Tag: Post-Metaphysical Thinking

Jürgen Habermas: Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 1: The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking

Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 1: The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking Book Cover Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 1: The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking
Jürgen Habermas, Ciaran Cronin (Translated by)
Polity Press
2023
Paperback
448

Reviewed by: Michael Maidan

Also a History of Philosophy (hereafter abbreviated AHPh), originally published in German in 2018 in two volumes, is presented in English translation in a three-volume edition. The first volume, corresponding to about half of the German first one, will be followed next year by a second.  A third and final volume will be published in 2025. Habermas —or his translator— provides a justification for the tripartite division (AHPh, p. 83). While the editorial decision to divide the original work into three volumes is understandable considering its length, it means that the English-language reader will have to wait another two years to become familiar with and evaluate the work in its entirety.

The editorial decision to release the book in three volumes also demanded some small adjustments to the text. Whereas volume One carries the subtitle: “The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking”, the German original is “Die okzidentale Konstellation von Glauben und Wissen”. Ciaran Cronin, who translated the book and is a veteran translator of Habermas, chose to substitute the original subtitle with the title of the first part of volume One (“Zur Frage einer Genealogie nachmetaphysischen Denkens”). There are advantages and disadvantages to this move. It can be argued, on the one hand, that Cronin’s choice depicts better the whole project than the original subtitle. Indeed, Cronin’s decision directs us to read the Occidental constellation as a particular subset in the development of postmetaphysical thought. But, as a matter of fact, the Western way is the only subset dealt with substantively. From this point of view, the new title promises more than what it can deliver. The translator promises to include a disclosure of the translation and editorial decisions in the third and final volume (AHPh, x). Readers interested in having an outline of the complete work can refer to pages 396-405 for an overview.

As Habermas makes it clear in the Preface, the genealogy to which we are invited in this work is the genealogy of philosophy, or, more precisely, of a form of philosophy that evolved from, and left behind its metaphysical impedimenta.  That philosophy is understood here broadly, is possibly hinted at in the title, which refers to this genealogy as being “also” a history of philosophy. But, why does Habermas make this recourse to philosophy? What can still count as an appropriate understanding of the task of philosophy in our times? (AHPh, xvii).  While the term “philosophy” appears in many of Habermas’ writings, most notably in his The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (German 1985/English 1987), it has seldom been thematized. In a 1981 essay, “Philosophy as Stand-In and as Interpreter,” Habermas proposes a redefinition of philosophy’s role in a culture that carved out the traditional understanding of reason into three orientations or research traditions: (a) modern natural science, (b) positive law and morals, and (c) autonomous art and art criticism (Habermas, 1981: 17). As each of these research traditions becomes more and more compartmentalized and specialized, they face the problem of how to mediate between the “experts’ culture” and the general one. Philosophy can be conceived, according to Habermas, as the repository of a will to unity, a will that nevertheless acknowledges that individual matters can only be developed and argued in each one of the differentiated cultural spheres. This is what Habermas characterizes as the post-metaphysical philosophy, which is opposed to the old understanding of philosophy as a kind of usher that oversees the proper sitting arrangements for each of the sciences.

In AHPh, Habermas may have returned to a more traditional understanding of philosophy. Habermas writes that philosophy cannot and should not renounce its holistic ambitions. To do so, even if Habermas acknowledges that those ambitions are unreasonable, would signal a betrayal of its identity, (AHPh, xx). The question is, “What can still count as an appropriate understanding of the tasks of philosophy today?” (AHPh, xvii).

Habermas starts from the observation that, based on his participation in contemporary discussions, there seem to be two different philosophical camps. One takes individual subjects, their ideas, intentions, behavior, and dispositions. The other starts with shared systems of symbols, rules, languages, practices, and forms of life. What Habermas proposes is a reconstruction of both camps because “only an understanding of the reasons that have compelled the philosophy of the subject since the Reformation to undertake an anthropocentric shift in perspective, and above all to embrace the postmetaphysical rejection of belief in a restitutive or ‘redemptive’ justice, will open our eyes to the degree of willingness to cooperate that communicatively socialized subjects must demand of the use of their rational freedom” (AHPh, xxi).

To proceed with this genealogy, Habermas takes a few unconventional steps. He first declares that philosophy, in its origins, is but one of the several metaphysical and religious worldviews of the axial age (AHPh, xxi).  Then, he points out that Western philosophy’s origins trace back to an “osmotic process” between Greek philosophy and early Christianity, a process in which religious concepts were assimilated by Philosophy, and at the same time, religious traditions and concerns were transformed into justifiable knowledge, i.e., one that can be argued about conceptually. This process did not end in late antiquity or the Middle Ages but continued well into the modern period, and its traces can still be found in the themes of rational freedom and in basic concepts of practical philosophy.

It may be objected, though, that traces of Judeo-Christian heritage are to be found only in one of the contemporary branches of postmetaphysical philosophy, whereas the empiricist and naturalist branch succeeded in making a complete break with their religious and metaphysical heritage. Habermas rejects this conclusion. The Kantian-Hegelian branch, with its own criticism of religion and metaphysics, preserved an interest in detecting “the traces of reason in history and, in general, an understanding of their philosophical work as oriented to fostering rational conditions of life” (AHPh, xxi).

In an important paper, written after completing the manuscript and before the release of the book, Habermas provides several useful comments to AHPh.  In his paper, Habermas qualifies his foreword to AHPh as a grandiose declaration that he now prefers to downplay a few notches.  First, he rejects the idea that philosophy can become a “normal” science, i.e., a discipline with a delimited subject matter and a commonly agreed methodology. That would amount to the disappearance of philosophy, a loss in Habermas’ eyes. He elaborates: “The cultural self-understanding of modern societies—and thus the present mode of social life itself—could not remain unaffected by the disappearance of this form of reflection” (Habermas, 2021: 5).  Habermas also explains that his account rests on basic concepts and assumptions of social theory on the “emergence, function and progressive desocialization of world views” (Habermas, 2021, 5). From this point of view, the history of philosophy, traditionally centered in discussions between rival schools, is presented by Habermas as a societal process which he summarizes in the formula: “from world views to the lifeworld” (Habermas, 2021, 5).

Habermas’ history of philosophy is not a philosophy of history. But neither is Habermas’ reconstruction of the history and development of philosophy a sociology of philosophy, as practiced by Randal Collins or Pierre Bourdieu and his school, but the reconstruction of an evolutionary process which should suffice to embed the history of philosophy into social theory.

Habermas introduces his project in section I (“On the Question of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking”). This is followed by a second section, which introduces the notion of “axial age,” a hypothesis first formulated by the philosopher Karl Jaspers, according to which we can identify a number of more or less simultaneous and similar breakthroughs in several civilizations in antiquity (China, India, Iran, Israel, and Greece). The third and last section of volume One compares the different approaches and insights of each one of the axial age civilizations. The volume ends with the “First Intermediate Reflection”, in which Habermas takes stock of the work accomplished up to this point and points to the way to be pursued in the remaining two volumes.

According to Habermas, Christian Europe had engaged in repeated bouts of self-examination, which exhibited as a recurring pattern a reflection on Graeco-Roman antiquity. This pattern was disrupted in the 17th century with the emergence of a new type of modernity, which distanced itself from Christianity, and not only from antiquity, as in previous ones. This movement was driven by a reflection on the mathematical natural sciences and by the influence of the Reformation, which questioned the concept of a universal Church. Christianity, and religion in general, become an object of interest for philosophy. But it was only with the Age of Enlightenment that the reflection on the Christian faith takes on the form of a foreign element whose contemporaneity, or to use Habermas’ expression, “whose contemporary configuration of spirit”, becomes problematic. This secularized philosophy bifurcates into a positive and a negative concept. “I am interested” writes Habermas, “in this caesura because the Age of Enlightenment ushered in by philosophy represents a parting of ways for secularized philosophy at which postmetaphysical thinking itself bifurcates.” (AHPh, 5). However, this bifurcation does not correspond to the common one between continental and analytical philosophies (AHPh, 7). Habermas prefers to speak of two different heritages, one tracing back to Hume and the other which continues the tradition of the young-Hegelians.  He then offers an interpretation of those heritages based on 4 criteria: (1) attitude to religion and theology (2) a cognitive versus a non-cognitive (or communicative) concept of practical reason; (3) their respective evaluation of the philosophical relevance of the human sciences; (4) their respective positions on the historical location of philosophical thinking (AHPh, 8). In the philosophies of Herder, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, and Hegel, Habermas notes a categorial shift from a paradigm of the subject to a paradigm of language: “With its detranscendentalization of the mind, post-Hegelian thought, in contrast to empiricism, learned simultaneously to reconstruct the activity of a meanwhile situated reason from the participant perspective and to describe it from the observer perspective in the historical context in which it is embedded.” (AHPh, 12). Habermas presents this turn as a “detranscendentalization of the mind”, which learns to simultaneously reconstruct the activity of reason from the perspective of the participant and to describe it from the perspective of the observer. This “dual perspective” is what makes it necessary for philosophy to be humble and to learn from the human sciences (AHPh, 13).

Volume One is divided into three parts. Part I introduces the question of a genealogy of post-metaphysical thought and its legitimacy. The rest of the book is a historical and reconstructructive analysis played on two levels, sometimes parallel and sometimes divergent, of Western philosophy and of the alternative but complementary system of thought elaborated in the Orient. Part II presents the hypothesis of an “axial transformation”, which frames the development of Western philosophy in the broader scheme of the breakthrough that took place around 500 BC in different civilizations. Part III presents a somewhat detailed comparison between the different worldviews that emerged from the axial breakthrough.  Volume One ends with a provisional summing up of Habermas’ argument.

Habermas presents the problem of postmetaphysical thinking from three points of view. The first consists of an analysis of the criticism of modernity and of a presumed withering away of the political that was elaborated by a number of German philosophers —e.g., Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Karl Löwith, and Martin Heidegger— in the first half of the 20th century. Habermas contests this melancholic approach and emphasizes instead Hans Blumenberg’s re-evaluation of modernity. According to Habermas’ interpretation, Blumenberg answers to the declinist understanding of modernity with a theory of philosophy as a learning process, because of which, some reasons no longer “count” (AHPh, 35). But this answer demands clarification. How is it that we came to accept only postmetaphysical patterns of explanation as plausible? We cannot answer this question in a direct way, without making a detour through history, understood as a series of learning processes. And Habermas reaffirms his position that patterns of argumentation that emerge from learning processes that we understand in a rational way are the only ones that do not require additional justification (AHPh, 36).

The second point of view regards the relationship between philosophy and religion, and finally, the third involves the suspicion that Western philosophy does not have any claims to universality, and that is, first and foremost, a narrow European perspective.

Why call this interpretation of philosophy conceived as the reconstruction of societal and cultural learning processes with the value-laden name of “genealogy”? The obvious reference is Nietzsche’s thought (AHPh, 36-37). Habermas claims to follow a suggestion made by Amy Allen to differentiate between “subversive,” “problematizing,” and “vindicatory” genealogies. “Vindicatory” genealogy is one that not only refers to the contingency of the context in which one’s ideas originated, something it has in common with other forms of genealogy, but also considers the distance from a naivety of understanding of the world that disappears once we become aware that its structure is the results of a learning process. Briefly, while the first form of genealogy appears to correspond to its use in Nietzsche, and the second to Foucault, the third would be the one chosen by Habermas, and is not only negative like the former forms, but has a positivity that results from its reinscription as results of learning processes (AHPh, 37).

Habermas’ example is meaningful. We see the secular premises of postmetaphysical thinking in a different light when we discover that these are not only the result of a return to premises of Greek thought, Christianized and forgotten during the Middle Ages, but from a protracted theological discourse on faith and knowledge. The kind of genealogy that Habermas has in mind preserves, at the logical-semantical level, the validity of its propositions (AHPh, 37). But characterized in those terms, Habermas genealogy is also a crypto-dialectic.  Indeed, echoes from Hegel’s philosophy are much present in this work. What Habermas hopes to find in a genealogy is, in addition to a cognitive function, also a social cohesive one (AHPh, 38). Early on, in the societies of the Axial Age, the aspect of social integration took the form of a political theory legitimizing the imperial kingdoms. In the Christian West, because of the division of labor with philosophy, religion took over this role. Later, with the secularization of the state, philosophy took on the role of providing justification for constitutional norms. Ultimately, philosophy could not satisfy itself with the normative perspective and had to incorporate findings acquired from an observer perspective, i.e., from the social sciences. Habermas claims that philosophy was able to do so only after the scientization of the knowledge of culture and society. The observer’s perspective and knowledge are either integrated into the existing “interpretative framework” or lead to its restructuring. Also, in the case of the normative realm, changes in the form of social integration translate into an expansion of modes of cooperation and the development of normative ideas. Habermas also adds that worldviews can store problem-solving potentials that remain latent until they can be fully utilized (AHPh, 39-40)

Section 2 deals with the question —that occupies Habermas in his more recent work— on the status of religion in modern society. There are two interpretations of Habermas’ belated interest in religion. The first interpretation stresses the continuity of Habermas’ interest in religion, starting with his earliest writings. The second restricts his interest in religion to a late stage, necessitated by the evidence of a re-emergence of religion in Western Europe and the USA, and the renewal of political theologies worldwide. Both camps can find elements in Habermas’ late work that sustain their interpretation. In what respects to volume One of AHPh, Habermas clearly subordinates the question of religion to the acknowledgment of the important role that the relationship between faith and knowledge had in the development of Western philosophy.  But he also considers the effects of the decoupling of philosophy from religion. Accordingly, he introduces a distinction between secularization at the level of our understanding of self and the world, and the process of secularization of state power and society. The latter is a matter of functional differentiation between the state and a church that has been relieved of the task of legitimizing political rule.

Section 3 confronts the question of postmetaphysical thought’s universality claims.

Habermas acknowledges the skeptical argument against the claim to universality. This is why we must consider Western philosophy as one of many voices in the concert of axial worldviews (AHPh, 66). This would also apply to postmetaphysical thinking, which can be defended only in an intercultural discourse among equal participants. To that effect, Habermas proposes what he denominates a “thought experiment” that would explain the legitimate role that postmetaphysical thinking can assume in discourses that are polyphonic and intercultural (AHPh, 73-82). This experiment corresponds to a translation of the vague aspirations of post-metaphysical thinking to the concrete experience of the development of international and interregional organizations based ultimately on disparate nation-states having different histories, cultures, and religions.  The question that Habermas presents is whether “reaching an intercultural understanding on principles of political justice can be conceived as possible in a multicultural world society at all, even though the parties who encounter each other there are shaped by the cultural legacies of competing world religions.” (AHPh,75).  In other words, “how an international community could reach an agreement on interculturally recognized principles of political justice at all.” (AHPh, 75). Habermas adds that the experiment that he is proposing has as an objective to identify the level of reflection on which the claim to universality could be clarified (AHPh, 76). Here, Habermas restricts the discussion to the domain of religions, disregarding the influence of economic, social, and other interests, as if only consideration of salvation and morality are operative in this situation.

The analysis is conducted in two parts. In the first, Habermas considers the viability of dialogue between religious and secular thought in which both parties accept the same principles of political justice for the same reasons. The second version of the argument requires that the religious party accepts that secular thought is sufficient for a self-supporting “rational justification”.  (AHPh, 79). Habermas agrees that this is a unilateral challenge to the religious side (AHPh, 81). He proposes two ways of resolving this contradiction. One asserts that the development of the worldviews of the different civilizations is broadly similar. Second, that those differences that cannot be reconciled by recourse to the previous observation “would have to be dealt with in intercultural discourse.” (AHPh, 82; 117).

After this extended introduction, Habermas presents in sections II and III the hypothesis of an axial breakthrough, taking place independently at approximately the same time in five ancient Asian civilizations. He deals first with the general characteristics of the axial turn and goes later into a specific comparison of the major traits of each of the axial civilizations. According to Habermas “The term ‘Axial Age’ stems from Karl Jaspers’ conception of the year 500 BC as an ‘axis’ around which the rotation of world history accelerated, as it were. This development was prompted by similar revolutions in the mentalities of the elites in the early Eurasian advanced cultures that occurred independently during a comparatively short period. Out of these revolutions emerged “strong” religious teachings and metaphysical worldviews that remain influential to the present day.” (AHPh, 115). This approach, which Habermas borrows from Jaspers, has some problems. Out of the monotheistic religions, both Islam and Christianity are missing, and is difficult to see how they could be integrated into the axial approach.  Egypt is missing, even though Greek philosophers thought of Egypt as the origin of at least some of their wisdom. Regarding monotheism, Habermas polemicizes with the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, who advocates a different interpretation and evaluation of the development and consequences of monotheism. To make room for everybody would require an expanded notion of axial breakthrough, which means not just the five breakthroughs that Jaspers identified, but also their offshoots. But Habermas is more interested in addressing a different problem: how these evolutionary events continue to influence contemporary societies. For this purpose, we need to discard a one-sided, intellectualistic interpretation of religion and metaphysical worldviews. Religions are not just worldviews; they connect interpretation with ritual and remain connected to an archaic experience. This realization leads Habermas into a lengthy exploration of ritual, language, social integration, and political rule. Ultimately, this provides an interpretation of the inner dynamics that lead to the axial turn, and also explains the persistence of religion in the contemporary world.

Habermas dedicates an important excursus to the question of the origins of language, referring to the research conducted by the developmental and comparative psychologist and linguist Michael Tomasello.  He uses Tomasello’s reconstruction of language acquisition to ground his insight that “cultural transmission, which replaces genetically controlled natural evolution, depends on an intersubjective relationship between speaker and addressee and their ability to share intentions aimed at something perceived in the objective world. And it is precisely this elementary interlocking of a horizontal relationship between persons with a vertical relationship to states of affairs proceeding from this shared basis that is made possible by the interposition of a public gesture perceived and understood by both sides as a symbol.” (AHPh, 155). Habermas reconstruction of the communicative situation puts into play five elements whose presence are required for the success of communication: (1) a deliberate gesture; (2) adjustment of perspectives; (3) reference to a state of affairs; (4) that the gesture refers for the speaker and for the addressee to the same state of affairs; and finally, (5) that the addressee interprets based on a shared normative background (AHPh, 154).  In the communicative situation, Habermas distinguishes a communicative use of the symbol which refers to an interpersonal relationship, from a representational use of the symbol, which points to the world. Entering into an interpersonal relationship, the participants adopt each other’s perspective and thereby create shared knowledge (AHPh, 156).

In the following section, Habermas extends the model of communication to interpret ritual behavior. Ritual is a more primitive form of communication, than, e.g., myth. Myth presupposes a grammatically developed language. (AHPh, 163). Not so ritual, which builds on the mimetic skills of our ancestors (rhythm, dance, pantomime, sculpture, painting, body painting, found objects, and so forth). What sets ritual apart is its self-referentiality. Ritual does not refer to something in the world (as is the case in linguistic communication) but is self-contained (AHPh,164). Ritual is a kind of “speech before language” (AHPh, 165). Habermas connects this description with a functional one. Ritual is a response to specific disturbances within the social collective, that are related to a vulnerability of the communicative form of socialization.  In the following pages, Habermas presents an explanation of the origins and function of ritual as a learning process. With the new level of communication and openness to the world, the individual is exposed to an increased flood of information. What is new must be integrated into familiar contexts. Myth is a response to this cognitive challenge (AHPh, 169-172). But rituals are not discarded; rather, they are combined with mythical narratives to which they provide already symbolically encoded experiences (AHPh, 173). Ritual steps in when the balance between individual self-assertion and the preservation of the collective. “Acute shocks to the social balance bring a practice into play in which individual members assure themselves of their dependence on the powerful collective by means of an aggression-inhibiting ‘submission to the superior’” (AHPh, 179).

In part III Habermas discusses in more detail the specific configurations of the worldviews elaborated in the different axial age cultures. The analysis contained in this section of the book is deemed to be provisional, in the sense that Habermas acknowledges his lack of expertise in each of the religions or cultures that he introduces briefly. Starting with a general discussion, Habermas concentrates on the rejection of paganism in ancient Judaism, the teachings and practice of Buddha, Confucianism, and Taoism, concluding with two sections on Greek philosophy, the first on Natural philosophy and the second with Plato’s theory of Ideas.

Habermas finds some interesting similarities between Plato’s theory of ideas and the cosmocentric Asian worldviews of the axial age: (1) Ontologization of the powers of salvation and misfortune into the moral and esthetic of the truly existent; (2) elaboration of the distinction between being and appearance into a theory of level of knowledge and being; (3) inquiry and knowledge are represented as a path to salvation; (4) moralization of the sacred,  perfectionistic ethics that prescribe a way of life characterized by wisdom, prudence, courage, and justice; (5) repudiation of idolatry and magic. In the case of Greek philosophy, though, de-coupling of doctrine from cult (AHPh, 316). Habermas also ponders the paradox of the politically advanced conditions of Athenian democracy and their inability to be projected to the whole of the population of the polis.

In the “First intermediate reflection” that concludes the present volume of AHPh, Habermas notes that since the breakthrough of the axial age, the paths of the major civilizations have diverged, and declares himself unable to explore in detail their development. He concentrates instead on the “Western way”. Nevertheless, he offers a few remarks on the commonalities in the development of the different civilizations, as they become visible “from a great distance”. Habermas indeed claims that the different “worldviews” seem to have had similar starting conditions for their emergence and their dynamic development. This is essential for Habermas’ hypothesis. A mere simultaneity, or even similar starting conditions but not similarities, will not satisfy the conditions required for a dialogue between contemporary societies beyond vague claims of either a clash of civilizations or relativism.  Habermas lists a number of similarities and emerging conditions (AHPh, 323): (1) a connection of the “sacred complex” with the new bureaucratic structure of the state; (2) a revolution in the intellectual elite which was enabled when written culture reached maturity; (3) a mythical tradition that got a literary expression that provided legitimation through a differentiated pantheon; (4) changes in cultic practices which took the form of state rituals on the one side, and of individual worship, on the other. Habermas also notes that there are some similarities in the geopolitical situations of the nations that played the lead in the axial breakthrough. Those were peripheral regions, removed from the center of power, afflicted by political unrest, foreign domination, or new modes of production.  Habermas emphasizes the centrality of a normative turn: “the religious and metaphysical worldviews of the axial age gave rise to generally binding norms that the ruler could no longer embody but could only represent to the extent that he himself was subject to them” (AHPh, 325).  The axial breakthrough produces a limited disenchanting of the world. This process was different in the Asian cultures and in Greece, which allowed the emergence of philosophical idealism. But, the “religious and metaphysical worldviews” (except perhaps for Greek philosophy) played an ambivalent role, providing spiritual and intellectual resources for subversion and resistance and to their stabilization (AHPh, 324).

Volumes 2 and 3 —which are forthcoming in English— deal exclusively with Western philosophy, from Christian Platonism to Pierce’s pragmatism. While more in line with traditional histories of philosophy in the array of subjects treated, Habermas’ choices are idiosyncratic. Not a pedagogic work, not a generic history of philosophy, and certainly not a philosophy of history, Also a History of Philosophy is intimately linked to the inner dynamics of Habermas’ project.

Bibliography:

Habermas (1981), “Philosophy as Stand-In and as Interpreter” in, Jurgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge, UK and Maldon, USA, cs1990.

Habermas (2021), “An author’s retrospective view”, Constellations, 2021;28:5–10 (DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12570).

Peter Hanly: Between Heidegger and Novalis

Between Heidegger and Novalis Book Cover Between Heidegger and Novalis
Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Peter Hanly
Northwestern University Press
2021
Paperback $34.95
224

Reviewed by: Sandro Herr (Bergischen Universität Wuppertal)

It is a unique quality shown in philosophical books, when they manage to treat topics which concern philosophy in a fundamental sense without falling prey to banal commonplaces or turmoil by endlessly adding relevant contexts. “A study in relation” (3), as Peter Hanly refers to his recent book Between Heidegger and Novalis, would precisely fulfil the criteria for such a topic. Yet, Hanly demonstrates stupendously well how to avoid said dilemma. His study is guided by a specific thinking of «between-ness» that “introduces a dynamic tension into the category of relation by conceiving it in terms of contradictory energies of separation, dispersion, pulling- apart, and gathering or converging” (3). Said between, as Hanly wants to show, comes from a heraclitean idea of harmonia which Heidegger and Novalis share as the common source for core elements of their thinking (7). The book is divided into two parts, eight chapters and an epilogue. Chapter transitions will be marked by the end of the paragraphs in the review at hand. Each part of Hanly’s study highlights an aspect of the between, the former its “Fertility” in Novalis and the latter “Pain” in Heidegger (16). Both parts explore these aspects in various philosophical areas, be they materialistic, idealistic, linguistic, or ontological, but also performative, rhetorical, or dramaturgical. Furthermore, by reconstructing historical and systematic contexts, Hanly gives insight into developments of both thinkers individually. In doing so, Hanly provides the reader not only with a vividly detailed depiction of each philosopher’s thinking regarding the question of between, but he also indirectly shows how the ambiguous relation of Heidegger and Novalis displays itself said between-ness. To outline the most important arguments of the book, I shall give a summary of both its parts followed by a few critical remarks at the end of the review.

Oftentimes, Novalis is neglected as an autonomous philosophical thinker. Heidegger, for example, illegitimately associates him with Hegel’s dialectical idealism (11) or merely uses him as authoritative reference (8). The first part of Hanly’s book makes it clear, among other things, that this view is not tenable. Quite the contrary, there is a highly original torsion of speculative philosophy and empirical naturalism in Novalis’ thinking.

The first context in which Hanly elaborates the notion of between is Novalis’ account on metaphor. Phrases such as “all is seed” (19) and the frequent use of terms like “dissolution”, “elasticity” or “fluidity” (22) demonstrate an affinity with the natural world that Novalis incorporates in his writings. For Novalis, however, metaphor is not simply an instrument that allows the illumination of abstract concepts. Much rather, it works as an “interweaving of registers such that a movement of exchange takes place, one in which the relations between concrete determination and ideational figuration seem to dissolve.” (24) Already here we find an implicit criticism of a hierarchical order between philosophy and poetry. Nonetheless, Hanly underlines that Novalis does not simply invert their relation. His understanding of metaphor derives itself from a philosophical endeavor, where philosophy becomes “the poem of the understanding” (26). To fully grasp the new fashion of this interpretation, one must trace back Novalis’ thinking to its roots in the early Fichte-Studies and, at the same time, not reduce his style of writing to an abstract ground (26). According to Hanly, the relation of I and not-I is the “crucible” (29) for Novalis. In Fichte there is the positing activity of the I which has already occurred in formalizations such as I = I or also I = not-I. This logic of activity or productivity becomes fragile for Novalis because the formalizations as such do not reveal any prioritization (29) and, counter to that, they explicitly stand for a limitation (33) that renders their relation less unilateral. While Fichte himself senses these problems, only Novalis shows the rigor to contest the recourse to an ultimate principle consequently. Instead, he keeps an “insistence on movement, on the motility of the exchange between I and not-I that governs their equivalence” (34). As Hanly underlines, abstraction from then on will be the transforming work of thought for Novalis, “effecting ‘logarithmic change’ upon both the obduracy of the sensible world and the ideality of the I” (36), where everything is unified or “chaos is transformed into a manifold world” (36) but unified only as free and self-determined beings. Novalis develops his very own “rigor of variation and combination” that he will retain throughout his oeuvre and most fully in his encyclopedic project Das Allgemeine Brouillon (59). Therein, abstraction becomes a specific task of the imagination. Other than just picturing things, imagination keeps various polarities in the state of hovering or, as Hanly puts it, of between (38).

The aforementioned philosophical consequence of Novalis becomes comprehensible if one understands where his thinking is initially situated. Reaching for a better understanding of the faculty of imagination and its hovering especially, Hanly addresses himself to Kant’s concept of «ideal» and Fichte’s «intellectual intuition» (39). Kant tries to understand the ideal as an Urbild without further instantiation that excludes any sort of oscillation which he then allocates to the so-called “schwebende Zeichnungen” (40). Whereas Fichte develops different models, circular and linear, to solve the problems of the oscillatory imagination that he himself recognizes. However, each of the models serves the purpose of banning the characteristic instability of the “hovering” by attributing a clear function to the faculty of imagination. It is only Novalis who unhinges the hovering of the between by revealing the inconsistencies of Fichte’s approach and by asking of the hovering: “What if we were really to take seriously its determinative instability, and orient our account around the effects that such an uncertainty introduces?” (47). Thus, I and not-I are not to be understood as “mutually determining poles, mediated by a “between” space” (50) but as markers, as words of coalescence which are the result of the perpetual movement of a between (52). But as Hanly carves out in several of Novalis’ writings, the overall approach goes further. By questioning why there are dichotomous oppositions everywhere (52), Novalis extends his criticism towards a primordiality of dichotomic relations in general. At last, this leads him to an “absolute sphere” of relation, of connectivity or of not-word (52) that synthesizes dichotomies (53). Based on this, the idea of an oscillatory movement between nodes (55) becomes predominant for Novalis. From “zones of visible and invisible, ideal and real” (56) or abstract and concrete, philosophy and poetry, Hanly lists the numerous nodes which are mutually exchangeable, involved in a constant reciprocal movement (56).

“Fragile and Fundamental” (56), as Hanly poses it, this between becomes the axis around which Novalis’ writing evolves. As an act of non-reductive mapping and intertwining, he ceaselessly advances to new territories. With his Encyclopaedia project, Novalis attempts a writing that abides by a “Combinationslehre” (62) about the scattering and dispersion of word-seeds and which at the same time gathers “into a totality” (61). In this regard, Hanly also finds Novalis’ “close involvement with the Schlegel brothers and with the sympraxis of the Athenaeum project” (68). But as demonstrated, he goes even one step further. In concordance with Blanchot’s criticism, Novalis does not only use the fragment in a way that the content works as “the mere illustration of a dynamics of the formal dance of writing.” (69) Much rather, he “pushes precisely towards a fusion of form and content” (70), where through the gathering of their between-space both mirror each other and dissolve their boundaries (72). As the overarching experience in the background of this phase, Hanly reconstructs the time Novalis spent at the Mining Academy under the influential presence of Abraham Gottlob Werner (74). Engaging with his studies, Novalis gains important insights in mineralogy and the natural sciences. For Werner, there is a “natural order” of description that “involves the coordination of a series of sensible traits with a certain kind of linguistic ordering” (75). While on the one hand Novalis shares the same kind of interest as Werner, he sharply criticizes him on the other. In analogy to his Fichte-Studies (79), Novalis spots a lack of engagement with the question of the between in Werner as he

fails to discern the possible transition — from the external characters to the inner constituents, or from symptomatics to chemistry, and yet this is the main approach for solving this problem. (78)

Just as minerals, stones and solid-state objects in general are exposed to transformative chemical processes, in his “Encyclopaedia” Novalis subjects the solidity of the word to liquefaction, to “fluid rhythms of gathering and dissolution” (80).

With that in mind, Hanly lastly turns to Novalis’ novel Die Lehrlinge von Saïs, which he says is best interpreted through the lens of Schelling’s First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (82). Other than Kant, who constructs nature as an interaction of active and passive forces, Schelling tries to abolish this dichotomy by grasping nature as “determining itself in and through its activity” (83) and as a force that dissolves everything (86). Drawing inspiration from here, Novalis wants to realize this nature of between at the level of writing (88) and planned, as noted in a letter to Tieck, great transformations of his project (89). He died the following year and so Die Lehrlinge von Saïs was left unrealized in that respect. Nonetheless, Hanly sees the written word as explicitly responsible for the rhythm of natural liquefication here, because

like Schelling’s natural object, but seemingly intimately bound up with writing: each figure, emerging from the play of gathering, seems to “belong to that great cipher- script” [Chiffernschrift ] that we “glimpse” everywhere (92).

The sense of lost plenitude, of dispersion (95), introduces a longing into the world and can only ever be restored “in the form of new ‘mixings’, new bindings— new configurations of connectivity” (96). At the end of the first part, Hanly requires us to ask for the resonance that Novalis’ thinking might have in our own. For Hanly, turning back to the very motif of his study, it is a “poetics of materiality: poetry names the word insofar as it emerges from and as a zone of relation between the human and the natural world. Poetry, thought thus, is relation” (98).

In the second part of his study, Hanly starts off with Heidegger’s reflections on Trakl. The primary intention of this second part is to map out the subject of pain as another facet of between. In this regard, pain is “the tension of a play of belonging such that what is kept apart is joined in that very separation, and what is joined is kept apart in its very joining” (103). However, with pain, the tensioned between-space we found at the core of Novalis’ thinking “is possessed of an entirely different affectivity” (104). Thus, Hanly follows the path of Heidegger’s thoughts on pain and its “semantic complex” (106) starting off from its most explosive appearance in the Bremen Lectures from 1949, then back to texts from the seynsgeschichtliche phase such as Das Ereignis, and to its later occurrence in Unterwegs zur Sprache (106). Pain in Heidegger is the rift “— a rending or tearing, an opening, a gap —” (108) as a central possibility of the human. As a rift it exceeds the limits of how the human being is construed. This results from an “’opening’, in which the differential structure that Heidegger calls ‘the fourfold’ emerges as such” (108), as a grounding structure of the world. However, leaving aside this notion for a moment, Hanly initially focuses on the concealment that suffering brings about pain which actually “is closer to us, more intimate” (109). It has the capacity to expose this danger of concealing, thereby acknowledging its own “hidden proximity” or “nearness” (109). Other than in Sein und Zeit (112), as Hanly mentions, nearness here is not to be understood in spatial terms. The positioning of a coffin, for example, implies a different nearness because “what is effected in this nearing is the determination of a world that gathers itself around an absence” (113). With Hanly’s elaborations on the first two of the Bremen Lectures, the coffin is much rather a “thing” than an “oppositionally objective” (114). It “draws together like a net” (115) the different interrelations of the world to let them eventuate and thus manifests the same dynamic of between around which Hanly’s study revolves (116). The consonances in which Heidegger expresses this dynamic such as «das Dingen des Dinges» are not merely rhetorical according to Hanly (117). Instead, “the rhythm of their sounding” (118) tends towards an «Einklang» (117) or a concordance of thing and world. This concordance could dissolve any sense of difference which is why Heidegger himself in the Appendix begins to suspect a “collapse of ’nearness’” (118).

As opposed to the «thing», pain as the rift and rending will be “the insistent reinscription of difference” in the third lecture. For Hanly, this contrast corresponds with a language of pain “that both considers pain and makes it manifest” (120), and for which he seeks out first signs in Das Ereignis but that “first comes clearly to the fore” (122) in the texts of the 1950s. As already indicated in the Beiträge, the between will no longer be the thread that connects structural elements of the world and that in so doing “remains subordinate to the poles it conjoins, […] fixing and reinforcing their complementarity” (125). Instead, it will “be given a kind of priority, to speak in a voice that does not defer to the complexes it separates” (125). The locus of said between will then be Dasein itself, not in a spatial sense but because it is the between more strictly (126), e.g., between men and God as elements of worldliness. Hanly investigates the experience of pain in Dasein along different aspects. He shows that while Heidegger rejects the tendency of Jünger to reify pain as the object of a relation (128), he resonates with the ideas of Nietzsche as he interprets pain as the erratic betweenness or oneness of terror and bliss (130, 135). Affiliate notions of pain are also identified by Hanly in Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin. This especially concerns the Hyperion, where Hölderlin explores the subject of leave-taking both narratively and metaphorically (140) and what is then, as affective domain, brought into a connection with the thinking of difference or Unterschied by Heidegger (142). Furthermore, in this context, pain must be thought in its relation to Stimmung, that constitutes the possibility of «there» in Da-sein as it “hears the pain of its dislocation, and thus ‘accords’ with that pain” (133). As Stimmung belongs to Dasein, it is equally irreducible to oppositional poles and therefore to be understood as “a pulling-away from the stable orderings of sensible and intelligible and into the unstable domain of a between” (134). Having followed the path of Heidegger’s thinking through all these different stations, Hanly arrives at a question:

[W]hat, fundamentally, is the relation of pain and language […] The question, then, will be whether it is possible to hear in language the same tension of gathering and pulling apart, the same primal movement of a one always differentiated in itself that seemed to mark out the space of pain in Heidegger’s discourse (134).

The cited question is of major importance for the rest of his book but before arriving at this language of pain, Hanly wants to approach the subject of «inception» or «beginning». He does so in the so-called “seynsgeschichtlich project”, (144) which “is never far from the question of difference, of the pain of difference” (144). Apart from describing the «there» of Dasein as an “agonistic between-space” (145), Heidegger also offers another way to think it. In the seynsgeschichtlich treatises, “Dasein is the crisis between first and other beginnings” (145). But as Hanly underlines with regard to the Beiträge, the relation of «first» and «other» beginnings “must be seen to break out of the constraints a chronology would impose on them” (148). They are therefore beyond a metaphysical narrative of progression. The goal is to think another kind of confluence between being, event and inception, where «what is» no longer precedes «what occurs» (149). According to Hanly, the inception describing the there-ness of Dasein is a singularity which “must be given over to an original multiplicity.” This multiplicity consists in the fact that “in the ‘uniqueness of its incipience’, the inception is fractured, sundered” (152). Hanly then approaches this problem of inception from three different perspectives, “the thought of repetition, the thought of confrontation, and the thought of belonging” (153). Repetition signifies the inherent structure of inception. It means that inception is never just «the same», but it becomes itself by self-division, “it reaches ahead and thus encroaches differently each time on that which it itself initiates” (155). From the aspect of confrontation, it is important to note that neither are different inceptions opposed to one another in the sense of a counter-direction, nor does one of them sublate the other. Much rather, as Hanly puts it

Inception, we are told, is “assigned” or “allotted” (zugewiesen) to its other. The sense of this assignment seems to be that of an ineluctable and necessary gathering: Heidegger says indeed that the “other inception” “must be the only other” in relation to the uniqueness of the first beginning. (159)

Thirdly, the aspect of belonging is the other side of this specific form of non-oppositional negation. First and other belong together, because they are different, “but yet cannot be withdrawn from the fracture that binds them” and not resolved in the unicity of a whole (160). All three aspects undermine a logic of timely progression. In their light, and because of the multiple senses of the word «inception», Hanly says that “perhaps words themselves halt, reaching a kind of limit, a breaking-point in which a silence, a Sprachlosigkeit will come to dominance” (161).

For the last chapter of his book, Hanly elaborates more deeply on the relation of language and pain. To this end, Hanly argues for an “irruptive pain of the word” (163) that Heidegger foregrounds with a particular style of writing. A central influence here comes from Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language. In Herder’s thinking, it is crucial that human experience is unspecified, “his forces of soul [Seelenkräfte] are distributed over the world” (165). Hanly sketches out how this dispersion is linked to the origin of language, because “the word, for Herder, will be torn out of this dispersive field: a mark, scarring the indifferent surface of sensation” (165). However, this word or mark cannot simply be reduced to the acoustic. Hanly shows how, according to both Heidegger and Herder, there is a dimension of gathering between the multiplicity of the sensually given and the expressed sound. This dimension is the mark understood as hearing and thus hearing “is to be of the non-sonorous as much as of the sonorous” (168). Coming back to the subject of Dasein, the point is that it is itself the mark of hearing. The «there» of Dasein is thus a figure of between that avoids metaphysical opposition. It carries silence in and as breaking, in-between, being “precisely the index of this movement, the crossing that the mark effects” (169). Finally, this ambivalence of the mark, the word as joining and tearing apart becomes manifest in a new sense of system. With Heidegger’s view on Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom in mind, Hanly interprets the Beiträge as the execution of this systematicity. Hanly says that when Heidegger is writing “’a legitimate renunciation of system can only originate from an essential insight into it’ (GA  42: 46/24), what he is requiring of us is an experience that fully acknowledges the necessity of system before it can move beyond it” (172). Pursuant to the etymology of «sunistemi», which translates to “placing together”, system can mean two things: on the one hand, it merely means “accumulation and patchwork” of extrinsic, indiscriminate elements (173). On the other hand, it refers to the order, manner, or content according to which elements are intrinsically composed. What the Beiträge are purposefully exposing after Hanly is that at the very core, any gathering will produce both kinds of joinings, extrinsic and intrinsic (173). Regarding each gesture of thinking, Heidegger says that “they unfold, on the one hand, necessarily in sequence, each adding to the force, the urgency (Eindringlichkeit) of the others, while at the same time, each says always ‘the same of the same’” (174). This movement of thought in language is enabled by the fundamental attunement which is “in a tense relation with that “coming to word””(175), although there is no word for itself. The fundamental attunement hovers between verbal determinations, it is characterized by a principal namelessness, by a failing of the word which makes it “accessible only to a thinking that belongs in a primary way to silence” (175). Therefore, the style of this thinking is one of restraint, as only “Erschweigung, as Heidegger calls it, can play out fully the demands of the systematic” (176) as it circulates around silence, unfolding it each time anew. Only with this writing and its peculiar rigor the task of philosophy can be most fully realized.

In the epilogue, Hanly underlines for one last time the importance of the motif of harmonia in Heraclitus that guides his study time and time again. The join of harmonia appears in multiple different configurations, which explains the plenitude of contexts that Hanly references throughout his book (178). However, there is a danger that lurks precisely in this multiplicity, namely that the harmonia is “just another metaphysical structure, a form that underpins or overlays the multiple modes of its encounter: a schema, in other words” (178). But it implies a specific nothingness, as it is nothing but joining, only apparent in multiple concrete contexts without “coalescing into a uniform conceptual structure” (178). Also, Heidegger and Novalis are historical possibilities of its appearance and perhaps even the between of them, “the resonance of their work is best felt together, conjointly” (179). Through Hanly who, one could say, produces this resonance with his book, “it could be that, if we listen, we will hear it too” (181).

In conclusion, Hanly’s study is convincing in various respects. The abundance of the collected material, the depth of the connections made regarding the subject of between-ness and the original dramaturgy of the book as an indirect comparison being only some of them. From a critical perspective, there are nonetheless two objections that I want to raise in the following. The first concerns a programmatic issue. Although Hanly says that the relation between Novalis and Heidegger is itself manifold, he divides his book in respect of a very univocal claim towards their contrast (16). Novalis thinks the between as fertility, Heidegger thinks the between as pain. First and foremost, Hanly does not really treat fertility in Novalis as a concept of its own right, whereas regarding Heidegger he gives an in-depth reconstruction of an explicit line of thought that makes pain its subject, giving numerous explanations and references. This imbalance is further mirrored in the mere amount of mentions of “fertility” in the first part of the book on Novalis. Here, the reader finds the expression only three times (60, 98) and even the reason for its usage remains opaque. One time, Hanly links it to the motif of seed (60), which is used several times as a specific, non-reductive thought-image of the between (20, 36), and the other time he speaks of it is when it occurs together with notions such as generative force, increase, words that blossom, proliferation, germination, or explosion (96), appearing almost synonymously with them. Furthermore, the claimed divergence between fertility and pain does not really hold up to scrutiny. When I and not-I, for example, become the poles of a movement of exchange that is a “chaotic motility” (50) then it remains questionable why this chaotic character is particularly fertile and not equally well limiting or determining. The same applies when Hanly names the between a “zone of fragility” (56) that is characterized by “porosity” and “volatility” (56), or when he highlights the «word» as between-space that is “amid the fluid rhythms of gathering and dissolution” (80). All these aspects stand against the highlighting of the aspect of fertility because they speak just as much for the opposite side of pain. This is also true if we do not presuppose our own understanding of pain but that to which Hanly’s study itself relates to, namely Heidegger’s. Not only because Heidegger speaks of a “pain of inceptual separation” which is precisely between gathering and separation or fracture (136) but also vice versa, as the pain in Dasein always already implies bliss as well as it marks a point of transition in its «there» which hovers “between ‘recollective energies’ and the possibilities of an ‘other inception’” (174). Considering these things, the reader finds no clue why they are not exemplary aspects of fertility alike. For all these reasons, the claimed contrast between fertility and pain appears as if it would only serve dramaturgic purposes of the book and as a means of dividing it into parts, parts that by their content however deconstruct this very dramaturgy.

The second of my objections concerns a methodological problem. It appears repeatedly as if Hanly would presuppose the central thesis of his study as an implicit hermeneutic method. I will try to illuminate this by pointing out two examples, one concerning Novalis and one Heidegger. Firstly, while searching for the philosophical grounds of Novalis’ thinking, Hanly cites the fragment that goes: “like us, the stars hover alternatingly between illumination and darkening” (27). Without giving a reason in the same context, he says that this fragment must be seen as something different than just a poetic ornamentation of a philosophical ground. Afterwards, he suddenly generalizes the argument and says that regarding the thought of between, its philosophical ground is being forsaken and still must be considered (27). And then, lastly, from the same fragment it is said that it can be used as a passageway back to these philosophical grounds. Shortly after, the hovering of the fragment is itself the between and should moreover negotiate the relation of philosophy and poetry (37). Then, eventually, the hovering will be thematized all from Kant’s theory of drawing to Fichte’s thoughts on intellectual intuition and Novalis’ Fichte Studies. Here it turns out to be not just a passageway but the very core of Novalis’ speculations (55). My critique is not about right or wrong, but about the way in which Hanly creates his line of thought. He both gathers several contexts in which variations of his major thought appear and disjunctive as the steps therein are often mediated vaguely. With regard to Heidegger, one can perceive something similar. Heidegger says that inception retains a multiplicity of senses and only thereby keeps open its incipience, meaning the principal possibility of (new) inceptions. In the face of this, Hanly says that “perhaps words themselves halt” and that a speechlessness will be dominant (161). Although it is only ‘perhaps’ the case, Hanly proceeds to the next chapter of his book and assumes this premise categorically, so that he can now reflect on speechlessness. Then, referencing Heidegger who says “In the first inception: wonder. In the other inception: foreboding” (162), he links inceptions to fundamental attunements. Again, he leaps from ‘wonder’ and ‘foreboding’ to the gathering of terror and bliss (162) who are supposed to be analogous and map closely with each other. The reader does not find any other reason for this than the fact that Heidegger speaks of wonder and foreboding in terms of “recoil, of shock, of horror” (162). But neither is the analogy suitable, because bliss is not mentioned in this context at all, nor does speaking of something in the same words imply that the matter talked about is the same. Especially so, if the subject of gathering which is of central relevance for the relation of terror and bliss does not occur at all on the other side of the analogy. Nevertheless, this enables Hanly to move on to pain as a gathering of terror and bliss and finally to the question of a language of pain at which he aimed beforehand (134). Here, citing Heidegger’s saying that “pain has the word” (163), Hanly again categorically claims it would mean that the word itself is pain. He does not consider different interpretations, e.g., that pain has the word because as an attunement it discloses the understanding of the world in a certain manner. Hanly says that his remark is an iteration of an earlier passage, although he did not justify his interpretation even the first time (143). However, it allows him to equate pain with word and thereby proceed to the irruptive pain of the word that is “to be most clearly felt” (163) in the seynsgeschichtliche treatises. To put it briefly, oftentimes it seems as if Hanly would have his conclusion already in mind, whereupon he collects, not always justified, elements of Heidegger’s text that are suitable to arrive there. In other words, he conjuncts and separates textual material in the modus operandi of the very between-ness he wants to prove in these texts.