “neglected” (153) part of Legitimacy of the Modern Age, the section about theoretical curiosity. Why has it been neglected? Buch: “The reasons for the relative neglect of the third part undoubtedly have to do with its length and more specifically its detail and apparent digressiveness, but above all its sheer material abundance.”

The editors sought to bring Blumenberg into conversation with other thinkers, and Buch chooses Husserl as Blumenberg’s conversation partner. Buch’s aim is “to juxtapose Blumenberg’s account of the genesis of early modern science with Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences” (153).

Perceptions of science’s legitimacy have relevance, Buch writes, given “the modern suspicion of science, aggravated dramatically in our times of climate crisis” (164). Husserl questioned the cause of a universal science, a science that adhered to rational structures and objectivity (166). Husserl reacted against the easy division between objectivity and subjectivity. Husserl posits that modern science fails to consider consciousness as a component of its investigations.

In Buch’s account, Blumenberg owes many debts to Husserl’s view of science and technology. The differences are fewer than the commonalities. One important difference appears in Blumenberg’s narrative about the electric doorbell in an essay Buch leans on heavily, “Phenomenological Aspects on Life-World and Technization,” now available in English in The Blumenberg Reader. Blumenberg says the electric doorbell, the workings of which are hidden in comparison to a mechanical doorbell, “is ‘packaged’ in a way that it conceals this history and deprives it from us in its abstract uniformity…. [I]t is legitimized by being … put into operation” (Blumenberg Reader, 386). The “artificial product,” the doorbell, is “shrouded” with “obviousness”; technization produces this unquestioned obviousness (Reader, 387), a point Blumenberg claims shows the limits of Husserl’s commentary on the connection between life-world and technization. Blumenberg aims to show that his account is “more complicated.” To appreciate Blumenberg’s point, think of the unknowability about the functioning of crosswalk buttons in urban centers, many of which remain deliberately unfixed. Even a non-working button gives the illusion of control.

Charles Turner’s chapter on “infinite progress” in science concludes with an exploration of time and the life of the politician (175). In the middle of the two topics is C. Turner’s choice for Blumenberg’s partner in dialogue, Max Weber. The question Weber poses that C. Turner investigates is: [W]hat are the chances that someone whose life is necessarily limited to one arena of activity can achieve something of lasting significance?” (181). Weber directs that question at scholars and politicians.

In making Weber’s question contemporary, C. Turner reminds readers about the fast pace of contemporary life coupled with an increase in life expectancy. In the infinity of time, how are finite individuals to gather meaning for their lives? For scholars, the fear is that one’s work becomes obsolete within the scholar’s lifetime. For the politician, long-lasting glory can come with great success, but few politicians are remembered beyond their lifetimes. As Weber puts it, the scholarly life is chained to progress (thus fear of obsolescence), while the political life is more like art in that multiple spectacular achievements by different artists are possible, though those achievements must be of a stature to escape temporal constraints (184).

Weber’s long view echoes Blumenberg’s considerations of Lebenszeit and Weltzeit, the tension between the individual’s tiny lifetime amidst the ocean of time that is world history. Blumenberg suggests we leave the tension in place, lest the world itself suffer as it did with Adolf Hitler. According to Blumenberg, Hitler’s sin was an effort at melding Lebenszeit and Weltzeit. The evidence lies in a quotation from Hitler: “I … stand under the command of fate to achieve everything within a short human life … That for which others have an eternity, I have merely a few meagre years” (191).

In Chapter 9, Oriane Petteni escorts her readers into the world of art history and optics. This gives Petteni reason to ponder Blumenberg’s preference not to be photographed (202), as if Blumenberg’s own study of optics caused his wish to avoid the medium. Petteni is well aware Blumenberg’s avoidance of selfies is something more than shyness. Petteni sees it as connected to much larger matters, like truth. The visible and the hidden link up with Western beliefs about truth. Petteni writes, “[I]n the modern age, truth no longer reveals itself; instead, it must be revealed by decisive action” (195). That is, we must work for our truth.

The comments on truth correspond to Blumenberg’s views about biology. Petteni sees that Blumenberg derives his anthropology from biology. Petteni turns to The Genesis of the Copenican World for evidence. “The Earth requires both exposure to the Sun for complex lifeforms to arise and protection from direct exposure to sun rays, which would otherwise threaten to consume every living thing. The exposure to light requires—for the Earth as well as for human beings—a kind of filter or screen” (203). Others back up Petteni’s sense that Blumenberg foregrounds the importance of indirection and camouflage, such as the recent biography by Uwe Wolff, who notes multiple times Blumenberg’s penchant for indirect communication.

Petteni finishes her reflections on Blumenberg via a journey through Franz Kafka’s Der Bau. The unfinished Kafka text parallels, for Petteni, Blumenberg’s open-endedness regarding the human impulse to fashion “endless significance” (211). The story about a burrow also fits in with a quotation Petteni cites by Heinz Wisman, “[Blumenberg’s] thought is strongly marked by the worry not to remain at the surface of things” (202).

Chapter 10 might serve readers best read in conjunction with the first and the last chapters where Descartes has a prominent role. One difference about Adi Efal-Lautenschläger’s chapter is the linkage between Descartes and Blumenberg’s book The Legibility of the World. Blumenberg himself points out the parallels between his theme in Legibility and Descartes’s Traité du monde et de la lumière. What does Blumenberg find in Descartes’ book? “The self is to be experienced according to the measure of the world, as compatible or not with its changing conditions” (Legibility, 92). This lesson runs counter to interpretations of Descartes that rely on the celebrated cogito ergo sum and tend to make Descartes a happy solipsist. The lesson also seems a challenge to Whistler’s essay in which Blumenberg leaves behind the messy world for timeless forms and models, though keep in mind that Whistler’s interpretation launches from a different Blumenberg work, Legitimacy rather than Legibility.

Efal-Lautenschläger contributes a useful dichotomy based on the arguments of Legibility: “Blumenberg chooses to put his concept of reality on the side of world-imaging, instead of world-modelling. [R]eality is understood as belonging to the arena of representations or of world-imaging. World imaging – and, with it, reality itself – has an interpretative orientation: the reality that results from the image of the world is designated as an act of reading” (224-25).

Credit the editors with choosing to follow Efal-Lautenschläger’s essay with one that expands Efal-Lautenschläger’s points. Returning to Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Sonja Feger dives into another pairing, “reoccupation” (Umbesetzung) and “reality-concepts” (Wirklichkeitsbegriffe). Feger tells readers that Blumenberg uses reoccupation “to explain how epochal change can be grasped. On the other hand, and in other texts, he provides a historical analysis of what he calls “reality-concepts.” “In this chapter, I attempt to bring these two concepts into line with each other” (237).

Reoccupation is up first. Feger: “It is important to note that “reoccupation”, that is, the English term Wallace uses to translate the German word Umbesetzung, does not allude to anything antagonistic; it is not about any kind of (intellectual) conquest or usurpation. Rather, the term brings into focus the process-character of epochal change” (244). Emphasizing the “process-character” of change points to Whistler again, because “reoccupation” is about a perennial question-and-answer model Blumenberg wants to say is at work. Not that a “firm canon” of “great questions” exists. Fegel warns readers not to become fixated on answers or questions in their concrete content. Relying on a quotation from Blumenberg’s essay on secularization, Fegel asks readers to remember that “the historical identity and methodical identifiability of supposedly secularized notions is an illusion created by the identity of the function that altogether heterogeneous contents can assume in certain positions within man’s system of understanding the world and himself” (245).

How do we find out about reality? In some places, like Blumenberg’s famous essay on the possibility of the novel, his response seems to be “sometimes we won’t.” Feger pinpoints his wording: “[I]t is quite natural that the most deeply hidden implication of an era – namely, its concept of reality – should become explicit only when the awareness of that reality has already been broken.” (246). It’s a version of not being able to see the forest for the trees. “The subject as historically situated can only account for earlier concepts of reality, not current ones” (246).

Exiting that reality dilemma depends on reality-concepts. “Making a reality-concept explicit draws on the distinction between an object (i.e. a certain behaviour towards reality) and reflection on that object” (247). While it looks as if Blumenberg’s position is that our reflecting on an object called reality is accurate only for earlier periods, Feger says our access to what’s real about the moment we are in depends on Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. “[T]ranscendental consciousness both carries out and simultaneously reflects upon the process of (reality-) constitution” (248). Problem solved (if Blumenberg is correct).

References

Bajohr, Hannes, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll (Eds.). 2020. History, Metaphor, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader. Ithaca, NY. Cornell University Press.

Hayles, N. Katherine. 2019. “Review of Morphing Intelligence.” Posted May 17, 2019. Accessed November 1, 2020. https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/n._katherine_hayles_reviews_morphing_intelligence.

Prisco, Jacopo. 2020. “Illusion of Control: Why the World is Full of Buttons that Don’t Work.” CNN.com. Accessed November 1, 2020. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/placebo-buttons-design/index.html.

Wolff, Uwe. 2020. Der Schreibtisch des Philosophen: Erinnerungen an Hans Blumenberg. München: Claudius Verlag.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2011. Living in the End Times. London: Verso.

Martin Heidegger: Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache (Gesamtausgabe 38 A), Klostermann, 2020)

Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache (Freiburger Vorlesung Sommersemester 1934) Book Cover Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache (Freiburger Vorlesung Sommersemester 1934)
Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 38 A
Martin Heidegger. Auf der Grundlage des Originalmanuskripts neu herausgegeben von Peter Trawny
Klostermann
2020
Hardback $102.60
X, 190

Agata Bielik-Robson, Daniel Whistler (Eds.): Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg Book Cover Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg
Agata Bielik-Robson Daniel Whistler (Eds.)
Palgrave Macmillan
2020
Hardback 96,29 €
XXIV, 268