Between Description and Interpretation: The Hermeneutic Turn in Phenomenology

Between Description and Interpretation: The Hermeneutic Turn in Phenomenology

Edited by: Andrzej Wiercinski

Hermeneutic Press 2005

CONTENTS I.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS AND HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

1. THE INTERPRETIVE TURN IN PHENOMENOLOGY: A PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY Gary B. Madison II. TOWARD A TELOS OF SIGNIFYING COMPLETENESS: GABRIEL MARCEL AND PAUL RICOEUR 1. “IF THERE IS A PLOT”: GABRIEL MARCEL AND SECOND DEGREE REFLECTION Paolo Diego Bubbio 2. HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY AT THE BOUNDARY OF REASON: MEANINGFUL GRAFT OR SUBVERSIVE DEVIATION Patrick L. Bourgeois 3. PAUL RICOEUR’S THEORY OF TRUTH: FROM PHENOMENOLOGY TO COMMUNICATIVE ACTION David M. Kaplan 4. THE UNSURPASSABLE DISSENSUS Olivier Abel III.

THE HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF HUMAN REALITY

1. PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE INSIDE OF SPACE: READINGS OF MERLEAU-PONTY Luís António Umbelino 2. MAN AND HIS DOUBLES: MERLEAU-PONTY’S “MIXTURISM” Leonard Lawlor 3. MICHEL HENRY AND THE “TRIAL OF THE TEXT” Mark Wenzinger 4. THE SUBJECTIVE BODY AND THE IDEA OF HEALTH IN MICHEL HENRY’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE Stella de Azevedo 5. GADAMERIAN HERMENEUTICS OF MEDICINE: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF HEALTH AND ILLNESS Fredrik Svenaeus IV.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOMENTS IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION

1. THE HERMENEUTIC-PHENOMENOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF HISTORICITY IN VIEW OF THE CRISIS OF THE NOTION OF TRADITION Dean Komel

2. BETWEEN DEATH AND HOLINESS -- THE NATURE OF THE PHENOMENON IN THE INTERPRETATION OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND MAX SCHELER Jaromir Brejdak 3. A “BETTER” OR JUST “ANOTHER” UNDERSTANDING? SOME REMARKS ON THE CREATIVE CHARACTER OF INTERPRETATION Andrzej Przylebski V. THE ARCHEOLOGY OF HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY: EDMUND HUSSERL AND MARTIN HEIDEGGER 1. “CHILDREN IN THE REALM OF PURE SPIRIT” OR “FUNCTIONARIES OF HUMANITY”? GNOSTIC AND ANTI-GNOSTIC ELEMENTS IN HUSSERL’S CONCEPTION OF TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY Martina Roesner 2. HISTORY AS THE OTHER -- NOTES ON HUSSERL’S IDEA OF A RADICAL SELBSTBESINNUNG Hans Ruin 3. THE IDEA OF PHENOMENOLOGY AS A DESCRIPTION OF “DIE SACHEN SELBST” IN HUSSERL AND HEIDEGGER Pawel Dybel 4. HUSSERL’S “GOD” Jan Sochon 5. THE EARLY HEIDEGGER’S CRITIQUE OF HUSSERL Sean J. McGrath 6. RIGOR AND ORIGINARITY: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE SCIENTIFIC CHARACTER OF HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGY IN MARTIN HEIDEGGER’S EARLY LECTURES Angel Xolocotzi

I.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS AND HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

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1.

THE INTERPRETIVE TURN IN PHENOMENOLOGY: A PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY

Gary B. Madison It is experience … still mute which we are concerned with leading to the pure expression of its own meaning.2 Experience is the experience of human finitude.3

Phenomenology and the Overcoming of Metaphysics Richard Rorty has said of phenomenology that it is “a form of philosophizing whose utility continues to escape me” and that “hermeneutic philosophy” is a “vague and unfruitful” notion.4 Remarks such as these should be of no surprise, coming as they do from someone who does not view philosophy as (as Hegel said) “serious business” -- i.e., as a reasoned and principled search for the truth of things -- but, rather, as a kind of “professional dilettantism” and who, accordingly, sees no difference between philosophy and literary criticism. It is hard to imagine two philosophers (if that’s the right term to apply to Rorty) standing in greater contrast than Richard Rorty and Edmund Husserl. Whereas in Rorty’s “neo-pragmatic” view philosophy can be nothing more than a kind of “culture chat” and, inasmuch as it may, just possibly, have some relevance to actual practice, a criterionless, unprincipled “kibitzing” and “muddling-through,” Husserl defended phenomenology because he saw it as a means at last for making of philosophy a “rigorous science,” one, moreover, which would be of supreme theoretical-critical relevance to the life of humanity.5 One thing Husserl meant by his programmatic remarks on this subject in his 1911 Logos article, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,”6 is that a properly phenomenological philosophy would rigorously eschew idle metaphysical speculations of the traditional sort and seek, instead, to remain in close contact with “the things themselves (die Sachen selbst),” i.e., our actual lived experience.7 In the early twentieth century, dominated as it was by

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This paper is dedicated to the memory of Franz Vandenbusche, S.J., of the University of Louvain (Leuven), who forty some years ago introduced me as a young graduate student to the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and who was killed in a collision with a train in 1990. 2 This is Merleau-Ponty’s own rendering of a line in Husserl; see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 129, hereafter VI, and Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), sec. 16, 38-39. 3 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1990), 320, hereafter TM. 4 See Carlos G. Prado, “A Conversation with Richard Rorty,” Symposium 7, no. 2 (Fall/Automne 2003): 228. 5 For a forceful statement on Husserl’s part of the responsibility as he saw it of philosophy for humanity, see his late, 1935 “Vienna Lecture” (“Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,”) in Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970); published also in Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965). 6 See Edmund Husserl, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1965); English translation in idem, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, hereafter PRS. 7 Cf. the following remarks of Hans-Georg Gadamer, a pupil of Husserl’s at one time: “He [Husserl] regarded himself as a master and teacher of patient, descriptive, detailed work, and all rash combinations and clever constructions were an abomination to him. In his teaching, whenever he encountered the grand 3

various forms of idealist philosophy, the phenomenological motto “Back to the things themselves!” was for a great many a revolutionary call which held out the promise of transforming philosophy into a genuinely “useful” and “fruitful” endeavor. The “problem of cognition” was one area in which Husserl sought to demonstrate the “utility” of a phenomenological approach to traditional philosophical problems. In a series of lectures in 1907 at the University of Göttingen (published subsequently in 1950 by Walter Biemel under the title Die Idee der Phänomenologie), Husserl presented a phenomenological response to the central problem which had bedeviled all of modern philosophy and which he stated thus: “How do I, the cognizing subject, know if I can ever really know, that there exist not only my own mental processes, these acts of cognizing, but also that which they apprehend? How can I ever know that there is anything at all which could be set over against cognition as its object?”8 This, as any student of the history of philosophy will immediately recognize, is the problem Descartes bequeathed to modernity and which came to be known as the problem of the “external world”: Is there a world “out there,” and, if so, how can I know there is? In more technical terms: How can I transcend (get out of) my own subjectivity so as to make contact with something “objective”? In these lectures, Husserl takes a truly radical and unprecedented approach to this traditional problem: He does not seek to solve it, as philosophers before him had, by coming up with his own “proof” for the existence of the world, but to dissolve it. By means of the phenomenological reduction, which Husserl presents for the first time in these lectures, he is able to show that the central epistemological problem of modern philosophy rests on certain metaphysical assumptions, assumptions having to do with the relation that obtains between the cognizing subject and the objective world, and he shows, as well, that these assumptions are, from an experiential (i.e., phenomenological) point of view, wholly without warrant -- and, therefore, stand in need of being deconstructed. By putting into play the phenomenological reduction, showing thereby how the modern problem of the “external world” is a pseudo-problem, Husserl’s phenomenology accomplishes a decisive overcoming of modern Theory of Knowledge (Erkenntnislehre) and, indeed, the entire tradition of “epistemologically centered philosophy,” as Rorty has referred to it. In his account of the phenomenological movement, Gadamer wrote: Above all, it [phenomenology] aimed its attacks at the [metaphysical] construction that dominated epistemology, the basic discipline of the philosophy of the time. When epistemological inquiry sought to answer the question of how the subject, filled with its own representations, knows the external world and can be certain of its reality, the phenomenological critique showed how pointless such a question is. It saw that consciousness is by no means a self-enclosed sphere with its representations locked up in their own inner world. On the contrary, consciousness is, according to its own essential structure, already with objects. Epistemology asserts a false priority of self-consciousness. There are no representative images of objects in consciousness, whose correspondence to things themselves it is the real problem of epistemology to guarantee. (PH, 131)

assertions and arguments that are typical of beginning philosophers, he used to say, ‘Not always the big bills, gentlemen; small change, small change!’ This kind of work produced a peculiar fascination. It had the effect of a purgation, a return to honesty, a liberation from the opaqueness of the opinions, slogans, and battle cries that circulated.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1976), 132-33, hereafter PH. 8 Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. William P. Alson and George Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 16. 4

What Gadamer is referring to in these remarks is the phenomenological doctrine of intentionality which, rejecting the standard “copy theory” of knowledge, asserts that consciousness is never in the first instance mere self-consciousness (conscious only of what is “inside” it: its own cogitationes, “ideas,” sense impressions, “representations”) but is always consciousness-of-something (i.e., something other than it, viz., the world). The realization that the essence of consciousness is intentionality represents an overcoming of the metaphysics of modernity, viz., the metaphysical assumption that there is an ontological gap or chasm between subject (consciousness) and object (the world). The subject/ object split is the fons et origo of modern philosophy,9 and it was this “situation phénoménale du clivage” that it is the purpose of the reduction to deconstruct.10 What the reduction teaches us is, in short, that the existence of the world does not need to be “proved,” since the world is precisely that of which consciousness is conscious. The world is a primary “datum” of consciousness, an immediate, phenomenological “given.” Sartre summed up phenomenology’s accomplishment in the following graphic way: Consciousness has been purified. It is as clear as a strong wind. There is no longer anything in it apart from a movement to flee from itself, a slipping outside itself. If, per impossibile, you were to enter “inside” a consciousness, you would be seized by a whirlwind and thrown outside, next to the tree, in the dust. For consciousness has no “inside.” It is nothing other than the outside of itself, and it is this absolute flight, this refusal to be substance that constitutes it as consciousness…[E]verything is outside, even ourselves—outside, in the world, amid others. It is not in I know not what inner retreat that we discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the city, in the midst of the crowd, thing among things, man among men.11 Once the metaphysics of modernity has been overcome, it becomes phenomenologically self-evident that consciousness is not a self-contained realm of “inner experiences” (subjective “states-of-mind”) but is, rather, a mode of being-in-the-world, i.e., a direct experience of the world itself. The world is that which consciousness intends; to experience a world is precisely what it means to be conscious. Once we have performed the reduction and deconstructed the metaphysical presuppositions of modern philosophy -- the notions of an “external world” and an “inner subject” -- we need no longer, as Merleau-Ponty remarked, “wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive.”12 By setting aside all mere constructions, the phenomenological reduction opens up the field of truth, conceived of not logically or epistemologically, i.e., as the “objective” correlation between “ideas” and “things,” but experientially, i.e., as the

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See in this regard Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in idem, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1977). 10 See the introduction by Alexandre Lowit to his French translation of Husserl’s Die Idee der Phänomenologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970). Already in 1904 William James had sought to undermine the notion that there exists a “gap” between subject and object; see William James, “A World of Pure Experience” (Essays in Radical Empiricism), in William James: Writings 1902-1910 (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1165. Husserl apparently possessed a reprint of this article as a gift from James himself -- see Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 2 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 1:112n2. 11 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: L’intentionalité,” in idem, La transcendance de l’ego (Paris: J. Vrin, 1966), 111, 113. 12 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), xvi, hereafter PP. For Merleau-Ponty, the whole point of phenomenology as a mode of transcendental analysis was that of “re-awakening a direct and primitive contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status.” (PP, vii) 5

self-givenness (Selbstgegebenheit) of the thing (Sache) itself, its presence to consciousness “in person,” in “flesh and blood” (Evidenz) -- and thus, at the most primordial level, as the field of lived meaning.13 The function of the reduction is, as Sartre says, to purify consciousness; it affords us access to what Husserl called the “realm of pure experience,” i.e., it enables us to explore and describe our experience of the world precisely as we experience it, free from the distorting lenses of metaphysical prejudice (“pure experience” was also the term favored by William James). Husserlian phenomenology is the systematic attempt to explore the various ways consciousness has of “intending” objects and, correlatively (since every act of consciousness [noesis] is always paired with an object [noema] which it “intends”), of the various ways in which objects of all sorts (perceptual, imaginary, ideal) come to be for consciousness; “phenomenological research,” as Gadamer says, “transcends in principle the opposition between object and subject and discovers the correlation of act and object as its own great field of study.” (PH, 144-45) In other words, phenomenology is, as Husserl says, the study of “what it means that objectivity is, and manifests itself cognitively as so being.” (PRS, 90) This sort of “intentional analysis (intentionale Analyse)” (or “meaning analysis” -- phenomenology, like pragmatism which is also a philosophy of experience, is in the first instance a theory of meaning and only secondarily a theory of truth --) proceeds entirely by means of reflexive acts -- “phenomenological method proceeds entirely through acts of reflexion”14 -- and is thus a form of inquiry that is resolutely transcendental. To say that phenomenology is a form of transcendental analysis means that, as a philosophy of experience, i.e., as a reflexive analysis of our experience of the things of the world just exactly as we experience them, it deliberately refrains from making speculative, metaphysical assumptions about the ontological status of what it seeks to describe; the phenomenological reduction, as Gadamer says, is a “return to the phenomenologically given as such, which renounces all [mere] theory and metaphysical construction.” (PH, 146) To take the “transcendental turn” that the reduction calls for is to adopt a stance of self-critical responsibility in the examination of one’s own experience, pursuing in a methodologically rigorous fashion Montaigne’s guiding question, Que sais-je? What exactly is it that I can legitimately claim to know, and how is it that I know this? Or, to put it in a less epistemological manner, What are those things of which I can say, “I have experienced them,” and in what exactly did this experience consist? David Michael Levin sums up the matter very nicely when he says that “the heart of phenomenology is a methodologically formulated respect for the integrity and validity of our experience just as we live it.”15 The overriding injunction of the phenomenological method -- Husserl called this “the principle of all principles” -- is that one must always seek to describe what one experiences precisely as one experiences it without importing into this description suppositions which are not warranted by the experience (Gadamer refers to this as “the fundamental phenomenological principle that one should avoid all theoretical constructions and get

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See Alphonse De Waelhens, Phénoménologie et vérité, Essai sur l’évolution de l’idée de vérité chez Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953). Husserl first developed his notion of Evidenz in the sixth of his Logical Investigations, a text which made a profound and lasting impression on Heidegger and which was in part the basis for his own notion of truth as unconcealment (a-letheia). 14 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), sec. 77, 197. 15 David Michael Levin, “Liberating Experience from the Vice of Structuralism: The Methods of Merleau-Ponty and Nagarjuna,” Philosophy Today 41, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 96. 6

back ‘to the things themselves.’” [RPJ, 22]). Phenomenology is indeed nothing other than a thoroughgoing and systematic attempt to cut through the metaphysical thicket of philosophical misunderstandings so as to get back to our lived experience of the things themselves. One thing that I cannot legitimately say that I know or claim to have experienced is what metaphysicians call “reality in itself,” reality as it exists (supposedly), apart from my consciousness of it. Indeed, from a strictly phenomenological or experiential point of view the notion of a reality that would be totally “in itself,” totally “outside” of consciousness, is a notion devoid of any discernible meaning. Being devoid of any real meaning, it is, as “the distinguished Husserl” would say, “absurd.”16 The notion of an absolute “beingin-itself” is, to speak like William of Occam, a notion that, while it can be said, is nevertheless one that it is impossible to think. The only thing that is genuinely real for us is our own experience of reality; we live, as James said, “in a world where experience and reality come to the same thing.”17 This being so, we must “reduce,” “bracket,” or “put out of play” the metaphysical notion of a world absolutely in-itself and focus instead on the objects of the world as we actually experience them. Phenomenologically speaking, we do indeed experience a “transcendent” world, but this “real” world does not lie on the far side of the subject/object gap. For phenomenology, “transcendent” is not a metaphysical concept referring to something existing “beyond” our experience of it; “transcendent” is the meaning we attach to certain objects of our experience (e.g., the maple tree outside my window). Once we make this transcendental move we can no longer conceive of consciousness, metaphysically or Cartesian-wise, as a kind of substance or thing (of a “mental” sort) standing in some kind of objectivistic relation with other things (of a “material” sort) and being acted upon by them in a quasi-mechanical, causal fashion (this, as Emmanuel Lévinas remarked, was “the great merit of the theory of the phenomenological reduction”18). Since the essence of consciousness is intentionality, the relationship between consciousness and the world is “sui generis”; it is not a “real” (causal) relationship but an intentional (“irreal”) one. Consciousness itself (the “mind”) is not something “real” in the metaphysical sense of the term19; what we call “reality” is, rather, an object for consciousness, something that comes to be constituted (as Husserl would say) as exactly what it is in accordance with the way in which it is “intended.” Or as James had said earlier on: “The way in which the ideas are combined is part of the inner constitution of the thought’s object or content.”20 And as later hermeneutic phenomenology, which continues to operate under the phenomenological reduction (i.e., under the refusal to speculate on what anything is in any absolute sense of the term), would maintain, there can be no

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This is something that Charles Sanders Peirce -- “the distinguished Husserl” is Peirce’s own expression (See Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 1:18) -- had already pointed out in his ground-breaking article of 1878, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” 17 James, “A World of Pure Experience,” 1168. 18 See Emmanuel Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Librairie J. Vrin, 1963), 208. 19 As William James said, “consciousness” is “the name of a nonentity” and, strictly speaking, does not exist; see James’s 1904 article, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” In a subsequent article of 1905, “La notion de conscience,” James expressed thus the phenomenological notion of intentionality: “Nos sensations ne sont pas de petits duplicats intérieurs des choses, elles sont les choses mêmes en tant que les choses nous sont présentes.” Both of these articles were subsequently published in James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). 20 William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1956 [1890]), 2:286. In his Logical Investigations, 2 vols., trans. John N. Findlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) Husserl expressed his indebtedness to James (1:420n). 7

doubt that what humans (and realist philosophers) call “the world” is a constituted entity -although, as we shall see, hermeneutics also maintains that the constitutional activity by means of which the world becomes a world is not that of a sovereign, transcendental Ego.21 As a reflexive inventory-taking of the “field of consciousness,”22 phenomenology is thus necessarily a form of transcendental analysis -- “all phenomenology is transcendental,” as Paul Ricoeur has noted23 -- such that the notion of a “realist” phenomenology is a contradiction in terms. The most insidious form of realism from a phenomenological point of view is the one Husserl singled out for criticism in his 1911 article: naturalism. As Husserl there notes, naturalism is a philosophical-scientific stance arising out of the way modern, mechanistic science conceives of nature, viz., as an all-encompassing spatiotemporal whole (encompassing both the physical and the psychological), as mere matterin-motion subject to determinable laws of a causal nature. As Husserl says, The naturalist…sees only nature, and primarily physical nature. Whatever is is either itself physical, belonging to the unified totality of physical nature, or it is in fact psychical, but then merely as a variable dependent on the physical, at best a secondary “parallel accompaniment.” Whatever is belongs to psychophysical nature, which is to say that it is univocally determined by rigid laws [of a mechanistic sort].24 (PRS, 79) The trouble with naturalism is that it is philosophically naïve. It is naïve in that (as is fully evident in the case of logical positivism) it accepts unquestioningly (i.e., uncritically) as ontologically valid the modern scientific concept of “nature,” and modern, natural science is itself naïve, in the strict sense of the term, in that for it, as Husserl said, nature is “simply there.” (PRS, 85) Modern science simply presupposes the existence of nature; it does not raise the question as to how it is that there can be (for us, as knowing subjects) anything like nature at all. Only a transcendental, phenomenological analysis can hope to clarify this matter (“was besagt, daß Gegenständlichkeit sei”); only an analysis of such a sort is capable of raising in a fully reflective, thematic manner the question as to the meaning of the being of the world.25

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For a detailed treatment of Husserl’s notion of constitution, see Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970. 22 As an instance of analyses of this type, see Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964). 23 Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Edward B. Ballard and Lester E. Embree (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Pres, 1967), 203. 24 Commenting on this passage, Quentin Lauer remarks: “According to Husserl, there is in every act of consciousness an element which is simply irreducible to nature. This we might call the basic intuition that set Husserl on the path to transcendental phenomenology.” (80n13) 25 Or as Eugen Fink, one of Husserl’s later assistants, would say, the question as to “the origin of the world” (see Eugen Fink, “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism,” in Roy O. Elveton, ed., The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings [Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970], 96). One is inclined to wonder if Richard Rorty might not have discovered some “utility” in phenomenology had he taken the time to make a detailed study of Husserl. Although in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979) Rorty effected a “hermeneutic turn” and mounted a thoroughgoing critique of modern, “epistemologically centered philosophy,” in the end he fell back into a crude form of materialistic behaviorism which had all the appearances of being a mere metaphysical opposite to the modernistic mentalism he had so effectively criticized. As Richard Bernstein, a sympathetic critic, said of this work: “There is something fundamentally wrong with where Rorty leaves us” (Richard Bernstein, “Philosophy In the Conversation of Mankind,” in Robert Hollinger, ed., Hermeneutics and Praxis [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985], 77). It is as if, Bernstein remarked, Rorty remained a prisoner of the metaphysical foundationalism 8

It should perhaps be noted that although phenomenology is inherently “antirealist” and although Husserl came to speak of transcendental phenomenology as being a “transcendental idealism,” Husserl’s phenomenology is not for all that a form of idealism in any customary sense. A number of Husserl’s early students (e.g., Roman Ingarden and members of the “Munich school”) reacted with dismay when Husserl began referring to the study of transcendental, purified consciousness as a transcendental idealism, but, as Heidegger sought to point out, their realist objections were off the mark. For Husserl’s “idealism” amounts to no more than maintaining (the phraseology is Heidegger’s but the idea is Husserl’s26) that one can never account properly for the being of the world merely in terms of real relations between real entities within the world (which is to say: the being of an entity is not itself an entity nor is it of an entitative [substantialist] nature). “If what the term ‘idealism’ says,” Heidegger wrote in defense of Husserl’s transcendentalism, “amounts to the understanding that Being can never be explained by entities but is already that which is ‘transcendental’ for every entity, then idealism affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic. If so, Aristotle was no less an idealist than Kant.”27 Antirealist though it unquestionably is, Husserl’s “transcendental idealism” is in no way a Berkeleyan-type psychological idealism -- a form of idealism that Husserl held to be as philosophically absurd as the naïve realism to which it stands opposed.28 Despite Husserl’s sometimes infelicitous manner of speaking (as when in the Ideas he talked about “the annihilation of the world”), the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not, as Merleau-Ponty perceptively remarked, the hallmark of an idealist philosophy; it is, rather, that which, by enabling us to set aside metaphysical constructions of whatever sort (realist or idealist), enables us to gain undistorted access to the most primordial phenomenon of all: our own everyday being-in-the-world.29 The only thing that is “idealist” about the phenomenological reduction is the language Husserl oftentimes used to describe it.30 of which he was otherwise such a perceptive critic and was unable to see any meaningful alternative to it. Husserl’s critique of naturalism, one may be inclined to think, might just possibly have helped him to do so. It is in any event unfortunate that Rorty, the “neo-pragmatist,” appears to have ignored the fact that one of the founders of American pragmatism, William James, was himself an early defender of the phenomenological notion of intentionality (and actually exerted an influence on Husserl in this regard); see for instance: Hans Linschoten, On the Way Toward a Phenomenological Psychology: The Psychology of William James (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1968); John Wild, The Radical Empiricism of William James (New York: Anchor Books, 1970); James M. Edie, William James and Phenomenology (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987); and Richard Stevens, James and Husserl: The Foundations of Meaning (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). 26 “Sous forme de phénoménologie, elle [la philosophie de Husserl] poursuit essentiellement des intérêts ontologiques.” Emmanuel Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition (Paris: Alcan, 1930), 178, see also 218. 27 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), sec. 43a, 251, hereafter BT. In An Introduction of Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), hereafter IM, after stating that “Appearing [being a “phenomenon”] is the very essence of being,” Heidegger says: “This punctures the empty construction of Greek philosophy as a ‘realistic’ philosophy which, unlike modern subjectivism, was a doctrine of objective being. This widespread conception is based on a superficial understanding. We must leave aside terms like ’subjective’ and ‘objective,’ ‘realistic’ and ‘idealistic.’” (BT, 101) 28 See Husserl’s remarks on this subject in the Preface to Gibson’s translation of Husserl’s Ideas (this being a translation of Husserl’s 1930 Nachwort zu meinen Ideen). 29 Cf. PP, xiv: “Far from being, as has been thought, a procedure of idealistic philosophy, the phenomenological reduction belongs to existential philosophy: Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’ appears only against the background of the phenomenological reduction.” 30 For a refreshingly clear description of the reduction and Husserl’s argumentative tactic in The Idea of Phenomenology, see Richard Cobb-Stevens, “The Beginnings of Phenomenology: Husserl and His Predecessors,” in Richard Kearney, ed., Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century, Routledge History 9

It must be admitted in this regard that Husserl’s way of presenting phenomenology and the phenomenological reduction, especially in the Ideas (Ideen I) and the Cartesian Meditations, and, in general, his “idealist” manner of speaking have the unfortunate effect of blurring the true significance of his work as a crucial overcoming of the metaphysics of modernity. Unlike William James, who was much clearer on this score and who fully realized the postmetaphysical significance of his own phenomenological-pragmatic investigations, Husserl presented his thought in a way which can easily mislead the unwary reader (who often comes away with the impression that the phenomenological reduction is but a version of Descartes’s doubt). Paul Ricoeur very rightly speaks in this regard of “Husserl’s opaque presentation of the famous phenomenological reduction.”31 The difficulty Husserl ran into in presenting the reduction in a non-idealist manner is in a way understandable, nevertheless, in that Husserl, born and brought up in the conceptuality or Begrifflichkeit of modern philosophy and as is often the case with pioneering innovators, was, so to speak, never able to fully free himself from it (which is perhaps one reason why he had so much difficulty understanding Heidegger who, early on, had sought to work out a strikingly different conceptual terminology32). The fact remains that it was precisely by means of this epistemological terminology that Husserl sought to effect a decisive break with modern epistemologism, which is to say, with modern philosophy’s bifurcational way of viewing the world and our relation to it. Husserl’s “idealist” way of proceeding can in fact be viewed as a kind of crude anticipation of existential phenomenology’s thesis to the effect that being-in-the-world is a unitary phenomenon of which self and world are, to use Hegel’s terminology, two “moments.” What in his own “idealist” fashion Husserl, like the existential phenomenologists after him, was doing, was denying that there exists, between consciousness (self) and world, any kind of metaphysical dualism (self and world exist as what they themselves are only in the form of what Gadamer would call a reciprocal interplay). The postmetaphysical significance of Husserl’s work is something that one of Husserl’s late assistants and the editor of his Experience and Judgment (1939), Ludwig Landgrebe, noted in a 1962 article entitled, significantly enough, “Husserl’s Departure from Cartesianism.” Referring to Husserl’s 1923-24 lecture course, First Philosophy, Landgrebe speaks of how in this work “metaphysics takes its departure behind Husserl’s back.” He writes: A retrospective glance from the historical distance we have now achieved permits us to understand that there occurs within this text a departure from those traditions which are determinative for modern thought and a breaking into a new basis for reflection. It is a reluctant departure insofar as Husserl had wished to complete and fulfill this tradition without knowing to what extent his attempt served to break up this tradition. It is therefore a moving document of an unprecedented struggle to express a content within the terminology of the traditions of modern thought that already forsakes this tradition and its alternatives and perspectives.

of Philosophy, vol. 8 (London: Routledge, 1994), 18-19. As regards the “contradictory” way in which Husserl presents the reduction, see Merleau-Ponty’s essay on Husserl in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 161-65, hereafter S. 31 Paul Ricoeur, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in Lewis E. Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 22 (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 11, hereafter IA. 32 For a detailed account of the early Heidegger’s attempt to strike out in a new direction, see John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994). 10

In noting how in general the novelty of Husserl’s work is obscured by his own selfinterpretation of it, Landgrebe remarks: Today, primarily as a result of Heidegger’s work, the “end of metaphysics” is spoken of as if with a certain obviousness. We shall first properly understand the sense of such language if we follow closely how, in this work, metaphysics takes its departure behind Husserl’s back. One can state quite frankly that this work is the end of metaphysics in the sense that after it any further advance along the concepts and paths of thought from which metaphysics seeks forcefully to extract the most extreme possibilities is no longer possible. To be sure, neither Husserl nor those who were his students at the time were explicitly aware of this, and it will still require a long and intensive struggle of interpretation and continuing thoughtful deliberation until we have experienced everything that here comes to an end.33 The interpretive turn in phenomenology, one might say, is nothing other than a long and thoughtful, interpretive reflection on the “shipwreck” (as Landgrebe referred to it) of Husserl’s rationalist construal of the phenomenological project, and hermeneutic phenomenology, as Ricoeur has pointed out, can be said to be a realization of Husserl’s phenomenology -- to be, indeed, the “truth” of it -- to the exact degree that it is a “reversal” of the idealist formulation that Husserl attempted to impose on it.34 Just as in his riposte to logical positivism Husserl declared that it is “we [phenomenologists] who are the genuine positivists,”35 so likewise -- Husserl’s own idealist self-interpretation notwithstanding -- one could say that a “transcendental idealism” which abstains from abstract theorizing and seeks to focus on the actual givenness of things is in fact the only genuine realism. For the notion of modern philosophers, that we are locked up inside our own heads and have no direct experience of the “real” world, is not, as it is often presumed, a datum of “common sense” and is not what the “man (or woman) in the street” believes in his or her concernful dealings with a universe of things ready-tohand (zuhanden); it is an invention, a metaphysical construct of modern philosophy. Ordinary people do not ordinarily doubt that there is a world with which they are in direct contact, and, thus, by putting out of play (“reducing”) the metaphysical notion of an initself, noumenal -- which is to say, inaccessible -- reality (the “reality” of modern philosophy), phenomenology is doing no more than attempting to bring our lived experience to the proper expression of its own meaning. Thus, to state the matter as clearly as possible, the reduction is a “suspension of belief,” not in “the world,” but in a particular philosophical-scientific (“Galilean”) theory about the world. (Of course, to the degree that “common sense” supposes, in a somewhat contradictory fashion, that the experienced world exists altogether “independently” of our experiencing it -- what Husserl called the “natural attitude” -- it too needs to be “reduced.”)

33

Ludwig Landgrebe, “Husserl’s Departure from Cartesianism,” in Elveton, ed., The Phenomenology of Husserl, 260-61. For further remarks by Landgrebe on “the contradiction between [Husserl’s] ‘program’ and that which is revealed unintentionally in his analyses,” see Ludwig Landgrebe, Major Problems in Contemporary European Philosophy: From Dilthey to Heidegger, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 27ff. 34 Paul Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” in Alan Montefiore, ed., Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 191, hereafter OI. In the view of some commentators (Ricoeur tending to be one of them), Husserl’s idealist-logicist way of dealing with phenomenological issues began, as it were, to self-destruct in his own later writings. 35 See Husserl, Ideas, sec. 20, 78. 11

It is crucial in this regard always to keep in mind that phenomenology is not a phenomenalism and that what phenomenology understands by “phenomenon” (“the phenomenon in the phenomenological sense of the word,” as Gérard Granel always made a point of saying36) is nothing other than the thing itself as it shows itself, reality itself insofar as it appears to us, as Heidegger sought to make clear in the second introductory chapter of his Being and Time. By “bracketing” the so-called external world, Husserl’s transcendental idealism effects a decisive break with the most basic -- and, as Nietzsche maintained, the most pernicious -- of metaphysical oppositions: that of reality versus appearance. It is not transcendental phenomenology that is idealist; it is the “realism” of modernist philosophers that is actually idealist. For what could be more idealist than to maintain that we never have direct experience of the real world but only of “ideas” (sense impressions, etc.) existing in (as Locke said) the “cabinet” of our minds? Husserl’s “difficult and original setting up of the problem of reality is,” as Paul Ricoeur remarks, “phenomenology’s essential philosophical contribution.”37 To those critics of his who, reluctant to follow him on his philosophical journey, fell back into an uncritical realism and who feared that a concern to explore the field of transcendental subjectivity must necessarily result in an outright subjectivism, Husserl replied with the following words of admonition: For children in philosophy, this may be the dark corner haunted by the spectres of solipsism and, perhaps, of psychologism, of relativism. The true philosopher, instead of running away, will prefer to fill the dark corner with light.38 Taking as their object of investigation the “I am” reflexive self-consciousness, which Husserl called the “wonder of wonders,” and filling the dark corner of subjectivity with light was the task that Husserl’s existential and hermeneutic successors were to undertake -albeit in a manner that Husserl barely envisaged and certainly would never have endorsed.

From Transcendental to “Existential” Phenomenology Despite his aversion to speculative metaphysics and despite his resolute attempt to focus (by means of the phenomenological reduction) not on metaphysical constructions but on our lived experience, Husserl was unable to jettison one of the traditionally most metaphysical (or rationalist) of notions: the notion that philosophy, to be true to itself, must culminate in an absolute, apodictic science of reality, a kind of mathesis universalis or “science of the universe, of the all-encompassing unity of all that is,” “the complete universe of the a priori.”39 Husserl believed that the only way of achieving such an allembracing science of the a priori, of apodictically certain truths, a “science which is alone [truly] science in the ancient Platonic and again in the Cartesian sense,”40 was by 36

See Gérard Granel, Le Sens du temps et de la perception chez E. Husserl (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1968). 37 Ricoeur, Husserl, 9. 38 Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), sec. 95, 237. 39 Edmund Husserl, “Phenomenology,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 4th ed. (1927), 17:67; reprinted (in a different translation) in Richard Zaner and Don Ihde, ed., Phenomenology and Existentialism (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973). For a detailed discussion of this matter, see my “‘Phenomenology and Existentialism’: Husserl and the End of Idealism,” in Frederick A. Elliston and Peter McCormick, ed., Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977). 40 Husserl, “Phenomenology,” 68. 12

discovering an absolute, unshakable grounding for all the evidences given to us in our experience (which is the task of a descriptive phenomenology to catalogue). In a timehonored fashion, Husserl looked for this fundamentum inconcussum, this absolute foundation, in something standing behind, as it were, our immediate consciousness of the world: the transcendental Ego. Accordingly, for Husserl the being (or “origin”) of the world was to be accounted for in terms of the immanent and invariant structures of the transcendental Ego, structures which prescribe in advance (a priori) the conditions of objectivity of any object whatsoever. From this point of view the world is a “subjective achievement” (Leistung) on the part of the transcendental Ego. Husserl’s “transcendental idealism” may not, as I have argued, be an idealism in any usual, metaphysical sense, but to a large extent it is, in both its conceptuality and its methodology, an “egology,” a “philosophy of consciousness” focused on the description of “mental processes.” From a purely phenomenological or descriptive point of view, however, it is not at all clear just what exactly this transcendental Ego is and what relation obtains between it and the philosophizing, reflecting subject. Is there, as Averroës (Ibn Rochd) said of Aristotle’s agent intellect (nous poetikos, intellectus agens), just one transcendental Ego for all conscious beings, or, as St Thomas subsequently argued, is each and every one of us a transcendental Ego (agent intellect) in our own right -- such that each of us is guaranteed our own personal immortality? These kinds of obtuse -- and forever unresolvable -questions have all the appearance of being the sort of metaphysical questions that a suitably thoroughgoing phenomenological reduction should be able to free us from. As James had said in this connection, in order properly to describe our lived experience, “we need not be metaphysical at all. The phenomena are enough.”41 Most of Husserl’s phenomenological disciples42 would no doubt have preferred that he had been more faithful to the phenomenological “principle of all principles” and had stuck with what, following James, he had said of the traditional notion of a transcendental (or “pure”) Ego (as the subjective center of relations for everything that is “in” consciousness but is not itself an object “for” consciousness) in the first (1900-01) edition of his Logical Investigations. “I must frankly confess,” he there said, “that I am quite unable to find this ego, this primitive, necessary center of relations.”43 Although Husserl subsequently chose to disregard James’s precept about not “going metaphysical” and claimed to have found this “central ego,” later phenomenologists like Heidegger and MerleauPonty remained unconvinced. For them the notion of a transcendental Ego as the linchpin of a Cartesian-like absolute science had no “phenomenological credentials.”44 In this, and without knowing it, they were following in the footsteps of James who had argued that the unity of consciousness is not the product of a substantial and perduring Ego but is a matter, instead, of a dynamic, on-going, retrospective self-appropriation on the part of a bodily subject, in other words: temporality (lived time). “Transcendental subjectivity” is nothing other than a name for the way the “stream of consciousness” (Husserl’s rendering of James’s “stream of thought”), in its on-flowingness, “hangs together” (der Zusammenhang eines Lebens).

41

James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:346. See, in particular, Aron Gurwitsch, who studied with Husserl in the 1920s, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966). 43 Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2:549. In the second, revised edition (1913) of this work, Husserl added to this sentence a footnote: “I have since managed to find it, i.e., have learnt not to be led astray from a pure grasp of the given through corrupt forms of ego-metaphysic.” 44 This apt expression is that of John D. Caputo; see his “Husserl, Heidegger and the Question of a ‘Hermeneutic’ Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies, vol. 1 (1984): 177. 42

13

Although Husserl, by means of the phenomenological reduction, may have “purified” consciousness of its naturalistic misportrayal, he did not question the priority of consciousness in the constitution of the world, and, as the existentialists knew, there is more to our Being (Sein) than our being-conscious (Bewusstsein). Accordingly, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty sought to overcome not just ego-metaphysics (“corrupt” or no) but also the overarching framework that dominated Husserl’s philosophizing, viz., the philosophy of consciousness itself. However, both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in their early writings did so without abandoning the transcendental turn and without falling back into any kind of naïve realism (which is why, in the title of this section of my paper, I have placed “existential” in scare quotes: existential phenomenology is still a form of transcendental phenomenology).45 The crucial point to note in this regard is that a transcendental phenomenology need in no way be a “constitutive” phenomenology in the idealist or neoKantian sense of the term, i.e., according to which consciousness is conceived of as “producing” meanings (the meaning “sensuous object,” for instance) out of itself or, otherwise expressed, which bestows meaning on the world through a sovereign act of meaninggiving (Sinngebung). “Transcendental” must not be taken to mean “primary” (as when Husserl speaks of consciousness as constituting, as being “prior to” or primary over against the world as constituted). To express the matter in yet another way, there are not, as Husserl tended to say, two kinds of “consciousnesses” or egos, viz., a transcendental or pure consciousness and a mundane or worldly consciousness; there is, as Aron Gurwitsch for one argued, only one consciousness (or, better said, self): a thoroughly worldly consciousness, but one which may nevertheless adopt a transcendental or reflexive attitude toward its own worldliness -- and whose essential (eidetic) understanding of things is always hemmed in and limited by its worldliness or facticity. The two most important notions that later phenomenologists took over from Husserl and which they sought to extricate from a questionable philosophy of consciousness are those of intentionality and the lifeworld.46 As regards intentionality, Heidegger, concerned with “the being of intentionality,” sought to reconceptualize this notion in terms not of “consciousness” but of “existence.” According to Heidegger, “knowing” or “cognizing” (“intuiting”) the world is not the most basic relation we have to the world; “knowing” is in fact a derivative or “founded” mode of something more basic, viz., our being-in-theworld. “Knowing is grounded beforehand in a Being-already-alongside-the-world, which is essentially constitutive for Dasein’s Being.” (BT, sec. 23, 88) To speak of “Dasein (existence)” and “being-already-alongside-the-world” is Heidegger’s way of articulating Husserl’s notion of intentionality while avoiding the terminology of a philosophy of consciousness. It in fact represents, as Ricoeur says, an “overthrow” of the primacy Husserl

45

See PH, 138, 148: “Being and Time…preserved the external form of an affiliation with the transcendental philosophy of his [Heidegger’s] master [Husserl]…. Heidegger’s critique of Husserl…has nothing to do with ‘realistic’ softenings. Rather, it presupposes the consistent carrying out of the transcendental thought in Husserl’s phenomenology — admittedly, in order to make it the object of an ontological reflection and critique that takes an entirely different direction.” For his part, Lévinas, a student of both Husserl and Heidegger, observed that “malgré tout l’abîme qui la sépare de Husserl,” Heidegger’s philosophy in Being and Time “demeure tributaire de la phénoménologie de Husserl.” Emmanuel Lévinas, En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Librairie J. Vrin, 1967), 52. On MerleauPonty’s continued adherence to Husserl’s transcendentalism, see my La phénoménologie de MerleauPonty, une recherche des limites de la conscience (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1973); English trans.: The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search for the Limits of Consciousness, Preface by Paul Ricoeur (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981), chap. 1. 46 Cf. Ricoeur: “it was through the theme of intentionality that Husserlian phenomenology became recognized in France.” (IA, 7); and cf. Gadamer who refers to the notion of the lifeworld as “the most powerful conceptual creation of the later Husserl.” (PH, 147) 14

accorded to consciousness47 and a “deepening” of the notion of intentionality: “being-in” is a more primordial phenomenon that the subject-object (noesis-noema) relation, and Heidegger’s “existence” is something decidedly more than Husserl’s “intuitional consciousness.” Thus, while Husserl spoke of consciousness “intending” objects, Heidegger, in his reformulation of the notion of intentionality, stated: “When Dasein directs itself towards something and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has been proximally encapsulated [Husserl’s egological “sphere of ownness”], but its primary kind of Being is such that it is always ‘outside’ alongside entities which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered.”48 (BT, 89) This world which is “always already there,” into which, as it were, Dasein is simply “thrown,” is what the later Husserl called the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) -- a “magic word,” as Gadamer said of it, that Husserl himself invented.49 The notion of the lifeworld is one Husserl came upon in the course of the investigations he undertook later in his life into the origins of modern science. By means of this “archeology” of Western consciousness, Husserl was able to flesh out his earlier critique of naturalism by showing how the lifeworld is “the forgotten meaning-fundament [Sinnesfundament] of natural science.” The lifeworld is the prescientific world of lived experience on which all (natural) scientific constructs are based and which they necessarily presuppose. Indeed, as Husserl again and again insisted, scientific constructs are mere idealizations, abstractions from and interpretations of this prereflective world of immediate life (“a garb of ideas [Ideenkleid]” thrown over the lifeworld). Although this is hermeneutically incontestable, Husserl nevertheless went on to insist that the natural sciences could be placed on a rigorous footing (and surmount their supposed “crisis”) only if the lifeworld itself could be scientifically accounted for. This, of course, was to be the task of the most ultimate of all sciences, “a science without bounds,”50 i.e., a transcendental phenomenology which relates everything back to the constituting activity of a transcendental Ego. For Heidegger, the significance of the notion of what Husserl was to call the lifeworld lay elsewhere. What the “pregivenness” (as Husserl would say) of the lifeworld means is that, by virtue of our very existence, we possess what Heidegger called a “pre-ontological understanding” of the world (of “Being”). This was not, however, the formula for an ultimate science of Being in Husserl’s sense, since what the discovery of the lifeworld signified for Heidegger was that all explicit understandings or theorizings, even those of transcendental phenomenology, do no more than build on, and are interpretations of, this always presupposed, and thus never fully thematizable, “ground.” This is what Heidegger called the “hermeneutic situation.” (Cf. BT, sec. 45, 275) Everything comes to us, as it were, pre-interpreted (or pre-articulated). To see or deal with something, for instance, is always to see or deal with it as this or that thing (this is what Heidegger referred to as the “existential-hermeneutic as.” [BT, sec. 33, 201]) For Heidegger all Being is in effect interpreted Being; as later hermeneuticians would say, “interpretation goes all the way

47

Paul Ricoeur, Main Trends in Philosophy (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), 129, hereafter

MTP. 48

Compare this formulation of the notion of intentionality with that of Sartre quoted above. The sentence in BT, sec. 43a, 251 beginning thus, “Only because Being is ‘in consciousness’ — that is to say, only because it is understandable in Dasein…” clearly indicates that the term “Dasein” is Heidegger’s functional equivalent of Husserl’s “consciousness.” 49 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Praise of Theory: Speeches and Essays, trans. Chris Dawson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 55. 50 As Husserl said in his entry on “Phenomenology” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 15

down and all the way back.”51 For Heidegger, interpretation is not just one mode of being-conscious, as it was for Husserl; it is the all-embracing form of our awareness of the world (being). The “given” is always an interpreted given, such that there is, and can be, no such thing as a “pure” seeing. Unlike Husserl, therefore, Heidegger did not believe that the lifeworld could ever be transformed into the fully transparent object of an absolute, presuppositionless (voraussetzungslos) science. For Heidegger, the ultimate discovery of the reflecting subject (the ultimate phenomenological “given”) is not a transparent, luminous transcendental Ego but, rather, the “opacity of the fact,” as Merleau-Ponty was later to say. Heidegger’s notion of Befindlichkeit (disposition) is meant to express a primordial characteristic of the lifeworld: the fact that we simply “find” ourselves in a world, “thrown” (geworfen) into it. We discover ourselves as “already there,” and the sheer, brute facticity of our being-there blots out any apparent “why” or “wherefore” for this factual state-of-affairs: “The pure ‘that it is’ shows itself, but the ‘whence’ and the ‘wither’ remain in darkness.” (BT, sec. 29, 173) Or as Heidegger also says: “Even if Dasein is ‘assured’ in its belief about its ‘whither,’ or if, in rational enlightenment, it supposes itself to know about its ‘whence,’ all this counts for nothing as against the phenomenal facts of the case: for the mood [of attunedness to Dasein’s factual situation] brings Dasein before the ‘that-it-is’ of its ‘there,’ which, as such, stares it in the face with the inexorability of an enigma.” (BT, sec. 29, 175) These remarks of Heidegger’s are thoroughly “un-Husserlian” and are in fact fully in line with what that earlier critic of the Cartesian ideal, Blaise Pascal, had written in his reflections on what, like subsequent existential writers, he referred to as the “human condition”: When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after,…the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light [no “science” of being], as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of escape.52 The kind of existential anxiety (Angst) Pascal is describing was one of the major topics of Being and Time. In Heidegger’s treatment of anxiety (which owed more to Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard’s morbid individualism and irrational decisionism, than to Pascal’s more sober assessment of the human condition), the function of anxiety or dread and the “call of conscience” is to lead the individual Dasein to “wrest” itself away, in a violent-like act of resolve (“anticipatory resoluteness”), from its “fallenness” in the

51

The phraseology is that of Schrag; see Calvin O. Schrag, “Traces of Meaning and Reference: Phenomenological and Hermeneutical Explorations,” Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 73 (1992): 26. For a discussion of Schrag’s contributions to phenomenology, see Martin Beck Matustik and William L. McBride, ed., Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy after Postmodernity (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002). 52 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. Alban John Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), nos. 68, 198. 16

impersonal, average everydayness of anonymous mass man, the “they” (das Man), so as to set itself on the path of authentic selfhood. For Heidegger, the “authentic” self was a kind of heroic, radically individualized, and guilt-ridden “solus ipse” capable of achieving genuine selfhood only in a kind of voluntaristic, self-assertive, quasi-Promethean manner and for whom “the Dasein-with of Others” had nothing to offer. (Cf. BT, sec. 40) This particular view of selfhood or subjectivity (which was to become greatly accentuated in the 1930s) was, in the eyes of many subsequent phenomenologists, extremely one-sided (and thus phenomenologically unsound53), and it was indeed one which would later come back to haunt Heidegger in such a way as to lead him, in a kind of compensatory overreaction, to turn away (in his famous “turning” or Kehre) from the human subject (Dasein) to concentrate more directly on Being itself, “Being-as-such (des Seins als solchen),” abandoning in the process the very notion of subjectivity (which he came to equate with the unbridled, modernistic Will to Power extolled by Nietzsche). Later phenomenologists would not follow Heidegger down this path but would, instead, attempt to conceptualize “authentic selfhood” in a less “subjectivistic” manner and would seek to view the phenomenon of intersubjectivity (our Miteinandersein, our being-in-the-world-with-others) in a much more positive light -- discarding in the process not only Husserl’s “transcendental solipsism” but also Heidegger’s “existential ‘solipsism.’” For all that, Being and Time was the crowning work of Heidegger’s Existenzphilosophie and a foundational work for interpretive phenomenology. In this book, Heidegger sought to pursue further, with the “necessary tools” provided by Husserl (cf. BT, sec. 10, 75n.x), but in a more radical way, one might say, the overcoming of metaphysics and modern epistemologism that Husserl had inaugurated (the book, one should not forget, was dedicated to Husserl “in friendship and admiration”).54 However, in going beyond the framework of Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness and in abandoning all talk of a transcendental Ego, Heidegger was not, contrary to what many have said and what, indeed, Husserl himself seems to have thought, turning away from transcendental philosophy and lapsing into a crude form of empiricism, into “anthropologism” and “irrationalism.”55 As John D. Caputo rightly observed: If Being and Time practices a hermeneutic phenomenology, this is because Heidegger has acted upon certain suggestions of Husserl, exploited certain resources in Husserl’s own method, moved phenomenology in a direction which Husserl himself made possible. If the phenomenology of Heidegger is explicitly hermeneutic, Husserl’s phenomenology is already in an important sense a “proto-hermeneutics.”56

53

Some phenomenologists would argue that (appreciative) wonder is as basic (“equiprimordial”) a reaction to the “thrownness” of our existence as is Heidegger’s (dreadful) guilt. In any event, Heidegger’s “resolve,” focused exclusively as it is on Non-Being (Nichts), has no praxial relevance to the question of how we should act in the world of everyday existence (which Heidegger equated with inauthentic being). (Interesting in this connection is the story told by Karl Löwith of one of Heidegger’s students who, upon emerging from a lecture of his, exclaimed: “I am resolved! Only I am not sure on what” [see Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 1:309n].) 54 That Husserl was unable to appreciate the genuinely phenomenological significance of Heidegger’s work is another matter: see, in this regard, Husserl’s 1931 Frankfurt lecture “Phänomenologie und Anthropologie” and Husserl to Alexander Pfänder (Jan. 6, 1935). 55 According to Lévinas, what Heidegger essentially did was to draw out the deeper, concrete, or existential “consequences” of Husserl’s intellectualistic “theory of knowledge”; in so doing, Heidegger continued along the way traced out by his teacher (maître). (See Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition, 187, 218. 56 Caputo, “Husserl, Heidegger and the Question of a ‘Hermeneutic’ Phenomenology,” 158. However, as Caputo also points out in this article, Husserl betrayed his own phenomenologicalhermeneutic insights by subordinating them in the end to the Cartesian ideal of an absolute science. 17

Heidegger characterized his own project in Being and Time as that of a “fundamental ontology” and, while ignoring Husserl’s transcendental Ego, yet maintained, in line with Husserl, that ontology can responsibly be pursued only in the mode of phenomenology, i.e., transcendentally (“Phenomenological truth [the disclosedness of Being] is veritas transcendentalis” [BT, sec. 7, 62]). Thus, as Heidegger said, if we wish to raise the question of the meaning of being, we must first of all (“a priori”) conduct a thoroughgoing analysis of that being, which itself raises the question of what it means to be (and without whom there would -- obviously -- be no question), viz., that being for whom its own being is itself a question.57 That being is of course the human being, Dasein. As Heidegger the phenomenologist states: To work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity—the inquirer—transparent in his own Being. The very asking of this question is an entity’s mode of Being…. This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term “Dasein”. If we are to formulate our question explicitly and transparently, we must first give a proper explication of an entity (Dasein) with regard to its Being. (BT, sec. 2, 27) The phenomenological analysis of human being that Heidegger undertook in Being and Time was meant to furnish the “transcendental horizon” for raising the question as to the meaning of being, but, as Heidegger said in his 1935 lectures on metaphysics, “the ‘transcendental’ there [in Being and Time] is not that of the subjective consciousness; rather, it defines itself in terms of the existential-ecstatic temporality of human being-there [Dasein].” (IM, 18) The purpose of Heidegger’s “existential analytic” in Being and Time, which was directed at “conceptualizing existentially [ontologically] what has already been disclosed in an ontico-existentiell [prereflective or “factical”] manner” (see BT, sec. 41, 241), was to reveal, by means of an eidetic analysis, the essential structures or basic traits, “existentialia (Existenzialien),” of human being-in-the-world. What this “phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity,” this phenomenological explication (interpretation, Auslegung) of the lifeworld disclosed, was that the most basic meaning, the essence of human being is temporality (“der Sinn des Daseins ist die Zeitlichkeit”58). The human subject constitutes itself as a subject by means of its being essentially (“ecstatically”) related to futurity. It exists, not in the static mode of a thing (which is never more than what, as a matter of fact, it is), but in the dynamic mode of possibility or potentiality, of continual self-transcendence. The human being is a being which is always more than what it ever actually is; it exists (ex-sists, stands out from itself) as an on-going process of self-interpretation and reinterpretation. Since the human being is that being for whom its being is always in question (until the day it is no more), the basic relation of the self (Selbst) to itself and to the world is that of an concernful or “circumspective” understanding of itself. The name Heidegger gave to this existentially-ontologically fundamental, future-oriented (“ek-static”) relatedness of self to self and to world (the “intentional” relation), a relation in which Dasein’s “ownmost potentiality-for-Being is an issue” (see BT, sec. 39, 275), is care or concern (Sorge).

57

See BT, sec. 43, 244: “The question of the meaning of Being becomes possible at all only if there is something like an understanding of Being. Understanding of Being belongs to the kind of Being which the entity called ‘Dasein’ possesses. The more appropriately and primordially we have succeeded in explicating this entity, the surer we are to attain our goal in the further course of working out the problem of fundamental ontology.” 58 See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967), sec. 65, 331, cf. BT, 380. 18

Unlike knowledge, which is something we may or may not have, understanding -- an understanding of what it means to be (Seinsverständnis) -- is what we most essentially and always are. This tacit (pre-ontological) understanding which is constitutive of our beingin-the-world is of a “horizonal” nature -- existing, as James would say, on the “fringes” of consciousness -- in that it is an undefined or under-determined understanding of the possible ways in which we could be (of our “potentiality-for-being”). Since the concernful understanding that we are is always future-oriented, temporally “already ahead of itself,” it is essentially “projective” in nature (entwerfendes Verstehen). “The phenomenology of Dasein,” Heidegger states, “is a hermeneutic in the primordial significance of the word, where it designates [the] business of interpreting.” (BT, sec. 7, 62) As regards the exigencies of philosophical method, to maintain that understanding is projective in nature means that the hermeneutic task of ontological interpretation, of phenomenological research, cannot be that of metaphysical, free-floating speculation but must be, and can only be, that of a patient and care-taking working-out and “appropriating” of the meaning-structures (“fore-structures,” as Heidegger calls them) of our pre-ontological, “projective” understanding of things -- an understanding which, being “projective,” is itself interpretive in nature. Or as Heidegger says: “The Interpretation by which such an understanding gets developed [i.e., phenomenology] will let that which is to be interpreted put itself into words for the very first time.”59 (BT, sec. 63, 362) The relation between the understanding that we are and the various ways in which this understanding, which is already interpretive (in a pre-ontological sort of way), itself gets interpreted (“developed,” “worked-out”) in an articulated (philosophical or ontological) fashion is, therefore, an inescapably circular relation. Indeed, one of the most significant accomplishments of Being and Time is the way in which, in this work, Heidegger transformed what traditional hermeneutics had called the “hermeneutic circle” which, as a purely methodological rule, meant that when interpreting a text one ought continually to interpret the parts in terms of the whole and the whole in terms of the parts. What Heidegger did was to have “ontologized” the hermeneutic circle. He showed how the “circle of understanding” is in fact rooted in the existential constitution of human being itself. All understanding is of a circular nature in that all explicit understandings always presuppose a pregiven world of meaning, this being the everyday, historically conditioned lifeworld into which we find ourselves “thrown.” This was a decisive move on Heidegger’s part in that it represented a truly radical break with modern metaphysics, with, that is, the Cartesian ideal that dominated all of modern philosophy, the notion, namely, that genuine, scientific knowledge must be presuppositionless or “foundational,” grounded upon some ultimate foundation -- this search for apodictic certainty being expressive of what Pascal called the “[burning] desire to find a firm footing, an ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to infinity.”60 This, of course, was an ideal (or idol) that Husserl, a “kind of super-rationalist”61 ever concerned to discover a solid, scientific foundation for all human knowing and doing, could not bring himself to relinquish.

59

See also BT, sec. 29, 179: “Phenomenological Interpretation must make it possible for Dasein itself to disclose things primordially; it must, as it were, let Dasein interpret itself. Such Interpretation takes part in this disclosure only in order to raise to a conceptual level the phenomenal content of what has been disclosed, and to do so existentially [ontologically].” 60 Pascal, Pensées, no. 199. Pascal went on to say: “but our whole foundation cracks and the earth opens up into the depth of the abyss.” 61 See Husserl to Lévy-Bruhl, March 11, 1935; cited in Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 1:84. 19

Heidegger’s transcendental-existential analytic, which he considered to be “a more faithful adherence to the principle of phenomenology” than Husserl’s own would-be science of being,62 provided the crucial impetus for the subsequent interpretive turn in phenomenology that was to come to fruition with Gadamer and Ricoeur, and it did so by reason of the way in which it managed to “existentialize” Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, as well as in the way in which it managed to overcome the rationalistfoundational project of modernity running from Descartes through Husserl. In this way it laid the groundwork not only for hermeneutic phenomenology but also for the phenomenological philosophy of human finitude that Maurice Merleau-Ponty was to develop some fifteen years later. In contrast to Husserl who insisted that “science is a title standing for absolute, timeless values” (PRS, 136), who as a philosopher lived in and for the Absolute, and who held that humanity’s own highest vocation was to live in and for the Infinite (“For the sake of time we must not sacrifice eternity” [PRS, 141]), Merleau-Ponty flatly stated: “No philosophy can afford to be ignorant of the problem of finitude under pain of failing to understand itself as philosophy.” (PP, 38) As would be the case with his hermeneutic successors, Merleau-Ponty insisted that, as reflecting subjects, we have no access to the absolute, and his phenomenology was nothing other than a sustained attempt to draw out the far-ranging philosophical implications that follow upon an unflinching recognition of human finitude. Also in response to Husserl who, in his customary way, had presented the phenomenological reduction as a means by which the reflecting subject could be led back (reducere = to lead back) to some kind of “inner” realm of pure experience, and who in the very last lines of his Cartesian Meditations had stated, quoting St Augustine, “Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself; truth inhabits the inner man,” Merleau-Ponty declared: Truth does not ‘inhabit’ only ‘the inner man,’ or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself. When I return to myself from an excursion into the realm of dogmatic common sense or of science [“naturalism”], I find, not a source of intrinsic truth, but a subject destined to be in the world [voué au monde]. (PP, ix) In saying this, Merleau-Ponty was reacting against the convoluted, round-about way in which Husserl, struggling to work out his position vis-à-vis Descartes and Kant, had sought to overcome the subject/object dichotomy of modern philosophy in such a way as to effect a return to lived experience. Husserl’s general tactic in this regard was to present the reduction not only as a “bracketing” of the nonsensical (unsinnlich) notion of traditional realism of a “being-in-itself” (the phenomenological reduction is a “transcendental” reduction to the precise degree that it does this), but, beyond that, as a reduction of everything that is to the “concrete ego” conceived of as the constituting source of all meaning and thus as omnitudo realitatis, as the sum total of reality, as a system of absolute being, the transcendental, self-enclosed field of all possible acts and objects outside of which (as he sometimes said) there is quite literally nothing (since for Husserl to be is to-be-an-object, i.e., a meaning, and being exists only for a consciousness which “intends” it). Along the way, Husserl adopted the Leibnizian term “monad” to refer to this “inner man.” In order, however, to counteract the manifestly idealistic and solipsistic implications of such a move (a move dictated by Husserl’s Cartesian quest for an absolute, presuppositionless starting point), Husserl would then typically go on to argue that this monad was not altogether

62

See Heidegger’s 1962 letter to Richardson in William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), xiv. 20

self-enclosed but had “windows” through which it could make empathetic contact with other such monadic egos. Eventually -- but only eventually and as a kind of filling-in of the blanks -- this “universal self-knowledge -- first of all monadic, and then intermonadic” was supposed to get around to dealing with the concrete, existential “problems of accidental factualness, of death, of fate, of the possibility of a ‘genuine’ human life,” and the “problem of the ‘meaning’ of history.”63 Such was the complex manner -- working to get at our experience of the world from, as it were, the top down and the inside out -in which Husserl sought to subvert or deconstruct the metaphysics of modernity. Although Merleau-Ponty always tried to present Husserl in the best possible light, he was not prepared to grant any validity to this typically modernist way of proceeding (this “methodic idealism,” as Ricoeur has called it), since the most important thing for him was to effect a decisive overcoming of that most basic conceptual opposition of the metaphysics of modernity, the opposition between “inside” and “outside.” “Inside and outside are inseparable,” he stated categorically and without hesitation. “The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself.” (PP, 407) Such, for Merleau-Ponty, was the true meaning of phenomenology’s great discovery: intentionality. In the Preface to his major work, Phenomenology of Perception, in which he sought to respond to the question (put to him by his thesis supervisor, Émile Bréhier) “What is Phenomenology?” and in the course of which he presented his own existential reading of some of the major themes in Husserl’s phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty stated what he himself saw to be the most important lesson to be learned from putting into play the phenomenological reduction. “The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us,” he said, “is the impossibility of a complete reduction.” (PP, xiv) In this much remarkedupon phrase, Merleau-Ponty was not calling into question the need for the reduction, i.e., for a conscientiously transcendental approach to the question as to the meaning of the being of the world. He was not advocating any form of “realist” phenomenology but was, instead, objecting to the way in which Husserl had presented the reduction (as described in the preceding paragraph). While, for Merleau-Ponty, the reduction was indispensable for overcoming the metaphysics of modernity and leading us back to our lived experience of the world, it does not, and cannot, afford us access to a “pure,” monadic ego which would be the absolute source of all that is, and can be for us, an absolute consciousness which would be coextensive with being itself. And in rejecting Husserl’s “idealist” presentation of the reduction, Merleau-Ponty was also thereby ruling out the possibility of our ever achieving the kind of apodictically certain science of being that Husserl had dreamed of. Like Heidegger,64 Merleau-Ponty believed that the ultimate discovery of the reflecting subject is that of his or her own “thrownness” into the world, or, as Merleau-Ponty put it, “the unmotivated upsurge of the world.”65 (PP, xiv) Accordingly, what a genuinely transcendental or “radical” reflection amounts to, he said, is “a consciousness of its own dependence on an unreflective life which is its initial situation, unchanging, given once and for all.” (PP, xiv) The greater part of the Phenomenology of Perception was devoted to an exploration of this unreflective or prereflective life which underlies and supports that of the reflecting subject, i.e., perception. In this work, which was intended as a kind of “inventory of the

63

See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, sec. 64, 156. It is obvious that Husserl, in a kind of afterthought, as it were, is here trying to find a place in his own transcendental-idealist conceptual framework for Heidegger’s existential concerns. 64 As Ricoeur observes, the “horizon” of the Phenomenology of Perception is “nothing other than Heideggerian care and being-in-the-world.” IA, 11. 65 This is what elsewhere Merleau-Ponty refers to as contingency, which was for him the most basic of all phenomenological facts. 21

perceived world” (PP, 25), Merleau-Ponty, contrary to what is commonly thought, sought not so much to put forward a theory of his own as to the nature of perception, as to criticize various objectivist theories of perception characteristic of the metaphysics of modernity.66 These theories were of two different sorts, realist (empiricist or materialist) and idealist (intellectualist or spiritualist), but they both rested on the same assumption, viz., that there are “two senses, and two only, of the word ‘exist’: one exists as a thing or else one exists as a consciousness.”67 (PP, 198) This is, of course, the metaphysical assumption par excellence of modern philosophy constitutive of the subject/object split, and in attempting to deconstruct this metaphysical assumption, Merleau-Ponty’s goal was to effect a “return to the phenomena,” to our actual lived experience (“the phenomenal field”). This “reduction” to lived experience was meant, in turn, to serve as the means for elucidating the unique mode of being of that being which, in our everyday, unreflective, perceptual lives we ourselves are. This particular being -- the perceiving subject -- is not a mere thing-like object, as naturalistic realism or materialist neuroscience would have it, but it is also not the selfconscious, transparent subject of idealist philosophy (the pure spectator of its own bodily experiences). A subject it most definitely is, but a unique, philosophically ambiguous sort of subject whose mode of being is neither that of the “in itself” (mere object) nor that of the “for itself” (pure subject). Far from being a pure Ego, the perceiving subject is an embodied subject, a body-subject, so to speak. Inasmuch, therefore, as I am aware of the world, I do not merely “have” a body (as modernist philosophers tend to say), I am a body -- an often overlooked yet, as regards the overcoming of modern epistemologism, crucial insight that Merleau-Ponty took over from Gabriel Marcel’s existential phenomenology of embodiment (for his part, William James had said that our bodies are not simply “ours,” they are us68). The perceiving subject is one’s own body, le corps propre. This is not the purely objective body that appears in the pages of anatomy textbooks and which is the body of nobody in particular; it is, as it were, a “subjective” or “lived” body. As Sartre said, I exist my body; my body is my unique point of view on the world, one on which I cannot myself take a point of view as an outsider might. The subject which perceives a world -and which is capable of perceiving a world only to the degree that it is capable of acting and moving about bodily in this world (in lived space) -- is that body which, as human subjects, each and every one of us is. While the notions of the lived body (Leib) and action (motility -- “I can”) were not absent from Husserl’s work, Merleau-Ponty felt that the true significance of those notions was obscured by Husserl’s overarching “mentalism” (or “psychism”), i.e., Husserl’s habitual way of viewing intentionality from within the framework of a philosophy of consciousness, as essentially a kind of psychic phenomenon or “mental process” (a feature of Husserl’s way of approaching issues that Charles Sanders Peirce had objected to earlier on). Following up on clues provided by Husserl,69 Heidegger had already pointed out that all higher-level knowledge of the world is founded on our “prepredicative” being-in-theworld, but, in showing in a thoroughgoing way how all reflective consciousness rests upon

66

See in this regard my “Did Merleau-Ponty Have a Theory of Perception,” in Thomas W. Busch and Shaun Gallagher, ed., Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1992). In this essay I maintain that “if ‘perception’ is understood in its traditional sense, as referring to some kind of reproductive, mirroring process, whereby what is ‘outside’ is duplicated ‘inside,’ the concept ‘perception' does not figure in the Phenomenology.” Ibid., 93-94. 67 See also PP, 37: “Everything that exists exists as a thing or as a consciousness, and there is no half-way house.” 68 See James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:291. 69 Cf. Caputo, “Husserl, Heidegger and the Question of a ’Hermeneutic” Phenomenology.” 22

and presupposes the unreflective life of our bodily or corporeal being, Merleau-Ponty went considerably beyond Heidegger in spelling out what it actually means to be in a world, to have a world (a “world,” Merleau-Ponty said, is “a collection of things which emerge from a background of formlessness by presenting themselves to our body as ‘to be touched,’ ‘to be taken,’ ‘to be climbed over.’” [PP, 441]) As Alphonse De Waelhens, one of MerleauPonty’s early defenders, observed: Heidegger always situates himself at a level of complexity which permits imagining that the problem which concerns us here is resolved. For it is at the level of perception and the sensible that the problem must receive its decisive treatment…. But in Being and Time one does not find thirty lines concerning the problem of perception; one does not find ten concerning that of the body.70 Indeed, one of the outstanding merits of Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception was how, with the aid of Gestalt psychology and the biological and behavioral sciences, he was able to elucidate in a concrete way the interpretive nature of perception and to show how there are no “pure sensations” (“Pure sensation…, this notion corresponds to nothing in our experience.” [PP, 3]), and how all seeing is a hermeneutic seeing-as. (Like other French phenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty had no sympathy whatsoever for Husserl’s attempt to salvage modern, epistemological philosophy’s notion of “sense data” [“sensualism”] by arguing that the meaningful objects of consciousness [noemata] are arrived at by means of intentional acts “animating” hyletic data existing within consciousness [as real, i.e., non-intentional parts thereof] and which are themselves uninterpreted and unmeaningful.) In pointing to the essentially ambiguous mode of being of the body-subject,71 Merleau-Ponty was attempting to take seriously something that the mainline tradition in philosophy had always passed over in silence.72 Contrary to the impression created in some early readers of his, however, Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to show how the personal, self-conscious subject is dependent “on an unreflective life which is its initial situation, unchanging, given once and for all” was in no way intended as a celebration of the unreflected life. He was most certainly not advocating -- as others have -- that we renounce the reflective or philosophical life and seek to coincide with immediate experience; “without reflection,” he insisted, “life would probably dissipate itself in ignorance of itself or in chaos.”73 Indeed, Merleau-Ponty, as a philosopher, was not particularly interested

70

Alphonse De Waelhens, “A Philosophy of the Ambiguous,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), xviii-xix, hereafter SB. One of the earliest published studies of Merleau-Ponty’s “philosophy of ambiguity” was De Waelhens’s Une philosophie de l'ambiguïté, L’existentialisme de M. Merleau-Ponty (Louvain: Bibliothèque philosophique de Louvain, 1951). 71 Cf. PP, 169: “Ambiguity is of the essence of human existence”; and PP, 123: “This ambiguity is not some imperfection of consciousness or existence, but the definition of them.” 72 See in this regard my “Merleau-Ponty’s Deconstruction of Logocentrism,” in Martin C. Dillon, ed., Merleau-Ponty Vivant (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1991). See also my “Between Phenomenology and (Post)Structuralism: Rereading Merleau-Ponty,” in Busch and Gallagher, ed., Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, 123: “If Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is rightly referred to as a ‘philosophy of ambiguity,’ it is because the central thrust of his thinking, from beginning to end, lay in his attempt to overcome the discrete, oppositional categories of modern philosophy and, indeed, of the entire metaphysical tradition.” 73 See Merleau-Ponty’s reply to his critics in his “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 19, hereafter PriP. 23

in the unreflected, in “perception,” purely as such; his overriding concern was, rather, with reflective consciousness itself, with what, in line with the tradition of French reflexive philosophy, he called the Cogito (the presence or “proximity” of the self to itself). The whole point of effecting a “return” to perception was, for Merleau-Ponty, to discern its “philosophical consequences” and to show how this “genealogy” of the conscious subject (“une généalogie de la vérité”) necessitates, on the part of a phenomenological philosophy, a resolute abandonment of the philosophy of consciousness and a thoroughgoing reconceptualization or refonte of what it means to be a self-conscious, rational subject. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and the body-subject was, as Ricoeur noted, “entirely in the service of a philosophy of finitude.”74 It is important to note, however, that in criticizing Husserl’s transcendental idealism, Merleau-Ponty was not in any way (contrary to what is sometimes thought) endorsing traditional realist philosophy.75 Rather, as he stated in his first book, The Structure of Behavior, his goal was “to define transcendental philosophy anew.” (SB, 3) In this he was not altogether successful, for, as he subsequently realized, the Phenomenology of Perception retains significant (residual, so to speak) traces of the philosophy of consciousness. In his later writings, therefore, Merleau-Ponty sought to “deepen and rectify” (VI, 168) his earlier phenomenological investigations into our bodily being-inthe-world and to reconfigure the notion of subjectivity in a much more radical way.76 In this regard, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical development was quite different from that of Heidegger.77 Unlike Heidegger who, after Being and Time (in his famous “turning” or Kehre), sought to overcome the “dominance of subjectivity” by “leaving behind” not only modern subjectivism but also the very notion of subjectivity (“des metaphysischen Subjektivismus”), Merleau-Ponty remained committed to the notion of the subject and the tradition of Western humanism that Heidegger criticized in his Letter on Humanism (a criticism that was part of his attempt to come to terms with his earlier embrace of Nazism78). Heidegger’s attempt to overcome the very notion of subjectivity (as well as, it may be noted, philosophy itself, which Heidegger came to equate with metaphysics pure and simple, i.e., the “forgetfulness” of Being), was, in fact, something Merleau-Ponty criticized; in his political philosophy,79 Merleau-Ponty reaffirmed those basic principles of the Enlightenment tradition of liberal democratic humanism -- civilization, Zivilisation -that Heidegger had rejected (he realized full well that if humanism and the notion of the 74

Ricoeur, Husserl, 209. Cf. PP, 47: “The return to perceptual experience, in so far as it is a consequential and radical reform, puts out of court all forms of realism, that is to say, all philosophies which leave consciousness and take as their datum one of its results.” 76 For a study of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical development and his attempt to escape from the confines of a philosophy of consciousness, see my The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search for the Limits of Consciousness. 77 For an overview of Heidegger’s work, see my “Heidegger’s Dialectic,” Reflections 1, no. 1 (Summer 1980). 78 As regards Heidegger’s Nazism and his hostility to liberal democracy and the values of the Enlightenment, see Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992), as well as Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990). 79 For a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy see the following articles of mine: “Merleau-Ponty Alive,” Man and World 26 (1993): 19-44, and “The Ethics and Politics of the Flesh,” in Gary B. Madison and Marty Fairbairn, ed., The Ethics of Postmodernity: Current Trends in Continental Thinking (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999) (reprised in Duane H. Davis, ed., MerleauPonty’s Later Works and Their Practical Implications: The Dehiscence of Responsibility [Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2001]). 75

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subject cannot be defended philosophically, neither can the idea of democracy80) and adhered to the age-old cosmopolitan ideal of humanitas -- an ideal that, in contrast with Heidegger also, Gadamer was to take up and defend in his philosophical hermeneutics (despite Heidegger’s criticizing him for so doing). To the end, Merleau-Ponty’s goal was to overcome modern metaphysics by reconceptualizing or reconstructing in a resolutely postmetaphysical and non-foundationalist fashion the modern notion of subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty’s work was, in fact, a life-long attempt to explore subjectivity to its deepest depths, in search of what, in his late work, he referred to as the foundational (“le fondemental,” a “transcendence within immanence”). Unlike the later Heidegger, he did not think that modern subjectivism (“anthropocentrism”) could be overcome simply by dissolving subjectivity and returning to a pre-Socratic age of ontological innocence before the advent of self-consciousness, and in this Merleau-Ponty anticipated both Gadamer’s guiding notion of effective-history and Paul Ricoeur’s conscientious attempt at effecting a hermeneutic decentering and non-idealist retrieval of the notion of the subject. Throughout his work Merleau-Ponty anticipated the interpretive turn in phenomenology in a number of ways, not the least of which had to do with the emphasis he placed on the issues of linguality and intersubjectivity. In his on-going battle with the philosophy of consciousness, Merleau-Ponty argued that both language and intersubjectivity are not, as modern philosophy had generally assumed, secondary phenomena but are, instead, absolutely central to what it means to be a thinking, personal subject. Against Husserl who, like Frege and others at the time, was fixated on the logic of signification (Bedeutungslehre) and who maintained in a very traditional manner that language (speaking) is a merely secondary phenomenon in relation to thought (the “stratum of expression—and this constitutes its peculiarity—…is not productive”),81 Merleau-Ponty insisted in the Phenomenology on what Gadamer would later refer to as “the indissoluble connection between thinking and speaking.” (RPJ, 25) Rejecting Husserl’s “mentalism” (or “logicism”) and Husserl’s modernist way of separating off thought from expression (redolent of the metaphysical opposition between mind and body), Merleau-Ponty maintained that expression is productive of meaning.82 The thinking subject, he insisted, is none other than the speaking subject (there is no thought, properly speaking, without speech; “inner experience…is meaningless.” [PP, 276]), and, in his later work, he went so far as to maintain that language is coextensive with our very being (“Language is a life, is our life and the life of things…. [W]hat is lived is lived-spoken…. [V]ision itself, thought itself, are, as has been said, ‘structured as a language.’”). The later Merleau-Ponty would have had no objections to Gadamer’s famous dictum: “Being that can be understood is language.”

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Given Heidegger’s one-sided view of modernity as the rise to prominence of instrumentalcalculative reason (the Will to Power or Will to Will) and nothing more, he rejected both Western liberal democracy and Eastern communism in favor of an idealized Nazism, since in his eyes both liberalism and totalitarianism were part and parcel of the modernist metaphysics of unbridled subjectivity and its project aiming at the technological domination of the earth. 81 Husserl, Ideas, sec. 124, 321; as Jacques Derrida observed in his translation of Husserl’s L'origine de la géométrie [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962], 61): “Aux yeux de Husserl, il serait absurde que le sens ne précède pas…l'acte de langage dont la valeur propre sera toujours celle de l'expression.” 82 Nothing could be further from Husserl’s logicist approach to language -- according to which words or “verbal expressions” are “signs” whose referential function or “signification” is bestowed on them by mental acts of “intending” -- than Merleau-Ponty’s maintaining that speaking (signifying) is in the nature of a bodily gesture. (PP, 183-84) Both Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer insisted, against both Husserl and the logicians (logikous), that words are not mere “signs”; for a discussion of the phenomenologicalhermeneutic view of language, see my “Being and Speaking,” in John Stewart, ed., Beyond the Symbol Model: Reflections on the Representational Nature of Language (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1996). 25

Nor would Merleau-Ponty have had any trouble endorsing Gadamer’s assertion: “Only through others do we gain true knowledge of ourselves.”83 For Merleau-Ponty, the issue of intersubjectivity (“other minds,” as modern philosophy referred to it) was never, as it was in modern philosophy, just a marginal issue, a kind of after-thought as regards the constituting activity of a pure Ego. In contrast with Husserl who, in the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations, had experienced great procedural difficulties in dispelling the notion that his transcendentalism, like that of his Cartesian predecessor, leads to solipsism by trying to give an account of how, within the realm of transcendental subjectivity (the “sphere of ownness”), we come upon a knowledge of the “Other,” for Merleau-Ponty the Other was from the outset a primordial given. From a Merleau-Pontyan point of view, what Husserl’s way of portraying the reduction as a reduction to one’s own ego (the “sphere of ownness,” the “primordial sphere”) overlooks, is that what is “properly” one’s own is never just “one’s own”: “We are mixed up with [mêlés au] the world and others in an inextricable confusion.” (PP, 454) Merleau-Ponty always insisted that subjectivity is, at its most primordial level, an intersubjectivity, and in his later work, with his notion of the “flesh,” he was able to show how the reflecting subject is already, as it were, an Other for itself and how, accordingly, the Other is inscribed in, is woven into, the very fabric of the subject’s own selfhood -- is part of its own flesh.84 The title of Ricoeur’s 1990 revised Gifford lectures, Oneself As Another, has a distinctly Merleau-Pontyan ring to it (not surprisingly, perhaps, since for Ricoeur Merleau-Ponty was “the greatest of French phenomenologists”).

Hermeneutic Phenomenology If Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology was already to a great extent hermeneutic, as it undoubtedly was,85 the accomplishment of Hans-Georg Gadamer was to have transformed phenomenology into an explicitly hermeneutic discipline. Although Gadamer was not familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s work at the time he was preparing his magnum opus, Truth and Method (first published in its original German version 1960), his own work was, like Merleau-Ponty’s, solidly grounded in the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. What Gadamer learned from Husserl and Husserl’s aversion to idle metaphysical speculation -- from, in a word, Husserl’s praxis -- was, he said, a sense for the “concrete,” i.e., the “phenomenological art of description” (“the fundamental phenomenological principle that one should avoid all theoretical constructions and get back ‘to the things themselves.’” [RPJ, 105, 113]). And it was this concern for the concrete, as well as for the practical issue (one that Heidegger ignored86) of phronesis or prudentia (“the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now.” [TM, xxxviii]), that led him, as he also said, to “bypass” Heidegger’s ever more pronounced preoccupation with the Being-question (die Seinsfrage) (PHC, 106) -- culminating, as many have

83

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” in Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, ed., Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1979), 107, hereafter PHC. 84 See in this regard my “Flesh As Otherness,” in Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, ed., Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990). 85 See in this regard my “Merleau-Ponty In Retrospect,” in Patrick Burke and Jan Van Der Veken, ed., Merleau-Ponty In Contemporary Perspective (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1993). 86 In Gadamer’s opinion Heidegger “disregarded phronesis and raised the question of being in its place.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, A Century of Philosophy: A Conversation with Riccardo Dottori, trans. Rod Coltman (New York: Continuum, 2004), 127. 26

alleged, in a kind of Seinsmystik -- and to focus directly on human understanding itself, explicating just exactly what it means to maintain, as Heidegger had in his existential analytic in Being and Time, that, as existing beings, an understanding of being is what we most essentially are. With Gadamer, phenomenology fully accomplishes its interpretive turn and also with him the long tradition of hermeneutic thought dating from the seventeenth century (and, in some ways, even before) becomes phenomenological. With regard to hermeneutics, Gadamer’s accomplishment was, indeed, to have brought a phenomenological turn to this old discipline. He did, so, as Husserl had earlier on, by breaking with the preoccupations of the modern “era of epistemology [l’ère de la théorie de la connaissance]),” ones which had set the parameters for earlier hermeneuticians like Schleiermacher and Dilthey.87 As Gadamer stated in the Foreword to the second edition (1965) of Truth and Method, “I did not intend to produce an art or technique of understanding, in the manner of the earlier hermeneutics…. My real concern was and is philosophic.” (TM, xxviii) Gadamer’s hermeneutics is indeed “philosophic” in that he was concerned not with technical issues having to do with correctness (“objectivity”) in matters of text-interpretation, but with clarifying “the conditions in which understanding [itself] takes place.” (TM, 295) His intent, in Truth and Method, was not epistemological (prescriptive, in the manner of logical positivism) but phenomenological (descriptive),88 in that he was concerned with ascertaining what, in actual fact, has occurred whenever we claim to have arrived at an understanding of things, other people, ourselves (“what always happens whenever an interpretation is convincing and successful.” [RAS, 111]). Truth and Method is in this sense a transcendental (reflective) inquiry, not into the logical “conditions of possibility” of understanding, but into its actual, phenomenal make-up (its “conditions of actuality,” so to speak). Gadamer’s transcendentalism is not a speculativedeductive transcendentalism à la Kant (transcendental-logical), but a reflective and interpretive transcendentalism (transcendental-phenomenological). Because Gadamer’s hermeneutics is a reflective inquiry concerned with “our entire understanding of the world and thus all the various forms in which this understanding manifests itself” (PH, 18), it is not so much a theory of text-interpretation, as was the case with Romantic hermeneutics, as it is a general, all-inclusive philosophy or ontology of human existence. Since it is an attempt to elucidate the nature of that understanding which, at bottom, we are, Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics could appropriately be described as an exercise in fundamental phenomenological ontology. Because Gadamer’s concern was with the human lifeworld, with “all human experience of the world and human living,” and because he wanted “to discover what is common to all modes of understanding” (TM, xxx, xxxi), he could rightly claim that the scope of hermeneutics so conceived is genuinely universal.89 Faithful to his mentor Heidegger, Gadamer’s main thesis in this regard is that all human experience of the world is essentially lingual in nature; language “is the fundamental mode of operation of our beingin-the-world and the all-embracing form of the constitution of the world.” (PH, 3) -- whence

87

See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Le défi herméneutique,” Revue internationale de philosophie 151 (1984): 334. 88 See TM, 465: “Fundamentally I am not proposing a method, but I am describing what is the case.” 89 See in this regard my “Hermeneutics' Claim to Universality,” in Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer; and PH, 25: “The phenomenon of understanding…shows the universality of human linguisticality as a limitless medium that carries everything within it—not only the 'culture' that has been handed down to us through language, but absolutely everything—because everything (in the world and out of it) is included in the realm of ‘understandings' and understandability in which we move.” 27

Gadamer’s oft-cited remark: “Being that can be understood is language.” (TM, xxxiv) In putting forward this claim, Gadamer was opening himself up to the criticism (coming from Habermas) that he was falling into a kind of linguistic idealism (Sprachidealismus) or was (as Rorty was, approvingly, to think) defending a version of linguistic relativism. Neither of these interpretations hold, however, for the relation between language and the world in Gadamer’s thought is of the same “intentional” nature as is the relation between consciousness and the world in classical phenomenology. Just as the world is not “outside” of consciousness, so also is it not “outside” of language; being what language “means” (intends), the world is the “inner” meaning (verbum interius) of language itself. That is to say, language is not something of a “subjectivist” nature standing over against the world and barring us from access to it; language is the world itself insofar as it is present to us and inasmuch as we have meaningful experience of it (“what the world is is not different from the views [language] in which it presents itself.” [TM, 406]). As Gadamer remarks, “language has no independent life apart from the world that comes to language within it” (TM, 401); and, as he also says, “things bring themselves to expression in language.”90 (PH, 81) To speak of “the nature of things” and of “the language of things” is, for Gadamer, to use two expressions “that for all intents and purposes mean the same thing.” (PH, 69) In short, language is the means by which our mute experience of the world is brought to the proper expression of its own meaning. By way of forestalling a possible misunderstanding (a rather common one, actually), it should be noted that Gadamer’s linguality-thesis does not deny the meaningfulness of non-lingual modes of experience; rather, it affirms that meaningfulness, by maintaining that such experience can always, in principle, be brought to expression (can be interpreted) in language. Indeed, if the pre- or non-lingual could not be so interpreted, it would be meaningless to speak of it as having any meaning at all. The important thing to note in this regard is that, as Ricoeur says, the language of phenomenology “is a language which expresses that which precedes language.” (MTP, 126) Thus, unlike the structuralists and poststructuralists who came upon the scene a short time later and who set themselves up as implacable foes of phenomenology and the phenomenological approach to language (and whose views on language Ricoeur would set himself the task of contesting), Gadamer was most definitely not maintaining that language is a kind of “prison,” as Derrida would imply (“Il n’y a rien hors du texte”), or something we cannot “break out of,” as Rorty would say. Unlike them, he was not seeking to call into question the very notions of “knowledge” and “truth” but was simply seeking, as Merleau-Ponty would say (see PriP, 13), to divest these notions of their metaphysical trappings by bringing them down to earth.91 What Gadamer’s emphasis on the linguality of our experience of the world clearly did contest is the modernist metaphysics of referentialist-representationalism, i.e., the notion that understanding (“knowledge”) consists in forming “inner representations,” mental copies of an “external” in-itself reality (“philosophy as the mirror of nature”). To maintain that “language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs” (TM, 389), amounts to maintaining that understanding is not “representational” but interpretive in nature: “All understanding is interpretation.” (TM, 389) And interpretation itself is never a merely reproductive activity but is always transformative of that which is to be interpreted: “[U]nderstanding is not merely reproductive but always a productive activity as well.” (TM, 296) 90

See also PH, 77: “Is not language more the language of things than the language of man?” For a more detailed treatment of Gadamer’s position in this regard vis-à-vis both Rorty and Derrida, see my “Coping with Nietzsche’s Legacy: Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer,” in Gary B. Madison, The Politics of Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermeneutics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2001). 91

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In regard to the more specific area of text-interpretation, and in opposition to the objectivistic assumptions of traditional, Romantic hermeneutics (and to contemporary representatives of it like Emilio Betti and E.D. Hirsch, Jr.92), Gadamer insisted that “understanding” (subtilitas intelligendi, subtilitas explicandi) and “application” (subtilitas applicandi) cannot be separated. The text is not an “absolute object” (as if it were something existing “in itself,” like the “external world” of modern philosophy), whose meaning one first grasps and then only subsequently “applies” to the situation at hand, for it is only in applying what the text says to our own situation that we can be said to understand it. Understanding is always of an “applicational” nature93; it “always involves something like applying the text to be understood to the interpreter’s present situation.” (TM, 308) As Ricoeur would later show, on the basis of his detailed studies of textuality (Schriftlichkeit), it is only in the act of reading that the meaning of the text itself is actualized.94 The “meaning” of what is to be understood is inseparable from its “significance” for the subject in search of understanding, and this is because, as Merleau-Ponty had already observed, anticipating one of the main tenets of the hermeneutic theory of text-interpretation, the true meaning of a work is not necessarily the one intended by its author. (See S, 24) Gadamer’s rearticulation of the relation between understanding and application amounts to an overcoming of an age-old metaphysical opposition, one as pernicious as the opposition between mind and body or between reality and appearance, viz., the opposition between the universal (the timeless and invariant) and the particular (the local and merely contingent). In opposition to this traditional, dichotomous way of viewing the matter, Gadamer insisted that the universal (e.g., the meaning of a text) never exists fully defined in its own right but always only in its varying instanciations -- which is not to say that in the matter of text-interpretation “anything goes” (this is what Gadamer referred to as “hermeneutic nihilism”). When Gadamer said, somewhat paradoxically, that it is the (universally) same text that we necessarily always understand in different ways, he was seeking to move beyond both objectivism and relativism. From a strictly phenomenological point of view, the universal cannot in fact be separated from the particular; “it’s simply the case,” Shaun Gallagher observes (invoking Gadamer’s notion of phronesis), “that we have no way to understand the universal except from within the particular situation in which we happen to find ourselves.”95 Gadamer’s way of reconceptualizing the age-old philosophical problem of the relation between universality and particularity by means of his notion of “application” (“application—that is, …bringing the universal and the individual together.”96), has, it may be noted, a great deal of relevance to the global lifeworld that is now everywhere emerging. Speaking of the phenomenon of globalization (“the world-wide interwovenness of economies”), Gadamer highlighted the challenge confronting humanity when he stated: “Humanity today is sitting in a rowboat, as it were, and we must steer this boat in such

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For a critique of Hirsch’s positivist-style version of hermeneutics from a Gadamerian point of view, see my “Eine Kritik an Hirschs Begriff der ‘Richtigkeit,’” in Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gottfried Boehm, ed., Seminar: Die Hermeneutik und die Wissenschaften (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1978); English version in my The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and Themes (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988). 93 For a discussion of the hermeneutic notion of application, see my “Hermeneutics, the Lifeworld, and the Universality of Reason (The Case of China),” in Madison, The Politics of Postmodernity. 94 For both Gadamer and Ricoeur, the act of reading is not, as the earlier Heidegger claimed, an act of “violence” but presupposes “good will” aiming at genuine dialogue. 95 Shaun Gallagher, “Hegel, Foucault, and Critical Hermeneutics,” in idem, ed., Hegel, History, and Interpretation (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997), 161. 96 Gadamer, In Praise of Theory, 61. 29

a way that we do not all crash into the rocks.”97 This challenge -- that of avoiding what some have referred to as a global “clash of civilizations” -- is to a large extent a hermeneutic one, having to do with reconciling universality and particularity, that is to say, the lifeworld reality of cultural diversity, with a philosophical need for a common, global ethic of human values (human rights, in particular), an ethic which, while being universal, would nevertheless be respectful of cultural/historical differences.98 One of the chief legacies of Gadamer’s “philosophy of conversation” undoubtedly lies in the way it can serve to promote, in the realm of human finitude, the hermeneutic-universalist ideals of “global dialogue (Weltgespräch)” and cross-cultural understanding, in other words: “solidarity,” i.e., “rational identification with a universal interest”99 -- and can do so in a way which is decidedly “non-hegemonic.” Ricoeur, it should be noted, has also been keenly aware of the interpretive need to reconcile ethical universalism (universal human rights) with cultural particularity. “How can we attain some kind of universalism of reflection,” he asks, “if cultural roots are so different? No doubt this is one of the greatest problems of the end of this century and the next century.”100 In stressing the role of “application,” Gadamer was emphasizing the inescapable “situatedness” (as Marcel would say101) of understanding and the unavoidable role that presuppositions or prejudgments (“prejudices”) play in understanding, and thus also our unavoidable “belogingness” (Zugehörigkeit) to our own particular cultural/historical traditions -- all of which is summed up in his key notion of historically-effective consciousness (das wirkungsgeschichliche Bewusstsein). As Ricoeur would later point out, effectivehistory (Wirkungsgeschichte) is “the massive and global fact whereby consciousness, even before its awakening as such, belongs to and depends on that which affects it.”102 Effective-history, it could be said, is the action of cultural/historical tradition (“historicality” or what Ricoeur calls “traditionalité”) and is that which provides us with our “enabling” presuppositions -- these presuppositions being what Alfred Schütz had called the “typical constructs” that are “the unquestioned but always questionable sum total of things taken for granted until further notice.”103 Like language itself, effective-history is the onto-

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Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, trans. Richard E. Palmer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 81, hereafter GOC. 98 See in this regard my paper presented to the Chinese National Academy of Social Sciences, “China in a Globalizing World: Reconciling the Universal with the Particular,” Dialogue and Humanism (Polish Academy of Sciences) 12, no. 11-12/2002. 99 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Power of Reason,” Man and World 3, no. 1 (1970): 13; for a further discussion of this matter, see my “Gadamer’s Legacy,” Symposium 6, no. 2 (Fall, 2002). It should be noted that Gadamer’s attempt to revise the notions of “universal” and “particular” has been greatly expanded upon by Calvin Schrag, who, in this context, speaks, perhaps wisely, not of “universalism,” but, more “postmetaphysically,” of “transversalism.” Both Gadamer’s defense of universalism and Schrag’s notion of transversalism are meant to contest the notion (promoted by Rorty and other relativistic postmodernists) that the various cultures of the world are “incommensurable.” 100 See Tamás Tóth, “The Graft, the Residue, and Memory: Two Conversations with Paul Ricoeur,” in Andrzej Wiercin´ski, ed., Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003), 647, hereafter BSS; and, for a discussion of Ricoeur’s position in this matter, see also in this volume my “Paul Ricoeur: Philosopher of Being-Human (Zuoren).” 101 As Thomas Busch has pointed out, Marcel’s notion of situatedness anticipates Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory; see Busch’s entry “Marcel,” in Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embree et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1997). 102 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 74, hereafter HHS. 103 Alfred Schütz, “Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action,” in Richard M. Zaner and Don Ihde, ed., Phenomenology and Existentialism (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 299. 30

logical milieu in which, as understanding, socially constituted beings, we “live, move, and have our being.” Gadamer’s hermeneutics is grounded in Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit),104 and thus, as Ricoeur also makes clear, the notion of effective-history means that we can never achieve a bird’s-eye overview of our historical situatedness in such a way as to realize the metaphysical ideal of an all-encompassing science -- “To exist historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete.” (TM, 269) “Between finitude and absolute knowledge,” Ricoeur observes, “it is necessary to choose; the concept of effective history belongs to an ontology of finitude.” (HHS, 74) Gadamer’s ontology of finitude is not, however, a version of relativism, as I mentioned above. To say that understanding is finite or situated, is to say that it is always bounded by horizons (“essential to the concept of situation is the concept of horizon.” [TM, 304]), but a horizon is not a wall or a barrier (an absolute limit) that closes us off from what is “other.” On the contrary, horizons, being mobile, invite exploration and allow us to move about in the world and make contact with what is distant and alien (the world itself being, as Husserl said, the “horizon of all horizons”). What lies beyond one’s horizon at any given time is, by definition, unknown, but it is not in principle unknowable; a horizon always points beyond itself to, as Husserl would say, a vast realm of “determinable indeterminacy.” Indeed, from a phenomenological point of view the very notion of a “closed horizon” (and thus also the notion that different cultural lifeworlds are “incommensurable”) is, as Gadamer says, “artificial” (see TM, 304), a metaphysical construction without any basis in lived experience. Thus, as Gadamer accordingly insisted, “Precisely through our finitude, the particularity of our being, which is evident even in the variety of languages, the infinite dialogue is opened in the direction of the truth that we are.” (PH, 16) Just as Merleau-Ponty maintained that truth is nothing other than the experience of a “concordance” between ourselves and others, so likewise for Gadamer, truth is not a matter of “adequation” between an isolated, cognizing subject and an objective, in-itself world (adaequatio intellectus et res), but is a matter of mutual agreement between actual human subjects freely engaged in dialogue, and seeking -- oftentimes painfully -- a common understanding of things. We are “in the truth” when, through a “merging of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung),” the “hermeneutic experience” par excellence, we are able to encounter other people and other ways of life and to arrive in this way at mutual understandings and common agreements as to what is or ought to be the case.105 Gadamer’s crucial insight, one which dominates all of his work, is that there is, or need be, no contradiction between “openness” and “belongingness” (between tradition and emancipation) -- which is what allowed him to assert that there is “no higher principle of reason” with which to think our effective-history than that of freedom.106 In maintaining that the locus of truth -- of reason (the logos) -- is not the isolated, monological subject of modern philosophy but the dialogical encounter between situated human beings, Gadamer’s hermeneutics effected a decisive break not only with modern epistemologism but also with the quasi-solipsism of Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty had said that the “germ of universality” lies not in a transcendental

104

See Gadamer, A Century of Philosophy, 130. For a discussion of this matter, as well as of other basic themes in philosophical hermeneutics, see my “Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Ricoeur,” in Kearney, ed., Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century; for a more succinct overview of philosophical hermeneutics, see my “Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Ricoeur,” in Richard H. Popkin, ed., The Columbia History of Western Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 106 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 9, hereafter RAS. 105

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“I think” but in “the dialogue into which our experience of other people throws us.”107 Like Merleau-Ponty who equated rationality with communication and whose focus was on the speaking subject, for Gadamer, too, language lives only in speech, such that, what as lingual, rational beings we most essentially are, is, as he always liked to say, a conversation (Gespräch). Because Gadamer’s hermeneutics is a “philosophy of conversation” (RPJ, 36) and is animated by an ethics of communicative rationality,108 he could rightly say that “there is no higher principle than this: holding oneself open to the conversation.” (RPJ, 26) Insofar as we hold ourselves open in this way (cf. Marcel’s notion of disponibilité), we are open to the truth of things, for truth, as something universal, is of a “horizonal” nature; like the world itself, truth is the realm of unrestricted openness (of “boundless communication,” as Karl Jaspers referred to it), and its locus is the transsubjective and transcultural community of all reasonable beings. Paul Ricoeur (who discovered Gadamer in somewhat the same belated way that Gadamer discovered Merleau-Ponty) was no less sensitive to the finitude of the human condition than was Gadamer, as is amply attested to by his early work in the 1940s and 1950s on human fallibility, frailty, suffering, passivity, and the mystery of evil in the world. Ricoeur’s early writings on philosophical anthropology (the kind of philosophical anthropology that Heidegger dismissed but that Gadamer thought was called for by Husserl’s discovery of the lifeworld, and that, in Ricoeur’s case, was part of a larger, never completed “grand project” on the Philosophy of the Will) were inspired by MerleauPonty’s magisterial work on perception, and in them he sought to extend the Husserlian method of eidetic analysis to a dimension of human existence that Husserl, given his “cognitivist” preoccupations (or what Ricoeur calls “Husserl’s logicist prejudice”109), had largely passed over in silence: the whole non-cognitive domain of affectivity and volition. Husserl’s “intellectualism” (as Lévinas referred to it) notwithstanding, it was Husserl’s transcendental philosophy of the subject which furnished Ricoeur with, as he says, his “starting point.”110 (BSS, 643) What in this regard Ricoeur sought to do was to separate the phenomenological method from Husserl’s idealist interpretation of this method (“I attempted to dissociate what appeared to me to be the descriptive core of phenomenology from the idealist interpretation in which this core was wrapped.” [IA, 11]). Subsequently, and in conjunction with his “lingual turn” in the 1960s, he attempted to “graft hermeneutics onto phenomenology” and entered into an on-going debate with various disciplines or intellectual trends such as Freudianism and structuralism which -- functioning as a kind of “hermeneutics of suspicion” -- seem to undermine the primacy that a reflexive philosophy such as Ricoeur’s accords to the subject (“A reflexive philosophy considers the most radical problems to be those which concern the possibility of self-understanding as the subject of the operations of knowing, willing, evaluating, etc.” [OI, 188]).

107

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 93, hereafter SNS. 108 For a detailed discussion of the hermeneutic notion of communicative rationality, see my The Logic of Liberty (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), chap. 10; and, for an analysis of the notions of communicative rationality and practical reasoning in both Gadamer and Ricoeur, see Paul Fairfield, “Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Practical Judgment,” in Wiercin´ski, ed., Between Suspicion and Sympathy. 109 Ricoeur, Husserl, 221. 110 It would be a bit more correct to say that Ricoeur’s “starting point” was Gabriel Marcel’s existential philosophy of embodiment (Ricoeur dedicated his Philosophy of the Will to Marcel) as reinterpreted through the lens of Husserlian phenomenology; for an insightful discussion of Ricoeur’s relationship with Marcel, see Boyd Blundell, “Creative Fidelity: Gabriel Marcel’s Influence on Paul Ricoeur,” in Wiercin´ski, ed., Between Suspicion and Sympathy. 32

Ricoeur’s overall work follows a rather complicated trajectory and undergoes numerous shifts in direction, all nevertheless “nesting one within the other.” (IA, 38) Subsequent to his early writings on the will, there is a gradual progression in his work from a hermeneutics of the symbol through a confrontation with Freudian psychoanalysis and structural linguistics to a hermeneutics of the text, and from there to a hermeneutics of action and intersubjectivity (passing by way of an analysis of metaphor, time, and narrativity) and culminating (at the time of this writing) in a renewed concern with ethics and politics (with issues such as justice, responsibility, remembrance, and phronesis or practical wisdom) -- Ricoeur’s overriding concern throughout all of this having been the acting person (l’homme agissant), a concern which reflects his indebtedness to the personalist philosophy of Emmanuel Mounier, a philosophy, in Ricoeur’s words, “of man’s recurrent protest against being reduced to the level of ideas and things.”111 (MTP, 356) Although Ricoeur, like his phenomenological predecessors, was always highly critical of Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness or what he generally refers to as Husserl’s “idealism” (“transcendental subjectivism” might be a more appropriate term), he nevertheless always considered the heritage of Husserlian phenomenology to be “the unsurpassable presupposition of hermeneutics.” (IA, 36; it was, indeed, Ricoeur’s early work as a translator and interpreter of Husserl that firmly established his academic credentials.112) Because the particular shape Ricoeur’s work has taken is the result of the debates he has engaged in on numerous different occasions with proponents of other views with which he felt he had to come to terms, his philosophical development is extremely complex with many twists and turns along the way (one might say that Ricoeur’s “method” [methodos, the way he followed in his thinking] is essentially one that proceeds continually by way of detours).113 There is nonetheless a kind of Ariadne’s thread running through it all, an underlying continuity in terms of both method and motivation. Methodologically speaking, Ricoeur’s basic concern, like that of other phenomenologists, has always been the reflexive-transcendental one of bringing our lived experience to the proper expression of its own meaning. As he stated in an early work, the vocation of philosophy, as he sees it, is “to clarify existence itself by use of concepts.”114 Ricoeur’s philosophical motivation in this regard is his fundamental belief that our existence is indeed meaningful, and thus expressible (dicible) -- this belief in the expressibility or “sayability” (dicibilité) of experience corresponding to Gadamer’s thesis as to the linguality or “speakability” of the world (die Sprachlichkeit der Welt). “There is no human experience that is not structured by language” (BSS, 680), Ricoeur maintains, echoing as it were Merleau-Ponty. Ricoeur’s philosophizing has in this way always been a search for meaning and has throughout been guided by a “central intuition,” or basic conviction, viz., that, notwithstanding the very real existence of unmeaning, necessity (unfreedom), and evil, there is 111

For an excellent survey of Ricoeur’s philosophical writings, see Mark Muldoon, On Ricoeur (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2002). 112 See Ricoeur’s translation of, and commentary on, Husserl’s Ideen I: Ideés directrices pour une phénoménologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), a work that Merleau-Ponty used and cited in his lectures at the Sorbonne in the early 1950s. 113 For an account by Ricoeur of the piecemeal way in which he has handled philosophical problems, see Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 81-82, hereafter CC; for a thematic overview of Ricoeur’s work, see Domenico Jervolino, “The Unity of Paul Ricoeur’s Work,” in Wiercin´ski, ed., Between Suspicion and Sympathy. 114 Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohak (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 17. 33

in existence a “super-abundance of meaning to the abundance of non-sense.”115 The underlying presupposition in Ricoeur’s work is his “presupposition of meaning” (or “postulate of meaningfulness”), which he formulates thus: It must be supposed that experience in all its fullness…has an expressibility (dicibilité) in principle. Experience can be said, it demands to be said. To bring it to language is not to change it into something else, but, in articulating and developing it, to make it become itself. (HHS, 115) In connection with his work on metaphor and narrative, he has stated that “these analyses continually presuppose the conviction that discourse never exists for its own sake, for its own glory, but that in all of its uses it seeks to bring into language an experience, a way of living in and of being-in-the-world which precedes it and which demands to be said.” There is always, Ricoeur asserts, “a being-demanding-to-be-said (un être-à-dire) which precedes our actual saying.” (OI, 196) Ricoeur’s dual concern with meaning and existence116 makes for an overarching thematic unity to his work; as “a hermeneutics of the ‘I am,’” its focus has consistently been on the issues of subjectivity and self-understanding. “[I]t is indeed the fate of human subjectivity,” he has said, “that is at stake throughout the whole of my work.”117 In pursuing his inquiry into the nature of selfhood, Ricoeur was acutely aware of the “idealist” pitfalls that menace any reflexive philosophy of the subject, for the traditional idea of reflection, as he remarks, “carries with it the desire for absolute transparence, a perfect coincidence of the self with itself, which would make consciousness of self indubitable knowledge.” (OI, 188) And as he freely admits, with regard to his presupposition of meaning, “It is difficult, admittedly, to formulate this presupposition in a nonidealist language.” (HHS, 115) It was, accordingly, in order to counteract the idealist tendencies of reflexive philosophy that Ricoeur insisted that “a philosophy of reflection must be just the opposite of a philosophy of consciousness.” (CI, 18) For the phenomenological fact of the matter is that the consciousness of self is, proximally and for the most part, a distorted, false consciousness. This is why, as he says, he rejected Heidegger’s “short cut (voie courte)” to an ontology of understanding and insisted that reflection must be “indirect” and that the passage from misunderstanding (“inauthenticity”) to understanding is not just a matter of willful self-assertion but must necessarily follow an arduous, roundabout detour through a painstaking decipherment of the various cultural/historical signs, symbols, and texts in which get expressed the human “effort to exist and desire to be.” (CI, 18) The reflecting subject is a subject that is lost in the world and that must “recapture” itself “in the mirror of its objects, of its works, and, finally, of its acts.” (CI, 18) It is only in this painstaking way that what at the outset is a bare ego can become a genuine, human self. In attempting to effect a “qualitative transformation” of reflexive consciousness, Ricoeur insisted that there is no “originary” presence of the self to itself and that the notion of intuitive self-knowledge is an illusion (for Ricoeur, the truth of the Cogito -- “I think-I am” -- is a truth that is as empty as it is certain). The phenomenological subject

115

Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 411, hereafter CI. 116 These two terms are ones that Ricoeur himself suggested as the title for the Festschrift in his honor that I edited on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday: Sens et existence, en hommage à Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975). 117 Paul Ricoeur, “Reply to G. B. Madison,” in Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 93; see also in this volume my “Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of the Subject.” 34

is not a transcendental Ego that would be an absolute creator or dispenser of meaning; it is not a subject that is, as Descartes would say, maître de soi, but a speaking/listening, questioning, story-telling subject that is itself “given” to itself by means of a long drawnout process of semiosis, a “reappropriated” subject that is both interpretive and interpreted. Being of a “mediated” nature, genuine self-understanding always involves a corrective critique of misunderstanding and can only be envisaged as a kind of “distant horizon”: “A hermeneutic philosophy is a philosophy which accepts all the demands of this long detour and which gives up the dream of a total mediation, at the end of which reflection would once again amount to intellectual intuition in the transparence to itself of an absolute subject.” (OI, 194) In his attempt to work out a hermeneutics of self-understanding, Ricoeur always had to do battle on two fronts. On the one hand, and in the name of a phenomenology of human finitude and “fallible man,” he had to resist the idealist tendencies in traditional reflexive philosophy and in Husserl’s transcendentalism by, so to speak, “desubjectivizing” subjectivity (“phenomenology is always in danger of reducing itself to a transcendental subjectivism.” [HHS, 112]) “Subjectivity,” he said in this regard, “must be lost as radical origin if it is to be recovered in a more modest role.” (HHS, 113) On the other hand, and in order to defend the very notion of the subject, he had to contest all those disciplines and intellectual trends of an objectivistic or naturalistic sort which would make of subjectivity an illusion pure and simple. Subjectivism and objectivism were always Ricoeur’s twin foes. Typical of his polemic with the latter was his dispute with the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the stated goal of which (anticipating the “death of ‘man’” theme in French philosophy) was not to understand better that entity we call “man” but, quite simply, to “dissolve” him, to reduce him to his “physicalchemical conditions.”118 Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist reductionism (wanting to “study men as if they were ants”) extended even to the very notion of meaning. As he said to Ricoeur in the course of a famous debate: Meaning (le sens) is always the result of the combination of elements which are not meaningful (signifiant) in themselves…. In my perspective, meaning is never a firstorder phenomenon; meaning is always reducible. In other words, behind all meaning there is non-sense (un non-sens), and the contrary is not true. For me, meaning (signification) is always just a mere phenomenon (est toujours phénoménal). To remarks such as these Ricoeur repeatedly objected: “If meaning is not an element in self-understanding, I don’t know what it is.” (What in that case it is, as Ricoeur himself said, is “the admirable syntactical arrangement of a discourse which says nothing at all [qui ne dit rien].”)119 As an existential-phenomenological hermeneutician, Ricoeur has always insisted that the point of all attempts at understanding the world around us (such as those evinced in Lévi-Strauss’s own anthropological research) is, ultimately, to understand ourselves better, and what it means for us to be (the “human condition,” as Pascal called it). His most powerful insight in this regard is that self-understanding is never a given but always a task, and that, moreover, our own selves which we seek to understand, are, as it were, themselves products of our encounter with what is “outside” and what is “other.” A 118

See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 246-47. See the text of the debate in Esprit 31, no. 322 (Novembre, 1963); Ricoeur’s frustration with this sort of objectivistic reductionism came to the fore when he said to Lévi-Strauss: “You despair of meaning, but you save yourself by thinking that if people have nothing to say, at least they say it so well that their discourse can be subjected to a structuralist analysis.” 119

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crucial “other” in our becoming who we are is the textual other, which is to say, the portrayal of other ways of being-in-the-world that we encounter in our reading of texts, the function of texts being that of calling into being or projecting “virtual” worlds, i.e., alternative, imaginative ways of being-in-the-world. Through its encounter with that “higher order referent” or “new reality” that Ricoeur calls “the world of the work” (a notion that he shares with Gadamer), the subject is exposed to other possible selves and ways of being -- “imaginative variations of the ego” (HHS, 94) -- and is able to emerge with a “refigured,” enlarged, more meaningful self: “To understand oneself is to understand oneself as one confronts the text and to receive from it the conditions for a self other than that which first undertakes the reading.” (OI, 193) The great lesson of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology is that what we as human subjects most essentially are is what we can become, the being-otherwise and being-more that are the objects of the effort to exist and the desire to be. Ricoeur’s vital contribution to an interpretive, postmetaphysical phenomenology is to have shown how -- Heidegger’s belief to the contrary notwithstanding -- it is indeed possible to overcome modern subjectivism (i.e., what has since become known as the “metaphysics of presence”), while at the same time upholding a renewed, non-idealist or non-substantialist notion of subjectivity itself -- a notion which Merleau-Ponty viewed as one of the great discoveries of modern philosophy (albeit, as he acknowledged, one that was of a decidedly creative nature, Montaigne being a key figure in this regard) and which, flawed though it may have been in its modernist version, he thought it would nevertheless be folly to attempt simply to abolish (as if the notion of the subject [“man”] were nothing more than “a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,” destined to be erased by it). By means of his work on selfhood, narrativity, and creative expression (la poétique du possible), Paul Ricoeur has managed to provide a properly hermeneutic, which is to say, non-idealist and non-metaphysical account of the “origin of the world,” i.e., of how, through the creative work of interpretation, the world, and we ourselves, come to be “constituted” as that which it, and we, are. Viewed as a whole, Ricoeur’s work, by fully accomplishing the interpretive turn in phenomenology, provides an outstanding example of how post-Husserlian phenomenologists have struggled not only to break out of the philosophy of consciousness but also to overcome, in a decisive manner, the classical opposition between realism and idealism that continued to the end to plague Husserl’s presentation of phenomenology.

Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences If, as philosophical hermeneutics maintains (akin in this way to Jamesian pragmatism), the meaning of any philosophical doctrine or theory lies in its “consequences,” in the way it “applies” to concrete situations and practical affairs -- i.e., to the realm of praxis -- the domain of the human sciences could be said to reveal the true meaning of hermeneutics which, as Gadamer always insisted, is itself a scientia practica (“hermeneutics is philosophy, and as philosophy it is practical philosophy.” [RAS, 111]) To employ a Husserlian expression, the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) can be viewed, to a great extent, as being so many “regional” hermeneutics; as interpretive sciences (die verstehenden Wissenschaften), it is the function of the human sciences to bring general hermeneutic theory to bear on the different realms of human action and endeavor in an interpretive attempt to discern the meaning of human being-in-the-world that transpires in these various lifeworlds. To a significant extent, the various human sciences are nothing other than “applied hermeneutics,” “extensions” of hermeneutics to the domain of practice (philosophical hermeneutics, from this point of view, being not a regional but a 36

transcendental discipline). As Gadamer stated in this regard, “The human sciences are not only a problem for philosophy, on the contrary, they represent a problem of philosophy.” (PHC, 112) As the philosophical-theoretical “science” of the human lifeworld, hermeneutics, one might say, is in its very essence a philosophy of the human sciences. Hermeneutics is nothing other than, as Gadamer says, the theory of the practice of interpretation, the reflective analysis of what is “at play in the practical experience of understanding.” (RAS, 112) And thus, as he also says, “as the theory of interpretation or explication, it is not just a theory.” (RAS, 93) Hermeneutics, one might say, is theory “with practical intent.” In the last analysis, the ultimate justification of hermeneutic theory, as a theory of practice, is its significance for practice. Just as Merleau-Ponty went further than Heidegger in the exploration of the bodily nature of our being-in-the-world, so likewise Ricoeur has gone further than Gadamer in dealing with methodological issues confronting the human sciences and in entering into a full-fledged debate with various human disciplines such as psychoanalysis, linguistics, historiography, and literary studies. He has always held the conviction that “philosophy cannot exist on its own” (BSS, 653) and that, in fact, it “perishes if its dialogue with the sciences…were to be interrupted.” (IA, 39) He has in this regard voiced a criticism of Gadamer’s stance in relation to which, as he says, he has “taken a certain distance.” (CC, 73) According to Ricoeur, Gadamer’s way of opposing truth and method (the “and” in the title of Gadamer’s magnum opus functioning in fact as a kind of disjunctive) seemed to Ricoeur to have the unfortunate effect of continuing the “anti-methodological conclusions of Heideggerian philosophy.”120 Thus, Ricoeur viewed his own endeavors as falling more under the heading of “methodological hermeneutics” than that of “ontological hermeneutics” and defined his own approach vis-à-vis both Heidegger and Gadamer as wanting to contribute “to this ontological vehemence an analytical precision which it would otherwise lack.” (OI, 196) Although Ricoeur fully subscribed to the basic ontological concerns of Heidegger and Gadamer, he nonetheless felt that their preoccupation with fundamental ontology tended to hinder philosophical hermeneutics from entering into a productive dialogue with the more empirically oriented sciences. While, as he once said, ontology may be the “promised land” of phenomenological reflection, “like Moses, the speaking and reflecting subject can only glimpse this land before dying.” (CI, 24) In attempting to work out a methodological hermeneutics in dialogue with the empirical sciences, Ricoeur was here also, as it were, following in the footsteps of Merleau-Ponty, whose way of thinking represented a methodological alternative to Heidegger’s “ontologism.” Whereas Heidegger’s religious-like preoccupation with “Being”121 effectively precluded him from taking much of an interest in the social sciences and the more mundane realm of human affairs, Merleau-Ponty’s concern to explore the bodily nature of our being-in-the-world with the aid of the empirical sciences led him to devote a great deal of attention to the relation between phenomenology and the human sciences in his lectures at the Sorbonne in the early 1950s.122 And when, in his later work, MerleauPonty turned his attention to explicitly ontological issues (under, in part, the influence of the later Heidegger), his way of doing so again contrasted with that of Heidegger. Unlike the later Heidegger who wanted to think Being directly, to “think Being without regard

120

See Paul Ricoeur, “Langage (Philosophie),” in Encyclopaedia Universalis (1971), 9:780; see also Ricoeur, Main Trends in Philosophy, 268-69. 121 As Gadamer observes, Heidegger’s preoccupation with “Being,” with the Sein of Da-Sein, “meant the search for God. He was a seeker of God his entire life.” Gadamer, A Century of Philosophy, 122, 127. 122 See, for instance, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Les sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie,” trans. John Wild, as “Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man,” in PriP. 37

to its being grounded in terms of beings,” to “think Being without beings,”123 MerleauPonty thought that the only appropriate way of pursuing the Being-question was by means of a “methodological” ontology or what he called an “intra-ontology.” (VI, 179) Reminiscent in a way of Marcel’s “concrete approaches” to ontology, Merleau-Ponty sought to think Being indirectly and only insofar as it manifests itself in beings -- in Nature and in the various realms of human expressivity conceived of as various “regions of Being” (“the mirrors of Being,”124 “the topology of being.” [S, 22]). Central to Ricoeur’s own endeavors to develop a methodological hermeneutics was the way, starting in the late 1960s,125 he sought to overcome the classical hermeneutic distinction between “explanation” (Erklärung) and “understanding” (das Verstehen). This distinction was the centerpiece of the earlier hermeneutics of Wilhelm Dilthey, and, inasmuch as it paralleled the clear-cut distinction he made between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), it reflected the modern, Cartesian split between mind and nature (Gadamer speaks in this regard of Dilthey’s “latent Cartesianism.” [PHC, 124]). Ever the dialectical thinker, Ricoeur sought to overcome Dilthey’s dichotomous distinction between explanation and understanding by arguing that “objective” explanation is not something purely and simply antithetical to “subjective” understanding, and that, as the science of linguistics clearly demonstrates, its sphere of validity is not limited to the natural sciences. While for Ricoeur (as for Gadamer) self-understanding is the ultimate goal of all attempts at understanding,126 it nevertheless remains, Ricoeur argued, that objective-type “explanation” has an important role to play in the overall understanding process.127 In the case of text-interpretation, for instance, the ultimate goal is that of appreciatively entering into the particular world projected by the text in search of a meaning that we can “appropriate” for ourselves in such a way as to better understand ourselves, but along the way it can be quite helpful to treat the text as a “worldless and authorless” object and to engage in a purely objective, semiotic analysis of the text’s linguistic and structural features, or to analyze the text in a strictly empirical manner by focusing on historical and philological factors (Ricoeur refers to this as “the statics of the text”). For Ricoeur, purely explanatory procedures, although “secondary in relation to understanding” (OI, 185), have nonetheless an altogether legitimate role to play in the overall interpretive process (in the “recovery of meaning”); one must, as Ricoeur says, explain more in order to understand better. “Explanation” forms one segment, the initial cornerstone, of what he calls the “hermeneutic arc,” which is ultimately grounded in our own lived experience. (See HHS, 161-64) Not only, therefore, should “explanation” and “understanding” not be set at odds with one another, the “detour by way of objectification” (IA, 48) can -- most importantly -help a reflexive-transcendental phenomenology to circumvent the pitfalls of a mere philosophy of consciousness, i.e., one animated by the naïve desire for absolute trans-

123

See Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 2. 124 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952-1960, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 112. 125 Ricoeur’s key essay in this regard is his “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding” (reprinted in HHS). 126 Cf. PH, 55: “In the last analysis, all understanding is self-understanding, but not in the sense of a preliminary self-possession or of one finally and definitively achieved.” 127 Ricoeur’s position contrasts in this regard with that of a disciple of the later Wittgenstein, Peter Winch, who, round about the same time, attempted to revive in an Anglo-Saxon format the Diltheyan dichotomy between the natural sciences and the social sciences, between (causal) explanation and (empathetic) understanding; see Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958). 38

parency and a perfect coincidence of the self with itself in the form of immediate and indubitable knowledge (Ricoeur refers to this as “the narcissistic ego.” [HHS, 192]). The detour by way of methodic “distantiation” is the key to overcoming what William James called “vicious intellectualism” and is the means, as Ricoeur sees it, for achieving a less distorted self-understanding than the one we invariably start out with. Richard Rorty notwithstanding, the hermeneutic theory of Ricoeur and Gadamer has proven, in the eyes of numerous practitioners of the human sciences, to be anything but “unfruitful.” Human scientists as diverse as ethnographers, historians, communicologists, psychologists, and nursing specialists have found in hermeneutic phenomenology an important source of support in their struggle to overcome the stifling and dehumanizing legacy of logical positivism in the human sciences. In this connection, hermeneutics could be said to constitute the most recent, the “third wave,” of influence and inspiration that phenomenology has had or visited upon on the human sciences, the “second wave” having come several decades earlier, pursuant to the existential phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and the “first wave” having originated in Husserl’s own phenomenology and the influences this exerted in the fields of psychology and sociology. By drawing out the methodological implications of Gadamer’s ontology of human understanding, Ricoeur was able to extend the scope of hermeneutics from its traditional base in text-interpretation to the wider, overall realm of the social sciences, i.e., to those sciences, such as sociology or economics, which are concerned primarily not with texts but with human action.128 (Heidegger’s preoccupation with “Being” -- his “ontological vehemence” -- and the quietist position he adopted in this regard [“Gelassenheit”] led him to ignore completely the notion of action [or practical thinking], which he tended to reduce to mere technological busy-ness [“calculative thinking”], while at the same time asserting that the only “true” action [das Tun] is something that is not action at all, viz., the “meditative thinking” of Being.) Ricoeur’s key thesis in regard to the issue of action is that to the degree the social sciences seek, interpretively, to discern the meaning of human action, action itself can be viewed “on the model of the text,” as a kind of “quasitext” or “text analogue.” The reason for this -- in terms of the hermeneutic theory of both Gadamer and Ricoeur -- is that, in the case of both text and action, meaning cannot be reduced to the psychological intentions of the author/actor; meaning must, so to speak, always be “desubjectivized.” This is obviously the case as regards human agency, since individual action takes place in a cultural/institutional context and thus has an irreducibly social dimension to it. As Hannah Arendt, who, unlike her mentor, Heidegger, was greatly concerned with the issue of action (the vita activa) said, “no man can act alone, even though his motives for action may be certain designs, desires, passions, and goals of his own.”129 To the degree that human action is social in nature, it cannot properly be understood in terms of individual psychology alone (actors’s intentions), since in the social realm “our deeds escape us and have effects which we did not intend.” (HHS, 206) The meaning of our deeds escapes us in the same way that, as Ricoeur has argued in his theory of textinterpretation, “the text’s career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author” and embodies a meaning “that has broken its moorings to the psychology of the author.” (HHS, 201) In going beyond the finite horizon of individual agents, human acting and doing opens up a public space in which its meaning or significance (its significative effects, as it were) gets “sedimented” or “inscribed,” this “place” being what we call “history.” 128

A key work of Ricoeur’s in this regard was his 1971 essay, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered As a Text” (reprinted in HHS). 129 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), 2:180. 39

(“History is this quasi-‘thing’ on which human action leaves a ‘trace,’ puts its mark.” HHS, 207.) For phenomenology, history is the history of human agency (according to Merleau-Ponty, only humans, strictly speaking, have a history; history, as Alfred Schütz said, is the “sediment” of human action), and, as the “record” of human actions and transactions, history is, effectively speaking, a text to be interpreted. As one commentator sums up the matter: “Hermeneutics is concerned with the interpretation of any expression of existence which can be preserved in a structure analogous to the structure of the text…. Taking it to the limit, the entirety of human existence becomes a text to be interpreted.”130 Thus, in his application of Ricoeur’s reflections on the relation between textuality and action to the field of anthropology, Clifford Geertz states: “Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a manuscript -foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.”131 One “reads” the traces of human agency and behavior in much the same way as one reads a text, for, as both Geertz and Ricoeur maintain, the realm of social action is thoroughly “symbolic” in its make-up.132 Now, what makes a text a text in the proper sense of the term is that it has a certain logic or “inner dynamic,” as Ricoeur calls it (OI, 193), which it is the business of text-interpretation to make evident. History likewise has a certain logic to it, as Merleau-Ponty ever insisted (there is, as he said, a “logic immanent in human experience.” [SNS, 65]). The phenomenological fact of the matter is that history is not, as the empirically-minded English like to say, “just one damn thing after another” (nor is it, as Rorty would say, “mere contingency”). Although history unfolds chronologically, and although events in the lifeworld are not, in the scientistic sense of the term, predictable, history itself is not a mere chronology, nothing more than a haphazard listing of disparate events.133 As Ricoeur says, history (“social time”) is “the place of durable effects, or persisting patterns,” these patterns becoming “the documents of human action.” (HHS, 206) Hermeneutics, conceived of as the interpretation of history, is nothing other than the attempt to discern -- amid what Kant called the seemingly “idiotic course of things human”134 -- various patterns of action, and to interpret these as to their significance. This sort of pattern-analysis (the discernment of what Geertz calls “structures of significance”) is a form of eidetic analysis. Patterns are “essences” of a sort, and, when we attempt to understand anything, we must have recourse to essences or universals (individuum ineffabile est). This is something Merleau-Ponty fully realized; speaking of Husserl’s notion of essences, he stated that the need to proceed by way of essences (eidè) is simply a recognition of the fact that “our existence is too tightly held in the world to

130

David Pellauer, “The Significance of the Text in Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Theory,” in Charles E. Reagan, ed., Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1979), 112, 109. 131 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 10. 132 Paul Ricoeur discusses Geertz’s notion of “symbolic action” in his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), chap. 15, hereafter LIU. For an exposition of what he calls “semiotic anthropology,” which is in effect fully hermeneutic, see Milton Singer, Man’s Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1984). 133 See in this regard Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in W.J. Thomas Mitchell, ed., On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 134 Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, Preface. 40

be able to know itself as such at the moment of its involvement, and that it requires the field of ideality in order to become acquainted with and to prevail over its facticity.”135 One must not, to be sure, misconstrue the nature of this “ideality.” Essences are not “metaphysical entities” (see PriP, 10); they do not exist, Platonic-wise, in rem, nor, for that matter, are they, as Husserl thought in his quasi-Platonism, things (of a quasi-sort) that can be directly intuited by means of an “eidetic insight” (Wesenschau). Everything is always, inextricably, part of a larger process, and the essence of any historical course of events is simply the way (Sosein) in which, in retrospective hindsight, i.e., narration or story-telling, it appears to the story-teller to have unfolded: Wesen ist was gewesen ist, as Hegel remarked. Essences are not things that can be “seen” or, faute de mieux, deduced; they are not mentalistic a priori (valid for all time) but are, rather, things of an “ideal” sort, which is to say (using the term “ideal” in a decidedly non-Husserlian sense) that they are semantic, interpretive -- which is to say, also, imaginative -- constructs of what has been and what, in light of a discernible pattern, is quite likely to be in the future.136 In short, the essence of anything is not an object (of whatever sort) that can be “referred to” or “intuited”; an essence is nothing more than a function of the interpretive-definitional statements we may make in order to appease our desire for intelligibility by saying “what” something or other is. The “whatness” (quidditas) of things is thus a function of the way in which, by means of language, we interpret them (for whatever purpose), and the “essential relationships” (Wesenszusammenhänge) between things (that metaphysicians believe are simply “there,” waiting to be discovered) are a function of the particular point of view with which we approach them. (The “correctness” of these points of view -- which, as Alfred Schütz observed, are never absolute but are always expressive of particular interests, theoretical or practical, on our part -- is always a function of their usefulness, as James would say, in leading us profitably from one resting-place in the stream of experience to another.) The point I wish to stress in all this is that essences, so conceived, are the only means by which we can prevail over our facticity (our lostness in the everyday world) so as to think our own history; as Hannah Arendt, a student of both Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, would say, they are the means for revealing “the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings.”137 To allude to an ancient maxim (sapientia est ordinare), the function of interpretation is precisely that of discerning, amid what is often a welter of confusing detail, the non-apparent, yet essential, order or logic in things. It should of course go without saying that, being interpretive constructs, the “essences” we arrive at in this way are always (to use a Husserlian term) “inexact,” and are thus always revisable in the light of further experience. It should also be noted that, although these essences or eidè are not “metaphysical entities,” they are also not (as Husserl rightly observed) mere generalizations or “inductions,” in the empiricistic sense of the term, and that, moreover, statistical analyses can never provide us with the essence of anything, since such analyses, in order to be meaningful, must always be interpreted in a suitable

135

See also Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on Husserl’s notion of eidetic insight in his “Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man.” (PriP, 54-55 and passim) In this lecture course Merleau-Ponty states that “a knowledge of facts always implies a knowledge of essences.” (PriP, 67) 136 Being semantic constructs, “essences,” like all concepts, have (as Gadamer pointed out [TM, 428ff]), their origin in the metaphorizing-analogizing imagination, and they are “validated” not by logical demonstration but by rhetorical persuasion (on the intimate relation between hermeneutics and rhetoric, see my The Politics of Postmodernity, chap. 4; on the heuristic and cognitive function of metaphor, see my Understanding: A Phenomenological-Pragmatic Analysis [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982]). 137 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1968), 104. 41

manner (statistical or regression analyses can of course alert us to the existence of patterns that we might not otherwise have noticed).138 One could equally well in this context speak of “ideal types,” a key notion in the phenomenology of the social lifeworld of Alfred Schütz that he took over from Max Weber.139 For Schütz, who remained faithful to Husserl’s transcendental turn and for whom the social world was essentially a “nexus of significance,” a “texture of meaning” (Sinnzusammenhang), the only way, by means of which we can grasp the logic of human affairs or discern meaningful patterns of human action (“the logic of everyday thinking,” or, as Geertz calls it, “the informal logic of actual life”), is by means of what he called “typification.” In attempting to understand the significance of what people do, the social hermeneut must view the results of human agency through the lens of “ideal types,” these being “constructs of the second degree, namely constructs of the constructs made by actors on the social scene, whose behavior the scientist observes and tries to explain in accordance with the procedural rules of his science”140 -- the assumption being that the function of the social sciences is that of attaining “objective,” i.e., intersubjectively verifiable, knowledge of the “subjective” meaning structures that guide and inform the action of individual agents. The reason why the social scientist must have recourse to second-order constructs, such as these, is because, as Ricoeur would say, the consciousness actors have of themselves is often a false consciousness, and the meaningful consequences of human action are often not the ones consciously intended by these actors. Because we are not sovereign consciousnesses (“a pure consciousness is capable of anything except being ignorant of its intentions,” as Merleau-Ponty said [PP, 440]), we do not have full control over the meaning of what we do and are liable to be surprised (often unpleasantly so) by the consequences of our own actions. In any event, depth psychology has sensitized us to the fact that we can never be altogether certain as to what our “real” intentions actually are. “To imagine that one might ever attain full illumination as to his motives or his interests,” Gadamer insists, “is to imagine something impossible.” (RAS, 108) As any number of observers of the human condition (or folly, as Erasmus called it) have remarked, human beings seem to have an undeniable talent for duplicity -- even, and perhaps especially, as regards themselves. Genuine self-understanding is always an arduous undertaking, as Gabriel Marcel indicated, when he stated: “The task of the profoundest philosophic speculation is perhaps that of discovering the conditions (almost always disconcerting) under which the real balance-sheet [of one’s life] may occasionally emerge in a partial and temporary fashion from underneath the crooked figures that mask it.”141

138

As economists Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Zilich have shown, “statistical significance” in pattern-analysis is no guarantee of real-world relevance and is not a reliable substitute for economic (interpretive) significance; see Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Zilich, “The Standard Error of Regressions,” Journal of Economic Literature 34, no. 1 (March 1996), and idem, “Size Matters: The Standard Error of Regressions in the American Economic Review,” Journal of Socio-Economics (forthcoming). 139 For a discussion of Schütz’s attempt to extend Husserlian phenomenology to economic science and to work out a phenomenological grounding for Austrian economics, the most prominent school of economics at the time, see my entry “Economics” in the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology; see also my “Phenomenology and Economics,” in Peter J. Boettke, ed., The Elgar Companion to Austrian Economics (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1994). 140 Alfred Schütz, “Common Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action,” in Richard M. Zaner and Don Ihde, ed., Phenomenology and Existentialism (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 293. In his discussion of “the typicality of the world of daily life,” Schütz was building on Husserl’s analysis thereof in Experience and Judgment, secs. 18-21 and 82-85. 141 Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 2 vols. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960), 1:207. 42

However great the difficulties of achieving a genuine understanding of things may be, the nature of the hermeneutic task as regards any historical/cultural community was nonetheless clearly stated by Merleau-Ponty. “It is a matter, in the case of each civilization,” he said, “of finding the Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, not a law of the physicomathematical type, discoverable by objective [objectivistic] thought, but that formula which sums up some unique manner of behaviour towards others, towards Nature, time and death: a certain way of patterning the world which the historian should be capable of seizing upon and making his own.” (PP, xviii) Given the hermeneutic difficulties alluded to above, Ricoeur was assuredly right when he said that there is “nothing…more obscure than the present in which we live.”142 (BSS, 648) Because of the “effectivity” of history, “we are located so completely in it,” as Gadamer says, “that we can in a certain sense always say, We don’t know what is happening to us.” (RAS, 36) But this is precisely why something like Schütz’s “typification” is indispensable if we are to understand anything at all. And although Ricoeur was also right, when he remarked that “every periodization is problematic” (BSS, 665), periodization, though always a legitimate subject for debate, is nevertheless indispensable when we seek to provide a properly narrative (“emplotted,” as Ricoeur would say) account of the past. In the various spontaneous orders of human endeavor -- and to the degree that, as in the case of the evolution of language or morals (moeurs), these orders are indeed spontaneous and not consciously designed and technocratically maintained -- an “invisible hand” or structural logic is always at work and (for better or worse) produces its effects independently of actors’s intentions.143 It is always a matter, as Merleau-Ponty said, of discovering “in this unrolling of facts a spontaneous order, a meaning, an intrinsic truth, an orientation of such a kind that the different events do not appear as a mere succession.” (PriP, 52) Despite Ricoeur’s aversion to terms like “modern” and “postmodern” (see BSS, 648, 660-61, 690), these periodizing terms (whatever might be the personal reasons for Ricoeur’s aversion to them) are highly useful ways of viewing cultural and intellectual history, i.e., historical and sociological processes, for, as Ricoeur does recognize, there are “certain trends in the history of philosophy.” (BSS, 665) It is the function of ideal-type analysis to identify these trends. Thus, although Ricoeur says that he doesn’t “know what ‘modernity’ is” (BSS, 648), it is not really all that difficult to know what the term “modern philosophy” means, as I sought to indicate in the first part of this paper. Likewise, in sociology and developmental studies, “modernization” has a well-defined meaning; we also know perfectly well what we mean when, in regard to architecture, we speak of “modernist” and “postmodern.” The case is no different with regard to philosophy. If one didn’t know that one of the essential characteristics of mainstream modern philosophy was its preoccupation with, as Gadamer would say, the “epistemology problem,” one could never appreciate the true significance of phenomenology (and Ricoeur’s own place within it). Indeed, to the degree that phenomenology effects a break with what Gadamer called the modern “era of epistemology,” phenomenology can, in this precise sense of the term, rightly be said to be “postmodern.” In opposition to the anti-theory movement in recent philosophy (and to the stance taken by Richard Rorty in this regard), hermeneutics staunchly defends the exercise of theory as described above.144 Human beings are, after all, “theoretical beings,” as Gadamer put it,

142

See also BSS, 690: “We do not know in what time we live. The darkness, the opaqueness of the present to itself seems to me completely fundamental.” 143 For a discussion of spontaneous orders and the “invisible hand,” from an hermeneutic point of view, see my The Political Economy of Civil Society and Human Rights (London: Routledge, 1998). 144 See in this regard my “The Practice of Theory/The Theory of Practice,” in Madison, The Politics of Postmodernity. 43

and they are such, precisely because “humans are the beings who have the logos,” i.e., language/reason.145 The hermeneutic fact of the matter is that we cannot make sense of our practices, or what Geertz calls our “shaped behavior,” without having recourse to theory (to typifications, periodizations, pattern-analyses, etc.) Without theory (the “field of ideality,” as Merleau-Ponty referred to it), experience would be meaningless. Without theory, we would have no well-formulated questions to put to our own mute experience that would allow us to bring it to the proper expression of its own meaning (“We cannot have experiences without asking questions” [TM, 362]), and thus, without leading questions, there would be nothing for us to learn. Moreover, without theory, without an interpretive grasp of the structural logic of the various realms or orders of human agency, we could not intervene -- in a responsible manner, that is -- in the empirical arrangement of things in such a way as, on the one hand, to enhance the likelihood of achieving the beneficial results we desire and, on the other hand, of decreasing the chances of inadvertently producing undesirable, counter-productive results. Without theory, there would be no social science and thus no means for bringing reason to bear on human affairs in such a way as to ameliorate the life conditions of humanity. Were there no eidetic-type laws (“formulae,” as Merleau-Ponty would say) discernible by means of theory in the way in which human events seem to unfold, we could never have any realistic hope of successfully making the kind of structural or institutional changes that are likely (subject, of course to the vicissitudes of Fortuna) to make for genuine progress and the greater freedom of all.146 As the preceding remarks indicate, the operant presupposition of hermeneutic reflection is that there is always a kind of objective logic at work in human affairs -- “objective” in the sense that this logic is not the result of mere human willing and wanting, and is, in this way, expressive of an element of “necessity” (necessità, as Machiavelli called it) in human affairs. This logic is, as it were, a logic that is the result of human action but not of human design. The logic at work in human affairs (Hegel referred to this as “objective spirit,” a notion that greatly fascinated Merleau-Ponty147) is objective in the sense also that the patterns of meaning with which the social sciences are concerned are not merely “subjective”; they exist, not in people’s heads, but, as Charles Taylor aptly remarks, “out there” in the intersubjective realm of social practices and cultural/political/economic institutions (the social/historical intermonde, as Merleau-Ponty called it).148 The fact that various such logics exist, renders vain the modernist, utopian idea that humans can arrange things however they see fit, so as to achieve total mastery over their own destiny (Ricoeur refers to this pathological form of utopianism as “the magic of thought”). Even Kant, that great believer in the ability of enlightened humans to take their destiny in hand and better their condition, recognized that “from such crooked wood as humanity is made of nothing perfectly straight can be built.”149 Although hermeneutics is fully in agreement with Kant on this score, it would, nevertheless, amount to a gross

145

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “In Praise of Theory,” Ellipsis 1, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 88. Laws of human behavior of the social-scientific sort can be formulated once the essence of any particular category, or its sub-types, has been (as Merleau-Ponty would say) “seized upon.” Lord Acton’s saying, that power tends to corrupt and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, counts as a universal law of a particular type (echoing Montesquieu, Gadamer observed that “every form of power, not just that of a tyrant or an absolute ruler, is dedicated to increasing its own power” [In Praise of Theory, 94]). For a discussion of the role of hermeneutic theory in the understanding of social practices, see my “Between Theory and Practice: Hayek on the Logic of Cultural Dynamics,” Cultural Dynamics 3, no. 1 (1990). 147 A key factor in the development of French phenomenology was the “existentialized” Hegel of Jean Wahl and Alexandre Kojève. 148 See Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in idem, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 36. 149 Kant, Idea for a Universal History, Sixth Thesis. 146

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misunderstanding of the hermeneutic position to think that it implies some kind of determinism and undermines the reality of human freedom. Freedom and necessity (le volontaire et l’involontaire, to allude to the title of one of Ricoeur’s early works) should not be viewed as metaphysical opposites. In actuality, eidetic, ideal-type analysis, by enabling us to realize what is “necessary” in human affairs, also, by the same token, enables us to realize what is genuinely possible. For, the utopian, revolutionist impulse notwithstanding, the not unhappy fact of the matter is that not just anything is possible at any moment. Since we are not pure consciousnesses fully aware of our motives and intentions, and thus fully in control of the meaning of what we do, there is a kind of objective logic or necessity at work in the various human lifeworlds. Through interpretation, it is possible to become reflexively aware of these logics -- but never in such a way as to be able to change them, just in any way we please. Just as, in reply to Habermas, Gadamer argued against the possibility of a total critique of “tradition” while, at the same time, maintaining that there is no inherited presupposition that cannot, in a piecemeal sort of way, be subjected to critique and revision, so likewise, although the logic of things is beyond the ability of humans deliberately to control, it is nevertheless always possible, through the creative power of the imagination, to introduce into this or that order of human behavior new structural/institutional constraints or incentives (in the economic sense of the term) which operate not in a moralistic (“subjectivistic”) way through an appeal to people’s “good intentions” but in a thoroughly praxial manner, by directly affecting people’s behavior. The same thing is true on the personal level. In both instances, social and personal, human freedom is the freedom to create new habits and new constraints, thereby altering la force des choses and opening up new directions for our being-in-the-world.150 As Merleau-Ponty pointed out in this regard, “Our freedom does not destroy our situation, but gears itself to it.” (PP, 442) Human freedom is never absolute, nor is it merely “necessity understood,” freely submitted to. Or again, for hermeneutics, human freedom is not the libertarian or anarchic (criterionless, unprincipled) freedom extolled by some poststructuralists (la liberté sauvage), pure, unconstrained spontaneity. Human freedom is a function of the ability humans have, as beings who have the logos (language/reason),151 of intervening judiciously in the course of events by interpreting necessity in a transformative way, thereby, on occasion, by means of a certain “power of initiative,” as Merleau-Ponty called it (PP, 439), bringing about new beginnings. The “gift of freedom,” as Arendt observed, is “the mental endowment we have for beginning something new, of which we know that it could just as well not be.”152 The crucial thing is that we exercise our limited freedom in a reflexively enlightened way.153 As Heidegger said, in response to Marx’s saying that philosophers have only

150

See in this regard James’s superb chapter on habit, in The Principles of Psychology. Cf. Merleau-Ponty: “We are born into reason as into language.” (SNS, 3) 152 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2:195. 153 In this regard, it should be noted that the dynamics of social orders can be, and often are, transformed or “short-circuited” in a totally unintended manner by human agents. By acting on what is seemingly predictable, given the dynamics of a given state-of-affairs, humans can, by that very fact, alter the course of events in unanticipated ways. Predicting the behavior of the stock market, for instance, can significantly affect what that behavior turns out to be. This has to do with what financier-philosopher George Soros calls the “reflexivity” of human behavior (George Soros, Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve [New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1995], 72, 209-220), a phenomenon that Ricoeur also talks about under the heading of the “self-fulfilling prophecy” (Ricoeur, Main Trends in Philosophy, 147-48). From a hermeneutic point of view, this is an extremely interesting phenomenon, in that it highlights an essential difference between the human order of symbolic interaction and the natural order of deterministic cause and effect. 151

45

interpreted the world, and that the point is to change it, the fact is that if we want to change the world for the better, we must first interpret it in the appropriate way. Therein lies the essence of human freedom. History is never rigidly determined, but neither is it ever simply invented -- “out of whole cloth,” as Marx would say. Historical forces (necessity) are something to be interpreted, and, in being so interpreted, transformed. The important thing is to think well. As Pascal said in his famous pensée on “man, the thinking reed, the weakest thing in nature,” the uniqueness (grandeur) of human beings in regard to nature is that they are reflective, thinking beings who, as such, know full well the great, crushing advantage that natural forces have over them, whereas nature knows nothing of this -- from which he concluded that “all our dignity consists in thought” and that, accordingly, “to strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.”154 Because, as Heidegger said, the essence of Dasein lies in its existence (ex-sistence, i.e., transcendence), the essence of the human being -- the speaking, story-telling, selfinterpreting, questioning animal -- is in fact nothing other than freedom itself. Necessity notwithstanding, we are, ultimately, as Dostoyevski said, responsible for everything we do. The fact, however, that our freedom, though real, is finite and that we are not pure consciousnesses, fully aware of our own intentions and thus fully in control of the meaning of what we do, introduces an element of tragedy into the human condition. It is especially tragic when we have no other option but to choose, freely but with heavy responsibility, not between the good and the not-quite-so-good, but between what are manifest evils, in the hope that the evil we do choose is a lesser evil than the others. Because we are free, we are also necessarily guilty, to one degree or another.

Hermeneutics and the Limits of Meaning Hermeneutic phenomenology is the philosophical search for meaning, understanding. As such, and as is the case with all attempts at understanding, it is guided by certain presuppositions. The most important of these is what Ricoeur calls the “postulate of meaningfulness.” That our lived experience is indeed meaningful and can, accordingly, be brought to the proper expression of its own meaning, is a “prejudice” or, as Merleau-Ponty called it, a “presumption on the part of reason,” but this presumption is not at all of an idealist nature (having to do with an “idealism of meaning”) and does not presume that there exists some kind of pre-established harmony between the rational and the real, or even that the notion of total intelligibility is at all meaningful. Hermeneutics’s postulate of meaningfulness is not metaphysical but phenomenological in nature, in that it is grounded in our own lived experience and is nothing other than the articulation, on the level of reason or reflection, of what Merleau-Ponty called our “primordial faith” (Urdoxa) in the existence of the world, a “faith” which is constitutive of what, as perceiving beings, we essentially and inescapably are. As Merleau-Ponty said in this regard, the “ever-reiterated assertion” in our lives is: “‘There is a world,’ or rather, ‘There is the world.’” (PP, xvii) The postulate of meaningfulness, one might say, is a “working hypothesis” of hermeneutic reflection -- one, moreover, that is borne out or “validated” in actual experience, for it is a fact that we are always able, to some degree or other, to discern meaningful patterns in the traces of human life. It is, of course, also a fact that no interpretation can ever legitimately claim to be “final,” to be the definitive truth of things, the one and only correct interpretation, for, as we also know from experience, there is no interpretation that

154

Pascal, Pensées. no. 200; see also pensée no. 620: “Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.” 46

cannot be challenged and is not susceptible of being displaced by subsequent, more developed and sophisticated interpretations. Any given interpretation, no matter how satisfying, is only, as James said, a provisional resting-place. “The very idea of a definitive interpretation,” Gadamer insists, “seems to be intrinsically contradictory. Interpretation,” as he goes on to say, “is always on the way” -- such that “the word interpretation points to the finitude of human being and the finitude of human knowing.” (RAS, 105) It is, in short, the nature of experience and interpretation that there can be no such thing as “the last word.” (Cf. GOC, 60). As the phenomenological psychologist Eugene Gendlin has shown in a revealing study of the relation between experience and expression (based on his own clinical experience as a practicing psychologist), it is the very nature of experience that the “felt meaning” of any experience can always be articulated in ever more refined ways; one “vital characteristic of experiencing,” as Gendlin points out, is that “any datum of experiencing—any aspect of it, no matter how finely specified—can be symbolized and interpreted further and further.”155 Adding to Gendlin’s observations on this matter, David Michael Levin points out that “the relation between experience and the language of its articulation is an ongoing process of hermeneutic disclosure, whereby (1) language forms the experience it is articulating in the process of articulating it and (2) experience continues to talk back to the words that have been used to render it articulate.”156 The unavoidable incompleteness, of any attempt at bringing our lived experience to the proper expression of its own meaning, that Gendlin has highlighted, is itself, as it were, empirical confirmation of Ricoeur’s basic conviction that in human existence there is a super-abundance of meaning to the abundance of non-sense (there is no experience that cannot be interpreted and reinterpreted productively, “further and further”). In any event, what the phenomenology of perception -- that of both Merleau-Ponty and William James -has shown is that, at its most basic level, the “stream of consciousness” is not the chaotic jumble of discrete “sense data” that British empiricism took it to be (or as James said of Kant’s metaphysical epistemology, “There is no originally chaotic manifold to be reduced to order”157) but is, rather, from the very beginning, the lived experience of an ordered, meaningful world. And as Merleau-Ponty said, “Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning.” (PP, xix) “The sensible,” as he also said, “is, like life, a treasury ever full of things to say.” (VI, 252) This is, of course, something that poets and great novelists like Marcel Proust have always known.158 In an arresting image, Merleau-Ponty once provided this description of the human situation: “Instead of an intelligible world there are radiant nebulae separated by expanses of darkness.” (SNS, 4) And thus, as he also said: “The highest form of reason borders on (est voisine avec) unreason.” (SNS, 4) Hermeneutics’s postulate of meaningfulness does not preclude it from recognizing the existence of a kind of radical ignorance and uncertainty in human existence; there is, as Jean Grondin rightly observes, “no triumphalism of reason” to be found here.159 Hermeneutics’s presumption of meaning, though rational, 155

Eugene T. Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the Subjective (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), 16; see also idem, “Experiential Phenomenology,” in Maurice Natanson, ed., Phenomenology and the Social Sciences (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 156 Levin, “Liberating Experience from the Vice of Structuralism,” 96-7. 157 James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:363. 158 In his Recherche, Proust describes many experiences of this sort, such as the one occasioned by the church towers of Martinville which he glimpsed in the course of an automobile ride, or the three trees near Balbec that he once sighted; see Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols. (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954), 1:180 and 1:717-19. 159 See Jean Grondin, “Gadamer on Humanism,” in Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, 167. 47

is not rationalist or idealist in that it is not simply a version of Leibniz’s “principle of sufficient reason” (nihil est sine ratione). In human affairs there are many things which are without reason or are resistant to reason, such that there is, and can be, no ultima ratio to which human beings could have access and which would bring their search for meaning to a happy conclusion. Apart from the absolute or “apodictic,” but empty, certainty of the Ego cogito type, the only kind of certainty available to humans is of a strictly relative and conditional sort, the kind of certainty Husserl called “empirical” or “presumptive.”160 Hermeneutics, as Ricoeur says, echoing Merleau-Ponty, is thus “a philosophy without any absolute.” (IA, 13) The highest knowledge we can attain to is the knowledge that there are many things we do not know and likely cannot ever know, or even know that we don’t know. As Pascal remarked, reason is nothing if it does not go as far as to recognize that.161 At some point or another, reason always runs up against the “opacity of the fact” which, as such, stares it in the face “with the inexorability of an enigma.” Hermeneutic enlightenment is not philosophical gnosis; it is, rather, as Gadamer said, “sophia, a consciousness of not knowing…. [H]uman wisdom is…the awareness of not-knowing [das Wissen des Nichtwissens], docta ignorantia.” (RPJ, 31, 33) “There is,” as Gadamer also stated, “no claim of definitive knowledge with the exception of one: the acknowledgment of the finitude of human being in itself.”162 To be reasonable is “to know the limits of one’s own understanding.”163 To emphasize, as hermeneutic phenomenology does, the unsurpassable finitude of human being is not, for all that, to issue a call for resignation in the face of the unknown; it is, rather, a recognition of the need for, as Merleau-Ponty would say, “unremitting virtù (la virtù sans aucune résignation).” (S, 35) The search for meaning can never be anything other than a constant struggle for meaning, a struggle against our inveterate tendency to misunderstand things -- as well as against what James called “a certain blindness” as regards the Other, and to which we are all prone -- by keeping ourselves open to new experiences, to further expansions in our horizons. When Gadamer said that “Being that can be understood is language,” he was not making a metaphysical statement and was not claiming that being could ever be made fully intelligible or that our life-experience could ever be fully explicated. He was, rather, pointing to what is morally incumbent on any reflecting subject: “The principle of hermeneutics simply means that we should try to understand everything that can be understood.” (PH, 31) “A hermeneutically informed notion of truth,” as Calvin Schrag observes, is one “liberated from its traditional epistemological paradigm,”164 which is to say that, for hermeneutics, “truth” is not so much a cognitivist-epistemological concept as it is an existential-moral concept and refers to a way of living, a resolutely communicative mode of being-in-the-world. Truth, for hermeneutics, is always of a “processual” nature and is a matter of “openness.” “The truth,” as Ricoeur says, “is…the lighted place in which it is possible to continue to live and to think.”165 Or, as Gadamer said, “The truth of experience always implies an orientation toward new experience…. The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in

160

See Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), sec. 77. 161 See Pascal, Pensées, no. 188: “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realize that.” 162 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Science of the Life-World,” Analecta Husserliana 2 (1972): 184. 163 Gadamer, “The Power of Reason,” 14. 164 See Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986), 187. 165 Paul Ricoeur, “Reply to My Friends and Critics,” in Reagan, ed., Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, no page no. 48

definitive knowledge but in that openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself.” (TM, 355) As a young Lithuanian phenomenologist has correctly observed, “while for Hegel experience is overcome in the closure of absolute knowledge, for Gadamer it is fulfilled in the openness to new experiences.”166 All language, even that of philosophy, Merleau-Ponty maintained, is indirect, and in whatever comes to understanding in our speaking of it there are always many things that necessarily remain unsaid. The most profound insight of Heidegger, who pursued with determination always the same question, the question as to the “meaning of being” -- or, as he preferred later to say, the “truth of being” -- was that the truth-process, the advent of truth (unconcealment, a-letheia), always has the dual character of both revealing and concealing. That being so, the self in search of self-understanding never experiences a “full” presence of itself to itself. Being in the nature of a process, human understanding is always only “on the way.” The important thing, that which allows for a certain coherence and meaning in our lives, is persistence in the asking of questions, for as Merleau-Ponty remarked, “Every question, even that of simple cognition, is part of the central question that is ourselves.” (VI, 104) Or, as Ricoeur’s mentor, Gabriel Marcel, had said earlier on, the question concerning the self is the question on which “all other questions hang.”167 An ancient Chinese sage once said: “The various artisans dwell in their workshops in order to perfect their craft, just as the junzi [the “gentleman” or wise person] keeps on learning in order to discover the truth [to reach the utmost of the Way].”168 This persistence -- “To know how to question,” Heidegger said, “means to know how to wait, even a whole lifetime.” (IM, 206) -- is what the Confucians called virtue (de), which consists in “awaiting one’s destiny (ming)” in “steadfastness of purpose.”169 This is the Way (Dao) of understanding and the basis of humanness (ren; humanitas) and the moral life.170

Postscript In this paper I have sought to cast a retrospective glance over some one hundred years of phenomenology, taking as my theme the interpretive turn in phenomenology. Despite significant differences between the leading figures I have considered (and despite the fact that some of them branched off in directions others declined to follow), there are, nonetheless, many commonalties binding them together. There is, indeed, as I hope to have shown in this “phenomenology of phenomenology” (limited, as it necessarily has been, to a select number of general themes), a certain logic -- dictated by the things themselves -- in the way in which phenomenology has unfolded over the last many decades and during which time new themes and concerns have appeared at this or that moment and some older ones have faded away. Given the protean way in which phenomenology has developed, it would undoubtedly be best to avoid speaking, as is often done, of “the Phenomenological Movement” (the

166

Saulius Genusias, “Analysis of Historically Effected Consciousness,” manuscript (2003). See Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 1:130. 168 Confucius, Analects, 19.7. 169 See Mencius, The Mencius, 7A1 and 7B33. 170 The Dao to which I have here alluded is the Dao of humanistic self-cultivation (Bildung) of the early Confucians and should not be confused with the mystical and anti-humanist Dao of Laozi, i.e., of “Daoism,” which was, not surprisingly, the Dao invoked by Heidegger (see Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz [New York: Harper and Row, 1971], 92). 167

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title Herbert Spiegelberg gave to his monumental history of phenomenology). Not only was phenomenology never a “school” of philosophy (as Spiegelberg readily allowed), it was not even a Movement in Spiegelberg’s (capital-M) sense of the term, i.e., a general, multifaceted trend of thought but one having a well-defined “common core” (this, as one might say, “hard core” being for Spiegelberg the disciplined, disinterested, and patient search for “essences” by means of a direct, intuitive grasp or “seeing” (Wesenschau) and faithful description of phenomena and their “modes of givenness” [to, as Spiegelberg says, “our inner eye”]). Husserl, as we know, hoped that his attempt at working out an ultimate science of being would be carried on after him by a dedicated group of researchers who would, in concerted teamwork, penetrate ever deeper into the field of pure subjectivity, mapping out ever more completely its essential, a priori, necessarily determined configurations. But this was not to be. In contrast to certain other trends in philosophy, there was never anything like a phenomenological orthodoxy -- or even a phenomenological orthopraxy. Certainly, there is a particular way of doing philosophy which is recognizably “phenomenological” and which makes for a definite set of “family resemblances” among its practitioners, but this is not to say that there is anything like a specific and commonly accepted “phenomenological method.” Perhaps the most that can be said in a general way about phenomenology as it has unfolded over the course of the last century is that, to use a term of Merleau-Ponty’s, phenomenology is a certain “style” of thinking (expressive of a “phenomenological attitude”), the “essentials” of which are an unremitting aversion to all forms of metaphysical reductionism and an abiding concern for the integrity of our own lived experience of things both human and natural. Whether this particular style of thinking -- this tradition -- can be expected to survive or even to flourish in this new century is another question. In the realm of human affairs, nothing is certain, but, given the recent renewed interest in the leading figures of classical phenomenology, and given also the significant number of new phenomenological organizations continually springing up, there are grounds for being, if not optimistic, at least hopeful in this regard.171 One thing that can be safely said, I believe, is that there exists no better conceptual apparatus than that of existential-hermeneutic phenomenology for counteracting the everpresent and seemingly ineradicable, naturalistic tendency on the part of humans to reduce human beings to that which is purely objectifiable (and thus manipulable) about them. The task of contesting this scientific-technocratic, anti-humanist, or “engineering” approach to things human, and recalling humans to their own humanness remains the indispensable task of any phenomenologically-inspired philosophy, both as a “pure” or general philosophy and in its “applications” to the different realms of the socio-cultural, the political, and the economic lifeworlds. In all these domains the supreme theoretical/practical task must be that of defending the claims of communicative or dialogical rationality (Vernüftigkeit) over the imperious demands and one-sidedness or “monologic” (as Gadamer called it) of merely instrumental or calculative rationality (Rationalität).172 In this respect, “phenomenology” is not just the name for a twentieth-century school of philosophy which may or may not have passed its zenith, but indicates, rather, what remains one of the most crucial tasks of thinking and which, as such, is something that, as Merleau-Ponty would say, still has all of its life before it (see PriP, 190). By its very nature, the truth of the phenomenological project can never be a “completed” truth (une vérité accomplie) but must remain always what Merleau-Ponty called vérité à faire. 171

At the present time, there exist some 117 phenomenological organizations world-wide. For information on developments in phenomenology, contact the web site of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology (CARP) directed by Lester Embree . 172 See in this regard my “Critical Theory and Hermeneutics: Some Outstanding Issues in the Debate,” in Lewis E. Hahn, ed., Perspectives on Habermas (Chicago: Open Court, 2000). 50

I shall, however, leave the last word to Heidegger, who was particularly attuned to what Marcel referred to as the “mystery of being” and who, however errant he may have been in some respects and however one-sided his “thinking of Being” may have been, nevertheless pursued the task of thinking with an uncommon steadfastness of purpose. After remarking how in the last century phenomenology determined the spirit of an age, Heidegger, in a late text, went on to say: And today? The age of phenomenological philosophy seems to be over. It is already taken as something past which is only recorded historically along with other schools of philosophy. But in what is most its own phenomenology is not a school. It is the possibility of thinking, at times changing and only thus persisting, of corresponding to the claim of what is to be thought. If phenomenology is thus experienced and retained, it can disappear as a designation in favor of the matter of thinking whose manifestness remains a mystery.173

173

Heidegger, On Time and Being, 82. 51

II.

TOWARD A TELOS OF SIGNIFYING COMPLETENESS: GABRIEL MARCEL AND PAUL RICOEUR

1.

“IF THERE IS A PLOT”: GABRIEL MARCEL AND SECOND DEGREE REFLECTION Paolo Diego Bubbio

Introduction The thought of Gabriel Marcel presents an ambiguous but interesting philosophical challenge. On the one hand, its importance for the development of the Existentialist movement is undeniable: the first edition of the Metaphysical Journal is published in 1927, the same year in which Heidegger published Sein und Zeit on Husserl’s review Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, but the early notes of Marcel’s Journal are dated 1914. Thanks to his hosting of the famous “Friday evenings,” he associated with many of the prominent philosophers of his day: Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Wahl, and Jean-Paul Sartre were among the many noted philosophers who attended these gatherings at one time or another. On the other hand, although he did not like to be labeled as an “existentialist,” referring to his own way of thinking as “Christian socratism,” the label of “Christian existentialist” which was attributed to him did not help his fame. His philosophy was considered merely as a “religious philosophy” (and this was a mistake, because his thought does not imply a preceding Christian profession of faith; thus it is rather a “philosophy of religion,” because his thought opens onto transcendence); other kinds of “existentialist” thought were preferred, and his thought has been almost forgotten.1 In our opinion, it is instead particularly interesting to focus on Gabriel Marcel’s thought, also for a reason of “topicality.” The epoch in which we live, characterized by a loss of shared values and by the confrontation (if not conflict) between different cultures, seems to issue to philosophy the challenge of expressing itself on the possibility of a thought able to be shared and “usable.”2 Nevertheless, the space granted to philosophy seems to be, at first sight, not very wide, particularly if we accept a hermeneutic point of view which excludes the possibility of a return to traditional metaphysics (which cannot be easily considered as shareable by different cultures and which, moreover, always hides within itself the risk of the assumption of a “violent” point of view) and the secular possibility of an absolute relativism (which renounces the search of a truly shareable sense, and which always hides the risk of a fall into complete aphasia). I think that a re-examination of some aspects of Marcel’s thought can help contemporary philosophy in setting out the boundary markers of this space. In what follows, I will try to make the point about the relationship between Marcel and phenomenology. Then, I will focus my attention on some central nuclei of Marcel’s thought: the notion of body, the notion of existence and the notion of “secondary reflection” (or “second degree reflection”). These themes are reciprocally connected, and I hope that the connection will be clear at the end of this paper, when I will treat the problem of universality. Finally, I will try to answer a question: is it possible to speak of a “Marcellian hermeneutics”?

1

Acknowledgment: part of this paper was written when I enjoyed the hospitality of Heythrop College, University of London, UK, and has been presented -- together with a previous version -- at the Philosophy Research Seminar (Heythrop College). Helpful comments from Peter Gallagher, Michael Kirwan, and seminar participants are gratefully acknowledged. I would like also to thank Tom Michaud and Brendan Sweetman for their suggestions. 2 See Maurizio Pagano, “La dimensione dell’universalità e l’esperienza ermeneutica,” in Giuseppe Nicolaci and Leonardo Samonà, ed., L’universale ermeneutico (Genova: Tilgher, 2003), 47. 55

Phenomenology and Method In Marcel’s philosophical education we can note three interesting points of reference. The first one is Henri Bergson, who was Marcel’s teacher.3 The second is British and American Idealism: Marcel studied deeply the thoughts of Coleridge, Bradley, Royce, and he often cited them in his works. The possibility of an influence of the phenomenological school of Edmund Husserl could be considered a problem, but this problem has been already solved, partially thanks to some explicit considerations formulated by Marcel himself, and partially thanks to the monumental work by Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement,4 and the fundamental article by Paul Ricoeur, Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology.5 Marcel “never claimed to be a phenomenologist.”6 On the contrary, in his Reply to Paul Ricoeur, he wrote: “I am barely acquainted with Husserl’s philosophy. I remember reading the Ideen some months before the beginning of the First World War and not understanding a word of it. I had not yet read the Logical Investigations. Much later I listened to the first Cartesian Meditations, when Husserl himself came to deliver them at the Sorbonne. At first I found them interesting, then tiresome.”7 The year of Husserl’s Sorbonne lectures was 1929; on August 5 of the same year, he wrote an entry of his second Journal, later published with the title Etre et avoir, which clearly shows his awareness of German phenomenology.8 And in The Mystery of Being, which contains the two series of Gifford Lectures given by Marcel in 1949 and 1950 at the University of Aberdeen, “he remarked twice with approval that Husserlian phenomenology had developed the conception of consciousness as intentional, i.e., as referring to something other than itself.”9 But we cannot speak of an “influence” in any case: “the truth seems to be that he is a largely underivative thinker.”10 Jean Heing, in his pioneering work entitled Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse, wrote: “We believe we may affirm that, even if German phenomenology (to suppose the impossible) had remained unknown in France, nevertheless a phenomenology would have been constituted there; and this, to a large extent, would be due to the influence of Gabriel Marcel.”11 Thus, where can we find a similarity between Marcel and phenomenology? We can find it in the philosophical approach and in the method of research. It is not by chance that Marcel uses the word phenomenology in the title of a lecture given to the Philosophical Society of Lyon in November 1933, “Outlines of a Phenomenology of Having,” later

3

“Indeed, I think I can say that, among all those whose courses I took, Henri Bergson was the only one whose thought and words took a sure and lasting hold on me.” Gabriel Marcel, “An Autobiographical Essay,” in Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1984), 17. 4 Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague/Boston/London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), 446-469. 5 Paul Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” in Schilpp and Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, 471-494. 6 Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 448. 7 Gabriel Marcel, “Reply to Paul Ricoeur,” in Schilpp and Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, 495. 8 Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 450. 9 Ibid., 448. 10 Kenneth T. Gallagher, The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), X. 11 Jean Heing, Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse: étude sur la théorie de la connaissance religieuse (Paris: Alcan, 1926), quoted in Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 448. 56

published in Being and Having.12 This work is cited by Ricoeur as evidence for the fact that “The refusal of system . . . is . . . what places Husserl and Marcel in the same philosophical light. I find no other explanation for Marcel’s use of the word.”13 In other words, there is an undeniable similarity between “Marcel’s refusal of system and his avowal of discursivity” and the famous “‘zu den Sachen selbst’ of Husserl.”14 The refusal of the system led Marcel to become an unsystematic thinker. But even an unsystematic philosopher needs a method -- maybe he needs a method more than a systematic thinker. Thus, the problem of a proper method became “more and more urgent for Marcel.”15 Marcel’s philosophical approach deals with the attention to the concrete experience rather than abstractions. In order to ground the philosophical ideas he is investigating, Marcel makes constant use of examples. He writes: I would like to make the point that for a philosophical approach like ours, which is essentially a concrete rather than an abstract approach, the use of examples is not merely an auxiliary process but, on the contrary, an essential part of our method of progressing. An example, for us, is not merely an illustration of an idea which was fully in being even before it was illustrated.16 The definition of his own thought as a “Christian socratism” is in fact linked with the attention to concrete experience and to the proceeding through examples. The use of examples is considered by Ricoeur as a point of contact between the Marcellian and the phenomenological method: “Again like Husserl, Marcel strives to decipher meanings on the basis of well-chosen examples and significant cases, and this implies that the essenceexample relationship is irreducible to any inductive generalization and consists in a direct reading of meaning in a singular fact.”17 This approach explains the skeptical attitude which Ricoeur always assumes when he examines the attempts of the abstract reason to express itself about the concreteness of existence: the objective constitutes for me (with a meaningful overturning) what is only apparent, thus unreal, and which constitutes for Marcel the sphere of the problematic.18 From this point of view, “His stake in phenomenology . . . represented a stage in his search for a concrete philosophy and for concrete approaches to it and to the ‘ontological mystery.’”19 Nevertheless, in order to analyze deeply the relationship between Marcel and phenomenology and, above all, in order to understand whether his thought can really represent a fruitful contribution to contemporary hermeneutic philosophy and to the question of universality, it is necessary to focus our attention on the notion of body and then on the notion of existence.

12

Gabriel Marcel, “Esquisse d’une phénoménologie de l’avoir,” in idem, Être et avoir (Paris: Aubier, 1935), 223-55; idem, “Sketch of a Phenomenology of Having,” in idem, Being and Having (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1949). 13 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 472. 14 Ibid. 15 Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 457. 16 Gabriel Marcel, Le mystère de l’être (Aubier: éd. Montaigne, 1951); idem, Mystery of Being, trans. Georg S. Fraser (London: The Harvill Press, 1950), I, 116. 17 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 472-473. 18 See Pietro Prini, Gabriel Marcel e la filosofia del concreto, introduction to Gabriel Marcel, Dal rifiuto all’invocazione. Saggio di filosofia concreta (Roma: Città Nuova Editrice, 1976). 19 Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 460. 57

Body and Coenaesthesis The starting point of Marcel’s way of thinking, broadly conceived, is a reflection about body. In fact, if we want to be concrete, we cannot leave this out of consideration. In order to clarify the relationship between me and my body, we have to use the notion of Coenaesthesis. Coenaesthesis is the common sensation of general and immediate perception of our body, an elementary form of bodily awareness. Coenaesthesis is the internal sensation of one’s body: in fact, the body is continuously perceived as one’s body by the person who lives it.20 What does constitute my identity? In other words, it seems necessary to understand “what connection my being – and by ‘my being’ I mean here just what I would mean by ‘my way of existence’ – has with what I call my body.”21 This connection is, according to Marcel, incarnation. If “I am my body,” as Marcel writes, “then existence is first of all incarnation.” Marcel explains: “the term ‘incarnation’ . . . applies solely and exclusively in our present context to the situation of a being who appears to himself to be linked fundamentally and not accidentally to his or her body.”22 If Coenaesthesis is the perception of my body as mine, incarnation is the consciousness that I cannot see the world but with my eyes, through my eyes. I can never “jump out of what I am.”23 My body is the insuperable border which distinguishes me and the rest of the world. It is clear that the starting point of Marcel’s way of thinking is very different from the phenomenological approach. As Ricoeur stresses, “Husserl’s first philosophical gesture is reduction. Marcel’s is diametrically opposed. . . . Marcel embarks on his itinerary by introducing the idea of ‘situation.’ . . . First and fundamentally, being implied or involved excluded both the distance characteristic of reduction and the promotion of a ‘disinterested spectator,’ the very subject of phenomenology.”24 The next step should be to analyze our consciousness. But this is not possible, according to Marcel, because to develop a real analysis, our consciousness should be more than what it wants to analyze. This is not the case, because the subject of this analysis is consciousness, and the object is consciousness itself. Marcel writes: “we must be wary of the tendency that leads us to place ourselves as it were outside consciousness in order to represent it to ourselves (here, as a mirror), for all this can only be an illusory advance, since it is an intrinsic quality of consciousness that it cannot be detached, contemplated, and considered in this way.”25 If on one hand we cannot understand our consciousness -- or, better, we cannot use our “objective reason” to grasp it -- and on the other hand we develop consciousness, it is a fact indeed. So, how do we develop it? We develop it as we perceive that there is something outside us. In other words, I understand that there is an “inside us” because there is an “outside us.”26 It is the perception of the “rest of the world,” of all which is beyond my body -- the body which I am -- that allows me to understand that there is something 20

Franco Riva, “Dall’autonomia alla disponibilità. Paul Ricoeur e Gabriel Marcel,” in Franco Riva, ed., Per un’etica dell’alterità. Sei colloqui (Roma: Edizioni Lavoro, 1998). 21 Marcel, The Mystery of Being, I, 103. 22 Ibid., 101. 23 Gabriel Marcel, Journal métaphysique (Paris: Gallimard, 1927, 1935); idem, Metaphysical Journal, trans. Bernard Wall (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1952), December 8, 1921. 24 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 476. 25 Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 1: 51. 26 “The existence of the other appears then as that which transgresses the sphere of personal belonging, like an irruption of otherness within the circle of sameness, constituted by the insular relation that I form with my vécu, my experience, my world.” Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 482. 58

inside me which makes me able to relate to the world around me. “Consciousness is above all consciousness of something which is other than itself, what we call self-consciousness, being on the contrary a derivative act whose essential nature is, indeed, rather uncertain; for we shall see in the sequel how difficult it is to succeed in getting a direct glimpse of whatever it is that we mean by self.”27 It is important to note that to understand that there is something outside me and that I can be related to it only through my eyes does not yet mean that I perceive other “selves” provided with a consciousness. First I perceive a world outside me, an indistinctive whole to which I am related but which is separate from me; I see nothing but other bodies around me. Only subsequently, once I have developed my consciousness, and thanks to the perception of this indistinctive world, I can, so to speak, “argue from analogy” and grasp that the bodies of the other human beings hide a consciousness in the same way I hide it to their eyes. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that a difference between the way in which I perceive myself as consciousness and the way in which I perceive other human beings as consciousnesses, always remains. This happens just because the perception of myself as a consciousness is immediate, whereas the perception of other human beings as consciousnesses is mediate; I distinguish them by analogy. This is also the reason why a human being always runs the risk of considering others simply as bodies, as tools which I can use.28 This conception of body is very important within Marcel’s thought and has a lot of consequences within his way of thinking. In this regard, Paul Ricoeur has spoken about an absolute “Copernican revolution” which “returns to the subjectivity its privilege.”29 This is, in fact, a quite unique conception within Existentialism and within that Continental thought which Existentialism has generated. Let us sum up: “The body that I call my body is in fact only one body among many others, in relation to these other bodies, it has been endowed with no special privileges whatsoever. It is not enough to say that this is objectively true, it is the precondition of any sort of objectivity whatsoever, it is the foundation of all scientific knowledge (in the case [sic] we are thinking of anatomy, of physiology, and all their connected disciplines).”30 From the other side: “The purely private self is an abstraction: the ego given in experience is a being-by-participation. . . . we cannot effectively divorce the self from that in which it participates, because it is only the participation which allows there to be a self. Participation, in other words, is the foundation -- the only foundation -- for my experience of existence.”31 In other words, as Ricoeur emphasizes, “the first ontological position is neither I existing nor thou existing but the co-esse.”32 At this point, the question is: how can I conceive myself as a unique and unrepeatable existent and, at the same time, aim at a real sharing of judgment with other existents?33 Even if the first ontological position is the co-esse, how does this position legitimate the possibility of any universality whatsoever?

27

Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 1: 52. It is interesting to note that in the Foreword to the English translation of his La Métaphysique de Josiah Royce, as Royce’s Metaphysics, trans. Virginia and Gordon Ringer (Chicago: Regnery, 1956), Marcel gave Royce credit for having helped him in the “discovery” of the “Thou” as the necessary correlate of the “I.” See Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 454. 29 Paul Ricoeur, Philosophie de la volonté. I. Le volontaire et l’involontaire (Paris: Aubier, 1950), 33. 30 Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 1: 93. 31 Gallagher, The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, XI. 32 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 484. 33 Marcel, Journal, 127. 28

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We have seen that we do not originally perceive our body as “a body among many others.” The analysis of the notion of body seems to demonstrate, according to Marcel, that it is necessary to use two different approaches, two different kinds of reflection. The first one argues that “this body has just some properties, that it is liable to suffer the same disorders, that it is fated in the end to undergo the same destruction, as any other body whatsoever”34; the second “does not set out flatly to give the lie to these propositions; it manifests itself rather by a refusal to treat primary reflection’s separation of this body, considered as just a body, a sample body, some body or other, from the self that I am, as final.”35 According to Marcel, the “fulcrum,” or the “springboard,” of this different kind of reflection is a “massive, indistinct sense of one’s total existence.” And here we can note the profound difference between Marcel’s and Husserl’s philosophical approaches: “it concerns the very relation of human beings and the world. For Husserl this relation may be raised to the rank of spectacle for the disinterested eye of the meditating ego. For Marcel the questions of suicide and of death impose on the human relation to the world the fundamental characteristic of concern. On this point Marcel is incontestably closer to Heidegger than to Husserl.”36 Our existence is incarnation. We cannot “define” it (“for, as the condition which makes the defining activity possible, it seems to be prior to all definition”); we only try to give it a name and to locate it “as an existential center.” The name given by Marcel to this kind of reasoning is “secondary reflection,” or “second degree reflection” (réflexion seconde). But, before we consider this kind of reflection as such, we have to clarify first what exactly Marcel means by “existence.”

Existence Approaching the notion of existence, we cannot forget the Coenaesthesis and the bond with my body. It is difficult, because we always have the temptation to keep outside the problem, but we cannot in any way: this problem, in fact, inevitably invades the whole scenario. In a certain sense, I am part of the problem that I am trying to analyze.37 It is important to resist this temptation, because to forget the bond with my body, which grounds my view of the world, means to surrender to the “spirit of abstraction.” In order to answer the question “What is existence?,” therefore, we have to begin from that existent the existence of which I cannot deny in any sense. Marcel writes: “This centrally significant existence, my denial of which entails the inconceivability of my asserting any other existence, is simply, of course, myself, in so far as I feel sure that I exist.”38 However, one could say that the fact that I exist is not so clear. It is evident that, with the expression “I exist,” Marcel means something more than the simple presence of a biologically alive body. Thus, one could say that we have firstly to answer the question: “Do I exist? And if I do, in which sense do I use the verb ‘to exist’?” Marcel argues that the question is badly put. We read: If, in the question, ‘Do I exist?’ I take the ‘I’ separately and treat it as a sort of mental object that can be isolated, a sort of ‘that’, and if I take the question as meaning ‘is’

34

Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 1: 92. Ibid. 36 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 488. 37 See Gabriel Marcel, Position et approches concrètes du mystère ontologique (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1977). 38 Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 1: 88. 35

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or is not existence something that can be predicated of this ‘that’? the question does not seem to suggest any answer to itself, not even a negative answer. But this would prove simply that the question had been badly put, that it was, if I may say so, a vicious question. It was vicious for two reasons: because the ‘I’ cannot in any case whatsoever be treated as a ‘that’, because the ‘I’ is the very negation of the ‘that’ whatsoever and also because existence is not a predicate, as Kant seems to have established once and for all, in the Critique of Pure Reason.39 Marcel stresses two points here. The first one is that the I is not a that, it is not a “mental object.” Of course, Marcel is not denying the possibility of thinking the I and treating it as an object, as a psychologist could do, when writing an essay about “psychological disorders of the I,” for example. To be honest, we are talking about the I as a mental object even in this moment. What Marcel wants to emphasize is that if I ask the question “Do I exist?,” I cannot consider my I as an object and, if I do this, what I am doing is a mere fiction. In other words, if I consider the I as an object within this question, I am not talking about my I, in fact, rather, I am talking about a concept. The second point stressed by Marcel is that existence is not a predicate. I cannot conceive the existence without the I -- or, better, without my I -- in any case. This is also the reason why Marcel strongly criticizes Descartes and the argument of cogito. Marcel sees, in this argument, the danger of a dissociation between the gnoseological subject, as an organ of an objective knowledge, and the vital element in our being. In other words, Marcel emphasizes the sum rather than the cogito; we cannot dissect the affirmation “I am,” because it refers to existence, and we argued that it is impossible to treat it correctly when using the traditional rational categories.40 Therefore, we established that “I exist” and that existence is, so to say, an “opaque datum.” The reason why, according to Marcel, we cannot use the rational in a scientific sense instrument to analyze it, is that existence is not a problem: it is a mystery. In Being and Having, Marcel explains: “A problem is something which I meet, which I find completely before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and initial validity.”41 Thus, Having is the way to solve the problems I find in the world. But what is Being? We could answer, in a speculative way, that it is the way to treat the mysteries I find in life, but this does not seem to help very much. First of all, we have to say that Being is something which deals with the notion of existence. In which sense? As a matter of fact we cannot use a rational, analyzing, dissecting, isolating language, we have to resort to a metaphor, so we can say that Being is the light and beings are illuminated by this light.42 It is interesting to note that Marcel adopts a “simpler” and “more concrete” solution than Heidegger’s one, about the relationship between Being and beings.43 One could also

39

Ibid., 90. Marcel, Position et approches concrètes, 264-5. See also Luigi Pareyson, Studi sull’esistenzialismo (Milano: Mursia, 2002), 184. 41 Marcel, Being and Having, 117. 42 See Entretiens Paul Ricoeur Gabriel Marcel (Paris: Éditions Aubier-Montaigne, 1968). 43 The relationship between Marcel and Heidegger is a very interesting topic, and it would deserve a larger treatment. According to Marcel, “this difficult philosopher, [i.e., Heidegger] is without doubt the most profound of our time, but the least capable of formulating anything resembling clear directions which could orient effectively the youth that turns to him as a guide.” Gabriel Marcel, L’Homme problématique, 40

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say that Marcel’s solution is more simplistic than Heidegger’s. It is true that the metaphor of Light is classic within the Western philosophical tradition, from Plato onwards. Nevertheless, there is an element distinguishing Marcel’s use and the classic use of this metaphor. This metaphor is used by classic metaphysical philosophers to explain that beings exist only because there is a Being conferring an ontological status on them. On the contrary, according to Marcel, “There is no way in which we can conceive of being as something cut off from existence.”44 Continuing to use our metaphor, we can say that we can see the light only in beings, which are illuminated by it. In other words, Being is a kind of horizon formed by the existences of all beings, of all individuals. Marcel does not distinguish between Existence and Being. Being is “being in a situation,” and thus is always changing. Our own mode of Being is being-in-the-world.45 In passing, it is interesting to note that Marcel’s thought is similar to Heidegger’s from this point of view, but is different if we consider existence itself. According to Heidegger, my existence is singular and unique because I am an historical being (Dasein), whereas in Marcel’s view my historical collocation is important, but not fundamental: my existence is singular and unique because I am I, thanks to my self-consciousness, because I see the world with my eyes. It is clear that, since the beginning of his philosophical work, Marcel confers on existence and consciousness a value which transcends the mere biological life and even the most complex psychic activity. Existence which deals with Being is something more, but Marcel does not demonstrate it; on the contrary, he affirms that it cannot be demonstrated, just because it is not a problem, in the meaning of the word that we have seen before; it is not something which deals with the scenario of Having. Is this an act of faith? The answer depends on the point of view. A materialist surely will answer that it is. For his part, Marcel probably retorts that the materialist is simply guilty of naivety, as he wants to apply to the sphere of Being a method of survey which is instead valid only within the sphere of Having. Moreover, scientific thought is universally valid just because -- Marcel says -- “science does not speak about the real, but in the third person.”46 whereas the thought on Being does not speak but in the first person.47 In this sense, what Marcel demands of his hypothetical materialist interlocutor is to wonder if there are not concrete experiences which can lead one to consider the plausibility of a speech on Being. It is not an act of faith: it is, rather, a wager. But if existence becomes, within Marcel’s thought, the indispensable datum of every concrete philosophical reflection, it cannot constitute the backbone of this reflection -otherwise philosophy could fall into vitalism or intuitionism. Therefore, it is necessary to find a philosophical strategy in order to formulate a thought which is concrete and nevertheless shareable, not merely subjective.

(Paris: Aubier, 1955), 147; quoted in Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 449. About the relationship between Marcel and Heidegger, see Dialogue sur l’espérance, in Gabriel Marcel et la pensée allemande. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Ernst Bloch (Paris: Présence de Gabriel Marcel, 1979). 44 Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 2: 33. 45 “Gabriel Marcel seems to have been the first to use the phrase être-au-monde in this sense, i.e., of “having business with the world” (“avoir affaire au monde”), while expressing his reservations about Heidegger’s too “spatializing” conception of être-dans-le-monde (in-der-Welt-sein).” Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 581, note 10. 46 Marcel, Journal, July 23, 1918. 47 “Three ideas are condensed here. First, speech in the third person is powerless to say «thou». Second, the recognition of the other is not a second step preceded by the certitude of the cogito, but rather communication is constitutive of my very existence. Finally, attesting to the presence of the other depends on my degree of ‘defensiveness’ and therefore on my «unreadiness» or my ‘openness.’” Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 484. 62

Reflection Philosophical thought is reflective. Reflection is the recall or re-examination of experience in order to understand or to comprehend it. Experience transforms itself into reflection. Reflection, according to Marcel, operates on more than one level. Marcel writes: “there is primary reflection, and there is also what I shall call secondary reflection.”48 What is first degree reflection? A problem is something I meet, which I find complete before me, but which I can reduce. Each problem can, in principle, produce verifiable solutions. We have to get sufficient distance from our own, subjective selves, in order to pose an objective problem, and thus we can get a verifiable answer. This is basically a phenomenological method, and Marcel believes that it will drive man to the right position. But it must also be emphasized that this kind of reflection -- first degree reflection -- “breaks the unity of experience,” as the subject does not enter into the object investigated. It is clear that Marcel, here, for “subject,” does not mean the body, but the I. When an experience deals with my I, I necessarily enter into the object investigated. But first degree reflection tends to ignore this. If we treat these experiences as problems, first degree reflection tends to analyze them, dissolving the unity of experience.49 “Reflection, because it is critical, is cold: it not only puts a bridle on the vital impulses, it freezes them.”50 Second degree reflection occurs when we recognize a break in the continuity of our experience: “To reflect, in this kind of case, is to ask oneself how such a break can have occurred.”51 Second degree reflection intervenes when I look back and realize that the “fixity” of the experience (derived from the work of first degree reflection) does not correspond anymore to the real, to the concrete. In this act, a keeping distance from the immediate happens; and this is the essence of the second degree reflection, and constitutes the condition of the possibility of thinking a conceptual universality which concedes nothing to the “spirit of abstraction,” but which on the contrary remains anchored to the concrete. Marcel gives a very concrete example of these dynamics: “A man who has been traveling on foot arrives at the edge of a river where the bridge has been carried away by a flood. He has no option but to call a ferryman. In an example such as that which I have just cited, reflection does really play the part of the ferryman. . . . I cannot go on just as if nothing had happened: there really is something that necessitates an act of readjustment on my part.”52 First degree reflection tends to break down the unity of experience, whereas second degree reflection tends to restore it: “Roughly, we can say that where primary reflection

48

Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 1: 83. It is convenient to say something, in passing, about the standard English translation of the two levels of reflection we are talking about. In French, Marcel calls them réflexion primaire and réflexion seconde. He does not use secondaire, which would translate perfectly into the English term secondary but means “subordinate,” “dependent.” These are not the meanings in the French term seconde; in fact, the réflexion seconde is not subordinate to the réflexion primaire: it is sufficient to note that Marcel sometimes defines the réflexion seconde as “reflection to the power of two,” which is very far from being “subordinate” or “dependent.” This is the reason why I prefer to translate réflexion primaire and réflexion seconde with “first degree” or “first level” reflection and “second degree” or “second level” reflection. I will continue to use “primary” and “secondary reflection” in the quotations. It is interesting to note that Marcel himself, who often used English words or phrasal verbs in order to explain his thought better, considering the English language more “concrete” and more close to the real, often complained about English translations of his works. 49 Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 1: 83. 50 Ibid., 1: 81. 51 Ibid., 1: 78. 52 Ibid., 1: 79. 63

tends to dissolve the unity of experience which is first put before it, the function of secondary reflection is essentially recuperative; it reconquers that unity.”53 It is important to note that second degree reflection does not go against the data of first degree reflection, but goes beyond it by refusing to accept the data of first degree reflection as final. According to Marcel, the level of second degree reflection is the area of mystery because here we enter into the realm of the personal. In second degree reflection, a person has to ask a question regarding his own existence. We have already seen an example of second degree reflection in Marcel’s discussion of man’s relationship to his body. According to first degree reflection, “the body that I call my body is only one body among others.” We have also already seen that the second degree reflection “does not set out flatly to give the lie to these propositions; it manifests itself rather by a refusal to treat primary reflection’s separation of this body, considered as just a body, a sample body, some body or other, from the self that I am.”54 In the same way, if first degree reflection considers existence a problem to be solved, secondary reflection considers it a mystery to be revealed. Before continuing, it would be worthwhile emphasizing two points about second degree reflection. First of all, it is important to underline that first degree reflection is a legitimate and very useful reasoning. We have to use it; but we cannot use it to treat a “mystery” as a “problem.” Marcel explains: To arrive at this or that determinate result, we properly make use of abstract thought, but there is nothing in the method of abstraction itself that has any note of the absolute about it. One might assert indeed, taking one’s stand against that mirage of abstract, absolute truth that has been thrown up by a certain type of intellectualism, that from the moment when we seek to transcend abstract thought’s proper limits and to arrive at a global abstraction, we topple over into the gulf of nonsense – of nonsense in the strict philosophical sense, that is, of words without assignable meaning. There is not, and there cannot be, any global abstraction, any final high terrace to which we can climb by means of abstract thought, there to rest for ever; for our condition in this world does remain, in the last analysis, that of a wanderer, an itinerant being, who cannot come to absolute rest except by a fiction, a fiction which it is the duty of philosophic reflection to oppose with its strength. But let us notice also that our itinerant condition is in no sense separable from the given circumstances, from which in the case of each of us that condition borrows its special character; we have thus reached a point where we can lay it down that to be in a situation and to be on the move are modes of being that cannot be dissociated from each other; are, in fact, two complementary aspects of our condition.55 First degree reflection, we have seen, “freezes” experiences: it has to do this, in order to use them. But I cannot “freeze” the experience dealing with my existence, because I am “on the move.” The second point: it is also important to emphasize that second degree reflection is indeed a reflection and does make use of concepts, but it is embedded in the concrete. Second degree reflection “can only get to work on the processes to which primary reflection has itself had recourse; seeking, as it were, to restore a semblance of unity to the elements which primary reflection has first severed. However, even when engaged in this 53 54 55

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Ibid., 1: 83. Ibid., 1: 92-93. Ibid., 1: 133-134.

attempt at unification, the reflective process would in reality still remain at the primary stage, since it would remain a prisoner in the hands of the very oppositions which it, itself, had in the first instance postulated, instead of calling the ultimate validity of these oppositions into question.”56 Therefore, second degree reflection does not represent a flight into a kind of irrationalism or mysticism.57 Second degree reflection makes use of concepts, but these concepts are expressions of concrete experience and are not formulated as abstract solution strategies to problems. Problems are indeed problematic precisely because they arose from and remain within the “spirit of abstraction.” According to Marcel, existence should be seen in this way, because life is a mystery, not a problem. But what does it mean, in the concrete? It means that men have the task of going beyond the problematic. And it means, at the same time, “a return to the immediacy of lived experience, though on a higher level.”58 Therefore, if first degree reflection can partially be identified with the phenomenological method, second degree reflection can also be seen, in this light, as an attempt to develop second degree reflection itself. Nevertheless, “Marcel never identified phenomenology with his second reflection, which is essentially a metaphysical or ontological approach.”59 Second degree reflection is indeed a return to the immediacy of lived experience on a higher level; but it is also an ontological approach, because the concepts used in the first degree reflection are still there in the second degree reflection, but they are transformed. They are not weakened; on the contrary, they are more concrete. From the instant in which first degree reflection applied to the real, to the instant in which I look back reflecting on that reflection, time has passed; and time has, paradoxically, made the concept more concrete, exactly as it has revealed its substantial fiction and fallibility.60 In other words, time has produced an overturning of concept, eliminating its abstractness and recovering its concreteness.

Time and Universality The conceptual space granted to second degree reflection is therefore a borderland, between the thoughts which practice solely and exclusively first degree reflection and ignore the essence of man as a “being on the move,” an existent who lives in time, and those nihilistic thoughts which, even if they recognize the Geworfenheit, in one way or another, turn out in identifying the most authentic dimension of time in the future. For Marcel, the dimension of plan (Entwurf) must not be rejected; nevertheless, favoring the future always implies the risk that the plan “devours,” so to say, the existence which it should address. In this case, the plan becomes the “postponement of existence to later”:

56

Ibid., 1: 93. Evidence of the fact that Marcel never renounced the use of reason and of concepts is this: “he considered the very term ‘intuition’ too dangerous and too loaded to call his metaphysical reflection ‘reflective intuition,’ as he once contemplated doing.” Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 460. Nevertheless, the “reflective intuition” does not overlap, at a deeper sight, with the “second degree reflection.” 58 Ibid., 460. 59 Ibid. 60 A confirmation of this interpretation, based on the centrality of the notion of time in the dynamic of second-degree reflection, can be found in the first part of Being and Having, and particularly in the note dated March 6, 1929. In this regard, see also John V. Vigorito, “On Time in the Philosophy of Marcel,” in Schilpp and Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, 391-420. About the notion of time, broadly conceived, see the recent and illuminating work of Ugo Perone, Il presente possibile (Napoli: Guida, 2005). 57

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it means inviting a being to plan instead of living. In this sense, the “prevalence of the future” is always a sign of nihilism.61 Marcel addresses his preferences to the past rather than to the future. In this preference there are, obviously, no Romantic tones, but there is a consideration of the past as the whole of the existential experiences which constitute the being who, here and now, I am. The profound memory of the past also allows a grasp, through the confrontation with my present, of my “being on the move.” Therefore, such dynamics constitute the starting point of second degree reflection.62 Nevertheless, according to Marcel, neither the future nor the past are the truly authentic existential dimension. The past, in fact, can always be “immobilized” and “frozen,” and the more we immobilize the past, the more the future appears as a past ante litteram, a past for anticipation. The past can be grasped in its profoundness only by linking it to the present, to that I, who, thanks to that past, is ‘I am’ hic et nunc. The present is, therefore, the most authentic temporal dimension: “There is not and there cannot be other origin of time if not the present.”63 Only the present owns, in fact, that feature of concreteness which allows me to plan myself authentically, whereas the past and the future have to be considered simply as a support and a reinforcement of it. Of course, also the present must not be “frozen,” but rather lived like “time on the move.” Only by planning a sense that begins from the present can we avoid the risk of nihilism. Such a process, in its ambiguity, constantly happens in the personal intimacy of everyone. The memories (i.e., everything I have been) represent the object which my present I interprets, while addressing them to my future I. It is the “being on the move” of the present which allows second degree reflection; and it is always a time lag which allows for a reflection, a reflection which can be considered a process of interpretation. At this point, it is important to note the relevance of Josiah Royce’s thought in Marcel’s development of this dynamic. An interpretation is real, according to Royce, only if the interpreters, i.e., the communicating subjects, constitute a real and concrete community, that is, only if the object does not remain extraneous, but is participated in by the interpreters. And it is important that this happen, especially if the interpretative process occurs in the intimacy of my I, because if the I who I am hic et nunc remains unconnected with everything which I have been and which leads me to be what I am, if it does not really participate in that heritage of memories, then my future I will also be excluded from it, outlining a process of total alienation.64 Marcel makes use of Royce’s theory of interpretation, but transfers it into a pure existentialist context. By using another notion introduced by Royce,65 he emphasizes that what is demanded, in the exercise of second degree reflection and in the interpretive process, is an act of loyalty to this concreteness. The penalty for a lack of loyalty to concreteness is the relapse into first degree reflection: the concept will “get cold” and will become again an “empty container,” without any concrete relationship with reality. To be “witness of concreteness” means precisely to recognize the second degree reflection and the fallibility of any concept which it shows, and to accept it consciously.66 The freedom of accepting or refusing second degree reflection presents two inseparable aspects. An ontological aspect: as it is a relationship with Being, my existence is a part

61

See Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator (Paris: Aubier, éd. Montaigne, 1945). The “prevalence of future” is one of Marcel’s criticisms of Heidegger. 62 Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 1: 194-195. 63 Marcel, Journal, September 15, 1915. 64 See Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual (New York: MacMillan, 1900). 65 See Josiah Royce, Philosophy of Loyalty (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999). 66 See Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 1: 170. 66

thereof. And an ethical aspect: that relationship is also, especially in its failures, the original interpretation of the truth. Moreover, such an ethical aspect of second degree reflection is linked with a constant attention to a theme which Marcel, in the Journal, labeled “the question of totality” and which, later, can be identified with the pursuit of a theoretic space where it can be possible to conceive an universal clearly personal but not exclusively subjective. In this sense, the privilege of universality is peculiar also to philosophy, and springs from an element which precedes every experience and which is at the origin of it: that “new immediate” which, for Marcel, is existence. This is why Marcel introduces second degree reflection: whereas first degree reflection tends to “freeze” the universal beyond every concreteness deriving from existence, the concrete universal, which constitutes the aim of Marcel, restores the connection between existence and concept, returning concreteness to concept. Precisely for this reason, this universal can become visible only in these intersubjective, historical and concrete experiences which actualize it.67 This is a clearly personal universal, as it roots in “my” concrete and particular existence, in “my” unique and unrepeatable look at the world; at the same time, this universal is not exclusively subjective, as it has not an unique “center” -- we can say, instead, that there are as many centers as “existent looks.” Therefore, only intersubjectivity -a term which, without doubt, Marcel assumes from Husserl or, in any case, from the phenomenological movement -- guarantees that “convergence of looks” which constitutes the concrete universality.68 In his paper Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology, Ricoeur writes: Thus for Husserl the concept of subjectivity is divided between a de jure universality, which fulfills its epistemological function of final justification, and a de facto singularity resulting from its thoroughly temporal constitution. It is the paradox that gave rise to the question of intersubjectivity. If the subject must be the final foundation and if the subject must be singular, there remains only one possibility: a kind of collegial or ecumenical foundation in which the virtually unlimited community of subjects carries the weight of universality. Less concerned with founding the sciences than with justifying human existence, Marcellian thinking attempts to escape from the choice between the universal and the particular by adopting an “intermediary level,” which is illustrated by aesthetic experience.69 Clearly, the aesthetic experience is not limited to what is usually considered a “work of art.” In some way, the experience of second degree reflection is an aesthetic experience, precisely because it is, essentially, an interpretative act. There is, in Marcel, an attempt of neither renouncing the concept -- though, as we said, this concept is an “overturned” concept, to the point that it loses every abstractness and reconquers the concreteness lost in the abstraction -- nor the possibility of the universality connected with the concept. Through a keeping distance from the immediate, where time plays a fundamental role, second degree reflection succeeds in grasping, or at least in having a look at what eludes first degree reflection: second degree reflection reaches its aim precisely when it shows us the failure of reason.

67

For a general introduction of this topic, see Pagano, La dimensione dell’universalità e l’esperienza ermeneutica, 67-68. 68 See the Conclusion of Marcel, The Mystery of Being, particularly 171-172. 69 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 480-481. 67

Conclusion A reference to religion appears only at the end of Marcel’s typical way of thinking. Second degree reflection, we have seen, is basically a kind of reasoning; nevertheless, it deals with transcendence. Using second degree reflection, it is possible to look at what cannot be conceptualized. It happens when first degree reflection reaches its limits; thus second degree reflection arises from the failure of first degree reflection. Marcel writes: “it may be that reflection, interrogating itself about its own essential nature, will be led to acknowledge that it inevitably bases itself on something that is not itself, something from which it has to draw its strength.”70 According to Marcel, transcendence is not something different from, or separate from experiences; on the contrary, we can approach the transcendent through experiences. Moreover, Marcel thinks that there are experiences which are purer than others -- love, friendships, hope -- and that this kind of experience opens us to transcendence. Marcel uses another metaphor here: “One might say, for example, that experience has varying degrees of purity, that in certain cases, for example, it is distilled, and it is now of water that I am thinking. What I ask myself, at this point, is whether the urgent inner need for transcendence might not, in its most fundamental nature, coincide with an aspiration towards a purer and purer mode of experience.”71 As a conclusion, it is worth examining Ricoeur’s shrewd criticism of Marcel’s opposition between mystery and problem. According to Ricoeur, this opposition “could not be established without immediately destroying the philosophical enterprise as such, threatened with a shift to a philosophico-religious fidéisme.”72 But, as we have seen, Marcel’s thought does not require an “act of faith;” rather, it requires a wager. Using second degree reflection means precisely to accept this wager. Marcel explains: “Thus one may see fairly clearly how secondary reflection while not yet being itself faith, succeeds at least in preparing or fostering what I am ready to call the spiritual setting of faith.”73 A wager is not a shift to some fidéisme; or better, it is not an act of faith more than the opposite choice. In other words, at the roots of every philosophy (or, better, at the roots of every human existence) there is always a wager: we can wager for the sense or for the absence of sense, that is, the nothingness. Of course, Ricoeur is right when he argues, “If the ontological affirmation were in no way an intellectual act, then it could not be elevated to philosophical discourse.”74 In fact, if Being is the “uncharacterizable,” “the unqualified par excellence,” it risks becoming also “the pure indeterminate.” It is true that Marcel, in his “Reply to Paul Ricoeur,” admits his own imprecision in the use of these terms, and explains that “Instead of ‘uncharacterizable’ one should say ‘non-characterizing’”75; but this explanation, if it reduces the problem, does not solve it. And the problem was already emphasized by Marcel in Being and Having and sounds in this way: how can something which cannot be reduced to a problem actually be thought? The question profoundly implies the essence of an existential philosophy which, as Ricoeur stresses, “cannot . . . limit itself to a critique of objectivity, of characterization, and of the problematic; it must be supported by the determinations of thought and by conceptual work whose resources are exhausted neither by science nor by technology.”76

70 71 72 73 74 75 76

68

Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 1: 38. Ibid., 1: 55. Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 489. Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 2: 66. Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 489. Marcel, “Reply to Paul Ricoeur,” 495. Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 491.

According to Ricoeur, “It is here that Husserl’s work recovers its legitimacy.”77 As a matter of fact, second degree reflection, seen from this point of view, holds a fundamental feature of the phenomenological dynamics, that is, the capacity to reconquer “a second naïveté presupposing an initial critical revolution, an initial loss of naïveté.”78 What can be said of Ricoeur’s position, which is a criticism and, at the same time, the proposal of a solution? A possible answer can be that offered by Spiegelberg, who explains: “Ricoeur makes it plain that he considers his epistemology “imperfect” . . . Thus Ricoeur was clearly unprepared to go to the full length of Marcel’s “mystic” antirationalism and tried to supplement it by the “rationality” of the Husserlian approach.”79 But is Marcel really an “anti-rationalist,” a “mystic”? As we have said, Marcel’s second degree reflection seems to be very far from every form of “mystic” intuition, and Marcel himself writes: “The incomparable merit of Kant and, I might add, of Fichte as well was to be fully aware of the dynamic character of reason, even if they were wrong in trying to fix it within immutable categories or within a dialectic that ultimately risks becoming tyrannical. This is sufficient to explain why I will never allow myself to be called an irrationalist.”80 Marcel keeps his distance from Husserl, saying that his own philosophical thought is “essentially an opening on and toward drama and not at all, like Husserl’s thought, an opening on and toward science;”81 but this affirmation need not be considered as a way to keep distance from any form of reason whatsoever. Second degree reflection is indeed “a second naïveté”; it is not based on a phenomenological “epoché,” but on a wager which rises from the paradox of existence and manifests itself as interpretation. In this sense, we can speak of a “Marcellian hermeneutics,” but a specification is necessary. Marcel “accuses” Husserl’s phenomenological perspective and Heidegger’s “mystic” philosophy of the same gap: he does not see concrete existence at the center of their thoughts. But a real, concrete philosophy must always have, at its center, the paradox of existence. As Kenneth T. Gallagher stresses, “The paradox is that this elusiveness is an essential constituent of his thought.”82 And Marcel argues: “I insist very firmly that all this must not be interpreted in an irrational sense: or rather, that such an interpretation would postulate a degraded conception of reason which would amount to identifying it with understanding.”83 The consideration of concrete reality as paradoxical refers to another Marcellian notion: the “reflective intuition” or “blind intuition” or “blinded intuition,” a fascinating notion never completely elaborated. The ‘blinded intuition,’ which depends on second degree reflection, constitutes the height of the failure of reason but, with a paradoxical movement, constitutes also an overturning of reason; in fact, there is no doubt for Marcel that the analytical and reducing reason, clashing with existence, inevitably fails -- but, at the same time, there is no doubt that this crisis can transform reason, rather than destroy it.84 The passage from the former to the latter level of reflection is therefore characterized as an overturning of the conceptual activity, with ceases to proceed in the “traditional” and “rationalistic” way and becomes existential and practical. When reason reaches its own 77

Ibid., 492. Ibid., 492. Ricoeur concludes: “This hard destiny is perhaps what distinguishes philosophy from poetry and faith.” 79 Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 590. 80 Marcel, “Reply to Paul Ricoeur,” 497. 81 Ibid. 82 Gallagher, The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, IX. 83 Gabriel Marcel, “Foreword,” in Gallagher, The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, XV. 84 See Xavier Tilliette, “Schelling e Gabriel Marcel: un ‘compagno esaltante,’” Annuario Filosofico 3 (1987): 243-254. Tilliette emphasizes the relationship between the Marcellian “blind intuition” with the Schellingian “ecstasy of reason.” 78

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limits, it paradoxically reaches also its landing place, i.e., authentic reality. This is the critical moment in which reason stops and is overturned; while forced to acknowledge its failure in front of the mystery of existence, it nevertheless approaches a deeper and richer reality. Therefore, blind intuition is also the beginning, the incipit of another reason, different from the rationality which has preceded it exactly because this “new” reason has its roots in the existential experience. Through second degree reflection, Marcel tries to set out the boundary markers of a new philosophical proceeding, a new language -- and here, in our opinion, Marcel is not very far from a certain part of contemporary hermeneutics.85 The “surveillance” and the rigor of reason cannot consequently be detached from existence and concreteness, and these cannot be detached from that flickering of sense which we can find in the fundamental human feelings -- those which Marcel calls “concrete approaches” -- like love or friendship. The very essence of Marcel’s thought, which is very topical from this point of view, is his absolute determination in the pursuit of sense. When Marcel uses the expression “If life has a point” in The Mystery of Being, he adds to the French expression the English sentence “if there is a plot.”86 This expression is more than a metaphor: it represents the aim of his whole thought. Questioning if life has a point, not renouncing it to pursue the sense of existence, means properly to believe that there is a plot and that, though it can sometimes appear absurd, we can always choose or, better, wager on sense or on nothingness. But it also means that, if we wager on sense, this demands an effort -- existential and philosophical at the same time -- in order to attempt to understand existence, starting from that “concrete approach” which, alone, can indicate the directions. In the current context, dominated on the one hand by the crisis in traditional metaphysics and, on the other hand, by the constant risk of an acceptance of the absence of sense (which is, in the last analysis, always a choice for non-sense), the perspective opened by Marcel’s thought can be fruitful for a philosophy which intends to re-appropriate its own speculative vocation, helping to delineate suitable limits for a space of possible sharing (within universality), while at the same time remaining faithful to the concreteness of existence.

85

See Paul Ricoeur, Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers. Philosophie du mystère et philosophie du paradoxe (Paris: Editions du Temps Présent, 1948); Marco Ravera, Introduzione alla filosofia della religione (Torino: UTET, 1995), 149f. 86 The French expression is “si la vie a un sens” (Marcel, Le mystère de l’être, 1: 189). It is interesting to note that the English expression has been maintained in the French edition, whereas in the English edition we find an ellipse which inevitably damps the strength of the expression: “If life has a point – or as we would say here, not to break the metaphor, a plot or a theme.” Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 1: 173. 70

2.

HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY AT THE BOUNDARY OF REASON: MEANINGFUL GRAFT OR SUBVERSIVE DEVIATION

Patrick L. Bourgeois

The conflation of phenomenology with the older tradition of hermeneutic produced some ambiguity in what emerges as hermeneutic phenomenology. One must still question whether this is the product of a fruitful graft or, rather, a subversion that requires more attention today. In this context there are two particularly relevant paths from phenomenology through hermeneutics to ontology that are of special interest, those of Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur. It is the thesis of this paper that these two quite different paths to ontology, directed by choices of method, require that we take a position between the two of them. The exclusions entailed in such a choice become exacerbated in light of further subversions produced by deconstructive enlightenment of recent postmodern thinking, the challenge of which is so fundamental that it threatens the entire project of any such philosophy. These developments away from the pure form of early phenomenology spring from certain realizations, which have been reinforced by recent postmodernists: that Husserlian intuition of presence contains an absence; that the living present contains alterity (retentions and protentions); and that the univocity of meaning gives way to the enigma and ambiguity of symbols, myths, or story. Hence, strict Husserlian intuition falls apart. Such alterity in the actual grafting of hermeneutics onto phenomenology, however, is not a stark otherness in sense and in the living present, but, rather, allows for continuity, richness and fluidity. This grafting of hermeneutics onto phenomenology is an attempt to read the deeper dimensions of the senses of existence beyond univocity, but without making the alterity too alien to the full sense of existence; and without making the living present a concatenation of discrete moments now. Thus, rather than a regression, this graft of hermeneutics onto the wild stock of phenomenology in the approach to existence preserves and extends the main gains of phenomenology: phenomenological primordiality in relation to lived experience, the priority of the holistic living present over a reduced discreteness in relation to its retentions and protentions and the priority of the semantic over the syntactic in language. Thus, I am defending the grafting of hermeneutics onto phenomenology as an extension of a method in the attempt to do greater justice to its ability to make sense out of experience, language, and Being. Rather than a subversion, this conflation of these two traditions reveals a recognition of early phenomenology’s myopic hope and weakness in over-playing the role of intuition, the cogito and the univocity of sense, especially as the developed method focuses on the complexities of human existence. Such a graft or conflation of hermeneutics and phenomenology cannot be allowed to confuse method and content, as Descartes and Husserl do. Any philosophical method, strictly as a method, while needing to be attuned and responsive to that which it interprets and explicates, cannot allow the very appropriation of method to predetermine the philosophical position. Such prejudiced appropriation of method must be considered to have forced Descartes into a mechanistic reading of nature and Husserl into idealism. In each case, metaphysical content was allowed at a pre-critical level to infiltrate the process of appropriating method: in Descartes’s case, presuming that nature is what the slanted perspective of a mathematical physicist sees -- mechanism; and in Husserl’s case, presuming that the transcendental as method has to be assumed in any derivation of a sense of Being -- the bringing about of a closure within the brackets of transcendental phenomenological method that sets the stage prior to any approach to ontology. Although it has been on the scene for some time now, hermeneutic phenomenology, as the welding and melding of two distinct traditions, can still be seen as having one of 71

the most meaningful contemporary sweeps in addressing the sense of existence, even within the context of the postmodern situation. Perhaps one must at this point admit that the opening of phenomenology to hermeneutics cannot constitute the entirety of philosophy, but, rather, it is merely a necessary stage through which any serious contemporary effort passes for philosophical adequacy in any attempt to do justice to interpreting existence. Such a stage on the way toward a fuller philosophy, allows -- even forces -- any attempt at a more far-reaching reading and writing to avoid over-simplification and to do justice to the richness of existence without reducing it to a false unity or univocal sense. I believe that it is obvious to any serious scholar in contemporary thinking that such a grafting of hermeneutics onto phenomenology is not only viable but necessary. Yet there is more than one way for this to be worked out, and I believe that somewhere within the contrasting approaches of Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur lies a very viable way of actualizing this renewed method, and one which responds well to the challenge of deconstruction in its tendency to subvert sense or meaning and the living present. I consider the subversion of such deconstruction to lie in a simplistic dichotomy between the living present and its constitutive elements of retention and protention, and the closure entailed in any sense or meaning at which one arrives. While it may be the case that I am over-interpreting this dichotomy in deference to hermeneutic phenomenology’s reading of sense and the living present, it is clear from his texts that Derrida tends toward the extremes, even though these may be only latent. I have explored the extremes1 so that the gains of a middle way -that of hermeneutic phenomenology -- can be won, and the regressive move by deconstruction can be redirected.2 In order to prevent these extremes, the enlightening ways of such a graft by Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur can be invoked. The outcome of their expansion in relation to one another pushes to the fore a path for philosophy today that is open to the tradition both of the past as well as of the future as one aspect of the ongoing and living tradition unfolds. The stark contrast between their appropriations of hermeneutics and phenomenology must be clear in the effort to work out a unified and consistent method. The reciprocity that Ricoeur admits between phenomenology and hermeneutics, in acknowledging the influence of Husserl and at once that of the tradition of Biblical hermeneutics, must be considered in contrast to Heidegger’s attempt to develop phenomenology in such a way as to coordinate hermeneutics with the internal development of Dasein’s understanding, thus supposedly deepening the arc of hermeneutics to the point where the previously hidden pre-comprehension of Being emerges as the guideline for focusing on human existence in ontical terms. In his pivotal essay “Existence and Hermeneutics,” Ricoeur contrasts his own “longer way” to ontology to Heidegger’s “shorter way,” contending that he remains on the level of epistemology of interpretation and its conflicts of hermeneutic methods before moving too quickly to the ontology of understanding as Heidegger does. In doing so, he avoids a too quick move to interpreting a unity of human existence that is, for him, more an aim than a given, as for Heidegger. In addition, he avoids the facile and prejudiced interpretation of human existence as essentially constituted by finitude at the expense of the infinite. Thus, Ricoeur avoids the typically Heideggerian move to collapse reason to sensibility.

1

Patrick L. Bourgeois, Philosophy at the Boundary of Reason: Ethics and Postmodernity, Vol. 1 (New York: SUNY Press, 2001); idem, “Semiotics and the Deconstruction of Presence: A Ricoeurian Alternative,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (1993): 261-279; idem, “Trace, Semiotics, and the Living Present: Derrida or Ricoeur,” Southwest Philosophy Review (1993): 43-63. 2 See Patrick L. Bourgeois, “Hermeneutics and Deconstruction: Paul Ricoeur in Postmodern Dialogue,” in Andrzej Wiercin´ski, ed., Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003), 333-350. 72

Although there seems to be a wide gulf between the hermeneutics of Ricoeur and Heidegger, their views are close enough so that an encounter between them proves to be quite profitable for hermeneutics today in the postmodern situation. What will become clear is that each can learn a lesson from the other: the Heideggerian short way learns that there is an advantage to dwelling on the ontic level in order to resolve conflicts and to solve problems often overlooked in attempting to trace the most direct route to the question of Being; and the Ricoeurian long way learns that the short way must be questioned in terms of a vision of a certain existential neutrality. The ensuing discussion will first turn to Ricoeur’s critique of Heidegger’s short way in favor of his long way before entertaining the possibility of inverting a basic dimension of that criticism from Heidegger’s direction and before somewhat dissolving the radical antithesis between these two ways, thus providing a mutual enhancement of and a reciprocal gain for each way. One of Ricoeur’s basic objections to Heidegger’s short way is that it too quickly reaches a unity of Dasein, which Ricoeur considers not to be forthcoming, and which remains for him problematical in the sense that the unity of man can be considered only as a regulative idea rather than one which an ontology of Dasein should reveal. Heidegger, however, shows the advantage of a prior guidance from an originary level. For Heidegger, this is an ontology that provides a comprehensive and foundational unity below the torn existence which supports the conflict of the hermeneutics of existence that have preoccupied Ricoeur for so long. The question for us now is whether the Heideggerian short way provides a guidance to Ricoeur’s long way, or, rather, whether it subverts Ricoeur’s efforts to read various and conflicting aspects of existence. Thus the question must be confronted as to whether it is necessary to take Ricoeur’s long way without the Heideggerian pre-comprehension as guide. Which is more fundamental? This inevitably leads us to the question of the priority of the epistemic or ontological in this context. This will be seen to be a false question in that the epistemological and ontological are equi-foundational and are merely two possible methodological focuses on the same phenomenon. This point will not be easy to establish in any Heideggerian context, but Ricoeur’s emphasis is instructive in helping us expand on both his and Heidegger’s limited view of the problem. Ricoeur emphasizes the conflict of interpretations as revealing differing aspects of existence that ontically found various hermeneutic methods.3 Further, on this ontic level and in an extended ethics, he has focused pointedly upon the problem of the place of evil in freedom within human existence and upon the ontic relation of human existence to the Sacred, which is central to his whole philosophy. Thus, for Ricoeur, pausing to dwell on the ontic has fostered an integration or a dialectizing of the symbols which support a phenomenology of spirit and a psychoanalysis of desire, with their respective orientations to teleology and to archeology, both of which prepare for the relation to the Sacred within a phenomenology of religion and its eschatology. These advantages of the long way, for Ricoeur, militate against Heidegger’s short way. Although his myriad writings on the hermeneutics of existence and its conflict of interpretations in a philosophy of limits within the boundary of reason seem to entail a lengthy detour in dwelling on this ontic level before reaching the promised land of ontology, their resolution still indicates the advantage of dwelling on the ontic level further than Heidegger does. The fundamental justification of the long way over the short way to ontology is the underlying difference in the fore-comprehension of human existence. For Ricoeur the unity of man can only be a regulative idea, not achieved in existence and not easily accessible to an ontology worked out too quickly. He says: “Moreover, it is only in a conflict of

3

Paul Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in idem, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 19. 73

rival hermeneutics that we perceive something of the being to be interpreted: a unified ontology is as inaccessible to our method as a separate ontology. Rather, in every instance each hermeneutics discovers the aspect of existence which founds it as method.”4 Thus, at the very outset, Ricoeur has challenged Heidegger’s view of care (Sorge) in a fundamental ontology emerging from an existential analysis of Dasein properly grasped in fore-comprehension. In addition, his view of the fallenness of human existence, in avoiding the ontologization of fault by placing evil in the disproportionate existential synthesis between the infinite and the finite, militates against the quick move from the concrete existence of man to conditions of possibility of that everyday existence. Thus, a great contrast is evinced in the differing passages from existence to ontology by Ricoeur and by Heidegger. Heidegger does not share Ricoeur’s view of existence as fallen, nor does he dwell on the founding in ontic existence of the conflicting interpretations and questions of method, which arise from that conflict. It is here that the Heideggerian way needs expansion to include human existence as a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the ontic aspects of which are far more complex than what can be revealed in a mere analysis of the everydayness of Dasein as the starting focus of the hermeneutics of Being. Such an exclusion challenges Heidegger’s fore-comprehension of the Being of Dasein in a unity that does not see the polemical synthesis of the infinite and finite on the cognitive, practical and affective levels. This is a synthesis rather than a unity. There is a difference, and the Heideggerian pre-comprehension must be instructed to see it. It is also clear that Ricoeur’s view is in need of a partial adjustment. The adjustment, however, is demanded by the exigencies of the fore-comprehension of concrete human existence reaching toward ontological understanding. Yet a delay or detour is needed before reaching it. This pause is a necessary one, and not done merely for the sake of rendering two disparate philosophies compatible. The consequence of these adjustments is that the respective passages to ontology by Heidegger and Ricoeur become somewhat more compatible and reciprocally beneficial, and at once mitigate the distance between the hermeneutics of existence and hermeneutic ontology. This discussion will turn now to Ricoeur’s view of human existence as fallen in order to provide an adjustment which removes, in part, an unnecessary limitation to existence and hence to its interpretation. Ricoeur’s philosophy recasts the Kantian view of the demand on the part of reason for totality, as well as reason’s placing of a limit on experience, in terms of his own development of a view of the quasi transcending of this limit as boundary through indirect expressions such as symbols and metaphors. In addition, for Ricoeur, such a demand for totality in a philosophy of boundary requires that ethics be extended beyond the Kantian formal ethic of law and freedom to an ethics of the actualization of freedom in the act of existing. Such an extended ethics relocates the place of radical evil in existence, and freedom to the synthesis between the infinite and the finite as the existential structural place for the possibility of evil. It is from that view of evil in freedom and existence that the view of hope emerges. It is likewise from that view that the necessity for speculative philosophy and its condition of possibility arises from the innovation of meaning engendered by the productive imagination in affording schemata for the rules of understanding and the extension of this function. This broadened ethics is understood as a philosophy that leads from alienation to freedom and beatitude, attempting to grasp the “effort to exist in its desire to be,”5 and opposing any reduction of reflection to a simple critique or to a mere “justification of science and duty as a reappropriation of our effort to exist; epistemology is only a part 4

Ibid. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 45. 5

74

of this broader task: we have to recover the act of existing, the positing of the self, in all the density of its works.”6 Hence it can be seen that Ricoeur has corrected Kant’s view of the place of evil in freedom. He has, however, considered the locus of evil to stem from the disproportion in the synthesis between finitude and infinitude on the theoretical, practical, and especially affective levels which come to expression in the fullness of symbolic language. It is from the symbols of evil that thought reaches the notion of the servile will or the will in bondage.7 Ricoeur’s recourse, in a philosophic reflection, to religious symbols and to their underlying meaning is not problematic in so far as a philosophic task is undertaken. He, however, does more than that by letting assumed religious content slip into the philosophical hermeneutic situation of his philosophical fore-comprehension. Thus, religious content is not simply looked at but assumed, and precisely within his philosophy of freedom and evil. This has led him to accept, with Kant, a somewhat religious overtone to his interpretation of radical evil as a necessary and constitutive aspect of existential freedom, requiring that human existence be fallen. It is precisely this assumed stance, within which Ricoeur begins his analysis of the ontic aspect of existence, which must be further examined. The pre-comprehension of existence that Ricoeur adopts requires an adjustment in order to liberate existence philosophically from its prejudice of a specific faith option, within which his reflection operates. Within that context radical evil must be extricated from its necessarily constitutive role in existential freedom. The resultant moral neutrality of existence must liberate human existence from fallenness as its necessary constitution, so that existence as innocent, fallen, and recreated can be seen to share the same existential structure. Thus, while Ricoeur has avoided, in his ethical account of freedom in terms of evil, the ontologizing of fault, he has, within the prejudice of his hermeneutic situation, made necessary to existence aspects which Heidegger has diligently avoided. The question then becomes whether and to what extent Ricoeur’s own long way, which initially aims at resolving the problems which the short way ignores, must accept some prior guidance from the ontological level, in order to accentuate certain dimensions of human existence which are first encountered ontically. Failing to accept such guidance, reflection on the ontic may result in exaggerating the importance of certain less essential aspects of the human condition, but in no way mitigating the need and advantage of his long way to ontology or his distinction between the essential and the existential dimensions of the human synthesis of the finite and infinite in relation to evil. By contrast, Heidegger’s hermeneutics of existence arises at the point of avoiding the option which Ricoeur exercises, in developing a philosophical anthropology.8 Heidegger frequently emphasizes that the definitive characteristics of the human are not at issue, but instead the “understanding of Being” which is constitutive of it, thus showing a fundamental prejudice toward reaching the ontological at the expense of a certain richness of the ontic accessible to methodological openness in another direction. This is clearly one place where Heidegger’s quick move to ontology precludes a certain necessary and beneficial investigation into concrete human being. In this context, what is so pivotal for Heidegger is the fact that the capacity for understanding Being as such emerges as the phenomenon for bringing the entirety of Dasein’s Being into question. There is, to be sure, a reciprocal implication between the inquiry into the meaning of Being and the being to whom this question is decisive, Dasein. But even within that reciprocity there is an even 6 7

Ibid. It is not our purpose here to explore the content of the symbols of evil or of the symbolics in

general. 8

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 74-75. 75

more pronounced recoil whereby the dynamics of understanding (projection) display the constitution of Dasein’s Being as ex-istence, and the attempt to define existence as the way Dasein enters into communion with itself and other beings entails the disclosure of understanding.9 According to Heidegger, the very possession of understanding exhibits the innermost dimension of human existence, namely, the “potentiality to be” (the Seinkönnen). Yet, what comes under scrutiny as the essential unity of understanding and existence, at first only vaguely accessible pre-conceptually and pre-ontologically, will in the end determine the theme of fundamental ontology, i.e., Dasein’s manner of uncoveredness. The decisive challenge for Heidegger’s hermeneutics of existence hinges on clarifying this event of discoveredness in ontological terms, in such a way that the consideration of the phenomenon which at first seems most remote to the analysis (as a mere characteristic of understanding) will ultimately come to the forefront of the inquiry as encompassing Dasein’s Being (care), i.e., Da-sein’s fundamental disclosedness. Indeed, in gauging the interchange between that which is “ontically closest” to Dasein and that which is “ontologically farthest,” hermeneutics succeeds in pealing back the successive layers of the fore-comprehension in order to arrive at Dasein’s thrownness into the “there.”10 Heidegger’s unique contribution lies in bringing forward the unexceptional, undifferentiated mode of Dasein’s existence, and, by making an adjustment to accommodate the marginally intelligible character of its “everyday” comportment, then distinguishing the structures that make everydayness possible. Through this approach Heidegger not only betrays a certain preoccupation with finding the roots of ontology, but also a definite intent to lay bare the phenomenon of everydayness in respect to its “intrinsic possibility” or to correlate it with specific ontological structures which are analyzable in their own right. The overriding concern for what “makes possible” has made Heidegger subject to the critique of adapting or adjusting a Kantian transcendental philosophy to fit an inquiry into the more concrete and essentially finite dimension of being-in-the-world at the expense of the Kantian infinite and reason. It likewise, in reflecting on the essential unity of understanding and existence, fails to distinguish on this level of human existence the further abstraction of the essential dimensions, by moving immediately to ontology. This again shows Heidegger’s failure, in deference to a quick move to ontology, to face up to something essential to human being, the clear and radical distinction between the essential and existential dimensions of the synthesis between the finite and infinite. Yet, Heidegger’s fore-comprehension can be instructive here for Ricoeur’s project, preventing it from a certain pitfall of the level of existence. Let us continue our analysis of Heidegger’s view, to flesh out this insight. As Heidegger observes in a passage from Being and Time, “Why does the understanding ... always press forward into possibilities? It is because the understanding has in itself the existential structure which we call ‘projection.’”11 Upon coupling this factor with the most elemental feature of interpretation, i.e., in addressing the presuppositions which govern any comprehension, we arrive at the distinctive direction for a hermeneutics of existence: to promote a “strategy” for wrestling forth the possibilities dormant in the fore-structure of understanding and thereby to initiate the radicalization of Dasein’s everyday self-

9

Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 257-261. 10 Heidegger, Being and Time, 359. This statement occurs in what is perhaps the most significant methodological discussion in Being and Time, the analysis of the “hermeneutical situation” encompassing the entire inquiry (section 63). 11 Ibid., 184-185. 76

comprehension. The implementation of the strategy constitutes hermeneutic phenomenology proper. Hermeneutic phenomenology addresses Dasein in all its concreteness as the being who is in each case mine; this approach involves appreciating the drastic switch from a concern for what Dasein is, as one being among others, to who it is, as possessing the feature of existentiality. To be sure, the selection of a more phenomenologically direct approach to address man -- pursued intentionally apart from any interest in developing a philosophical anthropology -- may not seem to change much, since, after all, the “nature of man” remains in question.12 Yet this step has tremendous significance, both for the task that Heidegger undertakes and for determining the direction of his own hermeneutics. Specifically, the pre-comprehension of Dasein’s existentiality (precisely in contrast to interwordly beings) becomes a safety for insuring that assorted ways of misconceiving Dasein’s Being do not inadvertently slip into the analysis. While this move does prevent making certain aspects of human existence essential, it at once prevents a more enlightening detour to that very level of existence and too quickly forces a unity of human existence which is not there. Thus, while Heidegger’s way can afford an advantage to the longer way, care must be taken not to give it too much play, or the loss entailed in Heidegger’s way will infringe on the many rich advantages of the longer way to ontology. Once again we see that the too quick move to the ontology of human existence misses too much of that existence, which must be considered if the place of evil in human experience is to be fleshed out: something to which Heidegger and Heideggerians should become more attuned. Yet, we must see that, despite his reservation about characterizing the nature of man in the abstract, Heidegger’s concentration on existence still requires addressing Dasein’s essence. The proclamation from Being and Time states: The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence”13 and later, in undoing Descartes’s misconception, “the substance of man is existence,”14 showing that Dasein finds itself in terms of a comportment in which it holds forth its own potential to be, and the recognition of this “can be” provides the clue for laying out the hidden facets of Dasein’s own understanding of its Being.15 The latter consideration becomes particularly crucial insofar as the attempt to explicate the essential structures of care proceed from the projective understanding which is definitive of Dasein. Hermeneutics as an interpretation of human existence, then, develops the pre-comprehension of care issuing from Dasein itself, in such a way that its very execution converges on the dimension of human existence which is the internal root of interpretation -- the laying out of the horizon of intelligibility precisely as its originates from the “there” of Dasein. Heidegger himself traces the reflexive structure of interpretation and delineates its character as “self-interpretation.” Yet, a casual reference to this phenomenon can provoke precisely the opposite connotations than those which are otherwise intended. For hermeneutics, in Heidegger’s sense, is surely not an attempt on behalf of the interpreter to single himself out, i.e., his nature, as constituting a specific area of inquiry within the order of beings. Herein lies the crux of Heidegger’s criticism of philosophical anthropology, including that of Ricoeur. Thus, on the one hand, Heidegger’s hermeneutics of existence aims at addressing the essential structures of care -- existence, facticity, and falling -- and, indeed, grasping them in their fundamental unity. On the other hand, the integration of

12

Cf. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), 212-225. 13 Heidegger, Being and Time, 67. 14 Ibid., 255. 15 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 275-279. Here Heidegger makes explicit that “understanding is a basic determination of existence.” 77

these structures throughout the whole of Dasein’s Being is not decisively comprehended until the existentialia are correlated with the structures that define Dasein’s comportment toward beings, including itself, namely, those which are constitutive of the “there,” understanding, states of mind, and discourse. The deepened inclusivity of Heidegger’s hermeneutics further emphasizes the importance of affirming the priority of the understanding of Being within the existential analytic. The ontological focus for hermeneutics emerges simply by recalling that understanding is itself a primary component within the disclosedness of the “there,” and that it is in the process of considering the existential constitution of the “there” that the issue of interpretation first emerges. From this hermeneutic situation arises the clue for discovering not only that interpretation is a radicalization of Dasein’s capacity for self-disclosure, but that, as mentioned before, disclosedness encompasses Dasein’s Being as care. Heidegger’s so-called critique of philosophical anthropology in favor of this quick move from the comprehension of the Being of Dasein to interpretation, allows him to pass over, to move quickly from, the ontic to the ontological, thus taking the short cut to the ontology of Dasein. But this short cut to ontology overlooks a possible distinction between the essential and existential aspects of man’s being as a synthesis of the finite and infinite.16 By dwelling on and emphasizing the statement in Being and Time: that “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence,”17 the longer way is precluded by this very stress on the essence as existence. For, even if man’s essence or way of Being is to exist, and if understanding is constitutive of his Being as Dasein, this existence can still be looked at and analyzed from the point of view of its concreteness. Thus, Ricoeur’s long way does not entail so much a denial of the existentiality or the ontology of Dasein as much as it is corrective by pausing in a detour to reflect on some existential aspects before indulging Heidegger’s prejudice toward the prior necessity of ontological reflection. Thus, Heidegger’s short way prejudices the issue in favor of his own short way at the expense of clear advantages to the longer way, which pauses to reflect on certain existential dimensions that are not essential to human being. This long way, in distinguishing certain existential dimensions from essential aspects of human being, affords a great advantage in dealing with human evil. Yet this detour to human existence can profit from Heidegger’s myopic view, as will be seen. Hence, let us now turn to the further analysis of Heidegger’s shorter way to ontology through his brand of hermeneutics, in order to set the stage for this gain from Heidegger’s way. To address interpretation in this Heideggerian way as a phenomenon is to become responsive to a movement which already oversees the deeper integration of all the components of Dasein’s Being and brings to the forefront its own initial dependence on the advance comprehension of existence, which is ontological at the expense of ontic aspects of existence. An opportunity is thereby created for arriving at the disclosedness of existence precisely as it takes shape in the interpreter him or herself. Interpretation, then, allows the self to relate directly to the possibilities which are housed in the forecomprehension; this appropriative process, which is directed from the center of Dasein’s potentiality to be, implicitly establishes the interpreter’s own entrance into the truth prior to any attempt at conceptualization. This ontological emphasis is further reinforced by the fact that any view of “language” is governed by the advance comprehension of existence in such a way that the analysis turns to address the constitution of Dasein in order to discover the capacity for speech. Implicitly, interpretation involves articulating whatever has already been comprehended, 16

Note that Being is capitalized in the context of Heidegger’s reference to Dasein’s Being process, and not for a more ontic aspect of the synthesis of the finite and infinite. 17 Heidegger, Being and Time, 67. 78

but the utterance into words of what is being interpreted proceeds from a pre-articulated level of and a predisposition toward comprehension which is grounded in Dasein’s everydayness. The radicalization of this everyday comprehension, which is a task reserved to hermeneutics, involves bringing into speech the unification of the structures of care which are already enacted concretely in the individual’s existence. Accordingly, the existential analytic, as Heidegger emphasizes, occurs when interpretation becomes the forum whereby Dasein “can put itself into words for the very first time.”18 The thematic of human existence then serves as testimony to Dasein’s own disclosedness; to interpret means to gather together the presuppositions that make human existence comprehensible in its own right, so as to let be seen that which shows itself in the most direct way possible, i.e., disclose it in its Being. Hermeneutics originally belongs to phenomenology or is the vehicle for its concrete implementation, insofar as the latter is taken most primordially not as a mere “method” but as a re-enactment of the ancient experience of truth as Aletheia. The arrival at this crucial juncture helps to establish that the analysis has traced the unification of Dasein’s Being back to a sufficiently original level. Only by attending to the project of Heidegger’s hermeneutics is it possible to ensure that no extraneous considerations or excessive assumptions have inadvertently been adopted from the forestructure of understanding. Heidegger questions in an ongoing way, in Being and Time, whether he has adequately taken into account the totality of presuppositions of the hermeneutic situation. This precaution applies to the intrusion of terms which refer no deeper than the initial familiarity that everyday Dasein displays towards itself and that would artificially restrict the horizon of intelligiblity to what can show itself in terms of the ready-to-hand or the present-at-hand. Thus steps are taken to avoid defining Dasein’s Being inappropriately in terms of such categories as that of substance. Yet, the initial hermeneutic situation is already ontological even in the fore-comprehension, thus moving away from, and losing the advantages of, a prolonged focus on the ontic and existential, non-essential dimensions of human being. The term Dasein and what it means, BeingThere, already bespeaks this prejudice in the initial hermeneutic situation. Yet, there is a precaution that arises from the Heideggerian short way that may be relevant to a Ricoeurian analysis of the human that circumvents the too quick analysis of the understanding of the Being of Dasein, and which elects to spell out an exclusive set of ontic human problems. To be sure, Ricoeur practices such a concrete hermeneutics. His emphasis is on the various hermeneutics which capture a specific dimension of human existence and the integration of existence thus revealed. In this way, he refuses to risk missing aspects of human existence not coming into focus in a too quick move to direct ontological disclosure of Dasein’s Being. However, he runs the risk of exaggerating certain aspects of human existence. Such an exaggeration is imminent when Ricoeur identifies a set of allegedly perennial and premier kinds of experiences pertaining to the human existential predicament and seeks to paint a holistic view of human nature. All of Ricoeur’s protracted analyses of the use and misuse of the will need to be tempered by an explication of the existential structures of everyday existence which recognizes a certain neutrality, even on the existential level, of the synthesis of the finite and infinite. Only given this stance of neutrality does it becomes possible to appreciate the transformation occurring within the structures of everydayness which brings forth the extremity of Dasein’s thrownness into its situation (of which human corruption forms one side). Conversely, abandoning this stance of neutrality which is a trademark of a more classical phenomenology, leaves Ricoeur vulnerable to endorsing naively a certain religious profile that envisions human existence constituted by and predisposed to corruption and fault.

18

Heidegger, Being and Time, 362. 79

By seeking a deeper unity of Dasein’s Being which is distinct from but not exclusive of all ontical considerations, Heidegger’s hermeneutics is able to avoid some of the tendencies that stem from characterizing the nature of man primarily in terms of a preset extended ethical vision and thus of the existential power of volition. Heidegger does, however, fail to focus on the synthesis of the infinite and the finite in human existence, but rather, chooses to bring the spirit or reason of man down to the finite and to assert the unity of care on the level of existence, thus leading him to affirm the coincidence of Dasein’s existence and essence in contrast to Ricoeur. Thus, the short way misses the more complex ontic dimensions of human existence which should have some play in a more explicit ontological focus. As will be seen further, it likewise misses, as sometimes does Ricoeur, a certain equi-primordiality of the epistemic and ontological at the fundamental level of human existence in being-in-the-world. For, if it is so that the understanding and interpretation of its own being is so fundamental to human existence, it is likewise true that the difference between the ontological and the epistemological focuses, overcoming traditional restrictions and limitations, are merely two distinctively differing focuses on the same fundamental dimension of human ontological-epistemic existence. In this context, perhaps it is necessary to affirm a reciprocal guidance on one another of the long and short ways to ontology. For, Ricoeur’s short way can be guided by an adjusted Heideggerian pre-comprehension and the attempt to get Dasein properly within the focus of forecomprehension of the hermeneutic method, now taking into account human being as a synthesis of the finite and infinite; and then a pause and detour become necessary precisely at this point, in order to reflect further on human existence in its desire and spirit leading to the Sacred. This will bring to light the disproportion in the synthesis between the finite and infinite on the cognitive, practical and especially affectively levels of this synthesis, which is something to which Heideggerian analysis is totally oblivious, due to its lopping off of the infinite and its burying of reason in the finite. In such an expansion, what emerges is the view that the structures of human existence are, like the eidetic or essential structures, equally foundational for innocent, fallen, and regenerated existence, for it is precisely existence which is neutral to all of these. This altered view does not rule out of place the privileged place of the mythic of evil, but, rather, puts it on an equal footing with the mythic of innocence and of regeneration, all without over-playing or over-interpreting its place in the philosophical analysis of human existence. Far from foreclosing all “specific” analyses of aspects of concrete existence within the world, the project of hermeneutic phenomenology opens up precisely those avenues by illuminating beforehand the horizon for the understanding of human existence in the synthesis of the finite and infinite in human being. What still needs to be determined, is some of the implication of this correction of Ricoeur’s long way to ontology in his grafting of hermeneutics onto phenomenology. Now that we have established a neutrality on the level of human existence in this grafting process, we can attempt to bring to light some of the insights for a philosophy that wants to inquire into human evil by looking at religious language and the experience that underlies it. We must try to flesh out a further presupposition that stands in need of correction if philosophical reflection on evil is to be further grounded, but without an initial unwarranted prejudice. In order to achieve this end, a philosophical foundation must be provided to support the various levels of religious options which are operative in philosophical reflection on religious existence and which originate from the essential level of openness and prior disclosure of human existence. In this context much of Ricoeur’s philosophical reflection on the religious realm of the Sacred and on evil is, however, philosophically ambiguous. His enthusiastic openness to the sciences on the ontic level implicitly allows for a possible rapport with such philosophical reflection on the Sacred and on the religious dimensions of experience. As will become evident shortly, Ricoeur’s philosophical reflection of the 80

Sacred must be expanded and deepened, so that the faith options influencing his philosophical thought are brought to their proper explication in the depth of human existence, at a level below specific faith concerns. For Ricoeur, there is a certain continuity between hermeneutics of existence and a philosophical reflection on religious existence that leads to the expression of the Sacred in symbols and myths, or to the place of evil and fallenness in human existence. Ricoeur might well regret Heidegger’s too quick move to the ontological origins of theology and epistemology. In contrast to Heidegger, Ricoeur remains on the ontic level, perhaps sometimes not heeding the need for its prior disclosure, which might well serve as a guide for his own analyses of ontic dimensions of religious existence and of expressions and interpretations of symbols and myths. Indeed, a prior ontological disclosure could provide a beneficial preview for Ricoeur’s own ontic focus, allowing its reflection to transpire within a certain explicitly grasped, but still operative, element of his hermeneutic situation. It is one such element in Ricoeur’s view of ontic religious existence that needs further clarification. This is simply the other side of the required existential neutrality considered above. On this ontic level in an extended ethics, Ricoeur has focused pointedly upon the problem of the place of evil in freedom within human existence, and upon the ontic relation of human existence to the Sacred that is central to his whole philosophy. It is thus that for Ricoeur, when pausing to dwell on the ontic, this has fostered an epistemology of interpretation beneath the subject-object disjunction and has allowed for an integration or a dialectizing of the phenomenology of spirit with a psychoanalysis of desire, with their respective orientations to teleology and to archeology, both of which prepare for the relation to the Sacred within a phenomenology of religion and its eschatology. He has spent vast energies on the consideration of the conflict of interpretations in order to reveal what he calls differing aspects of existence that ontically found various hermeneutic methods, as seen above.19 For, although his pausing to reflect on the ontic level of existence and the conflict of interpretation delays his ontology, the resolution of the conflict and the revelation of aspects of existence indicate the importance of considering the ontic level further than Heidegger does. Yet, in spite of these serious advantages of proceeding via the long way to examine ontical dimensions of human existence, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics seems to allow specific religious content to enter into his own philosophical fore-comprehension of human existence, which leads him away from the existential neutrality required above. This is something that has been seen to be corrected by means of a slight adjustment. To accommodate the radicality implied in Heidegger’s approach, Ricoeur’s view of existence requires an adjustment beyond the neutrality of existence that liberates human existence from fallenness as its necessary constitution. There is a further need to explicate the faith option within which much of his philosophy of existence is developed, in order to liberate existence philosophically from its prejudice of a specific religious tradition. This tradition assumes the corruption at the heart of human existence, which is what gives too much play to radical evil as necessarily constitutive in existential freedom. The essential dimensions of this were seen above, but the religious aspect needs to be explicitly dealt with. Perhaps by widening his initial hermeneutic situation to be somewhat broadened in the direction of Heidegger, Ricoeur’s way becomes better attuned to a philosophically radicalized approach to the religious neutrality at the heart of human existence. Such an approach would seek in the self’s responsiveness to the Sacred the enactment of freedom which un-

19

Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 13. These advantages of the “long way” militate against the Heideggerian “short way.” Ibid., 6, 10-11, 23-24. 81

folds a pre-given set of possibilities and which fosters a certain self-concern stemming directly from Dasein’s openness. For example, Ricoeur’s treatment of the “already there” character of evil20 and the “necessarily corrupt nature of freedom,”21 or “the prior captivity, which makes it so that I must do evil”22 can be replaced or put on a better philosophical basis than the Kantian notion of radical evil, or, for that matter, any religious tradition that too quickly buys into a view of an essential corruption of human existence. Rather, philosophically, all that these expressions say is that man is not determined and that freedom is capable of good as well as evil (or the lesser evil of errors and mere mistakes). Thus, reinterpreted, Ricoeur’s statement that “I claim that my freedom has already made itself non-free” means that freedom is already human, and thus must be actualized in the finite.23 This reinterpretation recognizes, within the existential structures, a neutrality common to innocent, fallen, and recreated existence.

20 21 22 23

82

Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, 435. Ibid., 422. Ibid., 436. Ibid.

3.

PAUL RICOEUR’S THEORY OF TRUTH: FROM PHENOMENOLOGY TO COMMUNICATIVE ACTION

David M. Kaplan

At various stages throughout his career, Ricoeur has examined the nature and limits of phenomenology, hermeneutics, narrative theory, and communicative rationality. Each time he addresses himself to a subject, it takes the form of a mediation that highlights and preserves differences between two positions without synthesizing a new unity. Instead, Ricoeur claims only to draw a “hermeneutic arc” between opposites, a metaphor that suggests a mitigated version of mediation. A hermeneutic arc, drawn between antithetical positions, contrasts each theory as seen from the perspective of the other, linking them together in a way that produces no theoretical resolution but only a practical one. In principle, opposites remain unreconciled; in practice there is a way to proceed as if they were not. Among the arcs Ricoeur has drawn, include those between phenomenology and hermeneutics, hermeneutics and structuralism, narrative theory and communicative rationality. On Ricoeur’s own self-interpretation, there is no relation between these mediations: each one addresses a different problem, developed in conjunction with different dialogue partners, and is limited in scope. He claims only to deal with particular problems, not to create systems in a more traditionally dialectical fashion. Yet, Ricoeur manages to do precisely that: he exhibits the internal connections among phenomenology, hermeneutics, narrative, and communicative rationality, and, in so doing, he suggests a single, promising model of social inquiry. Such a model contains a much stronger theory of truth and validity than found in the hermeneutic philosophies of Heidegger and Gadamer, but, at the same time, is less absolute than Husserlian phenomenology and more interpretive and creative than Habermasian communicative rationality. Building on the works of Ricoeur, I want to argue that phenomenological description, interpretive narration, and discursive argumentation are dialectically related; each is a part of a “practical whole” and needs the other to be complete. There are three distinct yet related conceptions of truth operative in Ricoeur’s work. They are truth as approximation, truth as manifestation, and truth as argumentation. Truth as approximation draws on Husserlian phenomenology, in which truth is the fulfilling of an empty intentionality. Truth as manifestation draws on Heideggerian hermeneutics, in which truth is the presencing of being. Ricoeur’s theories of metaphor and narrative extend this tradition. Finally, truth as argumentation draws on Habermasian pragmatics, in which truth is a rationally achieved consensus over a validity claim. Yet, for some reason, Ricoeur repeatedly emphasizes the weakest, least adequate, Heideggerian conception of truth, when he speaks of the world-disclosing character of literary reference in The Rule of Metaphor (1978) and Time and Narrative (1984). The Heideggerian conception of truth as manifestation only complements the two stronger conceptions of truth and validity related to the Husserlian and Habermasian character of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. These are the undeveloped elements in Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology that should be brought out to show that a much stronger conception of truth and validity can be gleaned from his scattered remarks on the subject.

Phenomenology Ricoeur retains from Husserl the central insight into the intentionality of consciousness, and the methodological technique of bracketing. The well-known doctrine of intentionality asserts that all experience is directed toward some object of reference, while every object 83

of experience is correlated to a particular experience. What is experienced is always correlated with how it is experienced by someone. Intentionality is the fundamental, invariant, transcendental condition for the possibility of experience. The methodological technique of bracketing, or the phenomenological reductions, are rules for directing our attention toward experience. What we bracket is the temptation either to make judgments about the ontological status of an object of experience, or to theorize and explain rather than describe experience. Instead, we are treating all experience simply as given in consciousness as a phenomena, or a meaning presenting itself to a consciousness. Furthermore, the reductions are geared toward uncovering essences, or what is invariant in experience. The goal of a phenomenological description is to explicate experience in terms of the intentional relationship to the world. Ricoeur’s conception of phenomenology is much like it is for Husserl: a descriptive analysis based on the doctrine of intentionality, and the methodological principles of bracketing and the eidetic reduction. As he explains, in phenomenology “our relation to the world becomes apparent as a result of reduction; in and through reduction every being comes to be described as a phenomenon, as appearance, thus as a meaning to be made explicit.”1 Implicit in the Husserlian conception of intentionality is the notion of evidence as a form of experience that satisfies or fulfills the conditions that guarantee certainty. The phenomenological conception of evidence is not a set of truth criteria, but rather the experiences that guarantee that an assertion is warranted. Various forms of evidence are possible, depending on the type of object, or assertion, or validity claim in question. In all cases, evidence involves the kind of experience that guarantees the reasonableness of the assertion, object, or claim. Such justification involves seeing proof with our own eyes. All proofs, arguments, deductions and inferences are derivative from what we perceive about the object or assertion. The validity basis for any form of evidence or argument stems from our direct perception of the matter in question. Evidence is nothing more than a particular kind of experience. According to Husserl, the condition for objectivity is that the object of consciousness must be given in such a way that nothing is missing from the lived experience of that object. Truth is grounded in experience -- not the experience of the natural attitude, but experience that has been phenomenologically reduced. Objectivity is given to a certain kind of consciousness in which the object corresponds with the act that intends it and bestows meaning upon it. Something is given to consciousness objectively, when the experience satisfies or fulfills an intention. Thus, evidence is a kind of seeing and intuiting that grasps things that present themselves in full clarity and evident intuition. The thing itself is given in itself to me, but not by means of an idea, a hypothesis, or an empty meaning. An unverified judgment is a mere opinion that has not been confronted by how things actually are. The meaning of such an intention is empty; it can only be fulfilled by a confrontation with the things that would satisfy the requirement of validity for that particular judgment. A fulfilled intention is the relevant, direct experience of whatever is required in order to have a clear grasp of the object in question. The evidence that would fill an intention would be different, for example, for a claim about a material object, a remembered event, an aesthetic judgment, the correct pronunciation of a word, and so on. The same object can be meant in an empty or filled way; the difference is, if the object is meant in presence or meant in absence. For example, an empty, absent intention is a remembered name; the fulfilled, present intention is the experience of perceiving the name next to a picture in the high school year book. A scientific hypothesis is an empty 1

Paul Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” in idem, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde, trans. Willis Domingo et al. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 247. 84

intention; an experiment that confirms the hypothesis is a filled intention. All evidence is the fulfilling of an empty intention with the appropriate experience (i.e., the approximation of the meaning-giving intention to the presence of the object meant). Truth is, therefore, the clear articulation of the experience of evident presence.2 Ricoeur devoted much of his early career to patient criticism and appropriation of Husserl. In Freedom and Nature (1950), for example, Ricoeur retains Husserl’s conception of the fulfillment of intentionality but applies it to a phenomenology of the will. He defines voluntary action in terms of a will that projects and decides the direction of an action to be done by me that is within my capabilities. To decide is to anticipate the future based on my capability or power to execute that action. A phenomenology of voluntary action shows that the realization of a decision is the fulfillment of a project or an intention-to-do something that is within my power. The intentionality of a project is a thought, but only the execution of a decision fulfills the intentionality of the project. An action fulfills a decision somewhat like a perception fulfills an empty theoretical intention.3 Phenomenology continues to play a role in Ricoeur’s recent major works. In Oneself As Another (1990), Ricoeur uses a typical phenomenological argument against Parfit, who questions the nature of our personal identity with examples of brain duplication, memory transplantation, and cloning machines. Ricoeur replies that such thought experiments fail to appreciate that human beings are not merely their brains and bodies, but corporeal beings who inhabit the world and who have intrinsic, not mere extrinsic, relations to that world. Our “belonging” to the world is the condition for the possibility for any reflection on or discourse about the world. Yet a description of belonging is precisely what is ignored by personal identity thought experiments about cloning and brain duplication. Ricoeur turns to phenomenology to develop a notion of the self that is fundamentally related to its surroundings and community. In his exchange with neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux in What Makes us Think? (2002), Ricoeur again returns to phenomenology, this time to correct Changeux’s attempt to use biological explanations for all aspects of human experience. This research program, known as “connectionism,” seeks to give an account of experience solely in terms of brain function. Changeux hopes to find a “third discourse” that would reconcile mind and body and eventually lead to a “neuronal” link between scientific knowledge (of the brain) and the normative prescriptions (of human agency). Ricoeur believes such an endeavor is doomed to fail, because the very premise of connectionism is confused. His argument is vintage phenomenology; the argument is based on an appeal to description. Third-person

2

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 11-23, 46-64. According to Husserl, absolutely indubitable evidence would require full presence or adequate givenness. Adequate evidence is absolute self-givenness, which is beyond question. Such evidence would be a completely fulfilled intention in which the object is self-given in an absolutely immediate seeing. However, such absolute certainty is, in principle, impossible to achieve. Experience is never completely fulfilled. There are always expectant and attendant meanings that mediate presence with absence. There are always implicit, co-present aspects of consciousness that form the inner and outer horizons of experience. Intentionality always intends beyond itself. There are always potentialities, implicit in every intentional act, that can never be completely accounted for. Experience itself provides the clues for the further experiences that are necessary to confirm, correct and fulfill such implicit intentionalities. The perspectival character of experience is evidence that things are never fully present in a complete and absolute manner. Complete fulfillment is an infinite task that could never be completed, and absolute certainty can never be attained. Instead, full presence functions as a limit idea that guides the gradual fulfillment of intentions. 3 Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim Kohak (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 135-197. 85

explanations of causal events in the brain are different from first-person reports about one’s experience. What occurs in the brain may indeed correspond to my experience, but my experience cannot be reduced to what happens in the brain. One must investigate experience phenomenologically, not through empirical techniques.4 Most recently, in Memory, History, and Forgetting (2004), Ricoeur undertakes a (Husserlian) phenomenological analysis of memory. The phenomenology of memory begins with an analysis of the objects of memory, the memory-experiences one has before one’s mind; it then considers the act of searching for a given memory, of anamnesis and recollection; finally, from memory as given and exercised, Ricoeur examines reflective memory, or memory itself. This phenomenology of memory grounds the successive studies on the epistemological nature of history and the activities of historians, and concludes with a “hermeneutics of the historical condition” that culminates on the phenomenon of forgetting and forgiveness. Together they comprise a reflection on the problem of representing the past. It is Ricoeur’s most explicitly phenomenological work in years. Among the investigations he conducts are a phenomenology of imagination, of perception, of mistakes, of recollection, and of testimony. Phenomenological description -- i.e., evidence -- is an inseparable part of historic understanding.5

Hermeneutics and Narrative Theory Closely related to the phenomenological account of truth as approximation is the hermeneutic conception of truth as manifestation. Ricoeur shares with Heidegger a conception of truth as aletheia, which means bringing things out from concealment into the open. According to Heidegger, aletheia means “taking entities out of their hiddenness and letting them be seen in their unhiddenness (their uncoveredness).”6 Truth as manifestation, for Ricoeur, is the revelation and disclosure of hidden aspects of reality, which occurs when we understand reference of creative discourses. All imaginative and creative uses of language improve our ability to express ourselves and extend our understanding of the world. Symbols, myths, metaphors, and fiction can capture experience in ways that ordinary, descriptive language cannot. Ricoeur maintains that the reference of creative language is “divided” or “split,” meaning that such writing points to aspects of the world that can only be suggested and referred to indirectly. Creative language refers to such aspects of the world as if they were real and as if we could be there. In The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur develops his thesis that the split-reference of creative discourse discloses a possible way of being-in-the-world that remains hidden from ordinary language and first-order reference. A metaphor is an “heuristic fiction” that “redescribes” reality by referring to it in terms of something imaginative or fictional, allowing us to learn something about reality from fiction. I experience the world through my experience of creative discourse. Reading creates a clearing that opens up new possibilities of being in the world. Heuristic fictions help us to perceive new relations and new connections among things, broadening our ability to express ourselves and understand ourselves. In Time and Narrative, the basic unit of meaning is a narrative, which is

4

Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Pierre Changeux, What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue About Ethics, Human Nature and the Brain, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 33-69. 5 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5-132. 6 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 262. 86

constituted by its plot that unifies the elements of a story -- including the reasons, motives, and actions of characters -- with events, accidents, and circumstances together into a coherent unity. A plot synthesizes, integrates, and schematizes actions, events, and, ultimately, time into a unified whole that says something new and different than the sum of its parts. A narrative truth is like a metaphorical truth, which is the ability of poetic discourse to bring to language hidden aspects of reality. A reader or hearer experiences a new way of seeing -- as through the referential dimension -- opened up by the use of creative language, including sentences symbols, metaphors, sentences, and narratives. Reading and hearing a creative discourse leads me to the (real or imaginary) reference through the sense of that discourse. I experience the world through my experience of listening and reading. Similarly, I experience the world through the unfolding of a narrative. Reference and horizon are correlative as are figure and ground. All experience both possesses a contour that circumscribes it and distinguishes it, and arises against a horizon of potentialities that constitutes at once an internal and an external horizon of experience: internal in the sense that it is always possible to give more details and be more precise about whatever is considered within some stable contour; external in the sense that the intended thing stands in potential relationships to everything else within the horizon of a total world, which itself never figures as the object of discourse.7 Narrative discourse refers to possible experiences one could have. As the reader grasps the sense and reference of the text, the reader’s experience is mediated and transformed by it. In this way, narratives disclose, reveal, and manifest something true. Ricoeur devoted most of his work of the 1970s-1980s toward developing a theory of truth as manifestation. There is no need to recount in detail all of the places it appeared and continues to appear in his work. However, in Oneself As Another, he begins to reduce the role of narratives (and hermeneutics, in general) in order to affirm a stronger notion of the universal that would justify our epistemological and normative claims. The criteria for a narrative truth in literature are inadequate for less creative discourses like moral reasoning or legal interpretation. One must offer valid, relevant reasons for preferring one interpretation over another. Although he never abandons a hermeneutic theory of truth, Ricoeur eventually argues that it needs to complemented by a stronger theory of truth as valid argumentation. He turns to Habermas for that.

Communicative Rationality Ricoeur follows Habermas far less than either Husserl or Heidegger, but he reads him, learns from him, and incorporates his theory of communication into a broader vision of hermeneutic philosophy and philosophical anthropology. Ricoeur appropriates from Habermas the transcendental-pragmatic presuppositions of discourse in which competent speakers can achieve understanding based on the recognition of validity claims. For Habermas, reaching understanding depends on knowing how to redeem implicit validity claims in speech. Discourse is the “reflective medium” or what Habermas sometimes calls the “court of appeal” where participants explicitly raise and contest the validity claims implicit in speech and action. Acceptance of a valid proposition ought to motivate one to

7

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 78. 87

accept one argument over another. A true consensus is one that is achieved on argument and appeal, as opposed to false consensus which is achieved though coercion and domination. Such communicative competence presupposes familiarity with the conditions under which the validity of a claim would be acceptable to another. Together, individuals coordinate action with one another thanks to the validity basis of communication, which always permits participants to call one another into question. Communicative rationality refers to “the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld.”8 Truth, for Habermas, is a validity claim, the justification of which is attained by a rationally achieved consensus. Participants must know how to raise and test validity claims, and they must be committed to reaching agreement rationally before they can establish something as true, right, or sincere. What determines rational discourse is the regulative ideal of unconstrained communication and the ideal speech situation, both of which function as regulative ideals, establishing conditions for achieving mutual understanding, establishing trust and good will, and promoting social integration and cultural reproduction. Ricoeur has an inconsistent take on Habermas. Sometimes he fully accepts and appropriates communicative rationality, other times his endorsement is more conditional. In his mediations of the Habermas-Gadamer debates in the early 1970s, for example, Ricoeur claims only to juxtapose hermeneutics and the critique of ideology.9 He claims he has no intention to “fuse them into a super-system that would compass both,” but rather, merely to show how “each speaks from a different place,” so that “each may be asked to recognize the other.”10 Olivier Abel calls this method of non-synthetic reconciliation Ricoeur’s “ethics of method.”11 For moral reasons, Ricoeur takes great pains to respect the differences among the philosophies he brings together. By showing how each can recognize the validity of the other, there is no reason to create a third perspective that would reconcile, hence eradicate, both terms. Instead, Ricoeur’s methodological practice of drawing a hermeneutic arc that contrasts, relates, and thereby suggests practical (not theoretical) ways to move beyond an opposition, preserves what is valid in both positions. In theory, for example, hermeneutics and the critique of ideology are unreconcilable; in practice, the very activity of recovering a tradition within the horizon of anticipated understanding achieves the practical aim of both. Where theoretical mediations are impossible, practical mediations are not. Yet, there are several places in Ricoeur’s works where he very explicitly incorporates a theory of communicative rationality into a hermeneutic philosophy, creating (implicitly) the very mediation he claims is impossible. For example, in the 1970s he described textual interpretation as a movement from guess to validation and from explanation to com-

8

Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 10. 9 For Ricoeur's mediation of the Habermas-Gadamer debate, see Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Culture,” in idem, Political and Social Essays, ed. David Stewart and Joseph Bien (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974), 153-65; idem, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” in idem, From Text to Action, 270-307; idem, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 249-253, 310-314. For an analysis of Ricoeur's mediation of the Habermas-Gadamer debates, see, David M. Kaplan, Ricoeur's Critical Theory (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2003), 37-45. 10 Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” 294-295. 11 For the ethical character of Ricoeur's method of mediation that respects differences, see Olivier Abel, “Ricoeur's Ethics of Method,” Philosophy Today (Spring 1993): 23-30. 88

prehension.12 An interpretation consists of a guess based on experiences resulting in explanations that must be validated by others, terminating in comprehension, which is another name for understanding that is informed and enriched by an objective process of validation. Determining which interpretations are more plausible than others requires that we argue for our descriptions and explanations by offering relevant reasons in order to convince an other of the superiority of one interpretation over another. Given the range of interpretations, often conflicting and contradictory, Ricoeur echoes Habermas, claiming that “the question of criteria belongs to a certain kind of interpretation itself, that is to say, to a coming to an agreement between arguments. So it presupposes a certain model of rationality where universality, verification, and so on are compelling.”13 Again, in Time and Narrative, Ricoeur argues that a regulative ideal of communication is operative within communication. He agrees with Habermas that any critique of tradition is mediated by a regulative ideal of unconstrained communication, which, in turn, remains historically situated in order to be applied in a particular context. The regulative ideal of unconstrained communication mediates our consciousness of effective-history. The transcendence of the idea of truth, inasmuch as it is immediately a dialogical idea, has to been seen as already at work in the practice of communication. When so reinstalled in the horizon of expectation, this dialogical idea cannot fail to rejoin those anticipations buried in tradition per se. Taken as such, the pure transcendental quite legitimately assumes the negative status of a limit-idea as regards many of our determined expectations as well as our hypostatized traditions. However, at the risk of remaining alien to effective-history, this limit-idea has to become a regulative one, orienting the concrete dialectic between our horizon of expectation and our space of experience.14 Ricoeur appropriates communicative rationality even more explicitly in Oneself As Another where he incorporates the ethics of communication as found in Habermas’s reinterpretation of the deontological tradition. Ricoeur agrees that communicative ethics provides a framework for resolving conflicts and reaching consensus regarding moral imperatives. Communicative ethics preserves both the universal validity and impartiality of moral judgments. Above all, it retains the central Kantian notion of autonomy but reinterpreted as “communicative autonomy,” which is the ability of speakers to express themselves freely to others. Ricoeur is in full agreement with Habermas over the basic principles of communicative ethics -- that the very process of justifying normative claims presupposes that speakers have a shared understanding of what norms and reasons are and what they expect of us. Valid norms are discursively redeemable, impartial, universal, and rationally justifiable. His acceptance is, of course, qualified. Rather than contrast, as Habermas does, the difference between argumentation on one hand, and particular interpretations, personal convictions, and traditional conventions on the other, Ricoeur argues that argumentation itself is an interpretive practice that leads to a potentially universal practical judgment in a particular situation. As Ricoeur puts it in Oneself As Another, “what has to be questioned is the antagonism between argumentation and convention, substituting for it

12

Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, Tex.: Texas Christian University Press, 1976). 13 Paul Ricoeur, “Interview with Charles Reagan,” in Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 104-105. 14 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 226. 89

a subtle dialectic between argumentation and conviction, which has no theoretical outcome but only the practical outcome of the arbitration of moral judgment in situation.”15 Argumentation is a particular, sometimes formalized, practice in which participants clarify their convictions in order to resolve conflicts and reach understanding. Argumentation never stands above our convictions or conventions, but instead is the “critical agency operating at the heart of convictions.”16 In The Just (2000), Ricoeur continues to advance a theory of interpretation and argumentation in the context of legal interpretation and decision-making. Ricoeur concurs with Habermas that the “thesis of a potential agreement at the level of an unlimited and unconstrained community” forms the horizon of universal consensus before which “we are to place the formal rules of every discussion claiming correctness.”17 Argumentation, however, is dialectically related to interpretation. The rules governing discussion go hand in hand with a prior meaning-giving context in which the interpretations of our needs and interests occur. The notion of an ideal discourse situation offers a horizon of correctness for all discourse where the participants seek to convince each other through argument. The ideal is not just anticipated, it is already at work. But we must also emphasize that the ideal can be inserted into the course of a discussion only if it is articulated on the basis of already public expressions of interests, hence of needs marked by prevailing interpretations concerning their legitimacy.18 The relationship between facts and norms in general is a dialectic interpretation and argumentation. Ricoeur goes on to say that the principle of universalization, “only provides a check on the process of mutual adjustment between the interpreted norm and the interpreted fact. In this sense, interpretation is not external to argumentation. It constitutes its organon.”19 Claims like these strain the credibility of Ricoeur’s prior claim to avoid creating super-systems that would encompass them both.

Narrative-Evidence and Communicative Rationality When Ricoeur’s reflections on truth are taken together, we have a model of the interpretation and validation of claims raised about human actions involving evidence, narration, and argumentation. Unlike the hermeneutic philosophies of Heidegger and Gadamer, Ricoeur’s theory of truth entails the argumentative vindication of claims under the presupposition of unconstrained communication. But unlike the universal pragmatics of Habermas, Ricoeur’s theory of truth presupposes not only the prior interpretation of the subject of discussion within a broader, interpretive context, but also the prior experiences participants bring to discussion. It includes the very descriptive, narrative, testimonial experiences that a consensus theory of truth forbids. If we were to construct a model of truth and validity from Ricoeur’s scattered remarks on the subject, we could draw a hermeneutic arc that would have one end anchored in phenomenological experience, passing through a narrative interpretation, anchored at the other end in communicative rationality. The path of the arc from phenomenology to hermeneutics is old route that does not need to be revisited here. The more interesting paths are those that connect an

15

Paul Ricoeur, Oneself As Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 287. Ibid., 288. 17 Paul Ricoeur, “Interpretation and/or Argumentation,” in idem, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 117. 18 Ibid., 119. 19 Ibid., 122. 16

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argumentative theory of truth as validity with a phenomenological theory of evidence and with a narrative theory of truth as manifestation. The path linking Husserl to Habermas through Ricoeur is the more reconstructive of the two. It starts by noting that, Habermas’s theory of communicative competence presupposes the reflective awareness of the individual participants in communicative action to raise and test implicit validity claims. Even though the theory defines truth in terms of the modes of argumentation competent speakers engage in together, it still makes reference to the perspectives of the participants in communication who reflectively thematize the validity claims of one another, who are oriented to mutual recognition, who individually and collectively have learned how to communicate competently, and who must be motivated to accept the force of the better argument. In fact, communicative rationality is, in part, defined in terms of the experience speakers and actors have when engaged in such discourse. In order to understand an expression, the interpreter must “bring to mind” the reasons with which a speaker would defend its validity; we must be “open,” “committed,” and “motivated” to reach understanding. Such subjective expressions and first-person descriptions are neither foreign nor inimical to communicative rationality. Establishing truth is a function of the reasons I can offer to support my claim and the ideal conditions under which my claim is accepted. But the formal procedures for reaching agreement in rational discourse say nothing about the content of the agreement. There is little or no connection between the objectivity of experience and the truth of agreed-upon propositions. So long as there is mutual, rational agreement, there is no way to mediate conflicting interpretations other than through further rational argumentation. From a phenomenological perspective, the consensus theory of truth entailed by the theory of communicative rationality lacks an adequate theory of evidence. Habermas recognizes the lacuna in a consensus theory of truth, but claims that he is only specifying the ideal conditions that must be satisfied in order for there to be any rational agreement. The idea of truth is transcendental and universally binding; the content of truth is historical and contingent. He explains that the criteria of truth lie at a different level than the idea of redeeming validity-claims. In other words, Habermas claims only to specify the procedural conditions for establishing validity, not to specify the criteria for ascertaining truth. What counts as a good reason is something that depends on standards about which it must be possible to argue. Nevertheless, Habermas confesses that he regards as “justified the admonition that I have hitherto not taken the evidential dimension of the concept of truth adequately into account.”20 If a theory of evidence is not incompatible with a consensus theory of truth, and if Habermas already acknowledges the legitimacy of reflective, first-person descriptions of experience, then perhaps it is possible to reconcile a phenomenological theory of evidence with a pragmatic theory of truth. Ricoeur’s model of textual interpretation as a movement from guess to validation and from explanation to comprehension traces the path from (individual) experience to (collective) argumentation. Following Ricoeur and Habermas, if we recognize the necessity of the perspectives of the participants in discourse, who must be motivated to accept the better reason, then we can see how subjective experience contributes to intersubjective experience. The relevant subjective experience for the validation of a truth claim is the experience of evidence. Achieving consensus by redeeming validity claims discursively presupposes that the participants achieve evident experience that they test, validate and corroborate with one another. Evidence is the gradual fulfillment of the intentionalities necessary to confirm a guess, validate a claim

20

Jürgen Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” in idem, Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John B. Thompson and David Held (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1982), 275. 91

or warrant an assertion. Such fulfillment can occur alone or with others. It can occur by reading a book, consulting an authority, performing a test, believing a good argument, confirming by experience, and so on. There are as many ways of fulfilling intentions as there are intentions. As filled intentions, they share a common structural relationship of presence and absence, and an approximate correlation between the object and its successive appearances. The closer I come -- or we come -- to having the appropriate evident experiences, warrants an assertion; in turn, reaching understanding communicatively validates evidence. Establishing the validity of evident experience is something that requires intersubjective validation, achieved through a process or rational argumentation that approximates ideal speech. In turn, evident experience establishes the objectivity of a rationally achieved consensus. For a claim to be warranted, it must be supported by both rational argument and appropriate evidence. The relation of narrative to argumentation is even more clear. Ricoeur himself makes the connection apparent on a number of occasions.21 Following his lead we can say that a narrative is an interpretation of events that raises claims of truth and normativity and thus presupposes the anticipation of consensus of universally binding reasons, whereas argumentation presupposes a narrative-interpretative framework that delimits a context of relevant facts to be subject to justification. “Narrative evidence” refers to the form of discourse we use to make truth claims about human actions. The evidence we bring to discussion to argue for an interpretation unfolds in a narrative, as participants raise and test the implicit truth claims contained in an interpretation to reach consensus. Narrativeevidence thus requires a principle of universalization in order to find a fair resolution to conflicting narratives, in the absence of an overarching vantage point that everyone recognizes. In turn, the argumentative practice itself -- that would vindicate a validity claim -occurs, in part, through narration. In short, narration and argumentation overlap. Narration requires argumentation to redeem its validity claims to truth and normativity, given the inadequacies in a model of narrative truth as manifestation. Argumentation requires narration to determine what the validity claim is about, how an event is placed under an explanatory rule, and to establish generalizable needs and vindicate normative judgments. Argumentation constitutes the “logical framework” and interpretation of the “inventive framework.”22 The political implications of the dialectic of narrative evidence and argumentation cannot be overstated if an interpretation of history is a retelling of what happened: what stories are told, how events are organized and assigned significance, to whom and what responsibility is attributed, and to whom stories are told, determine what will be preserved, remembered, judged and, above all, taken as true. To Ricoeur’s credit, he has always insisted that one can argue for the relative superiority of a conflicting interpretation by showing how one interpretation is false or invalid, or that the possibility of one interpretation is more probable than another. It is always possible to argue for one interpretation over another. To do so, we offer evidence from experience, use creative language to reveal and to show, and rationally debate the implicit validity claims raised. This, I believe, is what is implied in Ricoeur’s theory of truth, developed along the arc from phenomenology to narrative to communicative action.

21 22

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Ricoeur, “Interpretation and/or Argumentation,” 109-126. Paul Ricoeur, “Conscience and the Law,” in idem, The Just, 153.

4.

THE UNSURPASSABLE DISSENSUS

Olivier Abel

My intention in this paper is to briefly take up a few of the questions that Memory, History, Forgetting suggested to me, as though on the margins of the work. Nevertheless, my intention is also to briefly deepen two of them. The first (paragraphs 3-4) approaches the question of credibility, which seems to me to be one of the deepest themes of the book, with the idea that our era is characterized more by an excess of incredulity and distrust than by an excess of credulity, notably in the testimony of memory. The second (paragraphs 5-7) addresses the epilogue on forgiveness, where some wanted to see the real sense or topic as a Christian history. Before coming to this place of forgiveness in the economy of the book I would like to mobilize, in the central theme of the representation of the past, everything that touches on the problem of the politics of memory and forgetting, and which culminates in the question of the witness’s credibility. In passing, I will try to reposition Memory, History, Forgetting within the larger horizon of the other works of Paul Ricoeur.

1. The Past Represented I would say immediately that in distinguishing the cognitive problem (one remembers what, how?) from the pragmatic problem (who remembers and why?), Ricoeur repeats an old gesture of his, that of the separation-articulation of the modes (semiotic, semantic, hermeneutic in La Métaphore vive; or semantic, pragmatic, narrative, ethical, in Soi-même comme un autre). To the power to speak, to act, to impute to oneself actions, here is added the power to form memory (p. 344) or to remember (p. 57). In this gigantic eidetic variation on the subject that constitutes Ricoeur’s work, we must renounce with him the search for a variant idem, and to concern ourselves with the variations themselves, where the gaps indicate a selfhood that is never entirely recognized. It enters by way of the theme, always at once epistemic and ethical, of recognition, of a face for example, of the sense of a being or a moment: plain experience, and yet a small miracle of recollection. Ricoeur speaks meaningfully at the end of the book of an odyssey of the spirit of forgiveness, and of the incognito of forgiveness (p. 489 and p. 491), to designate precisely in forgiveness this major theme of recognition, here both paradoxical and negative, not by binding a subject to his or her history or actions, but by unbinding. In the representation of the past, Ricoeur will then privilege the variations of scale, of points of view, of genres of representation (in the quasi-literary sense, (p. 209 and p. 280). On the one hand, because variation itself displays (fait voir) that which otherwise would not be discerned, in a somehow stereoscopic vision that casts the until then unperceived into sharp relief. On the other hand, because it is the gap itself that is representative and normal language the anomaly, as Ricoeur had already shown in La Métaphore vive and as he constantly reaffirms: instead we must return to them from the Bergsonian method of division which invites us to consider the opposite extremes of the spectrum of phenomena before reconstructing the everyday experience whose complexity and disorder hinder clear description as a mixture. (p.439) Speaking of the representation of the past by history, he writes:

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the assertive vehemence of the historian’s representation as standing for the past is authorized by nothing other than the positive of the event having seen intended across the negativity of the being that no longer. (p.280) In a similar manner, in La Métaphore vive he speaks of: paradoxe indépassable qui s’attache à une conception métaphorique de vérité. Le paradoxe consiste en ceci qu’il n’est pas d’autre façon de rendre justice à la notion de vérité métaphorique que d’inclure la pointe critique du ‘n’est pas’ (littéralement) dans la véhémence ontologique du ‘est’ (métaphoriquement).1 This touches on the proximity and distance between historic representation and poetic fiction: precisely because it is not about the same absence, it cannot be precisely about the same affirmation, of the same vehemence, of the same attestation. We will come back to this when speaking of confidence and the forms of credibility. To bring us a step closer to our topic, we must note that the critical gesture of the distinction of register is not separated in Ricoeur, as we have just seen, from their rearticulation in a somehow broken dialectic, or rather in a zigzag without a determined end. In this sense the historical problem of representation is always already also a political, pragmatic and practical problem. Since the task is “to make human interactions intelligible” (p. 184), it is not enough to blend the external order of their causes and the internal order of their reasons, it is necessary to understand their ties and their history woven of discordances as much as of concordances,2 of conflicts as much as of agreements: just as macrohistory is attentive to the weight of structural constraints exercised over the long time span, to a similar degree microhistory is attentive to the initiative and capacity for negotiation of historical agents in situations marked by uncertainty. (p. 187) Ricoeur nonetheless refuses to let uncertainty in its turn become a category that explains everything. (p. 226) It is why Ricoeur, after having recognized the unpredictability in which the historical actor moves,3 faithful to the Arendtian polarity between promise and forgiveness, balances uncertainty and unpredictability by the irreparable and irreversible. At this point he passes perhaps a little quickly over the dispute and the conflict, irreducible to a simple rational competition between choices, through which this very actor has to struggle, to interpret his or her situation and to differ from others. The historiographic conflict of interpretations and systems of historicity is thus founded on the historical disputes themselves. On the other hand Ricoeur makes, it seems to me, the irreparable a central category not only for historic representation but for the historical actors who, we sometimes forget, carried with them their own mournings, their own irreparables -and their own disputes about the irreparable. It is one of the centers of gravity of Memory, History, Forgetting, to hold (with Michel de Certeau) historical writing as that which makes room for death (p. 550 no. 1), for the irrevocable (p. 364), to that which cannot be acted on, to the not-at-hand according to

1

Paul Ricoeur, La Métaphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 321. Translator note: As the primary text, quotations from Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, are taken from the Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). All secondary quotations have been left in the original. 2 Paul Ricoeur, Temps et Récit 1 (Paris: Seuil, 1983). See the entire first part on emplotment. 3 Who looks to reduce uncertainty and who exists only in somehow formulating vows or promises. See the work of Arendt and Nietzsche on promising. 94

Heidegger. Facing loss, memory, individual or collective, oscillates between the too much of melancholy that loses the sense of the present, or the too little of the easy exorcism. History has for deaths these gestures of burial, of entombment, that accomplishes in detail the work of memory, which is also a work of mourning, the acceptance of a purely interior presence of that which will never return. (p. 366 and p. 499) If resemblance, recognition, or recollection are about a kind of presence of the absent, the absence of the mourning is not the absence of fiction. This is the big difference in perspective between Temps et Récit and Memory, History, Forgetting: the latter exercises a real uncoupling of imagination and memory. Not that Ricoeur renounces the work of imaginative variation4 by which, relying on a few traces, the historian imagines the past (p. 211) and seeks to understand it. The temptation is to configure the plot in this, taking from literary convention the forms that best display the past and absent reality that is to be retrieved. Ricoeur elsewhere writes of fiction: La véritable mimésis de l’action est à chercher dans les œuvres d’art les moins soucieuses de refléter leur époque. L’imitation, au sens vulgaire du terme, est ici l’ennemi par excellence de la mimésis. C’est précisément lorsqu’une œuvre d’art rompt avec cette sorte de vraisemblance qu’elle déploie sa véritable fonction mimétique ... S’il est vrai qu’une des fonctions de la fiction mêlée à l’histoire est de libérer rétrospectivement certaines possibilités non effectuées du passé historique, c’est à la faveur de son caractère quasi-historique que la fiction elle-même peut exercer après coup sa fonction libératrice. Le quasi-passé de la fiction devient ainsi le détecteur des possibles enfouis dans le passé effectif.5 In these pages of Temps et Récit, Ricoeur pushes the point as far as investing imagination with the difficult task of making room, in a history that explains and rereads, for the horror that is attached to unique, incomparable events that must never be forgotten and that fiction designates and keeps: En fusionnant ainsi avec l’histoire, la fiction ramène celle-ci à leur origine commune dans l’épopée. Plus exactement ce que l’épopée avait fait dans la dimension de l’admirable, la légende des victimes le fait dans celle de l’horrible. Cette épopée en quelque sorte négative préserve la mémoire de la souffrance à l’échelle des peuples comme l’épopée et l’histoire à ses débuts avaient transformé la gloire éphémère des héros en renommée durable; dans les deux cas la fiction se met au service de l’inoubliable ... il y a peut-être des crimes qu’il ne faut pas oublier, des victimes dont la souffrance crie moins vengeance que récit. Seule la volonté de ne pas oublier peut faire que ces crimes ne reviennent plus jamais.6 All this remains in the terms of Temps et Récit, but I think that in Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur divides up the limits of narrative identity and narration, of which he wrote that it must join the non-narrative components of the formation of the subject that is acting, suffering, etc.7 What are these non-narrative components? One could introduce here, pointing to another path Ricoeur explores elsewhere, the ample variation of literary kinds that constitute the Bible: myths, codes of rules or laws, stories, prophecies, psalms, chronicles, proverbs, letters, dramas conversed, considerably widen the figures and the 4 5 6 7

Paul Ricoeur, Temps et Récit 3 (Paris: Seuil, 1984-85), 198f. Ibid., 278. Ibid., 274-275. Ibid., 358-359. These are the pages that had struck me ever since they appeared. 95

positions of the subject. For memory and history, it is as if the absence of mourning could not be satisfied with a representation that is only narrative. In Memory, History, Forgetting, it is about reclassifying narration among other processes of representing the past: But, in reclassifying narrativity in the way we are going to discuss, I want to [put an end to] one misunderstanding suggested by the upholders of the narrativist school and taken for granted by its detractors, the misunderstanding that the configuring act that characterizes emplotment would as such constitute an alternative in principle to causal explanation. (p. 186) It is not that historical causal explanation is a positivistic block inimical to plot. On the contrary, it is that it includes as much interpretation as any narrative. Ricoeur thus aims to show that interpretation is in play at all levels, from the documentary research through to the historiographic representation by way of the various hypotheses that enable us to make human interactions intelligible. And that narrative is one figure among others of the representation of absence. It is perhaps that the epic, that others tell of us in the third person, must sometimes give way to tragedy, where the witness and even the actor comes forward personally, who can say: “I was there,” even though they are no longer there, and to share the responsibility of giving back to the past that which is owed.

2. Just Memory We will now move ahead one more step in our topic, even though we have not lost sight of it from the outset. I spoke of the political problem of just memory, as the second (but not secondary) thread that runs through Memory, History, Forgetting. It is here that Ricoeur has attracted the most critical readings to this point, with regard to his notion of the “duty of memory.” Not that he rejects it categorically like Todorov. The duty of memory has an importance for him, and is a concern for a project of justice, even imperative if it is about returning justice to the other. (pp. 86-92). Moreover, one will notice that for Ricoeur there is no symmetry between memory and forgetting, and that he objects to the idea of a “duty of forgetting,” not only with regard to amnesty (pp. 500506), but even in the political project of restoring civil peace. I will note in passing that something like a duty to forget still exists, mentioned in the beginning of the text of the Edict of Nantes, which took France out of the wars of religion, or in the oath not to remember misfortunes, which led Athens out of civil war.8 It is why, as a purely political concept, which I would distinguish from a metapolitical or even antipolitical conception appropriate to tragedy, I would readily propose a moderate advocacy of amnesty, in spite of Ricoeur’s criticism. But this last here prefers to put forward the acceptance of the divided city, if not actual civic dissensus. We will come back to this. Whence then this polemic against the duty of memory, beyond the fact that most detractors didn’t read the book and are themselves limited to allusions? It is that Ricoeur expresses reservations regarding the duty of memory, when it is excessively expanded beyond the sphere that we just addressed: these reservations arise from the difficulties in controlling memory, and from the danger of implementing a politics of memory that is inscribed in terms of obligations, rights and

8

See Nicole Loraux, La cit divis (Paris: Payot, 1997), 256 and 277, and idem, La voix en deuil (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). 96

prohibitions. This is why there are not only abuses of forgetting but also abuses of memory. There are false memories, cardboard memories. And this is why he prefers to speak of a “work of memory,” where a memory of misfortune, far from deadening us to the misfortunes of others, opens us to them. This is how the indispensable and vital memory does not short-circuit history and critical distanciation, but rather releases repressed memories with its touch. This is an old theme in Ricoeur, and the heart of his critical hermeneutics (p. 373, see Du texte á l’action (pp. 101-117 and pp. 362ff.), that is also to say, against a romantic or ontological hermeneutics, the autonomy of history in relation to memory, and against a critical positivism, the irreducible dependence of history on memory (Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 106). This double arena of affiliation and distance makes delicate all discussion of Memory, History, Forgetting that would pick on one of the two sides as isolated and supposedly static (p. 458). The autonomy of history with respect to memory (p. 136 and 182) follows the autonomization of written and textual traces, which are like “the paradigm of distance in communication.”9 It is by this that a text orphaned from its author no longer answers questions that are sedimented and extinct, but opens up to new questions -- here perhaps we are again very near the dialectics of mourning and birth, when it prepares a dialectics of emancipation and attachment. On the other hand, however, the dependence of history, with respect to memory, could not be abolished entirely: Having arrived at this extreme point of the historiographical reduction of memory, we allowed a protest to be heard, one in which the power of the attestation of memory concerning the past is lodged. History can expand, complete, correct, even refute the testimony of memory regarding the past; it cannot abolish it. (p. 498) Emancipation never abolishes childhood, and what was but is no more always demands to be told. One sees, in this mutual overlapping of history and memory, this double connection, the extreme care that Ricoeur always takes to maintain both the continuity and the discontinuity of the problems. Not only are the problems of fidelity and truth irreducible, but they are also inseparable. It is this requirement that refuses the dogmatic synthesis just as it refuses the relativistic juxtaposition, and which sustains the theme of civic dissensus. It is time to linger a moment on this superb theme. To properly situate this notion it seems necessary to retrieve what Ricoeur calls the overlapping constitution of individual and collective memory: on the one hand one does not remember all alone, (p. 121) but on the other hand only singular points of view exist within the collective memory. (p. 123) The intermediate and central category here is the one of the memory of close relations, those about whom I can offer my testimony, those who can attest on my behalf, those that can deplore my death, and those whose death I can deplore just as they could rejoice in my birth or I could rejoice in theirs. But close relations are not only in an intermediate sociological category between the individual and the collective. It is a quasi-ontological dynamic of possible closeness and the remoteness: the close relation is the one who makes herself close, or who is suddenly drawn close by some event. Proximity indicates a vital, ethical, or contemplative impulse. Somewhat in the sense of what Kierkegaard calls the contemporary, close relations are those that can make one a contemporary, even if their coexistence seems anachronistic and they belong to different language worlds and generations. Ricoeur goes so far at to define them as those who can disapprove of my acts but not of my existence. (p. 132) Into this mutual

9

Paul Ricoeur, Du texte á l’action (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 102 and 193. 97

attestation slips a plurality, most notably an acceptance that my history can be recounted in diverse ways, represented by others. (p. 299) Moreover, it is in this intermediate time and the indirectness of the connection to close relations that the range of our differences of points of view in relation to an event is shaped, a gap that is the very shape of our temporality: what makes us contemporary can also make us anachronistic -- and the “petit miracle de la reconnaissance” or of recollection is perhaps just such an experience of anachronistic contemporaneousness. The civic dissensus appears then, just as it does with contemporaries, somewhere between the judge and the historian, in a common rhetorical space open to discussion. A discussion that works our memory, argument, and even our imaginations tireless, and of which we only know that the rules, boundaries, and audience are not the same, depending on the spheres. The historians and the judges both must certainly at times find support in the finality of the facts and on this practical perspective according to which history is not finished; but they do it differently. And there is no absolute third party that allows them to settle this. (p. 314f) However, it is exactly this dissensus that forms citizens capable of standing in the absence of a last judgment, capable of holding the tension of the sharing of the responsibility between the singular imputation of fault to the guilty individuals, and the political imputation to a consenting community. The citizen appears in the refusal that guilt be so tightly focused that all others can unload it onto a few guilty emissaries. But the citizen also appears in the refusal that responsibility is so diluted, explained, compared, and relativized, that no one is responsible for anything. (p. 330) The citizen is moved to take the responsibility on herself and share it.

3. The Credibility and Conflict of the Good Witness We will to come back to this point, as we now go far afield, and it will be our first long digression. One of the main problems that Ricoeur faces in this book, and which is found as much on the major side of representing of the past as on the minor side of just memory (neither too much nor too little), is the one of the credibility. In this he connects with the alternative that frightened Giovanni Levi, that men believe they can know everything, represent everything, say everything, and thus tumble into general skepticism, either by impossibility or, worse, with the feeling that any hypothesis, if well enough equipped, can be verified. Ricoeur writes: What finally brings about the crisis in testimony is that its irruption clashes with the conquest made by Lorenzo Valla in The Donation of Constatine. Then it was a matter of struggling against credulity and imposture, now it is one of struggling against incredulity and the will to forget. (p. 176) It is this remark that I would like to meditate on in the lines that follow, because Ricoeur makes a sensible point not only about the historic condition, but about the contemporary condition, and language and politics in general. And I believe it important to point out everything in the book that bears on it because I believe that it is one of the main questions that the book leaves us with, a common question that it opens. In the cited passage Ricoeur speaks of archives. But more broadly it is of course about the credibility of the testimonies, that asks, beyond the critical confrontation, a minimum of mutual approval, the acceptance that there can be for each something indubitable: “we have nothing better than testimony, in the final analysis, to assure ourselves that something did happen in the past.” (p. 147) It is the foundational thesis of the book. 98

I first say mutual approval, because the fabric of confidence in this institution of institutions that is speech, in the possibility to speak and to act, is woven of a mutual and fundamental confidence in the simple existence of each other. This mutual approbation expresses the shared assurance that each one makes regarding his or her powers and lack of powers, what I termed attestation in Soi-même comme un autre. What I expect from my close relations is that they approve of what I attest: that I am able to speak, act, recount, impute to myself the responsibility for my actions... In my turn, I include among my close relations those who disapprove of my actions, but not my existence. (p. 132) Testimony presupposes this mutual attestation. This confidence doesn’t disarm critical thought, rather it authorizes it: one can really only criticize on a foundation of confidence. This confidence is ever nourished by two signs never really filled: the first is the internal consistency of the testimonies, the second is their pluralism, the fact that they shift to make room for other witnesses: Before underscoring the most obvious oppositions that distinguish the use of testimony in court from its use in archives, let us pause to examine two features common to both uses: the concern with proof and the critical examination of the credibility of the witnesses. (p. 316) Common to both the judge and the historian is certainly their practice of confronting and controlled handling of suspicion, but also the installation of common rhetorical space, even if the rules and the institution do not always take the same shape. The courthouses cannot decree historic truth, and history, concerned as it is to render to all their due, is not to be decided in a courthouse. With regard to the credibility of a witness, it is necessary to carry the doubt to the heart of the witness and of the testimony itself, if one wants to get hold of the feeling of indubitable certainty that carries with it the experience of the recognizing the past: Upon this converge the presumptions of reliability or unreliability directed to memories. Perhaps we have placed a foot in the wrong imprint or grabbed the wrong ring dove in the coop. Perhaps we were the victims of a false recognition, as when from afar we take a tree to be a person we know. And yet, who, by casting suspicions from outside, could shake the certainty attached to the pleasure of the sort of recognition we know in our hearts to be indubitable? Who could claim never to have trusted memory’s finds in this way? (p. 430) It is not by chance that Ricoeur begins this chapter on “Forgetting and the Persistence of Traces” and the small miracle of recognition (p. 427) by expansive discussion on the confidence and distrust in the possibilities of memory, that accompany and mutually approve each other without definitively overriding the other.

4. The Historic Dissensus Confidence is inseparable from suspicion, and this “question of confidence” (p. 172) is bound to the frightening but unavoidable possibility, not only of the lie, but of the impotence of testifying, of making oneself heard:

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What confidence in the word of others reinforces is not just the interdependence, but the shared common humanity, of the members of a community. This needs to be said in fine to compensate for the excessive accent placed on the theme of difference in many contemporary theories of the social bond. Reciprocity corrects for the unsubstitutability of actors. Reciprocal exchange consolidates the feelings of existing along with other humans – inter homines esse, as Hannah Arendt liked to put it. This “betweenness” opens the field to dissensus as much as to consensus. And it is the dissensus that the critique of potentially divergent testimonies will introduce on the pathway from testimony to the archive. To conclude, in the final analysis, the middle level of security of language of a society depends on the trustworthiness, hence on the biographical attestation, of each witness taken one by one. It is against this background of assumed confidence that tragically stands out the solitude of those “historical witnesses” whose extraordinary experience stymies the capacity for average ordinary understanding. But there are also witnesses who never encounter an audience capable of listening to them or hearing what they have to say. (p. 166) I think that here we have a firm grasp of the disturbing point, that keeps us in suspense and requires the courageous response of attestation: to testify in spite of the feeling that it is not heard. But this requires and calls for no less than the courage to hear, to listen. And it is also necessary that the listeners be believable, capable of rebuilding their existential consistency as listeners while really taking account of what they heard, and capable of making it so that this experience, far from closing them, opens them to the possibility of other experiences of listening. The reception of the testimony is as important a critical element as its reliability. The whole question is to increase the public’s ability to actually receive the testimony. This point seems quite important to me, and it seems legitimate to me to consider that Ricoeur suggests it implicitly. In the lonely anguish to which we have just pointed, a thoroughly terrible philosophical question slips in, the question of skepticism, that is also the one of solipsism. One comes closer here to Wittgenstein, and to the question of skepticism, i.e., the withdrawal of each into one’s private language, doubting that whatever it is can really be known or communicated. We need not believe that we can share our experiences so easily, and even less to impose them on others. However, one does not remember all alone, and history is the work of many: In this regard, the earliest memories encountered along this path are shared memories, common memories (what Edward Casey places under the title “Reminiscing”). They allow us to affirm that “in reality, we are never alone”; and in this way the thesis of solipsism is set aside, even as a temporary hypothesis… In other words, one does not remember alone. (p. 121-122) It is precisely in the section on the exteriority of memory according to Maurice Halbwachs that this formula intervenes. Ricoeur follows this up with the important remark that “it is the connectedness of memory, dear to Dilthey…that has to be abandoned” and by the quasi-Leibnizian idea that “each memory is a viewpoint on the Collective Memory, that this viewpoint changes as my position changes.” (p. 122, 124) Credibility appears from then on as indissolubly linked to the test and exercise of dissensus, of the feeling of discordant voices. This discordance can be mapped onto the great historical processes: Osiel is drawn to the dissensus provoked by the trials’ public proceedings and to the educational function exerted by this very dissensus on the level of public opinion and 100

collective memory, which is expressed and shaped on this level. The trust he places in the benefits expected to follow from this culture of controversy is related to his moral and political credo on behalf of a liberal society – in the political sense that Englishspeaking authors give to the term “liberal.” (p. 323) It is, however, not only about the credibility of the testimonies in the juridical space of a lawsuit, but also about the reciprocal credibility (and of the incredulity) of history and memory. Here we find once again Ricoeur’s classic oscillation between a hermeneutic pole of belonging to the world already and a critical pole of distance and pluralism -- with this double connection of the autonomy of critical and comparative history with respect to memory, and of the dependence of history with respect to the memory of the incomparable, of that which was and “demande a être raconté.” The rehabilitation of memory in history proposes to find a point of balance, before the excess of credulity in the one drags the other into total skepticism. In passing we note, to complete the previous quote, that it is necessary to re-establish the balance between the liberalism of trust and the critique of suppressed dissensus: Of course, not everything historical can be included within situations of conflict or denunciation. Nor do they all come down to situations of the restoration of confidence through the creation of new rules, through the establishment of new uses, or the renovation of old ones. These situations only illustrate the successful appropriation of the past. Inadaptation contrary to the fitting act, too, stems from the present of history, in the sense of the present of the agents of history. Appropriation and denial of relevance are there to attest that the present of history does include a dialectical structure. (p. 226) It is because of this delicate balance between trust and dissensus that the historian must broaden the range and what Ricoeur calls “l’échelle des aspects non quantitatifs des temps sociaux.” He thus mentions authors such as Bernard Lepetit to show how the slow continuity and discontinuity of changes, with regard to the agreements and deep disagreements of a society, should be treated as the opposite ends of the same spectrum. The dialectical structure of the historical present, which is more a practical exercise of initiative than a theoretical representation, acts as intersection between the horizon of expectation and the experiential space so dear to Kosseleck, but without being able to designate, at the intersection of the legal and the historical, an absolute third party. The judicial lawsuit proposes a form of a third party, and historiographic narration also, certainly. To retrieve and pursue the four categories of responsibility that Ricoeur previously borrowed from Jaspers, there would also be the narrative one tells a friend, and the somehow metaphysical responsibility of the “survivors” before God. But these different faces of “party” do not comprise a system: “The vow of impartiality must thus be considered in light of the impossibility of an absolute third party.” (p. 314) As with the philosophy of ordinary language, the solution to the problem is not found in an assured certainty, but in the confident acceptance of this uncertain situation, of this troubling strangeness of the ordinary, in the wonder that we nevertheless so often mange to understand one another, trust one another, without ever being able to force it to happen. Recall the formula: “we have nothing better than testimony, in the final analysis, to assure ourselves that something did happen in the past.” (p. 147) I would gladly bring it closer to the famous words of J. L. Austin, in How to Do Things with Words: “Our speech is our action.” How to trust language, but not to put our trust in it? How do we not credit the capacity of the ordinary actors, speakers, and narrators to express more or less what they do and feel, and to understand and want what they say? 101

From where, perhaps, the place of the forgiveness to stop the increase of useless words, to start again by grounding ourselves anew in the possibility of speech: Forgiveness raises a question that in its principle is distinct from the one that...has motivated our entire undertaking... On the one hand, it is the enigma of a fault held to paralyze the empowerment to act of the “capable being” that “we are”; and it is, in reply, the enigma of the possible lifting of this existential incapacity, designated by the term “forgiveness.” This double enigma runs diagonally through that of the representation of the past. (p. 457)

5. The Horizon of Forgiveness Can we make a last step toward our topic without this, turning suddenly toward us, sending us back to the gate, forcing us to start again on a different path? We are going to come back to the point where we were while going off in quite a different direction, and this will be our second digression. The place granted to difficult forgiveness in the epilogue of Memory, History, Forgetting, touches very near to some very old concerns of mine, and I am very sensitive to the remarkable ambiguousness in which Ricoeur places forgiveness, because he situates it well inside his book as something that comes down from its unconditional height to move across the set of institutions (legal imprescriptibility, citizenship of historical responsibility) and exchanges (restoration of a possible reciprocity) before coming back to that which I called the negative recognition of the release: an order to be bound by a promise, the subject of an action must also be able to be released from it through forgiveness. (p. 459) In this difficult moment, forgiveness must pass through the test of justice, not short-circuit it, (p. 473) and Ricoeur speaks of the conditionality of the demand of forgiveness, against the unconditionality of a forgiveness granted. But at exactly the same time, he speaks of forgiveness as an exceptional, unconditional, extraordinary, impossible act, because it is addressed to the unforgivable. (p. 471f) He speaks of gestures incapable of being transformed into institutions (p. 458), and he speaks of abuses of forgiveness just as there are abuses of memory. (p.469) The link between to the book’s epilogue is then very uncertain, like a supplement where one does not know if and how it is connected to the rest: Ricoeur announces immediately that it is a question other than the one of representing the past that motivated the book as a whole: if forgiveness gives shape of the epilogue, it is rather like a figure of tragic wisdom or like: an eschatology of the representation of the past. Forgiveness, if it has a sense, and if it exists, constitutes the horizon common to memory, history and forgetting. Always in retreat, this horizon slips away from my grasp. It makes forgiving difficult: not easy but not impossible. It places a seal of incompleteness on the entire enterprise. (p. 59310) Ricoeur declared earlier in the text that it was necessary to place forgiveness “outside of the text.” In the optics of the book, the depth of “fault belongs to the parerga, the ‘asides,’” (p. 461) like all limit situations he addresses in the epilogue. We might object that if it is no longer about the major question of the representation of the absent past, we are nevertheless involved in the other big question, the one of a just politics of memory and forgetting. But Ricoeur challenges the idea of a politics of forgiveness: the collective

10

See also p. 646. Ricoeur is speaking of the horizon of accomplishment of a historical knowledge that is aware of its own limits. 102

is incapable of forgiveness, of escaping from the friend-enemy relationship. (p. 476-477) And there are no doubt things that are not so decided, and on which coercion has no hold. To understand this point properly, it is important to note Ricoeur’s extreme distrust with respect to love, and more precisely with respect to all premature synthesis between religious ethics of reconciliation or even merely of the compassionate agape, and the ethics of the magistrate. If there is no politics of forgiveness, it is because love “proves to be foreign to the world and, for this reason, not only apolitical but antipolitical.” (p. 488) Ricoeur, as always by another path, converges here with Hannah Arendt, in this distrust regarding compassion that does not leave any room for debate, distance, plurality, for conflict itself -- and therefore for its rules. On the other hand, neither is it about bringing back all unity in history or justice under the sign of synthesis; it is precisely that there are different forms of impartiality, there is no absolute third, as if it were so important to allow room for an antipolitical fringe. The gap is irreducible, and perhaps it is this anachronism that makes time human. I would guess, and this is what I would like to explore in the pages that come, that the word parerga, parergon, can help us to think through the ambiguous position of forgiveness and love in the epilogue. An epilogue is not a conclusion. Ricoeur speaks of incompleteness. I will add that it is less about a step in the same direction or a reconnection that enables a consolidation of all that has been achieved along the way, than of a kind of “detotalization,” of a return to the beginning -- but of course then, one does not begin again in the same way. The term of parerga is used by Kant in the final note that completes the first of the four general remarks that finishes the four parts of The Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. These four remarks are about grace, understood as that which is confined to religion, and give it its frame but would not know how to become an integral part of it. The inactivity of grace must remain an outside limit to religion. In the same way, it seems to me that Ricoeur places his epilogue under the title of forgiveness (and of an economy of the gift and the loss), to situate it on this margin that is neither inside nor outside. In a small book on the ethics of Ricoeur,11 I myself slipped in an epilogue on “Love and Justice” where I tried to show this ambiguity, the living tension, the twist he puts on the golden rule (not to do unto others what one would not want done to oneself). Sometimes it works like an old promise that constantly reopens the rules of procedural justice: détachée du contexte de la règle d’or, la règle du maximin resterait un argument purement prudentiel, caractéristique de tout jeu de marchandage. Non seulement la visée déontologique, mais même la dimension historique du sens de la justice, ne sont pas simplement intuitives, mais résultent d’une longue Bildung issue de la tradition juive et chrétienne, aussi bien que grecque et romaine. Séparée de cette histoire culturelle, la règle du maximin perdrait sa caractérisation éthique.12 Sometimes a principle of justice and reciprocity is formulated that, separated from love, becomes perverse in its turn. It is no doubt why the just can sometimes understand the opposition of the legal and the good, and sometimes be opposed to the good that would then point toward infinite love. Love then exceeds all justice in all ways:

11

Olivier Abel, Paul Ricoeur, la promesse et la règle (Paris: Michalon, 1996). “Une théorie purement procédurale de la justice est-elle possible?” Paul Ricoeur, Le juste (Paris: Esprit, 1995), 96. 12

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Sans le correctif du commandement d’amour, en effet, la règle d’or serait sans cesse tirée dans le sens d’une maxime utilitaire dont la formule serait do ut des, je donne pour que tu donnes. La règle: donne parce qu’il t’a été donné, corrige le “afin que” de la maxime utilitaire et sauve la règle d’or d’une interprétation perverse toujours possible.13 Likewise, here forgiveness works horizontally like a demand of reciprocity submitted to rules and conditions. Sometime it works vertically as the unconditional that can appear but cannot be forced to appear, but is attempted -- thinking ourselves capable. It is thus necessary to move constantly to assume the responsibility of the demands of forgiveness, to make oneself capable of it (which is submitted to conditions), while at the same time also to accept oneself as incapable, impotent (it would be necessary for the forgiveness to be entirely selfless and one never knows if it is). As always, and a little like a Platonic dialogue, Ricoeur stages this disproportion through readings that he opposes and conjoins, by which he lets them somehow conspire before arranging them and bending them to his plan. It is in this way that he borrows some elements of my analysis of the moral dilemmas of horizontal forgiveness, and borrows from Derrida some of the essential characteristics of the height of vertical forgiveness. And this is how he constructs his frame, which is like the limit idea of the whole book. It is a Kantian idea, and it is as if he defended a Kantian concept using human history.

6. A Kantian Frame Now Derrida some time ago wrote a very beautiful text on the parerga, by which I would like to make a detour. There he analyzed the notion of disinterested pleasure, defending the disinterestedness against Nietzsche and the pleasure against Heidegger; but he also noted Kant’s distrust of the parerga, this non-organic supplement to the work, as the frame for the pictures or the garments for the statues, this superfluous supplement. This frame, that is neither interior nor exterior, a little like the player who is neither inside his game nor outside his game if he is really playing, Derrida recovers it in the very structure of the Critique of Judgment, where Kant imports into the analytics of aesthetic judgment the set of judgments that issued from the Critique of pure Reason. The frame fits poorly: on transpose et fait entrer de force un cadre logique pour l’imposer d’une structure non logique, une structure qui ne concerne plus essentiellement un rapport de l’objet comme objet de connaissance. Le jugement esthétique, Kant y insiste, n’est pas un jugement de connaissance.14 According to Derrida, the only justification of this transposition resides in a hypothetical link with understanding. Making allusion to the Critique of Judgment (paragraph 1, p. 49), Derrida comments:

13 14

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Paul Ricoeur, Amour et justice (Paris: PUF, 1997), 56-58. Ibid., 81.

Le cadre de cette analytique du beau, avec ses quatre moments, est donc fourni par l’analytique transcendantale pour la seule et mauvaise raison que l’imagination, ressource essentielle du rapport à la beauté, se lie peut-être à l’entendement.15 A hypothetical link, therefore uncertain, confused: le rapport à l’entendement, qui n’est ni sûr, ni essentiel, fournit donc le cadre à tout ce discours; et en lui le discours sur le cadre ... tout le cadre de l’analytique du beau fonctionne, par rapport à ce dont il s’agit de déterminer le contenu ou la structure interne, comme un parergon.16 The frame becomes in its turn an example of that which permits its consideration as an example, a parerga of that which permits its consideration as a parerga. It is toward this bizarre composition of settings in the depths that Derrida is heading. For him, if Kant dismisses a supplementary frame based on another supplementary frame, it is because the judgment of beauty remains spellbound by the model of pure presence, released from all supplement, and that this presence gives way -- from whence the mourning, that means disinterestedness (the possible). Derrida speaks of a kind of grief-stricken connection to beauty -- a theme extensively developed on pages 92-94, where aesthetic experience, “a tulip without color and without perfume,” is already itself a work of the mourning. A little later, Derrida, observing that the beautiful no longer depends on empirical existence (neither that of the object, nor the subject), writes: le plaisir suppose non pas la disparition pure et simple, mais la neutralisation, non pas simplement la mise à mort mais la mise en crypte de tout ce qui existe en tant qu’il existe.17 We know, we have just recounted, that Ricoeur considers the notion of a “work of memory” as more sufficient than one of a “duty of memory.” He relates it to the work of mourning, and we have seen how pervasive the notions of mourning and burial were in Memory, History, Forgetting. There would be thus, as in La Recherche du temps perdu, a kind of memory that comes back from mourning, an orphism of memory. We recover in memory only that which was truly lost. There is however another side of the work of memory, more lively, inchoate, a side of memory somehow newborn. And it is there that Ricoeur parts ways with Derrida: one could bring the work of memory, of that which he esteems in La Métaphore vive as the work of resemblance -- which in turn does not seem to be very far from what he calls “the small miracle of recognition,” closer to this fundamental notion that recognition almost no longer works. We will come back to this. What is this sought after resemblance? In a superb text “Sur un autoportrait de Rembrand,”18 Ricoeur suddenly asks what allows thought that the represented face is that of the painter himself. Because the date and the signature of the picture say the painter’s name, but it is an external legend that indicates that it is regarding a self-portrait. The canvas represents one who is absent, the author of the canvas died, and we are told that they are identical. What is this identity? Faithful to his hermeneutics, Ricoeur insists on the fact that while doing this “painting examination” (in 1660, a difficult moment in his 15 16 17 18

Ibid., 83. Ibid. Ibid., 54. Paul Ricoeur, Lectures III (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 13f. 105

life), Rembrandt proposes an interpretation of himself, and that the work is henceforth orphaned from its author and its context. Just as living speech made room for writing, the work is unglued, unmoored, and there is nothing to look for around or behind it other than the absence of the one that rendered in this portrait what he saw of his face, and that he died. And this portrait, precisely because it is orphaned (I would say unmoored), looks at us today, made of us its contemporaries. It makes us see new resemblances. There is, in the numerous attempts of van Gogh to paint some shoes, the pairs sometimes lovingly odd, something that is at the level of a self-portrait. That is the appraisal of Jacques Derrida, in the text of “Restitution”: Dans un autoportrait, on se rend soi-même. À soi-même. … Mais rendre n’a pas le même sens dans les deux locutions: se rendre en peinture et se rendre quelque chose à soi-même, se payer. … et se rendre à quelqu’un serait pour qui se livre dans une reddition, un quatrième sens. Van Gogh a rendu ses chaussures, il s’est rendu dans ses chaussures, il s’est rendu avec ses chaussures, il s’est rendu à ses chaussures, il s’est rendu ses chaussures.19 What would be the differend between Derrida and Ricoeur? I don’t know. Mourning is not the same, maybe, but do we ever have the same mourning, and is it not just this that makes it irreparable? In La métaphore vive Ricoeur discussed the deconstruction by which Derrida, in his Mythologie blanche, sees a western metaphysical bias acting on the whole of modern philosophical discourse with metaphors that are worn-out, sedimented, eroded, apparently abolished, but that conceal themselves of it.20 Le coup de maître, ici, est d’entrer dans le métaphorique, non par la porte de la naissance, mais, si j’ose dire, par la porte de la mort. Le concept d’usure implique tout autre chose que le concept d’abus que nous avons vu opposer à celui d’usage par les auteurs anglo-saxons.21 But it is not enough to resuscitate metaphor under a concept, to show its reproductive mechanism: first because, it seems to me, wearing down itself could produce new significations, through the crumbling of semantic spheres, or setting in relief the sense that emerges in ordinary use. And then there is that which Ricoeur, in a sort of secondary Kantianism, calls “le schématisme de l’attribution métaphorique,” the possibility that original gaps slip into an old metaphor, reopening it, and to making it say something quite new; finally because there exists, constantly, always already taking support from the network of sedimented metaphors, the invention of new living metaphors. Ricoeur’s protest would be that one cannot separate mourning and birth, and that under history and forgetting themselves there is life. We can here recall that birth is a decisive philosophical theme on which Ricoeur rejoins Arendt: must this not be understood as a discreet yet stubborn protest addressed to the Heideggerian philosophy of being-toward-death? Should we not see action as “an ever

19

Jacques Derrida, La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 435. “Ce sont les grandes métaphores ontologiques de la présence, de la demeure, du sol, du soleil, vers lesquelles se retournent les figures de la philosophie depuis Platon (cited in Ricoeur, La métaphore vive, 367). 21 Ibid., 362. 20

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present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin”? In this respect, “action… looks like a miracle. (p. 246) The evocation of the miracle of action, at the origin of the miracle of forgiveness, seriously calls into question the entire analysis of the faculty of forgiveness. How can the mastery of time be joined to the miracle of natality? It is precisely this question that sets our entire enterprise into motion again and invites us to pursue the odyssey of forgiveness to the center of selfhood. In my opinion, what is lacking in the political interpretation of forgiveness, which assures its symmetry with promising on the same level of exchange, is any reflection on the very active binding proposed as the condition for the act of binding.” (p. 636)

7. The Faculty of Unbinding Forgiveness introduces at once a link, a bond of debt and mourning, and an unbinding, a rupture, the faculty to start over.22 It is why there is no need to raise the birth to the point of making it a triumph of life, like an unending process of renewal, which would completely lack the tragic.23 The theme of birth appears since Le volontaire et l’involontaire as even more radical than that of death, and comprised at the same time of the vigorous joy in the new, and of mourning. Birth is also orphaned, it is a necessary facet of all experience, a fundamental limit. And I would quickly point out that the last pages of Memory, History, Forgetting, which foreground the undecidable character of the polarity that divides forgetting between the grief-stricken entropy of erasure and the joyful confidence in that which he calls the forgetting in reserve, brings this equivocation to its paroxysm. If we give credit to the competence of ordinary beings in the face of time, we will not then think of mourning without thinking of birth, that is to say the desire to be -- it is here that the Bergsonianism probably conceals a discreet Spinozism, a deeply affirmative orientation, approving of the thought of Paul Ricoeur, who ends his book on the notion of life, of incompleteness. But this living continuity that one recovers with the astonishing idea of a forgetting in reserve that he opposes to the forgetting of erasure, to the discontinuity of deaths and births, as being of the same strength, does not designate something that would be at our disposal (otherwise this would not be of the order of forgetting), but something that arranges us. Moreover: in this respect, there is no representation of the past that could be a resurrection of it, that would no doubt require a finished work of memory (p. 499) -- mourning is there to separate the past from the present and to make room for the future, that is to say for being carefree, for forgetting oneself. Whence comes the final Kierkegaardian note. It is indeed a point where one can speak of a stilled forgetting, (oubli d vr) and Ricoeur then cites the magnificent pages of Kierkegaard on the lilies of the field and the birds of the sky, who do not work, do not compare, who forget themselves. This insouciance, this unbinding of the care of self, is again a theme of the forgiveness, not

22

This unbinding is a completely primary metapolitical theme, hearkening back to the Puritan Reformation, on the right of breaking alliances and contracts. At the same time it is a comic theme, a theme of wisdom: thus Ricoeur develops elsewhere more tragic and epic theses, which do not allow us as easily to think the binding of the agent and his act that Badiou attributes to Ricoeur as a Christian conception of the subject. Since then I have explained this in an article appearing in the Herne journals. 23 This would also be a mistaken reading of Hannah Arendt. 107

only as a place made for oneself as another, but also as an erasing of oneself before another, and who comes to be, to appear in world. It is exactly because there is the melancholy, the very impossibility of completing the task of mourning, that there is birth that neither finishes nor supplements this work, but stills it. The difficulty of forgiveness is to yield neither to the vertigo of entropy, the wear of forgetting, the habituation that relativizes all and by which all returns to indifference24; nor to yield to the prestige of negentropy, of this negative entropy by which memory would wish to be able to reclaim everything, to sort out and calculate with no remainder, in a total recollection and redemption of the past in its entirety.25 It is to the point that it seems to me possible to drive the idea, that the epilogue on forgiveness in parergon of Memory, History, Forgetting, is a limit, a paradox, a horizon, the place of tension, of torsion or the about-face of all discourses. Ricoeur’s epilogue puts forgiveness on a limit, a notion that is made very Kantian -in the sense of the question: “What am I permitted to hope?” To take the philosophical approximation of the theological vocabulary of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, we could say with Ricoeur that: “forgiveness offers itself as the best eschatological horizon of the entire problematic of memory, history, and forgetting.” Would forgiveness finally be like the eschatological horizon of the appeased memory, of the happy forgetting? But this must immediately be understood as a limit idea, which is why Ricoeur continues: “But this approximation of eskhaton guarantees no happy ending for our enterprise as a whole: this is why it will be question only of a difficult forgiveness (epilogue).” (p. 285) It is just why it is necessary “to examine it and side of the text, so to speak, in the form of an epilogue.” (p. 285) This horizon is less defined as a fusion of horizons in Gadamer’s sense than as a flight (fuite) of horizons, and an incompleteness. (p. 538) The eskhaton is not the Last Judgment, which Ricoeur greatly mistrusts (it is for him a contradictory notion, and even then there is no absolute third). And the odyssey of forgiveness ever reaches the promised land. It is that which Ricoeur shows in his magnificent reading of hope in Kant.26 To really grasp this point, I would say that Ricoeur does not conceive of forgiveness at all as the crowning or teleological reconciliation of history, but as an eskhaton, a constituent limit, and I would almost call it an ordinary condition.27 And it is why in my

24

It is the sense of the protest of Jankélévitch but also of Nietzsche’s criticism of Schopenhauerian detachment. 25 It is by this double movement, no doubt also influenced by a reading of a great essay by JeanFrançois Lyotard on Hannah Arendt (entitled Survivant, in his Lectures d’enfance), that I achieved my “Tables de Pardon,” in the appendix to Le Pardon, briser la dette et l’oubli (Paris: Autrement, 1992). 26 There he asks: “ajouter à l’objet de sa visée, pour qu’il soit entier, ce qu’elle a exclu de son principe, pour qu’il soit pur.” And radical evil “n’aît sur la voie de la totalisation, il n’apparaît que dans une pathologie de l’espérance, comme la perversion inhérente à la problématique de l’accomplissement et de la totalisation.” See Paul Ricoeur, “La liberté selon l’espérance,” in idem, Le Conflit des interprétations (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 407, 414. 27 Grace does not come as the crowning moment of nature or history, it precedes them as a first unbinding, a recommencement, a first gift, a free giving, an offer where forgiveness is but gratitude and recognition. It is why, during a 1996 course I gave in Lausanne on “Le pardon, l’histoire, l’oubli,” I adopted this alternate syntax (also used in my Esprit article in 1993: “Ce que le pardon vient faire dans l’Histoire”). Starting from an unconditional and impossible forgiveness, passing by way of the pragmatics of conditional forgiveness, I then moved toward an anthropology of a necessary forgiveness. It is this first forgiveness that I then confronted with two kinds of tragedy, the tragedy of conflict with respect to disagreements in history, and the formidable work of emplotment they require. The tragedy of the irreparable with respect to the double work of memory and forgetting culminated in moderate praise for forgetting. 108

small article on “Le pardon ou comment revenir au monde ordinaire,”28 I protest against a way of pushing forgiveness too far, outside the world, into an impossible extraordinary, and attempt to come back from a sublime and inaccessible forgiveness to one that is less dramatic. The eskhaton, in fact, is not the end of the world, just the opposite. It is elsewhere also the main argument of Ricoeur against a deconstruction that wants to be total: it is not necessary to construct a metaphysics of the original and the metaphorical on the duality of the figurative sense and the literal sense, because the latter means only current, usual.29 And if ordinary language is likewise entirely metaphorical, how do we get out of it, how do we not trust these normal anomalies of language that are our metaphors, all not-yet-lexicalized usage?30 I wrote above that if forgiveness appeared as this detotalization, a return to the beginning, one did not begin again the same way. If it was necessary to begin again, I would begin with Kant’s emphasis, in The Critique of Judgment, on the questions of receptiveness. This is not only the feeling that beauty speaks, but that we do not know what it says (this is no doubt hope). This is not only that in the absence of a third we can make room in ourselves for the possibility of another point of view, in a sort of enlarging of the imagination. (p. 414) It is the fact that my judgments, my memory, even my testimony, cannot be forced, obligated, ordered, nor imposed, and that their credibility and their very communicability rests, fragile, on the manner of which they are confided in their receivers. But as with pleasure, joy, or love, if forgiveness cannot be imposed (p. 471), is still works as something of a traversing of distrust and skepticism, not toward an assured and absolute confidence, but toward a confidence in the possibility of acting and speaking, and the indubitable recognition that “this was.” (p. 429-430) This zigzag of confidence in one’s own testimony, which renders to the testimony of others the confidence that is due, seems to me the beating heart the work that has been given us here to discuss and reflect on together. Translated by Boyd Blundell

28 29 30

Esprit (août-septembre 2000). See Ricoeur, La métaphore vive, 369. Ibid., 365-366. 109

III.

THE HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF HUMAN REALITY

1.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE INSIDE OF SPACE: READINGS OF MERLEAU-PONTY

Luís António Umbelino

1. It is with the notion of vécu -- a live reality, reality as “lived” -- at the forefront of his investigations, that Maurice Merleau-Ponty examines (among other notions) the “original experience of space, prior to making a distinction between form and content.”1 The ‘original’ experience of space makes us think of space as it might be, before the intrusion of some quantitative, measurable, and geometrical scheme; it makes us think of a reality in which I can move corporeally, by means of an original and invisible connection. Qualifying space as lived corresponds to discovering it as a “perceptual ground,”2 in so far as it is neither constituted from an objective quality belonging to things with their relations of size or distance, nor from a ‘decree’ issuing from a subject. By “perceptual ground” we must understand the very relation of coexistence by which the one who thinks about space realizes that he already belongs to that which he thinks. Thus the deep reality of space offers itself up to discovery only in those qualitative experiences where a locus or locality makes our gaze quiver with emotion3 and turns itself into deep intimacy and evidence of belonging. In other words, it needs to be said that the “ensemble of our experiences … is permeated throughout by an already acquired spatiality,”4 in which we “discover ourselves already under the influence of”5 an atmosphere that is not, by definition, entirely thematizable. Therefore, to state that a space is lived means, equally, to presuppose that, through my body, I have already established with the world a pact, more ancient than any other pact, i.e., a pre-thematic connection grounded on a communication that is “older than thought.”6 When we interrogate this pact, we learn that a concept of space purely founded on knowledge of spatial relations, between objects that are geometrically held like abstract functions, is very far from being impartial and from covering the whole of our experience concerning space.7 And this, because from the very start, and for a body situated in the world, the technical question of how to determine the spatial relations of defined objects is invariably tackled with a view to the original presence of a world that is always already familiar to us. Whenever I open my eyes to what surrounds me, I do not see all things as if they were made up of “a thousand facets [or] a sum of perceptions”8; I do not see isolated objects, I do not see this house or that tree, as if alone in a void. I am permeated by space and, for that reason, each thing I see, in the world, acquires its sense for me in the midst of an ensemble that seems to establish each and every thing in the encounter with my gaze; an ensemble, which is always already what I see. My home town, to which I return after a trip, or the face of a friend arriving, are, in this sense, lines belonging to the one space, in which presence happens through a non-presentification, intertwining things with one another. This feeling, imposed upon us by our experience of space, and which Patocˇka

1

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 287. Ibid., 290. 3 Ibid., 289. 4 Ibid., 293. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 294. 7 Cf. ibid., 324. 8 Ibid., 325; 331: “Tantôt il y a entre les événements un certain jeu qui ménage ma liberté sans qu’ils cessent de me toucher.” 2

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consolidated by terming it an “unmistakable withdrawal of phenomena (un retrait à découvert des phénomènes),9 is often compared to the idea of night. As for those who are plunged into night, night is never an object. The darkness surrounds us and touches us,10 eliciting our participation in the intricacies of reversibility and endorsement in a space which unbalances and disorientates us but is, at the same time, the condition of our situation. We are referring here to an experience of space that is distance in the closest proximity: proximity, because space envelops me and I am one with it; distance, because I cannot ever fully coincide with space. Vitally, the ultimate truth of perceived spatial relations depends on whether they subsist in the natural world in non-thematic form, while keeping a sense of interpenetration with the perceiving subject that corporeally inhabits the world. In this sense, the ghosts of dream and myth,11 every human being’s favorite images -- or even the poetic image12 -may well be seen as so many modes of emphasizing spatial relations as imposed by space itself. Many examples could be cited here, and the search for the presence of space could be explored with each impressive expression that depicts space as a reality which cannot be reduced to functional, productive or technical factors, since it equally comprises symbols, memory, desires and dreams. One way or another, there is always the ghost of a persistent, underlying question: is the specific character of the human being-in-the-world a relation to space as dwelling, a relation that expresses the inhabiting and the living in and with the world? Indeed, it is as if, besides a physical and geometrical distance existing between me and things, there is also a lived distance, uniting me to what matters and what exists for me. The experience of being in space makes us recognize ‘expressive experiences’ “before the ‘signification acts’ of theoretical and thetical thought; it is prior to the signified sense, as the expressive sense; prior to the subsumption of the content under the form, the ‘fullness’ of form in the content.”13 On account of all these reasons, lived space will always remain alien to any philosophical position ultimately oriented toward the pure domain of experience, and, therefore, already oblivious of all that is irreflected and yet nourishes all thinking. It is my contention that

9

Cf. Jan Patocˇka, Papiers phénoménologiques (Grenoble: Millon, 1995), 64. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 328. Cf. Eugène Minkowski, Le temps vécu (Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1968), 372. 11 As J. B. Vico had realized already, myth is not just an allegorical clothing of truth but a peculiar form of language with which man seeks to overcome his original strangeness to the world. This path, opened up by Vico, was later followed by Ernst Cassirer, who sees myth as an expressive comprehension, capable of conveying an ultimate layer, which is an act of assuming an attitude, an act of affection and will, a dynamic of vital sense. It is in this light that myth can be said to reveal a way of being in the world rooted in what is affective and impressive, and coloring it in tones of trust, intimacy and care. This mythical presence in space is discovered at the center of the very presence of space. Cf. Miguel Baptista Pereira, “O Regresso do Mito no Diálogo entre E. Cassirer e M. Heidegger,” Revista Filosófica de Coimbra 7 (1995): 7. 12 Here, we could first concentrate on what is “poetic,” not as meaning the attainment of aesthetic enjoyment, but as a sign of something that opens us up toward the world and gives rise to the presence of things, making us participate in the living mystery of the real and, thereby, in the vital experience of a space lived out in its density and untamed brilliance. Yet “poetic” also describes the space that can be expressed poetically, in other words, a space that consists of a tissue of the symbolic and mythical, a cultural entity, a throbbing texture symbolizing itself as enigma, a place containing incarnated allusions to each and every possible thing. Cf., for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Résumés de cours – Collège de France, 1952-1960 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 26. 13 Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 337. 10

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the model of play14 can help us understand what is at issue here, since being in space is to be implicated in the multiplicity of its symbols and rules. In other words, we cannot behave toward space as we would toward an external object, we can only participate in a process that draws us to itself and forms us, enveloping us in total fascination and surprise, and entailing great risk.15

2. Words such as mythical, poetic, playful, speak of a space that eludes being measured or any other kind of calculation; better words may say about space what can only be known through lived experience. We should, however, take note at this point and discern something essential: the “lived” that is comprised in space is far from representing any kind of psychological experience or any subjectivism that would interpret in individual terms what comes to the human being through the senses. This “lived,” of space, is not something lived but, rather, the lived itself, thus translating the very mode of man’s embeddedness in the world in terms of an integral presence that reveals a pre-possession of space over body. In other words, if there is ‘a lived’ concerning space, it is what space throws back at me as a reflection, by way of surmounting the traditional split between interior and external world. It is as if a very particular mode of being a body (my own body) is the very place where space gets to be experienced and expressed, i.e., where space comes to exist as sense. And this is far from saying too little: the subject as body knows the world in the act that makes it a body, and the world knows itself in the subject. A body’s belonging to space may be described as indwelling, in the sense that the body is embedded or inlaid in space, “frequents” it, is present to it, simultaneously integrating that “outside”16 which is always already an “inside.” Therefore we can discover, in this indwelling which is also an intertwining, the body’s responses to the enticement of things.17 From a phenomenological point of view, there are several equally important implications to such an assumption. First of all, they allow us to conclude that space puts my whole body into play, in the same manner that my body puts the whole of space into play, given that no other affinity with an external aspect is conceivable here. Moreover, if this is so, it will be equally clear that I am Leib rather than Körper, i.e., a living body that, as Marc Richir rightly remarks, never leaves us,18 being the framework of our condition as beings in the world. Finally, we are speaking here of a connection which, being always already “felt,” is then first to be considered for thematization. Hence it is possible to affirm, more precisely, that no place could ever be understood, unless it also were of an affective or ante-predicative character, for body and space are always born in one and the same moment, as well as from each other.

14

Play, as was shown by E. Fink, is an anthropological category which, by reinstating existence in its rational plenitude, reflects a form of symbolico-metaphorical coincidence of that existence with the totality which animates it. In brief, play is truly an existential act characterized by the welcoming and reflection of the escalating possibilities of the world. Cf. Eugen Fink, Le jeu comme symbole du monde (Paris: Minuit, 1966), 22; 138; 228. 15 Cf. Maria Luísa Portocarrero Silva, “Linguagem, Tradição e Jogo em H.-G. Gadamer,” in Miguel B. Pereira, ed., Tradição e Crise (Coimbra: F.L.U.C., 1986), 358ff. 16 Henri Maldiney, “À l’écoute de Henri Maldiney, à propos de corps et architecture,” in Chris Youènes, Philippe Nys, and Michel Mangematin, ed., L’architecture au corps (Bruxelles: Ousia, 1997), 18. 17 Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 161. 18 Marc Richir, “Corps, espace et architecture,” in Youènes, Nys, and Mangematin, ed., L’architecture au corps, 24. 115

If our analysis is correct, the “placing” of the body in space turns out to be a paradoxical condition in so far as it is marked by the “slippage” of physical space into a non-coincidence with itself. Through a “metamorphosis” achieved by means of a strange exchange system, physical space “slips” into the Umwelt of an expressive, significant body; a body which, reversibly, ceases to be in homogeneous space only. This possibility is demonstrated by the fact that a thing never appears as spatial without at the same time receiving from -- or giving to -- the beholder the whole of space in the evident a priori of its symbolism. Now, when we speak in this fashion about a lived experience of space, what we are talking about is not related to possession, but rather to reciprocal belonging. It is a relation by which I discover myself as a world-bound body, in the sense that we are no longer referring to a relationship between a subject and an external object, but to a living body that feels the world from the inside and his or her own inside as outside of the world; a world whose outside passes through the inside of the body as an ante-predicative reference for all comprehension. In brief, for the body, being in space is not an exercise in precision but a gesture of immersion in what is perceptible by the senses, an immersion always already perceived, always already felt. The presence of the body in space is hence, to a large extent, unsignalizable, not because our body ceases to be situated as a thing among things, but because that does not translate all that is meant by presence. There is a space that inspires19 the body and, however much the body may be mingling with objective space, it is nevertheless characterized by verticality and depth, for it appears to dilate, shrink, disperse, open itself up in pulsations, and retract.20 Let us intensify our search for the mode of being (in) space of that body, an objective body, when seen from the outside. Yet a body, when lived from the inside, fuses with the objects and prolongs itself in them without ever discovering where it itself ends and those begin. In other words, it is a body harboring from space a knowledge without place, where thinking and perceiving cannot be told apart. This constitutive ambiguity reveals the body’s capacity for reflexivity, asserted by Merleau-Ponty in his Phénoménologie with reference to the Husserlian problematic of “double sensations.”21 The body in the world is an object but, in so far as it is able to know itself in the world, not just an object. Being a being that knows itself (to be) in the world, it is a subject, but not just a subject, since that knowing, far from driving it away from that world, plunges it right into the world. Widely known, in this context, is Merleau-Ponty’s famous formulation on the question of a touching-touched body: “whenever I touch my right hand with my left hand, the right hand (i.e., an object) possesses, in the same way, this peculiar quality of feeling.”22 Since we never are, at the same time and in relation to each other, touching and touched, we must conclude that the issue is the hand’s capacity of being alternately touching and touched. In the transition from one function to the other, it is possible to recognize the touched hand as the very same that will soon thereafter be touching. And thus, for a brief moment, we catch a glimpse of an involvement or incarnation of the hand that, setting out to touch, finds itself being touched. At that moment, “the body catches itself, from the outside, performing a function of knowledge; it tries to touch

19

Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’œil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 31-32. We could also consider in this regard the kinestheses of the body’s eyes and limbs. In spite of the fact that the body can see and feel itself as an appearing body, such kinestheses belong to an order which is not just the one of physical sensations, as they precisely reveal that body to itself as an excess. Cf. Marc Richir, “Nature, corps et espace en phénoménologie,” in Chris Younès, ed., Ville contre-nature. Philosophie et architecture (Paris: La Découverte, 1999), 38. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 278. 21 Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 109. 22 Ibid. 20

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itself touching, it attempts a ‘sort of reflection.’”23 When I feel and feel myself, that is due, first of all, to that constitutive ambiguity by which the body can simultaneously be subject and object. When touched, I am an object, without entirely coinciding with it; and when touching, I am a subject, without, as well, fully coinciding with it. And this occurs because it is always the same body in both situations. But if this is so, everything will ultimately depend on the unavoidable incompleteness of that type of reflexivity by which the body-object awakens in an instant as a nimble and lively body-subject. “This reflexivity of the body -- casting a reflection on itself -- always fails at the last moment”24 in a twofold way: in the gesture of touching there is always something that is ultimately left untouched, since the touched hand finds itself touching and, therefore, never solely “touchable.” Moreover, if, as a body, I discover myself as a concrete being in the world, that is due to the very fact that this incarnation is not entirely “thinkable,” since it is always already experienced as a presence -- and previous possibilities of presence -- to the world. If this analysis is correct, we are struck by something decisive. The reflexivity of the body does not embrace the whole sphere of the sensible. That which is not reflected by the body, is another way of expressing the reality of a body able to welcome and respond, in itself, to the non-thematic presence of space. Consequently, the body only recognizes itself as living in the world on a previous experience of space, which suggests to this body a special mode of existence. The irreflected of the body is hence an icon for a space that does not stop at the physical boundaries of the body,25 but rather invades it and prolongs itself in it in a multiplicity of extensions and intensities. In each perception of space, the body carries within itself a latent knowledge that subverts any clarifying effort coming from consciousness, by revealing that effort to itself as rooted in a silent encounter, where living is already understanding. This domain of the “unthought” is visible, for instance, in the unity between all the senses of the body, which reveals a feeling prior to what is experienced by each of those senses in particular. We are speaking here of an esthesiology substantiated in a principle of anonymity or depersonalization. In each sensation, “I experience that it does not concern my own being, the one I am responsible for and over which I decide, but rather another (my)self who has already sided with the world, who is already open to some of its aspects and synchronized with them.”26 Only this can explain the fact that, whenever I listen to a piece of music, I do not merely recognize a sum of notes, but declare myself seized by an echo that runs through my whole body, allowing me to re-encounter it, always already in a space where unsuspected dimensions are suddenly disclosed. Music, as Merleau-Ponty significantly observed, is not in the visible space, but rather undermines it, invests it with itself, dislocates it at the very moment that it summons our whole body in a special way: In the concert hall, when I reopen my eyes, the visible space seems constricted in relation to that other space where, just a moment ago, the music was unfolding; and even if I keep my eyes open during the performance of the piece, I have a feeling that the music is not really contained within that precise and trivial space.27 It is therefore as if space itself was refolded over the presence of something that cannot be presented (“an impresentable”).

23 24 25 26 27

Ibid. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 24. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 250. Ibid. Ibid., 256. 117

The esthesiology of the senses of the perceptual body will lead Merleau-Ponty to the notion of “corporeal schema,” thereby meaning that the body is the “very actuality of the phenomenon of expression (Ausdruck). In the body, the visual experience and the hearing experience, for instance, are mutually impregnating, and their expressive value founds the ante-predicative unity of the perceived world and, thereby, the verbal expression (Darstellung) and the intellectual significance (Bedeutung).”28 My body is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my “comprehension.” Hence the secret of this “comprehending” will be the very relation of co-belonging, by which space prolongs itself and invades the “inside of the body,”29 and that inside of the body, proceeding towards its periphery, becomes entirely body and thus prolongs itself and invades space.

3. It would be interesting to confront the idea of an inside of the body with the analogous concept of an extension or inner space of the body30 as formulated by Maine de Biran (1766-1824), a philosopher whom Merleau-Ponty analyzes in lectures he gave in 1947-48 at the École Normale Supérieure, and which address the problem of the union of body and soul. The question of an “inner space of the body,” related to the theme of immediate apperception, is underlined by Merleau-Ponty as a decisive moment in that distinctive philosophical endeavor undertaken by Maine de Biran. In so far as de Biran’s work allows us to thematize a “space of the body preceding objective space, as well as a presence of the external at the very heart of self-awareness”31 that thus simultaneously discovers itself as consciousness of the body, this philosophical enterprise was regarded by Merleau-Ponty as a radical departure.32 It should actually be regarded as a real “pre-empting of phenomenology.”33 This cannot but arouse the interest of those who seek to mark the relation between the interior and the external as representing, and being at, the core of the problematic of space. At this point, Merleau-Ponty is analyzing the fact that de Biran, in reflections he developed in his later life, did not start out from a position that says all there is to say about the human being in its self-awareness. Rather, that de Biran began with the reality of a being “who is becoming aware of his or her existence and therefore struggles against a preceding opaqueness, i.e., a being who is trying to ‘become a self.’”34 In fact, de Biran presented the identity of the idea -- with itself as a simple boundary, or the reflective unity of experience as familiar -- with the temporal unravelling of that experience.35 For Maine de Biran, the necessary background to this question is the search for the beginning or starting-point of thinking. This search should establish the grounds for a “subjective ideology that concentrates upon the very core of the thinking subject and penetrates its relations with itself in a more intimate way.”36 At the center of this debate lies the notion of “cause,” whose original sense de Biran seeks to unveil in the individuality 28

Ibid., 271. Ibid., 272. 30 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson (Paris: Vrin, 1968), 59. 31 Ibid., 65. 32 Ibid., 49. 33 Ibid., 56. 34 Ibid., 54. 35 Ibid., 57. 36 Pierre Montebello, La décomposition de la pensée. Dualité et empirisme chez Maine de Biran (Grenoble: Millon, 1994), 25. Cf. Maine de Biran, La décomposition de la pensée (Paris: Vrin, 1988) III, 26. 29

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of a self-aware being. In this context, Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734) appears as a decisive interlocutor. He represents the project of “realizing the soul outside of consciousness,”37 which is the path taken by a metaphysics that tries to see the soul as an objective cause of thinking -- as if the sole cause of the “effects” of life were reducible to a “secret power, separated from the self.”38 By doing so, however, Stahl is actually attributing, as the cause of vital and intellectual activity, what he previously excluded from the activities of the self.39 Now, what de Biran indicates, first of all, is that the sum of venturesome ways of searching for causes from an external point of view is insufficient and far from covering the whole experience called “cause.” This is confirmed, straight away, by the fact that the model of thinking that is taken on by those who subscribe to this point of view rests on a forgetfulness: it is from the personal individuality, just as it is felt, that one borrows the notion both of an objective individuality and of an individual cause. For de Biran, there is an experience of “cause” which is first in view when thinking of the causality of the new sciences, that is, the experience of being cause. This is seemingly strange when we try to find it in objective grounds for something, but clear and familiar when we recognize the chosen model in the required effort. In other words, “the act or movement that follows or accompanies the effort (of thinking) created by the self can only be perceived as a voluntary product in the feeling of its cause or in the reflected idea of the will.”40 Consciousness, self, person, or will, are consequently many ways of understanding one fact: the intimate feeling of personal existence, gained in an immediate apperception that includes a “hyperorganic” force and the resistance of the body to it. Ultimately therefore, to the search for the beginning of thinking should correspond the task of inquiring into the nature of the boundaries that “separate” the human being as studied by physiologists in his or her simple vitality, from the being that thinks feeling and feels thinking, doubling its humanity.41 We will then discover that, at the heart of this “separation,” there is a transition, whose reach few have understood thus far. A transition, on the one hand, between the exteriority of physiological conditions and the sensible experience they induce, and on the other hand, the reflected idea of will comprised in the apperception which establishes consciousness.42 The analytical path thus proposed must therefore be capable of enlightening us as to the roots of that particular (and sui generis43) power of the will and of action, which belongs intrinsically to the person. In order to achieve this, it is not enough to follow the criteria adopted by the physiologist, who is solely concerned with the external aspects of that action, seeking to determine, by way of experiment, the organic causes contributing to the interactions of, for instance, the muscular contractility susceptible to being translated into objective images. Instead, it is the point of view concerned with the inner aspects that we must follow, that is, “the one that does not search, in those muscular functions, for anything other than the part likely to be played by consciousness in all this, namely, the perception corresponding to this interplay, or to the power of the self … which manifests it, 37

De Biran, Décomposition, 33. In the reflective feeling of his own existence, Stahl finds a force that acts when it becomes aware of itself; but, strangely enough, having thus touched the essential point, he lets it slip through his fingers, for he immediately abstracts the apperception and keeps only the activity, extending it, as a power and entirely observable henceforth, to the most hidden functions. 38 Ibid., 33; 87ff. 39 Montebello, Décomposition, 87. 40 De Biran, Décomposition, 47. 41 Ibid., 45; 90; 91; 444. Maine de Biran, Rapport du physique et du moral de l’homme (Paris: Vrin, 1984) VI, 110, 191; idem, De l’aperception (Paris: Vrin, 1995) IV, 197. 42 Montebello, Décomposition, 76. 43 De Biran, Décomposition, 102. 119

in certain cases, together with the feeling for what is its cause and the knowledge of its milieu and its object.”44 To dig deeper in the direction of that sui generis power of the will, transmutes the very endeavor of extending the concept of experience to a feeling of being cause, lived in the effort as a concrete and singular “given,” simultaneously distinct from the causality obtaining in modern natural sciences and that obtaining in ancient metaphysics. In this context, the concept of duality, when correctly understood -- and not, it should be noted, the concept of dualism -- will play a decisive role here. The cause we are is not unknown to us, since it is somehow exercised in the very reflection upon itself or, in other words, it happens in the very movement that, as de Biran put it, retrieves its natural base. And that is the reason why this philosopher uses the expression sentiment d’être cause rather than any other. That it should be a “feeling” to tell the reality of an experience of oneself, which is a “knowing that one is,” is no doubt significant. Everything is as if the “self” felt, in knowing, what allows knowledge, and already knew, in feeling, what allows feeling. In other words, it is a “feeling” that allows us to declare that being cause and knowing oneself to be cause are coincident, and that this coincidence is originary. In a word, the “feeling of being cause” reveals the way in which the self is influenced in its depths by the inner resistance of the body to the power of the will. Therefore, de Biran allows us to demonstrate that the power of thinking always already intrinsically comprises the power of the will and the presence of the body, of a subjective body, of a corps propre. On the other hand, the relation between will and body, long forgotten in the history of philosophy, is now breaking into the very heart of thought that thus discovers itself as contemporary to “a first effort connecting an act, a movement, a resistance,”45 without which it could not be constituted. The basis of thinking is then, one would say, the feeling of being the power present to the act of “ex-isting,” an outward movement that cannot make do without the presence of corporality, that is, one that discovers the beginning of its existence in an immediate apperception that has the body as its main element.46

4. For Merleau-Ponty, these considerations would be complete, if it were not for the necessity of extending them to the idea of a chiasm between the interior and the external. The image of an “outer space” wherein an “inner space” moves, does compel us to recognize in the latter an intrusion of the opaqueness of the former. This in turn compels us to meditate on the reflexivity of “corporeal thinking” as a manifestation, icon, figure or element of a wider reflexivity, which comes from the sensible itself. Merleau-Ponty would therefore argue, first of all, that the natural attitude of seeing, by which I make common cause with my ‘Look’ and give myself up to the spectacle of the visible, must be underlined, and secondly, that this reveals an original layer of feeling whose correlate is the “corporeal presence”47 of space. It must, however, be noted that this analysis would be incomplete if we did not return to that “my own body” (which harbors, at its interior, the very ambiguity of existing), while starting now from the sensible,48 through which its mode of being as a decentering force will be radically elucidated.

44 45 46 47 48

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Ibid., 100. Montebello, Décomposition, 79. Pierre Montebello, “Le corps de la pensée,” Les Études Philosophiques (2000): 207. Ibid., 269. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 304.

In order to go deeper with this possibility, Merleau-Ponty assumes the necessity of explaining ontologically the results of phenomenology and of thematizing Being -- with which we make contact -- a task, which the full range of Phenomenology is not entirely capable of accomplishing. It is quite clear, which way we should follow: to lay aside the point of view of consciousness and all the presumptions still founded on “echoes” of the subject-object dualism, and to return to the original nature of perception, materialized in the natural and intentional life of the human body in the world. In this radical course, the significance of being-in-the-world will acquire a final sense with its immersion and absorption in “the flesh” (la chair), the ultimate ontological dimension which is the radical phenomenalization of Being. Pre-empting further developments, Merleau-Ponty (still in his Phénoménologie) will term as “ontological world and body” the world and the body discovered at the “heart of the subject.”49 Thus he paves the way to our comprehension of his late works, where he will welcome the nature of Being as “wild,” “brute” and “vertical.” In every effective perception of space, it is therefore necessary to presuppose a deeper function that is a movement that takes us beyond (or ahead of) subjectivity and embeds us in the world by means of a perceptual faith,50 which demands, in its turn, a “genealogy of the subject”51 capable of finally answering the question “who sees?” The answer to this question cannot be “the soul,” nor “the eyes,” nor even “consciousness,” since none of these answers recognizes in the visible that which, since the beginning, surrounds and permeates me. It is for this reason that, in Le visible et l’invisible, the visible is said to be a “twilight brought on by a wave of Being,”52 whose prototype is flesh and whose body, while viewer-visible and touching-touched, is the most remarkable variant. Furthermore, in this context we may understand the sense in which the body unites us “directly to things, by its ontogenesis,”53 welding together the two parts that make it up, namely, the grain of “sensible” that it is, and the “sensible” from which it is born by segregation and to which it will always remain open. The presence in the world of a “visible” that ‘looks’ and that, actualizing itself in sensations and movement, becomes expression, is therefore a possibility given by a common origin which is neither matter, spirit, nor substance,54 but flesh or undivided Being. It is an ultimate ontological texture where body and space are both part of an enveloping relationship between the visible and the invisible in each. The “feeling” of a body thus uncovered from the pre-reflexive unity in which it unfolds into itself, and where the flesh of the world reflects and is reflected upon, acquires an ultimate meaning in this way. To feel is the very “turning upon itself of the visible, a corporeal adhesion of the one who feels to what is felt, and from what is felt to the one who feels.”55 Therefore I live space because (and to the exact measure in which) it lives me. But how should we think about this possibility? We have already seen it: as criss-crossing, intertwining, reversibility, overlapping or, finally, chiasm, a notion by which MerleauPonty chose to name the reality of that dual movement where ‘the look’ and ‘the perceived’ discover themselves as being always already contained in each other. Thus,

49

Ibid., 467. Cf. ibid., 17ff.; 209. Cf. Marc Richir, Méditations phénoménologiques – Phénoménologie et phénoménologie du langage (Grenoble: Millon, 1992), 345ff. 51 Rudolf Bernet, “Le sujet dans la nature – Réflexion sur la phénoménologie de la perception chez Merleau-Ponty,” in Marc Richir and Etienne Tassin, ed., Merleau-Ponty – Phénoménologie et expérience (Grenoble: Millon, 1992), 76. 52 Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 180. 53 Ibid., 179. 54 Cf. ibid., 184. 55 Ibid., 187. 50

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what the touched hand recognizes when it becomes a touching hand, is nothing other than the flesh and its reflexive power. The body that I am is a “field of Being,” solely thinkable from the point of view of the flesh. If I feel space and, in that feeling, find the peculiar mark of my inhabiting it, this always happens in a place of mysterious interchange, where (and by which) the traditional meanings of interiority and exteriority are subverted. Only the source experience,56 or -- retrieving a Husserlian terminology -“donation in flesh,” can help us elucidate in what measure space lodges itself between the folds of my body, and my body between the folds of the world.57 In this context of reciprocal encroachment, the phenomenon of the dream appears to Merleau-Ponty as a privileged mode of comprehending that mysterious corporeal interchange that shapes the very enigma of space. Already in the Phénoménologie he states this, when he writes: “If I wanted to describe perceptual experience accurately, I would say that it is perceived in me and not that I perceive. Every sensation contains a seed of dreaming.”58 MerleauPonty’s work in 1945 could not exhaust the subject of the dream, yet the reference is nonetheless significant. By juxtaposing feeling with the phenomenon of the dream, in the context of that chiasmatic interchange which takes place inside of the sensible, we are able to meditate upon the irreflected of the body in terms of an unconscious of the body in space and an unconscious of space in the body. Throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work, the issue of the dream is, in a broad context, framed by the relation between psychoanalysis and phenomenology. In fact, the French philosopher never ceased to insist upon the need to shed light on “the true meaning of psychoanalysis,”59 in which meaning he saw an inescapable way of criticizing intellectualistic conceptions of consciousness. In effect, if well analyzed, i.e., meditated upon outside of the dangers of substantialism, psychoanalysis does confirm the teachings of phenomenology, in that it unveils a “consciousness which, rather than knowledge or representation, is investment.”60 This possibility was already touched upon and brought closer in the debate initiated in the Phénoménologie on the subject of desire, as this is particularly suitable for expressing the “inner intentionality of Being.”61 Thus, the question of the dream or feeling is placed within the investigation of what is external in the interior, and of what is interior in the external.62 However, this possibility implies a re-reading of Freudian psychoanalysis, i.e., a reading which is capable of regarding the libido not just as a sex drive, but as a constitutive mode of being body in the world, and the unconscious not just as a place for representation, ruled by determinate laws, but rather as a “global and universal power of incorporation.”63 Once these theoretical lines are rectified, we may finally conclude that “the unconscious is feeling (in itself), because feeling is not our intellectual possession of ‘what’ is being felt, but rather our divesting ourselves in its favor, an openness to what we do not have to think in order to know.”64 Such are the possibilities opened up to us by a body henceforth understood as a “natural symbolism.”65 Given that “my own body” is both sensible (in the philosophical meaning) 56

Ibid., 209. Cf. Renaud Barbaras, Le tournant de l’expérience – Recherches sur la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 83. 57 Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 317. 58 Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 249. 59 Renaud Barbaras, De l’être du phénomène. Sur l’ontologie de Merleau-Ponty (Grenoble: Millon, 1991), 313. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Résumés, 69-70. 60 Barbaras, De l’être, 313. 61 Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 298. 62 Merleau-Ponty, Résumés, 178. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., 179. 65 Ibid., 180. 122

and sentient, is seen and sees, is touched and touches, and contains -- as sentient, seeing, and touching -- an aspect which is “inaccessible to everyone but its owner,”66 this understanding discloses the very invisibility of the visible and the visibility of the invisible. What is really at issue in the dream is an unknown system of exchange, through which a riot of experiences finds shelter “inside of me,” without clear awareness of its relevance or timing. When Merleau-Ponty talks about the subject of the dream, he accordingly is alluding to a continuous birth situated in the external, which is brought to life in me, signifying a global relation to a pre-personal unity. A unity that came to me without my actually thinking of it as such, and that now manifests itself -- still without being controlled by an arrogant “self” -- in an apparently unarticulated profusion of possibles concerning a distant but not absent world.67 More explicitly: “The distinction between the real and the oneiric cannot be the simple distinction between a consciousness filled by the senses and a consciousness given over to its own life. The two modalities encroach upon each other,”68 and, for this reason, the real essence of the dream is not a monopoly of consciousness, nor a particular case of bad faith, but rather an untamed thought. Thereby we understand what is already in the body, a characteristic of it since the beginning, i.e., the possibility of understanding the world in what evades every inspective attitude, of understanding the world (whenever I see, hear or touch) in what it already is in me as such a possibility of understanding. Consequently it becomes clear, to what extent the traditional split between interior and external must be modified before we can consider, in rigorous terms, the question of space: the dream is not a translation of latent contents into manifest ones; in the dream, a latent content is lived through the manifest one, which proves the capacity of the sensible for feeling itself, and for remaining sensitive in the absence of the external sensible. While dreaming, the Sensible is manifested in the content of the dream. The dreaming subject is not in charge of the content of the dream. That testifies to the body being part of the Sensible.69 This is the other (another) scene of the dream: it is the very presence of a reality that does not disappear in its absence, a corporeal reality that goes on existing even in the absence of its external deployment. But “where” does that sensible become an “inner sensible,” where does it appear in the counter-light of its exteriority? We have already seen it: in a (fr.) on, i.e., in a body of flesh, in a Leib that thus reveals itself -- in the apparent épochê of the Körper situated as observatory -- as anonymity, dispossession. The dream is the sensible in the body of flesh, as compelling.70 It is the mark of a being in space that it is also a mode of “being in the world without a body,”71 without a bodyobject but still and never without an own body, never without a Leib. The dream reveals the touched-touching body inhabiting space in the very eclipse72 of the body as touched. This does not, however, correspond to a denial of the body’s concreteness. The point here is the reality of a presence which mere topographic location cannot describe; a presence whose mode of being is concealment and, thereby only, presence and situation; a presence that implies a belonging, but not only to the external of space, also to its interior, to its

66

Ibid., 177. Cf. ibid., 67. 68 Ibid., 69. 69 Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 316. 70 Ibid. 71 Marc Richir, “Le sensible dans le rêve,” in Renaud Barbaras, ed., Merleau-Ponty. Notes de cours sur L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl, suivi de Recherches sur la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: P.U.F., 1998), 242. 72 Ibid. 67

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heart; a presence where a lived takes place. A lived, because what echoes in us (inside of our own body) before a beautiful landscape or a welcoming place is not merely something we see, but rather, the very space existing intra-corporeally, blending itself into me, in an intertwining which is the depiction of the non-depictable.73 To speak of an inside of the body, of an unconscious of the body, is thus speaking of a body that acquires its identity in complicity with space. That is to say, it acquires identity in the mode of being a place where space extends itself, extending the limits of the body. That this body is, for Merleau-Ponty, the place where memory happens74 can no longer surprise us. Being in the world signifies living a space which is always for us a field of vision and a field containing both the future and the past. Memory as such is proof of a shared belonging of body and space to one temporal schema,75 where it is discovered that all representation depends on a previous ‘being affected,’ which demands constant mediation. It is in this context that we may say that “such or such other place is attractive to us only in so far as it contains some part of the dream,”76 in the sense that this attraction is grounded on an original pact. On the one hand, the inside of the body already reflects the outside of space, in a mixture of strangeness and familiarity. On the other hand, the outside of space already entails the inside of the body, thereby making the body, in a unique moment, body and space.

73 74 75 76

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Ibid., 248. Merleau-Ponty, Résumés, 71-72. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 247-250. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 306. Richir, “Corps, espace et architecture,” 38.

1

2.

MAN AND HIS DOUBLES: MERLEAU-PONTY’S “MIXTURISM”

Leonard Lawlor

In the Ninth Chapter of The Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses): “Man and His Doubles.” Foucault says that “the analysis of lived-experience [vécu] is a discourse with a mixed nature.”2 (MC 332/321, my emphasis) In other words, Foucault is criticizing phenomenology for falling prey to a pre-critical (that is, pre-Kantian) naiveté; the concept of vécu (Erlebnis in German) mixes the conditions of experience with experience itself.3 Although Foucault never mentions him by name in Les mots et les choses, it is clear that Merleau-Ponty is the target here. The idea that guides the essay that follows is that Merleau-Ponty’s thought might be defined completely, even his late work in “Eye and Mind,”4 as a kind of “mixturism.” The eye, vision, in Merleau-Ponty mixes together passivity and activity. Yet, passivity, in Merleau-Ponty, seems to amount to a sort of blindness. Indeed, in two working notes to The Visible and the Invisible (from May 1960), Merleau-Ponty speaks of “punctum caecum,” a “blind point.”5 If we think quickly of Foucault’s analysis of the Velasquez painting, with which Les mots et les choses opens, we see that it too concerns a ‘blind point.’ Merleau-Ponty’s thought therefore seems very close to that of Foucault, and of course, it is. After all, Merleau-Ponty dies in 1961 and two years later, in 1963, Foucault describes his Birth of the Clinic as the re-examination of ‘the originary distribution of the visible and the invisible.’6 Yet, there is a subtle shift of emphasis between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. For Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind,” the vision of the painter reaches beyond the visual givens and gives visible existence to what is invisible, which implies that invisibility is always imminent visibility (OE 23/126), the invisible at the horizon of the visible. (VI 195/148) So, even if we can speak of a “blind spot,” an “impotence” (impuissance) of vision,(VI 194/148) Merleau-Ponty always

1

“Man and His Doubles” is the second part of a trilogy I have been writing on Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, a trilogy focused on the concept of life. “Un Ecart infime (Part I)” is forthcoming in Research in Phenomenology; “Un Ecart Infime (Part III): The Blind Spot in Foucault” is forthcoming in Philosophy and Social Criticism. These three essays are part of a large research project on the relation of memory and life. All the essays contributing to this research project will be collected into a volume that Fordham University Press will publish: A Miniscule Hiatus: Essays Contributing to a New Concept of Life. My thanks to all the students who have participated in three of my recent graduate seminars at The University of Memphis: “Foucault's Early Thought up to Discipline and Punish” (Spring 2002); “Merleau-Ponty's Later Thought” (Spring 2004), and “The Problem of Vision in Recent French Thought” (Fall 2004). I am especially grateful to Cheri Carr who contributed essential research for and comments on “Un Ecart Infime (Part II).” 2 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 332, hereafter MC; anonymous English translation as The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), 321. 3 Foucault, Les mots et les choses, 261; idem, The Order of Things, 248. 4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); English translation by Michael B. Smith as “Eye and Mind,” in Galen Johnson, ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993). Hereafter cited as OE with reference first to the original French, then to the English translation. The English translation of L’Œil et l’esprit has frequently been modified. For more on Merleau-Ponty’s relation to Klee, see Galen Johnson, “Ontology and Painting: ‘Eye and Mind,’” in Johnson, ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 35-55, especially 39-44. 5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 300-01; English translation by Alphonso Lingis as The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 247-48. Hereafter cited as VI, with reference first to the original French, then to the English translation. 6 Michel Foucault, Naissance de la clinique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998, vii; English translation by A. M. Sheridan Smith as The Birth of the Clinic (New York: Vintage, 1994), xi. 125

conceives it, not on the basis of non-coincidence, but on the basis of coincidence, not on the basis of blindness, but on the basis of vision, not on the basis of impotence, but on the basis of the “I can,” finally not on the basis of something like an absolute invisibility, but on the basis of “the non-mediated presence which is not something positive.” (VI 302/248) Because for Merleau-Ponty invisibility is always relative to the visible, because coincidence is always partial, all the prepositions in Merleau-Ponty, the “to” (“à”), the “in” (“en”), the “within” (“dans”), the “beyond” (“par-delà”), and the “between” (“entre”), in short, what he calls “the inside,” have the signification of resemblance. If we are going to have a strict conceptual difference between immanence and transcendence, the resemblance relation implies that Merleau-Ponty is not a philosopher of immanence, but a philosopher of transcendence. But even more, the resemblance relation implies that the upright human body is the “between” of survey and fusion, the “mi-lieu,” the “mi-chemin” between essence and fact. (Cf. VI 328/274) Since the human body is visible, the human is the figure standing out from the ground of the visible; as the figure, man can be studied as an empirical positivity. And, since the human body sees, the human resembles the ground of the visible; as the ground, man can as well be taken as the transcendental foundation. As Merleau-Ponty says, “the manifest visibility [of things] doubles itself [se double] in my body.” (OE 22/125, my emphasis) Therefore, and this claim is what I shall demonstrate in the essay that follows, Merleau-Ponty’s thought, his ‘mixturism,’ is defined by the “et” in “l’homme et ses doubles.”

The Conception of Merleau-Ponty’s Mixturism As is well known, “Eye and Mind” is the last text Merleau-Ponty published while he was alive. Merleau-Ponty wrote it during the summer of 1960 and published it in January 1961.7 Immediately after the initial publication of “Eye and Mind,” during the spring semester of 1961 at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty was teaching a course called “l’ontologie cartésienne et l’ontologie d’aujourd’hui” (“Descartes’s Ontology and Contemporary Ontology”).8 Following the structure of “Eye and Mind,” but also expanding on it, the lectures fell into two parts: fundamental thought given in art, and then Descartes’s ontology. The lectures on Descartes were given during April of 1961 right up to MerleauPonty’s death on May 3, 1961. At the beginning of the Descartes lectures, Merleau-Ponty says, If Descartes’s philosophy consists in this, [first, in the] establishment of a natural intelligible light against the sensual man [l’homme sensuel] and the visible world, then [second, in] the relative justification of feeling [du sentiment] by the natural light, it must contain … an ambiguous relation of light and feeling [sentiment], of the invisible and the visible, of the positive and the negative. It is this relation or this mixture [ce mélange] that it would be necessary to seek.9 (NC 1959-61, 222, my emphasis)

7

In 1961, it appeared in Art de France. In 1964 it appeared as a small book with Gallimard. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours, 1959-1961 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Hereafter cited as NC 1959-61. Since the English translation of these notes does not yet exist, all translations are my own. 9 See also NC 1959-61, 264, where Merleau-Ponty says that Descartes is the most difficult of authors because he is the most radically ambiguous; Descartes, Merleau-Ponty says, has the most latent content. Merleau-Ponty makes the same comments about Descartes in the first nature lectures course. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature. Notes de cours du Collège de France, établi et annoté par Dominque Seglard (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 36-37, in particular; English translation by Robert Vallier as Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 17-18. In the 8

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At the end of his life, Merleau-Ponty himself is seeking the mixture of the visible and the invisible. We can already see the pursuit of this mixturism in his 1947-48 lectures on the union of the body and soul. In the second lecture, he says, In Descartes, the question of the union of the soul and the body is not merely a speculative difficulty as is often assumed. For him, the problem is to account for a paradoxical fact: the existence of the human body. In the Sixth Meditation, the union is “taught” to us through the sensation of hunger, thirst, etc., which issue from the “mixture [mélange] of the mind with the body.”10 How are we to conceive Merleau-Ponty’s mixture? One conception of a mixture that we can rule out immediately is Sartre’s dialectic of being and nothingness. According to Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible, Sartre starts from abstract concepts of being and nothingness, that is, concepts abstracted from experience. As abstract, these concepts are “verbally fixed,” as Merleau-Ponty says (VI 95/67). And then they are put in absolute opposition to one another. The logical consequence is that we have a pure nothingness which is not, and a pure being which is. But, since this pure nothingness is nothing, it collapses; it is in fact identical to being. As Merleau-Ponty says, “as absolutely opposed, being and nothingness are indiscernible.” (VI 94/66) For Merleau-Ponty, Sartre’s dialectic is only so called; it is in fact a philosophy of identity. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty’s mixturism is opposed to Sartre’s philosophy of identity, Sartre’s, we might say, “ontological monism.”11 So, we can see already that Merleau-Ponty’s mixturism will have to be something like a philosophy of difference. In order to understand positively the difference in which Merleau-Ponty’s mixture consists, we can make use of three conceptual schemes from Merleau-Ponty’s writings prior to “Eye and Mind.” The first comes from Merleau-Ponty’s 1942 The Structure of Behavior.12 As is well known, in The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty appropriates the idea of Gestalt -- the form or the shape -- in order to overcome the dualism of the physical and the psychological; here too, even earlier than in the lectures on the union of the body and soul, Merleau-Ponty speaks of a mixture.13 (SB 212/197) A mixture is, for

nature lectures, Merleau-Ponty also says that nature is a mixture (La nature, 164; Nature, 121). 10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson (Paris: Vrin, 1978), 13; English translation by Paul B. Milan as The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2001), 33. In this passage, Merleau-Ponty is quoting Descartes’s Sixth Meditation. The quote can be found on p. 192 of the Haldane and Ross translation of the Meditations (The Philosophical Writings of Descartes [London: Cambridge University Press, 1973]). See also Meditationes de prima philosophia, Méditations Métaphysiques, texte latin et traduction du Duc de Luynes (Paris: Vrin, 1978), 81, line 13: in the Latin: “permixtione”; “mélange” in the Duc’s French translation. 11 See Galen Johnson’s introduction to “Eye and Mind” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 35-55. Here Johnson claims that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the flesh, the philosophy opposed to great rationalism, is not an ontological monism, not “a metaphysics of substance and sameness, a monism of the One.” (49) The concept of sameness that I am attributing to Merleau-Ponty, his mixture, is not a reductive identity, as I am trying to show through the three conceptual schemes. It is the sameness of identity and difference. Sartre’s philosophy, according to Merleau-Ponty, is an ontological monism. 12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990); English translation by Alden L. Fisher as The Structure of Behavior (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1983). Hereafter cited as SB, with reference first to the French, then to the English translation. 13 We are justified in returning to this work that is nearly twenty years earlier than “Eye and Mind,” because, in the course already mentioned (“Descartes’s Ontology and Today’s Ontology”), Merleau-Ponty makes use of the figure-ground formula of the Gestalt when he criticizes Descartes’s theory of vision. We 127

Merleau-Ponty, a form, a relation of figure and ground (fond), a whole. (SB 101/91) Here is the definition Merleau-Ponty provides of a whole: a whole is an indecomposable unity of internal, reciprocal determinations, meaning that if one of the parts changes, then the whole changes and, if all the parts change but still maintain the same relations among them, then the whole does not change. (SB 50/47) In other words, not being the sum of its parts, the whole is not an aggregate; there are no partes extra partes, no parts outside of one another, and therefore the whole, the relation of figure and ground, is always ambiguous. (Cf. SB 138/127) Now, the second conceptual scheme for understanding this ambiguous or mixed relation of parts and whole comes from the beginning of his 1952 “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.”14 It is well known, of course, that in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” Merleau-Ponty introduces Saussure’s linguistics into French philosophy. Thanks to Saussure, we know that linguistic signs such as phonemes reciprocally determine one another by means of “diacritical differences.” The reciprocal determination, which refers us back to the Gestalt, implies that Saussure cannot base language on a system of positive ideas. Due to the fact that Saussure is rejecting any other sense than the diacritical sense of signs, he must, according to Merleau-Ponty, be rejecting two ways of conceiving the whole and therefore two ways of conceiving the parts in relation to the whole. On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty tells us that the whole of language cannot be “the explicit and articulated whole of the complete language as it is recorded in grammars and dictionaries.” (S 50/39) On the other, the whole of a language cannot be “a logical totality like that of a philosophical system, all of whose elements can be (in principle) deduced from a single idea.” (S 50/39) Instead, as Merleau-Ponty says, “The unity [Saussure] is talking about is a unity of coexistence, like that of the sections of an arch which shoulder one another. In a whole of this kind, the learned parts of language have an immediate value as a whole.” (S 50/39, my emphasis) Merleau-Ponty’s comparison of the part-whole relation to that of the sections (les éléments) of an arch (une voûte) is illuminating. Clearly, if you change one stone, the arch falls; or, if you change all the stones but maintain the relations between them, then you still have the arch. The arch is not a mere aggregate of stones. Because the stones “shoulder” (s’épaulent) each other, each stone “has an immediate value as a whole”; each stone, in other words, is a “total part.” (Cf. OE 17/124) But this comparison implies that each stone, or, more precisely, each part, being a total part, is different from the whole and yet is identical to it. This sameness of identity and difference defines Merleau-Ponty’s mixturism; indeed, in “Descartes’s Ontology and Contemporary Ontology,” Merleau-Ponty says that “the visible opens upon an invisible which is its relief or its structure and where the identity is rather non-difference.” (NC 1959-61, 195) To anticipate, we should note that sameness of identity and difference is precisely how Foucault defines the modern reflection on finitude: “towards a certain thought of the Same – where Difference is the same thing as Identity” (vers une certaine pensée du Même – où la Différence est la même chose que l’Identité).” (MC 326/315, Foucault’s capitalization) In light of this definition of the modern reflection on finitude, it is not surprising that the third conceptual scheme for Merleau-Ponty’s mixturism comes from his 1956 “Everywhere and Nowhere.” Here, Merleau-Ponty calls today’s science “small rationalism” (le petit rationalisme), and any consideration of his view of science must start here.

shall return to this critique below. See Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours, 1959-1961, 229. 14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence,” in idem, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960); English translation by Richard C. McCleary as “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in Signs (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Hereafter all essays in Signes will be cited by the abbreviation S, with reference first to the French edition, then to the English translation. 128

Modern science or small rationalism takes its operations as absolute. (S 185/147) Today’s science has become absolute by means of working on indices, models, and variables that it has made for itself. In contrast, what Merleau-Ponty calls “large rationalism” (le grand rationalisme), which is the philosophy of the Seventeenth Century, in a word, Cartesianism, takes its science and its artifices or techniques as relative, relative to something larger, to God or to the “infinite infinite” or to the “positive infinite.” Merleau-Ponty calls the positive infinite “the secret of large rationalism.” The positive infinite is not numerical indefiniteness; rather, the positive infinite contains everything within itself: “every partial being directly or indirectly presupposes [the positive infinite] and is in return really or eminently contained in it.”15 (S 187/149) Every part being eminently contained in God means that all beings resemble God. Or, there is a relation of analogy between the creatures and the creator. Resembling God, every partial being would have to be a total part. With large rationalism, we are very close to Merleau-Ponty’s own thought,16 and we have already noted that the concept of the mixture comes from Descartes. Indeed, in “Everywhere and Nowhere,” Merleau-Ponty expresses some nostalgia for large rationalism, telling us that large rationalism is “close to us.” But, most importantly, he says that large rationalism is the “intermediary through which we must go in order to get to the philosophy that rejects large rationalism.” I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that “Eye and Mind” is Merleau-Ponty’s precise attempt to go through this necessary intermediary of large rationalism to the philosophy that is opposed to it.17 In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty is trying to make today’s science and its thought, which he calls “operationalism,” relative once more to something other and larger than itself. In other words, he is trying to make us understand that “small rationalism” (which again is modern science) belongs to a “heritage”; (S 186/148) small rationalism is a “fossil” of the “living ontology” found in large rationalism. But, we cannot return to large rationalism; instead, its living ontology has to be “translated.” In “Everywhere and Nowhere,” Merleau-Ponty says that “Descartes said that God is conceived of but not understood by us, and that this ‘not’ expressed a privation and a defect in us.18 The modern Cartesian translates: the infinite is as much absence as presence, which makes the negative and the human enter into the definition of God.” (S 189/150, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis) In a word, the translation makes the finite enter into God. Then the living ontology of large rationalism becomes the ontology of “sentir,” the ontology of sensibility that we see laid

15

Deleuze begins his examination of Spinoza by referring to this passage from Merleau-Ponty. See Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Minuit, 1968), 22; English translation by Martin Joughin as Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 28. It is also clear that this distinction between positive infinite and the indefinite maps onto Hegel’s distinction between the good infinite and bad infinite, but Merleau-Ponty never mentions it. 16 See Renaud Barbaras, who clearly sees the connection between Merleau-Ponty and Leibniz; idem, The Being of the Phenomenon (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2004), 229-234. 17 While all commentators have noted the relation of “Eye and Mind” to Descartes, no one, as far as I know, has presented its central thesis as being about the heritage of large rationalism. In particular, see Hugh J. Silverman, “Cézanne’s Mirror Stage,” in Johnson, ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 262-277, especially 265; also Véronique Fóti, “The Dimension of Color,” in ibid., 293-308, especially 296-97; also François Cavallier, Premières leçons sur L’Œil et l’esprit de M. Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 38-46. In particular, none of the commentators systematize Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Descartes’s Optics. Galen Johnson’s introduction to “Eye and Mind” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, while excellent in many regards, does not mention Descartes, 35-55. 18 In Les mots et les choses, Foucault describes the exact relation to the infinite that Merleau-Ponty here is describing. Foucault says that the relation to the infinite in the Classical epoch (Cartesianism), was a “negative relation.” See MC 327/316. 129

out in “Eye and Mind.” So, let us now turn to “Eye and Mind,” in particular to Part Three, which discusses Descartes’s Optics. Descartes’s Classical Ontology19 According to Merleau-Ponty, in the Optics Descartes wants to conceive vision as thought, and, at the same time, Descartes wants to conceive vision as touch. (OE 37/131) Thought and touch are not just two models of vision for Descartes, as some Merleau-Ponty commentators have claimed.20 Vision in Descartes, according to Merleau-Ponty, is a relation between touch and thought. We can see the systematic relation between thought and touch in the following passage. This is Merleau-Ponty speaking: “Painting for [Descartes] is … a mode or a variant of thinking, where thinking is canonically defined as intellectual possession and self-evidence.” (OE 42/132, my emphasis) Intellectual possession relates the immanence of consciousness, the cogito, or even the concept -- and this is how Merleau-Ponty always uses the word “immanence” -- to refer to the cogito -again intellectual possession relates the cogito to grasping by the hand.21 (NC 1959-61, 180nA, 190) For Merleau-Ponty, Descartes’s conception of vision, or, more generally, sentir, as a relation between immanence and grasping involves two complementary mistakes. (VI 168/127) These complementary mistakes are “fusion and survey.”22 (VI 169/127) If one conceives sensibility as fusion -- the immediate grasping with the hand - one coincides with and touches pure facts; in this case, “sentir” takes place in an absolute proximity somewhere. If one conceives sensibility as survey (survol) -- the view from nowhere -- one intuits and sees pure essences; in this case, “sentir” takes place at an infinite distance everywhere. (VI 169/127) In other words, according to Merleau-Ponty, Cartesian vision is at once too close to the thing seen and too far away from it. The mistakes reside in both the purity of touch, fusion and absolute proximity, and in the purity of vision (which in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty calls the “kosmotheoros,” VI 32/15), survey and infinite distance. This double mistake orients Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Descartes’s conception of vision in the Optics. What Merleau-Ponty is trying to show here is that Descartes’s conception moves from one mistake to the other. And Descartes is able to make this move because he conceives light as a mechanical cause. Descartes, according to Merleau-Ponty, considers not the light that we see but the light that makes contact with, the light that touches and enters into our eyes from the outside. (OE 37/131) In other words, Descartes considers light as a cause outside that makes real effects inside of us. Merleau-Ponty says, “In the world there is the thing itself, and outside this thing itself there is that other thing which is only reflected light rays and which happens to have an ordered correspondence with the real thing; there are two individuals, then, connected by causality from the

19

This discussion should be compared to the one found in the nature lectures (cf. La nature, 169-76; Nature, 125-31). 20 See again Silverman, “Cézanne’s Mirror Stage,” 262-277, especially 265; also Fóti, “The Dimension of Color,” 293-308, especially 296-97; also Cavallier, Premières leçons sur L’Œil et l’esprit de M. Merleau-Ponty, 38-46. Some commentators recognize that for Merleau-Ponty vision in Descartes is conceived as thought (Silverman), while others stress the model of touch (Fóti). Cavallier notes that Merleau-Ponty discusses Descartes’s different “models” for vision (touch and thought), but does not see the different models as being related (38). 21 See also Mauro Carbone, The Thinking of the Sensible (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2004), especially 45-47; here Carbone stresses the literal sense of concept as ‘to grasp.’ 22 In Le Visible et l’invisible, Merleau-Ponty says, “on se tromperait,” “one would be mistaken.” 130

outside.” (OE 38/131, my emphasis) For Merleau-Ponty, the proximity of cause has two inter-related consequences. First, and this is most important, causal contact eliminates resemblance; even the resemblance of the mirror image becomes a projection of the mind onto things. For the Cartesian, according to Merleau-Ponty, the image in the mirror is an effect of the mechanics of things. For Merleau-Ponty, because Descartes wants to conceive light on the basis of causality, a conception that requires no resemblance between a cause and an effect, we do not in fact have an image in vision, but rather a representation. A representation, such as an etching, works as signs do; signs in no way resemble the things they signify. Here, in the signs that do not resemble, we see the origin of the indices with which, according to Merleau-Ponty, today’s science works. (OE 9/121) Merleau-Ponty says, “The magic of intentional species—the old idea of efficacious resemblance so strongly suggested to us by mirrors and paintings—loses its final argument if the entire power of the picture is that of a text to be read, a text totally free of promiscuity between the seeing and the visible.”23 (OE 40/132) This citation brings us to the second consequence of Descartes’s conception of light as causal contact: vision in Descartes is the decipherment of signs. This move, which starts with the conception of light through causality, to vision as decipherment, leads to surveying thought (la pensée en survol). Since vision is the decipherment of signs, it thinks in terms of a flat surface; signs on the page for instance (like writing) are flat. But also, according to Merleau-Ponty, the representation, which is the effect of the mechanical light, immobilizes the figure so that it can be abstracted from the background. In the course from 1960-61 (“Cartesian Ontology and Contemporary Ontology”), Merleau-Ponty says: “This presence of the figure is all that [Descartes] retains from vision. The rest of the field is composed of such figures that are not present. The visible world is for me [that is, for a Cartesian] a world in itself upon which the light of the gaze is projected and from which the gaze cuts out [découpe] present figures. That eliminates the relation to the background which is a different kind of relation.” (NC 1959-61, 229) And it seems that this “different kind of relation,” for Merleau-Ponty, would have to be one of resemblance. In any case, Descartes takes only the external envelope of things and this abstraction of the figure from the field is why for Descartes, according to Merleau-Ponty, drawing is what defines pictures. (OE 42/132) Because the flat representation presents only the outlined figure, for Descartes, depth is a false mystery. (OE 45/133) Cartesian space is in itself, one thing outside of another, partes extra partes, and thus depth is really width. If we think we see depth, this is because we have bodies (which are the source of deceptions); therefore depth is nothing. Or, if there is depth, it is my participation in God; the being of space is beyond every particular point of view. (OE 46/134) God then, who is everywhere and has no perspective, sees all things, without one hiding another; thus

23

It is well known that Descartes tried consciously to break with the Scholastic tradition and used the Summa Philosophica Quadripartita of Eustache de Sancto Paulo as his guide to Scholastic philosophy. An intentional species (for the Scholastics), according to Eustache, is a mental image, but not a copy of an individual thing; it is an exemplar or species, an eidos, the Greek equivalent of species. Apparently, the discussion of ideas throughout the Scholastic period always referred to painters, or more generally artists. The model would be the exemplar or idea or intentional species, while the painting would be the image, the particular. Referring back to the Timaeus, this discussion conceived God as an artificer. See Roger Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 64-69. What is important for our purposes is that the concept of intentional species implies some sort of resemblance relation. 131

God creates, or better, draws, a “géométral,” a surveying plan.24 So, we can see now that Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of vision in Descartes’s Optics goes from fusion, at one extreme, to the other extreme, i.e., surveying thought, (OE 48/134) the kosmotheoros. Merleau-Ponty’s analysis is complicated. So, I am now going to reduce it down to its most basic steps. According to Merleau-Ponty, Descartes starts from the conception of light as a cause contacting the eyes. The contact of light with the eyes is the absolute proximity of fusion. Because the contact with the eyes is causal, there is no resemblance between the image and the thing. Instead of images that resemble, we have signs. Signs are the figure without the background, immobile, and they are flat, like writing or a drawing. Vision in Descartes, then, becomes the decipherment of signs. And the decipherment of signs leads to the intellectual surveying plan, the géométral. The géométral is a drawing according to rectilinear perspective, with nothing hidden. It is surveying thought. Now, before moving onto what Merleau-Ponty says about painting, we should note two things about this analysis. First, the movement from fusion to survey is Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Descartes’s dualism of substances. Thus, how Descartes conceives vision in the Optics really concerns how the two substances (of course, mind and body) relate to one another. As the citation from “Cartesian Ontology and Contemporary Ontology” indicates, the two substances, according to Merleau-Ponty, interact by “découper,” a cutting out or apart, a dividing. Therefore we can now provide a more conceptual determination of MerleauPonty’s mixturism. Like Sartre’s ontological monism, Descartes’s dualism of the division is opposed to Merleau-Ponty’s mixturism. In contrast, for Merleau-Ponty, in sensibility there is an “indivision” between the sensing or activity and the sensed or passivity. (OE 20/125) The move from division to indivision is Merleau-Ponty’s translation, as mentioned earlier, i.e., in “Everywhere and Nowhere” (S 189/150), of Descartes’s ontology of substances into the ontology of sensibility. The second thing we must note before we depart from Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of vision in Descartes’s Optics is that Merleau-Ponty is making a distinction between image and representation. As we have seen, according to Merleau-Ponty, the positive infinite contains the properties of all partial beings in an eminent way; in other words, God possesses the same properties as the creatures but only more so.25 Thus, following the translation of the positive infinite, an image is always based on resemblance, on the sameness not of God and man, but on the sameness of seeing and seen. In contrast, a representation is a sign; it involves no resemblance between the representation and the represented. So we must anticipate, once again, the intersection with Foucault. In Les mots et les choses, the final sentence of his description of the structure of Velasquez’s painting is: “This very subject [ce sujet même] – which is the same [qui est le même] – has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation [that of the same] that was structuring it [l’enchaînait], can give itself off as pure representation.” (MC 31/16, my emphasis) Merleau-Ponty’s translation of large rationalism is not yet complete. According to him, Descartes could not eliminate “the enigma of vision.” (OE 51/135) Instead, the enigma is shifted from surveying thought, the thought of vision, to “vision in act.” (OE 55/136) In other words, it is shifted to factual vision, to embodied vision. According to MerleauPonty, however, factual vision does not overthrow Descartes’s philosophy. For Descartes, 24

For more on Merleau-Ponty and the “géométral,” see Jacques Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, Essais, 1973), chapter 2; English translation by Alan Sheridan as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton, 1978). 25 See Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression, 38; Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 46-7. 132

there is a limit to metaphysics. Since vision is thought united with a body, I can live it but not conceive. As Merleau-Ponty says, “The truth is that it is absurd to submit the mixture [le mélange, of course] of the understanding and the body to the pure understanding.” (OE 55/137) For Descartes, by being positioned (by being finite, in other words), we are disqualified from looking into both God’s being and the corporeal space of the soul. Repeating a formula of “Everywhere and Nowhere,” Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind” calls this limit to metaphysics “the secret of the Cartesian equilibrium.” (OE 56/137) Of course, just as we cannot return to large rationalism, this secret has been lost forever. Yet, as Merleau-Ponty stresses, since we are the composite of body and soul, there must be a thought of that composite. The thought of the composite would be as much opposed to small rationalism (operationalism or today’s science) as to large rationalism (Cartesianism). As expressed in the lecture course from 1960-61, we can enter into this fundamental thought, into this philosophy “still to be made,” only through art, only through the painter’s vision. (OE 61/138-39)

Thinking in Painting The painter’s vision, for Merleau-Ponty, goes beyond “profane” (OE 27/127) or “ordinary” vision (OE 70/142) to “the enigma of vision.” (OE 64-65/140) Like Descartes’s conception of vision, profane vision, according to Part Four of “Eye and Mind” (which is probably the most famous part), consists in two extreme views. On the one hand, there is the view from the airplane, which allows us to see an interval, without any mystery, between the trees nearby and those far away. Yet, on the other hand, there is “the sleight of hand,” by means of which one thing is replaced by another, as in a perspective drawing. (OE 64/140) With these two views, once again, we have the proximity of fusion (the contact through the hand) and the infinite distance of surveying thought (the distance from the airplane). Yet, the phrase “sleight of hand” translates Merleau-Ponty’s “escamotage,” which means to make something disappear by a skillful maneuver; “maneuver” literally means using the hand, which is why I rendered “escamotage” as “sleight of hand.” But, “escamotage” is also etymologically connected to the French word “effilocher,” which means to unthread or untie something that has been woven together. We can see now that both the sleight of the hand and the view from the airplane separate things and make them be partes extra partes. This maneuver and view are the opposite of the interweaving in which the enigma of vision consists. Here is Merleau-Ponty’s definition of the enigma of vision: The enigma is that I see things, each in its place, precisely because they eclipse one another; it is that they are rivals before my sight precisely because each one is in its own place. The enigma is their known exteriority in their envelopment, and their mutual dependence in their autonomy. Once depth is understood in this way, we can no longer call it a third dimension. (OE 64-65/139) We can see the oxymoronic formulas by means of which Merleau-Ponty is defining the enigma: exterior -- known, they are partes extra partes -- and yet in envelopment -dependent in autonomy. But we can see as well the reversibility. Each thing is in its own place -- exterior to one another -- because they hide one another -- envelopment; they are rivals -- mutually dependent -- because each is in its own place -- autonomous. While for Descartes depth was a false problem, for Merleau-Ponty, as this quote indicates, depth is the whole question. As is well known, for Merleau-Ponty, depth is the first dimension or the source of all dimensions, “dimensionality,” (OE 48/134) “voluminosity,” (OE 27/127) 133

the “there,” the “one same space,” (OE 85/147) the “one same being”; (OE 17/124) depth is the experience of the reversibility of dimensions, of a global “locality,” where all the dimensions are at once. (OE 65/140) Now, and perhaps this is not so well known, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of depth (la profondeur) in “Eye and Mind,” refers us back to his early work in The Structure of Behavior on the Gestalt, to the relation of figure and ground (le fond). Therefore, we can see how Merleau-Ponty is proceeding here (in Part IV). With the enigma of vision we have depth and therefore we have the background; now we need the figure. For Merleau-Ponty, the figure is generated by color and line. But, color and line, like all the other dimensions, are not based in a “recipe,” as Merleau-Ponty says, for the visible. It is not a question of adding other dimensions to the two of the canvas. The lack of a recipe means that painting, or more generally pictures, for Merleau-Ponty do not imitate nature. He is rejecting the traditional concept of imitation, which implies an external relation between the painter and something outside of him or herself. For MerleauPonty, the painter is not viewing something else from the outside. Instead, the painter is born in the things by the concentration and coming to itself of the visible. This “being born in [dans] the things” is what Merleau-Ponty means when he speaks of the picture being “auto-figurative.” (OE 69/141) But, what is most important about this discussion in Part IV of “Eye and Mind” -- it seems to me that pages 69-72/141-42 are the heart of the essay; they overlap with the final pages of Chapter 4 of The Visible and the Invisible26 - is that, not only is the painter born in the things, but also the writer, or better, the poet. Here, through the idea of auto-figuration, Merleau-Ponty is trying to bring the language arts back to painting, back to the visible.27 First, Merleau-Ponty refers to Apollinaire, who said that there are phrases in a poem that do not appear to have been created but that seem “to have formed themselves.” (OE 69/141) Then, second, Merleau-Ponty quotes Michaux as saying that Klee’s colors seem to have been born slowly upon the canvas, to have emanated from “a primordial ground” (un fond primordial), “exhaled at the right spot like a patina or mold.” Between these two comments we have an “et,” an “and,” which implies a comparison or better a compatibility between the colors forming themselves on the canvas and the words forming themselves on the page, a compatibility between the eye that sees and the eye that reads. Here we must also refer to the intersection with Foucault. On the one hand, Apollinaire of course composed his poems as a calligram, the calligram being what Magritte “unmakes,” according to Foucault, in This is not a Pipe. On the other, in Chapter Nine of Les mots et les choses, Foucault will say that an “et” connects the doubles that define man’s ambiguous existence. The “et” means that Merleau-Ponty wants the painter and the poet -- in a word, man -- not on the inside of God (this would be large rationalism), but on the inside of the visible. Merleau-Ponty’s definition of art shows us that this “et” implies a mixture, an ambiguous relation of light and feeling, of the visible and the invisible. Art, for Merleau-Ponty, is not a “skillful relation, from the outside, to a space and a world.” Instead, “art is the inarticulate cry, the voice of light,” “la voix de la lumière.” (OE 70/142) In the course from 1961, “Cartesian Ontology and Contemporary Ontology,” Merleau-Ponty reproduces Valéry’s poem “Pythie,” which speaks of a voice of no one, the voice of the waves and the woods, which

26

Deleuze in his book on Foucault cites these final pages of The Visible and the Invisible. (VI 20102/153-54 See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986), 119 no. 39; English translation by Seán Hand as Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 149 no. 38. 27 For more on Klee, Merleau-Ponty, and auto-figuration, see Stephen Watson, “On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful: Adorno and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee,” Chiasmi International 5 (2003): 201-21. See also Galen Johnson, “Thinking in Color: Merleau-Ponty and Klee,” in Veronique Fóti, ed., MerleauPonty: Difference, Materiality, Painting (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996). 134

is literature, and the unveiling of the visible, the speech of things. Merleau-Ponty comments on this poem by saying that “the visible and what the poem means [are] interwoven (entrelacés).28 (NC 1959-61, 186) In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty provides a remarkable example of this interweaving, which is the painter’s vision (and not the profane vision) of a swimming pool.29 It is clear that, with this description of the view of a swimming pool, Merleau-Ponty is still concerned with a figure-ground relation, since he is speaking about the bottom (le fond) of the pool. Here is the description: If I saw, without this flesh, the geometry of the tile, then I would stop seeing the tiled bottom as it is, where it is, namely: farther away than any identical place. I cannot say that the water itself – the aqueous power, the syrupy and shimmering element – is in space; all this is not somewhere else either, but it is not in the pool. It dwells in it, is materialized there, yet it is not contained there; and if I lift my eyes toward the screen of cypresses where the web of reflections plays, I must recognize that the water visits it as well, or at least sends out to it its active and living essence. This inner animation, this radiation of the visible, is what the painter seeks beneath the names of depth, space, and color. (OE 70-71/142, my emphasis) Merleau-Ponty selects the vision of a swimming pool because, it seems, any swimming pool has to have depth so that one might be able to swim in it. The depth is the water, which is not in space or in the pool; the water “dwells there,” as Merleau-Ponty says, but dwelling (habiter) means that the water is not contained in the pool but is itself the container. Or, as Merleau-Ponty says here, it is an “element.” Now in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty also calls the flesh an element, saying “to designate the flesh, we would need the old term ‘element,’ in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway [mi-chemin] between the spatiotemporal individual and the idea.” (VI 184/139) Without the flesh of the water, we would be able to grasp the tiles with our hands and hold them in one identical place, but then we would not see their geometry, or, more precisely, geometry. The flesh allows us to see the geometry, since the water’s distortions function as a sort of variation of the spatiotemporal individual. The variation makes that the geometry is “farther away than any identical place.” But, being midway, the water makes that the geometry is not so far away as to exist in a second world of forms without any support from the visible; (Cf. OE 91/149) again, we see here that Merleau-Ponty’s thought is an anti-Platonism. The geometry reaches only as low as the bottom of the syrupy element and only as high as the screen of cypresses. You can see, I hope, that with this description of the swimming pool Merleau-Ponty is no longer speaking of voice. The geometry of the tiles refers us to the line. It is well known that Merleau-Ponty says, in this context, that modern painting contests the “prosaic line,” the line between a field and a meadow which the pencil or brush would only have to reproduce. Again, we can see that Merleau-Ponty is not interested in the traditional idea of art as imitation or reproduction. It is also well known that in this context MerleauPonty turns to Klee again. For Klee, according to Merleau-Ponty, the line is the genesis of the visible, and then, still according to Merleau-Ponty, Klee “leaves it up to the title to designate by its prosaic name the being thus constituted, in order to leave the painting

28

“L’entrelacs – le chiasme” is, of course, the title of The Visible and the Invisible’s fourth chapter. Merleau-Ponty, in fact, says that art, once it has awoken, gives vision new powers; these powers would have to define the painter’s vision. 29

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free to function more purely as a painting.” (OE 75/143, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis) In the course (“Cartesian Ontology and Contemporary Ontology”), Merleau-Ponty also speaks of the role of the title in Klee, saying that the title “disburdens the picture of resemblance [here Merleau-Ponty means imitation] in order to allow it to express, to present an alogical essence of the world which … is not empirically in the world and yet leads the world back to its pure ontological accent, [it puts] in relief its way of Welten [worlding], of being world.” (NC 1959-61, 53) This citation means that the title designates the thing whose genesis the painting is showing us -- without the painting imitating that thing. So, Merleau-Ponty says in “Eye and Mind” that Klee has painted the two holly leaves exactly in the way they are generated in the visible, in the way they “holly leave,” we might say, and yet they are indecipherable precisely because the painting does not imitate the empirical object called holly leaves; the title instead designates this empirical object which has been generated. It is important that Merleau-Ponty does not say that the title in Klee denies that the painting is of holly leaves. Klee does not say, “This is not two holly leaves,” “ceci n’est pas deux feuilles de houx.” The title affirms that they are indeed holly leaves, which implies that the title, like the phrases in the poem, like the geometry of the tiles at the bottom of the pool, is the outgrowth of the genesis, its final stage, its patina or mold, its exhalation. We might go so far as to say that the relation between the title and the painting in Merleau-Ponty is that of a calligram: the lines emerge from the depth and then they become words which still resemble the depth from which they came. Thus, recognizing the weaving of the words into the things, we can interweave the two quotations Merleau-Ponty uses to frame Part IV of “Eye and Mind.” The first, which completes Part IV, is from Klee: “I cannot be grasped in [dans] immanence,” in the immanence, that is, of consciousness, of the cogito, of thought. (OE 87/148) The second quote, which completes Part III, of course comes from Cézanne: the painter “thinks in [en] painting.”30 (OE 60/139)

Conclusion: Man and his Doubles The preposition in this phrase from Cézanne, “pense en peinture,” expresses, for MerleauPonty, the indivision of the invisible and the visible, of words and things. Therefore, what is at issue in this philosophy that comes from painting, is the connection between these two, (OE 64/140) the “between,” and the “entre-lacs,” the inter-weaving, as Merleau-Ponty says in The Visible and the Invisible. Being a “thought of the inside,”31 Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is always trying to move into this “between.” This interiority is why MerleauPonty rejects the traditional concept of imitation, in which the imitation is between two things outside of one another. Yet, despite the criticism of imitation, we must say that, while depth (la profondeur) is no-thing, there is a resemblance between the figure and the ground (le fond). If we are correct about the conceptual schemes for Merleau-Ponty’s mixturism, then we must recognize that the logic of the positive infinite implies a relation of eminence between the figure and the ground. Of course, again, what Merleau-Ponty is speaking about is not traditional imitation, not a copying relation, but he is speaking of resemblance and images. In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts about resemblance are especially guided by the specular image. (OE 28/128) Resemblance therefore seems to work in this way (for Merleau-Ponty). In a mirror, I see my flesh outside, and as 30

For the same quote, see also NC 1959-61, 206. See Françoise Dastur’s “La pensée du dedans,” in idem, Chair et langage (Paris: Encre Marine, 2001), especially, 125-26, where she compares, but not a contrario, Merleau-Ponty’s “thought of the inside” to Foucault’s “thought of the outside.” 31

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outside, I recognize my inside (an inside which, if I am a child, had hitherto been confusedly felt affects). But, this recognition does not occur before the mirror image, and it occurs only on the basis of that specular image that is outside. Then, I can transfer this recognized inside to other outsides, which are like the specular image I had seen of myself outside. In other words, on the basis of the specular image, I can attribute my inside to another’s flesh, even though the inside of another’s flesh remains invisible, even though it is Nicht-Unpräsentierbarkeit.32 (VI 292/238-39) As Merleau-Ponty says, “They [that is, the image, the picture, and the drawing] are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity [duplicité] of sensibility makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi-presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary.” (OE 23/126) It is significant, of course, that here Merleau-Ponty is alluding to Lacan’s mirror stage, about which Merleau-Ponty had lectured in 1949, and that he speaks of the imaginary and not of the symbolic.33 But, what we must stress is that, for Merleau-Ponty, the vision of the painter “gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible…. This voracious vision, reaching beyond [par delà] the ‘visual givens,’ opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuation or the caesura.” (OE 27/127) Because painting reaches beyond and gives visible existence to what was invisible, for Merleau-Ponty there is only ever “the invisible of the visible.” (VI 300/247) The invisible is always relative to the visible and is always on the verge, imminently, of being visible, of coinciding with the visible. (Cf. VI 163/122-23) The invisible is never a teeming presence but always on the horizon of the visible. (VI 195/148) And even if we can speak of a “blind spot” (VI 300-01/247-48), an “impotence” (impuissance) of vision, (VI 194/148) Merleau-Ponty always conceives it, not on the basis of non-coincidence, but on the basis of coincidence, not on the basis of blindness, but on the basis of vision, not on the basis of impotence, but on the basis of the “I can.”34 Here, in the question of power, we have the subtle shift of emphasis between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. This subtle shift of emphasis really does mean that all the prepositions in Merleau-Ponty, the “to” (“à”), the “in” (“en”), the “within” (“dans”), the “beyond” (“par-delà”), and the “between” (“entre”), in short, the inside, have the signification of resemblance. If we are going to have a strict difference between immanence and transcendence, then the resemblance relation implies that Merleau-Ponty is not a philosopher of immanence, but a philosopher of transcendence. We should recall again what Klee says: “I cannot be grasped in immanence.” What, or better, who is the emblem of transcendence in Merleau-Ponty? Who is the “between”? Between the two extremes of the distant view from the airplane and the up

32

See also my “The Legacy of Husserl’s ‘The Origin of Geometry’: The Limits of Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty and Derrida,” in Leonard Lawlor, Thinking Through French Philosophy (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2033), 62-79. At the time of the writing of “The Legacy” essay (1999), I was not aware of the difference of emphasis that this imminence makes. See Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher – Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 238-40. 33 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les relations avec autrui chez l’enfant (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1960), 55; English translation by William Cobb as “The Child’s Relation with Others,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 135. The lectures date from 1949-1951. In reference to the difference between the imaginary and the symbolic, see Gilles Deleuze, “A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?” in idem, L’île déserte et autres textes (Paris: Minuit, 2002), 238-269; English translation by Melissa McMahon and Charles J. Stivale as “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 170-192. 34 For more on blindness in Merleau-Ponty, see Galen Johnson, “The Retrieval of the Beautiful,” unpublished manuscript, 2004. I completed all three parts of this trilogy before reading Johnson’s essay, which he was kind enough to share with me. 137

close grasp of the sleight of the hand, between survey and fusion, between the screen of cypress trees and the bottom of the pool, there is the vision of the eyes. The eyes see that things are not flat and juxtaposed; one thing stands behind another and is therefore obscure and hidden. But, the eyes see in this way only if the body is upright with the feet on the ground.35 The verticality of the upright body is not, of course, vision absorbed into the cogito, as in Descartes. Nevertheless, I think that it is necessary to recognize that whenever Merleau-Ponty speaks of verticality, as he does so often in the working notes to The Visible and the Invisible, he is privileging the human body and its uprightness. (Cf. VI 325/271-72) In “Eye and Mind” he says, “This interiority [that is, the indivision of the sensible and the sensing] does not precede the material arrangement of the human body, and it no more results from it.” (OE 20/125, my emphasis) For Merleau-Ponty, the “fundamental of painting, perhaps of all culture” (OE 15/123) is the human -- and not the animal -- body. The upright human body is the “between” of survey and fusion, the “milieu,” the “mi-chemin” between essence and fact. (Cf. VI 328/274). Since the human body is visible, the human is the figure standing out from the ground of the visible; as the figure, man can be studied as an empirical positivity.36 And, since the human body sees, the human resembles the ground of the visible; as the ground, man can as well be taken as the transcendental foundation. As Merleau-Ponty says, “the manifest visibility [of things] doubles itself [se double] in my body.” (OE 22/125, my emphasis) Therefore we must conclude by saying that Merleau-Ponty’s thought, his “mixturism,” is defined by the phrase “l’homme et ses doubles.”

35

For more on verticality and vision, see Erwin W. Strauss, “The Upright Posture,” Psychiatric Quarterly 26, no. 4 (October 1952): 529-561, especially 546. 36 For more on the question of man in both Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, see also Etienne Bimbinet, Nature et Humanité: Le problème anthropologique dans l’œuvre de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Vrin, 2004), especially 312-13. 138

3.

MICHEL HENRY AND THE “TRIAL OF THE TEXT”

Mark Wenzinger

I. Textuality, Agonic Subjectivity, and the Seinsfrage As a young philosophy student in the 1960’s, Jean-Luc Marion’s first encounter with Michel Henry’s The Essence of Manifestation1 is illustrative of the reaction that the Henryian text often provokes in its readers: it was not enthusiastic. On the contrary, Marion relates that the book simply “fell from his hands.”2 Such lack of enthusiasm is not Marion’s final verdict, however, either on the person or on the work of Michel Henry, to whom the mature Marion acknowledges himself indebted by reason both of Henry’s “faithful friendship” and of Henry’s “example of philosophical probity.”3 Marion’s first and initially negative encounter with EM, followed by a much more positive and fruitful engagement both with it and with the rest of the Henryian œuvre, can be considered paradigmatic of the character of the reader’s successive moments of engagement with the work of Henry. On account of its size and complexity of structure, EM is particularly likely to provoke a negative reaction from the reader who seeks to engage it for the first time. The encounter is perhaps necessarily traumatic in character at the outset, but this “traumatic experience” [le traumatisme],4 to borrow the expression of François-David Sebbah, contains in itself the power and condition of possibility for the reader’s fruitful reception of a text that had at first seemed forbidding and even repellent.5 As Sebbah points out, the traumatic character of the Henryian text -- and this applies not only to EM, but to all of Henry’s philosophical works -- is perhaps more ultimately rooted in its being always “an operation carried out on language” [un travail sur la langue], practiced to excess, an activity of excess that is intended to do violence to the apophantic character of logos precisely by means both of apophantic logos itself and of the text that is its expressive Gestalt.6 Henry seeks to do violence to apophantic logos,

1

Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), hereafter EM. 2 This story is recounted by Natalie Depraz. Cf. her “The Return of Phenomenology in Recent French Moral Philosophy,” in John J. Drummond and Lester Embree, ed., Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy: A Handbook (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 521. 3 Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), xi. Marion’s attestation of Henry’s “example of philosophical probity” is a provocative estimate of the Henryian œuvre, especially given the fact that Henry is about to be characterized as a writer of “violence” and “excess” with respect to apophatic logos. 4 François-David Sebbah, L’épreuve de la limite. Derrida, Henry, et Levinas et la phénoménologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), 1, hereafter EL. Sebbah’s book well attests both to the traumatic character of the reader’s initial encounter with the texts of Henry -- the violent and excessive character of whose writing gives it a “family resemblance” with the work of Levinas and Derrida -- and to the philosophically fruitful character of the reader’s sustaining of the “traumatisme” provoked by the Henryian text. Rolf Kühn also underscores the violent character of the Henryian text. Cf. “Réception et réceptivité. La phénoménologie de la vie et sa critique,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 3 (July-September, 2001): 295-297. 5 Cf. EL, 1. 6 Ibid. I of course derive the idea of the visible Gestalt that is really expressive of an invisible ground from the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar. For an excellent introduction to the Balthasarian notion of Gestalt, cf. David C. Schindler, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 12-27. 139

understood both as discursive thought and as the language of discursive thought, when he says: Because the act of knowledge which divides up and yields an unreal object in otherness fails to reach the essence which is primordially in the act itself, viz., the essence of Being and life, that which the act of knowledge determines does not bear in it the characteristic of reality, it does not manifest the truth of reality. Its ‘exposure’ in nothingness is not that of Being and its language is not truthful; rather it hides what it claims to say. . . . The unhappy consciousness is not merely sensible consciousness, it is not merely to the latter, but to all knowledge, to all thought, that the question is directed, the question which is that of the essence itself, its most essential phrase: “Why do you seek the living one among the dead?”7 Henry sustains his critique of apophantic logos, understood as thought, language, and text, throughout the entirely of his philosophical project. Indeed, in one of his later books, Henry argues that the New Testament itself formulates the same critique of language, asserting language’s “inherent powerlessness” in contrast to that which is originarily powerful.8 Of the New Testament and its critique of language, Henry says: It endlessly discredits the universe of words and speech, and not simply by force of circumstance, according to the vicissitudes of the story, but for reasons of principle: because language, or text, leaves true reality outside itself, thus finding itself totally impotent with respect to that reality, whether to construct it, modify it, or destroy it.9 Henry goes on to assert that it is precisely by reason of language’s “inherent powerlessness” with respect to reality that language does have one dubious “power” that is entirely its own: The powerlessness of language to posit a reality other than its own does not leave it totally bereft. One power remains to it: to speak this reality when it does not exist, to affirm something, whatever it may be, when there is nothing, to lie. Lying is not one possibility of language alongside another with which it might be contrasted—speaking the truth, for example. This possibility is rooted in language and is as inherent in it as its very essence. Language, as long as there is nothing else but language, can only be lying. . . . To the powerlessness of language are added all the vices belonging to powerlessness in general: lying, hypocrisy, the shrouding of truth, bad faith, the overthrowing of values, the falsification of reality in all its forms—including the most extreme form, that is, the reduction of this reality to language and ultimately, in this supreme confusion, their identification with each other.10 Henry thus concludes: Language has become the universal evil. And we can certainly see why. What characterizes any word is its difference from the thing—the fact that, taken in itself,

7

EM, 405. Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 8, hereafter IAT. Here Henry is citing 1Cor 4:20: “For the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power.” 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 8-9. 8

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in its own reality, language contains nothing of the reality of the thing, none of its properties. This difference from the thing explains its indifference to the thing. . . . Emerging from its own powerlessness, the power of language suddenly becomes frightening, shaking up reality, twisting it up in its frenzy.11 Henry asserts that “language cannot blaze a trail to either reality or truth,” and that language’s claim to be “the means of communication par excellence” is in fact “its greatest illusion.”12 This is the case because the “single truth” that language can transmit “already exists, has already been revealed, revealed to itself by itself, independently of and prior to language.”13 For Henry, truly radical philosophical reflection on the powerlessness of language reveals that “philosophy always comes along too late because what it says was at the beginning.”14 That which is at the beginning is Being; understood phenomenologically, Being is the essence of manifestation. The essence of manifestation is the originary phenomenon that coincides absolutely with its phenomenality or mode of appearing. The essence of manifestation is Being, insofar as Being for Henry necessarily events only in the absolute coincidence of phenomenon and phenomenality. The essence of manifestation exists in itself and by itself, in complete ontological independence of everything for which a difference remains between what appears and the appearing of what appears. The essence of manifestation therefore effectively manifests itself to itself quite apart both from the operation of language and from the transcendental horizon to which language is tributary. As long as the relationship between language and this originary manner of Being and phenomenality is not articulated properly, language can only be the “negation” of all reality save “that pallid reality that pertains to language as a system of significations and that finds itself in principle to be an unreality.”15 Henry thus uses apophantic logos to do violence to apophantic logos itself -- that on which Western philosophy depends and which it so highly esteems. Such an operation on language cannot do otherwise than provoke indignation in the heart of the reader schooled in the very logos that Henry engages only in order, at least at first, to refuse it. The violence that Henry inflicts on the logos, however, is in fact intended ultimately to renew rather than suppress thought, language, or the text. The Henryian attack on the place of honor accorded to language is not in fact an attack on the primacy of language per se, but only on the primacy of language as understood from within the perspective of what Henry terms “ontological monism.”16 Henry’s attack on language is thus only a moment within a more ultimate effort to situate language otherwise than it is situated within a monistic understanding of Being, phenomenality, and human reality. Henry’s theory of textuality is “post-modern” in the sense that he refuses to valorize a “metaphysics of objective conceptual presence” in the name of the always excessive character of human reality with respect to this horizon. Relative to human reality, Henry emphatically refuses to grant the horizon any role in the self-manifestation of human subjectivity. Henry submits the horizon itself to the blow of the phenomenological reduction in order to examine its structure and ultimate conditions of possibility. Henry grants to Heidegger that the horizon is the transcendental condition of an object in general. But is everything that arises into presence in fact present only in the form of an object?

11 12 13 14 15 16

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 10. Ibid. EM, 169. IAT, 10. EM, 36. 141

While Henry thus questions “the metaphysics of objective conceptual presence” in a “post-modern” manner, he does so, however, only in order to achieve an end that standard post-modern thought dismisses as impossible of attainment. Henry refuses the rationalist and idealist metaphysics of presence precisely in order to attest to the reality and power of the Presence, radically subjective in structure, that both distinguishes from itself and unites to itself the transcendental milieu of objective presence in which things deprived of ipseity appear. Henry’s theory of textuality is thus rooted in a radical metaphysics of Presencing, with Presencing now understood as the original affectively structured energeia or essence that both eludes the reach of intentional consciousness and makes intentional consciousness itself effectively possible. Henry therefore resolutely develops his theory of textuality outside of the post-modern ambit in seeking to secure the effective possibility both of the horizon and of our intentional consciousness of everything that appears within it. His critique of ontological monism is in great part motivated by his realization that the monist perspective takes for granted, but cannot itself secure, the effective possibility of the horizon of objective conceptual presence upon which it would found human thought and human action. That which Henry wishes to indicate by means of the term “ontological monism” is in fact a constellation of assumptions concerning the ultimate ontological structure both of Being and of the essence of manifestation. Ontological monism’s central thesis is that “Being” is homogeneous.17 Phenomenologically speaking, this thesis means that there is only one ontological mode of phenomenality, only one essence of manifestation, by means of which all ontic things are rendered manifest. From this perspective, human reality is assumed to be an ontic reality like any other and as such dependent upon the one essence for its own promotion into presence. This ontological essence is “transcendence,” which generates the transcendental horizon of objective visibility in which all things appear in the mode of objects. Anything supposed to exist that does not appear within this “horizon of light” must remain essentially non-phenomenal, “invisible” in a privative sense.18 From the monistic perspective, the essence of manifestation is thus an impersonal and affectively indifferent foundation of an equally impersonal and indifferent horizon of objective visibility in which all things are equally and indifferently rendered manifest in the form of objectively structured intentional correlates. The subjectivity of the human subject is thus in fact no subjectivity at all, but only a transcendental objectivity that is related to human reality in a manner that is extrinsic, aporetic, and ontologically violent. From within the perspective of ontological monism, the relationship between transcendence and its horizon also remains aporetic, volatile, and unsecured. Insofar as transcendence shows itself to be dependent upon the horizon it deploys, it also attests to the fact that it is not itself the ultimate condition of possibility of the horizon. From within the perspective of monism, human reality is simply assumed to depend for its manifestation upon a horizon of visibility with which, however, it has an uneasy relationship, and the horizon itself depends upon the ontologically shaky foundation of transcendence to which the horizon is likewise uneasily related. Within monism, therefore, it is not only the case that human reality is deprived of its subjective character in its being subordinated to transcendence. It is also the case that transcendence cannot in fact play the ontological role assigned to it with respect both to its horizon and to human reality itself.

17 18

133. 142

Ibid. Cf. EM, Section I, “The Clarification of the Concept of Phenomenon: Ontological Monism,” 49-

From the perspective of ontological monism, there is no such thing as an “immediate knowledge” of the human self by itself. All knowledge is always in fact “mediate,” constituted through the mediation of the “phenomenological distance” or transcendental horizon that itself is a function of transcendence.19 In order that Being be manifest to itself, Being must be at a distance from itself. From the perspective of ontological monism, therefore, division, separation, and opposition within Being are the ultimate conditions of possibility for the manifestation both of Being and of beings. The human subject is therefore nothing outside of the event of alienation and distancing that permits the subject, which is phenomenologically impotent in and of itself, to take on the condition of an objectively structured phenomenon.20 From the perspective of monism, therefore, there is really no such thing as an irreducibly singular and ontologically determined human subject at all. The Henryian “excess” with respect to language and the text, at least insofar as language and text are understood from within the perspective of ontological monism, is intended to be expressive of what Paul Audi describes as the ontological excédence of transcendental subjectivity and ipseity with respect to transcendence and its horizon, an ontological “excess” that is at once both radically foundational of and absolutely heterogeneous to the ontological excès of transcendence and objectivity with respect to the onta that this latter permits to appear in the form of visible and insurmountably finite objects. With respect to the human subject himself, Henry seeks to use language in order to overcome the empirical self’s state of dissipation with respect to itself.21 Over and above both the empirically experienced self and the transcendental horizon of visibility within which the empirically experienced self is assumed to appear, each human subject immediately appears to himself as himself in an affectively structured “immanent dialectic” of suffering and joy that is absolutely in excess of that which he takes himself to be when he naively assumes that his being manifest to himself is simply a function of the horizon of objective visibility.22 The Henryian approach to language and the text, characterized by violence and excess thus understood, is furthermore intended to be philosophically fruitful not least by reason of its eliciting from the reader a phrone¯sis, a prudence, on the basis of which the reader

19

Ibid., 71. Cf. ibid., 60-66. Ibid., 78, 86. 21 Cf. Paul Audi, Rousseau, éthique et passion (Paris: PUF, 1997), 162-63, hereafter REP. At 161-62, commenting on Rousseau’s understanding of amour de soi in its radical distinction from amour-propre, Audi writes: “Or, cela signifie également que l’amour de soi est ‘excédent’ par essence, qui’il s’excède en lui-même et par lui-même, et que c’est pour cette raison, parce qu’il s’excède en lui-même, que Rousseau peut clairement le qualifier de passionel.” That amour de soi is “passionel,” however, does not mean that it is “excessif” in any sense: “la vérité est que l’amour de soi n’est jamais excessif, contrairement à l’amour-propre qui a toujours une tendance à l’excès. . . .” Rather, “Si l’amour de soi est passionel, c’est seulement en tant qu’il est radicalement passif, participant d’une passivité qui est sa ‘mesure’ intérieure, cette mesure étant elle-même incommensurable objectivement. Aussi est-ce à cette irrémissible passivité que renvoie l’excédance ontologique.” 22 EM, 671: “With the becoming of suffering and its interior transformation into joy a new and truly essential concept for the dialectic is revealed to us, i.e., the concept of an immanent dialectic . . . , which is the movement of our tonalities, the passage from certain qualitative determinations to others. . . . The dialectic does not constitute the structure of Being, it is possible only interior to Being. . . . It is upon the foundation of the unity of Being with itself in suffering that suffering transforms itself dialectically into joy; in existence the contrary does not proceed from opposition but from identity.” 20

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is able to persist in the undergoing of an “experience” [une épreuve] that is also a “trial,”23 the trying experience of the Henryian text itself.24 The reader who persists in sustaining the trauma of the Henryian text is brought to realize that although “textual truth” taken by itself inevitably subverts itself in a destructive manner as long as it remains founded on transcendence and the transcendental horizon, this same “textual truth” is able to subvert itself in a positive manner when its foundation is relocated in immanence. Immanence is the essence of manifestation; affectively structured immanence is Being, indeed “the Self of Being,”25 which shows itself to itself in the form of the “archi-impressionality” of the immanent dialectic of suffering and joy. Once the Being of the text is resituated in this manner, the “worldly word” and the “textual truth” is able to turn itself “away from itself,” able now to achieve “the displacement that leads outside its own word to this other site where the Word of Life speaks.”26 In short, the Being of the text -- and the Being of the human subject -is properly to be situated within God, whom Henry understands to be the Unity of the Relationship of Strong Reunion of the Self of Being with Itself.27 Both the human subject and apophantic logos are to be situated in God and not in the transcendental horizon. When this truth is understood, the text is able to serve as the very Gestalt of the now positively understood invisibility that determines both human and divine ipseity.

23

Cf. EL, 312. “Violence” is a concept that appears with some frequency in Henry’s later writing. Cf. Michel Henry, C’est Moi la Vérité: pour une philosophie du Christianisme [= CMV] (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 189, at which Henry speaks of the violence done to the human ego in order that it be in fact a living person, “cette violence lui est faite d’être un vivant.” Henry believes it is both just and necessary to inflict violence on the apophatic logos because violence is what makes the human ego a vivant, a living one. Cf. also CMV, 251, at which Henry points out that the suffering of Self is always already a violence, and “plus violente l’étreinte et s’empare de soi et jouit de soi—plus forte est la joie.” Cf. also REP, 224: “N’est-ce pas du reste ceci, l’essence de la violence: la possibilité inhérente à toute force de se donner toujours, en dépit de sa propre impuissance, et proportionellement à elle, les moyens de la conjurer en s’en délivrant?” 24 Cf. EL, 282. As Sebbah points out, the Henryian text is precisely a text, relying upon the very apophatic logos to which it seeks to do violence. As Sebbah also points out, the reliance of the Henryian text on the apophatic logos that it seeks to overthrow raises serious questions about the consistency of Henry’s philosphical enterprise. I think, however, that Sebbah overstates things when he says here that one cannot look directly to Henry to answer the questions raised by his dependence on the text, that “pour raisons d’essence il n’y a nulle place dans M. Henry pour une théorie du texte,” so that “il faut se tourner vers quelque indications, comme telles indirectes.” To the contrary, in connection with a consideration of the meaning of the truth of the Christian scriptures, Henry in fact explicitly discusses the inadequacy of the text as such relative to the Absolute Reality to which the text is subordinate. Cf. CMV, 7-19. Henry’s direct remarks regarding the inadequacy of the text might seem only to serve to render more pressing the question regarding his philosophical consistency. Henry himself points out that neither the Christian Scriptures nor the text as such is the object of his study in CMV. Cf. ibid., 286. Nonetheless, the whole of chapter 12 of CMV is dedicated to articulating the manner in which human language and the written text can serve the self-revelation of God in man. See especially ibid., 290-91. Cf. also Michel Henry, Paroles du Christ [= PC] (Paris: Seuil, 2002). The entirety of this book, Henry’s final work, concerns the nature of the relationship between human language/the human text and the original Logos of la vie. In fairness to Sebbah, however, it is of course necessary to point out that this last work was not available to Sebbah at the time of his own writing. 25 EM, 337. 26 Cf. IAT, 8 and 230. Cf. also EL, 287-88: “Le texte n’est-il pas précisément, et de manière exemplaire, ce dehors consenti, cette percée chez l’ennemi, qui ne peut se faire sans risque, qui ne peut se faire sans le risque . . . d’opacifier, de rendre ambiguë la Parole de la Vie? Plus radicalement, le texte n’est rien d’autre que ce risque. Le risque du texte, n’est-il, comme M. Henry semble implicitement le penser, qu’un sacrifice provisoire et contrôlé pour la Parole de la Vie, ou bien en aura-t-il toujours déjà assombri l’immédiateté?” 27 Cf. EM, 167 et passim. 144

As Sebbah points out, the Henryian text is thus an instance of a new genre of protreptic or hortatory philosophical discourse, such that it is “less descriptive than indicative, or even prescriptive,” prescriptive of a task that is also an experience [une épreuve] to which the reader must submit himself precisely in order to be himself.28 Ultimately, therefore, the “trial” to which the reader is submitted by means of the text is something more and something other than the text itself. The trying experience to which the reader is submitted by means of an encounter with the text is in fact the reader himself, who necessarily experiences himself and is given to himself originally as the undergoing of an “internal ordeal.”29 As Audi explains, the self’s original experience of itself is that it is given to itself in an “irremissible passivity” that for the self is the experience of the self’s being absolutely overwhelmed by itself in the face of its own ontological “excessiveness.”30 For Henry, original human self-manifestation is an experience of self as a trial always already undergone; it is precisely this “agonic” character of human self-manifestation that is the source of the human subject’s ipseity or “I-ness.” It is this “agonic” ipseity, furthermore, that constitutes the “specific difference” between human reality and everything else that is not human.31 My experience of being given to myself as myself in a radical passivity in which I am overwhelmed by my own ontological excessiveness is something of which I am always already aware. As self-aware, I do not simply “know the truth”; rather, I am the Truth in a participated manner with respect to the divine Ipseity. I am identically “the primordial truth,” from which I am consciously estranged only in a contingent and surmountable manner. The Truth that I am, as something from which I can be consciously estranged, is always also something to which I can also be consciously reunited. The excessive and violent character of the Henryian text is intended precisely to help me “remember” myself in a consciously achieved reunion of intentionality and affectivity. The “agonic” character of my own original experience of self-givenness is something which I can in fact 28

EL, 312. Cf. CMV, 311-12: “Aussi, nous proposerions volontiers de comprendre le corpus de textes auxquels cette étude s’est intéressée comme relevant d’une protreptique d’un genre nouveau: ces textes, en cela fidèles à la tâche phénoménologique bien comprise, et malgré l’apparence de paradoxe, sont moins descriptifs qu’indicatifs ou même prescriptifs: ils indiquent une tâche, et même—et c’est là leur spécificité dans le domaine phénoménologique—une épreuve, à laquelle le lecteur doit s’exposer.” 29 Cf. IAT, 38. The original French phrase employed by Henry, which Emanuel translates as an “internal ordeal,” is “épreuve intérieure.” Cf. CMV, 51. Thus do we have additional confirmation of Sebbah’s thesis that the Henryian “épreuve de soi” is an “experience of self” that is also a trial or ordeal. The concept of “ordeal” plays a very important role in CMV, since through it Henry accounts for (1) the non-ecstatic transcendence that obtains within God himself, (2) the non-ecstatic transcendence of God with respect to human reality, and (3) the possibility of human reality’s misuse of its freedom in order to sin and turn away from the God upon whom it remains radically dependent. Cf. ibid., 256ff and 318-19. 30 Cf. Audi, REP, 162. Continuing to comment on Rousseau’s understanding of amour de soi in its radical distinction from amour-propre, and comparing this distinction to that of Henry between immanence and transcendence, Audi writes: “Qu’est-ce qui en nous atteste de cette passivité-la? Nous disions à l’instant: la passivité du moi à l’égard de soi est un débordement absolu. De par son débordement expansif, cette passivité se révèle à jamais plus forte que tout.” This theme of the self as a trial to be undergone, on account of the ontological excessiveness that characterizes the Being of the ego, pervades contemporary French “theological phenomenology.” Cf. also Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, trans. Jeffrey Bloechl (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 119, hereafter UU: “This almost unbearable test that a person becomes for himself is related not at all to evil or sin, but to the excess of a human being over himself, an excess of what one is and can be over what one can think and comprehend. . . .” 31 Chrétien also evokes the theme of the agon with respect to that which is properly human. Cf. UU, 96. Speaking of human fidelity to God as a properly human act, Chrétien says that such fidelity “always has, in its very peace, something violent and agonistic about it.” 145

“remember,” but not as I would remember an ontic fact. By reason of my transcendental self’s ontological excessiveness, I receive it anew as a surprise, as a jolt,32 as a “shock.”33 To thus recover myself intentionally and consciously is to be surprised and overwhelmed by myself in a reflective manner that is itself a trace of my living experience of my first being given to myself in the mode of the “saturated phenomenon.”34

II.

The Existential Significance of Henry’s Understanding of the Affective Structure of the Being of the Ego

For Henry, it is always first and foremost with reference to ourselves -- and this for ontological rather than merely methodological reasons -- that we ask the question, “What does it mean ‘to be’?”35 The question about the Being of the Ego36 is at once both an ontological and existential question. It should now be clear that Henry’s manner of the taking up of the Seinsfrage in no way pits Being against the human being in a dialectically violent manner. Henry’s manner of taking up the Seinsfrage therefore in no way entails viewing human subjectivity as a merely ontic reality. Henry’s violence toward the text, furthermore, is primarily of a methodological order. Textual violence is itself effectively possible only on the foundation of the ontological peace that obtains between “Being in general” and “the Being of the ego.” In reading Henry, one must therefore continually keep in mind that Henry’s violent existentiell treatment of apophantic logos is tributary to and dependent upon the foundation of the original ontological peace that obtains between agonic Being, agonic subjectivity, and agonic textuality. Henry’s methodological violence is furthermore always motivated by a single existential goal: the securing of the phenomenological and ontological dignity of human reality in its independence of ontologically situated dialectical violence and alienation relative both to its being and to its appearing. Henry seeks to achieve a philosophical and therefore textually mediated articulation of what man is in his humanity, by which term Henry first of all means the specific difference that radically distinguishes man from any and every ontic

32

REP, 162: “Mais comment s’obtient cette révélation? Et d’abord, pourquoi parler ici de révélation? Parce qu’il s’agit là de la manifestation d’une vérité primordiale, et que cette manifestation insigne se produit à la manière d’une surprise qui suspend et déprend le regard de tout ce qui, par principe, lui est donné de voir et de comprendre.” 33 Cf. UU, 99. “Such a shock,” Chrétien says, “showing that we are not the measure of the divine, and that the divine escapes us at the same moment that we do not escape it, relates us to it essentially.” 34 Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, “The Saturated Phenomenon,” in Dominique Janicaud, ed., Phenomenology and the “The Theological Turn: The French Debate,” trans. Bernard Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 176-216. Audi, REP, 241-43, elaborates on the remarkable convergence that obtains between the thought of Rousseau and that of Henry. Thus, in Audi’s eyes, what is true of Rousseau is true of Henry. As Audi observes, ibid., 232, “la sagesse de Rousseau” has no other goal “que d’inviter l’âme à se re-prendre en soi, en sa propre puissance constitutive, afin d’en déployer les désirs et les ‘facultés’ intentionelles conformément à ses possibilités subjectives les plus propres.” The same desire, that of assisting the human person in the project of self-recovery, is likewise the motive force of the work of Henry. 35 EM., 275. 36 Cf. ibid., 1. The guiding question of EM -- and this is true of the whole of Henry’s œuvre -- is “[t]he meaning of the Being of the ego . . . what we mean by ‘I’ or ‘me’ whenever it is a question of ourselves.” 146

and ontological reality deprived of subjectivity.37 It must also always be kept in mind that Henry’s overall phenomenological and ontological project, the “whole” of which his theory of textuality is a “moment,” is always also an existential project inasmuch as it is the effort to clarify the nature of authentically human beatitude.38 We find confirmation of the fact that the Seinsfrage, understood phenomenologically as the question concerning the Being of the ego -- of the ultimate condition of possibility of properly human self-manifestation -- is also for Henry an existential question concerning the effective possibility of human beatitude, in Henry’s Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, the companion-volume to EM.39 In connection with PPB’s critique of “the Cartesian theory of passion,” Henry makes it clear that for him the problem of the meaning of the Being of the incarnate human ego is intimately related to “the problem of existential alienation.”40 In PPB, Henry describes the philosopher’s task as one of developing “a positive interpretation of the real alienation of man beginning with the clarification of the experience in which he lives this alienation.”41 Henry’s effort to clarify the meaning of the Being of the human ego is accordingly also an effort to make some sense of the distressing human experience of alienation. Since man’s lived experience of his alienation at least seems to be an existential first-person experience, the Henryian clarification of the actually existentiell character of human reality’s experience of alienation is therefore necessarily also the articulation of what Henry calls “a philosophy of the first person.”42 Henry’s “philosophy of the first person” refuses and does violence to any attempt to claim that the human experience of alienation is primarily an affectively structured and ontologically grounded experience of the self in its first-person mode of self-presence. To claim otherwise is really to reduce the ego to “the condition of an effect in the third person”43 that can exist independently of its excessive and ontological first-person foundation. Such a reduction can only result in the loss of everything that makes the ego to be singular, concrete, living, and effectively real. It is indeed meaningful to claim that a human being can be alienated, even as it is indeed meaningless to claim that a stone cannot be alienated.44 Only the human subject can experience alienation. But to admit that such is the case is not to admit that the experience of alienation pertains to the very essence of human self-manifestation. The experience of alienation is rather a founded and derivative human experience, a founded experience of the self situated in an equally founded third-person mode of 37

Cf. CMV, 44. Here Henry makes it clear that he disputes as being radically insufficient the traditional philosophical understanding of the human person as an animal possessing logos, reason, and language, as an animal capable of reflection. As long as man is defined by something other than himself, in this case by the animality and intentional consciousness that he shares at least with other sentient creatures, man’s humanity is for Henry betrayed and covered over. Intentional consciousness permits the development of human “self-consciousness,” but only on the foundation of the specifically human form of self-manifestation that events in the auto-impressionality of human self-awareness, the “immanent dialectic” of suffering and joy. 38 The concern for the promotion of human beatitude or happiness characterizes the Henryian œuvre from its beginning to its end. One need only observe that Henry’s Master’s thesis that he published in 1942-43 is explicitly concerned with an articulation of the meaning of human bonheur. Cf. Michel Henry, Le Bonheur de Spinoza (Beirut: L’université Saint-Joseph, 1997), 9-12 et passim, hereafter BS. 39 Michel Henry, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), hereafter PPB. 40 Ibid., 145. 41 Ibid., 145-46. 42 Ibid., 146. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 147

intentionally structured self-consciousness that itself remains always dependent upon and inseparable from the human subject’s first-person mode of self-presence. The human subject’s self-conscious experience of alienation is possible only because human subjectivity’s manifestation in the form of affectively structured self-awareness is always and only a first-person experience that is impervious to the corrosive effects of the existentiell experience of alienation that occurs within the third-person subjective mode of intentionally structured self-manifestation, i.e., intentionally structured self-consciousness. The human subject is indeed truly able to be manifest to itself in the mode of alienated self-consciousness, such that the self seems to exist as a self supremely in its experience of being dissociated from itself; but such can be the case only on the foundation of the human subject’s first-person and affectively structured experience of being self-aware, of being always already given to itself as itself in its first-person experience of the “immanent dialectic” of suffering and joy. A stone can never appear in a first-person form, and so a stone can never appear in an alienated third-person mode either, at least on its own power. In and of itself, a stone can only appear in the form of an object within an ontological horizon in which human subjectivity itself can never appear, no more in its third-person mode than in its first-person mode. Even when a human subject experiences itself in an affectively alienated third person manner, therefore, its experience of itself as an alienated self is the lived experience of a subject and never the ontically passive condition of an object. Furthermore, this subjective third-person mode of self-manifestation is not itself the human subject’s original manner of being manifest. I am specifically different from a stone because while a stone can only appear to me, and this only in the mode of an object, I appear to myself, and I do so originally in an excessive and first-person manner that excludes in principle all possibility of my living an insurmountably alienated human existence in the third person. It is on account of my constant lived experience of myself in the first person that I am an ego, that I exercise a manner of being and appearing that remains phenomenologically heterogeneous to the manner of being and appearing proper to a stone. If therefore I am to be able to give a positive account of the real experience of human alienation, Henry argues, I can do so only from “within” the first-person mode of being and appearing that I always already both live and am. Because human self-manifestation is a traumatic, first-person manner of appearing to oneself, the human “alienation” of which Henry seeks to give a positive account in PPB (and therefore also in EM) is contingent rather than necessary, surmountable rather than ontologically ultimate, precisely because this experience is intentionally rather than affectively structured. The human ego’s original, traumatic, and first-person manner of selfmanifestation to himself as himself, on the other hand, necessarily arrives in the form of an “affective tonality,” a “mood,” a Stimmung.45 Henry illustrates what he means by an alienation that is primarily intentional rather than affective by recourse to the example of the lived experience of Maine de Biran, whose philosophy of the subjective body PPB sets out to articulate. Maine de Biran’s testimony concerning himself is paradigmatic of human self-experience in general as being “the experience of an affective life which is constantly changing, of a humor which is at one time gay, at other times sad, more often sad, and whose modifications seem to be independent of the will of the ego which experiences them.”46

45

Cf. Michel Henry, L’essence de la manifestation (Paris: PUF, 1963), 19, where Henry equates the ultimate power or essence of manifestation with “la vraie Stimmung,” hereafter M. 46 PPB, 154. 148

For Henry, however, Maine de Biran’s “consciousness of an enslaved affective life”47 is precisely a function of intentional consciousness, such that the experience of selfconsciousness is a founded experience that arrives in the mode of the third person, and not at all a function of the founding first-person experience of oneself as oneself given in the affectively structured and irreducibly first-person mode of self-awareness. While we might understand our existentiell suffering and sorrow as weakness and alienation, we can so understand this founded form of intentionally structured suffering only on the foundation of our ontological and affectively structured undergoing of ourselves in the form of a trial that is identically a triumph.48 This dolorous, originarily first-person experience of self is thus for Henry something that is neither existentiell nor negative, but rather something wholly ontological and positive in nature.49 The whole of EM is dedicated to situating the meaning of the Being of the human ego within the insurmountably subjective immanent dialectic, the “edificatory integration”50 of suffering and passivity that is always and also the ultimate condition of possibility of human joy and human action. My originary experience of helplessness and sorrow turns out in fact to be first and foremost an expression of the originary Ereignis, the ontological and excessive experience of myself that arises effectively prior to and independently of any mediation on the part of any ontic or ontological reality deprived of ipseity. It is ipseity alone that for Henry can truly count as “life.” “La Vie,” Life, is originally and ultimately God himself.51 In a move that is itself characterized by excess and violence, Henry dares to claim that on philosophical grounds alone, authentically human beatitude can ultimately only be apprehended in terms of human salvation, such that the issue of God is always ultimately what is at issue when it is a question of human life and human destiny.52 God is the Truth and the Life in which human life is essentially and by nature included, the absolute Life by which alone human

47

Ibid., 155. Ibid., 154. As Audi observes, the problem of the meaning of the “enslaved affective life” is also of primary importance for Rousseau. Cf. REP, 244-45. Audi cites passages both in Emile and in the Dialogues in which Rousseau comments on the “flux continuel” of our affections, the passage from suffering to joy and from joy to suffering which he himself experiences. Audi notes that the “autobiographical” writings of Rousseau in which Rousseau discusses his own powerlessness relative to his affective life are in fact both ontological and ethical in character. As ontological, they concern that which we truly are in our original mode of self-givenness. As ethical, they are concerned with the existential questions to which our ontological “situation” gives rise. Rousseau’s writings are concerned with my properly human response to the existential situation in which I find myself always already having been situated. This existential situation is in truth an ontological “position” that is the ground of my unique and irreducible ipseity, from which I cannot escape, but which requires rather that I “suffer myself” -- permit myself -- to suffer that which I am. For Audi’s complete discussion of this theme, cf. REP, chapter four, “La position du Soi,” 179-253. 49 Cf. EM, 657. 50 Ibid., 661. 51 The whole of CMV/IAT is an effort to show that there is one sole Life, that of God, which is also the life of man. 52 Here one discerns the similarity of Henry’s project with the philosophical project of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Epilog (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1987), 18: “Die wahrhaft philosophische Frage nach dem Sinn des Seins im Ganzen wird, auf den Menschen zugespitzt, zur religiösen Frage nach seinem Heil im Ganzen.” There are many points of convergence between Henry and Balthasar relative to the centrality of the question of the meaning of human reality within their respective philosophical and theological projects. These points of convergence are uncanny both in their number and in their similarity of formulation, given that neither Henry nor Balthasar ever acknowledged or appeared to know of the work of the other. 48

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life can ultimately be defined in its specific difference from all that is not human.53 This original mode of Being and manifestation, which is first God and then also man in a subordinate and participated manner, is characterized for Henry by a concrete and phenomenologically determined structure of “archi-impressionality” that effectively eludes all possibility of being ontologically alienated from itself in order either to be or to appear. Whether or not one can fully accept Henry’s claim that God is manifest to the human subject in its original and affectively structured experience of self-awareness,54 the excessive character of this claim is itself a function of Henry’s understanding of the meaning of textuality. Henry’s theory of textuality, in which the text itself can be a witness to the excessive character of subjectively structured Being, secures the text in its ultimate conditions of possibility even as it secures the phenomenological and ontological primacy of man relative to the text. Everything real and living is for Henry indeed hors text; all the same, the text is not merely an effaced trace of a transcendental signified to which the text itself cannot attain. As situated in Life, the text becomes an expressive Gestalt of this Life; the “whole” that Life is can give itself to man in and through the “fragment” of the text. Textuality therefore shows itself not to be dialectically and therefore violently related either to subjectivity or to Being. Subjectivity rather is itself Being, the “archi-foundation” of textuality which subjectivity unites to itself precisely in establishing a difference without distance between the text and itself. It is on the foundation of transcendental subjectivity that the subjectively situated text is able to be the manifestation rather than the occultation both of Being and of human reality. Henry’s theory of textuality thus simultaneously serves the self-disclosure of la Vie and enables human reality to resist the temptation to regard itself, because of its existentiell experience of alienation, as a merely ontic reality related only extrinsically -- and therefore dialectically and violently -- to Being. It is human reality’s surrender to the illusion of its ontological poverty that results in what Henry decries in PC, his final work: man’s willingness to surrender himself to “everything which is less than man,”55 in order that he might thus be able to escape himself and so feel nothing -- be nothing -- at all.56 In truth, man can never in fact accomplish this, and the very simulacra of human life which man constructs around himself in order to shield himself from himself can ultimately only testify to the unconquerable power of la Vie in man.57 The Henryian text is thus meant to lead the reader back, by means of the experience of a “traumatic experience” provoked by the text, to the simultaneously traumatic and blissful experience of la Vie, the experience which the reader in his ultimate and therefore affective being always already is. The traumatizing phenomenological reduction that Henry effects proves to be at the service of a liberating existential reduction, a “leading back” of man to himself in his “transcendental humanity”58 via the resituated philosophical text in order that

53

Cf. CMV, 49: “il n’ y a qu’une seule Vie, celle du Christ qui est aussi celle de Dieu et des hommes...” 54 I would maintain that human reality’s experience of its ipseity or “I-ness” at the very least points beyond itself to a divine, “archi-ipseical,” ontologically autonomous foundation of this ipseity. 55 PC, 13: “tout ce qui est moins que l’homme.” 56 Cf. CMV, 138, at which Henry speaks of the human ego’s desire to hide from and even destroy itself. “. . . la vie auto-affectée, c’est-à-dire constamment assaillie par soi, écrasée sous son propre poids, pour se soustraire á celui-ci, se défaire de soi.” 57 In particular, cf. ibid., 344: “Les hommes voudront mourir—mais non la Vie.” 58 Cf. Michel Henry, La barbarie (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1987), 201: “La philosophie a pour thème l’humanité transcendantale de l’homme, elle seule est capable de fonder un véritable humanisme. L’humanitas de l’homme, c’est la subjectivité reconduite à sa dimension d’immanence radicale, à son autorévélation originelle et propre, différente de celle du monde.” This passage furthermore attests 150

he might know intentionally that which he always already is affectively: the effective and triumphant “obtaining of self” in and as a Suffering that is also and always Joy.59 This originary and affectively structured “obtaining of self” in the immanent dialectic of suffering and joy, powerlessness and plenitude, is so truly the very essence of manifestation itself that it can even manifest itself both to and through that which it always exceeds and eludes. Living ipseity can and does give itself to intentionally structured consciousness through the resituated text. The self-manifestation of existential pathos in and through the text is one of the many ways in which the Life that man is in a dependent and participated manner overcomes the existentiell experience of alienation that man has. As Audi points out, this original pathos of human reality that Henry evokes through the mediation of the text is identically “that which Rousseau evokes under the name of ‘natural goodness’.”60 Henry’s theory of textuality thus coincides with that of Rousseau. The “truth of the text” arises otherwise than from “reason” such as the latter is construed by the promoters of “Enlightenment.” The text in its effective conditions of possibility arises from and witnesses to the manifestation of the “Self of Being” which is always and also the authentic Life of man. Paradoxically, the text is possible precisely because philosophy itself “always comes too late,” since “what it says was at the beginning.”61

to Henry’s understanding of both the limits and the possibilities inherent in the philosophical enterprise accomplished through the mediation of the text: “La philosophie n’est pas la vie mais l’un de ses effets, celui dans lequel, ivre d’elle-même et s’éprouvant soi-même comme l’absolu, la subjectivité vivante entreprend de se connaître soi-même, se proposant ainsi à elle-même comme son thème propre.” Philosophy is not itself the Absolute, “la vie,” but rather a necessary and salutary effect of the Absolute, allowing for the human ego’s “reconduction” in thought to that which it always already in its affectively structured Being that both exceeds and makes possible thought itself. 59 Cf. M, 830: “L’impuissance du souffrir, la souffrance, est l’être-donné-à-lui-même du sentiment, son être-rivé-à-soi dans l’adhérence parfaite de l’identité et, dans cette adhérence parfaite à soi, l’obtention de soi [italics mine], le devenir et le surgissement du sentiment en lui-même dans la jouissance de ce qu’il est, est la jouissance, est la joie.” 60 REP, 162-63. “cette impuissance qui est la sienne et dont il ne peut se délivrer, loin de porter la marque d’une quelconque négativité, est ce qui, justement, ne laisse de faire échec à celle-ci. L’impuissance inhérente à l’excédence est en soi ‘positive’; et c’est cette positivité-là qu’abrite en son fond ce que Rousseau évoque sous le nom de ‘bonté naturelle.’” It is worth pointing out here that for Henry it is precisely this “ontological excessiveness” proper to human subjectivity that renders it relational and intersubjective in principle. As Audi goes on to say, speaking both of Rousseau and Henry, the soi’s “ontological excessiveness” with respect to itself is that which ensures that the “moi” is always also the “nous.” Cf. REP, 172: “Ils disent que l’être-Soi, l’ipséité, est toujours pour le moi, non pas un ajout, un supplément, un surcroît, mais un ‘plus’ de soi-même, une excédence irréductible de son affectivité, une surabondance de vie qui rend possibles le vivre-ensemble et la morale. Car c’est sur cette excédence irréductible de la subjectivité naturelle absolue, qu’un phénomène comme celui de ‘nous’, de la communauté, devient enfin possible. Ou, pour le dire autrement, c’est parce que la vie a pour essence son propre accroissement ontologique, qu’une communauté d’êtres vivants peu exister a priori.” 61 EM, 169. 151

4.

THE SUBJECTIVE BODY AND THE IDEA OF HEALTH IN MICHEL HENRY’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE

Stella de Azevedo

Entlebnis Versus Erlebnis Reflecting at length1 on the disastrous consequences of Galilean science for the understanding of life, Michel Henry departs from the “Krisis” to characterize the Galilean legacy as a “proto-founding act”2 of modern science and knowledge which excluded phenomenological life by reducing it to the geometrical mathematization of the material universe.3 The rupture between the knowledge (sagesse) inherited from the Greeks and Christianity, which survived until the eighteenth century, and the aestheticism of modern culture reflected on the opposition between two matrices: that of moral, religious and political unity of the simultaneously sentient and rational being, conceived in the image of God yet irreducible to all purely conceptual and demonstrable knowledge;4 and the scientific-technical matrix of the vision of the world, nature and man. In the latter, the modern concept of cogito reflected two major structural epistemological streams of Modernity: the valuing of the ego, the transcendental and timeless subject, with decisive consequences both for the devaluing of the concrete man (man builds his identity by transcending himself through reflection) and for the condition of “incommunicability” of the subject; and the discovery of the body-machine that functions autonomously without the contribution of thought. Marked by the rule of appearance and sensuality, the body of Modernity is governed by duality and separation, adopting some ambiguous attitudes towards the body: valuing it on the one hand yet devaluing it on the other. Modernity has thus radicalized the idea that man is fundamentally a dualistic being, a radicalization that was accompanied by the antagonism between subject and object, nature and society, individual freedom and social/communal laws or norms. The rupture or transformation of the unity of discourse, such as Modernity conceived it, culminated in the workings of the linguistic rules that embodied, in the Kantian system, the transcendental structures of understanding. The whole of post-Cartesian philosophy reflects, therefore, the parallelism between rationality and the systematic foundation of knowledge, resulting from an ontology of transcendental subjectivity and a notion of an all-enveloping human essence of a practical-ethical order. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, according to Georg Simmel’s analysis, reflected an arduous search for the lost unity of the “transcendence of life,” the recovery “on a higher basis of the lost unity between nature and spirit, between mechanism and inner meaning, between scientific objectivity and the meaning of value that we sense in life and things.”5 Johann Goethe’s life and works strongly expressed an evolution in the concept of the individual in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, since they contained various approaches to individuality (articulated in the idea that man should live from within himself, act from within), to freedom, to equality, in the

1

Michel Henry, La Barbarie (Paris: Grasset, 1987); idem, C’est moi la Vérité (Paris: Seuil, 1996). Henry, La Barbarie, 105, 117. 3 “Galilée accomplit ce que j’appelle en tant que phénoménologue l’acte archi-fondateur de la science moderne (…) Galilée a estimé qu’il faut connaître l’univers dans lequel nous vivons, car de cette connaissance procède l’éthique, notre devoir-être et notre devoir-faire. Mais cette connaissance a pour condition essentielle le rejet de toutes les formes de connaissance, en particulier celles issues des qualités sensibles.” Michel Henry, Auto-donation (Paris: Prétentaine, 2002), 131. 4 Pierre Fruchon, L’herméneutique de Gadamer (Paris: Cerf, 1994), 17-18. 5 Georg Simmel, Kant e Goethe (Buenos Aires: Nova, 1949), 264. 2

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constant flow of life. With Werther6 and Faust,7 Goethe marked the transition from a sentimentalist concept of life to a theoretical-practical concept. It is the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, that take it up again in the epistemic crisis of Physics, shifting the transcendental issue of the cogito theme to issues in which the being is in question, i.e. to the thought that is directed at the unthought and articulates with it. The body emerges as the result of an equilibrium between the “within” (dedans) and the “without” (dehors), between flesh (chair) and the world. From the concepts of W. Dilthey, H. Bergson and E. Husserl there is an evolution towards the legitimization of philosophical thought in areas that science had originally conquered, whose consequences translate today into the incompatibility of upholding a subject that asserts universal and absolute truth, through its suitability to the object produced in itself, through the act of understanding.8 From the notion of distance between the subject and the object, between man and the world, we go on to a notion of familiarity: the world is not the object of knowledge but the place where I live, where I am allowed to have hope and plans. The world is the place of habitation, the world of things, of implements; it is not an object but it is part of man who is, from the outset, thrown into it to face a situation. Another form of knowledge becomes necessary, a sympathetic knowledge, because it is capable of relating the subject with the object (the being-another), a relationship in which each is the interpretation, clarification and translation of the other. Husserl’s analyses of Lebenswelt have shown quite clearly that the concept of objectivity represented by the sciences only expresses a particular instance: “the human sciences and the natural sciences should be understood on the basis of the intentionality of universal life.”9 Taking Cartesian duality to its ultimate consequences, the mechanistic interpretation had gradually treated human consciousness as a reflection of the physiological or material processes, enabling the scientific study of the body. But it is the new sciences of the body that, due to the insufficiency of its purely naturalistic, objective and representative model, “lead to a new paradigm: that of the subjective body or lived body.”10 From the point of view of perception, the body (Körper) and flesh (Leib) already conform to the instauration of the new phenomenal region: carnally clearly does not mean the mode of the corporal; the word refers to “seeing,” “listening” and other functions through which other egological modalities come, such as for example, getting up, carrying, etc.11 This paradigm, when it described the process of hominization as the instauration of the cultural order, co-implies two strands: that man lives his life in a corporal world; and that thought is necessarily linked to the word as a condition for expression and progress through new significations in the use of words. Thus, the word mediates life -- through the body and in the body -and the humanity that human corporality takes on. The order of the symbolic, the cultural or the linguistic is the point of integration into the world starting from the rupture with natural order. The devitalization (Entlebnis) proper to theoretical knowledge had led to the oversight of the tension between the productive body (the object of the science of labor) 6

The pre-eminence of the subjective: “feeling is the whole.” The objectification of the subject: the pre-eminence of creating, acting and knowing. 8 “L’introduction des significations équivoques dans le champ sémantique contraignait d’ abandonner l’idéal d’univocité prôné par les Recherches logiques. Il faut maintenant comprendre qu’en articulant ces significations multivoques sur la connaissance de soi, nous transformons profondément la problématique du Cogito. ... C’est cette réforme interne de la philosophie réflexive qui justifiera plus loin que nous y découvrions une nouvelle dimension de l’existence.” Paul Ricœur, Le Conflit des Interprétations (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 21. 9 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Le Problème de la conscience historique (Louvain: Mercier, 1957), 39. 10 Maria Luísa Portocarrero da Silva, “Corpo Vivido: do corpo-objecto ao corpo-consciente,” Revista Igreja e Missão (1983): 62. 11 Cf. Edmund Husserl, La Crise des sciences européennes (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 122-123. 7

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and the represented body (the combination of forces, actions, affections, frailties). The living knowledge of life, in its original appearance, would be thought about by Heidegger in his early Freiburg Courses, delivered between 1919 and 1923, in terms of Erlebnis or lived,12 and subsequently, after 1920, as the practical affective dimension of the experience of life in terms of Befindlichkeit and Stimmung, starting from the reading of Aristotle.13 The essentially affective knowledge of life, proper to all that is lived, is not only characterized by a certain passivity but also, and mainly, by the absence of distance that separates the cognizant subject from the object known within theoretical knowledge, because to live something is to be it. Erlebnis does not mean the contemplation of an external process nor an “inner” or “psychological” process pertaining to subjectivity or consciousness, since the lived knows no internal nor external, i.e., my life is only living to the extent that it lives in a world, has a world, which is but the world I have and live in.14 Experience being a vital, historical process, its intelligibility does not depend on the mere observation of facts but on the blending of memory and expectation, as Dilthey had already argued. The ideality of meaning cannot, therefore, be assigned to a transcendental subject because it comes from the lived. The experience that offers itself to the subject is founded on meaningfulness and experiential nexus. Therefore, epistemic consciousness simply continues the thought initiated in the experience of life, since it is previously situated in its vital nexus and finds in it the reference of its own being. Science cannot, therefore, replace the ground on which it is itself rooted, i.e., the sensus communis (Vico), the ground for all ability and legitimacy to think and act (ability to judge). The sensus communis, or “common understanding” (der gemeine Verstand), is decisively characterized by the ability to judge, so judgement is not a concept created by reflective consciousness but indeed a sense of judgement similar to the sensitive judgements that, despite being formed with some certainty, are not however logically demonstrable. Life itself is the origin and fundament both of the objectivity of scientific knowledge and the philosophical reflection to arrive at the truth: the link between Life and knowledge is, therefore, an originary given, since consciousness is always incorporated in history, in society, in economy, in technique and in culture. Since Dilthey, subject/consciousness and object/nature cease to be regions of the Metaphysica Specialis; instead they designate concrete circles of phenomena, layers of facts, which concrete man describes and observes according to his position in the world, his experiential, cognitive and volitive attitude. The lived body (corps vécu) re-establishes the importance of the phantasmic, suffering body in the face of the dissected body. Heidegger’s analysis of the structure of man’s way of being meant the overcoming of a monadological and self-sufficient concept of man, rooting human essence in the connection with the other and others, in tradition, within the framework of societies and their institutions as significant mediations of language. The work of rationalization and systematization of the world, therefore, can only be explained by the hermeneutics of facticity in its capacity to analyze the previous way of being-there of the being in the world, the reason why Heidegger does not talk about the subject as something separated from the world but about Dasein -- something that is related to and inseparable from the world. For its facticity, the subject in its hermeneutic experience returns in the guise of the object,

12

Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, GA 56/57, ed. Bernd Heimbüchel (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1987), 63-67. 13 Here it is no longer the concept of life that enables existence (Dasein) to be thought, but the being-for-death, the ontological difference that brings about anguish. 14 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (Wintersemester 1921/22), GA 61, ed. Walter Bröcker und Käte BröckerOltmanns (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1985), 86. 154

as there will be no point in creating alternative horizons of sense or of personal or collective fulfillment, if these are not appropriable by those for whom they are designed. The phenomenology of the temporality of perception leads inevitably to the assumption of the historicity of all experience at the level of the world of life. Human reality reveals itself as structurally dynamic as Life, or the relationship incarnated from the self with the things that surround it. What is originary is the relationship marked by temporality (the new way of being15), “since man, revealing himself to be a being fundamentally oriented toward the future….”; i.e., an unmade being, who only lives through plans and hopes. The human experience of the meaning of the world is the openness of the being: man is situated “in the openness of the being,” he lives projected into the future and not in the present, he is originally a practical being that, through language, memory and his ability to predict/anticipate, plans and directs all his activity (praxis) towards a concrete, historical and unfinished existential dimension. The excessive or future, possible and linguistic dimension of the human way of being breaks out against the egological and monadological models of the person, taking down the historic-ontological premises of the monadological-modern concept of self-consciousness and its filiation from the Greek metaphysical-cosmological model of considering the real as a given thing.16 In turn, the decisive contribution of Psychoanalysis to the de-construction of the cogito revealed a profound structure similar to that of the object libido.17 The linguisticity that crosses the whole enigma of the body imposes on Western contemporary thought18 the non-identification of the body as an objective thing, as a thing that one has and uses. The body is fiction, a set of mental representations that are prepared, dissolved, reconstructed at the will of the subject’s history and the mediation of social-symbolic discourse. The body is lived from within as a myself. It is in the word, in the action, that the self is present as a person, in flesh and blood, and it is through it, as belonging to a given culture, that man constitutes himself as the bearer of a vision of the world and things. As the body takes on multiple significations, in a symbolic universe, this humanizes itself, also constituting itself as a fundamental possibility for man’s expression and fulfillment in the language of the world. The absolute non-identity of the self with the body is a consequence of human nature as excess in relation to every potential of the organic body; an excess that manifests itself in the thought, in the will, in the freedom that express and fulfill themselves in corporality. The body thus incarnates the order of the symbolic,19 reviving the Humboltzian connection of language (energeia) as vision and constitution of the world, in which the originary humanity of language simultaneously means the originary linguality of the being-in-theworld of man.20 Consequently, language is mediation and not an instrument (reflective or conceptual) of the self- and re-awareness of the subject as a tense unity of organic and symbolic systems within the historical and communitarian relationship that it establishes with the other.

15

Silva, “Corpo Vivido: do corpo-objecto ao corpo-consciente,” 65. Maria Luísa Portocarrero da Silva, “Retórica e apropriação na hermenêutica de Gadamer,” Separata (da) Revista Filosófica de Coimbra 5, no. 3 (1994): 113. 17 Michel Henry, “La pratique psychanalytique ne cesse de vérifier le primat de l’irreprésentable qui détermine la représentation et par exemple la prise de conscience,” in idem, La Barbarie, 163. Cf. Ricœur, Le Conflit des interprétations, 22. 18 Cf. Gabriel Marcel, Être et avoir (Paris, 1951), 225-226. 19 Ricœur, Le Conflit des interprétations, 159. 20 Gadamer, Le Problème de la conscience historique, 531. 16

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The Oversight of Life’s Oneself The methodological-scientistic concerns that became predominant since the seventeenth century overlooked the fact that formed consciousness (Bildung) overcomes all natural sense, since, while the latter is always limited by a certain sphere, consciousness “operates in all directions and, as such, is a general sense.”21 It is within a (formative) preunderstanding horizon that the Greek paideia is found in the “visual-objective model of externality (spatiality),”22 i.e., in the model of the thing,23 in which the categories of spatiality and temporality are inherent in the thing itself. The classic visual-objective model of the thing restricts reflective consciousness to the factum and its exact observation; science is the measure of all knowledge where space and time are exclusively a system of coordinates for accessing exact and accurate clues about all things. At an anthropological level, this model turned the concepts of logos and space into the commonplaces between the “world” of nature (the external, the physical) and the “world” of culture (the internal, the reflective consciousness). Man is since seen as an (objectifiable) corporal or biological thing, as a sum, a “pure object of the physical or external world, something that can be touched and objectified, i.e., a body comparable to that of an animal yet specifically different from it because it is endowed with something that animals do not have, the logos or the nous.”24 The Western model of man, for which Christianity is strongly responsible as the heir of the platonic concept of the body as a “passing condition of the soul,”25 introduces a deeper and more radical distinction26: “Flesh and spirit are not anthropologically constitutive elements of the human entity but rather ways of being of man in his referral to divinity. Man ... is not an amalgamation of two completely different substances but a single incarnate subject.”27 The crisis in the sciences after the seventeenth century is the crisis of culture (paideia), a crisis of existence brought about by the hyper-development that the Galilean legacy generated, with the subsequent multiplication of increasingly specialist knowledge, of new methodologies which opened up new horizons, but whose premises or conditions he did not theorize: the geometrical-mathematical legibility of the universe requires a transcendental performance of consciousness, an act of the spirit creating something that did not exist before.28 The ideality of Galilean science, which translates into forms and essences, is based upon a “seeing,” as the sum total of the senses, which operates in a phenomenological horizon: it reflects on an exterior world, a pure exteriority, since matter is res extensa and only knows idealities if they are presented before its very eyes: “The geometric determinations to which Galilean science tries to reduce the being of things are idealities. These, far from being able to account for the sensory, subjective and relative world in which our daily activity takes place, necessarily refer to this world of life; it is only in relation to this world that they have a meaning; it is on the insurmountable ground of this world that they are built.”29

21

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Verdad y método, trans. Ana Agud Aparicio and Rafael de Agapito (Salamanca: Sigueme), 47. 22 Silva, “Corpo Vivido: do corpo-objecto ao corpo-consciente,” 58. 23 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Qu’est-ce qu’une chose? (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 16-18. 24 Silva, “Corpo Vivido: do corpo-objecto ao corpo-consciente,” 58. 25 Ibid., 60. 26 Juan Marias, El Tema del Hombre. Antologias Filosoficas I (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1989), 16. 27 Silva, “Corpo Vivido: do corpo-objecto ao corpo-consciente,” 60. 28 Edmund Husserl, La Crise des sciences européennes et la phénoménologie transcendantale, trans. Gérard Granel (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 110f. 29 Henry, La Barbarie, 18. 156

Experience cannot be conceived as an effect; a reality cannot happen other than to the extent that it provides a sense and a consciousness. Scientific idealities always refer, therefore, to a sense-giving consciousness. This sense can exist in itself in axiomatic systems, yet to possess a value of knowledge in the so-called real world it has to go through the world-of-life, the sensitive world. In other words, as idealities, the geometric and mathematical determinations imply subjective operation, a transcendental consciousness, a principle which, as it continually engenders the world of science, is a permanent condition for its own possibility: “The transcendental condition of the possibility of the experience in general is the condition of science itself.”30 Continuing on the basis of a technological hyper-development, scientific knowledge invaded the entire field of the logos, of praxis31 and culture with an exclusive claim on truth, and its effects on the notions of the world, subjectivity and life often went unnoticed or were not thought through: “To the extent to which culture is the culture of life and pertains to it exclusively, the science that keeps this life and its specific development out of its subject matter, which is culture itself, remains well and truly alien to it. The relationship between science and culture is a relationship of mutual exclusion. … By eliminating … the world-of-life and life itself, science places itself paradoxically outside the latter and its development, and consequently outside all possible culture.”32 Culture has originally, in itself, nothing to do with science and does not ensue from it. Life, in turn, is not to be taken as the object of scientific knowledge: “The relation to the object is the vision of the object, whether it is the sensory vision of the sensory object or the intellectual vision of an intelligible object. … Now, the knowledge contained in the vision of the object is not in the least exhausted in the knowledge of the object. It means the knowledge of the vision itself, which is no longer consciousness, the intentional relation to the object, but life.”33 But if objective sciences have understood nothing about life,34 human sciences, for their part, have reduced man to an automaton.35 An example of this is the temptation of modern neurosciences and cognitive sciences to reduce thought and ideas to the objective body in which the possibility of excess of the question of sense is always presented as an illusion. Philosophy does not escape this either, as in the form of a classic transcendental phenomenology it does not know any manifestation other than that produced within the world36: “When subjectivity is nothing

30

Ibid., 104. Michel Henry defines praxis in the following way: “Le savoir de la vie comme savoir où la vie constitue à la fois le pouvoir qui connaît et ce qui est connu par lui procurant, de façon exclusive, son «contenu», je l’appelle praxis. … En tant que la culture est la culture de la vie et repose sur le savoir propre de celle-ci, elle est essentiellement pratique.” Ibid., 37-38. 32 Ibid., 102-103. 33 Ibid., 27. 34 “L’illusion de Galilée comme de tous ceux qui, à sa suite, considèrent la science comme un savoir absolu, ce fut justement d’avoir pris le monde géométrique, destiné a fournir une connaissance univoque du monde réel, pour ce monde réel lui-même, ce monde que nous ne pouvons qu’intuitionner et éprouver dans les modes concrets de notre vie subjective.” Ibid., 19. 35 “Les ‘sciences de l’esprit’, ou, comme on dit aujourd’hui, les ‘sciences humaines’ n’ont donc aucune autonomie, elles ne constituent pas le symétrique des sciences de la nature, leurs recherches apparaissent provisoires, vouées tôt ou tard à céder la place à un autre savoir, celui qui, délaissant la réalité psychique, c’est-à-dire le niveau de l’expérience humaine, s’oriente vers ses soubassements cachés, soit l’univers des molécules et des atomes.” Ibid., 17. 36 The clearing (Lichtung) where human existence is truly human (ex-sistence), while belonging to the world, is entirely dominated by the “dimensional ek-static” (dimensional ekstatique) which defines the “phenomenality of the world as such.” Michel Henry, La Généalogie de la psychanalyse (Paris: Puf, 2003), 6. The idea of “world” as the fundamental place of all appearance (the conception of the light of the world as a transcendental condition for all manifestation) constituted for Michel Henry the greatest obstacle to a true understanding of Christianity and revelation. 31

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more than externality and its unfolding, when it is no longer something alive, and that by which it is life is lost sight of, denied or concealed, and this by philosophy and science alike, then the former has no lesson to remind the latter, they both live in the same oblivion, in the same stupor in the face of what is in front, which only qualifies as being in their eyes. (…) It is also necessary to understand this subjectivity as life, in such a way that the transcendental contributions which make up, or rather are, science let themselves be recognised as modes of absolute life, for the same reasons as the creations of art, for instance, and in the same way as cultural phenomena for the same reasons as artistic phenomena.”37 Michel Henry’s critique to the egological character of phenomenology is directed at its insufficiency in overcoming the “illusions” of the transcendental and empirical subject. The critique of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty is based on the idea of the founding absence of the “Oneself” (Soi), that is, in Henry’s phenomenology of life the fundamental issue is that of the transcendental “Oneself” which allows us to say “I” and “Myself” (Soi). The “Self” is something affected as “Oneself” without distance, without the power of selfdetachment, without the power to escape the deepest layers of its being. “Ontological monism” -- the philosophy that upholds that nothing is given to us except inside and through the mediation of the transcendental horizon of the being in general,38 that subordinates the given, such as it is, to the order of transcendence or externality -- rested on this illusion of an ontological homogeneity between the plane of immanence, that of Life, and the plane of transcendence, that of Being. Echoing the concerns of Maine de Biran, who replaced a classic and empirical psychology for a subjective ideology or transcendental phenomenology,39 Michel Henry breaks away from the whole tradition of what he characterizes as ontological monism. The critique of ontological monism enables the unveiling of the subjective dimension of the body and its analysis enables the characterization of this absolute subjectivity on which all existence is dependent. According to Henry, in a phenomenological ontology the issue of our primary knowledge of the body is, simultaneously, the issue of the ontological nature of the body itself since, in such ontology, the appearance is the measure of the being.40 Distancing himself from Heidegger, Henry defends a material phenomenology whose objective is that of discerning, within pure appearance and under the phenomenality of the visible, a deeper dimension in which life attains itself before the emergence of the world.41 To think sensations, affections, affectivity, thoughts, phenomenologically implies that the dimension of the bodiless psyche or of the interpretation of the issue of the body (physical body on the one hand, and psychical body on the other) is overcome. It is necessary to hold in suspension all non-reflected and non-criticized pre-determination of the “prejudice” about the soul and the body, to strive to think without a pre-given frame of reference. The chasm meanwhile created between the somatic and the mathematical overlooks two fundamental dimensions of the singular experience of “being alive,” the flesh and the ego, which, by their very nature, are not the object of scientific knowledge. As Merleau-Ponty stated, we strive to think the

37

Henry, La Barbarie, 105-106. Michel Henry, Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps (Paris: Puf, 2003), 20. 39 Ibid., 22. 40 “L’édification d’une telle phénoménologie va de pair avec la constitution d’une ontologie de la subjectivité. … C’est parce que toutes les intentionnalités générales et, par suite, les intentionnalités essentielles de la conscience se connaissent originairement dans l’immanence de leur être même et dans leur accomplissement immédiat que nous sommes capables de les nommer et d’en acquérir l’idée.” Ibid., 22. 41 “Discerner au sein même du pur apparaître et sous la phénoménalité du visible, une dimension plus profonde où la vie s’atteint elle-même avant le surgissement du monde.” Henry, La Généalogie de la psychanalyse, 7. 38

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“lived body,” the “incarnated living,” from within, intrinsically, the “excess” in the affection itself, without reference to the having or the being, but not without reference to the who. The pure object (which intellectualism and realism want to reduce to own-body) is itself a horizon since it is removed from a purely representative consciousness. This is a fertile idea, in terms of the issue of the body, since it reveals to us the deep reasons for which the character specific to the body was mostly overlooked in favor of a pure and simple reduction of the body to the external object: “As regards the theory of the body, ontological monism had this decisive consequence of constantly preventing philosophical reflection from rising to the idea of the subjective body. The body, a real element in the effectiveness of the being in general, was necessarily something transcendent. Thus reduced to its subjective manifestation, what constitutes its essential being, i.e., the subjective body as inner transcendental experience of the movement, as well as the feeling, was mutilated.”42 Now, if the experience of the body is that of a reality that I do not have, but am, then it belongs originally to the sphere of existence which is subjectivity itself.43 Not only is the body not an object amongst others, but it is not an object at all, i.e., it does not belong, in any way, to the order of exteriority. The issue of the fair distance between the “self” and its body44 is expressed by the contribution of phenomenology to the discovery of the subjective body which is at the origin of experience, but which, according to Henry, restricted its investigation to the relationship of this sensing body with what it senses, understanding it as an intentional relationship: “The body, which is the real subject of knowledge, knows other bodies by relating intentionally to them. Consciousness is the setting of this fundamental overflow by which it always throws itself out into a world, into other bodies and its own. If we keep the word subjectivity, it must be said that modern phenomenology interprets our subjective body as an intentional body because it has already interpreted subjectivity as an intentional subjectivity.”45 Biranian thinking on the body had already determined the cogito as a power of production, updating the radical insufficiency of those philosophies which tried to constitute the body as an object, particularly Cartesian philosophy: “The Cartesian cogito should therefore undergo a radical change in value to adapt to the demands of the fundamental trend of Biranian thought. It would have to shed this immobility of substance-thought to become, on the contrary, the very experience of an effort in its fulfilment, an effort with which, according to Biran, the very being of the self begins and ends.”46 The hand (cf. Étienne de Condillac) is an example of the knowledge of own-body: constantly directed, it knows itself first through the experience of a power of production. As an instrument, it reveals itself within a power of prehension which cannot be given in the element of exteriority. The knowledge of the hand by itself is effected in the effort as pure auto-affection. What is specific to the effort is that it is given to itself without exteriority: the “content” which affects the effort is no more than the effort itself or, in other words, the being of the effort is this profound cohesion with itself, this impossibility of self-detachment, pure immanence, auto-affection, this presence unto oneself, without distance. In the effort, I propel a movement that is such that I do not detach myself from it: the “self” is only at the root of the

42

Ibid., 261. “Le corps, dans sa nature originaire, appartient à la sphère d’existence qui est celle de la subjectivité elle-même.” Ibid., 11. 44 Xavier Thévenot, “L’Église et le corps. Axes de recherches,” Cahiers Universitaires Catholiques 2 (1991): 15. 45 Henry, Auto-donation, 88. 46 Ibid., 72; “Cette pensée primitive, substantielle, qui est censée constituer toute mon existence individuelle, … je la trouve identifiée dans sa source avec le sentiment d’une action ou d’un effort voulu.” Ibid. 43

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effort if this effort gives rise to it. A movement without the least withdrawal, an action that compresses itself proportionately to its dynamism, the effort is the reality of the self. The being of the “self” is the action through which I endlessly transform the world; hence, the cogito does not mean I think, but I can (“je peux”).47 The body is a fascinating illustration of what Michel Henry calls a double presence: “The body first presents itself to us in the world and is immediately interpreted as an object of the world, something that is visible, that I can see, touch, feel. But this is only the apparent body. The real body is the living body, the body in which I am placed, that I never see and that is a cluster of powers – I can, I take with my hand – and I develop this power from within, outside the world. It is a metaphysically fascinating reality because I have two bodies: visible and invisible. The inner body that I am and is my real body is the living body, and it is with this body that I actually walk, take, embrace, am with others.”48 The being of the body is subjective, is absolute immanence, and is absolute transparency.49 The division of action corresponds to the division of the body: on the one hand, the body in the truth of the world (the real body, the visible body, the body-object comparable to all objects because it shares in their essence, the res extensa; on the other, the body in the Truth of Life, the invisible body, the living body.50 Therefore, the body is placed beside the subject since the experience of the subjective movement prevents its reduction to the condition of object: the being of this movement, this action and this power is that of a cogito.51 In other words, the body is a subjective reality, it is not an instrument. The experience we have of the body, in the sensing of the effort, is not a simple experience that reveals an object whose being is an “outside” of itself, in such a way that the body could be unveiled, for example, from the exterior. The movement, the effort, is physical,52 and the being of this power is that of immanence which, while moving-itself, is ex-pression: The body moves itself and, in this way, it becomes mobile and enters the world to ex-press, to ex-pose itself as mobile; the world, in turn, impresses itself on the body in immanence, therefore it is an originary impression that itself originates in mobility; that is, the world penetrates immanence as a legitimate extension of the moved-oneself of the subjective body. The movement is not an intermediary between the ego and the world: it is the ego itself, and its being is effort, and it is for this reason that we make our movements without thinking about them. Motor functions are, therefore, the condition for the possibility of transcendence itself53: this pure immanence that the effort reveals and accomplishes implies that the transcendental inner experience is always, too, a transcendent experience: the feeling of the effort is necessarily the revelation of a term that resists it. This resisting term is not an object which would reveal itself to be somehow liable to oppose the effort, which would lead to the separation of consciousness from its own movement. On the contrary, the movement is a form of specific and originary givenness which does not depend on any representation, and resistance is correlatively the modality according to

47

Ibid., 73. Ibid., 156. 49 Ibid., 79, 165. 50 Henry, C’est moi la Vérité, 301. 51 The profundity of this conclusion “ne réside pas dans le fait d’avoir déterminé le cogito comme un ‘je peux’, comme une action et comme un mouvement, elle consiste dans l’affirmation que l’être de ce mouvement, de cette action et de ce pouvoir, est précisément celui d’un cogito.” Ibid., 74. 52 “Notre corps est l’ensemble des pouvoirs que nous avons sur le monde.” Ibid., 80. 53 Merleau-Ponty in Visible et invisible, insists on the contrary, on the dimension of belonging that is implicit in motor functions: as intentional, it is phenomenalizing, but as motor functionality it is on the side of the transcendence that it phenomenalizes. 48

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which the world is originally revealed, the primary meaning of transcendence.54 In short, the originary impression is neither sensory nor representative, it is motional: “As for action or movement considered in themselves, they no longer belong to the sphere of the cogito, they are no longer determinations of thought but rather determinations of extension. The normal process that takes place, for example, from the idea of a movement to the actual accomplishment of this movement therefore poses a problem which cannot be solved or even contemplated within the sphere of pure subjectivity, and the body which is the milieu in which actual movements are achieved can only find its place in a philosophy which has an ontological region other than that of subjectivity. Within the latter, there is place neither for action nor the body, and if the self were reduced to pure thought, it would only be a milieu of passive change in which our desires could be born but in no way achieved.”55 To think about incarnation is to depart either from the resistance of the body to the consciousness or from the impossibility to fully incorporate it. The world-of-life, of the spirit, is the world to which we only have access from within a sensitivity that is ours and only given to us through the endless game of its everchanging and renewed subjective appearances.56 It is this subjective life that, in addition to creating the idealities and abstractions of science conveyed by language, gives shape to the world-of-life within which our concrete existence unfolds. Following the GrecoHellenistic period, the phenomenological determination of language was held captive by the insurmountable boundaries attributed to the concept of phenomenality,57 but only the apprehension of pure phenomenality in its originary mode of phenomenalization can transform our understanding of language. The word of life speaks in every living creature as the one it engendered at its own creation. It is on constitutive subjectivity that Michel Henry founds his philosophy of life as “auto-affection,” an affection not by the world but by oneself, and where all perception, all imagination, all conceptual thought is a heteroaffection: “It is an affection by an otherness, by this milieu of otherness whereby anything that is other can show itself to me, give itself to me originally as other. But if everything gave itself to me as originally other, there would not be a Self for it to give itself to.”58 Henry plans to overcome the critique of the Husserlian aporia of the intentional constitution of the other and develop the genetic rooting of the experience of the other as otherness to oneself, in its incarnate and reflective content. Such a return to the immanentist order therefore leaves inter-subjectivity unresolved. The language of life is the founder of the language of the world and it is in this relationship that the modes of phenomenalization of phenomenality are manifested: the language of the world merges into the “appearance” of the world (in which everything that it says is shown), and the word of life is the Word, the originary One through which life is revealed unto oneself. In other words, “talkative” intentionality aiming at a transcendental signification cannot refer to the latter other than on the condition that it is already in possession of oneself in the self-givenness of the pathos that makes it a life. But the pathos that consciousness experiences is not ideal in itself. Pain is immanent to the One who suffers it and is

54

This is why Maine de Biran qualified this pole, found through the effort, of resistant continuum, which does not designate any temporal or spatial extension. According to Henry, the determination of the real as what resists is an a priori determination which cannot, consequently, be absent from our experience. 55 Henry, C’est moi la Vérité, 71-72. 56 Cf. ibid., 19. 57 Cf. Michel Henry, “Phénoménologie matérielle et langage,” in idem, L’épreuve de la vie (Paris: Cerf, 2001), 29. 58 Henry, Auto-donation, 151. 161

manifest in the self-givenness of life, in the originary One who engenders in himself absolute life, in the self-revelation unto itself. The objectification of originary affectivity (pathos) is expressed in the thinking of the body (Leib) as objective transcendent body, as mere physical and biological support (Körper) for an Ego. Ontologically different from subjectivity, the objective body became a primary material in which personal identity is diluted and no longer an identitarian manifestation of subjectivity: “(...) It is not because our body is also a transcendent body, a body such as philosophy understood it before the discovery of the subjective body, that the being of man is a situated being. Rather the contrary, our objective transcendent body is only situated in a well-determined sense that is peculiar to it because our absolute body is already situated as subjectivity in a transcendental relationship with the world. Thus ontological analysis destroys the naive representations which dominate philosophical tradition, and according to which the metaphysical being of man, understood as pure consciousness and as abstract subjectivity, would only be situated, determined, even individualized by its being brought into relation, a mysterious one for that matter (as the myths concerning the “fall” of the soul into the body show) to an objective body. It is not that the character of being-in-situation somehow communicates itself from the body-object to the absolute body, it is in fact in the opposite sense that this “communication” is effected.”59

Passivity as an Originary Auto-Affection The emergence of a new concept of subject is linked to the need for overcoming various systems of historical and cultural references, definitions and experiences justifying anthropological coordinates that delimitate human nature, since psychocentric, sociocentric, theocentric and biocentric polarizations have always led to man’s loss of identity. The subject’s sovereignty used to rest on the sovereign demarcation of its space, from which it knew and appropriated what in nature, and by nature, was still external to it, giving rise to the great difficulties between theory and practice. The definition of man progressively shed the dichotomous, subjective-transcendental, empirical-biological prejudices on which it was founded. The refusal of the modern concept of autonomous subject in the name of the originary passivity and sensitive affectivity asserts the originary One as a self-given oneself and not a self-proclaimed ego, root of all thought, knowledge or power. Therefore, the belonging of (my) body to the being-of-the-world is far from that of objects to the world. A pure object only exists in the infinite term of a movement of objectification, which reveals the originary link between things and my body: the frontal correlation of the constituent subject and the blosse Sachen derives from the live unity of the body and its world. There is no life without the living, and no living without life; there is no life for a living creature except that lived by him. Life is not an external representation and no living creature brings himself to life: “If life originally only reveals its own reality, it is simply because its mode of revelation is the pathos, this essence entirely taken by itself, this wholeness of flesh immersed in the auto-affection of its pain and joy. In the immanence of its own pathos, this reality of life, therefore, is not just any reality. It is everything except what modern thought will make of it, some impersonal, anonymous, blind, silent essence. It necessarily carries in itself this Self generated in its pathetic selfgeneration, this Self which only reveals itself in Life as the very revelation of this Life

59

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Henry, Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps, 267-268.

to the self – as its Logos.”60 Life in the world can do nothing to relieve us from the suffering and anguish61 which are the indelible core of our feeling of existence. The world does not heal us from our suffering in existence unless it hides our true life from us and obliterates in us all sense of our existence. But suffering, without ceasing to be so, can at the same time be joy insofar as, suffering from life, it opens to us the door of the experience of the Divine in us. The unity of joy and pain is, therefore, an auto-affection that testifies to the double phenomenalization of phenomenality: the human and the divine.62 Far from being transcendence in the face of the subject, sensing is posited from the start in the relationship from which it is possible to identify the “sensing” and the “sensing oneself,” but the sensing, in turn, never is and can never be sensed,63 since it does not ensue from what affects us.64 Michel Henry posits affectivity itself in the divide where the dualist perspective would posit the nominative and the reflective subjects: “Affectivity is the essence of ipseity.”65 The ‘being subject’ means suffering, means being: “The constitutive subjectivity of the being, and identical to it, is the being-withitself, the achievement in itself of the being such that it accomplishes itself in the original passivity of suffering. The essence of subjectivity is affectivity.”66 Suffering is a word because it is it that speaks and says, because it is in the flesh of life’s suffering and through it that the revelation is made of what it says to us in this way: simply this suffering flesh. If it says itself to us without ever resorting to language, we may ask: “How does it say it? In its suffering and by it.”67 For this reason, in this pain, in this suffering, life has already spoken differently, in a more primitive suffering: “This suffering, in which life embraces itself in the process of coming to itself in the love and joy of itself – this suffering, which inhabits every mode of life, pain or joy, because in each one it is what gives life to itself inasmuch as it is in it, this original pathos of life belonging to it, [it is in this suffering] that absolute Life gives itself to itself.”68 The living creature, experiencing himself, is this Word of Life which he himself hears: “The possibility of hearing the Word of life is for each living Self consubstantial to its birth, to its condition of Son.”69 In his way of living, this fundamental passivity is a concrete phenomenological feature of concrete life. This is the legacy of Descartes who, in his Méditations métaphysiques, defined man as an apparatus which he calls thought, i.e., a being who feels and this feeling is self-feeling: “Cogitatio is a subjective mode which, like suffering, cold, hunger, heat, etc. experiences itself immediately, regardless of the world, in an a-cosmic way and, if the world did not exist, it does not necessarily mean that it would disappear. In other words, suffering might well exist outside the world to the extent that it exists as it experiences itself immediately. (…) Consequently, it is in affectivity that the unshakeable foundation sought by Descartes lies. I call this life because all that lives is of this order. Even seeing, to the extent that it is a living seeing, is always a pathos.”70

60

Henry, “Phénoménologie matérielle et langage,” 25-26. Cf. Henry, C’est moi la Vérité, 137. 62 Cf. ibid., 257. 63 Henry, L’Essence de la manifestation (Paris: Puf, 1963), 579. 64 Ibid., 829. 65 Ibid., 581. 66 Ibid., 595. 67 Henry, “Phénoménologie matérielle et langage,” 27. 68 Ibid., 29: «ce souffrir en lequel elle s’étreint elle-même dans le procès de sa venue en soi, dans l’amour et la jouissance de soi – ce souffrir qui habite, toute modalité de la vie, souffrance ou joie, parce qu’il est en chacune ce qui la donne à elle-même pour autant que c’est en lui, dans ce pathos originel qui est le sien, que la Vie absolue se donne à soi.» 69 Ibid. 70 Henry, Auto-donation, 134-135. 61

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Transcendental affectivity71 is the original mode of revelation by virtue of which life reveals itself and becomes possible as it is, as life. Life is essentially affective and affectivity is the essence of life.72 Pathos, as originary affectivity, is the mode of phenomenologization according to which life is phenomenologized in its originary self-revelation, the phenomenological matter this self-givenness is made of, its flesh: a pure transcendental affectivity in which all self-experiencing has its concrete phenomenological effectuality.73 Now the objectification of the pathos through contemporary scientific discourse was and is expressed in the thinking of the body as the merely physical support of an ego: “The will to consider Nature as simply a “natural being,” alien to life, already witnesses to the desire of this life to deny itself. … To consider the object in an exclusive fashion and, what is more, as a pure object, from which everything that would evoke life in it and, above all else, everything that is sensory and affective was excluded, eliminated, repudiated, devalued – to know a totally objective being, i.e., totally independent from subjectivity … is, after all, the best means of escape from oneself.”74 Pathos as an Originary Mode of the Phenomenologization of Life In the mid-twentieth century, under the apologetic discourse of a new imagination of the body, critical of the social modalities of physical existence (with a whole literature, unconsciously surrealistic, appealing to the “liberation of the body”), the body is posited not as the condition of man, but as an existence exterior to the concrete man, another selfsame. Ontologically different from the subject, the body becomes a concern (souci) and an object of disquiet: it is the body as alter-ego,75 the only unquestionable permanence, the target property for investments of all sorts, a “place” of conquest and even seduction. It is necessary to “fight” the intentional variations of the objective body over time, time’s marks on the face and the hair: it is necessary to remain “young.” The finitude of the flesh expressed by the disease, precariousness and pain which afflict it, its vulnerability and frailty, originate the objectification of the body, leading man to the “utopia of perfect health,” to the pursuit of immortality. The idea of health is reified, transformed into a scientific-technological object, and its dimension of a singularly lived experience is reduced. It is valued as a purely physiological good within a horizon of reified hopes, within an objectivist view of the physical and worldly dynamics in which all significations that make it a living body or a body-flesh (Leibkörper) are reduced, and in which health ceases to be a metaphorical referent and comes to be understood as the optimization of a risk.76 Thus, the mystery of incarnation is forgotten and the dissolution of the flesh, the disincarnation of the self, occurs: “The phenomenology of the flesh re-conducts us from our openness to the world, in the transcendental contributions of our various senses, to the auto-impressionability of these on the flesh of life. It is only because of this pathetic selfgivenness that our senses belong to a flesh, and that all that is given in them, that sensory content of our experience that we relate to things as their particular qualities, is found to be originally and in itself made of “impressions.” Now, this pathetic self-givenness of our senses in life has another decisive meaning: that of turning each of them into a power. … It is this originary impossibility for the living to move away from life that founds their own impotence in moving away from themselves. Thus, the living cannot remove them-

71 72 73 74 75 76

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Cf. Henry, La Barbarie, 30. Henry, L’essence de la manifestation, 596. Henry, “Phénoménologie matérielle et langage,” 25. Henry, La Barbarie, 128. Cf. David Le Breton, Anthropologie du corps et modernité (Paris: Puf, 1990). Ivan Illich, La perte des sens (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 334.

selves from themselves, from their Self, their pain or their suffering. If in the world’s outside of itself, which is the place of the separation, our own body cannot place itself outside itself, even if it is stretched out and its parts are external to each other, it is because this body, far from defining our real body – our invisible and indivisible flesh – is only its external representation.”77 This questioning and crisis of the body are accompanied by the growth crisis of contemporary individualism, i.e., that of a narcissistic sensitivity. The value crisis problematizes the relationship with the world, and it is in this context that the body becomes a haven and an ultimate value of youth, seduction, vitality, “best friend,” a “capital” that one needs to manage with the best resources, prime value property, an object for great attention, care and treatment: “A ruse of modernity passes off as “liberation” what is no more than praise for the young, healthy, slender, spotless, seductive body. The fashioning of appearance, the cult of form, the imperative of good health, induces a careful, often strict, relation to the self. The key values of modernity … are those of youth, health, vitality, seduction and hygiene. They are the cornerstones of the modern discourse on the body.”78 The individual is reduced to his organic physicality (corporéité) to such an extent that, when it deteriorates (old age, illness) he believes that he has lost his dignity: “The weakness of life consists of its will to escape itself – and this is an ever-present temptation. … The impossibility of breaking up the string that attaches life to itself, which is to say to escape its suffering, increases the latter, exasperates the will to escape it and, in turn, simultaneously, the feeling of its helplessness, the feeling of Oneself as an original impossibility of escaping oneself, a feeling which finally reaches its peak and resolves itself in anguish.”79 Old age and illness mark the progressive reduction of subjectivity to its organic body, reflecting the moment when this very body is exposed to the gaze, but without the other’s lenience on a not too favorable day.80 The temptation to “recycle”81 the body in the denial of its relationship with pathos, with pain, with anguish, is the reflection of the new representation of a body-object capable of being “dismounted” and “rearticulated” down to its last recess. The notion of perfect health is subsidiary to the notion of body-object since, like it, health has been objectified and defined as absence of illness, pain and suffering, dispossessing therefore the own-body from what defines it: its experiences, pain and suffering (pathos) as originary affection, hence non-objectifiable or representable. Illness is what becomes opaque, hidden, it is the stalemate and obstacle to the originary experience of human authenticity. Illness is the diffuse perception of the tension of a distance (alienation) between the self and the oneself that expresses itself throughout an entire human life.82 Like practical experience, the experience of suffering, the state of health is not objectifiable despite it having been made a sector of appearances.

77

Michel Henry, Phénoménologie de l’Incarnation (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 247-252. David le Breton, “À la recherche du secret perdu,” Revue Le groupe familial, no. 141 (October/December 1993): 6-7. 79 Henry, La Barbarie, 128. 80 Cf. Le Breton, “À la recherche du secret perdu,” 8. 81 Cf. Gilles Lipovetski, L’ère du vide (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). 82 In this context Georges Canguilhem says: “s’agissant de la maladie, l’homme normal est celui qui vit l’assurance de pouvoir enrayer sur lui ce qui, chez un autre, irait à bout de course. Il faut donc à l’homme normal, pour qu’il puisse se croire et se dire tel, non pas l’avant-goût de la maladie, mais son ombre portée.” Georges Canguilhem, Essai sur quelques problèmes concernant le normal et le pathologique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1950). 78

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The pursuit of health, strongly reinforced by post-war socio-economic and scientificcultural policies, becomes a social certainty/celebratory liturgy,83 mediated and instrumentalized by technical, social and cultural aspects; technical with the therapeutic synergy that paradoxically engenders new diseases; social for the existential uprooting and anguish that the diagnosis effects,84 haunting the patient, the elderly, the handicapped, the dying; cultural with the promise of progress embodied in the idea of “amortality” (Illich), and the consequent refusal of the precarious, fallible and suffering (pathetic) condition of man. The symbolic institution of modern culture turned, therefore, the notion of health into a social metaphor, setting it off against the notion of “salvation” (salut), and turning its pursuit into the prevailing “pathogenic” (pathogène)85 factor. Health and disease become crossing points of systems of probability curves organized in a specific clinical setting. The body, as an imprint of its natural and social environment, is an integral part of this symbolic institutionalization process -- the institution of its identity and the identity of subjects -- and is under permanent conceptualization both as a biological being and as a cultural product.86 Like the multiple techniques of the body87 (Marcel Mauss), the notion of health is itself symbolically institutionalized, in terms of what objective science, particularly the biological sciences institutionalized as questions to be solved, but then again as an escape from the questions of meaning and excess. To think of this excess means to contemplate the body from within, as a subjective body, as a living body (chair), no longer biological. What the conception and knowledge of the biological body showed is that its perspective from outside, as an objective system, institutes the body as a “wholeness” without inside.88 As historical beings, men maintain an original relationship with this

83

“Pour parler de la santé en 1999, il faut comprendre la recherche de la santé comme l’inverse de celle du salut, il faut la comprendre comme une liturgie sociétaire au service d’une idole qui éteint le sujet.” See Ivan Illich in “L’obsession de la santé parfaite,” Le Monde Diplomatique (1999): 29. 84 “Plus l’offre de la pléthore clinique est le résultat d’un engagement politique de la population, plus intensément est ressenti le manque de santé. En d’autres termes, l’angoisse mesure le niveau de modernisation, et encore plus celui de politisation. L’acceptation sociale du diagnostic «objectif» est devenu pathogène au sens subjectif.” Illich, La perte des sens, 331. 85 Ibid., 330. “Vers le milieu du XXe siècle, ce qu’implique la notion d’une ‘recherche de la santé’ avait un sens tout autre que de nos jours. Selon la notion qui s’affirme aujourd’hui, l’être humain qui a besoin de santé est considéré comme un sous-système de la biosphère, un système immunitaire qu’il faut contrôler, régler, optimiser, comme ‘une vie’. … Pour sa réduction à une vie, le sujet tombe dans un vide qui l’étouffe.” Illich, “L’obsession de la santé parfaite,” 29. 86 Manufactured and consequently artificial, as François Jacob’s theory of the do-it-yourself of forms proposes: “Comme tout organisme vivant, l’être humain est génétiquement programmé et programmé pour apprendre. Tout un éventail de possibilités est offert par la nature au moment de la naissance. Ce qui est actualisé se construit peu à peu pendant la vie par l’interaction avec le milieu.” in Le jeu des possibles (Paris: Fayard, 1981), 126. In this matter, on the other hand, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the fact that the anatomic organization of the body leaves open-ended behavioral possibilities for the creation of significations transcendent to itself, yet immanent to behavior as such: “Il est impossible de superposer chez l’homme une première couche de comportements que l’on appellerait ‘naturels’ et un monde spirituel et culturel fabriqué. Tout est fabriqué et tout est naturel chez l’homme comme on voudra dire, en ce sens que pas un mot, pas une conduite qui ne doive quelque chose à l’être simplement biologique, et qui en même temps ne se dérobe à la simplicité de la vie animale, ne détourne de leur sens les conduites vitales, par une sorte d’échappement et par un génie de l’équivoque qui pourrait servir à définir l’homme.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 220-221. 87 Cf. Marcel Mauss, “Les techniques du corps,” in idem, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Puf, 1983), 378-379. 88 “Ou sans ‘dedans’ autre que le dedans d’un sac que l’on peut ouvrir chirurgicalement pour intervenir ou observer, donc un dedans qui peut toujours lui-même être converti en dehors, à savoir un faux dedans, un dedans seulement empirique que rien, sinon la limite factuelle de la peau, des muscles et des os ne teint en son dedans.” Marc Richir, Le corps. Essai sur l’intériorité (Paris: Hatier, 1993), 28. 166

biological body, since common-sense concepts eventually assimilate the representations of science reasonably quickly: “It is not that a science like biology can offer us any enlightenment about it; on the contrary, it is on such knowledge that it itself is founded; it cannot be supposed to explain what it presupposes as its condition for possibility, as the ontological horizon inside which it can find its objects, offer its explanations and, above all else, pose its problems.”89 The chimeric longing for eternal health results from the modern observation of the precariousness of human existence: illness (and insanity) draws this same limit in which health is vital illusion, a time outside all temporality, the finished good of the human as the incarnation of health, constituting itself a posteriori as the space of a human community unified in a normative practice of life as a natural social value. The body is object, a useful vector, indispensable to life. In its way it becomes the practice of the modern modus vivendi, and the connection with this notion of health is situated there: a life technique that enables the body to live on, in spite of everything. Definitely and radically biologized, the human subject integrates itself in the order of treatment techniques, i.e., in the generalized, compulsive recourse to medicine, it is the whole life of man that is part of a social-therapeutic project to normalize everyday life, a sort of negation of the sensus communis90: ultimately, the figure of the physician emerges as the constitution of a new power or authority on life and death, henceforth dictating norms to the symbolic and cultural system (sensus communis). The biological body is the commonplace of the scientific determinations that make it up,91 and therefore it cannot constitute itself into originary ground since it is already a product of human reflection: “It is not that a science like biology can offer us any enlightenment about it; on the contrary, it is on such knowledge that it itself is founded.”92 The contribution of Henryian reflection to the range of an idea of “health” versus illness was derivatively prolific for the emphasis put on the idea of originally pathic selfgivenness (auto-affection) of all transcendental ipseity in the self-generation of Life93 and on that of subjective body despite the implicit Husserlian legacy of an epoché of the world. If Life never ceases to be lived, to be revealed, to summon the living to live and (re)turn to life (of which insanity, attempted suicide, euthanasia, etc., are examples), the true cure supposes a rebirth of ipseity, the resurrection from this life which for a given time seems to withdraw from itself, to self-deny itself. Modern culture has not only reduced knowledge by scientifying it, but also extended the self-denial of life and the pathos (this originary suffering) that sustains it94 to the world and to societies: “Curative work subordinates constantly cognitive progress to the destiny of the affect and, revealing the true nature of all concrete inter-subjectivity, the relationship between the analysis and the analyser is situated, or rather played, as a confrontation of forces immersed in themselves,

89

Henry, Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps, 5. Culture is a plurality of systems of action on which basis individuals and social groups can express their capacity to be and do, to think and live. 91 Ibid., 8. 92 Ibid., 5. 93 Archi-Ipseity of a First Living, of an Archi-Son: “le Christ comme la condition transcendantale de tout moi possible, moi lui-même compris comme moi transcendantal vivant.” Henry, C’est moi la Vérité, 143. 94 “En fin de compte l’autonégation de la vie s’accomplit de deux façons: sur le plan théorique, avec cette affirmation qu’il n’y a pas d’autre savoir que le savoir scientifique; sur le plan pratique, partout où se réalise, d’une ou de l’autre, la négation pratique de la vie. … Mais la science n’est pas la seule négation pratique de la vie. Dans la signification pathétique, en tant que mise á l’écart par le savant de sa propre vie, elle offre le prototype d’un comportement qui précipite la ‘culture’ moderne tout entière dans la barbarie.” Henry, La Barbarie, 130. 90

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each the prey of their own pathos.”95 The truth of pain lies in the one who feels it, for its register is too strong for us to verbalize it and, when there is language, it is metaphoric.96 If I suffer, it is because it is me that is the one who lives: “It is thereby that psychoanalysis separates itself from human sciences and resists Galilean reduction, specifically its linguistic reduction, inasmuch as, in the very heart of the devastation of humankind by objectivist knowledge and its absurd pretensions, it states and maintains, even without knowing it, the invincible right to life.”97 But to feel ill (alienation of the originary auto-affection of the oneself) is today different from being ill since, in contemporary terms, the reification of the model of health is founded on common ground, a ground that is originarily uniting, in which the awareness of feeling and being became two distant modes of the appearing, going deeper into what Henry sought to overcome: the psychological epoché, the distance between world and originary truth, enabling the ex-sistence of a oneself and a body that no longer belong to the world; in short, the overcoming of the ego’s disincarnation. The incarnate body is a suffering being, an impressional substance, permeated by a series of impressions (desire, fear) associated with the flesh because it is constitutive of its substance. My flesh is what I experience phenomenologically, particular to my body (the invisible) and not the mere biological and molecular substratum (corps), the object of treatment, repair or change (the visible). Despite being subsidiary to the appearance of a carnality (experience of oneself), of a subjective experience of the body not totally reducible to its corporality (physical materiality), the idea of “health” became an object of instrumentalized appropriation by biotechnologies. The emptying of the originarily impressional (and endless) character of Life by the attempt(s) to eliminate pain and suffering is precisely a consequence of this: “The impossibility of breaking the string that attaches life to itself, which is to say to escape its suffering, increases the latter, exasperates the will to escape it and, in turn, and simultaneously, the feeling of its helplessness, the feeling of Oneself as an originary impossibility of escaping oneself, a feeling which finally reaches its peak and resolves itself in anguish.”98 Subject to the model of “seeing,” thought overlooks its own living reality, its knowledge becomes a science of objects that disregards man.

95 96 97 98

168

Ibid., 163. Cf. David le Breton, Anthropologie de la douleur (Paris: Metaillé, 1995). Henry, La Barbarie, 163. Ibid., 129.

5.

GADAMERIAN HERMENEUTICS OF MEDICINE: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF HEALTH AND ILLNESS

Fredrik Svenaeus

Gadamer and Medicine In his preface to the collection of papers published in 1993 as Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit, Hans-Georg Gadamer writes: It has always been a particular occasion that has prompted me to speak about problems of health care and the art of medicine. The results are gathered together in this small volume. It should not be a cause for surprise if a philosopher who is neither a doctor nor feels himself to be a patient nevertheless wishes to participate in the discussion concerning the broad range of problems which arise in the field of health in the scientific and technological age. Nowhere else do the advances of modern research enter so directly into the sociopolitical arena of our time as they do in this area.1 Gadamer, the chief representative of modern hermeneutics, surmises here that a work concerned with the philosophy of medicine, but written by a representative of modern hermeneutics, should come as no surprise to the reader. I suspect, however, that many readers were indeed surprised by Gadamer’s late interest in issues of contemporary medicine and health care. Gadamer’s view is that, in questions of the methodology used in the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) as opposed to the sciences (Naturwissenschaften), the latter serves as a kind of negative antithetical image to the pattern of understanding found in the humanities. Considering this, is it really possible to talk about a Gadamerian hermeneutics of medicine by focusing attention on the activities of contemporary health care? Consider, for example, the following quote from Truth and Method: To that extent this seems a legitimate hermeneutical requirement: we must place ourselves in the other situation in order to understand it. We may wonder, however, whether this phrase is adequate to describe the understanding that is required of us. The same is true of a conversation that we have with someone simply in order to get to know him -- i.e., to discover where he is coming from and his horizon. This is not a true conversation -- that is, we are not seeking agreement on some subject because the specific contents of the conversation are only a means to get to know the horizon of the other person. Examples are oral examinations and certain kinds of conversation between doctor and patient.2

1

Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age, trans. Jason Gaiger and Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), vii. “Es waren stets besondere Anlässe, die mich bewogen, zu Problemen der Gesundheitspflege und der ärztlichen Kunst mich zu äußern. Die Ergebnisse sind in diesem Bändchen vereinigt. Dass ein Philosoph, der weder Arzt ist noch sich als Patient fühlt, gleichwohl an der allgemeinen Problematik teilnimmt, die sich für das Gesundheitswesen im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft und der Technik stellt, kann nicht verwundern. Nirgendwo treten die Fortschritte der modernen Forschung so sehr in das sozialpolitische Spannungsfeld unserer Zeit wie in diesem Gebiet.” HansGeorg Gadamer, Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993), 7. 2 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2000), 303. “Insofern scheint es eine berechtigte hermeneutische Forderung, dass man sich in den andern versetzen muss, um ihn zu verstehen. Indessen fragt es sich, ob eine solche Parole nicht gerade das Verständnis schuldig bleibt, das von einem verlangt wird. Es ist genauso wie im Gespräch, das wir mit jemandem nur zu dem Zwecke führen, um ihn kennenzulernen, d. h. um 169

According to views held by Gadamer around 1960, the dialogue as used in medical practice is primarily a strategic move by the doctor, entered into for the purpose of getting to know the patient and become able to manipulate him; the dialogue is not carried out in order to approach and seek the truth of the matter at hand (the illness) together with the patient. In contrast to this hermeneutic pattern of the mutual seeking of truth, contemporary medical practice is taken apart, even dismantled by Gadamer (in works following upon Truth and Method), not only as a manipulative strategy, but also as an event in which medical science and social institutions dominate and thus suffocate the voice and individual truth of the patient.3 This line of thought originates, in Heidegger’s analysis of modern scientific technology, as mastery over (Beherrschung) and suffocation of language and dialogue within the framework of pure calculation and manipulation (Gestell).4 Medicine presents no exception to this technological threat to humanistic values, neither for Heidegger, nor for Gadamer5: We encounter, for example, the loss of personhood. This happens within medical science when the individual patient is objectified in terms of a mere multiplicity of data. In a clinical investigation all the information about a person is treated as if it could be adequately collated on a card index. If this is done correctly, then the relevant data will all uniquely apply to the person involved. But the question is whether the unique value of the individual is properly recognized in this process.6 As we can see, a fundamental critique of (medical) science and technology is undeniably present in The Enigma of Health, but it is supplemented therein by a hermeneutics of everyday life, healthy or ill, which makes Gadamer’s contribution to contemporary medical philosophy and ethics a much more complex and original one than one might suspect7:

seinen Standort und seinen Horizont zu ermessen. Das ist kein wahres Gespräch, d. h. es wird darin nicht die Verständigung über eine Sache gesucht, sondern alle sachlichen Inhalte des Gespräches sind nur ein Mittel, um den Horizont des anderen kennenzulernen. Man denke etwa an das Prüfungsgespräch oder bestimmte Formen der ärztlichen Gesprächsführung.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 6th ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1990), 308. 3 See for instance: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Vernunft im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1976). 4 Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in idem, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954). 5 In Heidegger’s analysis, the “framework” (Gestell) of modern technology is united with, rather than opposed to, “humanistic values.” The pattern of Cartesian subjectivity is the modern “epoch of Being” (Seinsgeschick), which rules the Enlightenment as well as the scientific revolution. See Martin Heidegger, Brief über den Humanismus (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1949). In Gadamer’s dialogic hermeneutics, intersubjectivity and ethics attain far more central and crucial functions than in Heidegger’s philosophy, and it consequently makes sense to speak of a threat to “humanistic values” (but perhaps only from Gadamer’s perspective and within quotation marks). See Christopher P. Smith, Hermeneutics and Human Finitude: Toward a Theory of Ethical Understanding (New York: Fordham University Press, 1991). 6 Gadamer, The Enigma of Health, 81. “Da haben wir zum Beispiel die Auflösung der Person. Innerhalb der medizinischen Wissenschaft kommt sie durch die Objektivierung der Vielheit von Daten zustande. Das bedeutet, dass man in der klinischen Untersuchung von heute sozusagen wie aus einer Kartothek zusammengesucht wird. Wenn man richtig zusammengesucht wird, dann sind alle Werte die eigenen. Aber die Frage ist dennoch, ob unser Eigenwert dabei auch vorkommt.” Gadamer, Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit, 108. 7 A parallel to the development of Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics of medicine is found, strange as it may sound, in Michel Foucault’s late turn to “a care of the self” in classical Greek and Roman thought (see the last two parts of Histoire de la sexualité (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1984). Foucault’s earlier critical analysis of modern medical practice, in works such as Histoire de la folie à l’ãge 170

In the realm of medicine, in any case, the dialogue between doctor and patient cannot simply be regarded as a preparation for or introduction to the treatment proper. The dialogue between doctor and patient must rather be seen as part of the treatment itself and as something which remains important throughout the entire process of making a recovery.8 In both cases -- the critique of modern medicine as domination, and the attempt at developing the hermeneutic essence present in a clinical meeting, when approaching a phenomenology of health and sickness -- Gadamer reverts to his Heideggerian phenomenological roots. In this paper I will try to show how the hermeneutic philosophy developed by Gadamer in his first main work, Truth and Method, is indeed a phenomenological hermeneutics, and how one needs to acknowledge this phenomenological heritage in order to understand the directions taken in The Enigma of Health.9 This reading will enable us to see more clearly, what kind of contribution (and challenge) Gadamer offers to contemporary medical philosophy and ethics. This strategy will also enable us to return to the fundamental question we started out with above, only better equipped: In what sense could medical practice be considered in any way a hermeneutic activity? Given that doctors and other health care personnel are, in some everyday sense, “interpreting” their “material,” is this not a kind of interpretative pattern, which is fundamentally different from the outline of understanding found in Gadamer’s hermeneutics? Or is it rather the other way round? Will medical practice prove to be hermeneutic in a more profound sense than the reading of any historical text? Have Gadamer’s attempts to approach medicine within the framework of his own philosophy paved the way for a Gadamerian hermeneutics of medicine, which could not only walk in his footsteps, but also try to develop the hints we find in The Enigma of Health in a more consistent way?

Hermeneutics and Phenomenology Richard Palmer has traced for us the roots of the word “hermeneutics,” in his book with the same title: The Greek word hermeios referred to the priest at the Delphic oracle. This word and the more common verb hermeneuein and noun hermeneia point back to the wing-footed messenger-god Hermes, from whose name the words are apparently derived (or vice versa?). Significantly, Hermes is associated with the function of transmuting what is beyond human understanding into a form that human intelligence can grasp. The various forms of the word suggest the process of bringing a thing or situation from unintelligibility to understanding. The Greeks credited Hermes with the discovery of language classique (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1961) and Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1963), is here developed in the direction of a phenomenology of everyday life. As we will see in what follows, Gadamer too returns to Greek philosophy in sketching out a phenomenology of medicine. Foucault’s philosophy of medicine and illness is actually mentioned by Gadamer, once, in The Enigma of Health, 169. 8 Ibid., 128. “Auf alle Fälle ist im Bereich der Medizin das Gespräch keine bloße Einleitung und Vorbereitung der Behandlung. Es ist bereits Behandlung und geht in die weitere Behandlung ein, die zur Heilung führen soll.” Gadamer, Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit, 162. 9 The papers of the latter work range in time from the early sixties to the early nineties, which means that the development of a phenomenological hermeneutics of medicine evolves, in Gadamer’s philosophy, over a period of at least thirty years. 171

and writing – the tools which human understanding employs to grasp meaning and convey it to others.10 Keeping this etymology in mind, one can easily understand why hermeneutics began as a branch of theology, concerned with the principles of biblical interpretation. The holy texts needed to be deciphered in order to make full sense to the reader, and the discipline devoted to developing the manuals used in this decipherment was referred to as hermeneutics. We are here able to trace one meaning of the word hermeneutics, which is still prevalent today in theology and also in other disciplines, such as law and literature: methodology of interpretation. These methodologies naturally assume different forms, depending upon which discipline one is working in. They also depend upon the ambitions and theoretical background of the interpreter, and they can thus generate different interpretations of the same text. Accordingly, in the interpretation of texts and other artifacts, there often arises a conflict between different interpretations, in which it is hard to settle which interpretation is the correct one. The outcome of this conflict clearly depends on what one means by “correct,” here; but let us at this point note that it is precisely this seemingly endless battle of different interpretations in the humanities that has generated a certain distrust and contempt among the practitioners of the natural sciences, who claim to aim for objective truth and not simply for different opinions. In the beginning of the nineteenth century -- at the same time as modern scientific medicine was making its early breakthroughs -- Friedrich Schleiermacher attempted to develop a general hermeneutics, that is, a hermeneutics that would not be limited to a certain discipline or doctrine, but rather would give the general rules of all interpretation. Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics evolved in two complementary directions, one focusing upon the language of the text, and the other upon empathy (Einfühlung) -- the attempt to find out what the author of a document meant, by trying to imagine oneself in his position. Wilhelm Dilthey, at the end of the nineteenth century, was influenced by the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and tried to reformulate it as the method of the humanities dealing with the meaning of artifacts, in contrast to objects of nature. Understanding (Verstehen) and explaining (Erklären) were thus designated as distinct paradigms for, respectively, the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) and the sciences (Naturwissenschaften).11 The idea of hermeneutics as a method peculiar to the humanities in contrast to the sciences found sympathy in many humanistic disciplines. It was used as a theoretical basis for developing interpretive manuals that described methods for uncovering the intentions of the author of a text (artifact) or the meaning of the text itself, clear of its author’s intentions. In both cases, however, one is dealing with hermeneutics as a collection of methods for uncovering hidden meaning in artifacts through employing knowledge peculiar to the humanities in contrast to the sciences. Before we go any further, let me say that this is not the kind of hermeneutics Gadamer (or I) will claim to be essential to clinical practice. Patients are not works of literature, although, as we shall see, they share some important modes of being-in-the-world with the ontology of texts. This similarity is in fact the reason why doctors can learn and perfect their clinical skills by reading novels and poetry. The knowledge they gain from this reading, however, is not primarily a knowledge of how texts work, but rather a knowledge about human beings and their ways of being-in-the-world. 10

Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 13. 11 See ibid., 98-106. The sketch of the development of pre-phenomenological hermeneutics I give here, in common with Palmer, is (necessarily) crude, but still accurate in its main lines, I think. 172

The kind of hermeneutics that is basic to clinical practice is the phenomenological hermeneutics founded by Martin Heidegger in his main work, Sein und Zeit12 (1927), and, as we will see, developed further by Gadamer. Medical practice is to be viewed as a special form of understanding, which is identical with neither explanation in science nor interpretation in the humanities. Hermeneutics is here an ontological and not a methodological concept; that is, hermeneutics is not taken as a method, but as a basic aspect of life. The human being -- Dasein, as it is famously termed by Heidegger -- understands itself and its world by way of being thrown into a network of meanings that are referred to as its being-in-the-world. This being-in-the-world is always embodied and already attuned as well as in the process of articulating itself. Articulation in its most explicit form takes on the mode of being of language. Spoken discourse, however, can also be fixed in the form of texts, which are then to be read and understood by others. Understanding then takes on a rather indirect form compared to the more immediate understanding of, for example, everyday practical activities, but the activity of reading is still tied to the same kind of being-in that is played out in the meaning-structure of the world. Hermeneutics is thus not only, and not primarily, a methodology for the reading of texts, but a basic aspect of life. To be -- to exist -- means to understand. The phenomenology of being-in-the-world, in Heidegger’s philosophy, turns out to be a hermeneutics, since the attainment of self-understanding by everyday Dasein demands an uncovering, a dismantling, authentic interpretation. Heidegger makes clear in the first division of Sein und Zeit that Dasein is to be thought of primarily as a being-with-others (Mitdasein). In the ensuing analysis, however, he strongly links this a priori trait of human existence to the inauthentic being-together of “the they” (das Man), and thereby comes close to equating being-with-others with inauthentic existence (Verfallensein). Heidegger’s emphasis on authentic understanding as a solitary pursuit in contrast to the empty and distortive talk (Gerede) of “the they” calls for a critical, supplementary analysis focusing on the hermeneutics of dialogue -- a constitutive aspect of clinical medicine. Gadamer, as we will see, has taken the necessary steps and developed Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology in the very direction of a hermeneutics of being together with others. At first sight, Gadamer’s magnum opus (published originally in 1960) -- Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik -- might seem rather remote from the phenomenology of being-in-the-world that Heidegger is laying out in Sein und Zeit. Gadamer’s book is divided into three parts; the first and second parts, which are by far the most extensive ones, deal with the work of art and with interpretation in the humanities, respectively. The third part of the book deals with the ontology of language and can be read as an articulation of the special pattern of understanding found by Gadamer to be present in these disciplines. As Gadamer himself acknowledges, however, and as I will attempt to elucidate here, Wahrheit und Methode is most accurately read as an extension of the phenomenological hermeneutics of Sein und Zeit.13 As many of his readers have remarked, the title of Gadamer’s book should properly read “Truth or Method” and not “Truth and Method,” since it is precisely the methodological conceptualization of hermeneutics, as formulated by Schleiermacher and Dilthey, that Gadamer is trying to go beyond. Truth in Truth and Method is meant as a basic experience of being together with others in and through language, and not as a criterion for correct interpretations. This conception of truth is completely in line with Heidegger’s interpretation of the concept of a-letheia in Sein und Zeit; that is, truth as the openness

12 13

Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 16th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986). Gadamer, Truth and Method, 259 ff. 173

or disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) of Dasein to the world of meaning in which things can be found and articulated as such and such things.14 Thus, for a sentence to describe, to correspond to, a state of the world, this prior dismantling of the world as meaningful is necessary. In Gadamer’s philosophy, however, truth is to be understood primarily as openness to the other and his world and not only to my own world. The difference, of course, from Heidegger’s point of view, would not be decisive, because the world of the other is also mine -- we share the same world in our being-together. Still, authentic understanding is to a much greater extent a shared experience in Gadamer’s hermeneutics than in Heidegger’s philosophy. Language is emphasized by Gadamer as the key mode of human existence in being together with others. The form of language he concentrates his analysis on, in Truth and Method, is not, however, the spoken dialogue, but rather the reading of literature and other texts of the past. Historical texts are separated from us by a temporal distance, which makes the meaning incarnated in them more difficult to dismantle. Indeed, what does it mean to uncover the meaning of such a text? When we try to understand a historical document, our lifeworld -- our horizon of meaning -- is not identical with the lifeworld of the author of the document. Nevertheless, our horizons are not totally separated, but distantly united through the Wirkungsgeschichte -- the history of effects -- of the document.15 It is consequently possible to bring the horizons closer together and reach an understanding of the document (through Horizontverschmelzung, a merging of horizons). Gadamer is here not only referring to the necessity of actually learning the foreign language used in the document; to understand what the words mean, one must also understand their historical context in the lifeworld of the person who wrote the document. It is important to stress that, for Gadamer, this meeting or “merging” of horizons is not synonymous with reaching the same understanding of the document as that of the person who wrote it. The distance that separates and, at the same time, unites the horizons is always a productive distance, in the sense that we understand the document from our own point of view, with the Vorurteile -- prejudgements -- of our own time.16 Interpretation, according to Gadamer, is not, however, lawless and arbitrary, since we try to meet the horizon of the text -- we submit to its authority; but at the same time we can only understand from our own point of view, and will, consequently, always reach an understanding that is different from -- yet, ideally, richer than -- the understanding reached by the author and by the text’s original readers. The play in language (Sprachspiel) between different perspectives, the dialogic process of developing a rich, enlightened understanding, are indeed the Gadamerian counterparts to the Heideggerian concepts of authenticity and truth.

A Gadamerian Hermeneutics of Medicine The development that takes place between the second and third parts of Truth and Method, with Gadamer moving from the reading of texts in the humanities to an analysis of dialogue and language, is crucial, if one wants to understand how clinical medicine can be considered a hermeneutic enterprise. Here Gadamer states that, although his main concern in the book is with the humanities, the reading of the text itself -- according to his conceptualization of it as the merging of the horizons of text and reader -- is fundamentally

14 15 16

174

Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 212 ff. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 300 ff. Ibid., 277 ff.

dialogic in nature; thus hermeneutics in its purest form is found in the living dialogues taking place between people of real flesh and blood: In many respects, the discussion here is much too restricted to the special situation of the historical human sciences and “being that is oriented to a text.” Only in Part Three have I succeeded in broadening the issue to language and dialogue, though in fact I have had it constantly in view; and consequently, only there have I grasped in a fundamental way the notions of distance and otherness.17 In my study, The Hermeneutics of Medicine and the Phenomenology of Health: Steps Towards a Philosophy of Medical Practice,18 I have tried to show in detail how this dialogue-based hermeneutics is exemplary when it comes to elucidating not only the chosen interpretation (in the humanities), but also the interpretative structure of medical practice. The clinical encounter can be viewed as a coming-together of the two different attitudes and lifeworlds of doctor and patient -- of their different horizons of understanding, in the language of Gadamer -- aimed at establishing a mutual understanding, which can benefit the health of the sick party. Doctors (as well as representatives of other health-care professions) are thus not scientists applying biological knowledge, first and foremost, but rather interpreters, hermeneuts of health and sickness. Biological explanations and therapies can only be applied within the dialogical meeting, guided by the clinical understanding attained in the service of the patient and his health. Gadamer’s philosophy of hermeneutic understanding, which has mainly been taken to be a general description of the pattern of knowledge found in the humanities, might thus be expanded to cover the activities of health care, I argued. Gadamer’s late work, The Enigma of Health, supports this interpretation, addressing the area of medicine and health care in a more direct way than the philosopher’s earlier works. Medicine is here characterized as a dialogue (Gespräch) by which the doctor and patient together try to reach an understanding of why the patient is ill: It is the disruption of health that necessitates treatment by a doctor. An important part of the treatment is that the patient actually discusses his or her illness with the doctor. This element of discussion is vital to all the different areas of medical competence, not just to that of the psychiatrist. Dialogue and discussion serve to humanize the fundamentally unequal relationship that prevails between doctor and patient.19 What is particularly obvious in the medical meeting is the asymmetrical relation between the parties. The patient is ill and seeks help, whereas the doctor is at home -- in control by virtue of his knowledge and experience of disease and illness. This asymmetry necessitates empathy on the part of the doctor. He must try to understand the patient, not 17

Ibid., 311, footnote 240. “Wie vielfach in diesem Zusammenhange bleibt die Erörterung noch zu sehr auf die besondere Lage der historischen Geisteswissenschaften und das “Sein zum Text” beschränkt. Erst im dritten Teil erfolgt die in Wahrheit ständig anvisierte Ausweitung auf Sprache und Gespräch – und damit die grundsätzliche Fassung von Abstand und Andersheit.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 316317, footnote 240. 18 Fredrik Svenaeus, The Hermeneutics of Medicine and the Phenomenology of Health: Steps Towards a Philosophy of Medical Practice, 2d rev. ed. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001). 19 Gadamer, The Enigma of Health, 112. “Die Störung der Gesundheit ist es, die die Behandlung durch den Arzt nötig macht. Zu einer Behandlung gehört das Gespräch. Es beherrscht die entscheidende Dimension allen ärztlichen Tuns, nicht nur bei den Psychiatern. Das Gespräch trägt die Humanisierung der Beziehung zwischen fundamental Ungleichen, zwischen dem Arzt und dem Patienten.” Gadamer, Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit, 144. 175

exclusively from his own point of view, but through trying to put himself in the patient’s situation. Consequently, that the doctor attempts to reach a new, productive understanding of the patient’s illness in no way implies that he should avoid empathy. It is only through empathy that the doctor can reach an independent understanding that is truly productive in the sense of shared and independent. We can here return to Gadamer’s model of textual interpretation in Truth and Method (something Gadamer himself does not do in The Enigma of Health), according to which the reader must understand the text as authoritative, as posing a question to him that can only be answered through a meeting with the text -- through a “merging” of the two horizons of author and reader. It is thus first and foremost the doctor who is the “reader” and the patient who is the “text.” But since the meeting is dialogic, the reading is also a reciprocal process of question and answer. The distance between the two parties is not a time-related distance as in the case of the reading of an historical text; it is rather a distance between two lifeworld horizons, which can be narrowed down through the dialogue. This narrowing-down, this “merging of the horizons” of both doctor and patient during the consultation, means that the horizons are brought into contact with each other but nevertheless preserve their identity as the separate horizons of two different lifeworlds.

The Appropriation of Aristotle in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics One feature of Gadamer’s understanding of hermeneutics that is crucial for a hermeneutics of medicine is the philosopher’s emphasis upon application (Anwendung). The central passage on this theme is the second chapter of Part II in Truth and Method in which paragraph b) is called “The Hermeneutic Relevance of Aristotle.”20 Interpretation always takes place in a certain situation and with a special aim in view -- the paradigmatic example that Gadamer often gives in Truth and Method (and which we also frequently find in Aristotle’s ethics) being interpretation of the law in court. With this emphasis on application, Gadamer highlights a phenomenon that is crucial to the hermeneutics of medicine, thus displaying the usefulness of his philosophy to the development of a philosophy of medical practice. Understanding, in medicine, is sought for the sake of healing -- it is clearly applied for a specific purpose -- making it a very obvious case of applied hermeneutics. Despite the title of his book -- Truth and Method -- Gadamer makes clear that the goal of hermeneutic understanding is not the discovery of timeless truths that can be reached by some universal, timeless method. Truth is always particularized, always dependent upon the meeting of two different horizons, a meeting whose purpose is to bring about a concrete goal. As I have pointed out above, this view of understanding is not meant as a defense of some kind of “anything goes” pattern of interpretation, whereby the reader can always find whatever suits him best in the text; rather, its purpose is to underscore the view that the patterns of understanding displayed in the various activities of human life are put to work with specific goals in view. These goals are ultimately not chosen by the interpreters, but rather, are embedded in the activities themselves and dependent on the history of the activities in question. Thus the hermeneutics of medicine will exhibit a normative structure; it will aim to understand with a view to achieving a certain goal -- a goal it regards as morally praiseworthy: Let us understand in order to heal, for healing is a good thing.21

20

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 312-324. This approach owes a great deal to the path-breaking work by Alasdair MacIntyre: After Virtue, a Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981). 21

176

Apparent in the analysis of application in Truth and Method is the indebtedness of Gadamer’s project to the practical philosophy of Aristotle.22 Indeed, as mentioned above, a discussion of “The Hermeneutic Relevance of Aristotle” is at the center of the chapter devoted to the problem of application in the second part of the book. When Gadamer here chooses to continue his analysis of hermeneutic practice by turning to Aristotle and the Nicomachean Ethics, he does so in order to underline the normative aspect that I have touched upon above.23 But Gadamer’s reliance on Aristotle seems to run even deeper; consequently, it deserves to be explicated in greater detail. To quote from Truth and Method: To summarize, if we relate Aristotle’s description of the ethical phenomenon and especially the virtue of moral knowledge to our own investigation, we find that his analysis in fact offers a kind of model of the problems of hermeneutics.24 The Greek concept, rendered by Gadamer as “Tugend des sittlichen Wissens,” that is, the “virtue of moral knowledge” in the quote above, is phronesis. In the pages that lead up to the quote, Gadamer has developed Aristotle’s views on moral knowledge as a form of practical wisdom, which knows the right ending and not only the means, and which is able to conjoin the general and the particular in judgements where no theoretical laws apply. Phronesis is famously thematized by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, and is usually translated as “practical wisdom,” in contrast to technical skill in the arts and crafts (techne), to knowledge of science (episteme), to the theoretical wisdom of philosophy (sophia), and to intuitive reason (nous).25 All of these abilities or excellences are called intellectual virtues by Aristotle, in order to distinguish them from moral virtues. One must remember, however, that the terms arete and hexis, which are used in this context, do not have the Christian and Victorian connotations carried by the English word “virtue.” Rather, in Aritotle the virtues are states or dispositions of the soul (psyche) that make it possible for us to think, feel and act in an appropriate way. Practical wisdom is, according to Aristotle, of central importance in the making of ethical choices. In trying to find out how to act toward, and together with, others in problematical situations, one cannot merely rely on a set of (ethical) norms and principles, which are applied in specific situations; rather, one needs an educated knowledge of what good living consists in, which can only be gained through long experience in life matters (praxis). Accordingly phronesis, though not a moral virtue in itself (such as are courage or temperance), is the ability to judge the right ending for an action in a particular situation and to make a wise choice. The moral virtues are dispositions that tend to lead us in

22

Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s indebtedness to Aristotle’s practical philosophy has been highlighted recently by many scholars, including Franco Volpi, “Dasein as Praxis: the Heideggerian Assimilation and Radicalization of the Practical Philosophy of Aristotle,” in Christopher MacAnn, ed., Critical Heidegger (London: Routledge, 1996); Günter Figal, “Phronesis as Understanding: Situating Philosophical Hermeneutics,” in Lawrence K. Schmidt, ed., The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995); and Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgement and the Lure of Technique (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993). 23 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 24 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 324. “Wenn wir zusammenfassend die Beschreibung des ethischen Phänomens und insbesondere der Tugend des sittlichen Wissens, die Aristoteles gibt, auf unsere Fragestellung beziehen, so zeigt sich in der Tat die aristotelische Analyse als eine Art Modell der in der hermeneutischen Aufgabe gelegenen Probleme.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 329. 25 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, book VI, chapter 3. 177

the same direction as practical wisdom, when refined, but we tend to follow them unreflectingly.26 Practical wisdom and moral virtues are therefore mutually reinforcing traits, necessary in the quest for good living (eudaimonia) in Aristotle’s philosophy.

Phronesis and the Hermeneutics of Medicine Among the last books to be published by Gadamer before his death in 2002 was his own annotated translation of Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics -- that is, precisely the book that deals with phronesis.27 This fact is yet another sign of the importance of this concept for Gadamer’s philosophy. It is thus clear that Gadamer intended his hermeneutics to be a practical philosophy in the Aristotelian sense, and it is also clear that practical, phronetic wisdom is to be considered a hermeneutic virtue. Accordingly, phronesis is the mark of a good hermeneut and, maybe in particular, of a good medical hermeneut -- the doctor. What does it mean in this context? And what conclusions can we draw, in the case of medicine, from such a strong link between Aristotle’s concept of practical, moral wisdom and Gadamer’s hermeneutics? Phronesis, for Aristotle, is not a particular moral virtue in the manner in which fidelity, compassion, justice, courage, temperance or integrity are (as mentioned above). It is, rather, an intellectual ability; however, as such, it informs the moral virtues in specific situations, allowing the possessor of these virtues to make moral judgements. Phronesis is therefore in a sense a moral ability (despite being counted among the intellectual virtues by Aristotle), since it deals with practical decisions in situations in which not only abstract truths but also the concrete good are the matter at hand. The phronimos -- the wise man -knows the right and good thing to do in this specific situation; in the case of medicine we would say that he knows the right and good thing to do for this specific patient at this specific time. This cannot be learnt merely by applying universal theoretical principles, but only through long experience in concrete, practical matters of life. Let us now connect the concept of phronesis with hermeneutics, in the way that Gadamer envisages, and by extension with clinical hermeneutics. The first thing worth noting is that Gadamer’s reference to phronesis makes clear that applied hermeneutics does not indicate an application of universal rules. Medical hermeneutics is thus not applicative in the sense that universal, methodological rules are applied to a concrete situation. Rather, the hermeneutics of medicine is grounded in the meeting between doctor and patient -- a meeting in which the two different horizons of medical knowledge and lived illness are brought together in an interpretative dialogue for the purpose of determining why the patient is ill and how he can be treated. This was one of the main points above: medical practice is not applied science, but rather interpretation through dialogue in the service of the patient’s health. Within this interpretative pattern, science is made use of in various ways, but the pattern itself is not deductively (or inductively) nomologic in the natural-scientific sense. The appropriation of phronesis at the heart of (medical) hermeneutics can also be viewed as a critique of applied (medical) ethics. The idea that ethical principles can somehow be applied to the clinical situation by health-care personnel is strongly countered by the

26

It is not surprising that, as virtue ethics has been disinterred from the catacombs of ancient philosophy and has attracted new interest in the medical field -- thanks, in particular, to the works of Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, and Edmund Pellegrino and David Thomasma, The Virtues in Medical Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) -- phronesis has come to be regarded, by several writers, as the defining trait of a good physician. 27 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Aristoteles, Nikomachische Ethik VI: Herausgegeben und übersetzt von Hans-Georg Gadamer (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1998). 178

reference to phronesis, since Aristotle’s main purpose in developing this concept is that the application of abstract principles in the field of practical, ethical knowledge is insufficient. Indeed, the appropriation of phronesis can be taken as a critique of the idea that the profession of bioethics is at all possible, if “bioethicist” is taken to mean a person who has specialized, theoretical knowledge in medical ethics -- knowledge that is not based on practical experience. Medical ethics cannot only be “epistemic”; it must also be “phronetic.” Gadamerian phronetic hermeneutics of medicine will, in this regard, join an everloudening chorus of criticism directed against applied ethics as conceptualized and carried out during the last two decades in the field of medicine.28 The favorite target of this criticism is Tom Beauchamp’s and James Childress’s Principles of Biomedical Ethics, a work that has done much to foster the image of medical ethics as a rather mechanical practice.29 The view of the authors is that clinical decisions should be made in accordance with four fundamental ethical principles: do good, do not harm, respect autonomy, and be just. On closer inspection, all four of these principles are seen to require philosophical theories for the explication of their fundamental concepts; in addition and needless to say, there is no neutral way of balancing these four theory-laden principles. Therefore, the prima facie principles do not save us the trouble of devising a personal ethics that will allow us to choose between different views that cannot be substantiated in any neutral or objective way. The authors of the book are of course aware of these problems and do not regard their book as a road map leading to the only right decision in every difficult situation; rather, they want to advocate a way of starting to think systematically about ethical dilemmas encountered in the clinic. Sadly enough, this is not always the way their book has been received in the field of bioethics.

The Phenomenology of Health and Sickness Let us now return to Gadamer’s late work The Enigma of Health. How does Gadamer himself address the issues of medical ethics? I would say that he does so in at least two separate yet interconnected ways, neither of which bears much resemblance to mainstream work on the contemporary bioethical scene. The first of these approaches consists precisely in going back to ancient philosophy and Aristotle. His discussion of Aristotelian themes and concepts is very similar to the approach we already find in Truth and Method and other works of his, except for one thing: he now explicitly addresses medical practice (Heilkunst), and not only practice in general. Gadamer makes the point that medical practice -- in its ancient as well as in its contemporary form -never “makes” anything in the sense of techne, but rather helps to re-establish a healthy balance which has been lost. Medical practice therefore is closer to phronesis than to techne: Techne is that knowledge which constitutes a specific and tried ability in the context of producing things. It is related from the very beginning to the sphere of production, and it is from this sphere that it first arose. ... Now within the parameters of a concept

28

Three main critical voices are: Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1989); Pellegrino and Thomasma, The Virtues in Medical Practice, and Richard M. Zaner, Ethics and the Clinical Encounter (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988). 29 Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 179

of ‘art’ which still stands before the threshold of what we call ‘science,’ it is obvious that the art of healing occupies an exceptional and problematic position. For here there is no ‘work’ produced by art, and no ‘artificial’ product. Here we cannot speak of a material which is already given in the last analysis by nature, and from which something new emerges by being brought into an artfully conceived form. On the contrary, it belongs to the essence of the art of healing that its ability to produce is an ability to re-produce and re-establish something. This signifies a special modification of what ‘art’ means, and one which is unique to the knowledge and practice of the physician.30 We should acknowledge that health is certainly a rather special thing to produce, compared to, say, shoes, loaves of bread, or buildings. Indeed, according to Aristotle -as well as to Plato, Hippocrates and other ancient philosophers -- health is not something that the doctor can bring about by himself, but something that can only be brought about by the doctor helping nature heal itself. Health is a self-restoring balance, and what the doctor does is to provide the means by which a state of equilibrium can re-establish itself by its own powers. Gadamer’s aim is to investigate the ancient philosophy of medicine in order to find guidance for contemporary medical practice. This is not (only) a nostalgic appeal for a premodern, “humane” medicine, which was not dominated and controlled by technoscience, but rather a strategy that rests, on Gadamer’s insistence, upon the importance of Greek philosophy for our contemporary thinking and our contemporary way of life. We need to address and make explicit this influence in order to elucidate the structure and goals of contemporary medical practice, just as we need to do so in order to elucidate the structure and goals of the Geisteswissenschaften. The reason for this is indeed that modern medical practice is not applied medical science only, but a hermeneutic activity, which envelops the theories and technologies of science.31 The second way chosen by Gadamer, in The Enigma of Health, for addressing medical practice philosophically, is the way of phenomenology. Phenomena central to clinical practice, such as death, life, body and soul, anxiety, freedom and health, are analyzed by Gadamer for the most part in accordance with the phenomenological framework developed by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit. We have already confirmed the importance of Heidegger’s philosophy for Gadamer in Truth and Method, and the same holds good for The Enigma of Health. Since the phenomenological hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer is itself firmly rooted in Aristotelian patterns of thought, the marriage between the historical, philological approach and the phenomenological attitude in The Enigma of Health should come as no surprise at all. What might be more surprising is that Gadamer relies on the pattern of understanding developed in Truth and Method to such a small extent, when analyzing the dialogue essential to medical practice. He focuses, instead, upon the phenomenon that is central to the goal of clinical practice: health. Since this goal is what distinguishes medicine from other hermeneutic activities (which have other goals), it seems in many 30

Gadamer, The Enigma of Health, 32. “‘Techne’ ist jenes Wissen, das ein bestimmtes, seiner selbst sicheres Können im Zusammenhang eines Herstellens ausmacht. Es ist von vornherein auf Herstellenkönnen bezogen und aus diesem Bezug erwachsen. [...] Innerhalb eines solchen Begriffs von “Kunst”, der vor der Schwelle zu dem steht, was wir “Wissenschaft” nennen, nimmt nun offenbar die Heilkunst eine exzeptionelle und problematische Stellung ein. Hier gibt es kein Werk, das durch Kunst hergestellt und künstlich ist. Hier kann man nicht von einem Material reden, das zuletzt in der Natur vorgegeben ist und aus dem etwas Neues wird, indem es in eine kunstvoll ersonnene Form gebracht wird. Zum Wesen der Heilkunst gehört vielmehr, dass ihr Herstellenkönnen ein Wiederherstellenkönnen ist. Dadurch kommt in das Wissen und Tun des Arztes eine nur ihm eigene Modifikation dessen, was hier “Kunst” heisst.” Gadamer, Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit, 51-52. 31 Svenaeus, The Hermeneutics of Medicine and the Phenomenology of Health, part 3. 180

ways a promising way to go. It is also an original way to approach questions of medical ethics, which are seldom related in any substantive way to a theory of health. Central to Gadamer’s analysis of the concept of health is the thought that health is not simply synonymous with the absence of any disease (i.e., of pathological states or processes affecting the biological organism). Health has a phenomenological structure in itself, as a certain way of being-in-the-world: So what genuine possibilities stand before us when we are considering the question of health? Without doubt it is part of our nature as living beings that our conscious selfawareness remains largely in the background so that our enjoyment of good health is constantly concealed from us. Yet despite its hidden character health none the less manifests itself in a general feeling of well-being. It shows itself above all where such a feeling of well-being means we are open to new things, ready to embark on new enterprises and, forgetful of ourselves, scarcely notice the demands and strains which are put on us. This is what health is. ... We need only reflect that it is quite meaningful to ask someone ‘Do you feel ill?’ but that it would border on the absurd to ask someone ‘Do you feel healthy?’ Health is not a condition that one introspectively feels in oneself. Rather, it is a condition of being involved, of being in the world, of being together with one’s fellow human beings, of active and rewarding engagement in one’s everyday tasks.32 In many ways the phenomenon of illness seems to be far more concrete and easy to get hold of than the phenomenon of health. When we are ill, life is often dominated by feelings of meaninglessness, helplessness, pain, nausea, fear, dizziness, or disability. Health, in contrast, effaces itself in an enigmatic way (the dual meaning of the German Verborgenheit). It seems to be the absence of every feeling of being ill, the state or process which we are in when everything is running smoothly, flowing in its usual way and without hindrance. The conceptual background for Gadamer’s analysis of health is here undoubtedly Heidegger’s phenomenology of everyday human existence found in Division 1 of Sein und Zeit, although Heidegger himself never addresses health and sickness there. Another important source of inspiration for Gadamer’s analysis is ancient health theory. Theories of health in antiquity were built around various conceptions of balance and harmony, the most famous and influential of which was the Hippocratic doctrine of balance between the four bodily fluids -- blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile.33 In classical Greece, this balance between fluids or other elements (such as air, water, fire and earth) in the human body was thought to mirror the order of the entire world. Man was seen as a microcosmos, built according to the same principles as the order of all things -- as the order of the kosmos.

32

Gadamer, The Enigma of Health, 112-113. “Welche Möglichkeiten haben wir dann eigentlich, wenn es sich um Gesundheit handelt? Es liegt ganz unzweifelhaft in der Lebendigkeit unserer Natur, dass die Bewusstheit sich von sich selbst zurückhält, so dass Gesundheit sich verbirgt. Trotz aller Verborgenheit kommt sie aber in einer Art Wohlgefühl zutage, und mehr noch darin, dass wir vor lauter Wohlgefühl unternehmungsfreudig, erkenntnisoffen und selbstvergessen sind und selbst Strapazen und Anstrengungen kaum spüren – das ist Gesundheit. […] Mann mache es sich nur bewusst, dass es zwar sinnvoll ist zu fragen: “Fühlen Sie sich krank?” Aber es wäre fast lächerlich, wenn einer einen fragte: “Fühlen Sie sich gesund?” Gesundheit ist eben überhaupt nicht ein Sich-Fühlen, sondern ist Da-Sein, In-der-Welt-Sein, Mitden-Menschen-Sein, von den eigenen Aufgaben des Lebens tätig oder freudig erfüllt sein.” Gadamer, Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit, 143-144. 33 Oswei Temkin, The Double Face of Janus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 181

Gadamer’s approach, however, is not principally tied to the metaphysical biology and cosmology of Greek thought; rather, it thematizes the notion of a self-establishing healthy equilibrium in a phenomenological manner. That is, it seeks to analyze health and sickness by investigating the experiences of these states in everyday life, and not by invoking biology or physiology (in either their ancient or their modern form). Thus the analysis of health is placed on a lifeworld level and takes into account not only the absence of detectable biological disease, but also the concrete being-in-the-world of the patient, which includes thoughts, feelings and actions. I have carried on with such a phenomenological analysis of health and illness myself, in other works, an analysis contrasting homelike (healthy) and un-homelike (ill) modes of being-in-the-world.34

Health and Authenticity In what way does a phenomenological analysis of health bring us closer to phronesis as a key concept for medical ethics? In what way do the two roads travelled by Gadamer in The Enigma of Health meet? Precisely by defining the goal of clinical practice as something dependent on the individual patient. If health is to be understood in terms of beingin-the-world, and not only in terms of biomedical data, then the doctor needs to develop an understanding of the patient’s thoughts, feelings and lifeworld predicaments, in order to carry out his profession. He needs to address the questions around what makes a good life and around the meaning of life for this particular person. This is food for thought for medical ethics. The idea that ethical theories could somehow be added as a “non-medical” part to the analysis of the clinical situation is shown to be illusory, when health itself is analyzed in the same terms as good living. But a healthy life, as the goal of clinical practice, can surely not be the same thing as a good life in itself. There is more to good living than health, and a good life may be attainable even by someone who is not healthy. This assertion holds true even when health is analyzed as something over and above the mere absence of disease -- that is, when it is analyzed phenomenologically. Thus the emphasis on phronesis calls for a phenomenological distinction between a healthy life and a good life -- a distinction, which to my mind is not addressed by Gadamer in any consistent way in The Enigma of Health. Health is an enigmatic thing (die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit), but so, indeed, is good living. Aristotle’s conceptualization of a good life as human flourishing (eudaimonia), in the Nicomachean Ethics, is tied up with his analysis of the moral and intellectual virtues. If man, who is a social and an intellectual creature, is to be able to flourish, he needs to cultivate the virtues, which are present in him as potential forms waiting to be developed. This analysis represents an attempt to find objective criteria for good living. Modern philosophical theories about a good life (or “happiness,” as it is more often termed) are as a rule far more individualistic in nature.35 Utilitarianism, for example, in both its hedonistic and preference forms, leaves to the individual the question of settling what is pleasurable for him. As Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out in his influential study After Virtue, this conception of autonomy leads to a peculiar, modern form of relativistic nihilism, which has its roots not only in Nietzsche, but also in liberalism: I choose what is good for me, and the only justification for this choice is indeed that it is made by me. Autonomy is in itself 34

See Fredrik Svenaeus, “Das Unheimliche – Towards a Phenomenology of Illness,” in Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 3 (2000): 3-16; and “The Body Uncanny – Further Steps Towards a Phenomenology of Illness,” in Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 3 (2000): 125-137. 35 For a survey, see Martin Seel, Versuch über die Form des Glücks (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995). 182

a rather weak foundation for ethical theory, especially if it is divorced from its Kantian roots in the categorical imperative.36 I believe phenomenology opens up possibilities for a more substantial theory of what makes a good life than liberalism and utilitarianism, just as it opens up possibilities for a more substantial theory of health than medical science by itself does; but these possibilities need to be surveyed in a systematic manner, and they have problems of their own. It is also essential to realize that the critique of certain modern theories of a good life does not render the key concepts of these theories vacuous, just as the critique of a notion of medical practice as merely applied science is not a critique of medical science in itself. Freedom of choice and pleasure are important for us if we are to achieve good living, just as the treatment of disease is of the uttermost importance in the struggle for health. Authenticity is the road most often travelled in phenomenological and hermeneutic attempts to address the question of good living.37 It has its roots in Heidegger’s philosophy (ultimately in Heidegger’s reading of Kierkegaard and other Christian thinkers), and it has been the main source of inspiration for existentialist renderings of the meaning of existence, such as those found in Sartre or Camus. Authenticity, in its existentialist form as the solution of ethical dilemmas, tends to suffer from the same weaknesses as the liberal tradition’s concept of autonomy. According to these doctrines, the only criterion for a good choice is that it is my choice (although “my choice” would mean different things for an existentialist and a libertarian, since their philosophical anthropologies are indeed very different). If the concept of authenticity is to offer a substantive theory of good living, then it needs to be thicker, in the sense of incorporating intersubjectivity -- that is, in the sense of formulating the concept of a good life with others. Indeed, Heidegger’s conceptualization of authenticity -- as a bravely solitary being-towards-death -- has been criticized on many occasions precisely for its lack of this kind of thickness.38 With this remark we seem to be back with Aristotle and the philosopher’s attempts at analyzing philia (friendship) in the communal life of the polis, found in the Nicomachean Ethics. For Aristotle it is here, in philia, that phronesis has its roots, as do human flourishing and happiness (eudaimonia). But we are also back with Gadamer. As I mentioned above in introducing the main thoughts of Truth and Method, authentic understanding in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is a shared dialogic process of seeking the truth together, in and through language. This process might be taken as a model for a good life, a kind of ethics. Such a concept of good living, however, still needs to be differentiated from the concept of health, since they represent different aspects and different qualities of our being-in-the-world. Authenticity sets higher standards than health, and it can hardly in itself be the goal of medical practice, although health and authenticity are clearly related.

Concluding Thoughts Gadamer is hardly the first philosopher in the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition to approach the issues of health and sickness. But the attempts made for developing theories of health and sickness on a phenomenological basis have most often been restricted to the areas of psychiatry and psychology; somatic ailments have either been seen as the territory

36

Jos V. M. Welie, In the Face of Suffering: The Philosophical-Anthropological Foundations of Clinical Ehtics (Omaha, Nebr.: Creighton University Press, 1998). 37 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 38 Jean-Luc Nancy, Être singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996). 183

of biology and physiology, or they have been viewed as psychosomatic symptoms, by a good number of the phenomenologically inspired psychiatrists.39 There are some exceptions to this selective focus on psychiatry in the history of the phenomenology of medicine, phenomenological attempts in which the body is given a more explicit and independent place. No references, however, are given by Gadamer in The Enigma of Health to thinkers such as F. J. J. Buytendijk and Erwin Straus, and this is perhaps not surprising given the informal character of the work -- many of the papers were originally written for oral presentations. Nevertheless, I feel that Gadamer’s many ingenious hints and examples in The Enigma of Health need to be incorporated in a systematic analysis of the living body (Leiblichkeit) and its being-in-the-world in health and sickness.40 In this future project, links could be established with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (Buytendijk’s major source of inspiration) and/or to the Daseinsanalysen of Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss.41 The thesis that medical practice is a hermeneutic activity in the Gadamerian sense of a dialogical encounter between reader (doctor) and text (patient) on the way to truth (about the person and his lacking health), tends to expose itself to exactly the same kind of critical questions that were put to Gadamer by Jürgen Habermas and others, following the publication of Wahrheit und Methode in the sixties.42 One must take into account the embeddedness of clinical activity in the political context, which has a major influence on the structure of medicine. That analysis would have to be carried out by studying the interconnection between the more specific meaning patterns of clinical activity and the sociopolitical pattern of, for example, the organisation of health care and medical science. Interestingly, as we have seen above, Gadamer nurtures such a critical perspective by his roots in a Heideggerian phenomenology, which can be (and has been) developed as a critique of modern technology. Discussing the emergence of new psychopharmacological drugs, in a paper dated 1986, Gadamer writes: I am thinking, for example, of the world of modern psychiatric drugs. But I cannot separate this development from the general instrumentalization of the living body which also occurs in the world of modern agriculture, in the economy and in industrial

39

That the university of Heidelberg, the place where Gadamer spent the second half of his long life, has hosted some of the most prominent figures in this tradition of phenomenological psychiatry, such as Viktor von Weizsäcker and Wolfgang Blankenburg, is no doubt one of the reasons why Gadamer began approaching the themes of medicine and health in the sixties. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophische Lehrjahre: Eine Rückschau (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977). Weizsäcker, Blankenburg (and Jaspers) are mentioned by Gadamer in Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit, but without doubt he also knew the works of Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss and other key figures of this German tradition. See Herbert Spiegelberg, Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry: A Historical Introduction (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972). 40 Recently, American phenomenologists, prominently Drew Leder, Kay Toombs and Richard Zaner, have done important work in the phenomenology of medicine with an emphasis on the living body. For a survey see Kay Toombs, ed., Handbook of Phenomenology and Medicine (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001). 41 Another possible source of inspiration for future phenomenologies of health and sickness are the seminars conducted during the sixties by Heidegger, together with Boss and his students, which now have been published: Zollikoner Seminare (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1994). These seminars appear to be one of the very few places where Heidegger addresses not only health and sickness, but also embodiment (Leiblichkeit). Heidegger, otherwise reluctant to discuss the specific activities of everydayness, is here forced to address these themes in the presentation of his philosophy. The encounter between the famous philosopher and the doctors offers very stimulating reading, since Heidegger (even more than in his lecture courses) has to mobilize all his pedagogical skills in the face of questions asked by a philosophically untrained audience. 42 Karl-Otto Apel, ed., Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971). 184

research. What does it signify that such instrumentalization now defines what we are and what we are capable of achieving? Does this not also open up a new threat to human life? Is there not a terrifying challenge involved in the fact that through psychiatric drugs doctors are able not only to eliminate and deaden various organic disturbances, but also to take away from a person their own deepest distress and confusion? Here we cannot really speak of a simple ‘taking away’ as if we were in total control.43 Is Prozac the right answer to sadness and depression in the twenty-first century? Or is it, indeed, only the updated form of Heidegger’s das Man, an inauthentic, distorted, tranquillized form of life, in which we are made to comply with the rules and norms of “the they”?44 Modern medicine opens up fascinating avenues for phenomenological analysis, and nowhere do the results of modern science enter the strained social-political field of our time as much as within this realm, as Gadamer says in the opening quote of my paper. In this endeavour we can benefit greatly from dialoguing with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s path-breaking work.

43

Gadamer, The Enigma of Health, 77. “Ich denke an die Welt der neuen Psychopharmaka. Ich kann dies neue Können nicht ganz von all den Instrumentalisierungen von Leiblichkeit in der modernen Agrikultur, Wirtschaft und Industrie ablösen. Was bedeutet es, dass wir dies alles sind und können? Das bringt eine ganz neue Angriffigkeit in das menschliche Leben. Ist es nicht ein geradezu ungeheurer Angriff, wenn auf dem Wege über die Psychopharmaka nicht irgendwelche organische Störungen behoben und betäubt werden, sondern der Person die tiefste eigene Verstimmtheit und Verstörtheit weggenommen wird – wo doch von einfachem Wegnehmen, als ob wir auch dies beherrschten, nicht gut die Rede sein kann?” Gadamer, Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit, 103-104. 44 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 175-180. 185

IV.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOMENTS IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION

1.

THE HERMENEUTIC-PHENOMENOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF HISTORICITY IN VIEW OF THE CRISIS OF THE NOTION OF TRADITION

Dean Komel

The fact that being a European as such constitutes a fundamental value and a goal of the life-world (Lebenswelt) of the majority of nations that today inhabit the geographical region of Europe, was significantly influenced by the evolution of phenomenology1 throughout the twentieth century. Even atrocities such as those committed during the two world wars and the most recent Balkan war cannot undermine the credibility of this lifeworld. However, one needs to question whether phenomenology, during its century of evolution, has achieved an appropriate critical analysis of the goal value of Europe, as well as of all the concepts which inhere to this value: “culture,” “sciences,” “arts,” “history,” “politics,” “freedom of religion,” etc. In order to be able to give an appropriate answer to these questions, even if only approximately, it is necessary to elaborate a special insight into the cultural dynamics of the twentieth century, and above all, to draw a broad review of the findings within the modern and contemporary phenomenological fields. Of course, I do not anticipate that I will be able to deal with these tasks rapidly. If we accept the following thesis, according to which the development of contemporary phenomenology intrinsically defines the European life-world and its set of values, which developed itself alongside history, then this once-allowed phenomenological fact requires a systematic reflection on the typology of historicity as an active agent that is immanent in itself. In other words: if phenomenology took a decisive part in the formation of the different meanings of historical culture and if it wants to carry this task even further, then it is indeed imperative for phenomenology to develop its own sense of historicity. In order to achieve this, I will try to discern a specific hermeneutic complement of phenomenology, both in the textual and the methodical sense.

1

Research in modern phenomenology nowadays extends its activities to several fields of knowledge: to philosophy, sociology, cultural sciences, aesthetic theory, theology, religion, psychology and theory of science. “The existence of phenomenology belongs undoubtedly to figures of thought of this last century, which it accompanied from its beginnings. In 1900 Edmund Husserl made a decisive breakthrough with his Logical Investigations. “Something was born, which would be later on called ‘phenomenology,’ a fact that took its founder by surprise, as usually happens with every nascent theory.” Bernhard Waldenfels, Einführung in die Phänomenologie (München: Fink, 1992), 9. The instantaneous graphic display of something thought to be concrete represents the main characteristic of the phenomenological research method, which takes into account both the objective and the subjective aspects of knowledge. The breakthrough of phenomenology in the first half of the twentieth century, as initiated by Husserl, Scheler and Heidegger, is directly linked to the modern crisis of the notion of man as its own point of reference. Therefore, the phenomenological method only revealed its complete validity through the “post-modern” cultural movements of the last decades. The very fact that the most significant representatives of phenomenology can also be found outside of Germany, (e.g., in France with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Ricoeur, in Italy with Enzo Paci, in Spain with Ortega y Gasset, in Russia with Schpet, in Poland with Ingarden, in the Czech Republic with Patoèka, in Slovenia with Veber, etc.) indicates explicitly the pan-European character of phenomenology. In the foreground of the actual discussions surrounding phenomenology, the following subjects come across more notably: mainly, the confrontation of the phenomenological method with structural, analytical and socio-critical methods, but also its contradistinction with the European intellectual tradition, the various intercultural perspectives, democracy, individuality, with social environments, with religious and artistic wisdom, with the role of technology and the sciences in our modern society. In the effort to overcome a contemporary rationality, all of these researches are intrinsically bound by the attempt to develop a new type of thinking, which would not only take into consideration the multifaceted aspects of the notion of man as its own subjective point of reference but also in relation with its cultural and natural surroundings. 189

Therefore, I would like to concentrate on the preparation of this proposed “hermeneutic complement.”2 The term “hermeneutics” should be taken here more particularly in the sense that phenomenology primarily constitutes itself by its own active historical possibility, i.e., by handing itself over and therein achieving meaningfulness. I thus think that phenomenology, in its actual state of development, has so far not been successful in producing this, although Husserl had conceived phenomenology as the fulfillment of the historical aspirations of every philosophical tradition. Thus, it is also the task of phenomenology to point out the constitutive role of philosophy, which is historically certified, with regard to the comprehension of culture and for European intercultural communication. In order to clarify this point of view, the project of a hermeneutic phenomenology must continue its course toward the recognition of a historicity specific to the field of philosophy. In addition, hermeneutic phenomenology must not be allowed to rest on any general theories belonging to historical researches. In other words, the hermeneutic supplement of phenomenology would lead to a conversion of phenomenology in its active historicity. Only such an approach would make possible a reflection which would simultaneously take into consideration the unquestionable results that phenomenology and hermeneutics achieved during the twentieth century, and which would allow the creation of a new viewpoint on the basis of a critical discussion on the results cited above. In turn, this point of view could provoke a gathering of the cultural and intercultural “realities” of the European life-world. Our post-modern experience of these “realities” is itself controversial, since it characterizes, on one side, the trend of being connected to a “world,” which from an external point of view was mainly enabled by the development of information technology. On the other side, however, we perceive the tendency toward the acknowledgment of the differences and the dissimilarity essentially in terms used by cultural traditions. Obviously, the two tendencies generate a conflict, which will not necessarily remain idle. On the contrary, it would be unproductive and even harmful to want to suppress this conflict in the hope of achieving a counterfeited harmony. Since its beginnings in the ancient Greek world, philosophy has concentrated on the task of bringing the relationship of the One and the Many, of Unity and Diversity to language. In this respect, Husserl’s phenomenology has reached new heights with his theory of the “intentionality” of consciousness, i.e., each consciousness is a consciousness of something. In others words, despite the different experiences, languages, and values of our individual consciousness, there is nonetheless a common world in which we can communicate not only about what is universal, but also about what is singular. From a phenomenological point of view, this means that everything, which is somehow given to the consciousness, is given on the basis of our transcendentality in the world, the beingin-the-world. Therefore, the philosophical “unity of the world” is achievable only through a transcendental project. However, this project should not develop itself through the standardization and the simplification of differences, but through the specific historical dynamism of these differences. The unity of the world derives from the differences of the

2

Cf the hermeneutic view of the “complement” in Heidegger’s lectures The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics World, Finitude, Solitude (WS 1929/30): »Der Entwurf ist in sich ergänzend im Sinne des vorwerfenden Bildens einer »im Ganzen«, in dessen Bereich ausgebreitet ist eine ganz bestimmte Dimension möglicher Verwirklichung. Jeder Entwurf enthebt zum Möglichen und bringt in eins damit zurück in die ausgebreitete Breite des von ihm her Ermöglichten.« Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit, GA29/30, ed. Otto Saame und Ina Saame-Speidel, 3d ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004), 528. 190

cultural worlds and, as such, turns back again into these world-cultures. There is not one culture, but there are different cultures, which we can indeed experience from a perspective on the world which is complementary. We would like to show that a certain flexibility of interpretation is inherent in this uniform point of view. It also constitutes the specific historicity of philosophy and defines the philosophical sense of tradition. The philosophical notion of tradition (Latin translation: to endow, to hand over, to bestow) involves the aspect of a transcendental passing-over between the Unity and Diversity of the world. In recent times the concept of tradition itself has become one of the most doubtful concepts, not only in philosophy, but also in the humanities in general. Indeed, the questionability of knowledge regarding what is human as such emerges through that concept. Postmodernists increasingly tend to move on toward a post-tradition. This does not mean that we don’t appreciate tradition anymore, but on the contrary, tradition is everywhere held out as either an archetype or as a substitute. It essentially deals with the fact that man understands his own nature less and less on the basis of the events of tradition, in such a way that humanity, as a historical outcome, will transfer “one person into the other person.” Thus, the integrative idea of the human being has not only perished, but the differences between humans are also disappearing ever more rapidly. A conviction is being created to the effect that the transmission of the nature of the human being and of humanity, in terms of the historical tradition, can, and should be replaced by a technological reproduction of humanity. Everything points to the fact that this reproduction, which includes the biological and also the cognitive constituents of human beings, will take undreamt of proportions in the future. Thus, one must raise the only legitimate question that comes to one’s mind: what brings along this progress for a humanity that formed itself through, and within, tradition? Does that represent humanity’s end? Thus, talking about the “historical ends” already assumes a certain understanding of historicity. It would be counterproductive to try to vigorously defend this understanding with a tradition, and with concepts that took form through it: history, culture, and the humanities. Doing so would not amount to a philosophical defense of tradition at all, but only to build an ideological refuge for a humanistic traditionalism. At this point, one must pose the following question, which seems to be the most adequate to us: whether this radical way of putting tradition into question does not force us, rather, to consider carefully the significance of tradition. Today everyone can bear witness to the catastrophic social consequences brought about by the ideologically directed abolition of tradition within “real socialism.” What if “tradition” still contained a concealed side in addition to its bared and often criticized side, which could assert itself precisely during a period of radical criticism of the notion of tradition? Thus, the latter already seems to represent a meaningful task for philosophy, in connection with its phenomenological-hermeneutic element. Philosophy thus develops its own notion of tradition in the course of its intermediation between Unity and Diversity. One can observe the historical effect of the latter through the fact that philosophy can express itself in different languages that aren’t necessarily European, without losing its universal aspect.3 In our century, the latter affirmation is especially valid for phenomenological philosophy, which was created out of the idea of a philosophy that would refer itself directly to the

3

See also Edmund Husserl, “La filosofia come lingua europea,” in idem, Crisi e rinascita della cultura europea, ed. Renato Cristin (Venezia: Marsilio, 1999), 7-26. 191

classical Greek tradition of thinking.4 At the same time, however, phenomenology was also capable of confronting problems inherent in the crisis of this idea. Just as the notion of philosophy constitutes itself within phenomenology and simultaneously is also dropped, it requires a hermeneutic reconstruction of its own acting historicity as its complement. In order to be able to pursue our investigation of the concern uncovered above and, more particularly, with regard to the crisis surrounding the notion of tradition, the choice of methodology cannot and must not be made at random. On the contrary, this controversy, this crisis in itself, should be fruitful for finding our way, especially if we remain within the transcendental project of historicity. It is important to underline that by doing so, we did not determine the character of this “transcendentality” in advance. It has absolutely nothing to do with a transcendentality of something which would exist somewhere beyond the world. This transcendentality is distinct by its worldliness, in the sense of the transient quality of the Unity and of Diversity. Even in this case, however, we would like to point out that it doesn’t allude to the experience of the world as an entity existing in itself. The world is unambiguously a human world. (I would like to mention in passing that the German word “Welt” [world] means generation, a life span (Menschenalter), at least according to is etymology.5) Strictly speaking, a world lacking humans could not exist at all. Even if such a world existed, it would in some way have to relate to the existence of human beings. As a result of the way in which my initial thesis was announced, according to which phenomenological philosophy, or rather the phenomenological movement, is decisively bound to the cultural events of the twentieth century, the following conception could ensue, namely that we are dealing with a practical development of philosophy. Thus, it is as if philosophy had abandoned its uncorrupted theoretical plane and had passed over to the practical level of concrete action in the world, as if concepts such as world view (Weltanschauung), ethics, politics, technology, etc., were at play here. The conception of practical experience, and of practicality in philosophy, is irrelevant to phenomenology. Hans-Georg Gadamer, who fashioned his philosophical hermeneutics in Truth and Method on the foundations of the phenomenological insights of Heidegger and Husserl, has convincingly demonstrated that the concept of practical experience is already inherent in the sphere of the purest philosophical theory. It is another question, however, to ask whether philosophy, as a theory, is conscious of this and whether it takes this observation into account. In addition to this practical aspect, we could add that there is a poetic or creative dimension that is also inherent in philosophy. Out of the philosophical systematization of the whole body of knowledge into a theoretical, practical and poetic division, which originated from Aristotle and preserves its relevance to this day, primarily because of Kant, we still revert to dealing with the relations between philosophy and culture as well as the feasibility of a cultural hermeneutics. We must take into account the fact that Aristotle gives deeper reasons for such a classification, in the sixth volume of the Nicomachean Ethics, in which he develops his understanding of the ontological specificity of human beings as an essential part of practical experience. This suggests clearly enough that one should look at (and into) the human beings themselves, insofar as they philosophize, in order to find the reason for the practical development of philosophy. Aristotle knew that philosophizing wasn’t an arbitrary or incidental occupation. We could also assert that only this “occupation with philosophy” constitutes somehow the essence of human beings, in other words, their culture.

4

Cf. with the phenomenological observations of Klaus Held in La fenomenologia del mondo e i greci (Milano: Guerini, 1995) and in many other essays. 5 Cf. Duden, vol. 7, Etymologie (Mannheim: Dudenverlag, 1963), 760. 192

Philosophy does not merely participate externally in the process humanity’s development, of that which is instrumental in the ‘becoming’ of humanity (at least as regards European humanity). A person becomes the “I” on the basis of the philosophical question: who am I? This question accompanies our everyday activities, sometimes explicitly, but for the most part implicitly. It is impossible for me to give a definitive answer to this question, since I respond to it and can only answer it while becoming what I am. I must somehow go beyond myself, transcend myself, not in an arbitrary direction but rather exactly up to my “I am.” The factual and existential concern of my own “I am” pushes me beyond my everyday experience, beyond my self-knowledge. I try to “take refuge” in the arts, religion and philosophy. Every transcendental project for itself -- as a product of a certain culture -- and all these concepts together form the concept of tradition, which we accept or not, and which decides the way in which we will comprehend ourselves. If we argue around this line, then the following objection quickly overtakes us, namely that we want to adopt a transcendental and speculative procedure, on which basis the philosophy of “I” in German idealism principally developed, instead of using an empirically verifiable approach in order to address the question of ‘mankind.’ To some extent, we can find this question embedded in Husserl’s transcendental philosophy. The dispute between empiricism and transcendentalism still characterizes the actual philosophical discussion about the nature of humans, not only in its Anglo-Saxon expression, but also within its Continental aspect. This dispute, however, does not even come anywhere near to a sensible answer to the question: Who am I? The question regarding man cannot be theoretically tracked down appropriately in this way, inasmuch as we pursue our mental states or lower ourselves down to their level from the higher entity of a supra-empirical “I.” In my factual life situation, I am never a “mental state” or an “abstract I.” These are only theoretical constructions. In theory, the question “Who am I?” is only attainable within one’s life experience. This life experience is, phenomenologically speaking, the experience of the living-world (Lebenswelt). The question “Who am I?” is switched by its being close to the living-world, i.e., it directly belongs to a possible fulfillment in one’s life in this world. The ‘becoming’ of man, regarding the human being’s reply to his or her self-questioning, cannot be confined to the simple affirmation of the “I” and of consciousness, as it really represents the affirmation of the world, which presents itself to human beings as the answer to their question. This is one of the most basic “theoretical” premises of phenomenology in Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, Fink and Gadamer. As a result, phenomenology developed into a “theory” in the sense of a theoretical anticipation of the practical experience which remains close to the living-world. Thus, phenomenology affirms the ‘becoming’ of humans in the world. At this stage, however, we meet a major problem. The negation of this affirmation, barely noticeable, sneaks past the philosophical will and the demands of phenomenology as a rigorously constructed, wee-grounded philosophy of the living-world. Its outcome, i.e., results such as political totalitarianism, the Cold War, nuclear threats, global environmental pollution, etc., confers upon this negation a discernible, almost tangible magnitude. The negation of the human living-world is no longer a mere specter, issuing from some philosophical nightmare. The “European nihilism” à la Nietzsche, the European humanity à la Husserl, the forgetfulness of Being à la Heidegger, these are components of the reality, which we live and experience. As such, we must partake in it. However, the question remains as to how this negation, which we embody, is to be understood. We could dismiss it, put it aside and behave as if it had never been asked and as if it was nothing to us. By acting thus, we appear to prefer avoiding the possibility of becoming discountenanced by it. One can, indeed, notice a certain uneasiness among humans! 193

This uneasiness in human beings, which involves the negation of the living-world, has inspired Max Scheler to observe, very eloquently, that we have never before accumulated so much knowledge about humankind in the midst of such concurrent ignorance about itself.6 Scheler has worked out the details of this statement in order to ground his project of a philosophical anthropology. However, one can ask whether a philosophical anthropology can really rise up to the dimension of the historical ‘becoming’ of man. The idea of a philosophical anthropology is not only problematic in terms of its subject matter, i.e., human beings, but also as to whether its method should be a philosophic one. Moreover, its historical genesis and its development are problematic, given that there is no generally accepted statement on when it was recognized as a philosophical discipline. There are three different theses, which I would like to mention here: a) -

Philosophical anthropology arose when man appeared to himself as a human being. However, this moment of initial self-contemplation is not historically ascertainable. Moreover, it is not clear what is meant by it, as it is often interwoven with a religious theory of the genesis of man.

b) -

Philosophical anthropology definitively formed itself up as an independent philosophical discipline as recently as the twentieth century. Amongst the protagonists of this newly-formed philosophical movement, one usually mentions Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, Ernst Cassirer, Arnold Gehlen, to cite only a few. At the same time, the ‘becoming’ of philosophical anthropology will explicitly be associated with the crisis of the modern self-awareness of man.

c) -

As a specific philosophical discipline, the latter is an entirely modern phenomenon. In fact, it has acquired this specificity with the emergence of the notion of man as a subject. Thereafter, the ‘becoming’ of philosophical anthropology coincides with the endeavor to found philosophy itself on an anthropological basis. This attempt began in the second half of the nineteenth century.7

We must still be confronted with another question: in the end, in what sense is philosophical anthropology philosophical? What differentiates it from other kinds of anthropology, e.g., from cultural anthropology, social anthropology, or from anthropology as a medical discipline?8 According to the long-standing definition of Aristotle, philosophy as such should investigate beings (Seiendes) as a whole, but not according to Kant, who claimed that one should actually analyze the conditions of the possibility of knowledge. The purpose of philosophy is to give a description of the general, not the particular, which signifies the essence and not merely the occurrence. Accordingly, philosophical anthropology should also study man as a whole and not only his biological 6

Cf. Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9 (Bern/ München: Francke, 1975), 11. In his essay Mensch und Geschichte, Scheler writes: »Wir sind in der ungefähr zehntausendjährigen Geschichte das Erste Zeitalter, in dem sich der Mensch völlig und restlos ‘problematisch’ geworden ist; in dem er nicht mehr weiß, was er ist, zugleich aber auch weiß, daß er es nicht weiß. Und nur indem man einmal mit allen Traditionen über diese Frage völlig tabula rasa zu machen gewillt ist und in äußerster methodischer Entfremdung und Verwunderung auf das Mensch gennante Wesen blicken lernt, wird man wieder zu haltbaren Einsichten gelangen können.« Ibid., 120. 7 Cf. Odo Marquard, Zur Geschichte des philosophischen Begriffs ‘Anthropologie’ seit dem Ende des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, in idem, Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1982), 213-249. 8 See Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, GA3, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991). 194

or his social nature. For this reason, the problem of the philosophical project is displaced from the transcendental level of a priori knowledge (Erkennen) to the level of the concept of Wesensschau, to use Edmund Husserl’s expression. At this point, however, we meet once again the problem that we discussed above: as the sciences of experience could always dispute the a priori philosophical access to man, philosophy could always reject its pleadings in favour of the a posteriori approach.9 It is impossible to abolish the dichotomy between the a priori and the a posteriori, as we tend to bind the two approaches together in man, by inventing a unifying structure to deal with it. It would be better to leave open this dichotomy between the a priori and the a posteriori and to let a structural resolution be attained by itself within this openness. This would also mean that our subject-matter, the nature of man, would remain an open problem. This point of view was put forward by one of the most notable representatives of twentieth century philosophical anthropology, Helmuth Plessner. He did not, however, manage to establish appropriate dynamics for such openness, which consequently remained a determining factor concerning the problem raised by the a priori quality of anthropological statements.10 Terms such as a priori and a posteriori, proteron and hysteron, do not only possess epistemological validity, but also and above all, a constitutive historical validity, as their linguistic origins already imply. The historical openness of the difference between an a priori and an a posteriori reaches deep into the interaction between man and philosophy itself. As such, it remains representative for the European type of human being, which pretends at the same time to be a universal anthropological type (“sciences,” “democracy,” “culturalism”). This interaction showed up originally in the Delphian dictum, gnoti seauthon, know thyself, namely in relation to beings as a whole, to their testimony.11 The appendix to this dictum (in relation to its totality) is essential, since we would otherwise completely misconceive the genuine philosophical dimension of this imperative. This self-knowledge is neither meant to be introspective, nor to be contemplative. It forces us to view the question of beings as a whole, i.e., the world, as an open question with regard to our own life. Thus, man becomes historically responsible vis-à-vis that question. Only in such a way can a theory of beings as such, and as a whole, embody simultaneously the highest experience and the highest fulfillment of human life. The dynamics of this fulfillment can be thought out according to the model of the twofold phenomenological openness, i.e., the apparentness of the world and the openness of man to this apparentness. This modifies substantially the epistemological scheme of the a priori and the a posteriori. The event of this openness would represent the meditative midway between the viewpoints of Unity and Diversity of the world. The world as a unitary apparentness would always simultaneously represent a different openness to man. Between both terms, “only” historicity has an effect, while an additional Unity would still not work. However, the event of this openness should be brought toward the notion of a hermeneutic complement of phenomenology. Representing the apparentness of the world and the openness of man, this double-sided openness stands for a renowned phenomenological theme. On that account, Husserl’s phenomenology formed itself as the correlative way of the contemplation of “that which

9

Cf. Ludwig Landgrebe Philosophische Anthropologie - eine empirische Wissenschaft?, in idem, Faktizität und Individuation: Studien zu den Grundfragen der Phänomenologie (Hamburg: Meiner, 1982), 1-20. 10 Cf. Helmuth Plessner, Der Aussagewert einer philosophischen Anthropologie, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), 380-399. 11 Cf. Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Der Gott von Delphie und die Humanitäts-Idee (Pfullingen: Neske, 1965). 195

appears in the way of its appearance,” as Husserl says, expressing the designation of this phenomenological notion. Phenomenology remains open to different implementations and transformations precisely for this reason, i.e., it is always open to a new and renewed characterization of that which appears within its appearance (des Erscheinenden in seinem Erscheinen). The experience of reality (the everyday, academic, artistic reality, etc.) forms itself within the interpretative possibilities, which can be historically concealed, or again still unrevealed, not yet overcome or surpassed, or even inaccessible. This dynamic openness within the possibility characterizes the living-world as such. In the term “living-world,” Husserl believes that he has found a grounding for the horizon of our experience. The a posteriori experience of historicity and the a priori critical experience of reason are encapsulated in this notion. By defining the world as a transcendental horizon, Husserl has simultaneously forced reason into its most extreme transcendental possibility, which surpasses all the other possible interpretations of the world opened to us. It is here that the boundaries of his phenomenology are set in relation to its own historicity, which auto-proclaims itself as a teleology of reason. So doing, we definitively shut the door that would give access to a historical openness “between” man and the world. We could assert the same with regard to Wilhelm Dilthey, who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, strove to elaborate a hermeneutic methodology for the humanities and for historical interpretation. Dilthey had great regard for Husserl’s theory of phenomenology and tried to integrate it into his Critique of Historical Reason. Dilthey also dealt with the over-determinedness of historicity on the basis of critical reason. Indeed, he asserted that only history could tell humans who they are. By asserting this, however, he didn’t mean the historicity of the inter-relation of the world and human beings, but rather world-history, which already assumes the openness of the world for humanity. Even if Dilthey did not rise to the level of transcendental reflection, in particular that which concerns the world as a subject to be discussed, as Husserl had done, Heidegger nevertheless kept Dilthey’s historical hermeneutics before his eyes and later challenged it with Husserl’s transcendental position. Strictly speaking, inasmuch as the experience of reality, or as Heidegger says, “the understanding of being,” relocated itself within the possibilities of interpretation, a finite historical thrownness within space (Spielraum) bears witness to these possibilities. The project of such a possibility cannot be brought to a uniform transcendental level. It must again and again be factually accepted as a pure possibility of the transcendence of beingin-the-world. On a philosophical level, the openness of man and of the world, which turns against itself, is undoubtedly grasped more radically on the basis of this “hermeneutics of facticity.” In turn, it also announces the Heideggerian use of the term “Dasein” for the being that we are ourselves, which is open to the world in its being. Heidegger understands the openness of the human being and the apparentness of the world on the basis of an ecstatically horizontal temporality, and on the basis of transcendental reason. Nevertheless, the openness of the world still remains locked up in finite temporality. That is to say that if time originally yielded itself out of the finite temporality of Dasein, one may ask then, whether it wouldn’t be appropriate to say that historicity -- insofar as it is not to be understood as the historical time of world history -- apportions itself beyond this finite temporality? Do we not thus open a possibility in which we could adequately think through what formed itself historically as “over-delivery,” i.e., as tradition? Does tradition not reach into our finiteness exactly when it encroaches upon it? It seems that Heidegger endorses a vanguard view of tradition, given that he conceives of historicity from the viewpoint of the finite temporality of Dasein. Accordingly, tradition must dissolve into its elements (phenomenological destruction), in order to be able then to arise once again out of the determinedness of finite existence. This would perhaps be 196

the predominant reference for the tradition of liberal education in the twentieth century. However, it does not need to be the only one, particularly since the kind of tradition represented by this liberal education has not yet been recognized fully as relevant.12 This also means that the situation concerning our thinking is still rather confused. In comparison to Heidegger, we don’t take the pure project of transcendence (the possibility of existence) as a prerequisite of the possibility of historicity and historical lore. We think that transcendence must be itself integrated into the understanding of tradition. The pure project of transcendence should be understood as a trans-dimension of tradition itself. Besides, it is here not a question of a transcendence of the transcendence, or of a transcendence about a transcendence, but of an openness, which occurs in itself (the world) and beyond itself (man) in the sense of active historicity. As we have previously established that the negativity which invades the living-world, cannot be heard from the position of transcendental reason, it is imperative for us not to apprehend this negativity on the basis of the “finiteness of the Dasein in us.” Thus we couldn’t agree, for example, with the much debated claim of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, who asserted that Heidegger has went right to the roots of nihilism as a spirit-historical negativity, with his thesis of the finiteness of Dasein. Nihilism no doubt does annihilate the finiteness of the human existence, as Heidegger argued in his Being and Time. But from the point of view of existential analytics it would not be possible, for instance, to interpret the phenomenon of the dehumanization of victims as an obvious cynicism of the totalitarian systems of our century, or again, as an audio-visual manipulation of the media, which latter seems quite inoffensive to us in comparison with the former example. In this context, we would still have to bear in mind how nihilism stands with the phenomenon of historicity in the epoch of the salutis gratia historical-being change in Heidegger’s thought after Being and Time, when Heidegger actually arrives at the roots of Nietzsche’s nihilism. We are confronted here with another problem. It seems that the historical negativity regulates at least the entire meaning of an era of being. Therein, tradition turns literally into nothingness. Heidegger interprets this an-nihiliation positively, in the sense of the consolidation of Being itself into nothingness. The question of such an appropriation of the philosophical tradition, as well as European humanity and here the efficient (auswirkend) historicity still remains open. Heidegger acts ambiguously toward tradition. He simultaneously approves and refuses it as the “end of history,” which here can be spontaneously justified in a post-modern situation (ie., after World War II). If we want to avoid discarding the tradition of European humanity in its philosophical tradition, be this elimination ideological, interpretative, or informative (which, strictly speaking, is against what Heidegger tries to achieve), then we must work out its access to itself appropriately. Husserl tried, with his Erneuerungsbemühungen, alongside Heidegger, who also tried, by reflecting on a new start for European humanity, with the aim of overcoming the crisis of the notion of tradition. Although they both failed, the fact that they persisted and dwelt on this subject forces us to try to figure out a new approach to the phenomena of historicity and tradition, out of the foundations on which they both labored. In doing so, we cannot allow ourselves to be led along a path which would aim for a modernistic pretension of a radical reformation, or for a post-modernistic pretension of starting all over and anew. A novel and clear understanding of the historical tradition is already leading us to a new and different historical concept of tradition.

12

Otherwise the decline in the teaching of Latin and Greek (in particular) would not be as advanced as it in fact is. 197

We can sense such a philosophical disposition also in Gadamer’s project of a philosophical hermeneutics, as expressed in his book Truth and Method, and in the essays that followed it. According to the thesis advanced by his most consistent interpreter, Jean Grondin, Gadamer should have translated the Heideggerian historical-being into tradition.13 I think that this “translation” was successful only because it was able to connect the problematic of historicity with the problem of language. This connection, namely, makes possible a thorough understanding of tradition, which doesn’t merely fall on us (like rain), but rather is also assigned to us (as a task). Gadamer established his philosophical perception of the notion of tradition on the principle of the Wirkungsgeschichte. From a terminological point of view, we are really close to the concept of historicity, toward which we are striving here. It also appears that the proposal for a “hermeneutic complement” of philosophy (mentioned above) had something to do with Gadamer’s “singularization” of the “universal aspect of hermeneutics.” The universality of the hermeneutic aspect, which Gadamer brings forward in his proposition “Being that can be understood is language,” doesn’t only concern philosophical hermeneutics in the strictest sense, but also contemporary philosophy as a whole. Here, one could take as an example the question regarding the terms for the possibility of interpretation, the description of phenomena, ideological criticism, the disclosure of the structures through an analysis of the act of speaking, etc. Paul Ricoeur developed his philosophical hermeneutics as a confrontation within contemporary philosophy between the mainstream philosophies that already differentiated themselves from one another through the models of interpretation on offer in them. Could these models be raised to a universal level? The universalization of the hermeneutic aspect certainly conceals in itself certain theoretical pitfalls. Therefore, we only accept Gadamer’s conception of “Wirkungsgeschichte” (active historicity) with substantial reserve. Namely, that the universalization of hermeneutics is only viable if it is built up on a universal anthropological basis. However, Gadamer doesn’t try to consider this critically as such. If we defend this thesis, alongside with Gadamer, namely that humanity is essentially dependent on tradition, then such a reflection becomes absolutely necessary. It doesn’t suffice to only make a reference to Husserl’s concept of the living-world or to Heidegger’s concept of “Dasein.” If we do so, we should also accept their view on history, which would still make the above-mentioned hermeneutic complements necessary. There is a second reason that explains why we cannot accept Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as a hermeneutic complement as such, without examining it critically. Indeed, Gadamer discusses the concept of tradition, but in doing so, he crucially does not linger long enough on the concept of historical negativity, which, if one follows Nietzsche, this tradition brings along with itself, or to which it is at least vulnerable. In the long run, nihilism is a state of mind, toward which tradition pushes us. Therefore, I think it would make sense to mention two other philosophers, whose philosophical orientations are known to be post-modern. They have already dealt intensively with Gadamer, Husserl, Heidegger and Nietzsche, with regard to historicity. I have in mind the names of Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo.

13

»Die Überlieferung – das ‘Seins-geschick’ – wird als Sinnerschlossenheit und Wahrheitsquelle anerkannt. Erst diese Einsicht Gadamers ermöglicht die Anerkennung des Wahrheitsanspruchs der Tradition und mithin ein neues Verhältnis zu ihr. Man merke dabei die hermeneutische Wendung der Ontologie Heideggers: Das Seinsgeschick wird von jetzt an als Tradition aufgefasst.« Jean Grondin, “Zur Entfaltung eines hermeneutischen Wahrheitsbegriffs,” in idem, Der Sinn für Hermeneutik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994), 45. 198

Derrida’s deconstructivism is assuredly the most influential post-modern movement in philosophy. It represents the absolute primacy of difference in the ontological, semiological, sexual, cultural, political and individual realms. The name itself, “deconstructivism,” leads us directly to Heidegger’s phenomenological “destruction.” In several polemical essays, Hans-Georg Gadamer had indeed already shown that Derrida’s and Heidegger’s positions were not to be equated to one another in spite of a certain resemblance. However, Gadamer did not submit his own position to methodical criticism. He was satisfied with passing comments on what maybe corresponded to Derrida’s earlier philosophical style. According to the present author, the object of Derrida’s deconstructivist criticism presents itself as the very sense of historicity, above all with regard to the “fact” that it remains immanent in philosophical thinking, especially in a phenomenological one, which is the basis for Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer.14 According to Derrida, the philosophical propensity to historicity characterizes an aspiration for returning to the original and a demand to the effect that the original should return. Together with psychoanalysis, Derrida exposes the constructed character of this aspiration. His criticisms aim both at the transcendental return to the original grounds and at a pure “transcendental project” (Heidegger). For Derrida, only a negative reduction of the historical sense is itself possible, but not a positive reduction of history in any sense, i.e., there is no identity; only difference is. Such an account of deconstructivism appears to be contemporary. In the humanities it is used as a theoretical foundation of post-modernistic views. At the same time, it circumvents the dimension of historicity and tradition. Everyone does firstly so, as one deals these solely on the level of the “production of symbols.” According to this, then, every transcendental project of tradition has already lost its own historical effectiveness. If it appears to us only in its function as a symbol, it is impossible for us to appropriately undedrstand any philosophical essay, any work of art, and any religious proclamation, i.e., it can only appear in one or another determinate function. In the closest connection with this, we must also remark that -- if any criticism can be offered by deconstructivists at all -a heretofore “constructive” historical fluency of tradition must already exist.15 However, it cannot function purely as a symbol since it cannot merely be assumed philosophically. It requires an explicit significance, or else our standpoint on tradition becomes itself “centrifugal.” However, hermeneutics tries to shun away from precisely this. To some extent, Gianni Vattimo agrees with Derrida’s deconstructivist challenges, but he also rejects them, partially, which is directly due to the fact that he recognizes the importance of moderating such an exclusive point of view on tradition. His demands toward a “weakening” of thinking must also be understood in this way. Vattimo calls for an ethics of interpretation. In spite of a lot of suggestions and because he is somehow eclectic, his thinking offers mostly no systematic support for the identification of an access to the problems of historicity and tradition, in contradistinction with the hermeneutic complement of phenomenology, which does. In particular, Vattimo has not sufficiently thought through the question that he actually posed himself, with regard to the situation of the ethics of interpretation within the era of a society of information. The transmission of every shape of knowledge doesn’t strictly happen through and via tradition, which would be open to interpretation, but by means of the information that remains neutral to

14

See also János Békési, ‘Denken’ der Geschichte. Zum Wandel des Geschichtsbegriffs bei Jacques Derrida (München: Fink, 1995). 15 Cf. Daniela Vallega-Neu, Die Notwendigkeit der Gründung in Zeitalter der Dekonstruktion: Zur Gründung in Heideggers ‘Beiträgen zur Philosophie’; unter Hinzuziehung der Derridaschen Dekonstruktion (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997). 199

the act of interpreting, except when it is already calculated to produce further pieces of information. We have only been able to take into consideration the authors who belonged to the limited scope of the thematic that interested us in this present article. For this reason, we could not take into consideration important philosophers, such as Vico or Hegel, who have worked on a philosophy of history. Our critical reflection on the possibilities of identifying an immanent historicity of phenomenology as a hermeneutic complement allows us to go on and treat the proposition of such a project itself. When we speak about a hermeneutic complement, we mean by it exactly the completion of the totality of philosophical experiences; it no longer finds its sense in the character of transferability, but rather in the middle of the openness belonging to the two poles. In other words, we no longer deal with a justification of experience on the basis of an integrative truth of experience, but rather with an open truth of experience itself. In so far as we speak here about the totality of philosophical experience, we rehabilitate the concept of totality, which had been deprived of its legitimacy by many post-modern theoreticians.16 However, we must still legitimate such a hermeneutic-phenomenological claim for the whole. It is only implied here that we are aiming at the opened midway between unification and differentiation, between the One and the Many. Moreover, we are no longer concerned by the totality of the One-in-All and the All-in-One, but rather by the whole of the hermeneutic openness, in which the passage between One and Many was primarily founded. This openness, which is not only an apparentness of the world but at the same time man’s openness to the world, is comprehensible through a hermeneutic pattern of question and answer. As regards philosophy, we can thus assert that its knowledge develops within the scope of the questions, which its own tradition keeps open and which need us as answer. For this reason, the human race appears traditionally as a self-questioning race. Thus, we can also understand the negativity which breaks into the positively-composed world of phenomenology, as evidence of this openness, which places tradition in front of its self-questioning. An answer to this question could run as follows: historicity is a tradition that works in the open. At the same time, we could assert that historicity steps out into philosophy (whose foundation is based on the question about an ‘open’ humanity), but also into the horizon of our knowledge about the open truth of human experience. Here we conceive of the concept of “historicity” in the sense of the happening of experience as a whole. We must not represent it through the model of history proceeding through time. Historicity is a dynamically opening integration of experience as a whole. It is itself the hermeneutic experience, even though we can also regard it as its element, since the hermeneutic experience, once historicity itself, thereafter meant the oriented experience of historicity. Thus, language is taken once in the sense of the interpreted, but then also in the sense of the interpreting. What are the names of the elements, in which the hermeneutic experience can shape itself? Each one of them requires a particular access. According to a prevalent opinion in hermeneutics, it is supposed to be the art of understanding and of displaying.17

16

Welsch vehemently declares: »Post-modernism begins where totality ceases to be. Wolfgang Welsch, “Topoi der Postmoderne,” in Hans Rudi Fischer, Arnold Retzer, and Jochen Schweitzer, ed., Das Ende der großen Entwürfe (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), 38. 17 In connection with the historical formation of hermeneutics, I recommend the famous book by Wilhelm Dilthey, Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik (1900): see idem, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5 (Leipzig/Berlin: Teubner, 1924), 317–338, where Dilthey designates hermeneutics as »Kunstlehre des Verstehens schriftlich fixierter Lebensäußerungen.« and adds the remark that »Diese Wissenschaft hat ein sonderbares Schicksal gehabt. Sie verschafft sich immer nur Beachtung unter einer 200

Understanding and displaying refer to the textual and the linguistic aspects of what is comprehensible and displayable in the widest sense. Everything that is comprehensible and displayable presupposes a temporal insertion and a historical distance. Temporality and historicity determine every understanding and displaying, every textual and lingual aspect. We can only consider temporality and historicity in connection with the opening of human existence, in so far as it includes a moment of liberty. Existence and liberty are given to human beings, not only based on their possibility, but also according to their capacity, and as such, they prove -- by themselves -- the objectivity of culture and intellectuality. These hermeneutic experiences can be exemplified as in the following scheme: -

Understanding and Interpreting Textuality and Linguality Temporality and Historicity Existence and Freedom Culture and Intellectuality

This scheme puts together the hermeneutic fundamental terms and their nature with regard to the concept of experience. They are not attained from experience, but they claim experience for themselves. On that account, we are no longer dealing with hermeneutic factors, but with notions. This is also valid for the notion of hermeneutics itself, since it concretizes itself in the interlacing of its factors. We can see from this that the function of hermeneutics actually aims at the integration of experience. Since experience never means a single experience, the hermeneutic integrative function doesn’t aim at an amalgamation of experience, but rather at its dis-unification and at its opening. This is the second characteristic of the hermeneutic function, which becomes the most apparent in the phenomenon of reading. The totality of experience is never particular things and never only one thing: rather it is always simultaneously also something else. This requires a certain openness toward the Other, which consists in the possibility of the displacing in the Other and into that Other. The third possibility of the hermeneutic function rests on that. Then one is always prone to passiveness. This passiveness represents the openness of the hearing, which not only makes possible the understanding, but forswears intolerance and countenances the otherness that is constitutive of communication. Finally, the outcome of this is that the hermeneutic integration of the totality of human experience is based on the capacity of communication as constituent of the human community. It also includes the understanding that composes beyond that which is human, as well as for the “here and now” of natural law and also for the hereafter of the divine. The five characteristic features of the hermeneutic function, i.e. its integrative character, the dis-unification, the transfer into the Other, the keeping open of hearing, and communication, comprehend its particular characteristic trait in every particular factor of the hermeneutic experience. Hermeneutics itself is not a subject or an object, a matter or a product of the hermeneutic factor, rather its historical manifestation. More explicitly said, the hermeneutic function can occur in human experience itself. Within its occurrency, it is at the same time selfannounced. Thus, we can understand the hermeneutic function through the main feature of the act of making-known, which originally designated the Greek word hermeneuein. We now come back to the relation between philosophy and culture, which we identified at the beginning as our main problem. This problem needs an immanent

großen geschichtlichen Bewegung, welche solches Verständnis des singularen geschichtlichen Daseins zu einer dringenden Angelegenheit der Wissenschaft macht, um dann wieder im Dunkel zu verschwinden.« Ibid., 333. 201

phenomenological development. The proposed hermeneutic complement should then be understood as a contribution to the creation of a cultural hermeneutics. Such a planned cultural hermeneutics would have to regard the crisis of the concept of tradition as indicating the fact that all cultural appearances can be apprehended against the background of a problematical understanding of tradition. We have already raised the issue of the relationship concerning philosophy and culture in the concepts of the unity of the world and the difference of the cultural worlds, and we suggested at the same time that the main problem lies in the openness between unity and difference. The relationship between phenomenology and cultural hermeneutics remains to be observed in respect of its open viewpoint. The open viewpoint of culture means perspectivity. A culture opens up perspectives in agreement with its fundamental viewpoint. When we compare philosophy with culture, we realize that, in contrast, the former opens the Panorama. We used the names “Perspective” and “Panorama” in the strict hermeneutic-phenomenological sense. In doing so, we do not forget that the concept of “perspectivity” was philosophically already to be found in Leibniz and Nietzsche. We cannot assert the same with regard to the concept of “Panorama,” which stems from the Greek pan-horao, which means “on the whole, to see everything.” Jakob Burchardt noticed that the Greeks, who started this philosophy, had “panoramic eyes,” in other words that they were “omni-seers.” This viewpoint of the opening of a totality -- a complement -is decisive for philosophy. However, this totality presents itself only within the quarrel of perspectives. Greek statuary and literature, but also philosophy itself, are so many proofs of this fact. Let us only remember this historical and well-known example of the choicedecision in the first philosophy by Aristotle. The extraction of the first philosophy, in the way we encountered it for the first time in Aristotle, later also in Descartes and Husserl, can be understood here as a philosophical Europology. By this concept, I mean the project of a European humanity in terms of the totality of its culture, within the perspectives of theory, experience and poesis. Although in the twentieth century we experienced Husserl’s attempt to establish phenomenology as first philosophy, it seems to us, nevertheless, that within contemporary philosophy, namely in all its tendencies, the effort toward the second philosophy asserts itself as a priority and also (with it) another kind of Europology. This second philosophy should not only differ from the first one by the fact that the former doesn’t subordinate the difference of cultural perspectives to the panorama, but also by the fact that it allows an openness between the perspectives of culture and the panorama of philosophy.18 Notwithstanding how we define culture, it is nothing else than an openness of the life-world perspectives. On the contrary, if we bear in mind philosophy’s immanent historicity, philosophy displays a concern toward the totality. It is also an effort not to remain locked into one’s own perspective, but to sense a reciprocal integration in the totality of the world. Only that which opens us mutually and keeps us open can connect us -- the One like the Others. Thereby we could attain another view of tradition, which is active in the open. Translated by Etienne Charest

18

Manfred Riedel has recently called attention to the concept of “second philosophy” in his treatise Für die zweite Philosophie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988). However, he did not elaborate it systematically enough. He thinks that the second philosophy equals “hermeneutics in its practical purpose.” On the topic of our connecting the problematic of the first to that of the second philosophy, with the ‘Europology,’ Riedel’s essay on “The Universality of the European Sciences as a Conceptual and an Academic Problem,” ibid., 30–59, is particularly worthwhile; this “problem” is one that should -- in our opinion -- be developed further, for an understanding of our time. 202

2.

BETWEEN DEATH AND HOLINESS -- THE NATURE OF THE PHENOMENON IN THE INTERPRETATION OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND MAX SCHELER

Jaromir Brejdak “Der Tod birgt als der Schrein des Nichts das Wesende des Seins in sich.”1

I.

Introduction

This article is a reflection on the connection between death and holiness. According to Heidegger, holiness awaits in the being, as the being awaits in the nothingness -- my aim is to discover a connection between death, which is the hiding place of the nothingness, and holiness. At the same time it is a polemic within current opinions about the nihilistic silence of Heidegger, who clearly stated: Denn das Verschwiegene ist das eigentlich Bewahrte. Und als das Bewahrteste das Nächste und Wirklichste. ... Was für den gemeinen Verstand wie ‘Atheismus’ aussieht und so aussehen muss, ist im Grunde das Gegenteil. Und ebenso: dort, wo vom Nichts gehandelt wird und vom Tod, ist das Sein, und nur dieses, am tiefsten gedacht, während jenem die angeblich allein in sich mit dem ‘Wirklichen’ befassen, sich im Nichtigen herumtreiben.2 In this article I first discuss the radical forms of the phenomenological reduction (which is necessary in order to see the phenomenon in its full dimension); then I try to show that there is a connection between a form of radical reduction on the one hand -- which is termed “death” -- and existence as such on the other hand -- which is defined as “presence.” All this, on the basis of the seventh paragraph of Sein und Zeit, where the phenomenological difference (between that which appears and the appearance itself) was identified with the ontological difference (the difference between Being (Sein) and entity (Seiendes)). I see the experience of presence -- preceded by death in the phenomenological meaning -as a fundamental religious experience, an experience of presence as a formal aspect of the existence of things. It is accompanied by an act of worship, by the sacred. An act of worship is therefore a fundamental act of religious experience. Holiness comes from the experience of presence. This notion (briefly sketched out here) develops Heidegger’s and Scheler’s thoughts, to a certain extent; it is also a clear reference to the work of Martin Buber, whose 1922 Frankfurt lectures were originally entitled Religion as the Presence (and later on I and Thou).3

1

Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 6th ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1990), 171. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 6th ed. (Klett-Cotta: Stuttgart, 1998), 471. 3 Rivka Horwitz, Buber’s Way to “I and Thou”: The Development of Martin Buber’s Thought and His “Religion as Presence” Lectures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988). I found this hint in Gerd Haeffner, In der Gegenwart leben. Auf der Spur eines Urphänomens (Berlin/Köln/Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1996), 251-269. 2

203

II.

A Liberation, With a Meeting in Mind

1. Max Scheler -- Love and Old Age

a. Phenomenological Reduction or Moral Ascent The reduction being discussed here is a metanoia of existence, and not a learned technique. Husserl had come to this conclusion toward the end of his philosophical development. In Krise der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, he wrote …daß die totale phänomenologische Einstellung und die ihr zugehörige Epoche ´zunächst wesensmäßig eine völlige personalle Wandlung zu erwirken berufen ist, die zu vergleichen wäre zunächst mit einer religiösen Umkehrung, die aber darüber hinaus die Bedeutung der größten existenziellen Wandlung in sich birgt, die der Menschheit als Menschheit aufgegeben ist.4 And Scheler had analyzed the moral ascent which, in his text Vom Ewigen im Menschen, (see note 5 below) includes his philosophical conception of the phenomenological reduction. The goal of this reduction is to elicit three fundamental (and also obvious) things, which are fundamental both from the point of view of the human praxis and of a ‘theory of man.’ A first obviousness concerns the feeling of wonder that there is something, that there is presence. A second obviousness concerns an independent and substantial existence, one that does not have any grounding in the accepted way; Scheler described the existence of something so unmediated in terms of absolute existence. The third obviousness concerns the experience of existence, the experience of presence as such: Freilich: wer gleichsam nicht in den Abgrund des absoluten Nichts geschaut hat, der wird auch die immanente Positivität des Inhalts der Einsicht, dass überhaupt etwas ist und nicht lieber Nichts, vollständig übersehen.5 An experience of this threefold obviousness is fundamental to, and must precede, the experience of liberation which can free the human spirit from two strong fetters that impeded the human being’s vitality: Es bedarf dieser Akte, um den Geist das nur vital relative Sein, das Sein für das Leben…prinzipiell verlassen zu machen, um ihn mit dem Sein, wie es an sich selbst und in sich selbst ist, in Teilnehmung treten zu machen.6 This experience constitutes a phase of self-possession which consists in denying urges and sensuality. Thanks to the suspension of knowledge that is relevant to human lives (such knowledge is described as a person’s ‘world outlook’ (Weltanschauung)), a further

4

Edmund Husserl, Krise der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana VI (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 140. About this problematic, see also Jaromir Brejdak, Philosophia crucis. Heideggers Beschäftigung mit dem Apostel Paulus (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1996), 193-196. 5 Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke 5: Vom Ewigen im Menschen, ed. Maria Scheler (Bern/München: Francke Verlag, 1954), 95. 6 Ibid., 89. 204

knowledge is revealed, but it is not given or accessible in immediate sensual perception, nor is it based upon human urges; this knowledge strives for adequation to the essential knowledge, which is based on the categorical forms of being. After this phase of selfpossession or askesis, there follows another, a second phase (involving mortification with a view to humility as the proper sphere for self and will). After achieving the defeat of one’s own egoism, this knowledge leads to a ‘world outlook’ and a view of the world that moves within its categorical structures. Die Verdemütung bricht den natürlichen Stolz und ist die moralische Voraussetzung des für die Erkenntnis der Philosophie notwendigen gleichzeitigen Abstreifens 1) der zufälligen Daseinsmodi von den puren Wasgehalten... 2) der faktischen Verworfenheit des erkennenden Aktes in den Vital-Haushalt eines psychophysischen Organismus.7 Scheler denied the objectivity of science, hence in his opinion it is tainted with an egoistic desire to dominate; the fragmentary picture of the world provided by science does not give full and independent knowledge. In Scheler’s opinion scientific knowledge wants to rule and not to learn. The fullest knowledge is enabled by love, which here means nothing beyond the ‘view’ or ‘outlook,’ after which follows the action. “Die Liebe…bricht die im Menschen befindliche Quelle der Seinsrelativität alles Umwelt-seins.”8 This phase of the selfless view (and the action as its consequence) establishes a new kind of subjectivity -the subjectivity of a person -- and it is distinct from that of a philosopher. A philosopher, according to Scheler, does not cease to be a physical body (Körper) or a psycho-physical one (Leib), but he or she ceases to gain his or her motivation in an uncritical, simple way from these spheres of existence; in this way, he or she become persons.9 Through the act of love a person is correlated with holiness which is understood as the fullest sphere of reality (given to emotions) and which Scheler described rather sparingly as a person’s worth (Wert). Indeed, here is to be found the most primal emotional experience of the world, of matter; this experience is founded on the experience of unmediated existence, that existence which exists beyond any association with human existence as such. That is what has to be attained, whether in one’s youth or in one’s adult years, through spiritual exercises and a consistent moral attitude, a possessing of humility and of goodwill toward the world, and in old age this can indeed become a gift of maturity; it liberates the human being from the relativity attached to the vital, in a natural way. b. Old Age as a Natural Way for Reducing Vitality The starting-point for Scheler’s reflection about death is the experience of the individual life process, which is understood as a realization of possibilities, as a kinesis of life. In this Aristotelian paradigm of the world as nature, he holds that: Nicht das Tote ist als Totes ‘primär’ und als Positives ‘gegeben’ und es käme dann ‘Leben’ hinzu als das, was amechanisch ist – Rest dessen, was sich mechanisch nicht

7

Ibid., 90. Ibid. 9 See Jaromir Brejdak, “Phänomenologie, Wertethik, Politik,” in Jaromir Brejdak, Werner Stegmaier, and Ireneusz Ziemin´ski, ed., Politik und Ethik in philosophischer und systemtheoretischer Sicht (Szczecin: AMP Studio, 2003), 86. 8

205

denken lässt –, sondern das Leben: und ‘tot’ wird durch Erfahrung ihm das, was sich als lebendig nicht bewährt.10 The psychophysical decline of an organism ensues at the moment when the reproductive drive (Fortpflanzung) loses the combat against the antagonistic drives (i.e., the drives for power and food).11 The reduction in the reproductive ability (the cell regeneration) is the cause of old age and death. Physical and psychical death have the same cause -- the life factor (with all its functions) withdraws from one set of energy and matter and redirects its activity to another set. A change in attentiveness, switching from issues of vitality to those of a spiritual kind -- which was the goal of phenomenological reduction -- accompanies this process of decline. The following are some of the consequences of changing in attentiveness: - b.1.

Time: The future dominates the temporal horizons of a child; the production of images predominates here. In old age the sphere of expectation diminishes, the past determines the horizons; the images are reproduced ones.

- b.2.

Worth: The vital axiological consciousness of a child intensifies such attitudes as surprise, rapture and curiosity. The aged (or senile) consciousness compensates for the loss of vital attentiveness with an intensified capacity for corporeal impressions, but the turn to spiritual values prevails here.

- b.3.

Reality: A child experiences the world as a natura naturans, an old man or woman as a natura naturata, and thus reality becomes static in old age.

Scheler states: Mit allem Altern ist eine Umbildung der Ichkonstitution verbunden, und zwar des Verhältnisses des geistigen Person-Ich zum ‘Leben’ und den vitalpsychischen Vorgängen... Diese Umbildung hat zur Folge einen Wechsel des erlebten Verhältnisses zu allen Sphären: Gott, Natur, Leib, Mitwelt.12 Old age and death make, of a human being, an unwitting participant of the development of life in general. An individual death is a sacrifice for the continuous development and diversification of the species; it is not a sacrifice intended for species preservation. This development is a condition for comprehending (and getting a sense of) death: “Nur wenn es ein Alleben gibt, erhält er [der Tod] Sinn.”13 The goal of this development is sublimation, that is, the directing of the vital drives with the help of the spirit. The openness of life to the divine spirit means, on the one hand, that the vital force diminishes, and on the other hand it is the personal individualization which goes with the experience of continuous, personal existence, with God being the center of acts and action. The immortality of a spiritual person, like the immortality of God (who is a person), is not a given: it is a task to be accomplished.

10

Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke 12: Schriften aus dem Nachlass, vol. 3, Philosophische Anthropologie, 2d. ed., Manfred S. Frings, ed., (Bonn: Bouvier, 1987), 269-270. 11 This criterion of ageing seems to hold for the rich Western civilization. 12 Ibid., 311. 13 Ibid., 339. 206

Der Mensch ist nicht unsterblich. Aber Gott wächst in ihm und durch ihn. ... Er selbst sei das Opfer für den Werdegang der Gottheit und sein Tod die Ernte und die Genesung der Gottheit an ihm. Wer liebt, stirbt leicht, wer genügend die Welt in sich eingetrunken und sich seiner Verantwortung bewusst ist und seiner Mitverantwortung, stirbt leicht! Wer die Natur – die ichfremde – schon in seinem Leben als elementare Macht empfunden hat, als die große Welle, die ihn trug und die er nur ein ganz wenig zügelte – gibt sich leicht ganz den großen Fluten hin.14 Scheler’s notion of divinity exemplifies a tension between the spirit and the vital drives; according to Scheler, man redeems God by participating in the creation of this unity. God becomes real perfection through a man, at the end of the dynamic historical process, rather than at its beginning.15

2. Heidegger -- Death and Advent

a. The Liberating Power of Death The ‘view’ (or ‘outlook’), unrelated and lacking in references to any individual self, is the main theme of Heidegger’s philosophy, too. It is attained in the structure of resolute openness (Entschlossenheit). Dasein can free itself from its egoistic confinement thanks to three ways of existing -- through conscience, anxiety, and by advancing toward death (Vorlaufen zum Tode). The call of conscience passes over in its appeal all Daseins’s “wordly” prestige and potentialities. Relentlessly it individualizes Dasein down to its potentiality-for-Beingguilty, and exacts of it that it should be this potentiality authentically. The unwavering precision with which Dasein is thus essentially individualized down to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, discloses the anticipation of death as the possibility which is non-relational.16 The guilt here refers to the prime of being-there (Dasein); the factual being-there always lags behind its possibilities. This tension between potentiality and realization is described in terms of the category of ontological guilt. The departure of being-there from relations with the world is also intensified by anxiety, which challenges the apparent security of everyday existence. This anxiety is originally an anxiety caused by neglecting or even setting aside the possibilities of a full, authentic being; it is an anxiety in the face of being, an anxiety that is not contained by having a calcified outlook on the world or by current interpretations of the world. Only an authentic interpretation, which forsakes a merely current project (Entwurf), can free the dimension of true possibility; this dimension is an impossibility for a calculating man, it is inaccessible to any attempt at rationalization. The complete abandonment of relations between the world and Dasein (being-there) ensues in the advance toward death: “das moribundus gibt dem sum allererst seinen

14

Ibid., 338-340. Max Scheler, Vom Umsturz der Werte, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Der Neue Geist Verlag, 1919). 16 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), § 62, 354. 15

207

Sinn”17 and, following this: “Erst im Sterben kann ich gewissermaßen absolut sagen »ich bin«.”18 This resolute openness, preceded by the advance toward death, has many functions. Here are some: the resolute openness enables the full granting of the being-there, its transparency (to speak with Kierkegaard). It individualizes the being-there in the most proper way; it makes from the being-there a place where being happens, the being-there becomes the historical entity which answers to the call of being. In this way it opens the true sense of being, which is given in the historical being and not in an instrumental, objective being of the world. There are many facets to Heidegger’s concept of death: death as a personal possibility against a shared one, the indefiniteness of death which is a constant source of danger, the certain death as a fundamentum inconcussum of Dasein. I want to draw attention to two other aspects, namely to death as a possibility without any references, and to death as a ‘possibility-in-a-million’ (unüberholte Möglichkeit). The fulfillment of the latter aspect constitutes for Heidegger a fulfillment of the immense impossibility of existence; this impossibility is essential, because it restores the true dimension of possibility. Kierkegaard described this dimension as the paradox given (and hidden) in an act of faith.19 The description of death as a way of existence which is devoid in relation to the world is comparable to Scheler’s phenomenological reduction. It opens before the human being a dimension which was traditionally characterized as the dimension of holiness. Robert Spaemann in Glück und Wohlwollen wrote about it in the following way: Voraussetzung hierfür ist, dass ein Wesen herausgetreten ist aus der Zentralität des bloßen Lebens, für das alles, was ihm begegnet, nur eine Bewandtnis hat als Funktion für ein Subjekt, das als bewandtnisloses Selbst verborgen bleibt. In diesem Heraustreten, in dieser metanoia erst wird das Selbst als die fundamentale, allen “Wert” begründende Wirklichkeit sichtbar.20 For Heidegger, it is an access point into a dimension of ultimate thought (lacking any references) (das letzte Denken). In Was heißt Denken? we read that the ultimate thought is a thanks-giving for the gift of the appearance of being.21 b. The Advent In the late years of his philosophical work, Heidegger does not occupy himself with the conditions of the being-there’s openness, rather, he pays attention to that which this openness discloses, as he takes the position of historical adventism, writing about the essence of man: Weil sein Wesen ist, der Wartende zu sein, der des Wesens des Seins wartet, indem er es denkend hütet. Nur wenn der Mensch als der Hirt des Seins der Wahrheit des

17

Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, GA20, 2d ed. (Frankfurt a.M..: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988), 438. 18 Ibid., 440. 19 See Jaromir Brejdak, Słowo i czas. Problem rozumienia Innego w hermeneutyce i teorii systemu (Szczecin: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecin´skiego, 2004), § 7. 20 Robert Spaemann, Glück und Wohlwollen. Versuch über Ethik, (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989), 127. English, Happiness and Benevolence, trans. Jeremiah Alberg (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000). 21 Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken?, 5th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997). 208

Seins wartet, kann er eine Ankunft des Seinsgeschickes erwarten, ohne in das bloße Wissenwollen zu verfallen.22 Thus, in Heidegger’s late philosophy, expectation has no object; it means the opening for the space for an appropriation (Ereignis) of Being. Expectation does not denote idleness: it is the being attentive to the process of appropriation of Being, of its coming-tolight (Lichtung), which motivates us to revere that which emerges beyond the confines of human immanence. This reverence enforces a self-limitation or descent into humility, and this word depicts quite well the sense of Heidegger’s Gelassenheit, in which we hear echoes of St Augustine’s humilitas. The aim of humility is that of allowing for the otherness of a human being or of a thing; in Scheler’s philosophy it is love which corresponds with this moment. When creating the analytic of being-there (Daseinsanalytik) on the strength of religious examples, Heidegger stressed strongly the experience of an immediate transcendental intervention in the life of a being-there; Heidegger turned his attention away from the phenomena of experiencing transcendence in a contact with another human being or with nature. Later, in Sein und Zeit, he does eliminate this flaw, showing the thing as an epiphany of transcendence. In the contact with a thing I am touched by its presence, which is akin to being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode) and which liberates my existence, making it an authentic presence. c. Death as the Condition of Full Presence In conclusion we can say that death, in the philosophical conceptions mentioned above, is a metanoia of existence. Death is the opening of our outlook above and beyond any relations; things, when they are seen from this point of view, are seen as worthy in their absolute, relationless authenticity; they are not seen as worthy because of the possibilities they offer of using them as tools,23 in this phenomenological and existential understanding. Death reveals things in their ‘unbound’ presence, or, if we use Heidegger’s terminology, in their being. Let a verse from the poem On a Rose by Angelus Silesius24 be an example for this view: Die Ros ist ohn warum; sie blühet, weil sie blühet, Sie acht nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet. The nature of the appearance of the phenomenon reveals another aspect in addition to the aspect of the content of a concrete thing (freed from human usurpation), i.e., the aspect of presence as such.25 Phainasthai, in its full dimension, cannot be reduced to a given structural content of a thing; the nature of phainasthai is something more, because it is the very moment of a liberated and free lighting of presence as the horizon where our meeting with the thing takes place. It was Heidegger who discovered the phenomenological difference between that which appears and its appearance as an horizon of meeting with the thing. He writes:

22

Martin Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre, 8th ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1991), 41. I spoke about this at the international conference “Ethik und Politik angesichts der ökologischen Krise,” held in Szczecin in 2003. The subject of my paper was Großzügigkeit des teleologischen Denkens; its text has not yet been published. 24 As quoted by Heidegger, in Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, 8th ed. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997), 69. 25 This problem was addressed (at the conference in Szczecin) by Haeffner. Haeffner’s text was entitled In der Gegenwart leben [Living in the Present]. 23

209

Wenn ich dieses Buch sehe, sehe ich zwar eine substantielle Sache, ohne jedoch deswegen die Substantialität wie das Buch zu sehen. Dennoch ist es die Substantialität, das in seinem nicht Erscheinen dem Erscheinenden das Erscheinen ermöglicht. In diesem Sinne kann man sogar sagen, dass sie erscheinender ist als das Erschienene selbst.26 From the point of view of an objective presence, absence becomes an intensified form of presence: it is its appearance, as God’s so-called death is his intensified presence. The horizons of meeting with a given thing are responsible for the fact that the same thing can appear at one time as a handy tool, as a thing or even as a being-there-with (Mitdasein). Heidegger makes an uncanny identification of the phenomenological difference (that which was disclosed versus the disclosure) with the ontological difference (Being, Sein) versus the entity (das Seiende)). In the seventh paragraph of Sein und Zeit we read: Accordingly the φαινοµενα or “phenomena” are the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to the light – what the Greeks sometimes identified simply with τα οντα (entities).27 The experience of a phenomenon is not a construction of it on the ground of a transcendental ego, rather, it is a gift of spontaneous appearance in one of many ways of the granting of things appropriate to phenomenology. This occurrent granting and the appearance are identified with the Presocratic notion of nature, with physis.28 The experiencing of the horizons of meeting with the thing has a religious connotation; it is received as a gift. The appearance of the horizon of Being is for Heidegger a space of holiness which becomes a foundation of the experience of godhood.

III.

Holiness as the Appropriation (Ereignen) of Presence

Absolute nothingness, which for both Heidegger and Scheler is a result of turning away from the world, allows the experience not only of the self and of reality in its full dimension, but also of the occurrent appearance of presence as such. This appearance is the experience of Being as holiness. The resolute being-there and the person (in Heidegger’s and Scheler’s philosophies respectively), as they defeat the egoistic narrowness, become the wound of being in a man (Heidegger) or a holy wound, inflicted by God upon man (Scheler). In the mother-tongue of these authors the word “holiness” (Heiligkeit) is etymologically linked with the word “salvation,” (Heil) which gives the word “holiness” a quality of promise and obligation -- in Heidegger’s philosophy it is the ontological guilt and in Scheler’s it is the desire to redeem. Im Gegensatz hierzu ist Religion gegründet in Gottesliebe und in Verlangen nach einem endgültigen Heile des Menschen selbst und aller Dinge. Religion ist also zuvörderst ein Heilsweg. Das Summum bonum, nicht das absolut Wirkliche und sein Wesen, ist der erste Intentionsgegenstand des religiösen Aktes.29 26

Martin Heidegger, Vier Seminare (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1973), 115. Heidegger, Being and Time, § 7, 51. 28 The physis was characterized as a poietic extraction and an alethic showing, in Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre, 20. 29 Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen, 134. 27

210

Holiness, in this case, is an anxiety of the human spirit who wants to compensate for the normative character of things -- free from their instrumental status -- as they are, for a man. Scheler calls this dimension, which is a call to participate in the becoming of being, a dimension of deitas; he understands this being as a being as such, ens per se, as a spontaneous granting of Being (Jean-Luc Marion). The joint point, where in the becoming and happening God meets man, is called by Scheler a human person.30 The person becomes godlike, while wounded with a wound that is inflicted upon a man by God himself: “The Godly spirit penetrates persons, as the drive penetrates the bodies of persons.”31 A person is the stigma of holiness upon the human body; a person is a fragment in the absolute process of God’s becoming. The reality of God’s becoming does not fade away with the death of a man (or with the death of human aspiration), but it is continuous, like the action of a person, it is perpetual or immortal (as is, for instance, the action of St Maksymilian Kolbe mentioned in note 30). Through love, and later through the death of the body, a person becomes a fragment of absolute reality in that holiness is the moving mover of the world.32 In Brief über den “Humanismus,” Heidegger writes: Only from the truth of Being can the essence of the holy be thought. Only from the essence of the holy is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the light of the essence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word ‘God’ is to signify. … How can man at the present stage of world history ask at all seriously and rigorously whether the god nears or withdraws, when he has above all neglected to think into the dimension in which alone that question can be asked? But this is the dimension of the holy, which indeed remains closed as a dimension if the open region of Being is not lighted and in its lighting is near man.33 The clearing of Being can be called the truth, but not truth in the sense of a reflection in the mirror but in the sense of the appearance of Being, the happening of Being, which is included in the nature of the phenomenon as phainesthai. This dimension of Being is the foundation of holiness; within this space the talk about God makes sense. It is so in the present times, but in the past it was so too: God is seen as a first cause or as causality itself. Heidegger says:

30

This is the beginning of the history of God in the human being, thus it is the beginning of all history. Scheler defines the person through the actuality, that is through a permanent aspiration, and not through his or her substantiality (that is, a permanent existence, yet loaned, in a way). The person appears as such only when its human aspiration is directed toward holiness as the primary value; other values shine with this light -- as the moon reflects the sunlight. As an example, let us give St Maksymilian Kolbe, who became a person just when he had defeated the prevailing biological egoism and had given up his life for the life of another man, out of love. 31 Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke 12: Schriften aus dem Nachlass, vol. 2: Erkenntnislehre und Metaphysik, ed. Manfred S. Frings, (Bern/München: Francke Verlag, 1979), 210. 32 Scheler, Erkenntnislehre und Metaphysik, 221. 33 “Erst aus der Wahrheit des Seins lässt sich das Wesen des Heiligen denken. Erst aus dem Wesen des Heiligen ist das Wesen der Gottheit zu denken. Erst im Lichte des Wesens von Gottheit kann gedacht und gesagt werden, was das Wort »Gott« nennen soll. [...] Wie soll denn der Mensch der gegenwärtigen Weltgeschichte auch nur ernst und streng fragen können, ob der Gott sich nahe oder entziehe, wenn der Mensch es unterlässt, allererst in die Dimension hineinzudenken, in der jene Frage allein gefragt werden kann? Das aber ist die Dimension des Heiligen, die sogar schon als Dimension verschlossen bleibt, wenn nicht das Offene des Seins gelichtet und in seiner Lichtung dem Menschen nahe ist.” Martin Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit. Mit einem Brief über den »Humanismus«, 3d. ed. (Bern/München: Francke Verlag, 1975), 102-103; the English translation is taken from Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings: From “Being and Time” (1927) to “The Task of Thinking” (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell (New York/ Hagerstown/San Francisco/London: Harper & Row, 1993), 230. 211

Der christlich-jüdische Gott ist die Vergötterung nicht irgendeiner besonderen Ursache einer Bewirkung, sondern die Vergötterung des Ursacheseins als solchen, des Grundes des erklärenden Vorstellens überhaupt.34 In Identität und Differenz Heidegger contrasts the onto-theological God of the philosophers with the godlike God: Causa sui. So lautet der sachgerechte Name für den Gott in der Philosophie. Zu diesem Gott kann der Mensch weder beten, noch kann er ihm opfern. Vor der causa sui kann der Mensch weder aus Scheu ins Knie fallen, noch kann er vor diesem Gott musizieren und tanzen. Demgemäß ist das gott-lose Denken, das den Gott der Philosophen, den Gott als causa sui preisgeben muss, dem göttlichen Gott vielleicht näher. Dies sagt nur: Es ist freier für ihn, als es die Onto-Theo-Logik wahrhaben möchte.35 Indeed, the god of onto-theology has died, and that which remains is the piety/devotion of ultimate/ulterior thinking: Inzwischen aber lernten wir sehen: das Wesen des Denkens bestimmt sich aus dem, was es zu bedenken gibt; aus dem Anwesen des Anwesenden, aus dem Sein des Seienden. ... Das ist die Zwiespalt von Seiendem und Sein. Sie ist das, was eigentlich zu denken gibt. Was sich so gibt, ist die Gabe des Fragwürdigsten.36 The moment when Being comes to the present, between its concealment (Verborgenheit) and its appearance or unconcealment, there is the place for the experience of holiness, where holiness is a gift and the happening of presence as such. The phenomenon becomes a place where this kairological moment happens. The introductory condition of a religious act cannot call upon proofs of God’s existence; instead, human beings have the ability to think reflectively (das sinnende Denken) and to pay attention to everyday matters while also radically suspending their relationship with this world (which can be defined as their ‘death to the world,’ and which precedes their care of the world).37 Dies sagt für das sinnende Denken: Der Gott als Wert gedacht, und sei er der höchste, ist kein Gott. Also ist Gott nicht tot, Denn seine Gottheit lebt. Sie ist sogar dem Denken näher als dem Glauben, wenn anders die Gottheit als Wesendes seine Herkunft aus der Wahrheit des Seins empfängt und das Sein als ereignender Anfang Anderes ‘ist’ denn Grund und Ursache des Seienden.38 The Nietzscheans’ “death of God” (not the death of God as such, but the death of certain notions of God) recalls us to the original place where the experience of the presence of Being as the holy ‘happens’; without this recall or remembrance, only the void of egoistic reason remains. Spaemann asks:

34

Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, GA66, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), 239f. 35 Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, 12th ed. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002), 70f. 36 Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? 149. 37 “Die Aufmerksamkeit ist auf ihrer höchsten Stufe das Gleiche wie das Gebet, sie setzt Glaube und Liebe voraus.” Simone Weil, Cahiers. Aufzeichnungen, German translation by Elisabeth Edl and Wolfgang Matz, vol. 2 (München: Hanser, 1993), 104. 38 Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, ed. Hermann Heidegger (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), 85. 212

Wie können wir das Unbezügliche, das Heilige überhaupt erfahren? Heißt nicht etwas erfahren, es in einen Bewandtniszusammenhang einfügen? Alle Erfahrung ist kategorial strukturiert und als solche schon von der Art eines relationalen Gefüges. Die religiöse Praxis kennt indessen eine Weise der Zuwendung, die die Wirklichkeit als absolute ohne Bezug auf das Subjekt und ohne sprachliche Vermittlung vergegenwärtigt: den Akt der Anbetung. Wie immer die Religionsphänomenologie diesen Akt genauer analysieren mag, er schließt, zumindest in seinem jüdischen, christlichen und islamischen Verständnis die bedingungslose Zustimmung zu dem unbedingten Grund der Wirklichkeit ein, ... Bedingungslose Zustimmung hat den Charakter des Dankes für das, was sich in seiner reinen Unbezüglichkeit zeigt, für das, was in der Sprache der Religionen biblischer Herkunft ‘Herrlichkeit’ heißt. Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam ist eines der ältesten christlichen Gebete.39 In a similar way, Max Scheler wrote, in his article Zur Rehabilitierung der Tugend, about the experience of liberated reality as an instrumental aim. In Scheler’s phenomenology, the full experience of presence, which we have called the experience of the holy, is grounded in the strength of the act of worship: Sie [die Ehrfurcht] ist im Gegenteil die Haltung, in der man noch etwas hinzuwahrnimmt, das der Ehrfurchtlose nicht sieht und für das gerade er blind ist: das Geheimnis der Dinge und die Werttiefe ihrer Existenz. Wo immer wir von der ehrfurchtlosen, z. B. der durchschnittlich wissenschaftlich erklärenden Haltung zur ehrfürchtigen Haltung gegenüber den Dingen übergehen, da sehen wir wie ihnen etwas hinzuwächst, was sie vorher nicht besaßen; wie etwas an ihnen sichtbar und fühlbar wird, was vorher fehlte: eben dies »Etwas« ist ihr Geheimnis, ist ihre Werttiefe.40 In a world where things have been kept perfectly subdued and closed in in a narrow set of references and relations, God remains absent, and his absence is not even noticed. The discarding of an enslaving interpretation of the world enables us to be open toward the unconcealment of Being (die Unverborgenheit des Seins), which brings the dimension of holiness back to human beings and to things -- rather like witnessing the appearance or birth of a “new Adam.” We live in the time of God’s silent return.

39 40

Spaemann, Glück und Wohlwollen, 128. Scheler, Vom Umsturz der Werte, 33. 213

3.

A “BETTER” OR JUST “ANOTHER” UNDERSTANDING? SOME REMARKS ON THE CREATIVE CHARACTER OF INTERPRETATION

Andrzej Przyłe˛bski

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics arose from a generalization of the considerations and results of the specific hermeneutic theories elaborated in jurisprudence, theology and classical literature. A milestone in its development was without a doubt the general hermeneutics of Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher. It was he who extended the area of what could -- and sometimes even should -- be interpreted from the texts on every speech act, including a press article, a speech or a conversation. Belonging to the Romantic movement in the German philosophy of the nineteenth century he was sure that the object to be interpreted is the idea born in the head of a writer or a speaker. It is born spontaneously, in an unconscious way. That is why its creator does not understand its full range and meaning. The interpreter is in another position: he analyzes this spiritual product using the full power of his consciousness and methodological cleverness. Because of that it is possible for him to understand the author better than the author understood himself. In his hermeneutic theory Gadamer accepts some of the important results of the Romantic hermeneutics, such as abandoning the difference between understanding and interpretation. This difference was usually understood as the difference between a spiritual understanding and lingual articulation of what was understood. Further, Gadamer came to the conclusion that even a simple understanding act needs a language, and so insisted that there is not any essential difference between interpreting and understanding. But he never accepted the idea that it is reasonable to speak about a better understanding, also in the sense that we can understand an author better then he understood himself. In a well known section of Truth and Method, his major work, he writes: Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well. Perhaps it is not correct to refer to this productive element in understanding as “better understanding.” For this phrase is ... a principle of criticism taken from the Enlightenment and revised on the basis of the aesthetics of genius. Understanding is not, in fact, understanding better, either in the sense of superior knowledge of the subject because of clearer ideas in the sense of fundamental superiority of consciousness over unconscious production. It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all.1 The following remarks try to reconsider the arguments of Gadamer, joining them with his own interpretive practice and comparing them with considerations of Albrecht Wellmer. The result is that even according to Gadamer it seems to be possible to speak about a better understanding. Though this does not mean Schleiermacher was right. Indeed, he was incorrect regarding the proper object of interpretation. The assumption of the Pre-Romantic hermeneutics (Chladenius and others) was that the work of interpretation (a hermeneutic act) begins with a sudden break in the understanding of a text, with a so-called “dark place” in it. Interpretation is an occasional activity, required only in cases when understanding stops being immediate. The Romantic perspective of Schleiermacher changed it completely by going out from the assumption

1

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2000), 296-297. 214

that misunderstanding, not understanding, is automatic and natural. What needs an explanation is understanding. Trying to explain it, he came to the conclusion that understanding is always mediated by interpretation, so it is hardly possible to divide them. Romantic hermeneutics fuses understanding and interpretation into a unity. But, on the other hand, it has to accept a division between a nearly automatic, lingually mediated interpretation, and a carefully elaborated kind of interpretation called “Auslegung.” Because the profound aim of interpreting is to understand the act of the creation of sense, and this act is never fully consciously controlled, it is possible through a methodologically controlled interpretation to understand a creator of meaning better than he understood himself. A similar idea was explicitly held by Kant and Fichte, indicating that it was common in the thinking of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gadamer accepts the results of the Romantic hermeneutics that concern the unity of understanding and interpretation, but -- as already said -- he refuses to accept any possibility of a better understanding. The reason for that is that he adds a third element to the abovementioned unity, forgotten -- in his opinion -- by Schleiermacher and his followers. He calls it “application.” According to him, it is not an additional moment in the process of interpreting that can be separated from a real, full understanding, or relegated to an ancillary position. For him the hermeneutic act is the triunion of understanding, interpretation and application. He himself, as well as his critics, show that this important change is connected with including in his theory the hermeneutics of law and holy scriptures, in which the element of application plays a very distinctive role. For Gadamer, the role played by the application has also some existential features. Every interpretation occurs from some individual perspective, from a hermeneutic situatedness or -- speaking with Heidegger -- established by the “giveness” of the Human Being (Dasein). Because every interpretation contains a moment of application and we can not assume or prove the identity of two hermeneutic situations, it is impossible to say that one can understand better than the other. It is enough to say that one understands differently when he understands at all. This statement, although we understand its origin and ground, seems to be counterintuitive, against any evidence offered in our experience. Even in Gadamer’s own work it is possible to show that he does not act according to the principle. Why should we, for instance, accept his hermeneutic theory as a proper description of understanding if it has the same failing as that developed by Dilthey, Betti or Schleiermacher? This is a kind of an implicit argument. But there are also explicit arguments by Gadamer against this statement. He criticizes, for example, some of Heidegger’s analysis of Greek philosophy and German poetry, saying they are not totally wrong, but not good enough, and so proposes instead his own, better interpretations.2 The problems with the better versus different interpretation are evident. It is not easy to find and establish a criterion for a comparison of interpretations. But still it seems, against Gadamer, to be useful not only to keep the distinction between understanding and interpretation but also to insist that despite of the comparison problem it is in principle possible to speak about better and worse interpretations. The existential moment of understanding by integrating the application in the unity of understanding and interpretation is a specifically Gadamerian transformation of Heidegger’s topic from Being and Time. In his magnum opus Heidegger introduces a completely new notion of understanding that for him means a kind of “know-how.” Knowing how to deal with something is the original form of understanding in the life world. It is also a kind of applying something given to a situation. But also in this case it seems to be evident that

2

See Hans-Georg Gadamer and Silvio Vietta, Im Gespräch (München: Fink, 2002). 215

if we have two persons, a master and his pupil, for instance, dealing with the same instrument we will even be able to foresee, who of them “understands it” better. Why should it lose its validity for “things” like texts, films, theater performances? Gadamer is of course right when he says that the objects of interpretation are not the spiritual states or ideas in the mind of the author of the text, but his work as it exists in the intersubjective world, open to any kind of understanding. The author has no authority over his creation. In interpreting his work he is one of many interpreters, each equal in principle. One can understand the reasons that led Gadamer to abandon the distinction between understanding and interpretation. It is true that every interpretation is directed by something Heidegger called the pre-structure of understanding (Vorstruktur des Verstehens). But it not true that every understanding is connected with the elaboration of an explicit and lingually articulated interpretation. There are automatic understandings, especially in banal cases of everyday communication. Further, it is useful to distinguish between interpretation and understanding by presuming that a formulation in the words of a common language is a condition sine qua non, to speak about an interpretation. It forbids us to compare between an understanding and an interpretation and permits it in the case of two interpretations, in the above defined sense. Thus we are allowed to assume that there is something like a quality of interpretation. The phenomenological evidences show us very often that we can talk about better or worse interpretation. Assume that we go to a theater to watch a piece by Pirandello. Dramas and texts of that range demand interpretation. Without it they can be amusing but they will not form themselves into a unity of meaning. Given that not every possible interpretation is a good one, what is decisive here? In the seventies, during the long debate on Gadamer’s theory of understanding, Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel elaborated their own transcendental hermeneutics. Apel especially defended the possibility of better interpretation. Developing Apel’s arguments and trying to mediate between him and Gadamer, the philosopher Albrecht Wellmer devoted an important text3 to this subject. Let’s have a look on the line of his argumentation. To escape the dilemma between a “better” and a “different” understanding, Wellmer makes a distinction between two types of interpretation that are in principle different. He names the first one an “intern” or “immanent” interpretation. It is irreducible to the second one that he calls “extern” or “productive.” According to him, their difference is phenomenologically evident. The best example for the first one is a philologically faithful, immanent reconstruction of the sense of a text. The example of the second one would be a new, very critical reading of this text, in the manner of Heidegger’s or Adorno’s productive (mis)readings of the classical works of philosophy. Both kinds of interpretation demand intellectual activity and creativity of the interpreter. The type of creativity and the conditions of it differ according to the different aims of them. The first one is captured by its text. It does not question the truth of the text. Instead, it tries to discover this truth, to participate in it. The second kind of interpretation tries purposefully to be critical about the truth of the analyzed text, hoping to discover its deeper meaning through a kind of deconstruction of it. According to Wellmer, we can speak about understanding if the interpreter succeeds in transcending the text according to his/her own authority (Massgabe) in the direction of his/her truth claims

3

216

Albrecht Wellmer, “Zur Kritik der hermeneutischen Vernunft,” Lingua ac Communitas 5 (1995).

(Wahrheitsanspruch), i.e., when the truth and untruth of the text can be seen through the horizon and the language of the interpreter in a new, sharper light.4 If we agree with Wellmer, we can also accept the idea of a relative progress in understanding, against the explicit formulation of Gadamer’s Truth and Method. This progress is a relative one, because the pure existence of the above-mentioned two profoundly different types of interpretation -- and we cannot be sure that there is not a third or fourth one -- shows us that any comparison of interpretation is possible only in the frames of a given type. It would hardly be possible to compare an interpretation that is looking for a message of a text with the one that is seeking to disclose its unconscious element or structural features, conditioning the place of it in the universe of meaning. That’s why it is not easy -- also for Gadamer -- to accept a separate existence of the short, existentially motivated, hermeneutic way of Heidegger and the long, methodologically mediated way of Ricoeur. They need to be integrated. We can assume that Gadamer’s call for the supremacy of hermeneutics over aesthetics could be enlarged also on the subject we discuss here. He might say that a scientifically supported interpretation is acceptable only as an enrichment of the “normal,” messagesearching interpretation. That is precisely what he means by saying the role of psychoanalysis is to return the patient to a society and its communication. Resuming, we can say that it is safer for philosophical hermeneutics to speak about different understanding, and not about the better one. But it is possible, against Gadamer, to argue for a possibility in principle of a better interpretation. This does not break the back of Gadamer’s conception; both types of understanding work in accordance with his metaphor of fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung), though each makes it in a different way. In the intern, interpretation dominates the horizon of the text. The interpreter has to awake in himself the prejudices (Vorurteile) that enable him to reach the message of the text. His creativity relies on a kind of subordination of his own subjectivity to the possible truth of the text. The positive result of it is something Gadamer calls “Zuwachs am Sein,” an enriching of Being, of the interpreter’s world experience, also through questioning his previous prejudices. The second type of interpretation assumes the domination of the horizon of the interpreter. He critically questions the truth of the text’s message, trying to dig out the unknown dimension of its origin, its meaning and cultural position. This will be an interpretation of a given text -- and not a free creation of a critic -- as long as it keeps in touch with the different fragments of the text and helps us to understand its unexpected aspects. There are no winners in the controversy between Schleiermacher and Gadamer about the right to speak about a better understanding. Schleiermacher was right about the general possibility of speaking about it, but he was wrong in his thinking about the genuine object of the interpretation. Only in special cases are the subjective intentions of the author the object of interpretation. Gadamer is correct to stress this. On the other hand, interpretation is determined and expressed in language, and as such, can be intersubjectively discussed and compared in a conversation, making an agreement about a better or worse interpretation possible. The reason why Gadamer overlooked this possibility lies in the starting point of his analysis of understanding and interpretation: it is not the Heideggerian understanding of instrument (das Zeug) in everyday life, but the never ending interpretation of acknowledged canonical works of literature.

4

Ibid., 22. 217

V.

THE ARCHEOLOGY OF HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY: EDMUND HUSSERL AND MARTIN HEIDEGGER

1.

“CHILDREN IN THE REALM OF PURE SPIRIT” OR “FUNCTIONARIES OF HUMANITY”? GNOSTIC AND ANTI-GNOSTIC ELEMENTS IN HUSSERL’S CONCEPTION OF TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY

Martina Roesner

Introduction One of the most striking and perhaps also the most important features of Hans Jonas’s book The Gnostic Religion, is the hermeneutic reversal between the main corpus of the work itself and the additional chapter “Gnosis, Existentialism, and Nihilism,” written about twenty years after the first draft of the book and published as an epilogue to a later reedition.1 As Jonas himself puts it, the more thoroughly he analyzed the structures of ancient Gnosticism by means of the categories of existential ontology, the more he became aware that this hermeneutic choice -- though perfectly explicable, at a more superficial level, by his being a disciple of Heidegger’s and Bultmann’s -- had been implicitly motivated by the latent gnostic character of existential ontology itself.2 In this epilogue, Jonas intends to show the essential continuity between the main topics of fundamental ontology and this ancient dualist line of thought which conceives of human being in terms of absolute incommensurability with the rest of the universe. Not only does the abysmal difference between Dasein’s “ek-sistence” and the “being-ready-to-hand” or “beingpresent-at-hand” of natural or cultural objects parallel the gnostic dichotomy between the “pneumatic” and the “cosmic” sphere but the permanent risk of “authentic” existence losing itself in its preoccupations for merely inner-worldly things also seems a modern version of the struggle, within human being itself, of its “true” other-worldly essence against the continuous threat of its “psychic,” i.e., sensible inclinations. Although Gnosticism has exercised a hidden influence throughout the history of occidental philosophy from late Antiquity onwards, modern philosophy proves to have a particular proclivity for some of its main motives, especially for the radical dualism between spirit and nature. For Jonas, Pascal’s famous formula of the “thinking reed” is the paradigmatic expression of the radical homelessness of man in front of the empty universe of pure extension developed by the (modern) natural sciences. Nevertheless, concerning the more recent philosophical ancestors of gnostic tendencies in existential ontology, Jonas insists less on Pascal than on Nietzsche. What distinguishes, in his eyes, Heidegger’s approach from both the ancient Gnosis and the Pascalian vision of man, is the abandonment of the theological dimension of dualism and the reformulation of the principle of “evil” in terms of neutrality and indifference.3 This elimination of the original antagonism between the divine sphere and the world is prepared by Nietzsche’s concept of the “death of God,” which excludes, not so much -- as is the case in ancient Gnosticism -the idea of God’s presence in the world, but the very concept of God as a center of absolute (though unworldly) values serving as a guideline for human existence. According to Jonas, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology keeps using certain formal schemata, like “being-thrown,” “fallen-ness,” etc., without maintaining the background of an extra-human principle of absolute goodness, which alone could account for the unconditional existential claim of these categories. In this perspective, Heidegger’s conception of Dasein appears as a potentially dangerous blend of classical dualism, which makes man feel alien to the 1

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion. The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2d rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1963), 320-340. 2 Ibid., 320-321. 3 Ibid., 324-325; 331-332; 339-340. 221

cosmic world, and Nietzschean nihilism, which also makes man lose his rootedness in a transcendent sphere. Without denying the fundamental pertinence of Jonas’s analysis, as far as the existential ontology of Being and time is concerned,4 we would like to call into question the exhaustiveness of his approach with regard to the historical context. In reading Jonas’s book, one could come to consider Heidegger as the only philosopher of his time who developed a radically dualistic vision of human subjectivity, the idea of a metanoia from an inauthentic form of existence, or a more or less gnostic concept of temporality. No allusion is made, either to the neo-Kantian school, or to Husserl’s phenomenology, though both have much in common with these Heideggerian topics and could be ranked as belonging to modern “Gnosticism,” according to the criteria established by Jonas himself.5 In the following, we will limit ourselves to the phenomenological aspects of the problem and will point out in what sense Husserl’s transcendental approach -- crystallized in the notion of epoché -- could be considered an even more radical example of modern “Gnosticism” than Heidegger’s existential ontology. In the second part of this paper, we will try to show how -- by assigning to transcendental phenomenology a leading function in the teleological (but inner-worldly) achievements of humanity -- Husserl avoids the disastrous practical consequences of a crypto-gnostic dualism.

The Gnostic Dimension of Transcendental Phenomenology Phenomenology, Science, and the “World” Husserl’s approach, unlike that of classical Gnosticism, displays its dualistic tendencies essentially in the context of a theory of scientific thought. At least in its primary sense, the rift between “naive belief” and “true knowledge,” between “fallen-ness” and “conversion” or “awakening,” does not divide into two forms of existence -- concerning all human beings alike -- but rather, into two fundamentally different ways of realizing the scientific ideal of theoretical knowledge.

4

Of course, one should not forget that in other writings of roughly the same period (1928-1929), the “gnostic” dimension of Heidegger’s thought is far less clear or easy to recognize. Although he continues to insist on Dasein’s particular mode of being, the philosophical concept of “world,” conceived as a synonym of Dasein’s original transcendence, is subsequently purged of all negative connotations, especially of those related to the Christian-dualistic use of this notion, like, for instance, in the Gospel of St John or in St Augustine. See Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen des Grundes,” in Wegmarken, GA9 (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1976), 144-145. 5 Concerning the gnostic structure of temporality, that is essentially based on the devaluation of the present in favor of the future and the past, one is astounded to read in Hermann Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis a passage that could almost have been taken for an ante litteram quotation from Being and time: “It is the future which contains and reveals the characteristics of time. The anticipated future is closely followed and trailed by the past. What comes first, is not the past but the future, against which the past stands out. … But then, where do we find the present, which we are used to think of as a fixed point? It is anything but that; it hovers between points in a row, a row formed from such fixed points, and consists in the hovering between an anticipated future and a catching up with it, its resonance, the past.” “Die Zukunft enthält und enthüllt den Charakter der Zeit. An die antizipierte Zukunft reiht sich, rankt sich die Vergangenheit. Sie war nicht zuerst; sondern zuerst ist die Zukunft, von der sich die Vergangenheit abhebt. …Wo bleibt denn aber die Gegenwart, die man als den festen Punkt anzusehen pflegt? Sie ist nichts weniger als dieses; sie schwebt in der Reihe, welche von jenen Punkten lediglich gebildet wird, sie besteht in dem Schweben zwischen der antizipierten Zukunft und deren Nachholung, deren Abklang, der Vergangenheit.” Hermann Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 2d ed. (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1914), 154155; the translation is ours, the italics are Cohen’s. 222

From the very beginning, Husserl’s phenomenology is characterized by its opposition to all kind of contemporary scientific reductionism. If the qualitative distinction between pure logic on the one hand, and applied logic or psychology on the other, is the leitmotiv of the first part of his Logical Investigations,6 his Ideas I establishes phenomenology itself as an absolutely autonomous kind of science that differs both from formal logic and from the various material and formal ontologies which govern the object-regions of the natural and the human sciences.7 The “region” proper to phenomenology is no longer just part, a more or less fragmentary part, of a homogeneous extension: it is the result of a radical change in attitude with regard to the order of dependence between “pure consciousness” and the “world” as the totality of all possible objects. Whereas “reality,” in its broadest sense, is “purely nothing”8 apart from also being a phenomenon perceived by consciousness, the immanent sphere of the pure ego is radically heterogeneous and different from everything that is “transcendent,” i.e., from everything that is not intrinsic to the act of consciousness itself. The fundamental gnostic concepts of kosmos, psyché and pneuma (or their German equivalents Welt, Seele and Geist) also play a key role in phenomenology; their signification and mutual relationship, however, is slightly different from the classical gnostic schema. Though Husserl, on the one hand, does not fail to emphasize the difference between transcendental phenomenology and psychology as the science of the empirical ego, he maintains, on the other hand, an important distinction between empirical psychology and the rest of the natural sciences: both phenomenology and psychology deal with internal perceptions, which, unlike the external objects of the natural sciences, are inaccessible to inter-subjective verification. Without relapsing into psychologism, Husserl goes so far as to say that psychology is in a privileged relation to phenomenology, since all of its phenomena have their correlate in the sphere of pure subjectivity.9 Thus, instead of the ancient dichotomy kosmos / psyché versus pneuma, Husserl introduces a tripartite division by establishing first a distinction between the “natural” and the “intentional” before separating the intentionally structured, empirical subjectivity from the pure ego whose a priori structure includes the possibility, in equal measure, of being intentionally related to transcendent or to transcendentally modified phenomena. The radical asymmetry -- between the “immanent” and the “transcendent” within the sphere of transcendental subjectivity -- is not limited to the single act of consciousness; it also entails a dichotomy between the subject-pole and the laws that govern the different realms of phenomena. If “nature” does not mean anything in itself, but is the name given to a certain form of coherence within the sphere of external and sensible phenomena,10 then pure consciousness itself can never be subject to any of these merely factual laws. Like the “pneumatic man” of ancient Gnosticism, who is independent of the “mundane,” cosmic nomos or heimarmené,11 Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity is free of any causal or “real” connection with the world of things;12 it is both autonomous in itself and

6

See Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Erster Teil: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, Husserliana XVIII (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), 44-62, §§ 13-16. (Henceforth quoted as Hua.) 7 See Edmund Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Husserliana III/1, 2d ed. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976), 66-69; 125-127, §§ 33. 59. (Henceforth quoted as Hua.) 8 Ibid., 106, § 49. 9 See Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” in idem, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911-1921), Hua XXV (Dordrecht/ Boston/ Lancaster: Nijhoff, 1987), 17. 10 See Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie, 108, § 51. 11 See Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 328. 12 See Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie, 105. 223

absolute lawgiver to any possible “world,” i.e., to any consistent structure of transcendent phenomenality that can possibly be given to pure consciousness.13 In this sense, Husserl’s point of view is even more radical than ancient dualism: for him, the “world,” from which transcendental subjectivity has to be distinguished, includes not only the whole of the material or cosmological universe but also the “ideal” sphere of intelligible -- i.e., mathematical or logical -- objects, as long as their specific form of “existence” or “givenness” is naively presupposed without being recognized as a product of the spontaneity of the knowing subject.14 Therefore, the “world,” in which theoretical subjectivity always risks losing itself, does not coincide with the sum of all “external,” material things; it is potentially present also within the sphere of subjectivity itself, under the disguise of an immanent, ideal transcendence detached from the source of its phenomenal sense. The More-Than-Theoretical Dimension of the Transcendental Attitude Despite the apparently epistemological context of this issue, Husserl defines the particularity of transcendental phenomenology in terms that cannot be derived from a mere radicalization of fundamental scientific concepts. The “bracketing off” (Einklammerung) of the world and the empirical subject is much more than a temporary methodological stratagem that could be abandoned once transcendental phenomenology has accomplished the task of creating a new and definitive foundation for knowledge.15 If undertaking this radical modification of attitude is a free -- and, to a certain degree, perhaps even an “irrational” -- decision,16 then, once the epoché has been carried out, it has eliminated not only the general thesis of our worldly existence, but also the very possibility of a real and not only fictitious return to the “naïve,” pre-transcendental attitude.17 In most cases, the sciences and a non-phenomenological philosophy can and will continue to progress in profound ignorance of the innermost sense of their own activities, but one cannot realize the possibility of a radically different approach to reality as given by the epoché and go on persisting in this innocent naïvety. The obligation imposed by the epoché is as ineluctable as its breakthrough into individual scientific and philosophical existence is rare. One is free, not to take this step, but taking it amounts to an existential change that is comparable to a religious conversion.18 While drawing a clear distinction between practical wisdom and faith, on the one hand, and transcendental phenomenology on the other hand,19 Husserl employs a terminology that reveals the quasi-religious dimension of phenomenological existence itself, in comparison with the pre-transcendental scientific attitude. Doing science in the “natural

13

Ibid., 105-106, § 49, and Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, Hua XVII (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 243-244. 14 See Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie, 337, § 145. 15 Ibid., 64, § 31. 16 Ibid., 63-64. 17 Of course, Husserl does not pretend that the transcendental philosopher has to abstain from all acts and decisions required by the different non-transcendental aspects of his everyday-life (e.g., as a husband, father, citizen, etc.), but he will play all these roles in a second-level attitude, that is, “as if” he were not radically, and once and for all, committed to the particular profession of transcendental philosopher. See Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Hua VI (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954), 139. 18 Ibid., 140. 19 See Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” 49-59, and Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie, 109-110; 124-125, § 51. 58. 224

attitude” amounts to being a “child of the world” (Weltkind),20 whereas phenomenologists, after having renounced this “worldly” childhood, receive the new life of the “children in the realm of pure spirit” (Kinder im Reich des reinen Geistes).21 These two modes of being do not coexist in the common sphere of merely different but still comparable attitudes; the passage from the one to the other implies a change of paradigm that Husserl does not hesitate to call by the Nietzschean name of Umwertung (“reversal of values”).22 To neutralize a general theory about the world and the scientific attitude related to it, is in itself not a matter for neutrality or indifference, but one for taking up a stance, not with regard to the contents of a “thesis” or theory, or any other “conviction” whatsoever, but with regard to the sense given by the philosophical subject to its own functional “I.” By recognizing itself as the primordial origin of any phenomenal sense, transcendental consciousness does not, properly speaking, return from the “world” to its own “self”; rather, it learns to consider all forms of subjectivity and self-ness hitherto known as so many incarnations of the old philosophical Adam, who has to die in order to be reborn in the stream of the transcendental life which incessantly springs from the centre of absolute consciousness.23 However universal the structures of transcendental subjectivity are intended to be, Husserl’s approach, in Ideas I, is still characterized by a rather elitist vision of phenomenological rationality, as far as its concrete realization is concerned. Given the absence of logical continuity between the methods used by the “worldly” sciences and those of the phenomenological epoché, the latter will necessarily be attained by a still further reduced number of persons than the different forms of pre-transcendental theoretic knowledge. In this sense, the “philosophical conversion” involved in transcendental phenomenology seems less akin to the authentically Christian notion of “rebirth” than to its gnostic equivalent, which considers itself as a form of knowledge reserved to the “illuminated few.” At the same time, despite the empirically small number of transcendental phenomenologists, their work cannot simply be reduced to being ‘one activity among others.’ Husserl’s indignation -- when he became aware that phenomenology was being characterized as a conventional, “bourgeois” (bürgerliche) profession, or even as one of the “objective sciences” -- is felt by him in direct proportion to the “difference in value” (Wertunterschied)24 between the phenomenological attitude and all other forms of nonphenomenological existence, a difference which Husserl conceives of as “the greatest possible one.”25 Thus, the radical incompatibility of the phenomenological epoché with the value-system of the “natural,” “objective” attitude accounts both for the absolute claims made for transcendental phenomenology and the extreme rarity of its existential realization. “Factual History” Versus “Hidden History” During the “static” period of Husserl’s elaboration of phenomenology, the dualistic structure of his approach concerns the sphere of subjectivity in its “transcendental

20

See Edmund Husserl, Natur und Geist, Hua XXXII (Dordrecht/ Boston/ London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 7. 21 See Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß. Zweiter Teil (1921-1928), Hua XIV (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 466, and Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie, Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, Hua VIII (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1959), 123. 22 Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie, 63, § 31. 23 See Husserl, Erste Philosophie, Zweiter Teil, 121. 24 See Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, 139. 25 Ibid. 225

solitude.”26 If there is a “history of redemption,” it is only a private one that concerns the passage -- in the inner life of an individual subject -- from the “mundane” to the “transcendental” attitude. The history of humankind, however, and including the intersubjective communities that exist in a variety of subordinate forms, are part of the “natural world” parenthesized by the transcendental epoché. It is not until the 1920s that Husserl comes to deal with the problem of history in a way which repeats, very much like classical Gnosticism, the dualism between “mere fact” and a “hidden significance,” on a global scale.27 Like his pre-genetic analyses of the different fundamental attitudes of subjectivity, Husserl’s approach to human history is focused on the phenomenon of scientific and philosophical thought. Nevertheless, he does not treat the history of science and of philosophy as a mere subset of the historical development of humankind in general. This apparently very restricted chapter of history concerns all human beings alike, its intrinsic law being conceived as the progressive breakthrough of the idea of transcendental reason, whose essence is situated beyond all cultural, racial or other contingent determinations. Although himself explicitly referring to different key figures of occidental philosophy, Husserl is less interested in history as such than in its meta-historical dimension, something that reveals itself only in a transcendental reading of historical “facts.”28 It is worth noting that the possibility of such a reading actually lies in his own phenomenological approach, which appears to represent the crucial point in modern occidental philosophy.29 Transcendental phenomenology is not just one historical form of philosophy among other forms of philosophy; it is the historically incarnated possibility of endowing the history of thought with a sense that is more than the sum of its concrete, factual incarnations. Again, like in ancient Gnosticism, the event of “conversion” that enables the pneumatic neophyte to decrypt the “true,” hidden sense of history, is part of this history itself and at the same time its decisive turn,30 or, to speak in Kantian terms: phenomenology is at the same time the end of the historical series of philosophical approaches and what holds this series together as a whole. If the gnostic schema of parallelism between the principles of universal history and those of individual existence also appears in Husserl, it nevertheless proceeds exactly in the opposite direction. Whereas traditional Gnosticism considers the dualism between psyché and pneuma (in human beings) as a reflection of the macrocosmic strife between these two principles,31 Husserl projects the possible breakthrough of transcendental reason -- in the single thinking subject -- onto the universal context of human history. This approach constitutes more than a simple hermeneutic reversal; rather, it is the reason why, despite its dualistic tendencies, Husserl’s thought does not imply the same disastrous ethical consequences as traditional Gnosticism. Where the “world” (including its “nothingness,” as arrived at from the viewpoint of the pneuma) is considered to be a pre-given ontological domain, the actions of the “pneumatic man” inside this worldly sphere become completely irrelevant and are abandoned to arbitrariness. If, on the contrary, “world” is another name for a certain form of horizontal finality in the self-presencing of phenomena

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See Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922-1937), Hua XXVII (Dordrecht/ Boston/ London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 171. 27 See Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 45. 28 See Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlaß (1934-1937), Hua XXIX (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), 230; 403-404; 417. 29 See Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, 72-73. 30 See Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 35. 31 See ibid., 44. 226

to pure consciousness, then the transcendental subject cannot neglect or abuse the “world” without prejudice to the ultimate finality of its own “unworldly,” autonomous life. Whereas Gnosticism opens up an abyss between a static-extensional notion of “world” and a static-ontological notion of pneuma, in Husserl we have a still perfectly transcendent ego which nevertheless recognizes in a dynamic-horizontal “world” a genuine, if limited, offspring of its own finality whose infinite openness exceeds the limits of individual though transcendentally modified phenomena.

On Overcoming Transcendental Dualism: the Rational Generativity of History Without giving up, at any time, the radicalism of the transcendental epoché, Husserl subsequently develops his phenomenological approach in a way that can no longer be considered a modern version of ancient Gnosticism. His approach to the question of intersubjectivity, as well as his concept of historical time and the role of the divine in the context of human history, give much scope to showing up the differences which, in the end, actually do separate Husserl from the traditional forms of philosophical dualism. In this context, one of the basic concepts of phenomenology undergoes an important semantic shift: the initially purely theoretic meaning of “world” as synonymous with the totality of natural beings no longer occupies the position of the analogatum primarium for every possible kind of phenomenality. While Ideas I considered natural objectivity as the most fundamental and essential form of the givenness of phenomena to the subject,32 the later Husserl inverts the order of dependence by reinterpreting the notion of “natural world” from within the context of inter-subjective, social, cultural and ethical life.33 This step proves to be decisive for the further development of transcendental phenomenology. Having ceased to consider “nature” as the dominating mode of Being (in the sense of “Seinsweise”) in the sphere of transcendent phenomena,34 Husserl is then free to develop the idea of an original relation between transcendental subjectivity and the “world” without having to deny to the pure ego its non-empirical, non-natural essence. Organisms and Personalities of a Higher Order The crucial step in Husserl’s overcoming of his own dualistic tendencies consists in conferring upon the notion of “organism” a meaning that goes clearly beyond the purely natural dimension of this term. Indeed, Husserl’s analyses of the different forms of human inter-subjectivity largely make use of the organic paradigm in order to express both the particular interplay between the parts and the whole and the teleological character of their chronological development. According to the gnostic schema, the common tripartite distinction between body, soul and spirit is meant to indicate the complete strangeness of the pneuma to the rest of the individual. Husserl, on the contrary, insists more and more on a necessary embodiment

32

See (for instance in: Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie, 116, § 52) the necessary “foundation” of axiological and esthetic objectivity in the phenomenality of natural objects. 33 See Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, Dritter Teil (1929-1935), Hua XV (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 300, and Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, 304. 34 “The ‘I’ is inconceivable without a ‘non-I,’ which, however, does not at all need to be a real, spatiotemporal-causal world.” “Das Ich ist nicht denkbar ohne ein Nicht-Ich, das aber keineswegs eine reale, raumzeitlich-kausale Welt, zu sein braucht.” Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß. Zweiter Teil, 244; the translation is ours. 227

of reason, as far as the single human being is concerned, but also with regard to the different super-individual entities. This principle is not only applied to inter-subjective structures -- which, like the family or the people, presupposes the tie of natural, i.e., biological generation -- but also to entities which are usually ranked among the most “unnatural,” artificial products of human culture. In affirming, for instance, that even a book has something like a “double-sided bodily-spiritual objectivity” (zweiseitige körperlich-geistige Gegenständlichkeit),35 Husserl insists on the fundamental difference between artefacts and objects pertaining to the realm of inanimate nature. This does not mean, of course, that he upholds a kind of animism with regard to products of culture. If the book is said to have a “soul” or a “spirit,” this amounts to saying that its property of being a cultural object cannot be perceived in the same way as its physical qualities but only “apperceived” analogously with our empathetic apperception of the psychical sphere of another subject.36 This analogy between the “animated body” (Leibkörper) of a human individual and the “body of sense” (Sinneskörper)37 of a cultural product is neither arbitrary nor merely poetic. A cultural object can be credited with a “soul” insofar as it appresents an alter ego, i.e., another human being whose sphere of consciousness necessarily implies a spatiotemporally individuated, bodily existence which, in its own turn, tends to express itself and to find its continuation in artefacts, i.e., in objects whose mere perception already carries in itself a sort of universalizing finality that exceeds and supplants the final structure inherent in all intuitive acts in their phenomenal singularity. Unlike natural things, the different kinds of artefacts bear witness to the division of tasks, within humankind, and thus indicate the necessity for collaboration from all human beings with a view to their self-conservation. Nevertheless, the “organic,” “bodily” character of cultural objects cannot be reduced to their functional contribution to mankind’s biological persistence in an infinitely repeated “now.” In virtue of their particular intrinsic intentionality, cultural objects inaugurate a form of phenomenological temporality that is no longer subject to the dominance of the present. Just as the absent craftsman or artist in his particular historical world horizon endows the object in question with the dimension of the past and hence of tradition, the universal concept underlying the specific finality of the artefact implies the possibility of its being used successively by a virtually infinite number of different persons -- a feature that projects the essence of the cultural object out of the present of its natural, physical givenness toward the future of its teleological horizon. Though his interpretation of artefacts and art works according to the “body/soul”schema seems rather unusual, Husserl’s approach to inter-subjective structures like family, people, state, etc., in terms of “second-order organisms” is at first sight a commonplace of traditional political philosophy. Nevertheless, Husserl draws a distinction between organisms of a higher order, whose teleology is confined to mere self-conservation, and inter-subjective structures, which are endowed not only with a certain unity of consciousness, but also with the will to affirm themselves -- in the pursuit of a goal which is not already an intrinsic part of their own essential determinations. Only structures of this kind merit, apart from the name “organisms,” also that of “persons” or “personalities” of a higher order.38 Among these inter-subjective entities, the “state” constitutes a limiting

35

Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, Hua IX (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962), 111. Ibid., 110-111. 37 Ibid., 112. 38 See Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Hua IV (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1952), 319; 351; idem, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß. Zweiter Teil, 206; 220; 406; idem, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß. Dritter Teil, 154, footnote 1, and Husserl, Aufsätze und 36

228

case, since its existence depends at least partially on the natural tie of biological generation, while its concrete form and development are no longer determined by nature but subject to political decisions.39 This double characteristic reveals the borderline between natural generation, which consists in the diachronic process of reproduction of individuals of the same species, and another, non-biological form of “generativity,” which refers to the transmission of the collective human consciousness, whose contents are continually enriched and transformed by means of historical memory and tradition. The application of the concept of “organism” to cultural and inter-subjective entities results in a fragmentation and multiplication of the phenomenological notion of “world.” This concept no longer denotes, in its primary sense, the homogeneous, totalizing horizon of sensible phenomena, but rather, the horizon of comprehension of any kind of phenomenon in a given historical situation and with regard to a certain cultural context. Only subsequently can this multiplicity of partial “life-worlds”40 be referred to the unifying notion of “the” world, which, however, is neither an actual totality nor a pregiven horizon of totality,41 but the idea of an active overcoming of the limited “environmental worlds” (Umwelten) by a graduated approximation of human subjectivity to the infinite ideal of transcendental reason.42 In the case of artefacts, the teleological openness was still limited to the regionally determined finality of each cultural product. In a similar way, the teleology of “organisms” and “personalities of a higher order” remained inside a finite horizon of development, according to their specific and more or less universal goal. For the teleology to be infinite, it has to refer, not to this or that domain of rationally guided, human activity, but to rationality as such, in the plenitude of its historical development. And for Husserl, this new insight implies the necessity of reformulating his own approach of transcendental phenomenology in terms that take into account the essentially historical, generative dimension of human rationality without ever renouncing reason’s claim to universality. The Teleological Profile of History To the early Husserl, logic, in its most general and highest form -- as a purely theoretic “doctrine of science” (Wissenschaftslehre)43 -- had to be purged of all normative, that is, practical connotations.44 At the same time, history -- as the totality of contingent, past facts -- was considered a mere “spectacle” (Darbietung) like art and poetry, whose only utility consists in providing our imagination with the largest possible number of eidetic variations on the empirical forms of human existence.45 For the later Husserl, in contrast, this devaluation of practice and historical facticity is no longer sustainable. If, on the one hand, human history can only be understood, as history of the logos, in the form of

Vorträge (1922-1937), 5. 39 See Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, Erster Teil (1905-1920), Hua XIII (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 106; 110, and idem, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß. Zweiter Teil, 183; 205; 406. 40 See Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, 130-138. 41 See Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, Dritter Teil (1929-1935), 614. 42 See Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, 310, and idem, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, Dritter Teil (1929-1935), 436. 43 See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Erster Teil, 26-32, §§ 5-6. 44 Ibid., 44-71, §§ 13-20. 45 See Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie, 148, § 70. 229

transcendental reason,46 pure rationality, on the other hand, is necessarily characterized, both by an internal history and the relatedness to other egos, who appear to him, in a way, to be irreducible to theoretic intentionality. When considered from this perspective, the history of mankind is no longer a series of philosophically neutral, factual events. By integrating the different forms of finite teleology (art, religion, regional sciences, political structures, etc.) into the open horizon of an asymptotic ideal of rationality, Husserl does more than trace back the regionalized historical manifestations of the spirit to their common source. What is in question here, is not the mere extensional generality of the guiding principle of history, but its formal a priori necessity. Husserl’s interpretation of human history as the gradual breakthrough of the ideal of transcendental reason is not limited to what the progressive unfolding of thought has in fact been like, within the boundaries of European culture and philosophy, but is essentially concerned with what human reason ought to be, as seen from the absolute viewpoint of its ultimate ethical and practical fulfillment. Hence, the facticity of the past is no longer something that transcendental phenomenology is entitled to neglect or to parenthesize. Historical phenomena have to be considered, not as perceptible empirical facts, but as factual instances of an only apperceptible but ethically obligatory, transcendental ideal. As we have already pointed out, this concept of a “hidden” aspect of history bears a strong resemblance to the gnostic dualism between a “foreground” and a “background” dimension of historical events. This formal analogy, however, is no longer valid where the future dynamics of history are concerned. As Husserl sees it, the “hidden” aspect of philosophical history is not essentially and permanently hermetic. Indeed, his interpretation of history as the gradual coming-to-light of a universal principle aims at showing this very principle not as a pre-given, ineluctable law, but as an idea constituted by transcendental reason itself.47 Knowing what constitutes the hidden motor of history is not a matter of an inexplicable personal “call” or “illumination,” coming from outside and setting the recipient apart from the non-illuminated masses, once and for all. With Husserl, the distinction between those “who know” and those who do not is not ontologically founded but merely functional. Although initially articulated only by Husserl himself, and then only by a small following of phenomenologists, his insight into the secret, transcendental motivation within the history of occidental philosophy is considered to be potentially attainable by every human being, since it consists in nothing beyond an articulation of the generative structures of reason -- by reason itself, when considered from the viewpoint of its final perfection. The main difference between this approach and that of the earlier Husserl concerns the concrete determination of “absoluteness” and “infinity,” with which transcendental reason is now credited: whereas in Ideas I the carrying-out of the epoché -- by individual philosophers was considered to be the only requirement for bringing out the unvarying structures of virtually any, even the divine rationality,48 the later Husserl no longer places the infinite telos of absolute rationality within reach of the transcendentally singularized, philosophical subject. Once the essence of rationality is located not only in the subjectpole of noetic activity but also in the noematic object-pole of the historical intentionality of human consciousness, the idea of transcendental phenomenology itself requires a progressive, inter-subjective realization in the sphere of a virtually perfect, rational community. As Husserl himself puts it: “I, isolated as I am in my finiteness, cannot get far in knowing infinities. Philosophy is a task of infinite cognition within the infinitude of 46

See Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, 230. See Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, 234. 48 See Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie, 92. 351. 47

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humankind.”49 With regard to Husserl’s earlier insistence on the purely formal, performative character of transcendental subjectivity,50 one is somewhat taken aback by seeing him define philosophy as a knowledge whose infinity refers to both the intrinsic dynamism and the more or less remote object of its teleological movement. The need for actualizing an ideal, transcendental inter-subjectivity proves that, though the phenomenologist has to renounce childhood with regard to a transcendentally unmodified world, he does not have the right to refuse citizenship in the all-encompassing worldhorizon of mankind. In other words: the radical, apparently Manichean separation between the “transcendentally purified” and the “worldly” attitude becomes pointless, when transcendental philosophers recognize themselves as the first-born of a community of rational subjects, whose infinite task consists in the asymptotic assimilation of every possible kind of transcendent phenomenality with a variety of essentially inter-subjective, transcendental constitutions.51 If transcendental philosophers can be called “functionaries of humanity,”52 this means that they are the first to realize that there is no need for human subjects to separate themselves from the world, provided that they re-assign to themselves the origin of the phenomenal sense of “nature,” “culture,” “society,” etc. To transcendental reason (in its historical dimension), the very notion of “alienation” -- and hence the necessity of regaining the original “integrity” by cutting oneself off from the inner-worldly sphere -- becomes not wrong but simply meaningless. Indeed, the infinitely open horizon for the development of human reason even allows for the constitution of those most universal forms of phenomenality which cannot possibly be derived from the partial infinity of a single, though transcendentally de-empiricized, subject. Transcendence and Immanence of the Divine with Regard to Human History In the ancient gnostic tradition, the absolute dichotomy between the pneumatic element in human beings and the rest of reality is the consequence of a radically transcendent, other-worldly concept of God.53 The upholders of this conception of radical separation do not shrink from taking away from God (considered as the principle of the Good) the quality of Creator with respect to the material world, his activity as sovereign Maker being restricted to the realm of pure spirits. In truth, Husserl is one of the few philosophers who fully separate the philosophical notion of God from the idea of causality.54 Far more radical than Kant, on this point, he does not simply deny to the cosmological argument its coercive quality: the very notion of God as Creator of the natural world is not even mentioned by him as a possibility or by way of an hypothesis. During the “static” period of his transcendental phenomenology, characterized by the radical application of the epoché to every form of positive, “thetic” facticity, the question concerning the “origin” or “ground” of natural, empirical existence is of course quite meaningless and therefore remains outside his consideration. Yet, without ever analyzing the pre-transcendental mode of natural existence (from the viewpoint of a possible “extra-mental” genesis), Husserl presents the particular structures

49

“Ich isoliert in meiner Endlichkeit kann in der Erkenntnis der Unendlichkeiten nicht weit kommen. Philosophie ist Aufgabe der unendlichen Erkenntnis in der Unendlichkeit der Menschheit.” Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, vol. 9: Familienbriefe, Husserliana-Dokumente III/9 (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 110; the translation is ours. 50 See Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie, 109. 51 See Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften,154-156. 52 Ibid., 15. 53 See Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 42-44. 54 See Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie, 1; 125. 231

and properties of sensible phenomena as necessarily valid for both human and hypothetic divine consciousness.55 The absolute ineluctability of the transcendental structures of consciousness with regard to sense perceptions seems to deprive even the potential idea of a divine being of the possibility that this divine being might have an intuition that is not only “original” but “originating,” i.e., “creative.” Concerning God’s relationship with the already “existing” world, however, Husserl does not follow the common dualist conception of radical super-natural “transcendence.” If the divine being can be said to be transcendent, this is to be understood in quite a different sense than the noematic transcendence of phenomena inside the sphere of pure consciousness or the simple negation of mundane phenomenality as a whole.56 If God is not part of the sphere of “worldly” phenomena, he is not to be located in a sphere “above” or “beyond” the natural world either. For the earlier Husserl, God has no “place” at all; he is no more than the functional consistency of the one, indivisible transcendental reason, in the virtually infinite multiplicity of empirical egos.57 In the context of Husserl’s transcendental interpretation of history, this merely functional, non-factual notion of God undergoes a noticeable modification. On the one hand, God is still defined in relation to human consciousness, and never with regard to a “nature” of any kind. As internal entelecheia -- i.e., as the governing principle -- of human reason in its history, God is the “sovereign” in the kingdom of transcendental subjects. On the other hand, Husserl does not simply make God coincide with the mere dynamic of humanity’s progress toward transcendental reason. Given the double, noeticnoematic structure inside the historical intentionality of reason, the notion of God is at the same time the motor for, and the infinitely remote limit of, this transcendental evolution.58 The tendency being that of a constantly growing adequacy between historical reason’s intention and fulfillment, the “transcendence” of the divine is, if not altogether overcome, constantly diminished by the asymptotic realization of a perfectly rational form of human sociality. Here, the difference from the gnostic division of reality is quite obvious: instead of opening up an abyss -- first between God and the world, and then between the world and human beings -- the later Husserl tries to bring these three instances as closely together as possible by interpreting them as so many eidetic variations of the genetichistorical intentionality of transcendental reason. The perspective of a theo-teleological perfection of mankind by means of transcendental rationality, confers upon the temporality of history a meaning that is radically opposed to the gnostic interpretation. If on the one hand, Husserl seems to credit transcendental phenomenology with a genuinely “soteriological” power,59 on the other hand, he never considers the necessity for this ‘redemption’ to be a legacy of an “original sin” committed at the dawn of history. Despite the somber and sometimes downright prophetic undertones in his reading of the historical present,60 Husserl never goes as far as considering history as a history of original disaster. His approach is in no way centered upon an “unforethinkable” past, be this initial moment of history identified with an original lapse or an original integrity. The very idea of nostalgia is quite alien to Husserl, as is the notion of “doom” or “damnation” with respect to the temporary inner-worldly

55

See Edmund Husserl, Ding und Raum, Hua XVI (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 116-117. See Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie, 109-110; 124-125. 57 Ibid., 175. 58 See Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, Dritter Teil (1929-1935), 381; 610, and Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922-1937), 33-34. 59 In ibid., 95. 118, Husserl praises transcendental phenomenology as a “source of redemption” (Heilsquell) against the “sinful degeneration” (sündhafte Entartung) of European humanity. 60 See Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, 3-4; 8; 12-17. 56

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distraction and self-forgetfulness of human subjectivity.61 By reading history in terms of “intention” and “fulfillment,” Husserl does not need to attribute the numerous imperfections and shortcomings of human life to an original principle of “evil.” Inside transcendental phenomenology, “evil” has no name other than that of a provisional inadequacy between the present state of human consciousness and its foreshadowed, but never actually fulfilled, intention. This “de-cosmologization” of evil, however, does in no way diminish its phenomenological reality and ethical impact. Whatever abyss may be observable between factual human behavior and the transcendental ideal of human reason, its origin comes within the limits of the sphere of subjectivity itself, and apart from the insufficient transcendental élan of human consciousness, there is no one, or nothing that could be blamed by human conscience.

Telos and Kairos: History of Thought and History of Humanity in the Later Philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger At this point in our reflections on Husserl’s phenomenological reading of history, we would like to conclude with remarking on a few of the resemblances and differences between his approach and the later Heidegger’s conception of the “history of Being,” whose possible gnostic dimension -- given the posthumous publication of the corresponding Heidegger manuscripts -- could not be commented upon by Jonas himself. Having dedicated himself, in Being and Time, to the destruction of the fundamental concepts of the ontological and metaphysical tradition, the Heidegger of the late 1930s is no longer committed to reading the history of occidental philosophy as the history of the manifold forms of a “forgetfulness of Being,” within the different relevant Schools of Philosophy or Philosophical movements. The very fact of philosophy having forgotten the question of “Being itself” is no longer considered to be a matter of subjective, philosophical shortcomings, in fact the history of occidental metaphysics is even accorded some sort of inherent “truth,” insofar as its different approaches to thinking the “Being of beings” -- or ‘Being’, in a merely functional, onto-theo-logical, key -- is recognized as an adequate answer to Being’s way of giving itself to thought in the shape of a “withdrawal” (Seinsverlassenheit).62 By attributing the guiding impulse for, or motor of, history, not to the development of philosophy itself, but to an apparently “hidden”63 principle, we find that philosophical rationality has not constituted itself, and Heidegger does what he can -- or so it seems -- to justify après coup the charge of latent Gnosticism, as formulated by Jonas. Indeed, the problem is no longer limited to showing a structural dualism with respect to Dasein’s ontological status, rather, it concerns the possibility of a radical elimination of human responsibility in the name of the global principle of what is hidden and nevertheless compelling (das verborgen Zwingende).64

61

See (for instance in: Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922-1937), 4) Husserl’s disapproval of the fatalistic reading of history as found in Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (München: Beck, 1917); (English) idem, The Decline of the West (London: G. Allen & Jawin, 1961). 62 See Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), GA65, 2d ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1994), 114. 63 See ibid., 134. 64 Ibid., 10. 233

In clear distantiation from his own “methodological atheism” of the 1920s,65 the Heidegger of the 1930s gradually tries to develop a philosophical notion of God without having recourse to the traditional concepts and schemata of natural theology. His reading of Hölderlin’s poetry suggests to him the idea of a “flight (or “fleeing”) of the gods” (Flucht der Götter)66 and the possible manifestation of the “ultimate God” whose return, however, can at best be prepared for, but not brought about, by thought and poetry.67 On the one hand, the conception of this “ultimate God” reveals a strongly eschatological character; on the other hand, the dimension of certainty -- or even that of a more or less great probability -- for this manifestation to take place, is completely ruled out by conceiving the coming of this God as a sudden and unforeseeable “event.” Despite the need for the “future ones” (die Zukünftigen)68 -- in the present historical situation of “distress” (Not)69 and “poverty” (Armut)70 of thought, the possible form of the divine is not a future ideal human reason, or even the thought of Being as “event” -- could gradually come nearer. Even though, during the 1950s, Heidegger explicitly reintegrates his notion of the divine into the context of the “world” as the finite yet all-encompassing frame for the life of mortals on earth, the temporality of the ‘ultimate God’s coming’ remains detached from concrete historical time. The more Heidegger develops his notion of the divine, the more it seems to constitute a sui generis form of the “event,” without any necessary relation to the future history of thought and the empirical development of mankind. Even by conceiving of Being itself in terms of “withdrawal” and “refusal,” the “thought of the other beginning”71 cannot in itself pre-trace the historical place for the ‘ultimate God’s appearance.’ Preparing for this possible ‘coming’ is mainly entrusted to the poets, whose poems call the world and assign the mortals to their abode on earth.72 The future form of thought is part of a world whose foundation is in itself not a matter of constitutive thought but of poetry. Within the frame of this poetic foundation of the world, philosophy is not only separate from the ideal of asymptotic infinity, but proceeds under the sign of a double finitude: being dependent on the poetic foundation of language -- as far as its possibility of articulation is concerned -- it is committed to thinking of human beings in terms of being essentially mortal and bound to the earthly dimension. In comparison with this radically kairological approach to the question of the divine, Husserl’s theo-teleological conception of occidental history is clearly more optimistic with regard to the possibilities of reason. There is no need for a rupture with respect to the metaphysical tradition of the past. On the contrary, what is at stake is the definitive coming-to-light of the transcendental principle whose dynamic already underlies the pretranscendental forms of European philosophy. Husserl’s view is profoundly marked by the idea of an asymptotic infinity, the essential mortality of animal monads73 -- being no more than the necessary stimulus to join the non-empirical, immortal life of transcendental

65

See Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, GA61, 2d ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1994), 197; 199, and idem, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, GA25, 3d ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1994), 109-110. 66 See Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, 7th ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1994), 269-272. 67 Ibid., 274-275. 68 See GA65, 395-401. 69 See ibid., 125. 70 See Martin Heidegger, “Brief über den ‘Humanismus’,” in GA9, 364. 71 See GA65, 171. Heidegger’s expression is spefifically “das Denken des anderen Anfangs.” 72 See Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), 28-30; 204-208. 73 See Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, Dritter Teil (1929-1935), 172; 406, and idem, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, 338. 234

reason.74 To the degree in which humanity conforms itself to this rational ideal, the phenomenological God cannot fail to become real; God’s appearance depends exclusively on the future development of reason, while the question of concrete forms of human language is confined to the contingent domain of the “home-world” (Heimwelt).75 During their later years of thinking, both Husserl and Heidegger show a marked tendency toward an originary “ethics,” developed from within a singular re-reading of the history of occidental philosophy. But, whereas the idea of a perfect community of rational subjects is the keynote of Husserl’s project, Heidegger’s “ultimate God” is a God for the “world to come,” not primarily a God who delights in being the Monarch of the ideal realm of rational beings. In Husserl’s eyes, the teleological realization of a transcendental community of human beings is in itself a warrant for the constitution of a world in perfect harmony with the requirements of reason. For Heidegger, the “world as ‘event’” is entirely dependent on the poetic foundation of language, which, given the exceptional character of poetic existence, can at any moment fail and withdraw. For Husserl, the historical time of transcendental rationality -- especially that which concerns the future -- is permeated with a non-empirical dynamic, which, despite all difficulties and contingent obstacles, cannot fail to carry humanity toward its teleological fulfillment. The facticity of this historical process is nothing other than the garb of finitude that will gradually be undone by philosophical reason, in direct proportion to its growing approximation to the ideal of a divinized, i.e., fully rational, humanity. The phenomenological God knows no time than the time of philosophical reason, and, if it is true that transcendental reason can at most approach its divine ideal asymptotically, it can also be sure that the God will not tear or break into the tissue of the rational progress that has already been achieved. Being finite only in its need for factual, historical progress, transcendental phenomenology never runs the risk of losing its past results. Inside the Januslike, finite-infinite structure of thought, the weight shifts continually from the balancescale of finitude to that of infinity -- an infinity that already gilds the past, that is, the historical stages reached within the European philosophical tradition. For the later Heidegger, by contrast, the coincidence between “philosophical” and “theological” temporality has to be dissolved in order to be able to conceive philosophical thought and the divine in the key of a discontinuous, non-progressive and non-cumulative temporality. The discontinuous, incalculable structure of time, which Heidegger assigns to both the philosophical and the theological dimension of thought, is a hallmark of radical finitude -- and hence a reminder, to “thinkers” and “theologians” alike, that all possible “results” or “achievements” of rational thought remain a fragile thing which has to be gained, defended and regained at every moment in the unfolding of human history. If classical Gnosticism is characterized by a profound indifference to the world and a complete arbitrariness of human behavior, then one is bound to conclude that both Husserl and Heidegger, having both come perilously near the region of structural philosophical dualism, struggle to overcome this danger by trying to establish a relation between the essence of philosophy and the manifestation of the divine in the historical context of human life in the world. This relation, however, will always remain frail, since neither the constitutive, genetic approach of transcendental rationality, nor the concept of world and God as so many forms of the “event,” will ever convey the same existential certainty as the static ontological categories of the ancient Gnostic worldview.

74

Ibid., 332. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, Dritter Teil (19291935), 224-225. 75

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2.

HISTORY AS THE OTHER -- NOTES ON HUSSERL’S IDEA OF A RADICAL SELBSTBESINNUNG

Hans Ruin

With his late and posthumously published work, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl is generally acknowledged to have led his phenomenological project into a somewhat new direction, a more historical and perhaps hermeneutic direction.1 Phenomenology is here introduced from within an historical account of the evolution of philosophy in the modern times, starting with Galileo and Descartes. But, more important than the factual historical content of the presentation, is Husserl’s emphasizing that phenomenology must understand itself from within such an historical context; it cannot assert its radicalism without a certain historical consciousness, transformed into a Selbstbesinnung.2 On the face of it, this seems to indicate a radical departure from the standpoint developed until then, and most recently in the Cartesian Meditations, where the primacy of the phenomenological reflection is confirmed without any such detours. In an early essay on Husserl’s understanding of history, Paul Ricoeur -- in a very clearsighted manner -- raised the question of the status of historical reflection within Husserlian phenomenology.3 He showed there, how it grows partly from a personal disillusionment with the contemporary historical situation, but also how it arises from within the phenomenological project itself. He notices how, in one sense, the historical considerations are nothing but a natural and parallel extension of the reflexive philosophy which had already been achieved on the interior level (pp. 299-300). Ricoeur carefully displays some of the problems and inner workings of this historical extension, and towards the very end of his essay, he makes a few remarks which make up the starting point for my reflections in the present essay. There he focuses on what he holds to be the principal enigma of Husserl’s discussion in The Crisis, viz., the relation between the individual reflecting cogito in the shape of the transcendental ego and the historical spirit of which it is ultimately a part. It is, as Ricoeur expresses it, a theory of a history which “encompasses that by which it is encompassed.” (p. 314) This paradoxical notion, which operates throughout The Crisis, is not explicitly treated within the context of that same work. However, according to Ricoeur, its clues are to be found elsewhere, viz., in the Husserlian analysis of the structure of intersubjectivity and the constitution of the Other. This was something Husserl

1

Translated from the German by David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), henceforth referred to as Crisis. The evaluations of the larger implications for phenomenology and Husserl’s own self-interpretation have widely differed. For a brief summary of the discussion up until the late sixties, cf. Carr’s introduction to the translation, xxx-xxxi. For a very recent monograph on this particular work, see James Dodd, Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2004). 2 Carr translates this expressive German notion as “self-understanding” and Dorion Cairns, in his translation of the Cartesian Meditations, as “self-examination.” Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1988). However, neither of these alternatives is really able to bring out the full meaning of a thorough coming-to-terms-with and grasping oneself that is implied by the original expression. 3 Paul Ricoeur, “Husserl et le sens de l’histoire,” Revue de métaphysique et morale 54 (1949): 280316. 236

worked on all along his later philosophical period (i.e., following the Logical Investigations), and which found its most famous expression in the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations.4 Referring to the latter text, Ricoeur writes: “this eruption toward the ‘foreign’ in the very core of the ‘proper’ is indeed the problem to be taken on.”5 Ricoeur goes no further, he leaves the questions to be answered by subsequent readers. It is my intention here, precisely, to take on this problem and to trace a few more steps in the direction of its clarification. In following this path, we have an opportunity to reflect on what it means for Husserl and orthodox phenomenology to widen its scope toward a hermeneutic philosophy, but also what constitutes the interior limits for such an expansion.6 In 1935, Husserl gave his famous lecture to the Vienna Cultural Society, with the title “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity.”7 It is written in direct relation to the manuscripts that make up The Crisis, and in many ways it catches the spirit of this work in a condensed and slightly popularized way. I will use it here as a sort of introduction to the problem I wish to discuss. The principal idea of Husserl’s lecture is to present Europe as a unitary spiritual form in imminent danger of losing its own direction. The notion of “spiritual form,” which is elaborated to some extent, is said to denote a historical community bound together by a common goal. In the case of Europe, this community must be seen as more than just any other spiritual constellation which has inhabited the earth. What is significant about this particular form, is that it is bound together by the idea of what Husserl calls an “infinite task.” The ultimate expression of this task is science and the corresponding “theoretical attitude” to the world. This project has its historical origin -- viz., the Greek culture as it took shape in the sixth and fifth century B.C. -- but from then on its status is that of a universality which inevitably transgresses every national and cultural border. It distinguishes itself from any other cultural expression or praxis, precisely in this autonomy with respect to time and place. It represents a certain maturity of mankind, which in the decision to know itself and its world takes on the responsibility for its own cultivation. The goal of this scientific attitude is “absolute responsibility,” but as an infinite task of internal critique of its own life. In other words, it is the original establishment of a community of truth and rationality progressing towards its own self-understanding through history. The danger facing this attitude, Husserl detects primarily in a wide-spread “objectivism” or “naturalism,” in which all psychological phenomena are treated on a par with natural events. The task of philosophy, in this situation, is to articulate a true understanding of the spirit in which it is understood as existing in and for itself in self-sufficiency. And this is

4

Cf. also, for example, Husserl, Ideen, Part 2, Husserliana, vol. IV, §§ 43-53, about the constitution of the other and the notion of “empathy,” and the three volumes of published manuscripts concerning intersubjectivity: Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Husserliana, vols. XIII-XV. The amount of work which Husserl devoted to this subject is quite remarkable, and thus it is no coincidence that the last and longest of the meditations in the Cartesian Meditations (which was meant to serve as an introduction to his work in general) is devoted precisely to this topic. 5 “Cet éclatement vers l’‘étranger’ au sein même du ‘propre’ est bien le problème à assumer.” Ricoeur, “Husserl et le sens de l’histoire,” 314. 6 Following Ricoeur’s essay, there appeared a number of studies devoted to Husserl’s historical reflections and the problem of history within phenomenology in general; e.g, David Carr’s Phenomenology and the Problem of History (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press 1974), Ludwig Landgrebe’s Phänomenologie und Geschichte (Güterloh: Güterloh Verlagshaus, 1967), and also Jacques Derrida’s introduction in L’origine de la géometrie (Paris: P.U.F., 1962). In more recent years, the topic has been raised again by, among others, Renato Cristin, in his Fenomeno storia: fenomenologia e storicità in Husserl e Dilthey (Napoli: Guida, 1999). However, to my knowledge no one has yet further developed the particular point of comparison raised by Ricoeur. 7 Included as an appendix to: Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, 269-299. 237

precisely the accomplishment of phenomenology, which for the first time has made the spirit accessible to systematic experience and science. On one level, the mood and form of expression of this presentation does not, perhaps, provoke any particular reaction. One is aware that it is indeed a public lecture, presented in a non-specialist context. Husserl simply states, in his particular version, what any serious general philosophical theory, secure in its own outlook, would try to do in a similar situation: he presents a historical context and an analysis of what he perceives to be a serious spiritual problem, and from there he suggests in what way his own philosophical attitude could serve as a liberating therapy. But in the particular case of phenomenology, such a shallow understanding of the intentions of the author is not sufficient. What is said and suggested, in this public lecture, in fact stems from the deepest layers of the phenomenological project, in ways I will now try to develop. First of all, Husserl’s language in this lecture immediately strikes one as surprisingly nonphenomenological. He does not mention either the natural attitude, or any of the reductions. And finally, he focuses on the “spirit,” a notion of which he seldom speaks otherwise. On the other hand, the underlying scheme remains very much the same. “Objectivism” need only be replaced with the “natural attitude,” and the whole discussion of the need for a certain change in attitude (in understanding the spirit) with that of the need for a transcendental turn. Finally “spirit” could in this context very easily be substituted for “transcendental subjectivity,” and immediately the continuity would appear obvious. Other authors have already pointed out that, what seems to be operating throughout the writings connected to The Crisis is a peculiar new kind of reduction, closely affiliated with the transcendental reduction but arising from a different context, viz., what David Carr calls an “historical reduction.”8 Phenomenology had already, from its early beginning, defined itself as a radical reflection, seeking legitimacy in its determination and ability to attain a truly original stratum of experience of pure givenness, where every unreflected presupposition was to be set aside, in favor of an account of how things manifest themselves in noematic variation. This ambition found its formal expression in the transcendental or phenomenological epoché or reduction, by means of which the reflecting ego -- to use the formulation of the Cartesian Meditations -- “posits exclusively himself as the acceptancebasis of all Objective acceptances and bases.”9 The principal target of the transcendental turn is the so-called “natural attitude,” in which the ego does not perceive itself as the ultimate acceptance-basis, but rather as only one among many psychic egos inhabiting the world. The reduction transforms this selfunderstanding of the personal ego by means of a fundamental gestalt-shift. Suddenly all facticity, which was up till then seen as existing in itself, is encountered as sense and validity for the intending ego. What was hitherto perceived as external transcendency, suddenly appears as immanent transcendency, and the former isolated psychic ego is at once disclosed as a transcendental intentional field of experience for itself to investigate. The principal target for the reduction is thus the sense of the existence of material objects, accessible to experience. Once they are seen as appearing within the field of intentional subjectivity, their givenness can be interpreted and explicated in a new fashion. But how much does the reduction claim to encompass? In §11 of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl expresses himself in the following way: “That I, with my life, remain untouched in my existential status, regardless of whether or not the world exists.”10

8 9 10

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Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History, 117. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 26. Ibid.

If thus the world in its entirety is affected by the reduction, then obviously it affects the status not only of material objects, but also that of cultural objects and of other people. But what about the past? This is a difficult question, one that can be answered on different levels. In one sense, “pastness” should pose no particular problem to phenomenology. On the contrary, the theory provides exemplary means to analyze the intentional structure of the flow of time, its dialectic of presence and absence, etc., which was demonstrated vividly already in the early lectures on internal time consciousness.11 Yet time and temporality constitute perhaps the most serious threat to the self-assertion of phenomenology. Husserl raises the question himself, when he asks, in Cartesian Meditations: “Does not transcendental subjectivity at any given moment include its own past as an inseparable part, which is accessible only by way of memory?”12 This question seems to open up an abyss in the center of the whole project. The reduction has disclosed the field of transcendental subjectivity as a fundamental ground, from which all human experience can be assessed and explicated as to its intentional structure. But with the continuous passing of time, this very same ground seems to have access not even to itself, except indirectly (like any other empirical subjectivity) through memory. From this sketchy background one can see how the phenomenological project, as a result of its ambitions to reach a radical Selbstbesinnung, carries with it an inner momentum, so to speak, which forces it, at one point or another, to face the necessity of a reduction operating not only on the World but also on history, as the history of transcendental subjectivity itself. And it is from this viewpoint that one can affirm, with Ricoeur and others, the continuity of Husserl’s reflections as they are presented in the Vienna lecture. Somehow the voice of transcendental subjectivity, speaking from within the individual philosopher, must claim to have a privileged access to the past, in order to be persistent in its original ambition. The next step in my argument is to look at some of the problems and conflicts which seem to arise from within phenomenology itself, once this attempt is made. How then is history realized from the point of view of the transcendental subject? This is the question I now wish to turn to, by initially looking at some of the general ways in which phenomenology classifies the given. The phenomenological description operates from within the stream of transcendental subjectivity, but with an eye, not to its particular transformations but to its eidetics, i.e., what is typical and persistent. The ultimate generality is always the object in general (der Gegenstand überhaupt), but from there on down, one can distinguish any number of more particular types, such as formal, material, animal, etc. Every object has its own mode of givenness, and as such it signifies a rule-structure of transcendental subjectivity, which can be displayed in intentional analysis.13 The most easily exemplified mode of presentation is of course the visible physical object, such as a house, a dice, or a table, which are all examples that Husserl likes to use. It is part of their structure of appearance that they are never fully accessible, i.e., there is always an alternative perspective to be taken, from which they can be viewed. This, however, does not diminish their accessibility in any essential way. It is part of their meaning that whatever is absent from one perspective can be made present from another, or by means of some manipulation of which I am (in principle) capable. The situation is somewhat different, when it comes to that which is not immediately present, but only indirectly so through memory. The time which has passed can never be 11 12 13

Cf. Husserliana, vol. X. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 22. Ibid., § 21. 239

brought as such into the present, it is essentially tainted by an uncertainty. It has what Husserl calls a “presumptive” character, meaning thereby that it presents itself as in principle not fully presentable.14 But precisely this presumptivity constitutes the particular “horizon” of expectations and possible transformations which surrounds it. With the notion of a horizon, the uncertainty itself can be made into an object of intentional investigation. And, from this point of view, the difference diminishes, between the open infinity surrounding the givenness of the material object (in all its possible transformations) and the inaccessibility of the past given in memory. The present has a distinct way of receiving and realizing the past, and it is precisely this intentional structure, which is to be revealed. In this sense, the past is -- and can be explicitly made -- present. A third type of givenness is that of the other person. Just as in the givenness of times past, the experience of the other person involves a certain “absence.” The other is never given to us in evident intuition, as a natural object of experience. Only the body of the other is present in this way, but the sense of his being as an other person is never exhausted by this bodily presence. This fact never leads Husserl to raise the traditional philosophical question of how one can really know that there is actually someone “in there.” Such a question already presupposes a distinct division between objective and spiritual being, and how they are linked, a presupposition which should have been eliminated with the transcendental reduction. But even in the reduced state, the contrast remains. There remains something about the way the other is presented to me, which seems to be essentially inaccessible. The other is given to me within my “sphere of ownness,” and as such he belongs to it, and yet he belongs to it as something alien. It is alien, not as the inaccessible side of the material object, which is always potentially presentable. For it is given only in, what Husserl calls, “appresentation.” In a sense, this is a parallel to the situation with the past, which also cannot be recovered by means of a direct presentation.15 But the past, which can be recovered in memory, is always my past, and thereby it lacks the peculiar phenomenological sense of that which is truly other. The transcendental field splits, at this point, in a “division into the sphere of his ownness ... and the sphere of what is ‘other.’”16 Instead of probing deeper into the detailed analysis of the different levels of sense through which the other appears, I will again return to the main question of this paragraph, i.e., the status of history in this scheme. Where should this phenomenon be located? Within the context of The Crisis, this question does not seem to have been raised as such, i.e., as a phenomenological problem in its own right. In § 15, where one finds perhaps the most condensed account of the whole project of an historical Selbstbesinnung, the access to history (and its true interpretation) are taken for granted. The methodological questions are limited to remarks concerning the need to perform this kind of reflection, in order to retrieve “the hidden unity of intentional inwardness which alone constitutes the unity of history.”17 Still, I believe there is such an answer to be found from within the phenomenological horizon, and I will take the risk of suggesting what it could be. Initially, one must distinguish the different levels on which the phenomenon of history appears. One principal distinction is the one between personal and non-personal history. To my own history, I maintain a particular and inexchangeable bond as to that which I myself have experienced. It is preserved by means of memories and material souvenirs, 14

Ibid., §9. Husserl himself makes this comparison, cf. ibid., 115, but further down on the same page, he also acknowledges the limit of it. 16 Ibid., 100. 17 Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, 73. 15

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including the personal body, with its scars and wrinkles. This history is the infinite horizon of the, in principle, re-enactable experiences of my personal past. The other history is that of others, either singular or in communion, or of a community consisting of myself and others. It necessarily includes experiences which I have never had. To this history, I stand in a mediated relationship. It is given to me, initially, as a story told by somebody else about how it was or what happened. Thereafter, I can of course, to a greater or lesser extent, try to find out for myself what actually took place. But whichever way I go about this, the knowledge will be mediated by some kind of cultural object; a manuscript of some kind, or a photographic image, but it could also be an artwork, a building, or simply the material remnants of a human body. In this way, history is handed down by means of different kinds of signs. History, in the broader sense of non-personal history, is not something that is primarily remembered; it is something heard or read, and as such something learned from another by means of a signifying act. And this is, of course, particularly true of the philosophical-scientific history of which Husserl speaks in The Crisis. History is the life of others, mediated to me by means of signifying objects that were composed by others. History, I would dare to say, is essentially other. But if this is the case, how can phenomenological reflection expect to have direct access to it? On what ground can Husserl claim that “a historical backward reflection ... is thus the deepest kind of self-reflection.”18 If the self can only appropriate the other in their otherness, as essentially non-present, how could it possibly get around this situation in the case when the other appears as history? In order to address these questions I think it is necessary to look again, more closely, at the structure of the transcendental ego that is implied by the description of the encounter with the other. The account of the sense of the being of the other is ultimately an account of the structure of intersubjectivity. The transcendental is intersubjective; it represents a level of constituting subjectivity in which every human being partakes and to which everyone, at least in principle, has reflective access by means of the transcendental reduction. Thus, when Husserl analyzes how another person appears to the reflecting subject, he speaks not in the name of himself, but in the name of any possible human center of experience, exposed to any possible other human being. In a sense, this is obvious, but it is still important to keep in mind. For, the question at issue -- viz., the possibility of a phenomenological philosophy of history -- points precisely to the problematic notion of a center of reflection. When the other appears within the sphere of ownness, it is always as a “there,” as another possible center of reflection. This other center is one which I, from my centered point of view, could in principle occupy as another possible orientation. In this sense, the other is another I. His perspective of the world is in principle open to me, as just another version of my own. And yet he (or she), in his (or her) sphere of ownness, is not presentable by me. This relation is of course reflexive, i.e., from his or her point of view, it is my sphere which constitutes an appresented apperception, which is not open to fulfillment by presentation. On the face of it, this reflexivity is perfectly consistent and in line with the general attitude of phenomenological analysis. Phenomenology concerns itself with essential structures of subjective life, and among these one finds the experience of the other, which -- on one basic level -- is the same for all. But at the same time, it points to certain problems with regard to the relation between the individual ego and transcendental subjectivity. Before the relation to the other is brought up, it is not necessary to distinguish transcendental subjectivity itself from the individual ego in the transcendentally

18

Ibid., 72. 241

reduced state. As soon as the reflecting ego performs the necessary reductions, it obtains access to the elementary levels of constituting subjectivity. And speaking in the reduced state, the subject is, so to speak, the autobiographer of transcendental subjectivity itself. And as such, the individual ego is interchangeable with any other intelligent ego. Every rational human being has part in this structure, and anybody (who is sufficiently trained in reflective thinking) can articulate it. But, with the introduction of the theme of the other person, this structure is immediately made more problematic. The other constitutes, so to speak, a gap or a void within transcendental subjectivity itself. The aspect of the other, which can not be made present from my subjective point of view, is precisely their subjectivity. This subjectivity, which to me is in principle inaccessible, is, on the other hand, what is most accessible to the other. What is obvious in this situation, is, of course, that the same structure of subjectivity cannot be realized or fulfilled in the same individual subject at the same time. I cannot fail to have both my own and the other’s perspective on the world, present in evident intuition. But more importantly, what this means is, that even on the level of transcendentally reduced intuition there is a distinct stratum of experience whose meaning is never immediately given, viz., the content of the other’s mind. By means of analogical representation I can produce an “empathic” understanding of what is going on within the other’s subjectivity, on the basis of bodily manifestations. But this content can never be given with the same certainty as my own inner experiences. Thus one could actually say that the transcendental ego produces from within itself an unsurpassable level of uncertainty, which is experienced as a certain absence or lack of presence in human encounters. This, in turn, points to a further question: to what extent does this unsurpassable uncertainty contaminate experiences that are not directly experiences of the other person as present in the visual field of the ego? The other can be present in mediated ways, e.g., in the form of a written statement or a material creation of some sort. In all such cases, the ego encounters a bodily manifestation of some kind, which points beyond itself to a known or unknown alien subjectivity, from whose internal horizon the ego is essentially excluded. Ultimately, the whole of nature is colored by this alien subjectivity, something which Husserl readily recognizes, when he speaks of an ever present “appresentational stratum,” viz., “the same natural Object in its possible modes of givenness to the other Ego.”19 It is with these considerations in mind that I now wish to turn back to the problem of history and the possibility of a historical Selbstbesinnung. If history is indeed the bodily and spiritual activities of other people, as reported and inherited by means of signifying objects, what are the possibilities of a radical unifying intuition of this heritage? In one of the introductory paragraphs of The Crisis, entitled “The ideal of universal philosophy and the process of its inner dissolution,” Husserl speaks of his philosophical attempt as on a par with that great movement of a “humanity struggling to understand itself.”20 He claims that it is possible to “gain self-understanding, and thus inner support, only by elucidating the unitary meaning which is inborn in this history from its origin.”21 Further on he says that, what we need to do is to “inquire back into what was originally and always sought in philosophy, what was continually sought by all the philosophers and philosophies.”22 I have tried to argue that these extremely general claims, bold as they are, are naturally generated from within the original ambitions of phenomenology. Now it must be shown 19 20 21 22

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Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 125. Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, 14. Ibid. Ibid., 18.

how they complicate certain other key findings of phenomenological analysis in the theory of intersubjectivity. The historical account of the evolution of modern philosophy, as provided by Husserl, begins with Galileo. The latter is a key figure in Husserl’s historical drama, for he not only marks the beginning of the modern philosophy of nature, but he also enacts the very blindness which is immediately present in this development. Galileo, in Husserl view, was not aware of the full implications of his work. Therefore he must, in a sense, be deconstructed. Or, as Husserl himself puts it: In order to clarify the formation of Galileo’s thought we must accordingly reconstruct not only what consciously motivated him. It will also be instructive to bring to light what was implicitly included in his guiding model of mathematics, even though, because of the direction of his interest, it was kept from his view: as a hidden presupposed meaning it naturally had to enter into his physics along with everything else.23 There is no need to deal, in this context, with the specific content of Husserl’s assessment and criticism of Galileo and the ensuing philosophy of nature. Husserl’s grand over-all interpretation is so convincing, in many ways, that it tends to ward off a critical examination of its presuppositions. Among these presuppositions we find the conviction that it is indeed possible, by means of a special type of reflection, to restore and rearticulate an original meaning within Galileo’s thinking, which was not even fulfilled by Galileo himself. This is nothing but a very radical hermeneutic claim, to have reached an articulation of sense beyond -- and yet operating within -- the constituting subjectivity of an historical agent. Underlying this claim is the idea of a certain “task” which is articulated -- during the course of history, in a dialectical manner -- through internal critique, until it reaches a level of “perfect insight.” It is something that the spiritual forefathers have all sought to express, but in an incomplete manner, and which now has to be adopted in full responsibility. Whoever is able to articulate it, does not receive it as something alien, but as the innermost articulation of his own self: A historical, backward reflection of the sort under discussion is thus actually the deepest kind of self-reflection aimed at a self-understanding in terms of what we are truly seeking as the historical beings we are.24 This passage only repeats again what has already been stated, in different version, viz., that for Husserl the historical reflection on the destination of philosophical thinking is in the end equivalent with the self-understanding of the reflecting ego itself. The reflecting ego must not only give itself a history in order to perceive its own unity; it must (moreover) perform a critique of inherited history, to make sure that no hidden presuppositions are operating from within it, as eventually was the case with both Galileo and Descartes. Thus, in the historical reflection envisioned by Husserl, the transcendental ego -- or spirit -- must somehow be able to interiorize its other. This is brought out quite

23

Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 25. In a similar manner, Husserl further on (p. 75) introduces his investigation of Descartes, of whom he says: “It is with good reasons that I now devote considerable space to my attempt at a careful exposition, not repeating what Descartes said, but extracting what was really involved in his thinking and then separating what he became conscious of from what was concealed from him, or rather what was smuggled into his ideas, because of certain things -- of course very natural things -taken for granted.” 24 Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, 72. 243

explicitly in the Vienna lecture, where Husserl speaks of the categories “familiarity” and “strangeness.”25 These categories are here applied to cultural communities, perceiving one another. In the end though, he says that they are not sufficient for describing the situation we are in. There is something particular or unique about the Greek-European heritage, which explains, why it can never remain within this relativistic opposition. It compels other cultures to follow in its path, not by means of force, but by means of an entelechy operating within it. Translated into the technical terms of intersubjectivity, it would seem as if this particular heritage ultimately can preserve its interiority in the face of the exteriority of the other culture. Whenever a true interiority manifests itself, seemingly speaking from the outside of this interiority, it has in fact already placed itself within the very same ideal entelechy. Thus it seems, that the eye and voice of this interiority in the end accommodates every single truth-claim that can possibly be stated. We see the same scheme operating in Husserl’s readings of Descartes and Galileo. Whatever is alien in their approach is viewed as unreflected strata of their thinking. Whenever they speak truly, they speak with the voice of the same transcendental “we,” for which phenomenology is the ultimate articulation. The absolute ego is, as Husserl repeatedly states, the location where the distinction between inner and outer disappears. Outer transcendency becomes, in the reduced state, immanent transcendency, and thus transcendental interiority. But still, as seen from the analysis of the other, transcendental subjectivity is also the place where inner and outer are ultimately constituted in the encounter between two distinct subjectivities. In Husserl’s approach to history, however, he seems to be working with an even broader notion of transcendental subjectivity, which in the end is able to cancel the experienced contrast. This brings us back to the formulation of the problem by Ricoeur, which was mentioned at the outset of the present paper. Ricoeur spoke precisely of the notion of a history which encompasses that by which it is encompassed. We are now in a better position to assess this formulation. The inner dynamics of the search for a radical Selbstbesinnung requires that the reflecting ego is able to descend to a level of pure intuition, where it fully encompasses the field of all that is given, including the ultimate sense of its own history (not, of course, the content of the past individual facts of this history) and destination. But this history is not its own, in the sense of its own life history. The history it seeks to encompass is a history constituted by the alien intentional acts of others. It can not claim to know the immediate sense of the content of these past egos; that is something which must remain as interpretative hypotheses. On the other hand, it can -- and it must -claim to have an access to the ultimate level of sense, which transcends the individual acts of these alien subjectivities. It must claim to have access to the workings of a subjectivity which is located at no particular place, and from within no particular ego, whose heritage it thus claims as its own. On this supreme level of meaning-constitution, the split between different subjectivities has supposedly disappeared. Its voice is the voice of an impersonal reason or spirit, which progresses through history, for which every foreign element is absorbed into familiarity. Towards the end of the Vienna lecture, Husserl writes: The spirit, and indeed only the spirit, exists in itself and for itself, is self-sufficient; and in its self-sufficiency, and only in this way, it can be treated truly rationally, truly and from the ground up scientifically.26 25

For a good discussion of these categories, and an interpretation of Husserl focused around problems of history, community and generativity, see Anthony Steinbock’s Home and Beyond. Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995). 26 Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, 297. The whole passage is italicized by Husserl. 244

And on the next page: Here the spirit is not in or alongside nature; rather, nature is itself drawn into the spiritual sphere. Also, the ego is then no longer an isolated thing alongside other such things in a pregiven world; in general, the serious mutual exteriority of ego-persons, their being alongside one another, ceases in favor of an inward being-for-one-another and mutual interpenetration.27 Perhaps the extension of a radical historical Selbstbesinnung requires such a level of subjectivity, since it requires that all exteriority can in principle be organized within one single subjective economy. But with this move, phenomenology also clearly starts out from a position where it can refer to entirely fulfilled intuitions. Certainly this ultimate subjectivity, towards which the individual reflection points, can not remain anything else than an infinite idea. For how could the individual reflecting ego possibly claim to have intuited history from a viewpoint that encompasses every -- essentially alien -- perspective? The problem of history is essentially related to the problem of the other. The analyses of intersubjectivity, on which Husserl spent so much time, clearly indicate that even the claim to perform analysis from within the constituting stream of transcendental subjectivity, must admit an important limit. This limit is formally articulated within phenomenology with the idea of the appresentability of the other. But in terms of content, it marks an indefinite horizon of uncertainty, pertaining not only to the actual content of the subjectivity of the other person in their bodily presence, but also to every culturally generated object. And this includes history as it is inherited, in the form of written documents of our spiritual ancestors. Husserl, in one way acknowledges this, indeed he provides the formal tools for expressing the situation. Yet in his own desire to deepen the scope of his phenomenology, he reaches out beyond the limits which he himself has articulated. In a sense, he experienced this inner conflict in himself. We have the -- often quoted -- pessimistic fragment, included as an appendix to The Crisis, which begins with the saying that philosophy as science is a dream which is over.28 There again, Husserl defends the importance of historical reflection but, at the same time, he seems to seriously doubt that any historical interpretation can ever reach beyond the level of “poetic invention.” And yet, this very uncertainty can be accommodated, as when he says, a bit further down: Let us be more precise. I know of course, what I am striving for under the title of philosophy, as the goal and field of my work. And yet I do not know. What autonomous thinker has ever been satisfied with this, his ‘knowledge’? For what autonomous thinker, in his philosophizing life, has ‘philosophy’ ever ceased to be an enigma?29 This humble expression seems to speak against the grander claim found in the other parts of The Crisis, and particularly the Vienna lecture. Should one seek a reconciliation? Or must not perhaps the range and applicability of phenomenological analysis remain uncertain? Beyond the apparent tensions built into Husserl’s understanding of history as both

27

Ibid., 298. Ibid., 394. One should of course be aware, which Carr also points out in his introduction, that the statement about the end of philosophy as a science does not imply a self-evaluation on Husserl’s part. The context indicates that he is there talking about the spiritual situation in general. The more personal pessimistic tone appears further down in the text. 29 Ibid. 28

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the task and the very environment of a radical phenomenological reflection, this seems indeed to be the conclusion manifested by his own example.

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3.

THE IDEA OF PHENOMENOLOGY AS A DESCRIPTION OF “DIE SACHEN SELBST” IN HUSSERL AND HEIDEGGER

Paweł Dybel

The well-known motto from Husserl's phenomenology -- zu den Sachen selbst! -- had been formulated by him, in the first place, to contest the Neo-Kantian tradition that had penetrated German philosophy and was altogether dominant in it at the turn of the nineteenth century. Its adherents attempted to reinterpret Kant’s philosophy in epistemological terms, thus preoccupying themselves -- according to Husserl -- with abstract conceptual schemes that have nothing to do with the factual way in which “things as such” present themselves to the human consciousness. Husserl tried to resist the (Neo-Kantian) philosophical discourse then current by means of a program of presumptionless phenomenological description that apprehends “things” as they really are, i.e., irrespective of the images that appear in response to an epistemological subject. Yet it became clear to him, in the course of time, that this radical phenomenological program of describing a thing’s primordial appearance without any presumption can, literally, not be realized; that is to say, the thing’s appearance is subject to the particular intentional structure of the individual consciousness of the one who is describing it. One can detect a clear echo of this, a leading postulate in Husserl’s phenomenology, in Heidegger’s own concept of phenomenological description, as outlined in his Being and Time. According to Heidegger, the main task of the phenomenological method is “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.”1 This Heidegger-assertion seems to radicalize Husserl’s early program of phenomenology, which had attempted to establish his method as a presumptionless science for describing things as separate entities. Heidegger goes further still, in this respect, and says that the description of things should apprehend them as they appear von ihnen selbst her, that is, from themselves. It seems that it is the one who describes things, who should bend over backwards and look at them not from his or her “subjective” viewpoint, but from theirs alone. The desired (and also expected) identity between the way in which things appear and the way in which they are seen by the one who describes them, as postulated here, prompts Heidegger to say that “Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible.”2 According to this postulate, the description of things by the one who looks at them is identical with the way in which they appear “from themselves,” thus being the only “measure” that can be applied to their description. However, Heidegger’s identification of ontology with phenomenology goes well beyond the traditional understanding of the term “ontology.” In the metaphysical tradition, ontology was conceived as a theory of Being, which, while investigating the possible structures within Being and characterizing their properties, is situated at a different level from Being as such. On this assumption, any person wishing to engage in ontological reflection does so by taking up a position that is found to be situated at a distance from Being itself, whereas according to Heidegger, ontology arises directly from Being and should be under1

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), 58. “Das was sich zeigt, wie es sich von ihm selbst zeigt, von ihm selbst her sehen lassen.” Idem, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1972), 34. 2 Heidegger, Being and Time, 60. “Ontologie ist nur als Phänomenologie möglich.” Idem, Sein und Zeit, 34. 247

stood “from itself.” As a result, the very understanding of Being then seems to exemplify a unity with the appearance (the showing) of Being as such. And yet, how is it possible to “describe” Being? How is phenomenology possible at all, if what it describes is meant to be identical with what is described? How is it supposed to be possible for the gaze of the person describing things to change its direction in such a way that it looks at things as though with their own eyes? To answer these questions, let us dwell for a moment on how description as a concept functions in Husserl’s early program of phenomenology. According to him, description is the basic procedure used within phenomenology, consisting in a perspicacious and precise grasp of how things are given over to consciousness: If phenomenology, then, is to be entirely a science within the limits of mere immediate Intuition, a purely “descriptive” eidetic science, then what is universal of its procedure is already given as something obvious. It must expose to its view events of pure consciousness as examples [and] make them perfectly clear; within the limits of this quality it must analyze and seize upon their essences, trace with insight the essential interconnections, formulate what is beheld in faithful conceptual expressions which allow their sense to be prescribed purely by what is beheld or generically seen; and so forth.3 This concept of description presumes an adequate rendering of the thing described by the one who describes it, which implies the total absorption of the very description into the described thing. Yet, although the basic characteristic of consciousness is “intentionality,” i.e., its direct, a priori orientation to things as they appear in its visual field, one can always differentiate between the “subjective,” noetic side of description (the founding intentional structures of consciousness) and its “objective,” noematic side (the founded things themselves as they appear in consciousness), which need to be coordinated with each other. This distinction gives to the Husserlian phenomenological method a particular dynamic, since, to reach the ideal of an adequate apprehension of the things described, the phenomenologist advances in disclosing the founding intentional structures of consciousness again and again. One could say then, that it is precisely because the phenomenologist is not placed on the side of the described things (but describes them from the subjective viewpoint of his or her own intentional consciousness) that he or she can make progress in the “making clear” (erhellen) of the conditions of possibility of the “givenness” (die Gegebenheit) of things described. When compared with Husserl’s early program of phenomenology as a descriptive science, the radicalized Heideggerian concept of description encourages one to have some basic doubts about this matter. Does not the author of Being and Time -- by postulating a change-over from the phenomenologist’s viewpoint to that of the things described --

3

Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. Frederick Kersten (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 150. “Will sie nun gar eine Wissenschaft im Rahmen bloßer unmittelbarer Intuition sein, eine rein “deskriptive” Wesenswissenschaft, so ist das Allgemeine ihres Verfahrens vorgegeben als ein ganz Selbstverständliches. Sie hat sich reine Bewußtseinsvorkommnisse exemplarisch vor Augen zu stellen, sie zu vollkommener Klarheit zu bringen, an ihnen innerhalb dieser Klarheit Analyse und Wesenserfassung zu üben, den einsichtigen Wesenszusammenhängen nachzugehen, das jeweils Geschaute in getreu begriffliche Ausdrücke zu fassen, die sich ihren Sinn rein durch das Geschaute, bzw. generell Eingesehene vorschreiben lassen usw.” Idem, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, ed. Elisabeth Ströker (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1976), 153. 248

demand something impossible? Does his concept of phenomenology not defy the very essence of phenomenological description as conceived by Husserl? Heidegger maintains that quite the opposite is the case. In Being and Time, and in his lectures from the twenties, he underscores again and again that his “analytic of Dasein” still represents the true descriptive (phenomenological) method. Yet his understanding of this concept differs from Husserl’s in that he maintains that the phenomenological description does not so much understand the described thing adequately, but rather, interprets it (auslegt). Hence his assertion that “the meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation.”4 The Husserlian postulate concerning the adequate, transparent description of the appearance of things, described as per original, essential insight [Wesensanschauung], has been transformed here into postulating an understanding that realizes itself as interpretation (die Auslegung). This radical transformation of the very procedure of the phenomenological method results, first of all, from the fact that Heidegger conceives of the described “thing” in a very different way than does Husserl. As Pöggeler writes, Heidegger’s phenomenology hat nicht auszugehen von der “Anschauung,” wenn diese Anschauung gedacht wird als Anschauung von “Objekten,” sondern vom “Verstehen.” Die “Beschreibung” darf nicht als Beschreibung von Objektartigem, von dinglich Seiendem gefaßt werden, sondern muß vom Verstehen geleitet sein.5 The transformation of the described “thing” that now becomes a “thing” of understanding, implies a new stance taken up toward it by the phenomenologist. The one who describes the “thing” relates to it as always already open to it, that is to say, he or she “understand” the “thing” when it is already “affected” by him or her. Consequently, the described “thing” cannot be treated by them simply as the object of their description (noemat), since this implies and makes possible the very way in which it is described. This difference results from the fact that the “thing” is conceived by Heidegger neither as the way in which the objects of the outer world appear in the consciousness of the phenomenologist, nor as the structural component of consciousness itself; the “thing” is the very “meaning of Being” that is always already understood/interpreted by the Dasein that describes it: The λóγος of the phenomenology of Dasein has the character of a ερµηευειν, through which the authentic meaning of Being, and also those basic structures of Being which Dasein itself possesses, are made known to Dasein’s understanding of Being. The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic in the primordial signification of this word, where it designates this business of interpreting.6 To describe these “things,” then, means (for Heidegger) to explore the basic existential structures of Dasein and thus prepare for the interpretation of the “meaning of Being.” This type of description, which progresses as the analytic of Dasein -- which, in turn,

4

Heidegger, Being and Time, 61. “Der methodische Sinn der phänomenologischen Deskription ist die Auslegung.” Idem, Sein und Zeit, 37. 5 Otto Pöggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen: Neske, 1963), 68. 6 Heidegger, Being and Time, 61-62. “Der λóγος der Phänomenologie des Daseins hat den Charakter des ερµηευειν, durch das dem zum Dasein selbst gehörigen Seinsverständnis der eigentliche Sinn von Sein und die Grundstrukturen seines eigenen Seins kundgegeben werden. Phänomenologie des Daseins ist Hermeneutik in der ursprünglichen Bedeutung des Wortes, wonach es das Geschäft der Auslegung bezeichnet.” Idem, Sein und Zeit, 37. 249

makes possible the further interpretation of Being -- does not aim at the adequate apprehension of how things appear to Dasein, but arises as a direct account of how Dasein understands “the thing” called Being. Consequently, Heidegger transforms the Husserlian idea of phenomenology, as an adequate description of how things are given (appear) in the consciousness of the one who describes them, into a “phenomenology of Dasein,” who always already understands Being, and whose understanding of his own being results directly from an interpretation of Being. In this sense, phenomenology really is hermeneutics, since its “description” consists in the interpretation of Dasein’s understanding of Being. If, then, for Husserl, the meaning of “the thing” is identical with the way in which it is given in the consciousness of the phenomenologist, and could therefore be adequately described by him or her, for Heidegger, the meaning of “the thing” is identical with the “meaning of Being,” which is always already understood by Dasein, and could only be hermeneutically interpreted (ausgelegt). By analogy, if for Husserl the phenomenological description of “the thing” represents the transformed form of transcendental cognition (in which the transcendental ego plays the role of being the fundamental condition of possibility), then, as Pöggeler writes: Heidegger setzt an die Stelle des transzendentalen Ichs das Leben in seiner Tatsächlichkeit. Dieses “faktische” Leben ist Leben in einer Welt; es ist letzlich “historisch” und “versteht” sich “historisch.” So wird die Geschichte zum Leitfaden der phänomenologischen Forschung.7 The notion of factuality (Faktizität) refers to the way in which Dasein exists in the world as always already understanding its own being. This presupposes that if one tries to describe adequately the way of being that appertains to Dasein, one should not resort to sophisticated methods like the “phenomenological reduction,” which guarantees the essentiality of one’s insights: it is sufficient to apprehend the factual way in which Dasein relates to itself and to the world. Precisely in this sense, the phenomenology of Dasein is the “hermeneutics of facticity” that is based on its understanding of Being, and its proper theme -- as it will show itself in the last chapters of Being and Time -- is the historicity of the way of being of Dasein. Let us sum up these considerations. For Husserl, the best guarantee for a truly phenomenological description is the essential insight (Wesensanschauung) of things, which “makes clear” how they are given to consciousness (i.e., the postulate of adequate description that preserves the originality of their being-given). In contrast, I have tried to demonstrate that Heidegger maintains that what underlies the relation of Dasein to the world, is its a priori understanding of Being, through which understanding the Dasein also interprets. According to Husserl, a phenomenologist first perceives and originally apprehends the things as given to his or her consciousness, then tries to describe this understanding adequately, which presupposes that his or her description adheres to the things like “a shirt [clings] to a wet back.” For Heidegger, on the contrary, the “original” apprehension of the ‘thing’ of Being realizes itself as its understanding by Dasein and results in its interpretation (Auslegung). The interpretation of Being is not an additional activity superimposed by the phenomenologist on the understanding of Being, it is not even a modification of this understanding, but is precisely the way in which the understanding of Being realizes itself. If, then, Heidegger shares with Husserl the assumption that there is no gap between the original phenomenological apprehension of things and the language in which

7

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Pöggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, 70.

this apprehension is described, then he differs from Husserl in the way in which he conceives of this very relationship.

*** Let us now return to Heidegger’s formula for phenomenology. It says that -- let me repeat this -- the main task of phenomenology is “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.”8 In my earlier reasonings, I stressed the strictly “methodical” aspect of this formula and tried to answer the question of how it is meant to be possible for the phenomenologist to describe the appearance of “the thing” precisely as it shows itself “from itself” (von ihm selbst her). I had not yet taken up the question of how to conceive of this particularly direct way in which “the thing” shows itself to Dasein -- so Heidegger -- and in which his idea concerning the phenomenological description/interpretation is rooted. “That which shows itself” is, according to Heidegger, the very Being, to which Dasein is always already related while “understanding” it. In the introduction to What is Metaphysics? he describes Being, metaphorically, as “the openness” (Offenheit) toward which Dasein is always already open, and where he contradistinguishes this relationship from its traditional metaphysical correlative, in which consciousness is the basis (sub-ject) of the Being it perceives, as it is consciousness which conceives of Being as its object. He maintains that the latter understanding obscures the factual way in which Dasein relates to Being while experiencing Being in its understanding, conceived of as: “ecstatic thrown projection, ecstatic here meaning: standing in the realm of the open.”9 Whereas consciousness “does not itself create the openness of beings, nor is it consciousness that makes it possible for the human being to stand open for beings.”10 According to the new terminology, which appears in Heidegger’s works in the 1930’s, one could say that the understanding of Being by Dasein ensues through its a priori “opening” or “standing open” (das Offenstehen) in the “openness” (Offenheit) of Being. In other words, the “opening” or “standing open” of Dasein becomes possible only with regard to what it is always already open to, that is to say, with regard to Being as openness. Strictly speaking, then, it is not primarily Dasein that “opens” itself to Being, with Being, as a result of this, appearing in its visual field, but rather, it is the very openness of Being that opens Dasein to itself and to the world, and thus calls it into “existence.” For that reason, Heidegger can say that Being shows itself for Dasein “from itself” (von ihm selbst her) and not from the “subjective” viewpoint of the one who describes/ interprets it. This means that Being shows itself to Dasein as “openness” which opens it to itself, thus opening the endless space of its relation to itself and to the world. Or, to put it differently: precisely because Dasein is literally Da-sein, (“being there”), that is to say, because it “exists” only in so far as it is already open to the openness of Being, the latter cannot be met by it in any way other than “from itself” (von ihm selbst her). One can say, then, that Being is, in its openness, the fundamental “condition of possibility” of Dasein, who, while opening to himself, calls Being into existence as such. In a way, Dasein is -- in its standing open (das Offenstehen), in the openness (Offenheit)

8

See note 1. Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 286; idem, Wegmarken (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1978), 372. “Der ekstatische, d.h. im Bereich des Offenen innenstehende geworfene Entwurf.” 10 Heidegger, Pathmarks, 284; idem, Wegmarken, 370. “[...] schafft weder erst die Offenheit von Seiendem, noch verleiht es erst dem Menschen das Offenstehen für das Seiende.” 9

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of Being -- already grown into Being. That is to say, it is Da-sein (“being there”) only in so far as it opens itself to the openness of Being. Or, to put it the other way round: Dasein is Da-sein only in so far as he is opened to himself by the openness (die Offenheit) of Being. Consequently, there is, in the openness of Being, no space that would be separate or transcendent with regard to Dasein and thus hidden from its sight. There is nothing in Being -- as openness -- which Dasein would not understand and would not interpret in his understanding. Clearly, this apprehension of the relationship between the openness of Being and Dasein (which latter ‘stands open’ in Being) excludes the possibility that a phenomenologist might commit a transgression with regard to the “thing” that he or she describes, but also looks at, from its own perspective. For, how could Dasein change over to that which makes his standing open within himself possible? How can he discard his own Offenstehen in the openness of Being, when it is only in this openness (Offenheit) that the ‘thing’ of Being can possibly show itself to Dasein? If this is so, then Heidegger’s program of phenomenology would represent some sort of descriptive mysticism, contradicting the fundamental presumptions of the analytic of Dasein, and the phenomenologist would be the one who endeavors to reach something that is impossible to reach: while seeing things “from themselves” (von ihnen selbst her), he or she would also have seen right through them. Any given ‘thing’ would be absolutely transparent to him or her, because their gaze would melt into one with “the thing” and would shine through it from inside it. In a way, and as a whole, Being and Time is an attempt to demonstrate, step by step, the impossibility of such a going beyond Dasein to reach Being. This is already excluded by the fundamental existential structure of Dasein, conceived by Heidegger as a “thrown project” (geworfener Entwurf). This formula implies that Dasein, as always already open to Being, relates to Being from the perspective of his “thrownness,” that is to say, from the perspective of his a priori being-open to Being. The “thrown” character of the relationship of Dasein to Being also implies that other well-known Heideggerian assertion, which maintains that Dasein’s way of being consists in the understanding of Being. According to this assertion, Dasein’s understanding of Being does not represent an additional activity, superimposed on the primary way of Dasein’s existence, but is identical with his existence. In other words, Dasein does not so much exist “as” the one that understands Being, as it is his understanding of Being that represents the way in which he exists. Hence, not only does Dasein always understand Being (while interpreting it), but his prior understanding of Being also presupposes Being in his selfunderstanding, his understanding of others, and his understanding of the world. In short, only because Dasein always understands Being (while interpreting it) can Dasein understand anything at all. Yet if this is so, then the phenomenologist, in striving to describe/interpret Being, does not have to change over to Being’s side before he or she can see the “thing” of Being “from itself” (von ihm selbst her), since he or she is always already there! That is to say, while describing Being, the phenomenologist is always already open (in his or her understanding) to its meaning. The circular structure of the relationship between Dasein and Being comes to light when phenomenologists ask their question about the meaning of Being. It appears, then, that they are not able to answer this question because their very questioning is already a way of being. For, how can one characterize the “meaning” of something that presupposes this thing in one’s self-understanding?

***

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The next question is, how should one characterize the “meaning of Being.” In order to answer this question, one would first have to ask another: what is “Dasein ‘understands’ Being” supposed to mean? If Dasein were not to understand Being in the way in which he understands the statements of others, or the meaning of any cultural product, or any ‘thing’ in the world, etc., then in what would his understanding of Being consist? Dasein understands Being, not in the sense of being open to some concretely identifiable “meaning” of Being, but in the sense of being open to the endless horizon of meaning, that is, to that which makes his understanding possible. Dasein’s understanding of Being does not consist in the recognition, in Being, of any “concrete” meaning and, as a result of this, in the putting forward of a definition for this meaning. It consists, rather, in Dasein’s openness to what made all interpretations of Being in human history possible, even though they may well not yet have been identified as such. Consequently the only thing that the phenomenologist can do, is to clarify the very relationship that holds Dasein together with Being. Phenomenological description assumes the form of an analytic of Dasein, in which latter Heidegger discloses the existential structures that underlie (and make possible) a circular relationship between Dasein and Being. This is not yet the interpretation of what Dasein understands as the “meaning” of Being -which still remains the presumed goal of the analytic of Dasein -- but the exploration of the consecutive “conditions of possibility” that underlie the understanding of Being by Dasein. One could say, then, that Heidegger explores, in his analytic of Dasein, the very structure of the circular relationship in which Dasein remains with Being and thus makes possible Dasein’s understanding of anything at all. Heidegger’s assertion, that Being appears “from itself,” now means that it appears always in light of the a priori relationship of Dasein to it, i.e., of its “standing open” in Being as openness. Thus Being is not originally experienced by Dasein as a particular, ideal “object,” describing it from the distinct and “subjective” position of the transcendental ego (as does Husserl). Rather, Being is always already “given” to Dasein as the “thing” Dasein is open to, a priori, and as what constitutes him in his “standing open” in this ‘thing.’ In this sense, the phenomenological “description” of the relationship as an apprehension of the showing (appearance) of Being “from itself,” does not mean that the one who describes Being has -- literally -- changed over to its side. It only means that the phenomenologist tries to explore the pre-ontological structure of Dasein’s a priori relationship to Being from the perspective of his or her own finitude. One can say, then, that Heidegger’s concept of phenomenological description/ interpretation differs from Husserl’s in three essential respects. First, it differs in the conception of the descriptive method, secondly in the understanding of the position of the phenomenologist toward the described “thing,” and thirdly in the understanding of the very nature of the described “thing.” However, there is still one fundamental assumption that is common to both philosophers, and it is the postulate concerning the description of things simply as they appear to the one who describes them. Yet again, when one takes a closer look at how they both understand this postulate, there is a fourth essential difference to be noted. According to Heidegger, phenomenological description cannot just ‘happen’ after the phenomenologist has given up his or her thesis concerning the existence of the world, as if it were only then possible to explore the “essential” way of givenness (die Gegebenheit) of things as they appear in this world. On the contrary, it is precisely the fact of Dasein’s “being thrown” (“thrownness”) into the world that is the most original phenomenon, which the phenomenologist needs must take as his or her starting-point for the description. For, this “fact” -- unlike the concept of fact as understood by the positivist -- has nothing empirical in itself. Rather, it has the status of unquestionable evidence, since it always “precedes” Dasein in his relation to himself and to the outside world. In this sense, 253

the Husserlian idea of phenomenology as a “descriptive science,” which aims at exploring the “essence” of things, is transformed by Heidegger into a “hermeneutics of facticity.” Thus the postulate concerning the description of ‘things from themselves’ now means nothing less than to describe them from the perspective of their own “way of being,” i.e., the way in which Dasein encounters them and interprets them in his understanding. It would be difficult to imagine a more anti-Husserlian concept of phenomenology. For it implies that the phenomenologist must start with the description/interpretation of his factual relationship to Being, a relationship that has been given up on by the author of Ideas, for methodological reasons. In other words, the phenomenologist must, in Heidegger’s view, start with Dasein’s “fact” of being in the world, and not with the presumed ideal “essence” of this world, which is achievable only by a methodical denial of the very fact of being-in-the-world. Heidegger would then have to say that Husserl cut himself off, right from the start, from having access to “things” as they really show themselves ‘from themselves’ to whoever is looking at them. The phenomenologist then has to stay where “things” have always been, without need for suspending his or her belief in the existence of the world, with the result that the attitude of intuitive insight will be inflicted upon “them (things)” instead. For it is precisely due to that attitude that they are not able to experience the most original and hermeneutic evidence of Being as given (die Gegebenheit) and as always already understood by them. It is hard to imagine a greater difference in the understanding of the word “phenomenology.”

*** Heidegger’s conviction that a properly phenomenological description/interpretation should start with the analytic of the factual way in which Dasein is related to Being, prompts him to describe/interpret -- as his first move -- Dasein’s way of being. This description/interpretation, while relying on the assumption that Dasein fundamentally understands Being, takes the form of systematically exploring his successive existential structures, which make this understanding possible. And yet, at the point where Heidegger reaches the ultimate existential structure, which he calls “temporality” (Zeitlichkeit), and tries to disclose its relationship with Being, his whole phenomenological undertaking undergoes a radical change. He identifies a problem with the fundamental feature of this structure in zeitigen, that is to say, in its permanent self-differentiation in relation to itself and with respect to Being. How, then, is one to describe the relationship of Dasein with Being, since its structure characterizes a permanent infraction that points beyond itself? The phenomenological description of this circular relationship cannot proceed further, since there is no “deeper” existential structure underlying it. The temporality of Dasein can only be described by exploring his circular connection with Being, in which they permanently displace one another even while referring to each other. Heidegger, who in his analytic of Dasein proceeds in the manner adopted by the classical, transcendental scheme, now has to admit to helplessness, in this matter. He says that his existential interpretation of Dasein “is constantly getting eclipsed unawares”11 and that consequently “everything is haunted by the enigma of Being.”12

11

Heidegger, Being and Time, 444; idem, Sein und Zeit, 392. “[...] gerät ständig unversehens in den Schatten.” 12 Heidegger, Being and Time, 444. 254

A good starting-point for Heidegger’s attempt at clarifying the particular circular structure of this situation is his metaphorical designation of Being as “openness” (Offenheit), as elaborated above. This designation implies that the openness of Being represents some sort of ultimate point of reference, to which Dasein is always already open. In other words, the openness of Being makes the being-open of Dasein to itself possible, in some way. The openness of Being always already governs this being-open and sets it up as such. By that understanding, Dasein is an “opening” only in so far as there is always already an openness of Being which opens him to himself. Expressed differently, Dasein is always already the opening on the openness of Being, and he is nothing more than this! Yet the metaphors of Being as an “openness” and Dasein as an “opening” or “standing open” in this openness are still not sufficiently precise, since they do not take a proper account of the characteristics of “displaceability” in this relationship, such as implied by the analytic of temporality concerning Dasein. Taking the characteristics of being “displaceable” into account means to designate Dasein as the being-open that permanently opens him to the openness of Being. But then, by analogy, one would also have to say that Being cannot itself be identified as a stable point of reference for the being-open of Dasein and should therefore be conceived as an openness that permanently opens itself in the never-ending movement of self-exceeding or going beyond oneself. If this is how the matter stands, then we enter into a “correlation” between the beingopen of a Dasein in operation and the permanent opening of the openness of Being. Yet we must also remain aware that this “correlation” does not consist of a correspondence between the two kinds of “opening” movements mentioned above: that of Dasein and that of Being. It is, rather, that the movement of Dasein’s opening -- his Zeitigung -- takes place only when, and in so far as, Dasein opens himself to Being as-an-openness. This Zeitigung or opening of Dasein occurs as always already “incited” by Being as-an-openness, i.e., Being as permanently opening itself to itself. In other words, while Dasein is an opening, he is so only in so far as he opens himself to the opening movement of Being as openness. In this sense, Dasein wholly “depends” on the openness of Being (which permanently opens itself to itself. Dasein is an “opening” only in so far as it is always already open to the openness of Being. One could say, then, that Dasein -- in its temporality -- is always already part of, or grown into, the movement implied by the openness of Being. The processes involved in the two kinds of “opening” -- that of Dasein and that of Being -do not correspond with each other as two distinct yet analogous movements; rather, they represent two differing aspects of the one process of “opening” (in relation to the openness of Being), which, in their radical otherness, are nevertheless indissolubly intertwined with each other. Gadamer, therefore, while commenting on the particular relationship between Dasein and Being, says that it is this (complex) very Being that is time.13 This assertion implies that Being is experienced by Dasein as the movable horizon of time, with regard to which Dasein opens itself to itself (zeitigt sich) in its temporality. On the other hand, though Dasein is said to be “hauled” into its temporality by the movement of Being-as-openness, this does not mean that Dasein mystically dissolves into Being. Rather, the being-open of Dasein represents an ontologically privileged “place” within Being itself; it is a kind of aperture, which ensures that Being can only open toward itself. In other words, the movement implied in the openness of Being can occur only in so far as there is an “opening” in Being that enables this movement to take place. Consequently, although the opening (temporality) of Dasein seems to be wholly grown

13

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: Mohr, 1975), 226. 255

into the openness of Being, it differs from the openness of Being precisely because of its absolutely negative characteristics. The negativeness of Dasein’s “opening” is borne witness to by Heidegger’s helplessness in the face of Being, which now appears to him as an “enigma,” when interpreted from the perspective of the temporality of Dasein. Up to this point in his work, Heidegger had endeavored to describe Being from the viewpoint of Dasein, uncovering Dasein’s successive existential structures at the same time, and had prepared, in this way, what he presumed to be the “proper” description of Being “from itself.” But now it appears to Heidegger that there can be no direct “exceeding” (or going beyond himself) to lift the “negative” level of the temporality of Dasein to the “positive” meaning of Being. What remains as an only possibility is the description of Being from the negative perspective of the temporality of Dasein, which perspective cannot, in essence, adequately depict the very process implied in the “opening” of Being-as-openness. In his attempt at breaking the deadlock due to the traditional mode of questioning, i.e., the transcendental mode, Heidegger introduces, in Being and Time, the term “the historicity of Dasein” (die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins). At first glance, this term appears to designate an existential structure in Dasein, underlying Dasein’s temporality and therefore belonging among the successive existential structures of Dasein. After closer inspection, however, it seems that the ‘historicity’ in question represents an “aspect” or “dimension” of Being itself, which latter is experienced by Dasein from the perspective of his own Zeitigung or “opening”. Thus it is due to this particular “aspect” of Being that Dasein has any “history” at all. Consequently, so Heidegger, the historicity of Dasein, being based in Dasein’s temporality, is due to the self-transcendent structure of Being, only the latter ensuring that Dasein exists historically. But history (Geschichte), in its most fundamental dimension, is also the history of Being (die Seinsgeschichte). History is the result of the process of self-differentiation within Being, a process that carries along every Dasein that experiences it, in a kind of encompassing totality, the inherent “logic” of which cannot be made wholly transparent. This aspect of Being, as it appertains to the human experience of history, has been very perspicaciously grasped (in Heidegger’s view) by Graf Yorck, who writes, in his letter to Dilthey: “Concerning history, what comes to one’s attention and catches the eye is not the main thing. The nerves are invisible, just as essentials in general are invisible.”14

*** The author of Being and Time thus himself attests the insight that the historicity of Dasein cannot be put forward adequately by the quasi-transcendental scheme of an existential analytic as presented in his book. In other words, the historicity of Dasein cannot be described/interpreted as a successive existential structure of Dasein, merely underlying all prior structures, since Being too has its own history that cannot be regarded as a function of human cultural activities, but must, on the contrary, be regarded as the source of these activities (which are an “effect” of Being). In consequence, the historicity of Dasein does not now appear to be founded in its temporality. Rather, it is the temporality of Dasein that has its basis in the historicity of Being, that is to say, in what occurs within Being itself.

14

Heidegger, Being and Time, 453; idem, Sein und Zeit, 401: “Mit der Geschichte ist's so, daß was Spektakel macht und augenfällig ist nicht die Hauptsache ist. Die Nerven sind unsichtbar wie das Wesentliche überhaupt unsichtbar ist.” 256

Despite this, Heidegger, while himself pointing to this aspect of the phenomenon (in the last chapters of Being and Time), still “interprets” the historicity of Being as coming from the quasi-transcendental perspective of the temporality of Dasein. He seems to be bound, in his phenomenological description, by and to the traditional metaphysical terminology. A radical break with this terminology will occur only after Heidegger’s “turn” (die Kehre). The historicity of Being will be recognized by him as equivalent to Being’s “occurrence” (das Ereignen), and he will henceforth try to testify to this phenomenon in his discourse. He will then be able to apprehend the historicity of Being from itself, that is, from the perspective of Being as “occurring” (ereignen). One needs to understand Gadamer’s statement -- that Heidegger’s thought after the “turn” can still be called phenomenology -- in this sense. Indeed, Heidegger’s thought adheres to the phenomenological rule of “demonstration” (die Aufzeigung) when he examines the described “thing.” However, one should here add at once that, in consequence of the very “thing” now having changed, the idea of phenomenology too has undergone a transformation. The description of the historicity of Being does not come about as an exploration of Being’s successive existential structures -- which presupposes some kind of reflexive distance between the described “thing” and the one who describes it -- but by (in a way) “unifying” the reflexive distance into “the thing.” Rather than describing Being as “occurring,” Heidegger’s mode of conducting the argument shows how his very description already is the “occurrence” of Being. While describing Being, he also testifies to it in his own understanding, in which Being “occurs”: “Thinking is of Being inasmuch as thinking, appropriated by Being, belongs to Being.”15 This new type of philosophical discourse proves that Heidegger believes he has now overcome the quasi-transcendental perspective, which required of him that he should question the meaning of Being (and which had dominated his discourse in Being and Time). It does not mean, however, that there is no difference, at this point, between the one who describes Being and Being as a described “thing.” It means only that it is not possible to draw a clear distinction between these two, since now it is the “thing itself,” i.e., Being as it occurs in language, that dominates over the one who merely describes Being. In other words, Being is not only what is described by the phenomenologist, but Being occurs in the very process of its description. In his comments on this transformation, Heidegger says that what -- in Being and Time -appeared to him as the way forward to truth, now manifests itself as being ‘truth on its way.’ In other words, what was being looked for, in the existential analysis, as the truth of Being -- whose meaning has to be interpreted -- now comes to light as a truth that is not identifiable in its essence but encircles and carries along the one who describes it. Or, to put it the other way round: the truth of Being can be experienced only inasmuch as it occurs in language, where it takes possession of the one who speaks about Being. In this sense, then, Heidegger’s discourse can be conceived of as a phenomenological description that apprehends “Being from itself.” Such a description does not describe Being as an occurrence, but is itself an occurrence of Being.

***

15

Heidegger, Pathmarks, 241; idem, Wegmarken, 314: “Das Denken ist zugleich Denken des Seins, insofern das Denken, vom Sein ereignet, dem Sein gehört.” 257

We now need to quote a second, well-known Heideggerian saying: “Rather, language is the house of Being, in which the human being ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of Being, guarding it.”16 This saying implies that language is not a medium that is separate from Being, a medium in which Being is expressed, but that it is Being itself that occurs in language. In other words, language, as the house of Being, is the occurrence of Being, since it is only in language that Being appears and stays preserved. As a result, the fabric of language-with-Being as occurrence calls for a different type of “description” than that which is still dominant in Being and Time. This new type of description -- as the demonstration (die Aufzeigung) of the thing from itself -- assumes the form of a permanent meta-phorization of Being in language. This results in the tendency to “poetize” the language used in the “description” of Being, a tendency that increases apace and becomes, in its turn, dominant in Heidegger’s late works. At this point, we should not forget that the term “description,” when used to describe Being as an occurrence enjoys quite a different status from that accorded to it by Husserl’s phenomenological description of the “thing itself.” The aim of the former “description” is neither to make the “thing” originally visible, nor to clarify it by interpretation. It is, rather, to transform the very description into an ‘occurrence,’ so that the “thing” comes to light in its very occurrence. Accordingly, the phenomenological description assumes a performative character. It realizes in itself what in Being and Time still appeared as the mere horizon of language (which makes possible the description/interpretation of anything at all). In this sense, Heidegger does not abandon the idea of phenomenological description, but realizes it in its most radical form: as a factual description of “the thing from itself.” The idea of phenomenological description as formulated in Being and Time thus comes to a transforming climax in Heidegger’s work after the “turn.” The description of the “thing from itself” emerges as the ‘thing’s self-presentation,’ that is, it has been transformed into the thing’s direct occurrence in words. Differently expressed, phenomenological description has become a direct “activity” of the thing itself. It is, literally, the thing itself which calls phenomenological description into being. We are not speaking only of a particular fusion between phenomenological description and Being itself, as the new characteristic of the philosophical language used by the later Heidegger. We are now speaking of the transformation of the very “description” into the occurrence itself of Being. Consequently, the early Husserlian idea of phenomenology as a “descriptive science” has metamorphosed into phenomenology as a “performative science,” in which the description of Being becomes the occurrence of Being itself in the process of being expressed. Phenomenology has become language, and language comes into being in the very occurring of Being.

16

Heidegger, Pathmarks, 254; idem, Wegmarken, 330: “Vielmehr ist die Sprache das Haus des Seins, darin wohnend der Mensch eksistiert, indem er der Wahrheit des Seins, sie hütend, gehört.” 258

4.

HUSSERL’S “GOD”

Jan Sochon´ Man can only derive empathy from his own place, from his cognitive and sentimental horizons, and with this shape the ways of faith. Edmund Husserl1 Initial Remarks I begin by referring to the book De Consolatione Philosophiae, by Anicius M. S. Boethius.2 He wrote this book at a special and tragic point in his life, that is, when he had unexpectedly been charged with participating in a conspiracy against King Theodoric, was identified as godless and was condemned to death. His death occurred, probably, in the year 525. While imprisoned in Pavia (Italy) and waiting to be executed, Boethius tried to examine his own existential situation, calling for aid on a lady with “bright [and] glowing eyes,” namely philosophy. She, ignoring all circumstances, chased away the Muses of lyric poetry from Boethius’s side, calling them “harlots” and “mermaids” who would only add to his suffering, and decided, by herself, to be the one who would take Boethius out of the sickness named coma, i.e., Plato’s oblivion of oneself. Her therapy brought about the intended effect. Boethius, having listened to philosophy’s arguments, concluded that the essence of happiness is to be found only in experiencing God; and, that philosophizing itself is not just a search for the ultimate good, which is God, but also a step toward preparing for a dignified experience of death. Therefore, philosophy includes the function of consoling and bringing alleviation to human beings. Could Boethius’s experience be repeated now, when philosophy has been transformed to such an extent? Karol Tarnowski noted, in his essay about The Consolation of Art, that philosophy today consoles hardly anybody any more, mainly because our contemporary culture has entered the so-called “postmetaphysical” phase. And although the questions that gave rise to metaphysics as philosophy have not disappeared -- questions, which can be defined as “metaphysical” in a broad sense and concern the deepest sense of the human being in the world -- something worse has happened. On the one hand, the answers to these questions, expressed in the spirit of the Western rational optimism, are no longer satisfactory, and on the other, the basic key to a metaphysical intuition of reality has been lost.3 In spite of this, I still believe that philosophy is not something that belongs to a lost past. It invariably stands a chance of expressing reality in some degree, unless deceived by post-modern delusions or the perils of scepticism, provided that it trusts in experience and the intellect. The latter has the power of approaching what is true, or even of reaching out to the transcendent and, as such, it can open up to Revelation, which is capable of consoling the mind. This is why it is necessary to reflect upon the “essence” of philosophy. The history of culture proves the indispensability of philosophical tools in the process of formulating a

1

Edmund Husserl, Kryzys europejskiego człowieczen´stwa a filozofia, trans. Janusz Sidorek (Warszawa: Aletheia, 1993), 100. 2 Boecjusz, O pocieszeniu, jakie daje filozofia, trans. Mikołaj Olszewski (Warszawa: PWN, 1962). See also Boecjusz, Traktaty teologiczne, trans. Roman Bielak and Agnieszka Kijewska (Ke˛ty: Antyk, 2001); Lambros Couloubaritsis, Histoire de la philosophie ancienne et médiévale. Figures illustres (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1998), 819-836. 3 Karol Tarnowski, “O pocieszeniu, jakie daje sztuka,” in Józef Lipiec, ed., Wielkos´c´ i pie˛kno filozofii (Kraków: Collegium Columbinum, 2002), 317. 259

“knowledge about the world.” In ancient times, the philosopher was, or rather, he was supposed to take on the role of, a priest, a wise man [magus], a seer, who, while distanced from the crowd as an erudite man, is at the same time an intellectual and political leader for the crowd. Nevertheless, he always asked “different questions” concerning the world. He did not regard external facts as the only reality. He also destroyed existing ways of explaining reality. In our own day, the preponderance of a liberated imagination allows philosophers to create works that are independent of existing thought-patterns: the greater their apparent irrationality, the greater the publicity for post-modern trends, and the higher the recognition given to what preceded those trends. Philosophy has cut itself off from the philosophical tradition, aesthetics has lost the classical sense of beauty, and consequently art has abandoned moral principles and truth. Yet God did appear in philosophical reflection, though not always in an open way, as He is, more often than not, hidden in the interior workings of a system or becomes, as in Kant’s thought, the threshold before which the human mind remains silent and does not inquire beyond. Some representatives of the school of philosophy established by Edmund Husserl, that is, phenomenology, were interested in more than philosophy; they were also interested in issues concerning religion. They perceived that the methodology used in phenomenology is equally conducive to the study of religious experience. This is evident, for example, in Mircea Eliade, whose search focused on archaic and archetypal traces of religiosity in the history of religion.4 Perhaps one should therefore ask, whether Husserl regarded himself as a religious man, or rather, as a “man on the way,” who did not exclude the problem of God from phenomenological research as such. However, does the version of phenomenology suggested by him present us with any theoretical foundation for speaking of God at all?

The Specific Character of Phenomenology as Philosophy According to the etymology of the word phenomenology (phainómenon), phenomenologists attempt to describe all essences that present themselves in the act of human cognition, both directly and clearly, sometimes even giving them the status of belonging to the threshold of the cognitive sphere tout court. Phenomenology is therefore the science of phenomena, the so-called primary philosophy, which wants to remain autonomous and free of all assumptions, thereby providing a theoretical basis for scientific cognition or, for that matter, the whole of culture. Thus there is no reason for accusing philosophy of striving -even if only hopelessly -- for being first, without which it would die (as such).5 Phenomenologists also examine the sense, the essence of phenomena. By using a special procedure, i.e., ideation (built upon the notion of what is individual), we immediately and spontaneously grasp what is fundamental. As a result of assuming an eidetic attitude (i.e., by focusing on the essence), the object of cognition is changed. It is no longer the concrete, the individual (i.e., something existing in reality -- for instance, as a body -- or, purely intentionally, as a piece of art), but some ideal quality or set (assembly) of ideal qualities constituting the content of individual ideas. The act in which we obtain direct knowledge of the content of ideas (for instance, ideas of a body or a human being), is called the eidetic examination (Wesensschau). This examination is a source of necessary knowledge, which is concerned with the objectively existing ideal sphere. It is not created by human consciousness; it exists, but not in reality (it is out of time and space, and does 4

See Andrzej Bronk, Zrozumiec´ s´wiat współczesny (Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 1998), 257-282. 5 See Jean-Luc Marion, Fenomenologia donacji a filozofia pierwsza, trans. Włodzimierz Starzyn´ski (manuscript, 2). 260

not participate in causal connections existing in the real world).6 This implies that the objectives of phenomenology come down to initiating a cognitive contact with what is directly given, without any mediation, “face to face,” so to speak. Therefore, there are many methods of cognitive “proximity” to objects, many varieties of experience. Husserl did not want to lose an individual’s seeing of reality; facts that are experienced are objects of conscious experiencing. As a matter of fact, when practicing phenomenology, we are not dealing with what is, but rather with what we see and sense as existing. For this reason, Husserl suggested we follow some procedures (for instance epoché, eidetic reduction), in order to grasp necessary truths that go beyond the casual character of the natural world. He pointed to the existence of some “timeless ego” in every human, the basis for every experience, which he called “transcendental Ego.” People, when thinking, have this type of assumption-free, pure point of observation. This transcendental idealism of Husserl shows the “power of consciousness,” which constitutes the sense of objects. It is the “origin” of the evident character of all concepts and all beings. At the same time, it is intentional, and this means that it always refers to phenomena. Consequently, in order to reach for scientific and “absolute” knowledge, we need to rely on intentional consciousness. Due to Husserl, the scholastic term ens intentionale gained a new meaning. A human being is no longer res corporea, rather, it exists as “open,” united by meaning. Therefore, each phenomenon is a phenomenon for the experiencing subject. Without this relation, there can be no object of cognition. Consciousness is a “miracle of miracles.” It creates the “sense of the world,” and this means that it constitutes the meaning of things. To be human means to be able to constitute sense. More specifically: Husserl attributes the constituting properties to the “transcendental Ego” (not existing in the world), which “grows out of and beyond the world as a mysterious reality.”7 What is presented as the origin is given in a fundamental way, depending on “how” it is presented to the experiencing subject. With consciousness, a philosophical importance attaches to the human inner experience. And this experience is the area of reflection and philosophical thought (and was so for Husserl, especially in his later years), concerning, among other things, religious issues. As a matter of fact, phenomenology is a philosophy of the inner workings. It directs us to pay attention to the “what” and the “how” of human consciousness. And it features not only phenomena of sensual experience, but also other types of experience, for instance in the field of ideas. A phenomenologist trusts what he finds, in a direct way, within him or herself; he/she does not have to refer to anything external to consciousness (or against his/her findings). But does the phenomenologist avoid the trap of solipsism? Did Husserl’s assumption of the concept of the “pre-Ego” propel him into areas of thought dealing with what is absolute (in the religious sense)? It is hard to give an explicit answer, though Husserl suggested that God could be regarded as the Creator of “sensible matter” as well as the existence and movement of transcendental consciousness.8

6

See Antoni B. Ste˛pien´, “Zagadnienie Boga w fenomenologii (Kilka uwag wste˛pnych),” in Bohdan Bejze, ed., Aby poznac´ Boga i człowieka. Cze˛s´c´ pierwsza – O Bogu dzis´ (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Sióstr Loretanek, 1974), 86; Jan Krokos, “Metody fenomenologiczne i ich aktualnos´c´. Zarys problemu,” Studia Philosophie Christianae 34, no. 2 (1998): 103-111. 7 See Józef Tischner, S´wiat ludzkiej nadziei (Kraków: Znak, 1975), 114. 8 See Halina Perkowska, Bóg filozofów XX wieku. Wybrane koncepcje (Warszawa: PWN, 2001), 183. 261

Husserl’s Conversions Theological issues were of no interest to Husserl. He radically separated philosophy from theology. He nonetheless supposed that phenomenological studies could be of some importance for theological determinations. Our direct intentions are not heading toward theology, but toward phenomenology, though indirectly it can be of great significance for theology.9 On the other hand, he regarded himself as someone who was intentionally searching for the truth, wanting to hold “the crown of truth.” And in order to do so, he abandoned mathematics in favor of philosophy and also converted to Protestantism. From then on -as formulated by Manfred Sommer -- Husserl thought in the Cartesian manner and lived the life of a Protestant.10 Of Jewish origin -- which led to some dramatic existential consequences for this philosopher -- Husserl was baptized on 26 April 1886, being named Edmund Gustav Albrecht, in the municipal church of the Evangelical Augsburg parish in Vienna. This was for him the fulfillment of what he perceived to be his calling: to build a philosophy in the manner of mathematics, a serious science. Whereas a philosophy of optimism and peace -- like Mach’s philosophy -- was perceived as a kind of deviation from the proper calling of the professional philosopher, something sinful even.11 Thus it was phenomenology, as a primordial and self-legitimate philosophy, that was, in his opinion, to pave the way toward God and a truthful life. And yet, why did Husserl not expressly advocate the God of religion, or at least the God of philosophy? What was it that checked his acceptance of a religious lifestyle, while many of his disciples (apart from Roman Ingarden) were brought to God or even to sainthood (as recognized by the Catholic Church), like Edith Stein, by philosophizing “in the spirit of Husserl”? Perhaps the main reason for this lies in the character of phenomenology itself, which confines experience within the borders of consciousness. If the “transcendental Ego” category were to refer to an even more primary “source” than consciousness, then the foundations of phenomenology as such would be destroyed. Therefore Husserl could not cross the limits set by consciousness, since it represented the ultimate (perhaps even the divine?) dimension of all experience. We cannot find much in Husserl’s texts, however fragmentary, that would prove his philosophical search for God. Rather, we should simply recognize their atheistic character. This philosophy does not ask for God, and frequently used terms like “God” or “god” are only figures in a kind of intellectual experiment, marginal figures understood as fictum. In Husserl’s texts it even happens that he refers absurd, blasphemous, or contradictory expressions to God himself -- after the earlier example of Pseudo-Dionysios Areopagita -- though, at the same time, they have nothing to do with any form of negative theology. Calling God “boundlessly stupid” only suggests that this God is not one that could be blasphemed against. The egocentrism of phenomenology makes consciousness “absolute,” even in the sense that it has the capability of “self-creation.”12 And it can be called God. In no way, however, is this the God of Scripture, or of the Christian faith.

9

Edmund Husserl, Idee czystej fenomenologii i fenomenologicznej filozofii, trans. Danuta Gierulanka (Warszawa: PWN, 1967), 96-97. 10 Manfred Sommer, “Fenomenologia jako powaz˙na praca i pogodna pasywnos´c´,” in Stanisław Czerniak and Jarosław Rolewski, ed., Studia z filozofii niemieckiej, vol. 3, Współczesna fenomenologia niemiecka (Torun´: Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika, 1999), 134. 11 Ibid., 135. 12 Ibid., 136-137. 262

Nevertheless, some of Husserl’s statements permit other interpretations. They make us pay attention to Augustine’s achievement. Husserl was to find there a way of reaching God, similar to his own and consisting in going deep into one’s own subjectivity. The author of the Confessions emphasized how God was closer to him than he was to himself, and that the way to God starts at the spiritual level; but he did not stop there. Whereas Husserl was not looking for God, but for the truth: We find different transcendence, which is not like pure Ego directly given with reduced consciousness, but which we experience very indirectly.... I mean transcendence that is God.... He would be transcendent not only for the world, but certainly also for the “absolute” consciousness.... We are naturally spreading phenomenological reduction onto this “absolute” and “transcendence.” It should be excluded from this field of study that we are to create from scratch since this is supposed to be a field of pure consciousness only.13 Since God is not just a phenomenon, He cannot be placed at the same level as pure consciousness, and -- even more so -- this consciousness cannot be made into a place where God is manifested and to be found. He is not reachable by the human mind as such, and this is why God reaches the dimension of the ideal telos -- divinity. Husserl himself stressed that God -- if God exists -- is “absolute” in a completely different sense than consciousness, and that the “absolute experience” available to the human being has a finite dimension.14 For this reason, some researchers say that Husserl’s phenomenology was, in its assumptions, egocentric, and theocentric in its purpose.15 Therefore, Augustine is closer to Husserl’s standpoint than Thomas Aquinas. But Husserl himself knew that, in order to resolve the “issue of God,” he had to go beyond the phenomenological structure of philosophy and turn toward metaphysics. The issues around the fundamental character of transcendental consciousness cannot be easily avoided. Yet he did not leave phenomenology, since he was looking for what it was possible to achieve while staying in its confines, namely, the building of a philosophical method that would ensure that a proper foundation can be created for human culture in general. Therefore, reality is for him only a human reality, and the human mind consequently has abilities that are almost divine. Did he credit phenomenology with being a special kind of “new religion”? In his works, Husserl did not mention any personal experience of faith. He did not examine God as an object of religious or para-religious acts, but he did point to God as a theoretical possibility. Nevertheless, only a possibility. When stressing the role of “the highest innner concentration,” he perhaps left a space for “the silence of faith.” He knew that religious experience can be described only as far as it is really experienced. Contrary to Roman Ingarden, he did not construct an idea of God. He preferred to sit on the fence, caught in a kind of intellectual paradox. His search was concentrated on a “God without God,” without recourse to the tools of metaphysics.16 While unable to overcome subjectivism, he could nevertheless accept that looking for truth is inseparably connected with God.

13

Husserl, Idee czystej fenomenologii, 110-111. Ibid., 189. 15 This interpretation was presented by Tadeusz Gadacz during the Symposium “On the Christian Character of Philosophy” held on 4 November, 2003, at Warszawa UKSW. 16 This does not mean that Husserl ignored metaphysics as a whole, as suggested by Jacques Taminiaux in his essay “Les deux maitres de la phénoménologie face à la métaphysique,” in Jean-Marc Narbonne and Luc Langlois, ed., La métaphysique, son histoire, sa critique, ses enjeux (Paris; Sainte-Foy: Vrin; Presses de l’Université Laval, 1999), 129. 14

263

And this proved, probably, to be a form of consolation, though not the kind of consolation as previously experienced by Boethius.

Husserl’s Silence about God Husserl’s life-task, to reach for what is certain and non-dubious, was not successful. It turned out that “things,” after becoming phenomena, remained powerless -- as phenomena -as against reality. He also did not make any attempt at answering the question concerning a foundation for all possible phenomena. Some of Husserl’s disciples and followers brought a breath of life (and faith) to phenomenological studies: Husserl did not do this himself. He remained throughout a philosopher who claimed exclusivity for his description of what is real, inside and out. He did not wish to talk about things that do not present us with absolute concreteness from their beginnings, their source.

264

5.

THE EARLY HEIDEGGER’S CRITIQUE OF HUSSERL

Sean J. McGrath

Notwithstanding Heidegger’s sometimes savage criticism of Husserl, Heidegger dedicated Sein und Zeit to Husserl “in friendship and admiration” and generously acknowledged Husserl’s positive influence on his work.1 Heidegger and Husserl agree that the proper theme of phenomenology is the meaningful as such. Heidegger departs from Husserl on the structure and mode of access to the meaningful. Neither Heidegger nor Husserl are system builders, so a facile reduction of either to a set of theses is not helpful. Moreover, Husserl’s view changes over his long career, undoubtedly under the influence of the work of Heidegger, Scheler and his other students. Much of what the early Heidegger advances, finds some correlate in the later Husserl. The traditional contrast between Husserl as a reflective phenomenologist and Heidegger as a hermeneutic phenomenologist is not without its problems. Nevertheless, it succeeds in underscoring Heidegger and Husserl’s divergence on the question of the structure and access to the meaningful. By absolutizing the theoretical comportment to beings, Husserl compounds Western philosophy’s forgetfulness of the fore-theoretical (“factical”) sources of thinking, and therewith, the forgetfulness of being. Husserl re-inscribes the prejudice in his contention that intentionality, directedness to an object, is the essence of thinking. According to Heidegger the subject-object relationship is only one of many ways in which Dasein is comported to being. Moreover, it is a “founded” relationship. The most basic relationship of Dasein to being cannot be articulated in the language of subject / object or noesis / noema. Prior to the project of knowledge, Dasein is immersed in everydayness, lost in practical concerns, which are determined by its unthematized pre-occupation with its own death. In everydayness Dasein is disclosed, not as a subject / ego, but rather, as being that is always outside itself in the temporalizing practical, social, and existential pre-occupations, which Heidegger formalizes as “care” (Sorge), “being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-in-a-world.” (SZ 192) This paper follows a reverse chronology. I begin with an overview of the middle Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, with attention to those details of it which Heidegger found most problematic. I then sketch Heidegger’s 1925 critique of Husserl. The paper turns from this more familiar terrain to the young Heidegger’s early innovations in phenomenology: his effort to return to the fore-theoretical, and the method of formal indication. In this way I hope to shed light on what Heidegger means when he accuses Husserl of forgetting being.

1

Heidegger’s uncharacteristically generous tribute to Husserl in Sein und Zeit (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh [Albany, N.Y.: SUNY, 1996], hereafter SZ, 400, n. 5) must be read in context. Sein und Zeit was originally published in Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. That Heidegger is to some degree playing a political game here is clear from scathing remarks about Husserl which appear in his correspondence at the time. See for example Martin Heidegger to Karl Jaspers, December 26, 1926 in Martin Heidegger / Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel 19201963, ed. Walter Biemel and Hans Saner (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990), 71. Recent studies of Heidegger’s relationship to Husserl include, Stephen Galt Crowell, “Heidegger and Husserl: The Matter and Method of Philosophy,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, ed., A Companion to Heidegger (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 49-64; idem, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning. Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001). My reading of the Heidegger-Husserl dispute is indebted to Kisiel’s superb studies. See in particular, Theodore Kisiel, “From Intuition to Understanding. On Heidegger’s Transposition of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” in idem, Heidegger’s Way of Thought, ed. Alfred Denker and Marion Heinz (New York: Continuum, 2002), 174186; idem, “Heidegger (1907-1927): The Transformation of the Categorial,” in ibid., 84-100; idem, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993). 265

Husserl’s Reflective Phenomenology Although Husserl’s thinking underwent substantial changes over the span of his career, from his early concern with the foundations of logic to his later transcendental idealism, he always remained motivated by the Cartesian ideal formulated in his earliest works, the project of establishing “apodictic” foundations for the sciences. Philosophy was to be a “rigorous science” grounded in indubitable evidence, an objective analysis of the most basic ground of experience and thought. Through a prejudice-free return to “the things themselves” -- the given as it appears under methodologically controlled conditions -- phenomenology would clarify the epistemological foundations of other sciences. Husserl’s phenomenology is “reflective” because it is based upon this Cartesian style examination of the immanent contents of subjectivity. With Descartes, Husserl presupposes a selftransparent ego. Husserl suspends or “brackets” (epoché) the “natural attitude,” the common sense assumption that objects of knowledge exist independent of consciousness. Everything known is a datum of consciousness. Being cannot be conceived apart from consciousness. The “phenomenological reduction” returns to the “most basic field of work,” the sphere of “absolutely clear beginnings.”2 We ‘reduce’ thinking or lead it back (reducere) to its original source, from the so-called ‘independent world’ to the immanent contents of consciousness. The reduction reveals that the original data of thinking are not objects but intentionally structured meanings. Within the realm of the purely given, every object shows itself as a correlate of a subjective act, the intentum of an intentio. Intentionality was originally a Scholastic concept retrieved by Husserl’s mentor Franz Brentano. In order to find a scientific basis for experimental psychology, Brentano distinguished psychological from non-psychological phenomena on the grounds of the psyche’s ineluctable directedness, its essential reference to an object.3 All consciousness is “consciousness of.” The known is a cogitatum of a cogito, the intentum of an intentio, the object pole of an indissoluble relation to a subject. Brentano’s retrieval of the notion of intentionality was the beginning of the end of the reification of the ego in modern philosophy. For Brentano and Husserl, consciousness is neither a substance with the accident of rationality, nor a thinking thing. It exhibits a feature found in no substance or physical thing: directedness. Consciousness is an activity, a relation. “Each cogito, each conscious process . . . ‘means’ something or other, and bears in itself, in this manner peculiar to the meant, its particular cogitatum.4 Intentionality means that the how of a phenomenon can be distinguished from its what. Husserl introduces a new set of inseparable terms to elaborate this distinction: noema, that which is intuited, the what of an intention, and noesis, the way of intuiting, the how of an intention.5 To understand the given, it is not enough to look at its objective features; we must examine the way it shows itself. Perception of objects is piecemeal, but meaning is holistic and contextual; every noema has a noetic “horizon” constitutive of its meaning. We synthesize one-sided views of things into anticipated wholes. Intentional analysis explicates these implicitly given ‘wholes,’ constitutive a priori horizons or eidetic contexts,

2

Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Edmund Husserl: Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, ed. Quenten Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 146. 3 See Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Oskar Kraus and Linda McAlister (New York: Humanities Press, 1973). 4 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Nijhof, 1960), 33. 5 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. 1, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten (The Hague: Nijhof, 1982), 199-216. 266

yielding an a priori system of categories which encompasses the formal structure of anything that can be thought. Husserl writes, “For psychology, the universal task presents itself: to investigate systematically the elementary intentionalities and from out of these unfold the typical forms of intentional processes, their possible variants, their syntheses to new forms, their structural composition, and from this advance towards a descriptive knowledge of the totality of mental processes, towards a comprehensive type of the life of the psychic.”6 In a return to Kant and Fichte, the foundation of all intentional structures is thematized as “the transcendental ego,” the a priori source of possible experience. All intentional acts are traced back to an absolute horizon of transcendental subjectivity, a field of transcendental experience within which subject and object, self and other, are originally constituted.

The Forgetfulness of Being in Reflective Phenomenology In a largely sympathetic 1925 overview of Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger identified the three major discoveries of phenomenology as “intentionality,” “categorial intuition,” and “the original sense of the a priori.”7 (GA20 27-75) “Categorial intuition” is Husserl’s discovery that the Neo-Kantian disjunction between intuited contents of consciousness (sense data) and spontaneously generated formal structures (the categories) has no warrant in experience. The assumption that categories, ideas, and expressions are imposed on the given by a synthesizing consciousness is phenomenologically unjustified. We have no intuition of raw data. Rather we intuit pre-categorially structured data, which elicits a category. The categories are not filters that we place upon the data of sensation; they do not constitute the ‘hard wiring’ of subjectivity. Rather, categories are derivations from a foretheoretical structure integral to the given.8 This “founded” nature of categorial intuition discloses the original sense of the a priori. The a priori is not a set of innate ideas, but a co-intuited structure that is transcendentally “prior” to the intuited thing. I have an experience of a desk, not just any desk, but the desk upon which I work every day. Co-given with this intuition is the formal structure of “desk in general,” the essence, and more generally, the formal structure of “thing in general.” These formal structures are a priori, not in the sense that we bring them to the experience of a thing, but in the sense that experience presupposes them as possible ways of interpreting a thing. Foremost among pre-categorial structures is being itself. The being of the sensible is given with the sensible, without however being itself sensible. And yet, Husserl remains blind to the implications of his discovery. The derivative nature of categorial language is left unaddressed and the ambiguity in the meaning of being is not engaged. On the contrary, a traditional understanding of being is uncritically assumed. “Being for Husserl means nothing other than true being, objectivity, true for a theoretical scientific knowing.” (GA20 119). The question of the meaning of being cannot even be raised when being is identified with objectivity. In a letter to Husserl, Heidegger underlines the difference between Husserl’s reflective approach and his own: “We agree that beings, in the sense of which you call the ‘world,’ cannot be clarified through a return

6

Edmund Husserl, “Phenomenology,” trans. Richard Palmer, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 2, no. 2 (1971): 87. 7 Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, GA20, ed. Peter Jaeger (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994); English: History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992), 135-6. 8 See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. John N. Findlay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), vol. 2, sec. 40-48. 267

to beings of the same nature. But this does not mean that what determines the location of the transcendental is not a being at all. Rather, it leads directly to the problem: What is the kind of Being of the being in which ‘world’ is constituted? That is the central problem of Being and Time; that is, a fundamental ontology of Dasein. It tries to show that the kind of Being belonging to human Dasein is totally different from that of other beings . . . and consequently contains in itself the possibility of transcendental constitution.”9 When intentional analysis is carried through to its end, Heidegger argues, the being of the intentional object, the intentional act, and the intentional subject are brought into question. “To the intentionality of perception belongs not only the intentio and the intentum, but also the understanding of the Being of that which is intended in the intentum.”10 What is the being of the being that is constituted by intentionality? How does it differ from other beings? What do these multiple ways of being indicate about the meaning of being itself? “Phenomenological questioning in its innermost tendency itself leads to the question of the being of the intentional and before anything else to the question of the meaning of being as such.” (GA20 136) Rather than exploring the differences between the being of the intentio and the being of every intentum Husserl imposes upon consciousness a notion of being derived from the domain of objects: consciousness is “immanent being” by contrast to “transcendent being,” “absolute being,” by contrast to “contingent being,” “constituting being,” by contrast to “constituted being,” “pure being” by contrast to “individuated being.” The predicates “immanent,” “absolute,” “constituting,” and “pure” are not determinations drawn from the being of intentionality, but hyperbolic extrapolations from the domain of objectified being. Husserl had not remained true to his own principles; he had defined the phenomenological theme “not out of the matters themselves but instead out of a traditional prejudgment of it.” (GA20 128) Intentionality indicates an essential ambiguity in the notion of being, the unthematized divergent ways in which beings can be. Yet because Husserl’s brackets exclude ontological considerations, this ambiguity cannot be engaged. “It [Husserl’s phenomenology] disregards not only reality but also any particular individuation of lived experiences. It disregards the fact that acts are mine or those of any other individual human beings and regards them only in their what. It regards the what, the structure of the acts, but as a result does not thematize their way to be, their being an act as such.” (GA20 152/109-10) The questioning of the being of the intentional thrusts reflective phenomenology into crisis. Being cannot be accessed through direct examination of conscious acts; it demands an interpretive method that works with indirect manifestations and hidden meanings. The historical self, who always already understands being, is not a “transcendental ego”; it does not reflectively possess itself a priori, but only encounters itself insofar as it enacts its pre-comprehension in living.

Heidegger’s Return to the Fore-Theoretical From the beginning of his apprenticeship to Husserl (1919), Heidegger suspected that the eidetic reduction to pure intuition remains trapped in the tradition of privileging theoretical seeing over concretely and historically embedded understanding. Where phenomenology 9

Heidegger, letter to Husserl of October 22, 1927, in Husserl and Heidegger: The Question of a Phenomenological Beginning (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1983), 95-6. 10 Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA24, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997); English: Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1982), 71. 268

for Husserl is a non-distortive elaboration of subjectivity, a transcendental reflection on conscious acts, phenomenology under Heidegger becomes hermeneutical, the provisional thematization of that which is hidden, that which cannot be directly accessed through reflection but must be “formally indicated.”11 Kisiel characterizes this as a move from “intuition” to “understanding.” For Husserl intentions are fulfilled in intuitions, where the paradigm for an intuition is a sense experience, the immediate grasp of content. The intention heads for the intuition. If it is not fulfilled it is an “empty” intention. Heidegger finds this view artificial, struggling under the epistemological construct of experience as a subject / object confrontation. Intentionality analysis remains inadequate to phenomenology re-conceived as “the hermeneutics of facticity.” Heidegger’s phenomenology would dig beneath intentionality, and the cognitive-paradigm implied by it, into the fore-theoretical foundations of all human experience. For the young Heidegger experience is always already structured before it becomes the term of an intentional act. Consciousness does not “intuit” things, but “understands” them, that is, it finds them understandable, laden with meaning, and appearing within the horizon of Dasein’s practical involvement with them. A thing is not first ‘given’ to us as an intentional object; it is first revealed to us as an historically-charged nexus of meaning. What is understood is not an object for a subject but a lived experience for a living human being. According to Heidegger, Husserl’s intentionality analysis never accesses the most basic level of lived-experience because it remains stuck in a theoretical paradigm, where Dasein is interpreted as primarily a knower / perceiver. For Heidegger the practical concerns of life precede knowing and perceiving. Knowing is an act characteristic of a special kind of activity, the theoretical project of science. But Dasein is more than a knower. Care (Sorge) is possible because the world is not a mute aggregate of un-interpreted sense data, awaiting the naming activity of intentional consciousness. The world is pervaded by understandability.12 Heidegger speaks, not of consciousness, but of Existenz, thrownness into a world. Whatever intentions may emerge in the ‘subject’ are always already preceded by non-intentional horizons of meaning, “the ecstatic structures of worldly existence.”13 As early as the 1919/1920 course Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (GA58) Heidegger was radicalizing Husserl’s notion of intentionality in terms of factical life. No longer understood as the convergence of subjective acts with intended objects, intentionality becomes indicative of life and its motivational tendencies. Every life-tendency is directed toward a certain content, but this is not originally an object, a thing with a distinct essence. Rather the term of a tendency is a concretely determined, historically singularized life-world, a meaningful-whole that motivates the self to behave in a certain way. By 1921 Heidegger had introduced the notion of “comportment” (Verhalten) into his lectures as a term for fore-theoretical intentions, underscoring the factical involvement of the self with its world. The situational connotation of the German word Verhalten corrects the

11

The key discussion on formal indication occurs in Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, GA60, ed. Claudius Strube (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995); English: The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsche and Jennifer Anna Gosetti (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2004), 38-45. On formal indication see Ryan Streeter, “Heidegger’s Formal Indication: A Question of Method in Being and Time,” Man and World 30 (1997): 413-30; John van Buren, “The Ethics of Formale Anzeige in Heidegger,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69, no. 2 (1995): 157-170; Daniel Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Method: Philosophical Concepts as Formal Indications,” Review of Metaphysics 47 (June 1994): 775-795. 12 Kisiel precisely formulates the difference between Husserl and Heidegger on this point: “The Heideggerian retrieve opposes Husserl in situating the understanding and exposition of meaning not in acts of consciousness but first of all in a pre-conscious realm of being-in-the-world, which is already pervaded by ‘expressivity.’” Kisiel, “The Transformation of the Categorial,” 98. 13 Ibid., 100. 269

worldlessness of Husserl’s intentionality. Verhalten is an attitude, a behavior adopted under particular circumstances. Thus understood, a comportment occurs in a determinate life-context. On the most basic level of experience, the self is indistinguishable from its historical life. A comportment is always en-worlded: “The intransitive-verbal meaning of ‘to live’ explicates itself . . . always as living ‘in’ something, living ‘out of’ something, living ‘for’ something, living ‘with’ something, living ‘against,’ living ‘towards’ something, living ‘from’ something. We define the ‘something’ . . . with the term ‘world.’” (GA61 53, 85-86) Heidegger elaborates four moments in comportment: content-sense, the what of a tendency (Gehaltssinn); relational-sense, the how or form of a tendency (Bezugssinn); enactment-sense, the actualization of the historical tendency in a concrete situation (Vollzugssinn); and temporalizing sense, the temporal significance which makes the tendency possible (Zeitigungssinn). (GA58 260-61, GA61 52-53) Content-sense and relational-sense correspond to Husserl’s noesis and noema. Enactment-sense is roughly analogous to Husserl’s notion of intuitional fulfillment. However, Heidegger places the emphasis on the way the fulfillment occurs, holding that each enactment brings with it a unique shade of meaning. Temporalizing-sense exceeds anything developed by Husserl. For Heidegger the whole meaning structure is determined by temporality, the how of being enacted in time. Husserl aims to lift noetic structures out of their factual situation in order to isolate essences. But according to Heidegger, this is a distortion of the phenomenon. A meaning enacted today is different from a meaning enacted yesterday. The accommodation to the heterogeneity of history is crucial if phenomenology is to stay true to its theme, life as it is lived by us. The distinction between the theoretical and the fore-theoretical in the early Freiburg lectures develops into Sein und Zeit’s distinction between the “present-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit), and the “ready-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit). Vorhandenheit, from the common German word for availability (literally, “being-before-the-hand”), means objectified being, the theoretical determination of a thing as an object, a thing with a distinct essence. Things can only be so defined by being “de-worlded,” abstracted from the nest of relations in which they originally show themselves. The form of the present-at-hand bears traces of the deeper fore-theoretical ground, the thing as “ready-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit), nested in the contextual whole of my living. The hammer, which weighs such and such, has a certain shape, and belongs to a class of artifacts, represents the tool swinging in my hand as I build my house, and the referential whole within which such activity is possible, the world of human construction, planning, and sheltering. A tool is fore-theoretically determined by what it serves to do. As such, it cannot be understood apart from those whom it serves, their purposes, and the other things to which it is related. By contrast to Vorhandenheit, Zuhandenheit cannot be thought without the relational whole of factical life (die Bewandtnisganzheit). To define a thing, I first lift it out of the world and place it before myself as an instance of a class. Without the fore-theoretical context I would have no acquaintance with the thing whatsoever.

Formal Indication The indirect nature of Heidegger’s language stands in marked contrast to Husserl’s scientific discourse. Where Husserl expresses himself in direct and categorical language, Heidegger employs elliptical, often tortuous neologisms to make his point. Early on in his career Heidegger came to see that if phenomenology is to thematize life as it is lived by us, it must share in the being of the historical. It must become itself historical. This involves a new approach to philosophical rhetoric. Heidegger does not abstract from that 270

which can be otherwise, but immerses himself in it. His phenomenology is therefore inescapably provisional. Apodicticity is sacrificed for the sake of remaining true to things. Hermeneutic phenomenology’s ‘results’ are not definitions of essences but formal indications, that is, empty directives for thinking, which remain open to diverse historical applications. Formal indications are never set in stone, they are subject to continual revision. Provisionality does not undermine rigor. Rather, it makes phenomenological analysis an act that must be perpetually re-enacted. It is difficult to hold fast to thinking, when that which is thought is as fluid and unstable as thinking itself. Yet in this difficulty, this ‘staying with,’ phenomenology finds its only possible justification: to let life show itself by allowing it to live in our speaking and thinking. The task cannot be completed (to speak of completion makes no sense here). But its significance does not stand or fall on its completion. Phenomenology’s task is not to “create new knowledge,” but to call to life, to call it to a living appropriation of itself. Heidegger wishes to break the theoretical glass that encases the philosophical thinker, the wall that renders him or her personally invulnerable to the matter in question. The questioner must experience a re-direction of inquiry if the hermeneutics of facticity is to succeed. We, the questioners, are the ones who are put into question. The safe impartiality of a theoretical inspection is no longer possible. To make facticity questionable is to resist the subtle substitution of general ideas for concrete experience. We are called to think our own existence. In the interest of staying as close to life as possible, Heidegger works with historically situated and provisional expressions (formal indications). The goal is to establish an oblique access to the everyday, to light up the factic from within. While formal indication, so essential to the early Freiburg lectures, all but disappears from Sein und Zeit as an explicit methodological technique, the reasons which led Heidegger to articulate the notion remain central to his phenomenology.14 The idea was to find a non-invasive way into the fore-theoretical, to philosophize, without disturbing “the stream of life.” A formal indication does not dictate the theme in advance (it does not define content), but invites the thinker to discover the theme for him or herself. One could argue that the methodological discussion disappears as Heidegger’s discourse becomes even more indirect and elliptical. The whole of Sein und Zeit is formally indicative. Formal indication is necessary because of the singularity (Jemeinigkeit) of Dasein. The being of this being is absolutely historical. It is therefore never theoretically thematized. The only way to thematize a being that cannot be named is to formally indicate it, to exhortatively point to it in such a way that we are drawn to perform the act of thinking which will light up the being for ourselves. Read as formally indicative, Sein und Zeit is a practical manual of exhortations which call us to a hermeneutical performance of thinking. It is “an empty book,” as Ryan Streeter puts it.15 Heidegger’s development of the method of formal indication is rooted in his 1915 Habilitationsschrift and its examination of the problem of the ineffability of the singular.16 14

Heidegger uses the term formale Anzeige in Sein und Zeit when an articulation of an existential structure of being-in-the-world is needed without committing to any particular existentiell (ontic) interpretation of its meaning. See SZ 109, 213, 289. 15 Streeter, “Formal Indication,” 426. 16 Martin Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1, Frühe Schriften, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), 189-401. On Heidegger’s study of Scotus see Sean J. McGrath, “Heidegger and Duns Scotus on Truth and Language,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 57, no. 2 (December, 2003): 323-343, idem, “The Forgetting of Haecceitas: Heidegger’s 1915-1916 Habilitationsschrift,” in Andrzej Wiercin´ski, ed., Between the Human and The Divine: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2002), 355-377; Kisiel, Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, 21-68. 271

According to Aristotle, intellection is universal, while sensation is singular. Yet intellection depends upon sensation. While we cannot think without the singular, we never cognize it as such. Individual things are cognized only insofar as they are instances of a universal. Scotus’s work on this problem generated the doctrine of haecceitas, the notion of the concrete intelligibility of the singular. For Scotus, Aristotle’s doctrine of the ineffability of the singular exposes the limits of the mode of thinking constituted by defining and judging universals. Ineffability does not signify unintelligibility but the limitations of theoretical cognition. If the singular exhibits an intelligibility which eludes abstract intellection, we must speak of a fore-theoretical stratum of intelligibility. When we look at how we use language, Heidegger says, we see that defining content and judging are not the only ways of expressing intelligibility. Where definitions are not possible, language can performatively and exhortatively point to that which cannot be named. The exhortation calls the recipient, not to think certain thoughts, but to perform a way of thinking. Formally indicative language is a spur to existential self-engagement. To understand a formal indication, I must break out of the self-forgetfulness of theoretical speculation and apply it. Formal indication highlights historically differentiated semantic structure by suspending the relational-sense, the how of the phenomenon.17 We are not told how to interpret the matter. Rather, we are invited to interpret the matter ourselves. Formal indication is an exhortation to apply a way of thinking, without any clear directives as to how thinking is to be applied. Thus the formal indication puts the recipient into crisis. It is an intentional and strategic ambiguity.18 Determinate meaning is in some way withheld and application (the enactment-sense or Vollzugssinn) is highlighted as the locus of significance. The formal indication is therefore semantically unsatisfying yet formally charged with suggested and possible meaning. The formal indication is analogous to the ironic speech act. The semantic gap in the formal indication, like the ambiguity in the ironic statement, startles us into interpretation. The contradiction between the form and content of the ironic speech act emphasizes a contextual significance that exceeds the content of the individual words. In order to understand the expression, I must enact it. I have to put myself into the situation of the speaker and see what it could mean for him or her. The understanding of irony is only possible through self-transposition: we see the expression through the eyes of the one who uses it and only then grasp its meaning. But to ‘see something through the eyes of another’ is to see it through our own eyes, that is, to apply the meaning in a certain way. Hermeneutic phenomenology is inevitably circular, life’s re-doubling of itself. In the opening pages of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger shows how we cannot ask the question about the meaning of being without already understanding something about being. (SZ 4) Yet we cannot thematize our pre-understanding of being without first articulating the question.

17

“The formal indication is intended primarily as an advance indication of the relational sense of the phenomenon, in a negative sense at the same time as a warning! A phenomenon must be pre-given in such a way that its relational sense is held in suspense. One must guard against assuming that its relational sense is originally theoretical. This is a position that opposes the sciences in the extreme. There is no insertion into a content-domain, rather the opposite: the formal indication is a warding off, a preliminary protection, so that the enactment character remains free. The necessity of this precaution lies in the decadent tendency of factical life experience, which forces us into the objective, from which we must nevertheless draw the phenomena.” GA60 44. 18 “The formal indicator, although it guides the consideration, brings no predetermined opinion into the problem. . . . The formal predication is not bound to any content, however it must be motivated somehow. How is it motivated? It arises from the meaning of the attitudinal relation itself. I do not look from the what determination to the object, rather I view the object in a manner of speaking in its determinateness. I must look away from the given what-content, and instead see that the given content is given, attitudinally determined.” GA60 38, 40. 272

This circularity is not something to be overcome, but something to be worked with. “What is decisive is not to get out of this circle but to get into it in the right way. . . . A positive possibility of the most primordial knowledge is hidden in it.” (SZ 143) The possibility opened up by the circularity of the inquiry is the opportunity to shape pre-judgment or Vorhabe (fore-have), the anticipated totality of relevance from which perspectives and concepts are drawn, and which determines what is unconcealed and what remains hidden. Hermeneutic phenomenology makes the implicit explicit in order to see how habitual prejudgments unveil and conceal being. Our “average everydayness” is interrogated in such a way that the pre-judgments pre-reflectively operative in all our thinking and speaking are permitted to show themselves. As Pöggeler puts it, “Phenomenological philosophizing is traveling along with life.”19 We are now, with the publication of the early Freiburg lectures, beginning to understand the methodological care with which the young Heidegger experimented with language in order to overcome Husserl’s tendency to turn phenomenology into a theoretical science. The point was not to freeze life before the theoretical gaze, but to jump into life, midstream as it were, to live phenomenologically. This is not something the phenomenologist could do for anyone. Heidegger’s phenomenology is an invitation to apply a way of thinking, to think, on the assumption that every application will yield a different result. It is a phenomenology that is not only open to revision; it deconstructs itself in a struggle to stay with the stream of history. For it is in the haecceity of concrete historical existence that being is disclosed in its most primordial sense, as time. None of this would have been possible without Husserl’s work, especially his Logische Untersuchungen. But it was clear to Heidegger from the beginning that the hermeneutics of faciticty represents a transposition of phenomenology into an existential key, a transposition which significantly transforms Husserl’s project.

19

Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, trans. David Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1987), 53. 273

6.

RIGOR AND ORIGINARITY: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE SCIENTIFIC CHARACTER OF HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGY IN MARTIN HEIDEGGER’S EARLY LECTURES

Angel Xolocotzi

I.

Introduction

The recent publication of both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s later work (in Husserliana and the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe) allows us to see and explore the connection between these two thinkers with greater clarity than would previously have been possible. One of the core points regarding this connection is that it is precisely the idea of phenomenology that binds them together. Both Heidegger and Husserl would have questioned any loss of strictness or scientific rigor, if such were found in a philosophical work with pretensions to being a solid piece of work. Indeed, phenomenology consists -for both thinkers -- in providing a solid scientific basis for philosophy. This does not show up all that clearly in work done in 1928, nor in somewhat later work,1 but is indeed latent in the phenomenological origins of both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s thought. In the following analysis, I intend to discuss the way in which both thinkers shared a concern for philosophy to be scientific in character, an issue that surfaces in their early writings. In the case of Husserl, my analysis will focus on the Logische Untersuchungen, and regarding Heidegger I shall look to his Frühe Freiburger Vorlesungen.

II.

Philosophy as a Strict Science in Husserl

a) Husserl’s Intentions It was in the year 1911 that Husserl first published his famous text Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft. Husserl’s aim is evident from the very first sentence: From its very first practitioners onwards, philosophy has laid claim to being an exact science, namely one that would meet the highest theoretical demands and would enable life, in respect of its ethical-religious aspects, to be lived according to purely rational laws.2 And, according to Husserl, philosophy and its tradition “have never shed such an aim.”3 That is why he would later say that “philosophy is always guided by the desire to be scientific.” This guidance has been followed throughout history with varying degrees of

1

We remember Husserl’s remark in Formale und transzendentale Logik, first published in 1928/29; see Husserliana XVII, 7 (henceforth quoted as Hua): “philosophy has come to be some sort of theoretical technique.” Ten years later, Heidegger would question the same thing in his famous text “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” published in Holzwege. 2 Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” Logos 1 (1911): 289, hereafter PhSW. “Seit der ersten Anfänger hat die Philosophie den Anspruch erhoben, strenge Wissenschaft zu sein, und zwar die Wissenschaft, die den höchsten theoretischen Bedürfnissen Genüge leiste und in etisch-religiöser Hinsicht ein von reinen Vernunftnormen geregeltes Leben ermögliche.” 3 PhSW, 293. 274

intensity, yet the search for philosophy as a strict science has nevertheless been constantly renewed.4 It is in this light that Husserlian phenomenology attaches to this philosophical quest to be scientific. Through reflexive phenomenology, Husserl attempted a radical turn in philosophy, or at least attempted to break new ground by trying to found philosophy as a strict science. However, science is not to be understood here as one among many, but instead as the “most elevated and rigorous science of them all.”5 Several questions arise now: What is scientific at all about this new prima philosophia? How is it scientific? How could it possibly be the “most elevated and rigorous science”? What does it mean not to mistake it for other particular sciences? Husserl had been thoroughly convinced that phenomenology is a science -- and a particular one at that -- since writing his Logische Untersuchungen. As such, to grasp a more complete picture of phenomenology as a strict science, we shall direct our attention to the final section of the Prolegomena and to the Introduction to the second book of the Logische Untersuchungen (LU). b) Science and the Question after its Essence As some scholars devoted to Husserlian phenomenology have already pointed out,6 Husserl’s work is only to be understood in light of his pretensions to scientific rigor. Even in the Prolegomena, Husserl’s enterprise is displayed as a search for pure logic, logic as a mathesis universalis. For Husserl, science has two fundamental features: every science is a set of grounded knowledge, and they (the sciences) are all linked by a certain grounding unity. He wrote: “scientific knowledge as such is grounded knowledge [wissenschaftliche Erkenntnis ist als solche Erkenntnis aus dem Grunde].” (Hua XVIII, A 231.) Knowing the reason for something means “to appreciate the necessity for something to be this way or that [die Notwendigkeit davon, dass es sich so und so verhält, einsehen],” that is, to discover the “normative validity of the state of affairs one has referred to [gesetzliche Gültigkeit des bezüglichen Sachverhaltes].” Nevertheless, it is imperative that a principle of unity corresponding to such scientific pretensions be found. Whatever it is that makes this principle of unity possible can be given either as essential or nonessential. In the former case, the truths of one science are linked by an essential principle of unity that they found: “the essential unity of the truths of a science is their explanatory unity.”7 Since the knowledge of grounding laws is understood as knowing the fundamental basis, then the explanatory unity will be a unity built from the totality of grounding laws, that is, a unity devised as a unity of theory, a theoretical unity. Hence this kind of science is characterized as theoretical or abstract.8

4

According to Husserl, the desire to attain to proper ... with philosophy lies within the SocraticPlatonic turn, as well as in the Cartesian turn. Conversely, Romantic philosophy shows a tendency toward a “weakening or faking of the desire to achieve the strongest philosophical constitution of science.” See PhSW, 292. To find more concerning ‘strictness,’ ‘exactness’ (Strenge), see Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 27, 44. (Henceforth GA27.) 5 PhSW, 290. 6 E. Ströker, Husserls transzendentale Phänomenologie (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann), 20. Also see A. Aguirre, Genetische Phänomenologie und Reduktion (Dordrecht: Kluwer), xvii ff.; Ströker, “Die Einheit der Naturwissenschaften,” Philosophische Perpektiven III, (1971): 176-193. 7 Hua XVIII, A 234. 8 Starting with Kries and onward, these kinds of science can be called nomological sciences, “inasmuch as they legitimely acquire that only principle as their main research goal.” Hua XVIII, A 234. 275

The latter, the nonessential principle of the unity of sciences, can be twofold: on the one hand it consists in the unity of the thing. Here, truth would relate to “one and the same objectivity (Gegenständlichkeit) or to one and the same genre.”9 As such, sciences would not explain anything through groundwork, but rather, they would merely describe something. They would be descriptive sciences inasmuch as their “descriptive unity was determined by the empirical unity of an object or set of objects.”10 On the other hand, a nonsensical principle might arise “from a unitary valuing interest [aus einem einheitlichen wertschätzenden Interesse].” “This therefore constitutes the belonging together (Zusammengehörigkeit) of truth-content or unity within the realm of normative disciplines.”11 This truth/unity constitutes theory. From this perspective, philosophical inquiry into the conditions of possibility of science becomes the question after the conditions of possibility of general theory, that is, of theoretical knowledge as such.12 Owing to that, philosophical inquiry is actually a form of meta-theorizing, or a theory of theory. This ‘theory of theory’ idea is only possible through a “completely different revisiting of forms and laws, and of the theoretical links of the level of knowledge they belong to.”13 “A pure logic would be hence something to clear up the idea of theory.”14 This attempt, as shown in the Prolegomena, will be continued by Husserl in the Introduction to the second book of the LU, without, in this case, staying with the question after the essence of theory but with the possibility of knowledge in general.15 c) Phenomenology Characterized as Groundwork for Particular Sciences In his introduction to the second book of the LU, Husserl clearly points out the scope of phenomenology: “Pure phenomenology shows a field of neutral research upon which diverse sciences are rooted.”16 We have already indicated that, even though phenomenology is presented in LU as a phenomenology of life-experiences (Erlebnis), it ought not to be mistaken for psychology. Instead, it should be understood as a purely eidetic science. That is how the analysis points toward logical ideas and not toward psychic acts. The task of setting up a more detailed characterization of phenomenology as such is fueled by the analysis regarding theory and the essence of science that was done in the prolegomena. But the limits set in the Prolegomena only started a push forward, due to the development of pure logic as a mathesis universalis: “the great task of clearing up and distinguishing, in a theoretical and congnitive way, logical ideas, concepts and norms, arises.”17 Yet clarity and distinction are not to be found within theoretical explanations or descriptions, as they indeed are in particular sciences. Phenomenology ought to be “a science standing on a fundamental basis.”18 The theoretical-cognitive task of reflexive phenomenology turns up instead well before any given descriptive or explicative science does. 9

Hua XVIII, A 235. We can also refer to these sciences as concrete, or, following Kries, ontological. 11 Hua XVIII, A 236. 12 Ibid., A 237. 13 Ibid., A 243. 14 Ibid., A 254. 15 See Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach, Edmund Husserl, 2d rev. ed. (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1996), 50ff. 16 Hua XIX/1, A 4. 17 Ibid., A 7. 18 Hua V, 139. 10

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Phenomenology does not concern itself with knowledge as a temporal happening. It does not handle knowledge as either a psychological or a psychophysical affair; what it wants is to clear up the idea of knowledge in terms of its constitutive elements and its laws. . . it wants to raise pure forms of knowledge (and its pure laws) to a never-before achieved level of clarity and distinction, folding back to a plain, whole and fitting intuition.19 If phenomenology could reach the aforesaid clarity and distinction (clara et distincta idea) through intuition, we must stress the fact that, for Husserl, such intuition would be apprehended reflexively, that is, it would be a reflexive intuition. In other words, the way clarity and distinction are to be obtained is possible only by means of a reflective ‘objectmaking’ (vergegenständlichen), through reflecting on it. Phenomenological clarity and distinction are obtained during different levels of reflection. That is why a theoreticalcognitive feature is found in that reflective ‘object-making’ aspect of Husserl’s intuition. Heidegger saw this key feature of Husserlian intuition very clearly, even in Husserl’s first lectures. Inasmuch as this intuition grants knowledge, it was considered by Heidegger from the very beginning to be a theoretical intuition.20 It can be easily understood, from this perspective, why Husserl spoke about a phenomenology of knowledge, that is to say, a phenomenology “directed toward pure life experiences and whatever meaning-constituents might belong to these.”21 It is an eidetic science that goes after clarity and distinctiveness in theoretical knowledge through a reflexive intuition (Anschauung). However, it will only unfold itself completely, finding its fundamental basis, through a final step: by discovering the transcendental realm based on the epoché and the phenomenological reduction: “Only with a transcendentalphenomenological approach can philosophy begin to develop as science in any later scientific activities.”22 A further question can be justifiably asked at this point: How is knowledge -understood as a reflexive intuition (Anschauung) -- possible? Husserl says: If this pondering about the meaning of knowledge is to yield not ‘simple’ opinions, but rather, as we rigorously require here, intellectual awareness [Wissen], it must therefore be carried out based only on both mental and cognitive experiences that are given to us [gegebener Denk- und Erkenntniserlebnisse].23 Phenomenology’s strictly scientific features are a search for self-evidence in knowledge, which is given through intuition. According to the analysis that took place in the sixth LU, a knowledge-providing intuition is characterized as fulfillment. By ‘fulfillment,’ what Husserl means is the act’s theoretic-cognitive essence.24 As such, it might be implied

19

Hua XIX/1, A 21: “[Die Phenomenologie] will nicht die Erkenntnis, das zeitliche Ereignis, in psychologischem order psychophysischem Sinn erklären, sondern die Idee der Erkenntnis nach ihren konstitutiven Elementen, bzw. Gesetzen aufklären [❼] die reinen Erkenntnisformen und Gesetze will sie durch Rückgang auf die adäquat erfüllende Anschauung zur Klarheit und Deutlichkeit erheben.” 20 What Heidegger mentioned in the KNS-lectures regarding the features of knowledge of the Husserlian point of view (GA56/57, 65) was formulated with greater clarity a few years later. For example, see GA21, 109. Heidegger mentioned that according to Husserl knowledge (Erkenntnis) is intuition (Anschauung). 21 Hua XIX/1, A 21. 22 Hua V, 147. 23 Hua XIX/1, A 19. 24 This theoretical-cognitive essence, which was worked upon in the 28th section of the sixth Logical Investigation, mustn’t be mistaken for intentional essence, which was developed by Husserl in the fifth LU. See also G. Heffernan, Bedeutung und Evidenz bei Edmund Husserl (Bonn: Bouvier, 1983). 277

that, for Husserl, every act is indeed intentional, yet not every act need be cognitive. Only those acts characterized by the fulfilling intuition would be cognitive. Fulfillment thus shows that acts of knowledge are stratified in such a way that they take place throughout a modification of meaningful acts or “empty intentions,”25 that is to say, by means of modifying the meaningful intention.26 In other words: when, during a statement, meaning is ‘free’ from what is being meant, an ‘empty meaning’ (Leermeinen) hence takes place, or, as Husserl stated in his Méditations cartésiennes (MC), “to mean a thing” (Sachmeinung). No knowledge is acquired in this case. However, if a meaningful intention is ‘attached,’ then a modification might happen just where the Adäquation appeared: between what was meant and what was intuited. Only through this modality of fulfilling intuition is knowledge possible. Adequatio is also characterized as evidence. Science’s founding task is to have a tendency toward evidence. This was cleared up by Husserl in the MC: “Instead of the thing’s being present as a mere assumption made from “a distance,” to evidence that the thing is there, present, “itself,” the objective fact “by itself.”27 Further ahead it will be shown just how this scientific tendency of Husserl’s grounds itself in such a principle that is, however, de-formalized within the framework of theoretical-cognitive scientificity. It is henceforth shown that reflexive phenomenology is rooted in its attempts to achieve a theoretical-cognitive objective, or as Husserl put it in the MC, a realm of knowledge.28 Husserl stressed this objective in his Logos article, taking a firm stand against historicism and naturalism. Husserl showed that philosophy alone, as a rigorous science, can solve the enigma of knowledge, this being possible if philosophy becomes a transcendental phenomenology.29 Naturalism cannot solve such an enigma as it necessarily originates with a naturalization of consciousness and ideas. Historicism, and most ‘world-view (Weltanschauung) philosophies’ aim at a ‘striving for knowledge’ (Weisheitsstreben),30 by means of which philosophy’s scientific aspect withers: “True science knows no deep meanings, as they are not within the scope of its true doctrine ... deep meaning belongs to wisdom, but clarity and distinction belong with strict theorization.”31 Grounded on what has so far been worked upon, we can now understand Heidegger’s later remark about Husserl’s being guided by the decisive idea of Philosophy as a strict science, an idea that “has guided modern philosophy ever since Descartes.”32 The idea of Philosophy as an absolute science follows the Cartesian idea of science,33 while being founded upon intuitive evidence.

25

Hua XIX/2, A 568. Husserl distinguished between meaningful and intuitive acts. The former are empty intentions, that is, intentions that lack the fulfilling moment which nevertheless they aspire to. Intuitive acts, on the other hand, do entail fulfilment. To these both imagination and perception belong. We can find different degrees of fulfilment within the intuitive act. The task of phenomenological knowledge will examine the mutual relation between those two different kinds of acts. 27 Hua I, 51. (MC). 28 Hua I, 53. 29 That knowledge be an enigma is something that Husserl remarked in the Die Idee der Philosophie lectures, in 1905. See Hua II, 36. Also see Bernet, Kern, Marbach, ed. Edmund Husserl, 52. 30 PhSW, 331. 31 PhSW, 339. It’s not surprising at all that Biemel noted the fact that Husserl didn’t understand philosophy as a Sophia but rather as science in the way we nowadays understand this concept. Walter Biemel, “Die entscheidenden Phasen der Entfaltung von Husserls Philosophie,” in Gesammelte Schriften I, 86. 32 GA20, 147; GA17, 72. Also refer to GA32, 14 onward. See J. F. Courtine, Heidegger et la phénoménologie (Paris: Vrin, 1990), 192ff. 33 Hua I, 52ff. 26

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d) Features that are Fundamental to Philosophy as a Strict Science Phenomenology’s already mentioned (in the LU) non-theoretical character is branded, in the Logos article, as a “scientific knowledge of the essence of consciousness” that is to be unfolded.34 The basis on which science rests is, for Husserl, its hidden prescientific essence. This basis is indeed interpreted as a consciousness constituent. In this light, for Husserl, the field of effectively originary science, or first philosophy, shall be the realm of the transcendental. That’s why it’s possible to say that Husserl’s radical twist was the discovery of a science of transcendental subjectivity, since transcendental subjectivity rises as the Urstätte of all meaning-giving and meaning-keeping.35 It has thus been noted elsewhere that an immense field of research is opened through phenomenological reduction and ‘epoché.’ Were we to live in a naïve natural attitude, the world and worldly things would simply lie before us. By giving the world up, that is, by giving naïveté up and retreating to originary life consciousness, we discover the source of the meaning of worldly facts. The world and worldly things are discovered as phenomena constituted within pure consciousness. However, this shift from a natural attitude to a transcendental attitude doesn’t convey “fleeing from the world toward a specialization that is alien to it, and therefore theoretical and uninteresting.”36 Such an shift is rather something which makes a radically different investigation of the absolute possible. Based upon what has been said so far, it is now possible, by means of Husserl’s philosophy, to answer the question regarding how philosophy might be scientifically founded. This carries along with it three main features: 1) Its characterization as knowledge is shown thanks to the ‘evident intuition.’ 2) Yet, intuition regarded as “whatever is shared by every kind of ‘giveness in itself’”37 that is reflexively determined; this shows that, for Husserl, philosophy ought to be understood as a theoretical discipline from the very beginning. 3) Methodologically speaking, philosophy in its entirety is possible as a transcendental science alone. That happens through a change of attitude, through reduction and phenomenological epoché. To recap, it might be thence stated that for Husserl first philosophy must be understood as a transcendental, theoretic-cognitive science.

III.

Philosophy as an Originary and A-Theoretical Science in Heidegger

a) A-Theoreticality and Originary Science When Heidegger spoke about phenomenology as an originary science, isn’t this a mere transposition of the pre-scientific character of phenomenology that Husserl mentioned in the LU? How can Heidegger’s position shed new light unto thought concerning phenomenology’s scientificity? The answer to these questions will be shown by glancing at Heidegger’s radical position regarding tradition and, particularly, regarding Husserl. This is why we should 34 35 36 37

PhSW, 300. Hua VIII, 4; Hua V, 139. Husserl, “Phänomenologie und Anthropologie,” in Hua XXVII, 178. See Eugen Fink, Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930-1939 (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1968), 207. 279

not forget what Husserl meant by a-theoretical pre-theoretical, in order to set proper limits to the slogan of Heidegger’s “originary a-theoretical science.” Pre-theoretical,’ when used by Husserl, can be understood in the following way: On the one hand, ‘pre-theoretical’ refers to the fundamental feature of the natural attitude, in which the general thesis of the world’s ‘being-there-simply-for-me’ and mundane things is valid. An attitude shift from naïveté to the transcendental realm by means of reduction and phenomenological epoché can also be understood as a shift from pre-scientific to a scientific attitude. Only through the discovery of transcendentalism can the world and the mundane thing cease to be merely a theme for discussion. Scientific work as such needs to sort out what is otherwise merely discussed. On the other hand, we have discovered pre-theoreticality in a pre-transcendental level in the LU, at the point where phenomenology is, so to speak, sorted away from any particular science. Phenomenology is not scientific in the way explicative or descriptive sciences are, but rather, and to put it in Kantian terms, it is focused on the conditions of possibility of knowledge of whatever be regarded as ‘scientific.’ This is why Husserl says that particular sciences are rooted in phenomenology. The first meaning of ‘pre-theoretical’ points to a transition, the transition from prescientificity to scientificity. This can be regarded thus as the ‘thematic transition.’ Something being scientific shows therefore that phenomena as such pertain only to the transcendental realm, as that is where they become properly thematic.38 The second meaning of pre-theoretical points to an essential structure or determination of Husserlian phenomenology, and philosophy in general. These must not be mistaken for any particular science, not even psychology. Phenomenology entails rather its own way of being determined throughout a search to comprehend how the world is constituted. It is originally pre-scientific, as it establishes the groundwork for particular sciences. However, both meanings of ‘pre-scientific’ are to be understood within the framework of their determining scope: theoreticality. Pre-scientificity (understood as pre-phenomenologicality), it being a step toward scientificity (as phenomenologicality), has already been determined theoretically, as stated above. Pre-scientific life, within the natural attitude, can’t be the same thing as pre-theoretical factual life. It is, rather, pre-scientific life assumed in a theoretical fashion. The pre-scientific aspect of phenomenology, inasmuch as it founds particular sciences, can be found also within a theoretical framework. As a matter of fact, Husserl sees this as a strengthening of the scientificity of particular sciences. That’s why he would later speak of prescientificity as a ‘theory of theory.’39 Heidegger’s achievement is therefore a radical overturning of this theoretically coined scientificity. This radicalism is shown in the concept of ‘originary a-theoretical science.’ In this light, we can already tell that whatever Heidegger called ‘originary a-theoretical science,’ is neither pre-scientificity as understood by the ‘natural attitude’ nor in the way it is understood by the theoretical structure of Husserlian phenomenology.

38

See Eugen Fink, “Reflexionen zu Husserls phänomenologischer Reduktion,” in idem, Nähe und Distanz (Freiburg i.Br.: Alber, 1976), 113. In that work, Fink demonstrates that we can truly speak of three concepts of ‘phenomenon’ in Husserl. The first of these must be understood as the thing grounded within its appearing. The second is the result of the eidetic reduction, that is, its essence. And the third is what remains after the phenomenological reduction and the epoché have taken place, that is, the thing in its neutrality. 39 Hua XIX/1, A 21. 280

b) ‘Science’ in ‘Originary Science,’ Understood As Methodical Characterization From the start, science is understood as knowledge; that is, as knowledge of objects or of a certain realm. It’s been so far shown that for Husserl science obtains its scientific status by knowing its groundwork and through a unifying principle. However, philosophy is geared toward clearing up knowledge in itself, and toward the mutual relationship between knowledge and that which is known. Therefore, we can feature the structure of Husserlian phenomenology as pre-scientific, as it points specifically to the conditions of possibility of knowledge. With this in mind, we ought to pose the question regarding whether science as ‘originary science’ has that same meaning for Heidegger, that is, to direct itself toward the condition of possibility of knowledge. We can thus say that by keeping the concept of ‘science,’ Heidegger refers to something that stands in a given relationship with knowledge. It will later be shown, by Heidegger, that knowledge is something grounded on the originary realm of life and life experiences, in the life experience of the surrounding world. The apparent obviousness of the scientific determined by theoretical knowledge is followed to its origin, that is, radicalized through a more originary scientificity. This way, the relation with knowledge expressed by the concept ‘science’ is a questioned relation instead of being an understood founding relation. If knowledge is to be revealed as founding through a radical, originary science, the question about how this originary science should take place arises. Could it possibly be without knowledge? Were this to be the case, originary science wouldn’t have any scientific-methodical features and it would thus become, as some improper interpretations would want it, irrationality or mysticism.40 We will therefore state without hesitation that originary science is scientifically and methodologically directed, in so far as it entails ‘knowledge.’ It is not a mystical or mythical construction, but instead, radically scientific. Its knowledge is more originary and radical than the knowledge of a theory of knowledge or of the conditions of possibility of transcendental philosophy. If we comprehend the scientific with regard to knowledge, the originary scientific will be as well understood as originary knowledge. How should that be understood? It has already been said that for Husserl it is necessary that phenomenology entail specifically theoretical-cognitive features, owing to the fact that intuition is understood by him as knowledge. This way, the manner in which something is seen has been determined theoretically beforehand. Further ahead we shall see that this yields a deformalizing of the main phenomenological principle. If Heidegger, however, tries to show the founded features of knowledge through the idea of an originary science, this means, thus, that Husserlian intuition should already be a founded intuition. “Intuition” is shown for Heidegger then as the most originary founding ground, that is, even more originary than the theoretic-cognitive intuition. Its source of knowledge would not be a theoretical intuition, but rather a comprehending intuition. The comprehending intuition would be more originary than the theoretical one, inasmuch as the latter would always be a modification of the former. Heidegger already had this theory of comprehension in mind even as he gave his first course as Privatdozent: “Instead of an exhaustive knowledge of

40

Irrationalism only makes sense if it is opposed to rationalism. If this opposition is surpassed, which is in itself theoretical knowledge, this objection becomes pointless. On the other hand, mysticism points to the object’s opening into subject, that is, the lack of a boundary between them. This objection misses the mark as well, as in originary science the concept of science is understood in a completely methodological fashion. That is, there is no mystical fusion of the object with the subject in originary science. Rather, originary science goes beyond this difference and shows that the origin of such a difference is a theory of knowledge grounded upon subjects and objects. 281

things, we shall comprehend by intuition and intuit by comprehending.”41 In the next lecture course, he would refer to philosophy as a hermeneutic phenomenology,42 and in 1923 as a hermeneutics of facticity.43 Heidegger’s terminological modification throughout his courses is to be understood in the following way: originary science is not science, because it is not a founded knowledge. Instead, it refers to the comprehending and founding attitude, that is, to hermeneutics.44 It is important that special attention be paid here to a possible misunderstanding. Apprehending a given science as non-theoretic-cognitive must not be understood as a rejection of a theory of knowledge. It rather places a theory of knowledge within its determined main feature: it is derivative. The possibility of an originary a-theoretical science hence shows that “Whatever be theoretical in itself always refers to the pretheoretical.”45 Heidegger’s aim is precisely to free pre-theoreticality or a-theoreticality from the rule of the theoretical: “This rule ought to be broken…,” but this then also needs another opening of realms that had remained untouched up to that point. The realm of life-experiences in the surrounding world as a realm of science, can’t be opened in a theoretical fashion, only according to the life experience in itself. Originary science as such and its research field can’t be reached in a theoretical way, neither transcendental nor pre-transcendental. Only by comprehending, that is, hermeneutically, can it be accessed. In the 1920 summer semester, Heidegger outlined this matter more clearly: “This explaining and determining the essence of philosophy (as originary science) shouldn’t be apprehended as a task performed by knowledge, as a content result, but rather in a performative fashion.”46 Here we can see the contrast between philosophy as an originary and pre-theoretical science and philosophy as a strict science. We’ve shown that what makes up the scientific aspect of strict sciences in Husserl can be summed up in three main features: cognitive, theoretical, and transcendental. Philosophy as a strict science in Husserl is mainly seen as a transcendental theoretic-cognitive science. Heidegger saw beyond these features, by radically overturning the scientific character of science while discovering its originary pre-theoretic-hermeneutic field of work. Philosophy as an originary science in Heidegger must always be a hermeneutic and pretheoretic science. c) The Object of Science If our starting point is to be scientifically determined in its own way, then the following questions arise: Shouldn’t every science have its own object of research? And, were that to be the case, what happens then to originary science? What shall be its object and how shall the way it is bound to its object be understood? Can we still talk about objects proper if we set our eyes on the origin of the theoretic-cognitive object-making (vergegenständlichen). Grounded on what we have so far worked upon, it must be thus said that it is not possible to speak of objects regarding originary science, inasmuch as whatever it is that ought to be our research subject, it is that in which we always find ourselves: namely, life itself. The latter cannot name any object in the theoretic-cognitive

41

GA58, 19ff. GA56/57, 131. 43 GA63, 14ff. 44 We should understand what Heidegger stated in the 1919–20 winter semester in the following way: “originary science is in no way a strict science. It is, indeed, philosophy.” GA58, 230. 45 GA56/57, 59. 46 GA59, 8. 42

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sense: My own life, at its origin, is never understood as a “what,” in the way the objects of particular sciences are. It’s not a “what” we could observe or ponder on. That is why in 1919 Heidegger wrote that originary science did not set its sights on the object of knowledge, but rather in the knowledge of the object.47 Heidegger makes a similar remark in a letter sent to Jaspers in 1922: “There are objects that one does not have, which rather ‘are’: furthermore, the ‘what’ of such objects lies in their ‘being something.’48 That the “object” of the pre-theoretical, originary research is not a sorting or theoretical discipline indicates that this ought to be understood in a quite different way. That’s why Kovacs shows that originary science is unveiled as a ‘way of opening.’ Life, at its origin, is always originally opened in a determined way.49 In this light, originary science aims at the manner in which life is unveiled, and not at life understood as a theoretic-cognitive object. That is why originary science should be understood as a method of research determined by that very “object.” Is this not an in probando circle, even if a complete development of philosophy takes place, grounded on that yet to be discovered realm? How can the object of originary science become accessible, given that its unveiling as a method of opening is already determined by its own realm of research? The circle that shows itself here doesn’t refer to a drawback or flaw in philosophy; it rather constitutes a unique feature of the philosophical method, as Heidegger would later state. Circularity refers to two aspects: Firstly, the method is not an external procedure, it is instead tightly bound to its object. In other words, it is borne “out of a particular problem within an object-realm.”50 That’s why Husserl stated that the method consists in clearing up problems.51 The philosophical method is thus not a technical means or tool; it’s rather made possible by including the object to be researched. Strictly speaking, the method is determined by its own object. We have, however, already pointed out that the “object” isn’t a “what,” and therefore cannot be given in a theoretic-cognitive way. The realm of research must be earned.52 Borrowing from Aristotle, Heidegger wrote in 1922 that “the apprehended being, within its many ‘possibilities’ of being ‘determined as

47

GA56/57, 235. We mustn’t mistake this for Rickert’s principle. Indeed, Rickert set his sight on both of his “roads to knowledge,” seeking to actually know the object. However, we ought not to forget that, in his view, knowledge of an object consists in building a bridge to connect the gap between the transcendental validity of truth and the immanent being of a statement. Rickert attempted, by returning to a view of knowledge, not to go back to an originary opening of the object, but instead just to ensure his own approach to the theory of value. That is why Heidegger wrote that, for Rickert, knowing something is to value something, instead of merely seeing something. Ibid., 193. 48 We shall further see that the object of philosophy is empty. See GA61, 33. Also see Th. C. W. Oudemans, “Heideggers Logische Untersuchungen,” Heidegger Studies 6 (1990): 87ff.; J. F. Courtine, Heidegger et la Phénoménologie, 172. 49 G. Kovacs, “Philosophy as a primordial Science (Urwissenschaft) in the Early Heidegger,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 21-2, 1990: 121-35. Kovacs grounds his principle on Heidegger’s statement that “instead of adjusting myself to the object of knowledge, I can set to the knowledge of the object.” GA56-7, 28. That is why Kovacs writes that “the idea of philosophy as a primordial science does not stand for a set of teachings, but for a way of knowing; it is not the content of some new discipline, but a method of disclosure.” Ibid., 125. See also Manfred Riedel, “Die Urstiftung der phänomenologischen Hermeneutik,” in Christoph Jamme and Otto Pöggeler, ed. Phänomenologie im Widerstreit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999), 215-233. Riedel interprets the scientific aspect of originary science as an attitude or behavior, that is, “the way in which the human Dasein behaves towards himself and towards the world.” Ibid., 216; Istvan Fehér, “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Lebensphilosophie: Heidegger’s confrontation with Husserl, Dilthey and Jaspers,” in Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren, ed. Reading Heidegger from the Start (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY, 1994), 78-89; regarding primordial and originary science see 82. 50 GA58, 4. 51 PhSW, 297; GA17, 71. 52 See GA58, 29. 283

something,’ is not merely there (Dasein), but also constitutes a ‘task.’53 The task of phenomenology is thus placing the phenomenon up front, it consists in discovering the phenomenon in its unveiledness (in dessen Unverhülltsein). Secondly, obtaining the realm of originary science as the main duty of hermeneutical phenomenology cannot be derived from somewhere else. It must ground itself on itself. This shows another fundamental feature of the circularity of originary science. Circularity refers then to originary science’s own groundwork. This is to be understood as a principium and not as principium, in the way particular science does.54 Inasmuch as science is featured as life, it is then featured as self-contained, as Heidegger did in the winter semester of 1919. All of Heidegger’s later work would then be based upon this determining focus. It can easily be seen how important this would become for Heidegger, even in his first lecture. With regard to method, we are standing at a crossroads that will be decisive for whether philosophy as such is to live or die, at an abyss opening up before Nothingness, that is, the nothingness of total realism/reality, or we will succeed in taking a leap into another world, or, to be precise, into this world for the first time.55 This might resemble Kierkegaard, or even Husserl’s transcendental method. However, what Heidegger means refers to the radical character of his views: either we remain in the theoretical view, which has guided Western philosophy, or else we leap toward the unveiled pre-theoretical realm through a radical opening. The latter can give philosophy life, that is, it can save her from the agonizing state in which she lies, owing to the reign of the theoretical. This idea of the life or death of philosophy is shown to Jaspers as well, in a letter written in 1922: Either we take philosophy seriously, with its potential for principled/primary scientific research, or we have a self-understanding as scientifically-minded human beings capable of a most grievous lapse, in that we play around with casually picked up concepts and dabble in undefined trends, working only with our bare needs in mind.56

53

Martin Heidegger, “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles,” Dilthey-Jahrbuch 6 (1989): 257. 54 GA56/57, 24. Heidegger explicitly deals, in the Winter Semester lectures of 1928-1929, with this issue, that is, how philosophy should define itself. The concept of scientific philosophy is thus put into question, which might be understood in a metaphorical way, as in a ‘rounded circle.’ The circle is not rounded, as something rounded is simply a failed adjustment attempting roundness proper. Besides, the circle is round by definition, it perfectly represents the idea of something round. “Concerning the expression ‘scientific philosophy,’ a quality that does not belong to philosophy is being attributed to it: philosophy is more than a science; something scientific, which belonged to philosophy from the start, is attributed to it. Philosophy is more originary than science, as every science is rooted in philosophy. They sprouted from philosophy.” GA27, 16. In this case, Heidegger rejects from the start every interpretation of philosophy that might try to see it as a science. However, what Heidegger remarks in his KNS– Lectures as originary science, is to be understood in a completely different way. The concept of ‘originary science’ (Ursprungswissenschaft) is grounded in the fact that philosophy is essentially a kind of originary being of every individual science. 55 GA56/57, 63: “Wir stehen an der methodischen Wegkreuzung, die über Leben oder Tod der Philosophie überhaupt entscheidet, an einem Abgrund: entweder ins Nichts, d.h. der absoluten Sachlichkeit, oder es gelingt der Sprung in eine andere Welt, oder genauer: überhaupt erst in die Welt.” 56 Heidegger-Jaspers Briefwechsel, 28: “Entweder wir machen Ernst mit der Philosophie und ihren Möglichkeiten als prinzipieller wissenschaftlicher Forschung, oder wir verstehen uns als wissenschaftliche Menschen zur schwersten Verfehlung, dass wir in aufgegriffenen Begriffen und halbklaren Tendenzen weiterplätschern und auf Bedürfnisse arbeiten.” 284

d) Methodical Thematization of Life Throughout Originary Science It has been pointed out already that the “scientificity” (Wissenschaftlichkeit) of originary science points toward a given methodical process: it sets up a ‘how,’ as we are already immersed within the object. We can neither escape it, nor can we set it in opposition to ourselves. Rather, a philosophical thematization of pre-thematic life takes place. However, by speaking of methodical theme-making, the question whether every theme-making be already and in itself an object-making once again arises. In other words, theorizing. Doesn’t an essential change that would prevent access to that which is pretheoretical from happening take place as well, in the shift from that which is pre-thematic to that which is thematic? Should the guiding question be the question after the access to life and life-experiences (Erlebnis), then life itself would be made thematical in relation to its access. This way, we shall discover that the access to life plays a unique role: the “access” is not a tool that could make any object thematic in an arbitrary way. For that reason, we can state now that making life thematic is itself a making-thematic that does not necessarily fall within the realm of objectual-theoretical making-thematic. In this light, any non-explicit modifications that life might undergo in its explicitness doesn’t necessarily take place throughout a process of objectivity. Someone might suspect here that this explicit makingthematic also belongs to a different way of understanding explicitness and conceptforming. That is what Heidegger means when he said in 1919 that any explicitness that matches originary science ought to be understood as a concrete feature of the apprehension of life itself.57 Still submerged in this context, he would later write in his following lecture that: “The main problem when forming philosophical concepts is not posterior or scientific in nature, but rather, it is a philosophical problem at its core.”58 Tradition couldn’t show this possibility of thematizing because it was always guided in a way that concentrated on the theoretical, as Heidegger would have it in 1919.59 For this reason, conceptual making-thematic within the philosophical tradition was always determined “according to class.”60 That is why it is not quite plain that when access to life took place in the context of tradition, it happened always in a theoretical fashion. It was this blindness that made a non-theoretical access seem impossible. If the scientific aspect of originary science points to its methodical aspect, which also includes its object, we might as well say that originary science likewise points to both a methodical way of accessing as well as to a thematic realm. The access happens in a hermeneutical-phenomenological fashion. That’s why, in 1919, Heidegger spoke about a comprehending science.61 The hermeneutic aspect of the “access” entails phenomenological features, which are nevertheless interpreted in an even more originary way. It is throughout a more originary characterization of phenomenology so that its methodical instances are thus unveiled. They are not, however, unveiled reflexively but hermeneutically. Hermeneutics determines the way phenomena will be dealt with, something which leads us to a modification of the methodical aspect: the phenomenon of life. For this reason Heidegger would characterize philosophy as a comprehensive guideline during the winter semester of 1919-20.62 That is, the phenomenological reduction and the

57 58 59 60 61 62

GA58, 139, 232. GA59, 169. GA56/57, 59. GA59, 8. GA56/57, 208. GA58, 150. 285

epoché in Husserl become a hermeneutic reduction and co-author reconstruction and an accompanying destruction in Heidegger. Regarding the realm of research, we have already pointed out that this is constituted by the non-theoretic realm of life and life-experiences, which must be highlighted as part of life itself. It has an ‘objective feature.’ Heidegger put it this way in 1920. “Objectivity in philosophy does not have the theoretical feature of being a thing, but instead it is meaningfulness. ...”63 Meaningfulness refers to the way in which life is shown at its origin, i.e., to the way it is understood. Life, inasmuch as it is the realm of research does not unfold itself adequately as related to a theoretic spawning, as a thing, but rather it’s bound to its own features of meaningfulness. This cannot merely be exposed through an objectifying reflection. Instead, life itself must be accessed hermeneutically as an “execution” (Vollzug) by means of its features of meaningfulness. The primal science (Urwissenschaft) that can make this possible shall be understood, as Heidegger has it, as a hermeneutical-originary science. Here we find a key difference with Husserl’s phenomenology, since, for Husserl, the phenomenological method is determined by consciousness inasmuch as it is the object that is being researched. That’s how we should understand the reflexive character of his phenomenology.64 e) Philosophy -- World-View (Weltanschauung) -- Science In light of what has been discussed so far, we can approach that which Heidegger calls ‘Originary Science.’ In oder to see its philosophic-scientific features more clearly, we will direct ourselves to the underlying distinction between philosophy, world-view and science.65 For Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians, such as Rickert, philosophy can be seen as a worldview, whereas for Husserl its purely scientific features should be really insisted on. How does Heidegger understand philosophy? Rickert’s position is grounded on values, that is to say, that life’s groundwork only has meaning insofar as it is related to a transcendental validating duty, and in the values and goods that are attached to it. In other words, life’s groundwork can only be understood through culture. According to Heidegger, this comprehension aims at being “the interpretation of the meaning of human existence and human culture in light of values that are absolutely valid.”66 World-view is here shown to be the boundary of philosophy.67 Dilthey, nonetheless, builds up from the experience obtained through introspection. However, this realm can only be opened through a descriptive psychology, and with that as a starting point, the different life-figures or lifestyles that are related to the world thus are formed: “within the edge of such fundamental views of the world can men, their particular existence and their social lives experiment ‘explanation’ and matching interpretations.”68 By discovering the fundamental world and life conceptions is philosophy made complete. Heidegger here reads world-view as being philosophy’s task.

63

GA59, 197. During the 1923 summer semester, Heidegger would once again explain that “meaningfulness isn’t a trait but a character of being.” GA63, 89. 64 Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Hermeneutik und Reflexion (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 2000). See also his Subjekt und Dasein, 3d ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 2004), 16-20. 65 Regarding this triad, see Ramón Rodríguez, La transformación hermenéutica de la fenomenología (Madrid: Tecnos, 1997), 17-35. 66 GA56/57, 9. 67 This vision access of world vision directed to life as a boundary can be clearly seen in the NeoKantians, as in their posture the only access to life that takes place is when life is thought. 68 GA56/57, 8. 286

“The internal struggle against the mystery of life and the world is appeased by the fixing of something definite in the world and in life.”69 Throughout this double featuring, it is clear that the relationship between a world-view and philosophy has paved the way of Western philosophy. This relationship was in fact taken for granted: world-view was simply seen as a part of philosophy and as such, belonging to philosophy. This way of seeing things was questioned by Husserl’s phenomenology. In the Logos article, Husserl pits world-view against scientific philosophy. A philosophy of worldviews, being as it is the showcase of the pondering on the process of the temporal spiritual becoming that are tied to a given cultural community, is “daughter to historicist skepticism.”70 In other words, this philosophy is representative to a temporally oriented idea of change. Scientific philosophy, on the other hand, would be ‘supratemporal,’ as “it is not bound to any kind of relationship with the spirit of an age.”71 All this yields another problem: if the link that binds philosophy and world-view together, right to the present day, has been taken for granted, we ought then to ask, whether that conveys a link between philosophy as an a-theoretic originary world-view. f) Originary Science and World-View Heidegger wrote in 1919 that world-view “shows phenomena alien to philosophy,”72 referring to the link between philosophy and world-view. A year later, he would nevertheless indicate that: “a philosophy of life [that is, a philosophy oriented within life conceptions, A. X.] was a necessary phase in philosophy’s path.”73 How should this be understood? In a footnote in his Habilitationsschrift, Heidegger points out the importance of Husserl’s treatment of the overcoming of psychologism, while at the same time criticizing his transcendental phenomenology, citing the possibility of abandoning this transcendental point of view. This can be accomplished “only throughout the systematic means of a philosophy oriented towards the world’s life-views.”74 However, this philosophy oriented toward the world’s life-views shall be understood only as an impulse to Heidegger’s later thought. When he points out that a philosophy of life understood as a world-view describes a necessary phase, we shouldn’t take it as an isolated phase. We should rather see this phase within its context, that is, as bound to the question after an ontological ground that has to be sought from the start. Heidegger made this very clear in his first writings, when he asked for the categories and life.75

69

Ibid. PhSW, 328. 71 Ibid., 332. 72 GA56/57, 12. 73 GA59, 154. 74 GA1, 205. 75 Istvan Féher follows the path from the Habilitationsschrift to the first lectures in Freiburg and to what later would become Sein und Zeit in his “Zum Denkweg des jungen Heideggers II,” Annales Universitatis Scientiarum Budapestinensis 22-23 (1990): 127–153. Regarding incorrect interpretations which speak of “phases” and “changes” in Heidegger’s first works, see Theodore Kisiel, “Das Entstehen des Begriffsfeldes, ‘Faktizität’ im Frühwerk Heideggers,” Dilthey–Jahrbuch 4 (1986-7): 91-119. Kisiel articulates Heidegger’s path of thought toward SuZ in two main lines: a “philosophy-of-life” (Lebensphilosophie) phase, and an “ontological” one, p. 116. However, Heidegger’s path shouldn’t be seen just as related to a determinate terminology, like Dilthey’s conceptuality, which was used to support tradition. We should see, as well, phenomena at the most originary point, which have already been examined through a methodological access that is established through the object. Fink mentioned that it 70

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When Heidegger characterizes world-view as something extraneous to philosophy, in 1919, his ‘alienation’ takes place in respect to the boundaries of world-view. This is not sufficiently unveiled, philosophically. This way, it cannot offer an adequately originary access to factual life. The position concerning world-view must be questioned as well. That’s why Heidegger was actually asking for the originary groundwork of world-view when he wrote that “the essence of world-view is bound to be problematic.”76 During the 1919/1920 Winter semester, Heidegger mentioned that “a certain meaning” of world-view will be rejected, that is, “the general realm (life) shall remain, but only as a strict science.”77 That means that it ought to be a pre-theoretic originary science. Heidegger’s intentions to grasp life as it is (something attempted by world-view also), as it can be thus seen, is not merely rejected. What is rather rejected by Heidegger is just the manner by means of which world-view makes life accessible. It doesn’t apprehend life as it “arises from an origin.”78 That’s where the limitations of the so-called “life-view” philosophies show themselves. Pre-theoretical science, on the other hand, is the science that can open life within its primitiveness (Ursprünglichkeit). This means that philosophy, seen as an originary science, should depart from its relation with world-view, a relation that has always been taken for granted. Should philosophy ask for the originary groundwork of world-view, for its essence, then quite a different link between them is given: “World-view becomes a problem for philosophy in a very different way.”79 This tells us two things: on the one hand philosophy cannot afford being merely a world-view anymore, and, on the other hand, the very essence of world-view hence becomes a philosophical problem in itself. This separation thus demands that such relationship be understood in a radically different fashion, and that a new kind of philosophy be undertaken. That is to say, that philosophy itself becomes now a problem. It is now therefore mandatory that an overturning of its essence take place. Heidegger’s new conception of what philosophy ought to be is precisely that which we have so far analyzed under the name of originary pre-theoretical science. Philosophy is determined at its core as an originary science. The main drawback of philosophy as an originary science dictates that it be always understood within its tradition as a prote philosophia, prima philosophia, metaphysics, transcendental philosophy (Kant), a science doctrine (Fichte), absolute science (Hegel) or transcendental phenomenology (Husserl). The originary science that Heidegger sought is to be understood as a new radical figure of a Western first philosophy. In other words, the very same intentions that characterized Western philosophical thought are also found within the concept of originary science. Those intentions were to guide Heidegger’s thought in each and every one of its later manifestations, including his Ereignis period. Philosophy as an originary science points to an originary comprehension of life. This is the same as a different way of opening life itself. This way is shown as an apprehension of life, as a ‘deepening of the origin.’ This ‘deepening’ entails three specific features: selfsufficiency, expression, and meaningfulness. It is possible to foretell that within these three features the radical characteristics of originary science make themselves known in science. We have already shown self-sufficiency as a self-grounding of life and its own access. Likewise, the expression of this self-sufficient way of opening is not an external,

becomes difficult to see a thing where a name is missing. Fink, Studien, 215. 76 GA56/57, 12. 77 GA58, 28. Nevertheless, what Heidegger means by ‘strictness’ [Strenge] in this case is not what Husserl meant by it. For Heidegger, at least in 1920, ‘strict’ meant: “to focus on the authenticity of life’s references within concrete life itself.” GA58, 231. Also see GA58, 137; GA60, 10; GA27, 44. 78 GA58, 81. 79 GA56/57, 12. 288

synthetic construction. Instead, it is founded in the links of meaning that pervade life as part of life itself, that is, it’s founded on another “objectivity” that isn’t theoretical: meaningfulness. Translation: Jonathan Camargo

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