Modernity – Phenomenological Reviews

Henri Bergson: Freedom – Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904-1905

Freedom – Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904-1905 Book Cover

Title: Freedom – Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904-1905
Author: Henri Bergson. Edited by Nils F. Schott and Alexandre Lefebvre. Translated by Leonard Lawlor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date: 2024
Format: Hardback
Pages: 272

Reviewed by: Kynthia Plagianou (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Introduction

This edition marks the first in a series of three English translations of lectures that Henri Bergson (1859-1941) presented from 1901 to 1905 at the Collège de France. As the editors of the series, Nils F. Schott and Alexandre Lefebvre, mention, the complete list of courses Bergson offered during his fourteen-year appointment at France’s most prestigious academic institution remains unknown (Schott & Lefebvre 2024: ix). Intriguingly, from the eleven known delivered courses, only four were preserved in writing out of sheer coincidence: Charles Péguy, a dedicated attendee of Bergson’s lectures, hired two stenographers to keep verbatim notes when a scheduling conflict prevented him from attending the lectures for four subsequent years. These four transcriptions, the only records of Bergson’s teaching style and material, eventually appeared in print by the Presses Universitaires de France between 2016 and 2019. With the first book on The Evolution of the Problem of Freedom (1904-1905) published in 2024, the other two of the four courses are scheduled to appear in English translation by 2027: The History of the Idea of Time (1902-1903) and The History of Theories of Memory (1903-1904).[1] Since the current edition introduces the series to prospective readers, I want to briefly comment on the project’s specifics before I provide an overview of Bergson’s lecture on the problem of freedom. It is worth noting that, for curious reasons, the English translations do not follow the courses’ chronological order. However, the editors do clarify why the fourth preserved course on The Idea of Time (1901-1902) is not included in the series: only the last sessions were transcribed, and the French edition is based on a reconstruction of the course thanks to surviving students’ notes (Schott & Lefebvre 2024: xiii).

The translations arrive in good time as the revived enthusiasm for Bergson’s thought has peaked in the past few years. In the English-speaking world, Bergson Studies flourishes, with new publications on different aspects of his thought and life appearing almost annually.[2] Edited and translated by leading Bergson scholars, the lectures at the Collège promise to attract a wide readership. For philosophers and intellectual historians, especially those working in the continental tradition, the lectures manifest the richness of Bergson’s philosophical vision. Perhaps the most important philosopher of the early twentieth century in France, Bergson revolutionised metaphysics and developed rigorous reflections on many topics relevant to contemporary philosophy, such as the nature of time, the relation between memory and perception, types of causality, and, of course, the possibility of freedom. Luckily, not only do we have the preserved transcripts, but these are devoted to the three central themes of Bergson’s thought until the 1910s: time, memory, and freedom. In his course material, Bergson recapitulates or anticipates the ideas developed in his three major works, Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907). The lectures read complementarily to the published works as they follow the historical evolution of each theme, looking at cardinal moments in Western philosophy when a thinker or a school of thought shifts the problem in a new direction. This engagement with the tradition in the lectures corrects the impression Bergson’s writings sometimes evoke, “that he springs from the ground as if without any predecessors at all” (Schott & Lefebvre 2024: x). Importantly, the lectures offer an accessible way into the Bergsonian universe for a general audience interested in philosophy and the history of ideas. Designed to appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike, the courses at the Collège were open to everyone without academic requirements, registration, or fees. In this regard, Bergson’s lectures can still play their part in disseminating complex ideas while conveying to the general audience the pleasures of “thought in the making”.

The Freedom Lectures

Necessity and the origin of the idea of freedom in antiquity

Bergson’s course on the problem of freedom unfolds in twenty lectures over a period of five months (from 6 December 1904 to 20 May 1905). In the first lecture, instead of defining freedom directly, thus “favouring a particular theory and prejudging the solution”, Bergson sketches the constitution of freedom “as a problem” in the history of philosophy. Perhaps anticipating impatient listeners, he downgrades this introductory exposition, characterising it as invoking “vague generalities”, but in truth, it sets the tone for the entire course (Bergson 2024: 12, 21). His opening lines, “[…] no matter what theory (people) advance on the subject of freedom, there’s one point on which everyone agrees: freedom is a certain characteristic that is inherent, or that seems to be inherent to our action such as it immediately appears to us, such as it’s given to our immediate consciousness” (Bergson 2024: 12), condenses several assumptions, which Bergson unpacks into the following interrelated claims.

First, there are two primary faculties that differ in nature and function: “immediate consciousness” and “reflective thought”, reigning over “action” and “speculation” respectively. Second, freedom arises as a problem in the encounter of these two mutually exclusive faculties: “[i]t is the problem that our action poses for our speculation” (Bergson 2024: 12). Why is this so? Precisely because they work differently. Any voluntary act, Bergson continues, is “self–sufficient”: it exists in the thrust of a single intention. The intellect, on the other hand, operates through pairs of terms. While the will is expressed in one single tendency that translates into action, the intellect oscillates between two terms and, by establishing a causal relation, makes a synthesis for reflection. Even so, it is still unclear why the problem of freedom arises at this stage, and Bergson deepens his explanation, marshalling the concepts of time and duration. His third claim is that, while action necessarily unfolds in time, time “absolutely escapes the grip of reflective thought”. Summing up the gist of themes that appear in Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory and the drafts of Creative Evolution, Bergson makes a fourth claim: immediate consciousness proceeds via intuition and becomes the site for the unfolding of inner life, while the intellect proceeds via understanding, and has an altogether different role and relation to time. The intellect evades duration or the passage of time. It merely registers the results of this passage arrayed in fixed positions in space. Even if we introduce movement to simulate duration, this is composed of spatial elements, and as much as we narrow the intervals between points, we will not capture the flow of time.

According to Bergson, science and intellectualist metaphysics, relying precisely on a spatial conception of time, grasp only “what is already made” and eschew what exists “in the making”, namely action. Historically, they constantly upgrade their methods, advancing all the more sophisticated theories to determine causal relations and uncover natural laws, committing to an all the more rigorous determinism. However — with this point being the crux of this introductory exposition — the tighter our deterministic outlook becomes, the more the dissonance between our intellectual faculties and intuition increases. The inner feeling of agential freedom we experience when we act, and to which intuition testifies, persists despite our intellectual progress. Even though the will, with its practical orientation, harnesses the intellect and its capacity to establish necessary connections to navigate through a chaotic world, the intellect remains oblivious to the will’s freedom. Evolutionary speaking, action precedes speculation, and our intellectual faculties have developed to facilitate action. Increasingly, these faculties gained independence and instituted their own proper scientific and speculative domains. When the question of freedom is posed from within these domains, we necessarily adopt the deterministic framework that renders freedom a mere illusion. By contrast, starting from the practical domain of action and the perspective of the will, both freedom and determinism are rendered effectively explainable.

Turning to history, Bergson notes that there are good reasons why determinist views predominate and the freedomists are “always on the defensive”. Since all habits of thought, logic and even language conform to necessitarian thinking, the freedomists are “forced to appeal to an inner feeling”, which they can only articulate through ready-made concepts and in opposition to determinism. In that respect, notwithstanding the course’s title, “Evolution of the Problem of Freedom”, it is deterministic theories that have evolved, properly speaking. An early conjecture of necessity as a “rhythmic movement” that periodically brings back the same events is found in the Ionian philosophers. With the Stoics, the grid of causal connections tightens, and what was understood as a “vague regularity of nature” turns into a cosmological doctrine “of the universal interdependence of all things” (Bergson 2024: 19). Later, Plotinus, while rejecting the Stoic doctrine, refines it further. Deterministic thinking, as Bergson relates, evolves throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance until it finds its most rigorous expression in modernity. While in antiquity necessity was understood in qualitative terms, the effect manifesting a qualitative change induced by the cause, with the advent of modern science and the mathematisation of nature, causal relations become quantifiable, that is, relations between magnitudes expressed by functions. The scientific mechanisation of necessity will first enter philosophy with the Cartesian system and culminate in Spinoza’s and Leibniz’s absolute determinism.

If the idea of necessity is naturally prompted by our intellectual tendency to structure reality according to causes and effects, the idea of freedom arises in an altogether different manner. Stemming as a sentiment accompanying action, freedom grows and strengthens primarily outside philosophy. Progress in the ideas of freedom never occurs from speculation or science but rather “by an intrusion into philosophy of certain sociopolitical elements”, which are products of collective intuition. Bergson’s interesting thesis accounts for the discontinuous manner in which ideas of freedom surface and claim validity throughout intellectual history. The first “explosion” of the freedomist sentiment, according to Bergson, took place in the fifth century BCE in Pericles’s Athens, where social changes shifted notions about citizenship and ethico-political life. The collective experience of social upheaval found expression in Socratic thought. Even though Socrates did not explicitly interrogate the possibility of human freedom, his thought is impregnated with a latent intuition of freedom, which will become explicit in Plato and Aristotle.

The lectures between December 16, 1904, and March 10, 1905 — the second to twelfth lectures in the current volume — present the evolution of determinism in antiquity: from early Greek thought to Neoplatonism, through to the Stoics and Epicurean atomism. As mentioned, Bergson argues that the ancient stream of necessitarian doctrines was disrupted by themes of freedom rooted in Socrates’s moral considerations. Bergson’s originality is easily seen in his interpretation of the Greek canon. Despite Socrates being treated by historians — including Aristotle — as a psychological and ethical determinist, Bergson argues that he is evidently a nascent freedomist: his focus on human action, his questioning of the scope of natural science, his resort to inward experience, and his propensity to mysticism are all traits of freedomist thinking. According to Bergson, the Socratic intuition of freedom is manifested in the possibility of choosing knowledge leading to virtue over ignorance. Plato dramatises this theme through his mythical and allegorical imageries: in the fall of the soul and the allegory of the cave, the good is a kind of light, and freedom consists in the choice of enlightenment. However, Platonic freedom is a concept that is not easy to circumvent, either. Depending on which dialogue we consider, Plato’s reflections on the human soul oscillate between determinism and freedom. In fact, in Timaeus, he posits two forms of necessity: one that guides action towards the good aligning with reason, and a blind, physical necessity of bare chance (anankē). The possibility of freedom lies between these two distinct causal orders in choosing the middle ground of aretē (virtue). As Bergson notes, Plato, like every great thinker of freedom, reveals its problematic nature: “[….] the moment we’re about to grasp it, we say to ourselves that now free will must be explained, that if we choose, we do so for a reason and for something. Then, as we articulate the choice, we see it vanish into thin air” (2024: 57-58).

Next, Bergson moves on to make some interesting remarks about Aristotle’s general methodology insofar as it takes the problem of freedom into an altogether new terrain. For Bergson, Aristotle is not a systematic thinker in the sense of constructing new problems; rather, he is a great analyst: his speciality is analysing existing ideas to their elements, clarifying them and pushing them to new ground. Regarding freedom, we will not find a definition or a theory in Aristotle, but rather a meticulously developed network of concepts, “chance, randomness, a general theory of contingency and the relation of the soul and pure intellect (nous)” that are all components of the problem of freedom. For Bergson, Aristotle is the first to acknowledge that the idea of contingency frustrates the mind’s attachment to necessary conditions, and he discusses in detail Aristotle’s solution to the problem of future contingents. The latter was originally formulated by the Megarian School, and then reconstructed by Aristotle in his Peri hermēneias (On Interpretation) in the following way: “out of two opposite propositions relative to the future one is (already) necessarily true; thus, there is no contingency and future is fully determined” (2024: 73). Aristotle rejects this formulation because experience and common sense inform us otherwise: logic cannot foreclose the actuality of the future, and tukhē (chance) remains open in the present. Instead, what qualifies as the truth of two opposite future propositions in the present is a disjunctive proposition that poses the two as alternatives (“Tomorrow there will be or there will not be a sea battle”).

According to Bergson, Aristotle’s analysis of the Megarian syllogism reveals the fallacy behind any form of determinist argument. Specifically, the rejection of contingency results from an arbitrary and illusionary negation of truth’s temporal character. Tricked by the intellect’s natural tendency to think mathematically, strict determinists understand all possible truths to be similar to mathematical propositions, namely eternal truths (the fact that even mathematical truths are discovered does not alleviate the fallacy). The intellect cannot accept a truth’s semi-eternity, the fact that it comes into existence: “[…] it seems to us that (a) proposition, which became true, has been true for all eternity. It’s one of the characteristics of truth, as soon as it appears to us as truth, to leap outside time and appear to us as timeless” (2024: 76).

Moreover, for Aristotle, contingency is an inherent defect of nature introduced by hylē or matter, which is a principle of indetermination. Freedom is a human privilege, precisely because it refers to a choice: to reverse the movement of nature towards indetermination, ascend towards nous or the pure intellect, and reconnect with what is essential and the immutable. This is contrasted with the modern humanist idea of freedom, which maintains absolute necessity with respect to matter, while contingency pertains only to questions of ethics and human agency (2024: 78). Prefiguring the conclusion of the course, Bergson challenges both accounts, arguing that contingency and freedom, understood as the “creation of certain unforeseeable actions” and “indetermination in relation to causes” are found “everywhere there is consciousness, and de jure, everywhere where there is organic life” (2024: 78).

The next school of thought discussed by Bergson is Stoicism, which introduced the doctrine of universal fatalism in its “most powerful expression” (2024: 93). For Bergson, the Stoic doctrine exemplifies the absorption and assimilation of ideas of freedom into deterministic presuppositions commonly found in history: “[w]e have here the first example of a fact we find throughout the entire history of philosophy. […] what I’d call the necessary chocking of the doctrines of freedom by speculations concerning the whole of nature” (2024: 93). Stoicism, in particular the Greek founders of Stoicism, aiming to “democratize” philosophy, modified certain aspects of Platonic-Aristotelian thought to make it more accessible. The most critical of these transformations is the substitution of the single principle of logos spermatikos (generative reason) for the duality of matter and form or Idea (hylē and eidos). The Greek word logos has different meanings (speech, discursive reasoning, theatrical practice), but they all designate “the idea or image of a double-sided reality”, “something that as multiple, as unrolled, as slackened or as extended, is material, and that, when considered as one, as taut in itself, as undivided, is something rational, intellectual, and even intelligent” (2024: 104). In Stoicism, the universe is at once matter and intelligence, both corporeal (all that is, is a body, sōma) and rational or intelligent.

According to Bergson, ancient philosophies tend to agree that if things were perfectly rational, there would be no place for contingency, indetermination and, consequently, human freedom. For Aristotle and Plato, things are not as they ought to be: the world is subjected to movement and change, and these processes degrade it. Movement is the tangible proof of imperfection in the world. For Aristotle, the fact of contingency makes human freedom possible, whose purpose is to compensate for the disruption of the rational order: “[t]he function of our will is to put things back in place, as much as that’s possible” (2024: 106). By contrast, in Stoicism, things are as they ought to be insofar as change and movement are not understood as imperfections; their very explanatory principle, logos, is something essentially mutable and in a constant state of unfolding. The principle of logos spermatikos entails movement, change and transformation; it is an intelligent and rational principle, and yet mobile. For Bergson, the Stoics do not perceive any breach between things as they are and things as they ought to be. The world is exactly as it should be (“sympathy of everything with everything”), and its perfection and absolute coherence exclude contingency and, consequently, freedom in humans.

Bergson devotes considerably less time to conceptions of freedom and necessity derived from ancient atomism, developed by the Epicureans and solidified by Lucretius. While he dedicates two lectures to all the other ancient doctrines, his discussion of Epicurus and his legacy is cut short to almost half a session. This is because, as he argues Epicurean “ideas on the subject of freedom did not evolve” (2024: 119). Nevertheless, Bergson emphasises the radical character of the atomistic theory of necessity, which is indeed close to modern and contemporary mechanistic determinism based on the idea of the material universe as an abstract field of mathematical points. Ultimate units or atoms, indestructible and unchanging, separated by the void, yet mobile, combine in different aggregates, changing their relative positions and generating all natural phenomena. Whereas in Stoicism universal interdependence posits a rational necessity that proceeds from the whole of the universe to its parts, like the image of an organism, in Epicureanism, necessity has no overarching meaning, and the universe emerges as the sum of the primary elementary necessities of the atomic combinations. Despite its deterministic kernel, Epicurean philosophy accounts for contingency and freedom through the notion of paregklisis (the Latin clinamen). To allow for the accountability of human action, Epicurus endows atoms with the ability to deviate slightly (paregklinein) from their preordained course, from the ‘path that destiny assigns to it’ (118).

Bergson concludes his discussion of ancient doctrines with Plotinus’s “synthesis of all ancient thought” (2024: 127). As Bergson states, Plotinus’s doctrine of freedom is “by far the most complete, the most highly constructed of what the ancients have bequeathed to us on this question” (2024: 127). Plotinus’s corpus, in general, is the most systematic philosophy in antiquity, and it has reached us intact. He produced a “perfectly coherent and unified” synthesis of all Greek thought, aiming to insulate it from the ideas of his time (third century CE), which he considered “barbaric”. This is particularly evident, for Bergson, in Plotinus’s theory of freedom, which integrates Platonic-Aristotelian and Stoic elements. Even if “he fought the Stoics, and the Stoics’ fatalism in particular”, Plotinus’s starting point, according to Bergson, is distinctly Stoic, for he accepts the “perfect regularity of the course of nature” (2024: 129). Bergson cites several of Plotinus’s descriptions, all of which are reminiscent of Stoic themes: for example, his conception of the universe as a living being composed of parts, separated in space yet contiguous, fulfilling a universal sympathy or intention; or his comparison of the material universe to the harmonious complexity of a dance, where “the dancer is not conscious of the multitude of movements”, but s/he simply wants to dance (2024: 129).

As Bergson notes, Plotinus articulates the quest for freedom with the greatest precision: “[i]t suffices to find a solution, that, on the one hand, preserves the principle of causality […] and that, on the other hand, will allow us to be something” (2024: 130). For Bergson, Plotinus’s particular novelty is to present the problem of freedom as a question of the origin of life, specifically human life. Extending the Platonic-Aristotelian teaching on the body-soul relationship, he provides a theory about how the human being both enters the order of nature as a living body and “breaks” it in exercising her will. Plotinus argues that, even if we can overcome the natural order and secure for ourselves the realm of action, true freedom rests on detaching from nature and retreating to the plane of the Intelligible (kosmos noētos). As Bergson explains, the Neoplatonic teaching that “freedom does not reside in action but in the intellect” and “[h]umans produce action when they are too weak for contemplation, action being only the shadow of contemplation” is the ultimate expression of the Greek belief that the faculties of action are inferior to the intellect. In modernity, under the influence of Jewish and Christian theology — Bergson mentions the debate between Scotus and Aquinas over the primacy of the will — this hierarchical relationship will be reversed: beginning with Descartes, modern philosophers acknowledge and affirm the miraculous power of the will to prevail over understanding, to multiply its power, and, in certain cases, to be the source of the intellect.

The first (thematic) half of the course ends with Bergson demarcating ancient and modern assumptions pertaining to the problem of freedom. So far, his discussion is systematic rather than simply historical and follows the interpretational lines announced in the first lecture: freedom marks the limit between the speculative and the practical domain. Occasionally, Bergson indulges in small digressions, which enrich the main exposition without affecting its structure and lucidity. For example, when he explains that necessitarians do not oppose theories of freedom but rather “absorb” them to assimilate freedom with necessity, Bergson does so with a comparison from geology: every intuition about freedom is a “geological eruptive force”, while theories of necessity are forces of “disintegration” and “sedimentation” that act upon intuitions and reshape them (2024: 21); or, when, in an illuminating digression, he discusses the ideas of moira (fate) and anankē (necessity) in ancient non-philosophical literature — from tragic and epic poetry to Herodotus — with the aim of elucidating the emotional and affective roots of fatalistic thinking (2024: 25-27).

2. Determinism and the problem of freedom in modern philosophy

The second thematic half of the course comprises seven lectures, from 17 March to 20 May 1905 (lectures thirteen to twenty in the volume). Bergson here follows the intertwining of necessity and freedom within the framework of Western modernity. As it was prefigured in the first lecture, the new parameter defining the relationship between the two notions from the early seventeenth century onwards is the advent of modern science. According to Bergson, the scientific framework mandates, on the one hand, that causal relations pertain to physical laws and that, on the other hand, the reality of these relations can be fully grasped by mathematics. In that respect, Bergson’s discussion follows the way in which philosophy grapples with scientific determinism, beginning with Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, through to Kant’s Copernican Revolution, with the discussion concluding with a brief but suggestive preview of Bergson’s position (introduced in “The Introduction to Metaphysics” (1903) and fully developed in Creative Evolution (1907)).

While philosophical notions of necessity evolve vis-à-vis developments in science, philosophy always turns to questions of freedom when forced by developments in the social domain, and always via intuition. In the dawn of modernity, the second “eruption of freedom” is traced back to the transformations Christianity and Judaism initiated in social and psychical life. These themes, which persisted throughout the Middle Ages, were incorporated by Descartes’s voluntaristic philosophy and, from there, spread across modernity. The third explosion emerged from ‘ideas and feelings’ related to the 1789 Revolution as they appear in Rousseau and more thoroughly in Kant.

Bergson highlights several key aspects of Cartesian philosophy, the first of which refers to the “incontestable and profound influence” of Christianity in Descartes’s system. The most obvious influence is Duns Scotus’s ideas on the subject of divine and human will. Descartes’s freedomist doctrine rests on a series of creationist theses: God not only created the world but also created the truth and the good, and the criteria to judge his creation, by a “decree of his free will” (2024: 152). The idea of a creative God, a willful and active deity intervening in the world, is absent from ancient thought, in which contemplation and the intellect are superior to action and everything appetitive (2024: 151). By contrast, Descartes affirms that the human will is infinite, similar to the divine, and he ascribes to human beings an absolute faculty of choice. The difference between human and divine will is that, in humans, even if in principle infinite, factually the will is restricted by the intellect, which imposes its own time to judge and evaluate. Bergson sees as underlying Descartes’s voluntarism a theological motivation. Error and sin result from a lack of coordination between the will, infinitely invested in every act and operating fully in the present, and the intellect, which takes its time to deliberate. Thus, Descartes can account for the existence of evil through this discordance of the faculties, without tracing it directly back to God.

What is striking about Descartes, in Bergson’s view, is that he combines a rigorous determinism with the quest for freedom. While Cartesian metaphysics follows the mechanistic principles found in physics and analytic geometry, his moral intuition affirms the inner feeling of freedom manifested in action. In Descartes’s disciples — Spinoza, Leibniz, and the eighteenth-century physicians and scientists inspired by Cartesianism — the rational component of Descartes’s thought prevails. Specifically, Bergson sees in Spinoza and Leibniz a “partial return to the Greeks” as they seek “to provide a unified and simple, consistent and logical explanation of the totality of things” (2024: 175). Christian influences are superseded by an intention to unify Cartesianism, eliminate its subjectivist presuppositions, and provide a metaphysical ground. In doing so, Bergson holds that, even if not deliberately, they return to Aristotelian and Neoplatonic themes. Spinoza, for example, assumes the Aristotelian ideal of athanatizein, of allowing the human intellect to reconnect with what is purely intelligible and eternal. The difference is in the execution of the plan towards immortality. Broadly speaking, for the ancients, the essential, eternal forms or genera, the source of pure knowledge, lie more or less in “a beyond”, while in Spinoza’s metaphysics, which conforms to the new science, the intelligible, that is, natural, physical laws, are immanent to nature.

For Bergson, Spinoza transforms Cartesianism “from a doctrine of freedom that it was into a doctrine of necessity, and of the most radical and least flexible necessity that has ever been formulated” (2024: 178). Nevertheless, Spinoza’s interventions resolve Descartes’s inconsistency or discontinuity, as Bergson calls it, that is, the influence of the soul on the body, which remains inexplicable in Descartes and which disrupts the order of universal mechanism. Bergson focuses on the first two parts of the Ethics, and his discussion of the key moment of Spinoza’s doctrine is lucid and insightful: the difficulty with explaining the status of the attributes, the type of distinction pertaining to modes, and the symmetry of order between modes of different attributes. Bergson argues that everything in Spinoza’s system leads to a single goal: beatitude, what Spinoza calls true freedom as the liberation from servitude, an aspect of which is the illusory belief in free will. Rather, we partake in “the absolute freedom of God” when we apprehend what is necessary, the eternal reasons inscribed in nature expressing God.

Similarly, Leibniz aimed to eliminate the Cartesian rift between determinism and freedom, and he did so in the extreme. Bergson calls Leibniz a “pure intellectualist” much more assiduous than Spinoza: “he is convinced that reality can be fully resolved into ideas” (2024: 187). Both epistemological and metaphysical aspects of Leibniz’s determinism are equally inflexible and result from the reworking of ancient doctrines, modifying them to fit the new scientific framework: “[t]hus, by starting from the Aristotelian […] conception of science and by eliminating hylē, we arrive more or less at the doctrine presented in the Discourse on Metaphysics, just as, by taking Plotinus’s doctrine, his theory of the Intelligibles, and by eliminating hylē, we arrive at a doctrine analogous to the one presented in the Monadology” (2024: 192). First and foremost, Leibniz aims to erase the troubling idea found in Descartes that the soul can, somehow, interact with the body and change its movement. Developing this criticism, Leibniz will abandon the idea that matter is essentially extensive because extension results from an abstraction, a homogenisation of a fundamentally heterogeneous reality. From there, Bergson explains, Leibniz is led to posit indivisible elements that are “dynamic points”, or mathematical points, the center of forces that he calls monads or souls. Monads are isolated from each other, and each is a “state of mind”, a perception that fuzzily represents the totality of the universe and clearly only as a (point of) view of this totality: a “monad is a view of the universe; the totality of these complementary views make up the universe” (2024: 196). According to this theory, space is a projection made by the human mind, a symbolical order that allows us to represent the partial views or monads, that is, “purely qualitative differences, which alone are real”, as magnitudes (2024: 196).

Bergson maintains that, for Leibniz, this inelastic, fully saturated universe sustains not only human freedom in the Cartesian sense, but wholesale contingency. Leibniz breaks freedom down into three essential characteristics: spontaneity, intelligence and contingency, and he argues that, in his monadological universe, each substance maintains these three elements. Spontaneity characterises the monads to the extent that they are self-developing and self-determining, being totally insulated from each other. Intelligence as a condition of freedom “is realised by human souls”, and so the anthropomorphic notion of freedom is maintained. Finally, contingency is affirmed: even if actions are absolutely determined by the monads’ notion (its complete definition), these determinations are not logical necessities, since their opposite would not imply a contradiction. They are real possibilities, alternatives to what is actually the case. The latter, which “we call existence”, is akin to a highlighted contour among all the other possible sketches that remain unactualised. As Bergson remarks: “[f]reedom is power. An intellectualist like Leibniz cannot accept the idea of power, and so he spreads out all the possible actions, he turns them into so many accompaniments, as it were, of the action really performed” (2024: 211).

The last three lectures, on 5, 12, and 19 May 1905, comprise a second, much shorter semester. Bergson touches upon several important issues, but in places, due to the limited time, the discussion seems uneven. He begins with a summary of the main differences between ancient and modern notions of necessity, indeterminacy, causality and freedom, as they have been developed throughout the lectures. He also makes some interesting methodological remarks on how philosophical notions are displaced within scientific debates. For example, he sketches an acute criticism of reductive and eliminativist positions in psychophysiology, arguing that the misapplication of allegedly rigorous materialist commitments to mental phenomena results in a much less rigorous metaphysics, a weak variant and “simplification of Cartesian metaphysics” (2024: 219). This is why, Bergson stresses, “we have to distinguish very clearly between science and philosophy” and their respective methodologies, and that the philosophical question is “whether freedom can find a place” within the mechanistic explanatory framework. According to Bergson, this type of semi-scientific, semi-metaphysical determinism prevailed at the end of the eighteenth century, nourishing its own opposition as notably expressed in Rousseau’s moral and political philosophy. At the same time, in England, Berkeley’s immaterialist and nominalist ideas challenge the foundations of Newtonian and Cartesian science, based on the criticism that the mechanistic image of nature they presuppose is a mental or symbolic construction (2024: 228). While Rousseau’s motivations are moral, and while Berkeley’s are primarily theological, their criticisms halt the unbound mechanism prevailing at the time, creating a current of thought that puts freedom back in the discussion and prepares the third Kantian “eruption of freedom”.

For Bergson, “Kant’s stroke of genius” was that he realised that “if we put freedom in the very place of reality, we don’t for all that compromise scientific mechanism […]; on the contrary, we’re able thereby to found this mechanism, give it an unshakeable basis” (2024: 229). In the remaining one-and-a-half lectures, Bergson explains in what the Kantian solution consists, and how we should understand the notion of freedom that it entails. Already with Descartes, free will defies mechanism, and becomes a positive and creative power. Kant’s great invention, however, is to posit freedom’s creative power as the ground of the mechanistic, natural order itself. Beginning from a concept of nature that adheres to Newtonian science, Kant’s starting point in the Critique of Pure Reason is to establish the link between physics and mathematics: the problem of founding mechanism translates to a question of founding mathematics. Bergson provides an instructive summary of Kant’s transcendental epistemology, which renders nature coextensive with scientific consciousness and its transcendental apparatus, meaning that “nature and science are the same thing: nature cannot [not] be scientific because they’re the same thing” (2024: 233). As Bergson explains, the Kantian conception of nature, the realm of phenomena constituted by human intellect, becomes the seat of mechanism: “determinism exists, in short, only for our intellect, […], as a function of our knowledge” (2024: 234). Kant endorses freedom, but not as a possibility for the empirical self, locating it outside the causal order of knowledge. Kantian freedom, in Bergson’s description, refers to the transcendental perspective, from which the pure self initiates the unfolding of a moral character. Bergson stresses, that while our moral conduct is conditioned upon the transcendental position that the “intelligible self” creates for itself and occupies, yet it unfolds in a series of actions in time. It is questionable if such an unfolding of freedom can be integrated into the mechanistic order, as Kant claims it can. We must assume that our actions “carve out a surface from the rest of nature”, which necessarily depends on a certain flexibility granted by the causal order (2024: 236). For Bergson, this interdependence implies that the spontaneity and autonomy of moral conduct are compromised, and arguably, freedom, even if it is granted, cannot be sustained.

By the time the reader arrives at the final lecture, the problem of freedom arises as “the problem of the relationship between thought and action” (2024: 239). It is in the last lecture that Bergson speaks from the perspective of the present, and therefore, not as a historian but as a philosopher aspiring to transform the problem of freedom in his own right. For Bergson, Kant gave the modern problem of freedom its most precise and rigorous formulation, and consequently, any systematic intervention must begin there. Kant’s solution was so effective that, despite the nineteenth-century’s explosive developments in the sciences and in mathematics, there was no radical displacement of the problem of freedom. In this paradigm, knowledge is “a perfectly coherent system of mathematical relations” underlying natural phenomena, and action is a separate domain that precedes this order: “[a]ction is reality itself, and what we call science is something that gravitates around action”, which is “the foundation of science” (2024: 241). Therefore, freedom hinges upon how rigorously one upholds this primacy of action over knowledge. In Kant, the primacy of action is conditioned by universal consciousness, the impersonal, transcendental human mind that “insofar as it is free, it will launch phenomena into space and time that perfectly connect with one another, and insofar as it knows itself, it will present a nature in which everything is necessary” (2024: 242).

Bergson takes an issue with Kant’s solution based on universal consciousness because it renders philosophically irrelevant the inner feeling of freedom accessed by “empirical or psychological consciousness”. The latter, for Bergson, testifies to the complex conditions of action within what he calls “duration”. Kant does not, and could not, allow “jurisdiction” to empirical or immediate consciousness because he lacks an understanding of time as duration and treats time in spatial terms (2024: 244). Bergson’s critique of spatialised conceptions of time, as alluded to in the introductory lecture, concerns the discrepancy between the intellect’s spatial mode of knowing (giving coherence to distinct elements that remain external to each other) and intuition’s mode of access, which testifies to the qualitative change in the stream of inner experience, a type of knowledge that the intellect cannot register. Between the two, that is, “physical or discursive knowledge” and “intuitional knowledge”, Bergson sees intermediary forms, such as the systematicity corresponding to organic life (2024: 245). Between orders of knowledge, what changes is the density or tension of deterministic relations: “[i]n the physical world, causality means necessary determination, but to the extent that we go from the physical to the psychical, we see the connections between cause and effect becoming less and less tight. And when we reach the pure psychical, there’s almost no more connection at all, causality being not a relation but a being, a production […]. So we go by degrees, by an imperceptible transition, from what Kant called causality according to nature, physical causality, to what he calls causality by freedom, which is creation” (2024: 246). Bergson’s course on the problem of freedom ends with a statement of his philosophical project: to develop a kind of radical empiricism that is both scientific and takes into account intuition or internal experience, recasting thus the problem of freedom anew.

Conclusion

My aim in this review was primarily to inform potential readers about the contents of this publication. I offered some evaluations of the lectures’ general format and teaching aims, but I avoided criticisms of Bergson’s historical arguments as it would have necessitated an extensive reference to his monographs and other works. I want to conclude this task with some additional comments. First, the transcribed version of Bergson’s lectures might sound, at times, repetitive to the reader, but this serves perfectly the aims of the oral exposition, in which dramatising repetition creates cohesion and imprints the ideas on the audience. Ideally, Bergson’s lectures would be recited, perhaps, in the context of a study group, to reinvigorate the orality of this “thought in the making”. Second, readers interested in the history and historiography of philosophy should bear in mind that Bergson presents the ideas of the canonical thinkers in the form of a metanarrative, which serves the reconstruction of “the problem of freedom”. His reading is selective, and as he notes, sometimes he diverges from the standard interpretations and classifications of thinkers found in the scholarship. For example, Bergson’s presentation of Kant’s concept of freedom is based exclusively on the Critique of Pure Reason and its relation to transcendental idealism, and he omits the details of Kant’s moral theory. Finally, the contemporary reader cannot avoid noticing the patent Eurocentrism of Bergson’s discussion, which focuses exclusively on the Western philosophical canon. Without disregarding the time and context of the lectures, readers might think that Bergson could have acknowledged the limits of his presentation. But overall, and as I highlighted at the beginning of this review, both specialists and non-specialists will find Bergson’s Freedom lectures a rich and rewarding reading experience.

Bibliography:

Bergson, Henri. 2024. Freedom: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904-1905. Edited by Nils F. Schott & Alexandre Lefebvre. Translated by Leonard Lawlor. London-New York: Bloomsbury.

Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott. 2024. “Series Preface” and “Introduction: Henri Bergson, Freedomist”. In Freedom: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904-1905. Edited by Nils F. Schott & Alexandre Lefebvre. Translated by Leonard Lawlor, ix-xiv, 2-9. London-New York: Bloomsbury.

Alexandre Lefebvre, Nils F. Schott & Alan Shepherd. 2024. “Freedom Regained: Henri Bergson at the Collège de France, A conversation with Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott”. In The Philosopher, Vol. 112, No. 2, 78-83. Available at https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/freedom-regained.

[1] See also ‘Freedom Regained: Henri Bergson at the Collège de France, A conversation with Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott’, available at https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/freedom-regained.

[2] The most recent in publication order: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition, Bloomsbury (2018); Mark Sinclair, Bergson, Routledge (2019); Alexandre Lefebvre & Nils F. Schott, Interpreting Bergson: Critical Essays, Cambridge University Press (2020); Paul Atkinson, Henri Bergson and Visual Culture: A Philosophy for a New Aesthetic, Bloomsbury (2020); Mark Sinclair & Yaron Wolf (eds), The Bergsonian Mind, Routledge (2022); John Ó Maoilearca, Vestiges of a Philosophy Matter, the Meta- Spiritual, and the Forgotten Bergson, Oxford University Press (2023); Emily Herring, Herald of a Restless World. How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, Basic Books (2024).

Lorenzo Girardi: Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka

Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka Book Cover

Title: Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka
Series: Reframing the Boundaries: Thinking the Political
Author: Lorenzo Girardi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Release Date: 2024
Format: Hardback
Pages: 226

Reviewed by: Peter Shum (University of Warwick)

Introduction

Lorenzo Girardi’s wide ranging and highly informative book, Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka, explains the origins and nature of Europe’s contemporary “crisis”, and conducts its own enquiry into the significance of the catastrophes that befell Europe in the twentieth century. It investigates the limitations of rationality in the political sphere, and is sympathetic to the insights of agonistic political theory.

Girardi ends the introduction to his book on the same note on which he concludes the book itself, namely by warning us not to forget about the unprecedented catastrophes that befell Europe in the twentieth century. The admonition is apposite, since the book’s entire train of thought turns out to be, in a certain way, haunted by the hecatombs of the first and second world wars. It alludes not only to a peril associated with a fading of our collective memory, but also to a philosophical danger of failing to comprehend what it was that transpired in the first place, in the traumas that we now denote with terms like “The Great War” the “The Holocaust”. Indeed, I suspect that many readers will be prompted in the course of this book to wonder if the term “war” itself is due a metaphysical clarification.

Edmund Husserl predeceased those whose lives were cut short by the Holocaust, but by the time of his death in 1938 he was, to say the least, more cognizant than most of the nature of the crisis that seemed to be engulfing Europe. Husserl thought Europe was in crisis on the grounds that a naturalistic conception of the world cannot account for or support humanity’s existential needs. He saw rational discourse as a reliable path towards the reconciliation or convergence of opposing views, and wanted conflicting nations to embark on a political journey from their respective cultural life-worlds to a more universal life-world.

Girardi elaborates an important counterpoint to Husserl’s rationalist teleology, by introducing the thought of the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. Girardi explores Patočka’s concerns about Husserl’s understanding of the root of Europe’s crisis, and about Husserl’s proposal to restore the ideal of reason in political philosophy. This turns out to be connected to potential philosophical problems that can arise when one tries to attribute a final or transcendent meaning to the world as a whole. This, in turn, is connected to phenomenological questions pertaining to how one attributes significance to experiences, and how one responds to situations of apparent meaninglessness. All of these considerations inform Patočka’s concept of problematicity, which is really the central theme of the three final chapters. Girardi goes on to consider the implications of Patočka’s notion of problematicity for the discussion about the future of politics in Europe, and how this discussion has been taken up by certain post-structuralist political thinkers. The interconnectedness of the topics of Patočka, problematicity, and politics will incline me to review the book’s final three chapters as a unit, in place of the chapter by chapter approach that I shall adopt for the rest of the book. Toward the end of this book review I shall offer three discussion points that I hope readers will find constructive.

The Idea of Europe and the Ideal of Reason

The main discussion of the book opens by drawing attention to the centrality of rationality in Europe’s sense of its own self-identity, and of its own relation to the rest of the world. The very notion of “Europe”, as something other than simply a geographical designation, advanced when “Europe” began to replace “Christendom” in diplomatic language to signify a collection of cooperating coordinate sovereign states with a shared heritage from Christendom. The distinguishing feature of this European civilisation was that it saw itself as based squarely and fundamentally on reason.

This European civilisation saw itself as superior to all others, and the capacity for reason was held to be constitutive of our humanity. Importantly, this involved seeing reason not only as a mode of enquiry but as a way of resolving disputes. According to the rationalist perspective, all fields of human life, including morality, and the organisation of society, were to be grounded in reason. Grounding everything in reason had the consequence that the world became “disenchanted”, since in principle everything could be mastered by means of calculation.

However, by the end of the nineteenth century, there were concerns that rationalism was undermining community and social cohesion. Weber observed that for all of rationalism’s successes, it didn’t seem to have much success in answering questions about the ultimate meaning of human existence. In a rationalist discourse concerning how to organise society, there isn’t typically much emphasis on accommodating a plurality of views. Sociologists like Ferdinand Tönnies regarded rationalist society as a complete inversion of community. Later in the twentieth century, the idea was put forward, by the Frankfurt School of critical theory amongst others, that rationalism contributed to, facilitated, or made possible the atrocities of the first and second world wars. Girardi points out that the extent of rationalism’s responsibility for these horrors remains a matter of dispute.

A Philosophical Sketch of the Contemporary Situation

Chapter 2 begins to explore some of the different currents in the ongoing contemporary debate concerning the philosophical direction that European political thought ought to be taking, and in particular how entangled with rationalism this direction ought to be. One pole of the contemporary debate argues that Europe needs to revert and reconnect to its Christian heritage. This view gained ground after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, when there was a resurgence of Christianity in many Eastern European countries. This became an important part of their national identity. At a European level, this reinforces the centrality of Christianity to contemporary European identity. Today, sceptics of the EU project are often proposing a culturally Christian Europe. They regard reviving Europe’s Christian heritage as a way of counteracting the disenchantment of the world that rationalism seemed to usher in, and re-enchant the world with some transcendent spiritual values. This position is not so much about completely rejecting rationality as keeping it in check and making space for a re-enchantment of the world. Girardi points out that Novalis (1772-1801) was a very early proponent of a version of this view, and that, more recently, Gianni Vattimo (2002) argues that European identity is inextricably enmeshed with Christianity.

A different pole of the contemporary debate argues that the way forward for Europe is to double down on rationalism. Proponents of this view argue that rationalism could have enabled us to rise above our small-minded human disputes over territory, natural resources, and cultural differences, and that if only Europe had been more rational, it would have avoided both world wars completely. In the rationalist’s view, the world wars were not a case of rationalism taking Europe in the wrong direction, but instead a bursting forth of an incomprehensible and lethal irrationalism.

The cogency of the pro-rationalism pole of the debate is difficult to deny, but Girardi observes that the main drawback is that it now seems to be leading us toward a bureaucratic European Union devoid of human existential meaning. The idea that rationalism was supposed to enable us to rise above our cultural differences seems to have been conflated with the view that it is improper to rate one culture more highly than another. This is to say that cultural relativism has acquired a strong foothold in political circles. This view informs the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We now run into the problem where there is a tension between respecting what we deem to be universal human rights and respecting a foreign culture.

A second drawback stems from the fact that, understandably, those backing the EU project like to use the Holocaust for symbolic purposes. Yet Eastern European countries, and the UK, for instance, tend to be less willing than Germany to accept culpability for the Holocaust. For such nations, Holocaust culpability is not part of their national identity. In the end, observers of the contemporary debate about the future of Europe need to be cognizant of the fact that those who wish Europe to revert to its Christian heritage are liable to hold up the Holocaust as an admonishment against the dangers of unchecked rationalism, whilst their opponents hold up the Holocaust as an admonishment against the dangers of neglecting rationalism.

Rational Politics, the Liberal Consensus, and the Agonistic Critique

Girardi observes that it seems to be a characteristic of a purely rational or “universalist” rationalist discourse concerning how to organise society that there isn’t typically much emphasis on accommodating a plurality of views. After all, in a strictly rational society (if such a society were ever to exist) the function of reason would be to optimally redesign and reorganise society. This gives rise to concerns that this way of going about things is conducive toward totalitarianism.

Pluralist rationalism (as opposed to universalist rationalism) aims to address this concern by introducing a process of reconciliation between diverse attitudes and opinions. The two-fold aim of a pluralist rationalist society is mutual safety and individual freedom. Under pluralist rationalism, the state is neutral with respect to worldview. Liberal democracy has much in common with pluralist rationalism, but is not completely neutral with respect to worldview. Sometimes democratic procedure restricts individual rights. This is the tension between democracy and liberalism. This leaves room for a wide variety of versions of liberal democracy, and Rawls and Habermas each develop their own.

One of the features of a liberal democracy is the requirement that there should be a general consensus across all citizens about democratic procedure. This is called the liberal consensus. In searching for the liberal consensus, Rawls and Habermas both want to strike the right balance between universalism and pluralism. Habermas doesn’t want secularism to dominate public debate, and this means affording traditional worldviews the opportunity to participate in public political debate. Consonantly, people should have the right, in Habermas’s view, to contribute to public debate in their own religious language. This means Habermas could be said to be a post-secularist, something that Rawls is not.

After the discussion of Rawls and Habermas, Girardi turns his attention to the topic of the agonistic critique of rationalist political theory. Proponents of the agonistic critique advance a battery of objections stemming from the suspicion that the idealised conceptions that rationalist political theory employs do not correspond to reality. They tend to argue that rationalist political theory has invented a fictional political model using idealised conceptions of discourse, discussants, citizens, consensus, deliberation, and the discursive environment. Agonists are concerned that rationalist political theory ignores the possibility that some problems may be irresolvable in principle. They typically believe that (a) there is an irreducible plurality of values; and (b) when values come into conflict, it is a mistake to assume that the conflict can be resolved, or that it is necessarily possible to devise a comprehensive or overarching reconciliation procedure. They maintain that there is no political framework that can be devised a priori, that rationalist political theory marginalises people critical of the liberal consensus, and that it curtails the plurality of views.

Girardi proceeds to examine in more detail the respective positions of various agonistic thinkers, including Honig, Mouffe, Gray, and Connolly. In the course of this discussion, Girardi explores how they advocate resisting and disrupting the liberal consensus. Agonists like Gray and Connolly are proponents of a radical and ever-changing pluralism, which can involve a plurality of possible political frameworks. According to this kind of agonistic stance, illiberal views and illiberal political frameworks cannot be ruled out.

Husserl’s Europe as a Philosophical Project

Girardi draws attention to the important distinction between Husserl’s “idea” of Europe and his “absolute idea” of Europe. Husserl’s “idea” of Europe is a conception of European culture. It is so broad that it can be taken to refer to Western civilisation in general, including the colonial expansion of the British Empire, and the migration of European peoples to North America. It excludes, however, itinerant peoples such as the Roma. This “idea” of Europe is formed eidetically based on what is given in concrete empirical instances. Every culture or civilisation will have an equivalent “idea” or “spiritual shape” of this kind.

By contrast, Husserl’s “absolute idea” of Europe is not constituted eidetically on the basis of empirical instances. Instead, it is a self-standing ideal concept grounded in rationality itself. It is independent of, and in that sense transcends, actual human experiences. According to Husserl, the “birthplace” of this “absolute idea” of Europe was Ancient Greece. It is the idea of a completely rational human civilisation.

When Husserl speaks of a European “crisis”, he essentially means that Western civilisation has fallen short of, or fallen away from, its rational ideal, that is, its “absolute idea”. More specifically, Husserl believes that we have become so enthralled by scientific discoveries and technological developments that our understanding of the true remit of rationality has become impoverished and truncated. In the first part of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl scrutinises and critiques the way many people, including some scientists, tend to think about the hard sciences. He says they “take for being what is actually method”. By this he means that they think the idealised scientific world is the actual real world. Science has been so successful that one begins to think of the idealised mathematical world that the scientific method works with as the real world. The trouble is that we have forgotten that the sciences presuppose the world as we ordinarily experience it. Husserl observes that we still require philosophy to ground science, on pain of committing ourselves to the erroneous position of naturalism, which is the view that the only possible objects of knowledge are the objects of the natural sciences. Naturalism subtracts cultural properties from objects, and excludes all matters pertaining to value. Those caught up in naturalism overlook or ignore the fact that we still require philosophy to investigate the existential meaning of life and its value. Another way of looking at this is to realise that philosophy, for whatever reason, has failed to be a satisfactory foundation for the sciences. This amounts to a falling short of rationalism as a whole.

For Husserl, the fundamental distinction in political thought has to be between rationality and irrationality. Europe’s failure to understand the remit of rationality has led some citizens to seek existential meaning in irrational areas, such as ethno-nationalist politics, or develop an hostility to reason, and has led some European governments to pursue irrational foreign policies. Husserl believes that the catastrophe of the first world war revealed the irrationality, the “inner untruth, the meaninglessness” that had befallen European civilisation.

We have found, then, that philosophy itself is implicated in, and entangled with, the crisis that Husserl is describing. It is only when philosophers can understand the nature of the crisis that has engulfed them, and for which they are partly responsible, that they can begin to find a way out of it. The first step is to reassess what rationality really is, and what its remit is. Rationality should include what Girardi calls “existentially relevant questions”. Once we have revised our understanding of rationality, we must then recommit ourselves to it.

Husserl’s Reestablishment of the Ideal of Reason

Husserl believes that, in response to Europe’s “crisis”, there are a number of pressing reasons for exploring the “life-world”, which is constituted in one’s pre-scientific experience of the world. One of these reasons is the overcoming of naturalism, and the provision of a proper epistemological foundation for the sciences. Another reason is to investigate what Girardi calls “existentially relevant questions”, which includes enquiry into moral values. The life-world can disclose to us things that we pre-theoretically intuit to be morally right. An example of this is that when a group of people live in proximity to one another, we often find it morally appropriate to come together in a community of love, in which individuals are valued and loved in all of their uniqueness and particularity. Phenomenologically, it is an intrinsic property of moral values that they transcend time and space: they are applicable at all times and in all places. This brings us to the idea that an important reason to investigate the life-world is to uncover a universal sense of the world. Finding a world valid for everyone is relevant to the field of reconciliation between conflicting parties and nations. Indeed, chapter 5’s main concern is the problem of finding a universal life-world.

One and the same perceptual object may be understood to be amenable to being apprehended in separate acts located across a set of perspectival and temporal positions. The set of perspectival and temporal positions may be said to form an intentional horizon, and this is sometimes referred to as the object’s internal horizon. Yet in addition to an internal horizon, perceptual objects are also found to be embedded within an external horizon. Husserl describes the external horizon as “the openness of the world as an indeterminate horizon against which things can become determinate.” The internal and external horizons are both regulative principles ordering experience.

Every life-world partially “fills in” the indeterminate external horizon. The external horizon is pre-given and implicit in every life-world. Husserl calls this universal horizon the world in general. The world in general is the world in its universal sense. We find that objects belonging to the world in its universal sense are not only given horizonally (internally and externally) but also carry the sense “experienceable by everyone”, or “meant for all”.

It is important to note that in the life-world, perceptual objects belong to a wider cultural world of values that exceeds them. The life-world is always already embedded in one’s culture. So there is in this sense a plurality of life-worlds across the population of the world, since there is a plurality of cultures. Or to put it another way, the life-world of someone aware of the existence of other cultures is a plurality of cultural worlds.

This would seem to raise the aspiration of finding a universal culture. It is to this end that Husserl tries to find an account of the life-world that is consistent with rationality, and hence valid for everyone. Husserl seeks the rationalisation of culture, but not its deletion. This leads Husserl to consider the possibility that perhaps philosophy could take certain traditional beliefs and somehow restate them philosophically. We might cautiously draw some encouragement from the observation that there is already some commonality discernible between the various life-worlds. One reason for this is common biological needs across all humans. Another reason is sharing the same planet.

In the course of chapter 5, also Girardi raises some doubts about the prospects for Husserl’s rationalist teleology, and mentions a number of possible objections to it, including the agonistic critique.

Patočka, Problematicity, and Politics

Patočka’s relation to Husserl is a complex one, and ultimately ambivalent. Whilst Patočka agrees with Husserl that the life-world and the scientific interpretation of the world very often seem to be at odds with each other, he is doubtful on the question of whether such conflict can always be resolved. Husserl finds grounds for believing in the possibility of the resolution of such conflict in what he sees as the intrinsically teleological structure of experience. However, Patočka argues that there is no absolute grounding for the meaning of the objects that appear to us. The world as a whole is implicit in the meaning of the objects that appear to us, but it doesn’t make sense to ascribe a final meaning to the world as a whole. The world as a whole doesn’t have a meaning, but instead should be understood to be the horizon of all meaning.

Patočka’s criticism of Husserl suggests that we ought to look more carefully at the phenomenology of the life-world and how we go about attributing meaning to the objects we encounter there. Patočka thinks Husserl makes the mistake of striving for a philosophy that will be capable of deciding, or eventually converging upon, the final meaning of the world. By contrast, Patočka thinks the world as a whole has significance but not a final meaning. In fact, he maintains that significance precludes the possibility of a final meaning. So we must distinguish between significance and signification. The act of intuiting significance, for Patočka, means grasping the potential for a system of possible significations. Interestingly, this leads Patočka to the view that instances of apparent meaninglessness can have significance, on the grounds that they might harbour the possibility of finding meanings.

This brings us to Patočka’s concept of problematicity. Problematicity refers to an absolute indeterminacy in the meaning of an event or an experience. Patočka’s concepts of significance and problematicity can therefore be regarded as two sides of the same coin. Problematicity is always in relation to a fundamental moment of significance. Events and experiences that strike us as significant always seem to refuse a final meaning. We experience problematicity when we run up against the limits of meaning. The experience of problematicity subverts the sense of the world passed down by tradition, myth, ideology, and religion. Patočka thinks religions tend to make the mistake of bestowing a signification on certain instances of significance. According to Patočka, problematicity has always been part of human experience. The history of mankind is one of shaking the certitude of a pre-given meaning. Every life-world is intrinsically problematical. The disenchanted scientific world that rationalism ushers in is problematical, because there is a loss of transcendent meaning. In general, Patočka wants to postulate a problematical relationship, or an incongruence, between the empirical and the ideal. Patočka thinks we have in the end to regard problematicity as an objective insight, that is, that problematicity is to be regarded as a structural characteristic of human existence and the world in general. It is to be thought of as a feature of the world, not a deficiency in our understanding of it. Patočka’s account of problematicity renders his philosophy incompatible with both Husserlian phenomenology and Christianity. It precludes a rationalist teleology toward a unitary universal life-world.

Understanding Patočka’s concept of problematicity is one thing, but understanding its phenomenology is another. It makes sense to suppose that if one wished to explore the phenomenology of problematicity, then it would become most salient in situations involving a pronounced or unequivocal incongruence between the empirical and the ideal. This explains why Patočka finds encounters with meaninglessness to be particularly illuminating of the phenomenology of problematicity. Patočka wants to suggest that in the encounter with an instance of meaninglessness, one can be moved to bring meaning into the encounter oneself, by sacrificing oneself in some sense. One decides spontaneously to put oneself on the line, so to speak, without concern for, or clear knowledge of, the consequences for oneself or for others. Patočka’s “sacrifice” is an existential refusal of nihilism. It manages to eschew or stave off the Nietzschean response to the problem of nihilism, according to which the only way to produce meaning is through force, strength, and power. In Patočka’s sacrifice, then, we seem to have an experience of transcendence without a metaphysical positing of that transcendence. Patočka calls this Negative Platonism. It seems to be about demonstrating how strongly you are choosing to commit yourself to certain values. One experiences an absolute freedom in doing so.

This idea of discovering a meaning to life that reaches beyond one’s own survival, the satisfaction of one’s own appetites, and the mere perpetuation of human life is consonant with the Ancient Greek philosophical project of the “care for the soul”, which Patočka himself seeks to adopt and incorporate into his own philosophy. Patočka thinks freedom is crucial to the care of the soul. One chooses, in a free act of the will, a project or a cause whose scope transcends the immediate parameters of one’s own life. Adopting such a project places one in a position to live a free, responsible, and thoughtful life in which one’s thoughts and actions should be in harmony with the project. Instead of constantly reacting to circumstances, one begins to think and act meaningfully and coherently in the world. In the confrontation with instances of apparent meaninglessness, Patočka’s notions of sacrifice and the care of the soul offer a way of escaping what he sees as an excessive reliance on rationality, and is conducive toward an existentially responsible shaping of one’s life. It is a path toward a deepening of the soul.

Committing to a cause that you have chosen for yourself motivates you to enquire, research, and work things out for yourself, instead of relying on pre-given answers that have been passed down by religion or tradition. This is why, for Patočka, the care of the soul is fundamental to politics. Part of Patočka’s politics is aimed at forging new forms of community outside of the traditional community. Such communities should always comprise diverse views and opinions. They prioritise debate, dissidence, and dialogue over the survival of the community. Patočka sees a parallel between a society’s dissidents and Plato’s “guardian class”. They demonstrate model characteristics for everyone else: public spirited, community minded, ascetic, sincere, admonishing, speaking inconvenient truths, self-sacrificing. Because of their integrity, they are well suited to running stable institutions for a society. We find, then, that Patočka’s political philosophy takes its inspiration from Plato’s notions of the care of the soul, and the just state.

Patočka’s ambivalent relation to Husserl therefore turns out to be highly relevant to the contemporary debate surrounding the theory of the state and the question of finding the right architecture for a pluralist political framework. The philosophical rationale behind such an architecture is multi-faceted. Firstly, just as the polis of Ancient Greece provided a framework for dissent and debate, Patočka desires a respectful political space in which conflicting views can be aired, scrutinised, and reflected upon. Patočka, together with other agonistic political thinkers who have taken up his thought, want to find ways of incorporating dissidence and problematicity into our political institutions. Yet Patočka also wants his philosophy to inform a constructive politics – a politics that is capable of effectuating change, as well as facilitating dissent and debate. The framework and space for such debate and discussion is what Patočka calls the sphere of the political. For Patočka, the sphere of the political is distinct from politics. The sphere of the political is essentially indeterminate with respect to ideology, because it is grounded in the concept of problematicity. Such a political sphere will be more likely to forestall tendencies toward totalitarianism, and make twentieth century atrocities such as the Holocaust less likely to recur.

Furthermore, Patočka wants to find a middle way between rationalism and relativism. Pluralism cannot be allowed to become pure relativism, on the grounds that activity within the polis must be subject to certain norms of conduct and procedure. On the other hand, Patočka also wants to avoid pure rationalism, because he believes pure rationalism can lead to a kind of intellectual cul-de-sac that neglects the care of the soul. One of the attributes of a just state is that it is possible for the one who cares for his soul to flourish. This is connected to a concern of Patočka’s that liberal democracies can be conducive to a kind of moral vacuity, and don’t sufficiently nurture human freedom.

Part of the task lies in navigating the inherent tension between freedom, as Patočka conceives it, and the state’s institutions. A step in the right direction has been taken by some liberal democracies to the extent that they have a separation of powers between different institutions. They separate powers between the government of the day, the law-makers, the judiciary, law enforcement, and so on. This is what is meant when it is said that democracy is an institutionalisation of conflict, and that a healthy democracy will have an absolute indeterminacy at its foundation. Additionally, state institutions can have an important role in protecting certain basic freedoms, such as those of petition, association, publication, assembly, and speech. Subject to certain conditions, a healthy liberal democracy will actively encourage the expression of a diversity of views.

The desire to forestall relativism raises the question of whether there should be hurdles or entry criteria to the sphere of the political. The successful operation of Patočka’s political framework would not depend upon the possibility of a reconciliation between conflicting parties, but merely a mutual recognition of the essentially problematic nature of human existence. All parties should subscribe to a shared view of problematicity. Conflicting parties find themselves sharing a space of significance. One “prays for the enemy”, or at least tolerates him as a valid participant in the debate. This kind of tolerance is known as agonistic respect. Patočka calls it the “solidarity of the shaken”.

Patočka himself is pessimistic about the prospects for a widespread spiritual conversion to his doctrine of problematicity. It would require a transformation of political culture, a collective conversion to a new “civil religion”. But a new civil religion of problematicity, Patočka believes, would give modern human existence a meaning that it currently lacks.

Discussion Point 1 – Two Kinds of Optimism

One of this book’s key topics is reconciliation. This could mean reconciling the worldviews of two different cultures, reconciling two warring nations, or reconciling the agendas of two political parties. In this context there are two relevant senses of the term “optimism” (and similarly “pessimism”) in relation to the prospects for such a reconciliation. In some places, it is clear which sense Girardi has in mind, but in other places it is not always entirely clear.

Firstly, there is a teleological sense. For instance, one might believe that it belongs to the nature of rational discourse to arrive, sooner or later, at an agreement. Husserl believes that Western culture has an inborn teleology, a striving toward rationality and a life of reflective self-responsibility. When Girardi refers to “optimistic rationalism”, I infer that he is using “optimistic” in this teleological sense.

Secondly, there is a practical sense. For instance, one might believe, purely on the basis of what one knows about the world, human nature, and our political realities, that there are grounds for hope in relation to the prospects for reconciliation in certain areas. As Girardi points out, in this practical sense, Husserl himself is not entirely optimistic about our prospects. Husserl acknowledges that often history seems to be resisting and frustrating his goal. This is why Husserl describes his infinite task as “a struggle between awakened reason and the powers of historical reality.”

Two examples of where it is not entirely clear which sense is being used are: “Overall, however, Patočka is certainly less optimistic about Europe’s trajectory and the capacities of reason than Husserl was.” [94]; and “Although the possibility of a positive appropriation of problematicity is indicated here, Patočka is also pessimistic of the possibility of such a metanoia on a grand scale.” [122].

Discussion Point 2 – Habermas’s Shift to Post-secularism

Towards the end of chapter 5, Girardi points out some commonality and complementarity between Husserl’s and Habermas’s political philosophies, in that they both exhibit a faith in the process of reconciliation between different views. Girardi points out that Habermas “[…] attempt[s] a purely procedural approach to reconciliation”, and has “a faith in the rational transformation of particular views with an eye on their reconciliation” [89]. Girardi indicates that, according to Habermas, “all relevant views can meaningfully by reconciled with each other” [90]. Girardi argues that it is debatable whether Husserl’s and Habermas’s optimism with respect to the possibility of reconciliation between diverse views is justified, and that we need to consider the possibility that some views are not amenable to a process of rational reconciliation.

My concern here is that this particular discussion in chapter 5 doesn’t distinguish between Habermas’s earlier and later work. We have already learned in chapter 3 that “[i]n his later work, [Habermas] is no longer as committed to the secularisation thesis as he was in his earlier work” [39], and that in his later work Habermas sees liberal democracy as “a rationalisation, of communicative practices already present in more traditional worldviews, even if he no longer believes that these traditional worldviews can fully be replaced” [39]. Girardi also suggests in chapter 3 that when Habermas says he will not impose the condition of reflexivity on the worldviews of others, he comes close to “problematic relativism” [39].

Discussion Point 3 – The Holocaust

The Holocaust is pertinent to this book in a number of ways. Firstly, references to the Holocaust have an admonitory function. They serve to remind participants in the discussion about Europe’s political future of the imperative to avert a recurrence of something like the atrocities of the second world war. Indeed, the book’s closing sentence warns about the importance of not forgetting about them.

Secondly, the book is also concerned with enquiring into the complex web of causation behind the Holocaust. Girardi rightly points out that the extent of rationalism’s causal role behind the Holocaust remains a matter of controversy. [13] Yet the Holocaust would not have been possible without either advances in military and industrial technology, or systematic planning. So rationalism is certainly implicated in the web of causation, and Girardi is inclined to endorse Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of a “structural connection between the Holocaust and modernity” [19]. My observation about the phrase “structural connection” is that it could be taken to imply that modernity was somehow always going to entail something like the Holocaust. Perhaps such an implicit claim requires more justification than Girardi provides.

Thirdly, considerations about the web of causation behind the Holocaust lead on to questions about culpability. The egregious nature of the immorality of the Holocaust leads Girardi to believe that European civilisation itself bears some culpability for even making it possible. [150] It seems to me that laying a portion of blame at the door of European civilisation itself raises the following potential problem. What is to be said in this regard to Eastern European countries, for example, who tend to be less willing than Germany to accept culpability for the Holocaust? For them, Holocaust culpability is not part of their national identity. [26]

Fourthly, Girardi is also interested in how the Holocaust has affected our understanding of the broad sweep of European history, and the extent to which the Holocaust has dispelled a “Grand Narrative” of European cultural progress. There is no escaping the force of the observation that it would be a very strange “Grand Narrative” indeed that led up to something like the Holocaust. Yet Girardi also recognises that, after the Holocaust, the “Grand Narrative” did not disappear completely from the way historians thought about European history. [170]

As I reflect on the various ways in which the Holocaust haunts Girardi’s book, I find myself wondering if it might have been fitting for him to have said more about Patočka’s account of war contained in the sixth of his Heretical Essays. It is relevant to the question of causation, and, by implication, to the question of culpability, and provides an original metaphysical perspective on how we might understand the hecatombs of the first and second world wars.

Conclusion

As its title indicates, Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka is broad in scope, and covers a lot of historical and philosophical ground. What stood out for me was the way it raised and explored the question of the limitations of rationality, and the unsettling possibility that the worthy aspiration to eliminate conflict and hostility in world affairs could turn out to be metaphysically mistaken and futile. In that respect, I found the chapters engaging with the thought of Jan Patočka particularly valuable. In those chapters I was impressed by Girardi’s elucidation of the ways in which Patočka’s philosophy is informed by subtle echoes and motifs from Christianity, such as the ideas of sacrifice and praying for the enemy.

In addition to becoming acquainted with the philosophy of Jan Patočka, and agonistic political thought more generally, there are many other good reasons for studying this book. Some readers will be seeking to find out more about the diverse roots of European culture. Other readers will be aiming to improve their understanding of the philosophical motivations behind rationalist pluralism and liberal democracy. Yet others will be interested in Edmund Husserl’s account of Europe’s “crisis”, and how his concerns about Europe motivate his phenomenological project. Girardi’s fascinating book is a thorough enquiry into the main currents that inform the contemporary debate about the direction of European politics. It is an absorbing read from start to finish, and contains a treasure trove of insights for anybody interested in the intersection between philosophy and politics.

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

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

Title:

History of the Present: The Contemporary and its Culture

Series:

Morality, Society and Culture

Author:

David Roberts

Publisher:

Routledge

Release Date:

2022

Format:

Paperback

Pages:

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

Title:

Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters

Series:

Routledge Research in Phenomenology

Author:

Andreea Smaranda Aldea, David Carr, Sara Heinämaa (Eds.)

Publisher:

Routledge

Release Date:

2022

Format:

Ebook

Pages:

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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Aldea, A. S. 2016. “Phenomenology as Critique: Teleological-Historical Reflection and Husserl’s Transcendental Eidetics”. Husserl Studies 32 (1): 21–46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-016-9186-8

Aldea, A. S., D. Carr & S. Heinämaa. 2022. Phenomenology as Critique. Why Method Matters. Milton: Routledge.

Al-Saji, A. 2017. “Feminist Phenomenology.” In The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, ed. by S. Khader, A. Garry, and A. Stone, 143–54. New York: Routledge.

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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Cerbone, D. R. 2022. “Feckless Prisoners of Their Times: Historicism and Moral Reflection.” In Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity, ed, by S. Heinämaa, M. Hartimo, and I. Hirvonen, 183–98. London: Routledge.

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

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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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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

Title:

Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity: A Study of Imitation, Existence, and Affect

Series:

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy

Author:

Wojciech Kaftanski

Publisher:

Routledge

Release Date:

2021

Format:

Hardback £120.00

Pages:

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

Title:

The Formation of the Modern Self: Reason, Happiness and the Passions from Montaigne to Kant

Author:

Felix Ó Murchadha

Publisher:

Bloomsbury Academic

Release Date:

2022

Format:

Hardback $103.50

Pages:

264

Publisher Page

Hartmut Rosa: The Uncontrollability of the World

Title:

The Uncontrollability of the World

Author:

Hartmut Rosa. James Wagner (Translator)

Publisher:

Polity

Release Date:

2020

Format:

Paperback €18.10

Pages:

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 21^st 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):

Being Affected: Primarily explained as some inward, aesthetic experience- a song can have such capacity.
Self-Efficacy: An emotoinal and outward movement or reaction. The exchanges of gaze, or a warm dialogue would satisfy such denotation.
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.
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

Title:

The Uncontrollability of the World

Author:

Hartmut Rosa. James Wagner (Translator)

Publisher:

Polity

Release Date:

2020

Format:

Paperback €18.10

Pages:

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

Title:

Religious Responses to Modernity

Author:

Yohanan Friedmann and Christoph Markschies (Eds.)

Publisher:

De Gruyter

Release Date:

2021

Format:

Hardback 77,95 €

Pages:

141

Publisher Page

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

Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg Book Cover

Title:

Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg

Series:

Political Philosophy and Public Purpose

Author:

Agata Bielik-Robson, Daniel Whistler (Eds.)

Publisher:

Palgrave Macmillan

Release Date:

2020

Format:

Hardback 96,29 €

Pages:

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.