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 REFLECTIONPaolo Diego Bubbio 2. HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY AT THE BOUNDARY OF REASON:MEANINGFUL GRAFT OR SUBVERSIVE DEVIATIONPatrick L. Bourgeois 3. PAUL RICOEUR’S THEORY OF TRUTH: FROM PHENOMENOLOGY TOCOMMUNICATIVE ACTIONDavid M. Kaplan 4. THE UNSURPASSABLE DISSENSUSOlivier Abel III. THE HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF HUMAN REALITY 1. PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE INSIDE OF SPACE: READINGS OF MERLEAU-PONTYLuís 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’SPHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFEStella de Azevedo 5. GADAMERIAN HERMENEUTICS OF MEDICINE: A PHENOMENOLOGYOF HEALTH AND ILLNESSFredrik Svenaeus IV. PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOMENTS IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION 1. THE HERMENEUTIC-PHENOMENOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF HISTORICITYIN VIEW OF THE CRISIS OF THE NOTION OF TRADITIONDean Komel

2. BETWEEN DEATH AND HOLINESS -- THE NATURE OF THE PHENOMENON IN THEINTERPRETATION OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND MAX SCHELERJaromir Brejdak 3. A “BETTER” OR JUST “ANOTHER” UNDERSTANDING? SOME REMARKSON THE CREATIVE CHARACTER OF INTERPRETATIONAndrzej 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 CONCEPTIONOF TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGYMartina Roesner 2. HISTORY AS THE OTHER -- NOTES ON HUSSERL’S IDEAOF A RADICAL SELBSTBESINNUNGHans Ruin 3. THE IDEA OF PHENOMENOLOGY AS A DESCRIPTION OF “DIE SACHEN SELBST”IN HUSSERL AND HEIDEGGERPawel Dybel 4. HUSSERL’S “GOD”Jan Sochon 5. THE EARLY HEIDEGGER’S CRITIQUE OF HUSSERLSean J. McGrath 6. RIGOR AND ORIGINARITY: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE SCIENTIFICCHARACTER OF HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGY IN MARTINHEIDEGGER’S EARLY LECTURESAngel Xolocotzi

I.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS AND HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

1. THE INTERPRETIVE TURN IN PHENOMENOLOGY: A PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY1

Gary B. Madison

It is experience … still mute which weare concerned with leading to the pureexpression 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 utilitycontinues 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 some-one who does not view philosophy as (as Hegel said) “serious business” -- i.e., as a reasonedand principled search for the truth of things -- but, rather, as a kind of “professionaldilettantism” and who, accordingly, sees no difference between philosophy and literarycriticism. 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 defendedphenomenologybecausehe 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 Onething Husserl meant by his programmatic remarks on this subject in his 1911Logosarticle,“Philosophy as Rigorous Science,”6 is that a properly phenomenological philosophywould 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

1 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 phenomenologyof 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,TheVisible 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,”Symposium7, no. 2 (Fall/Automne2003): 228.

5 For a forceful statement on Husserl’s part of the responsibility as he saw it of philosophy forhumanity, see his late, 1935 “Vienna Lecture” (“Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,”) inEdmund Husserl,The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introductionto 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 combinationsand 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 thingsthemselves!” was for a great many a revolutionary call which held out the promise oftransforming 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 seriesof lectures in 1907 at the University of Göttingen (published subsequently in 1950 byWalter Biemel under the titleDie Idee der Phänomenologie), Husserl presented aphenomenological response to the central problem which had bedeviled all of modernphilosophy and which he stated thus: “How do I, the cognizing subject, know if I can everreally 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 allwhich could be set over against cognition as its object?”8 This, as any student of thehistory of philosophy will immediately recognize, is the problem Descartes bequeathed tomodernity and which came to be known as the problem of the “external world”: Is therea world “out there,” and, if so, how can I know there is? In more technical terms: Howcan 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 approachto this traditional problem: He does not seek tosolveit, as philosophers before him had,by coming up with his own “proof” for the existence of the world, but todissolveit. Bymeans of thephenomenological reduction, which Husserl presents for the first time inthese lectures, he is able to show that the central epistemological problem of modernphilosophy rests on certainmetaphysicalassumptions, assumptions having to do with therelation 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 ofview, wholly without warrant -- and, therefore, stand in need of being deconstructed.

By putting into play the phenomenological reduction, showing thereby how the modernproblem of the “external world” is a pseudo-problem, Husserl’s phenomenology accom-plishes a decisive overcoming of modern Theory of Knowledge (Erkenntnislehre) and,indeed, the entire tradition of “epistemologically centered philosophy,” as Rorty hasreferred to it. In his account of the phenomenological movement, Gadamer wrote:

Above all, it [phenomenology] aimed its attacks at the [metaphysical] construction thatdominated epistemology, the basic discipline of the philosophy of the time. Whenepistemological inquiry sought to answer the question of how the subject, filled withits own representations, knows the external world and can be certain of its reality, thephenomenological critique showed how pointless such a question is. It saw that con-sciousness is by no means a self-enclosed sphere with its representations locked up intheir own inner world. On the contrary, consciousness is, according to its own essentialstructure, already with objects. Epistemology asserts a false priority of self-consciousness.There are no representative images of objects in consciousness, whose correspondenceto 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 bigbills, gentlemen; small change, small change!’ This kind of work produced a peculiar fascination. It hadthe 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 ofintentionalitywhich, rejecting the standard “copy theory” of knowledge, asserts that con-sciousness is never in the first instance mere self-consciousness (conscious only of whatis “inside” it: its own cogitationes, “ideas,” sense impressions, “representations”) but isalways consciousness-of-something(i.e., somethingother than it, viz., the world). Therealization that the essence of consciousness is intentionality represents an overcoming ofthe metaphysics of modernity, viz., the metaphysical assumption that there is an onto-logical gap or chasm between subject (consciousness) and object (the world). The subject/object split is thefons et origo of modern philosophy,9 and it was this “situationphénoménale du clivage” that it is the purpose of the reduction to deconstruct.10 Whatthe 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 worldis a primary “datum” of consciousness, an immediate, phenomenological “given.” Sartresummed up phenomenology’s accomplishment in the following graphic way:

Consciousness has been purified. It is as clear as a strong wind. There is no longeranything 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 bya 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, thisrefusal 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 innerretreat that we discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the city, in the midst of thecrowd, thing among things, man among men.11

Once the metaphysics of modernity has been overcome, it becomes phenomenologicallyself-evident that consciousness is not a self-contained realm of “inner experiences”(subjective “states-of-mind”) but is, rather, a mode ofbeing-in-the-world, i.e., a direct ex-perience of the world itself. The world is that which consciousness intends; to experiencea world is precisely what itmeansto be conscious. Once we have performed the reductionand deconstructed the metaphysical presuppositions of modern philosophy -- the notions ofan “external world” and an “inner subject” -- we need no longer, as Merleau-Pontyremarked, “wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the worldis what we perceive.”12 By setting aside all mere constructions, the phenomenologicalreduction 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

9 See in this regard Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in idem,The Question Con-cerning 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’sDie Idee derPhänomenologie(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970). Already in 1904 William James hadsought 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 agift 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,” inidem,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 modeof transcendental analysis was that of “re-awakening a direct and primitive contact with the world, andendowing 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, asthe field of livedmeaning.13

The function of the reduction is, as Sartre says, to purify consciousness; it affords usaccess to what Husserl called the “realm of pure experience,” i.e., it enables us to exploreand describe our experience of the world preciselyas we experience it, free from thedistorting lenses of metaphysical prejudice (“pure experience” was also the term favoredby William James). Husserlian phenomenology is the systematic attempt to explore thevarious ways consciousness has of “intending” objects and,correlatively(since everyactof consciousness [noesis] is always paired with anobject[noema] which it “intends”), ofthe various ways in which objects of all sorts (perceptual, imaginary, ideal) come to befor consciousness; “phenomenological research,” as Gadamer says, “transcends in principlethe opposition between object and subject and discovers the correlation of act and object asits own great field of study.” (PH, 144-45) In other words, phenomenology is, as Husserlsays, the study of “what it means that objectivity is, and manifests itself cognitively as sobeing.” (PRS, 90) This sort of “intentional analysis (intentionale Analyse)” (or “meaninganalysis” -- 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 --) pro-ceeds entirely by means of reflexive acts -- “phenomenological method proceeds entirelythrough acts of reflexion”14 -- and is thus a form of inquiry that is resolutelytranscen-dental.

To say that phenomenology is a form of transcendental analysis means that, as aphilosophy of experience, i.e., as a reflexive analysis of our experience of the things ofthe worldjust exactly aswe experience them, it deliberately refrains from making specul-ative, metaphysical assumptions about the ontological status of what it seeks to describe;the phenomenological reduction, as Gadamer says, is a “return to the phenomenologicallygiven 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 ofself-critical responsibility in the examination of one’s own experience, pursuing in amethodologically rigorous fashion Montaigne’s guiding question,Que sais-je?Whatexactly is it that I can legitimately claim to know, and how is it that I know this? Or, toput it in a less epistemological manner, What are those things of which I can say, “I haveexperienced them,” and in what exactly did this experience consist? David Michael Levinsums up the matter very nicely when he says that “the heart of phenomenology is amethodologically formulated respect for the integrity and validity of our experience justas we live it.”15

The overriding injunction of the phenomenological method -- Husserl called this “theprinciple of all principles” -- is that one must always seek to describe what one experiencespreciselyasone experiences it without importing into this description suppositions whichare not warranted by the experience (Gadamer refers to this as “the fundamentalphenomenological principle that one should avoid all theoretical constructions and get

13 See Alphonse De Waelhens,Phénoménologie et vérité, Essai sur l’évolution de l’idée de véritéchez Husserl et Heidegger(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953). Husserl first developed hisnotion of Evidenzin the sixth of hisLogical Investigations, a text which made a profound and lastingimpression 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 ofMerleau-Ponty and Nagarjuna,”Philosophy Today41, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 96.

6

back ‘to the things themselves.’” [RPJ, 22]). Phenomenology is indeed nothing other thana thoroughgoing and systematic attempt to cut through the metaphysical thicket ofphilosophical misunderstandings so as to get back to our lived experience of the thingsthemselves.

One thing that Icannotlegitimately say that I know or claim to have experienced iswhat metaphysicians call “reality in itself,” reality as it exists (supposedly), apart from myconsciousness of it. Indeed, from a strictly phenomenological or experiential point of viewthe 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 “being-in-itself” is, to speak like William of Occam, a notion that, while it can besaid, is never-theless one that it is impossible tothink. The only thing that is genuinely real for us is ourown experience of reality; we live, as James said, “in a world where experience andreality come to the same thing.”17 This being so, we must “reduce,” “bracket,” or “putout of play” the metaphysical notion of a world absolutely in-itself and focus instead onthe 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 thefar side of the subject/object gap. For phenomenology, “transcendent” is not a meta-physical concept referring to something existing “beyond”our experience of it; “transcendent”is themeaningwe attach to certain objects of our experience (e.g., the maple tree outsidemy window).

Once we make this transcendental move we can no longer conceive of consciousness,metaphysically or Cartesian-wise, as a kind of substance orthing (of a “mental” sort)standing in some kind of objectivistic relation with other things (of a “material” sort) andbeing acted upon by them in a quasi-mechanical,causal fashion (this, as EmmanuelLévinas remarked, was “the great merit of the theory of the phenomenological reduc-tion”18). Since the essence of consciousness is intentionality, the relationship betweenconsciousness and the world is “sui generis”; it is not a “real” (causal) relationship butan intentional (“irreal”) one. Consciousness itself (the “mind”) is not something “real” inthe metaphysical sense of the term19; what we call “reality” is, rather, an objectfor con-sciousness, something that comes to beconstituted(as Husserl would say) as exactlywhatit is in accordance with the way in which it is “intended.” Or as James had said earlieron: “The way in which the ideas are combined is part of the inner constitution of thethought’s object or content.”20 And as later hermeneutic phenomenology, which continuesto operate under the phenomenological reduction (i.e., under the refusal to speculate onwhat anything is in any absolute sense of the term), would maintain, there can be no

16 This is something that Charles Sanders Peirce -- “the distinguished Husserl” is Peirce’s ownexpression (See Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 1:18) -- had already pointed out in hisground-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, “Lanotion de conscience,” James expressed thus the phenomenological notion of intentionality: “Nossensations ne sont pas de petits duplicats intérieurs des choses, elles sont les choses mêmes en tant queles choses nous sont présentes.” Both of these articles were subsequently published in James’sEssays inRadical Empiricism(1912).

20 William James,The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1956[1890]), 2:286. In hisLogical Investigations, 2 vols., trans. John N. Findlay (London: Routledge andKegan 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 bymeans of which the world becomes a world is not that of a sovereign, transcendentalEgo.21

As a reflexive inventory-taking of the “field of consciousness,”22 phenomenology isthus necessarily a form of transcendental analysis -- “all phenomenology is transcendental,”as Paul Ricoeur has noted23 -- such that the notion of a “realist” phenomenology is acontradiction in terms. The most insidious form of realism from a phenomenological pointof view is the one Husserl singled out for criticism in his 1911 article: naturalism. AsHusserl there notes, naturalism is a philosophical-scientific stance arising out of the waymodern, mechanistic science conceives of nature, viz., as an all-encompassing spatio-temporal whole (encompassing both the physical and the psychological), as mere matter-in-motion subject to determinable laws of a causal nature. As Husserl says,

The naturalist…sees only nature, and primarily physical nature. Whatever is is eitheritself physical, belonging to the unified totality of physical nature, or it is in factpsychical, but then merely as a variable dependent on the physical, at best a secondary“parallel accompaniment.” Whatever is belongs to psychophysical nature, which is tosay 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 isfully evident in the case of logical positivism) it accepts unquestioningly (i.e., uncritically)as ontologically valid the modern scientific concept of “nature,” and modern, naturalscience is itself naïve, in the strict sense of the term, in that for it, as Husserl said, natureis “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 toclarify this matter (“was besagt, daß Gegenständlichkeit sei”); only an analysis of sucha sort is capable of raising in a fully reflective, thematic manner the question as tothemeaning of the being of the world.25

21 For a detailed treatment of Husserl’s notion of constitution, see Robert Sokolowski,The Formationof 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 LesterE. Embree (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Pres, 1967), 203.

24 Commenting on this passage, Quentin Lauer remarks: “According to Husserl, there is in every actof consciousness an element which is simply irreducible to nature. This we might call the basic intuitionthat 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 ofthe world” (see Eugen Fink, “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and ContemporaryCriticism,” 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 discoveredsome “utility” in phenomenology had he taken the time to make a detailed study of Husserl. Although inPhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979) Rorty effecteda “hermeneutic turn” and mounted a thoroughgoing critique of modern, “epistemologically centeredphilosophy,” in the end he fell back into a crude form of materialistic behaviorism which had all theappearances of being a mere metaphysical opposite to the modernistic mentalism he had so effectivelycriticized. As Richard Bernstein, a sympathetic critic, said of this work: “There is something fundamentallywrong 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” andalthough Husserl came to speak of transcendental phenomenology as being a “transcen-dental idealism,” Husserl’s phenomenology is not for all that a form of idealism in anycustomary sense. A number of Husserl’s early students (e.g., Roman Ingarden andmembers of the “Munich school”) reacted with dismay when Husserl began referring tothe study of transcendental, purified consciousness as a transcendental idealism, but, asHeidegger 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 theidea is Husserl’s26) that one can never account properly for the being of the world merelyin terms of real relations between real entities within the world (which is to say: thebeingof an entity is not itself an entity nor is it of an entitative [substantialist] nature). “If whatthe 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 alreadythat which is ‘transcendental’ for every entity, then idealism affords the only correctpossibility for a philosophical problematic. If so, Aristotle was no less an idealist thanKant.”27 Antirealist though it unquestionably is, Husserl’s “transcendental idealism” isin no way a Berkeleyan-type psychological idealism -- a form of idealism that Husserlheld 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 theIdeashetalked about “the annihilation of the world”), the transcendental-phenomenological reductionis 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 whateversort (realist or idealist), enables us to gain undistorted access to the most primordial phe-nomenon 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 describeit.30

of which he was otherwise such a perceptive critic and was unable to see any meaningful alternative toit. Husserl’s critique of naturalism, one may be inclined to think, might just possibly have helped him todo so. It is in any event unfortunate that Rorty, the “neo-pragmatist,” appears to have ignored the fact thatone of the founders of American pragmatism, William James, was himself an early defender of thephenomenological 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 Psychologyof William James(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1968); John Wild,The Radical Empiricism ofWilliam 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: TheFoundations of Meaning(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).

26 “Sous forme de phénoménologie, elle [la philosophie de Husserl] poursuit essentiellement desintérêts 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. InAn Introduction of Metaphysics, trans. RalphManheim (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 emptyconstruction of Greek philosophy as a ‘realistic’ philosophy which, unlike modern subjectivism, was adoctrine of objective being. This widespread conception is based on a superficial understanding. We mustleave 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’sIdeas(thisbeing a translation of Husserl’s 1930Nachwort zu meinen Ideen).

29 Cf. PP, xiv: “Far from being, as has been thought, a procedure of idealistic philosophy, the pheno-menological reduction belongs to existential philosophy: Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’ appears onlyagainst the background of the phenomenological reduction.”

30 For a refreshingly clear description of the reduction and Husserl’s argumentative tactic inThe Ideaof Phenomenology, see Richard Cobb-Stevens, “The Beginnings of Phenomenology: Husserl and HisPredecessors,” 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 andthe phenomenological reduction, especially in theIdeas (Ideen I) and theCartesianMeditations, and, in general, his “idealist” manner of speaking have the unfortunate effectof blurring the true significance of his work as a crucial overcoming of the metaphysicsof modernity. Unlike William James, who was much clearer on this score and who fullyrealized the postmetaphysical significance of his own phenomenological-pragmatic in-vestigations, Husserl presented his thought in a way which can easily mislead the unwaryreader (who often comes away with the impression that the phenomenological reductionis 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 dif-ficulty Husserl ran into in presenting the reduction in a non-idealist manner is in a wayunderstandable, nevertheless, in that Husserl, born and brought up in the conceptuality orBegrifflichkeitof 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 reasonwhy he had so much difficulty understanding Heidegger who, early on, had sought towork out a strikingly different conceptual terminology32). The fact remains that it wasprecisely by means of this epistemological terminology that Husserl sought to effect adecisive break with modern epistemologism, which is to say, with modern philosophy’sbifurcational way of viewing the world and our relation to it. Husserl’s “idealist” way ofproceeding can in fact be viewed as a kind of crude anticipation of existential phenomeno-logy’s thesis to the effect that being-in-the-world is a unitary phenomenon of which selfand 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 denyingthat there exists, between consciousness (self) and world, any kind of metaphysicaldualism(self and world exist as what they themselves are only in the form of what Gadamerwould call a reciprocal interplay).

The postmetaphysical significance of Husserl’s work is something that one of Husserl’slate assistants and the editor of hisExperience and Judgment(1939), Ludwig Landgrebe,noted in a 1962 article entitled, significantly enough, “Husserl’s Departure from Cartesian-ism.” Referring to Husserl’s 1923-24 lecture course,First Philosophy, Landgrebe speaksof 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 usto understand that there occurs within this text a departure from those traditions whichare 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 thistradition 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 contentwithin the terminology of the traditions of modern thought that already forsakes thistradition and its alternatives and perspectives.

of Philosophy, vol. 8 (London: Routledge, 1994), 18-19. As regards the “contradictory” way in whichHusserl presents the reduction, see Merleau-Ponty’s essay on Husserl inSigns, 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 PaulRicoeur, 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 JohnVan Buren,The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana UniversityPress, 1994).

10

In noting how in general the novelty of Husserl’s work is obscured by his own self-interpretation of it, Landgrebe remarks:

Today, primarily as a result of Heidegger’s work, the “end of metaphysics” is spokenof as if with a certain obviousness. We shall first properly understand the sense of suchlanguage if we follow closely how, in this work, metaphysics takes its departure behindHusserl’s back. One can state quite frankly that this workis the end of metaphysics inthe sense that after it any further advance along the concepts and paths of thought fromwhich metaphysics seeks forcefully to extract the most extreme possibilities is nolonger possible. To be sure, neither Husserl nor those who were his students at the timewere explicitly aware of this, and it will still require a long and intensive struggle ofinterpretation and continuing thoughtful deliberation until we have experienced every-thing that here comes to an end.33

The interpretive turn in phenomenology, one might say, is nothing other than a longand thoughtful, interpretive reflection on the “shipwreck” (as Landgrebe referred to it) ofHusserl’s rationalist construal of the phenomenological project, and hermeneutic phenome-nology, as Ricoeur has pointed out, can be said to be a realization of Husserl’s pheno-menology -- to be, indeed, the “truth” of it -- to the exact degree that it is a “reversal” of theidealist 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 idealistself-interpretation notwithstanding -- one could say that a “transcendental idealism” whichabstains from abstract theorizing and seeks to focus on the actual givenness of things isin fact the only genuine realism. For the notion of modern philosophers, that we arelocked 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-to-hand (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 directcontact, and, thus, by putting out of play (“reducing”) the metaphysical notion of an in-itself, noumenal -- which is to say, inaccessible -- reality (the “reality” of modern philo-sophy), phenomenology is doing no more than attempting to bring our lived experienceto the proper expression of its own meaning. Thus, to state the matter as clearly aspossible, the reduction is a “suspension of belief,” not in “the world,” but in a particularphilosophical-scientific (“Galilean”) theory about the world. (Of course, to the degree that“common sense” supposes, in a somewhat contradictory fashion, that the experiencedworld 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 Phenomenologyof 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 inContemporary European Philosophy: From Dilthey to Heidegger, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt (New York:Frederick Ungar, 1966), 27ff.

34 PaulRicoeur, “On Interpretation,” inAlanMontefiore,ed.,Philosophy inFranceToday(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1983), 191, hereafter OI. In the view of some commentators (Ricoeur tendingto be one of them), Husserl’s idealist-logicist way of dealing with phenomenological issues began, as itwere, 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 aphenomenalism and that what phenomenology understands by “phenomenon” (“thephenomenon in the phenomenological sense of the word,” as Gérard Granel always madea point of saying36) is nothing other thanthe thing itselfas it shows itself, reality itselfinsofar as it appears to us, as Heidegger sought to make clear in the second introductorychapter of hisBeing and Time. By “bracketing” the so-called external world, Husserl’stranscendental idealism effects a decisive break with the most basic -- and, as Nietzschemaintained, the most pernicious -- of metaphysical oppositions: that ofreality versusappearance. It is not transcendental phenomenology that is idealist; it is the “realism” ofmodernist philosophers that is actually idealist. For what could be more idealist than tomaintain that we never have direct experience of the real world but only of “ideas” (senseimpressions, 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, fellback into an uncritical realism and who feared that a concern to explore the field oftranscendental subjectivity must necessarily result in an outright subjectivism, Husserlreplied with the following words of admonition:

For children in philosophy, this may be the dark corner haunted by the spectres ofsolipsism and, perhaps, of psychologism, of relativism. The true philosopher, insteadof running away, will prefer to fill the dark corner with light.38

Taking as their object of investigation the “I am” reflexive self-consciousness, whichHusserl called the “wonder of wonders,” and filling the dark corner of subjectivity withlight 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 onour lived experience, Husserl was unable to jettison one of the traditionally mostmetaphysical (or rationalist) of notions: the notion that philosophy, to be true to itself,must culminate in an absolute, apodictic science of reality, a kind ofmathesis universalisor “science of the universe, of the all-encompassing unity of all that is,” “the completeuniverse of thea priori.”39 Husserl believed that the only way of achieving such an all-embracing science of thea 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: ÉditionsGallimard, 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,” inEncyclopaedia Britannica, 4th ed. (1927), 17:67; reprinted

(in a different translation) in Richard Zaner and Don Ihde, ed.,Phenomenology and Existentialism(NewYork: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973). For a detailed discussion of this matter, see my “‘Phenomenology andExistentialism’: 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 ourexperience (which is the task of a descriptive phenomenology to catalogue). In a time-honored fashion, Husserl looked for thisfundamentum inconcussum, this absolutefoundation, in something standing behind, as it were, our immediate consciousness of theworld: the transcendental Ego. Accordingly, for Husserl the being (or “origin”) of theworld was to be accounted for in terms of the immanent and invariant structures of thetranscendental Ego, structures which prescribe in advance (a priori) the conditions ofobjectivity of any object whatsoever. From this point of view the world is a “subjectiveachievement” (Leistung) on the part of the transcendental Ego. Husserl’s “transcendentalidealism” may not, as I have argued, be an idealism in any usual, metaphysical sense, butto 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 allclear just what exactly this transcendental Ego is and what relation obtains between it andthe philosophizing, reflecting subject. Is there, as Averroës (Ibn Rochd) said of Aristotle’sagent intellect (nous poetikos, intellectus agens), just one transcendental Ego for allconscious beings, or, as St Thomas subsequently argued, is each and every one of us atranscendental Ego (agent intellect) in our own right -- such that each of us is guaranteedour own personal immortality? These kinds of obtuse -- and forever unresolvable --questions have all the appearance of being the sort of metaphysical questions that a suit-ably thoroughgoing phenomenological reduction should be able to free us from. As Jameshad said in this connection, in order properly to describe our lived experience, “we neednot be metaphysical at all. The phenomena are enough.”41

Most of Husserl’s phenomenological disciples42 would no doubt have preferred thathe had been more faithful to the phenomenological “principle of all principles” and hadstuck 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” con-sciousness but is not itself an object “for” consciousness) in the first (1900-01) edition ofhis Logical Investigations. “I must frankly confess,” he there said, “that I am quite unableto find this ego, this primitive, necessary center of relations.”43 Although Husserl sub-sequently chose to disregard James’s precept about not “going metaphysical” and claimedto have found this “central ego,” later phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty remained unconvinced. For them the notion of a transcendental Ego as the linchpinof a Cartesian-like absolute science had no “phenomenological credentials.”44 In this, andwithout knowing it, they were following in the footsteps of James who had argued thatthe unity of consciousness is not the product of a substantial and perduring Ego but is amatter, instead, of a dynamic, on-going, retrospective self-appropriation on the part of abodily subject, in other words: temporality (lived time). “Transcendental subjectivity” isnothing other than a name for the way the “stream of consciousness” (Husserl’s renderingof James’s “stream of thought”), in its on-flowingness, “hangs together” (der Zusammen-hang eines Lebens).

41 James,The Principles of Psychology, 1:346.42 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 astrayfrom 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 ofa ‘Hermeneutic’ Phenomenology,”Husserl Studies, vol. 1 (1984): 177.

13

Although Husserl, by means of the phenomenological reduction, may have “purified”consciousness of its naturalistic misportrayal, he did not question the priority ofconsciousness in the constitution of the world, and, as the existentialists knew, there ismore to our Being (Sein) than our being-conscious (Bewusstsein). Accordingly, Heideggerand Merleau-Ponty sought to overcome not just ego-metaphysics (“corrupt” or no) but alsothe overarching framework that dominated Husserl’s philosophizing, viz., the philosophyof consciousness itself. However, both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in their earlywritings did so without abandoning the transcendental turn and without falling back intoany kind of naïve realism (which is why, in the title of this section of my paper, I haveplaced “existential” in scare quotes: existential phenomenology is still a form of transcen-dental phenomenology).45 The crucial point to note in this regard is that a transcendentalphenomenology need in no way be a “constitutive” phenomenology in the idealist or neo-Kantian 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, other-wise expressed, which bestows meaning on the world through a sovereign act of meaning-giving (Sinngebung). “Transcendental” must not be taken to mean “primary” (as whenHusserl speaks of consciousness as constituting, as being “prior to” or primary over againstthe world as constituted). To express the matter in yet another way, there are not, asHusserl tended to say, two kinds of “consciousnesses” or egos, viz., a transcendental orpure consciousness and a mundane or worldly consciousness; there is, as Aron Gurwitschfor one argued, only one consciousness (or, better said, self): a thoroughly worldlyconsciousness, but one which may nevertheless adopt a transcendental or reflexive attitudetoward its own worldliness -- and whose essential (eidetic) understanding of things isalways hemmed in and limited by its worldliness or facticity.

The two most important notions that later phenomenologists took over from Husserland which they sought to extricate from a questionable philosophy of consciousness arethose of intentionality and the lifeworld.46 As regards intentionality, Heidegger, concernedwith “the beingof 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” isin fact a derivative or “founded” mode of something more basic, viz., ourbeing-in-the-world. “Knowing is grounded beforehand in a Being-already-alongside-the-world, whichis 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 articulatingHusserl’s notion of intentionality while avoiding the terminology of a philosophy of con-sciousness. 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 thetranscendental philosophy of his [Heidegger’s] master [Husserl]…. Heidegger’s critique of Husserl…hasnothing to do with ‘realistic’ softenings. Rather, it presupposes the consistent carrying out of thetranscendental thought in Husserl’s phenomenology — admittedly, in order to make it the object of anontological reflection and critique that takes an entirely different direction.” For his part, Lévinas, a studentof both Husserl and Heidegger, observed that “malgré tout l’abîme qui la sépare de Husserl,” Heidegger’sphilosophy inBeing 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 Merleau-Ponty’s continued adherence to Husserl’s transcendentalism, see myLa phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty, une recherche des limites de la conscience(Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1973); English trans.:ThePhenomenology 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 becamerecognized in France.” (IA, 7); and cf. Gadamer who refers to the notion of the lifeworld as “the mostpowerful 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, andHeidegger’s “existence” is something decidedly more than Husserl’s “intuitional con-sciousness.”

Thus, while Husserl spoke of consciousness “intending” objects, Heidegger, in hisreformulation of the notion of intentionality, stated: “When Dasein directs itself towardssomething and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which ithas been proximally encapsulated [Husserl’s egological “sphere of ownness”], but itsprimary kind of Being is such that it is always ‘outside’ alongside entities which itencounters and which belong to a world already discovered.”48 (BT, 89) This worldwhich is “always already there,” into which, as it were, Dasein is simply “thrown,” iswhat the later Husserl called the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) -- a “magic word,” as Gadamersaid of it, that Husserl himself invented.49 The notion of the lifeworld is one Husserlcame upon in the course of the investigations he undertook later in his life into the originsof modern science. By means of this “archeology” of Western consciousness, Husserl wasable to flesh out his earlier critique of naturalism by showing how the lifeworld is “theforgotten meaning-fundament [Sinnesfundament] of natural science.” The lifeworld is theprescientific world of lived experience on which all (natural) scientific constructs arebased and which they necessarily presuppose. Indeed, as Husserl again and again insisted,scientific constructs are mere idealizations,abstractions fromand interpretations ofthisprereflective world of immediate life (“a garb of ideas [Ideenkleid]” thrown over thelifeworld). Although this is hermeneutically incontestable, Husserl nevertheless went onto insist that the natural sciences could be placed on a rigorous footing (and surmounttheir 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 withoutbounds,”50 i.e., a transcendental phenomenology which relates everything back to theconstituting activity of a transcendental Ego.

For Heidegger, the significance of the notion of what Husserl was to call the lifeworldlay elsewhere. What the “pregivenness” (as Husserl would say) of the lifeworld means isthat, by virtue of our very existence, we possess what Heidegger called a “pre-ontologicalunderstanding” of the world (of “Being”). This was not, however, the formula for anultimate science of Being in Husserl’s sense, since what the discovery of the lifeworldsignified for Heidegger was thatall explicit understandings or theorizings, even those oftranscendental phenomenology, do no more than build on, and are interpretations of, thisalways presupposed, and thus never fully thematizable, “ground.” This is what Heideggercalled the “hermeneutic situation.” (Cf. BT, sec. 45, 275) Everything comes to us, as itwere, pre-interpreted (or pre-articulated). To see or deal with something, for instance, isalways to see or deal with itas 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 effectinterpreted 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, hereafterMTP.

48 Compare this formulation of the notion of intentionality with that of Sartre quoted above. Thesentence 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’sfunctional equivalent of Husserl’s “consciousness.”

49 See Hans-Georg Gadamer,Praise of Theory: Speeches and Essays, trans. Chris Dawson (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 55.

50 As Husserl said in his entry on “Phenomenology” in theEncyclopaedia Britannica.

15

down and all the way back.”51 For Heidegger, interpretation is not just one mode ofbeing-conscious, as it was for Husserl; it is the all-embracing form of our awareness ofthe world (being). The “given” is always aninterpretedgiven, such that there is, and canbe, no such thing as a “pure” seeing. Unlike Husserl, therefore, Heidegger did not believethat the lifeworld could ever be transformed into the fully transparent object of anabsolute, presuppositionless (voraussetzungslos) science.

For Heidegger, the ultimate discovery of the reflecting subject (the ultimate pheno-menological “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 ofBefind-lichkeit (disposition) is meant to express a primordial characteristic of the lifeworld: thefact that we simply “find” ourselves in a world, “thrown” (geworfen) into it. We discoverourselves as “already there,” and the sheer, brute facticity of our being-there blots out anyapparent “why” or “wherefore” for this factual state-of-affairs: “The pure ‘that it is’ showsitself, but the ‘whence’ and the ‘wither’ remain in darkness.” (BT, sec. 29, 173) Or asHeidegger 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 fornothing as against the phenomenal facts of the case: for the mood [of attunedness toDasein’s factual situation] brings Dasein before the ‘that-it-is’ of its ‘there,’ which, assuch, 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 inline with what that earlier critic of the Cartesian ideal, Blaise Pascal, had written in hisreflections on what, like subsequent existential writers, he referred to as the “humancondition”:

When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comesbefore and after,…the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in theinfinite 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 forme 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 inits dumbness and man left to himself with no light [no “science” of being], as thoughlost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he hascome 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 desertisland, 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 topicsof Being and Time. In Heidegger’s treatment of anxiety (which owed more toKierkegaard, and Kierkegaard’s morbid individualism and irrational decisionism, than toPascal’s more sober assessment of the human condition), the function of anxiety or dreadand the “call of conscience” is to lead the individual Dasein to “wrest” itself away, in aviolent-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 Theory73 (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 asto set itself on the path of authentic selfhood. For Heidegger, the “authentic” self was akind of heroic, radically individualized, and guilt-ridden “solus ipse” capable of achievinggenuine selfhood only in a kind of voluntaristic, self-assertive, quasi-Promethean mannerand for whom “the Dasein-with of Others” had nothing to offer. (Cf. BT, sec. 40) Thisparticular view of selfhood or subjectivity (which was to become greatly accentuated inthe 1930s) was, in the eyes of many subsequent phenomenologists, extremely one-sided(and thus phenomenologically unsound53), and it was indeed one which would later comeback to haunt Heidegger in such a way as to lead him, in a kind of compensatory over-reaction, to turn away (in his famous “turning” orKehre) 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 withthe unbridled, modernistic Will to Power extolled by Nietzsche). Later phenomenologistswould 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 pheno-menon of intersubjectivity (ourMiteinandersein, our being-in-the-world-with-others) in amuch more positive light -- discarding in the process not only Husserl’s “transcendentalsolipsism” but also Heidegger’s “existential ‘solipsism.’”

For all that, Being and Timewas the crowning work of Heidegger’sExistenz-philosophieand 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 meta-physics and modern epistemologism that Husserl had inaugurated (the book, one shouldnot forget, was dedicated to Husserl “in friendship and admiration”).54 However, in goingbeyond the framework of Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness and in abandoning alltalk of a transcendental Ego, Heidegger was not, contrary to what many have said andwhat, indeed, Husserl himself seems to have thought, turning away from transcendentalphilosophy and lapsing into a crude form of empiricism, into “anthropologism” and“irrationalism.”55 As John D. Caputo rightly observed:

If Being and Timepractices a hermeneutic phenomenology, this is because Heideggerhas acted upon certain suggestions of Husserl, exploited certain resources in Husserl’sown method, moved phenomenology in a direction which Husserl himself made possible.If the phenomenology of Heidegger is explicitly hermeneutic, Husserl’s phenomenologyis already in an important sense a “proto-hermeneutics.”56

53 Some phenomenologists would argue that (appreciative)wonderis as basic (“equiprimordial”) areaction 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 ofhow we shouldact 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, uponemerging 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 genuinelyphenomenologicalsignificance of Heidegger’swork is another matter: see, in this regard, Husserl’s 1931 Frankfurt lecture “Phänomenologie und Anthropo-logie” and Husserl to Alexander Pfänder (Jan. 6, 1935).

55 According to Lévinas, what Heidegger essentially did was to draw out the deeper, concrete, orexistential “consequences” of Husserl’s intellectualistic “theory of knowledge”; in so doing, Heideggercontinued 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 phenomenological-hermeneutic insights by subordinating them in the end to the Cartesian ideal of an absolute science.

17

Heidegger characterized his own project inBeing and Timeas that of a “fundamentalontology” and, while ignoring Husserl’s transcendental Ego, yet maintained, in line withHusserl, that ontology can responsibly be pursued only in the mode of phenomenology,i.e., transcendentally (“Phenomenological truth [the disclosedness of Being] isveritastranscendentalis” [BT, sec. 7, 62]). Thus, as Heidegger said, if we wish to raise thequestion of the meaning of being, we must first of all (“a priori”) conduct a thoroughgoinganalysis of that being, which itself raises the question of what it means to be (and withoutwhom there would -- obviously -- be no question), viz., that being for whom its ownbeing is itself a question.57 That being is of course the human being, Dasein. AsHeidegger the phenomenologist states:

To work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity—theinquirer—transparent in his own Being. The very asking of this question is an entity’smode ofBeing…. This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiringas one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term “Dasein”. If we areto formulate our question explicitly and transparently, we must first give a properexplication of an entity (Dasein) with regard to its Being. (BT, sec. 2, 27)

The phenomenological analysis of human being that Heidegger undertook inBeing andTimewas meant to furnish the “transcendental horizon” for raising the question as to themeaning of being, but, as Heidegger said in his 1935 lectures on metaphysics, “the‘transcendental’ there [inBeing 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” inBeing and Time,which was directed at “conceptualizing existentially [ontologically] what has already beendisclosed 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 “phenomenologicalhermeneutics of facticity,” this phenomenological explication (interpretation,Auslegung)of the lifeworld disclosed, was that the most basic meaning, the essence of human beingis 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 athing (which isnever more than what, as a matter of fact, it is), but in the dynamic mode of possibilityor potentiality, of continual self-transcendence. The human being is a being which isalways morethan what it ever actually is; it exists (ex-sists, stands out from itself) as anon-going process of self-interpretation and reinterpretation.

Since the human being is that being for whom its being is always in question (until theday it is no more), the basic relation of the self (Selbst) to itself and to the world is thatof an concernful or “circumspective” understanding of itself. The name Heidegger gaveto this existentially-ontologically fundamental, future-oriented (“ek-static”) relatedness ofself to self and to world (the “intentional” relation), a relation in which Dasein’s “own-most potentiality-for-Being is an issue” (see BT, sec. 39, 275), iscareor concern(Sorge).

57 See BT, sec. 43, 244: “The question of the meaning of Being becomes possible at all only if thereis something like an understanding of Being. Understanding of Being belongs to the kind of Being whichthe entity called ‘Dasein’ possesses. The more appropriately and primordially we have succeeded inexplicating this entity, the surer we are to attain our goal in the further course of working out the problemof 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 -- anunderstanding of what it means to be (Seinsverständnis) -- is what we most essentially andalwaysare. This tacit (pre-ontological) understanding which is constitutive of our being-in-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 thepossible ways in which wecouldbe (of our “potentiality-for-being”). Since the concernfulunderstanding 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 ahermeneuticin the primordialsignificance of the word, where it designates [the] business of interpreting.” (BT, sec. 7, 62)As regards the exigencies of philosophicalmethod, to maintain that understanding isprojective in nature means that the hermeneutic task of ontological interpretation, of phe-nomenological research, cannot be that of metaphysical, free-floating speculation but mustbe, and can only be, that of a patient and care-taking working-out and “appropriating” ofthe meaning-structures (“fore-structures,” as Heidegger calls them) of our pre-ontological,“projective” understanding of things -- an understanding which, being “projective,” is itselfinterpretive in nature. Or as Heidegger says: “The Interpretation by which such an under-standing gets developed [i.e., phenomenology] will let that which is to be interpretedputitself into words for the very first time.”59 (BT, sec. 63, 362) The relation between theunderstanding that we are and the various ways in which this understanding, which isalready interpretive (in a pre-ontological sort of way), itself gets interpreted (“developed,”“worked-out”) in an articulated (philosophical or ontological) fashion is, therefore, aninescapablycircular relation.

Indeed, one of the most significant accomplishments ofBeing and Timeis the way inwhich, in this work, Heidegger transformed what traditional hermeneutics had called the“hermeneutic circle” which, as a purely methodological rule, meant that when interpretinga text one ought continually to interpret the parts in terms of the whole and the whole interms 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 con-stitution of human being itself. All understanding is of a circular nature in that all explicitunderstandings always presuppose a pregiven world of meaning, this being the everyday,historically conditioned lifeworld into which we find ourselves “thrown.” This was adecisive move on Heidegger’s part in that it represented a truly radical break with modernmetaphysics, 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 apodicticcertainty being expressive of what Pascal called the “[burning] desire to find a firmfooting, 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 con-cerned to discover a solid, scientific foundation for all human knowing and doing, couldnot bring himself to relinquish.

59 See also BT, sec. 29, 179: “Phenomenological Interpretation must make it possible for Daseinitself to disclose things primordially; it must, as it were, let Dasein interpret itself. Such Interpretationtakes part in this disclosure only in order to raise to a conceptual level the phenomenal content of whathas 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 earthopens up into the depth of the abyss.”

61 See Husserl to Lévy-Bruhl, March 11, 1935; cited in Spiegelberg,The PhenomenologicalMovement, 1:84.

19

Heidegger’s transcendental-existential analytic, which he considered to be “a morefaithful adherence to the principle of phenomenology” than Husserl’s own would-bescience of being,62 provided the crucial impetus for the subsequent interpretive turn inphenomenology that was to come to fruition with Gadamer and Ricoeur, and it did so byreason of the way in which it managed to “existentialize” Husserl’s transcendentalphenomenology, as well as in the way in which it managed to overcome the rationalist-foundational project of modernity running from Descartes through Husserl. In this way itlaid the groundwork not only for hermeneutic phenomenology but also for thephenomenological philosophy of human finitude that Maurice Merleau-Ponty was todevelop some fifteen years later.

In contrast to Husserl who insisted that “science is a title standing for absolute, timelessvalues” (PRS, 136), who as a philosopher lived in and for the Absolute, and who held thathumanity’s own highest vocation was to live in and for the Infinite (“For the sake of timewe must not sacrifice eternity” [PRS, 141]), Merleau-Ponty flatly stated: “No philosophycan afford to be ignorant of the problem of finitude under pain of failing to understanditself 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, andhis phenomenology was nothing other than a sustained attempt to draw out the far-rangingphilosophical implications that follow upon an unflinching recognition of human finitude.

Also in response to Husserl who, in his customary way, had presented the phenomeno-logical reduction as a means by which the reflecting subject could beled back(reducere=to lead back) to some kind of “inner” realm of pure experience, and who in the very lastlines of hisCartesian Meditationshad stated, quoting St Augustine, “Do not wish to goout; 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 innerman, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself. When I returnto 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 theworld [voué au monde]. (PP, ix)

In saying this, Merleau-Ponty was reacting against the convoluted, round-about wayin which Husserl, struggling to work out his positionvis-à-visDescartes and Kant, hadsought to overcome the subject/object dichotomy of modern philosophy in such a way asto effect a return to lived experience. Husserl’s general tactic in this regard was to presentthe reduction not only as a “bracketing” of the nonsensical (unsinnlich) notion of traditionalrealism of a “being-in-itself” (the phenomenological reduction is a “transcendental” reduc-tion to the precise degree that it does this), but, beyond that, as a reduction of everythingthat is to the “concrete ego” conceived of as the constituting source of all meaning andthus asomnitudo realitatis, as the sum total of reality, as a system ofabsolute being, thetranscendental, self-enclosed field of all possible acts and objects outside of which (as hesometimes said) there is quite literally nothing (since for Husserl to be is to-be-an-object,i.e., a meaning, and being exists onlyfor a consciousness which “intends” it). Along theway, 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 startingpoint), 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: ThroughPhenomenology to Thought(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), xiv.

20

self-enclosed but had “windows” through which it could make empathetic contact withother such monadic egos. Eventually -- but only eventually and as a kind of filling-in ofthe blanks -- this “universal self-knowledge -- first of all monadic, and then intermonadic”was supposed to get around to dealing with the concrete, existential “problems ofaccidental factualness, of death, of fate, of the possibility of a ‘genuine’ human life,” andthe “problem of the ‘meaning’ of history.”63 Such was the complex manner -- workingto 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. AlthoughMerleau-Ponty always tried to present Husserl in the best possible light, he was not pre-pared to grant any validity to this typically modernist way of proceeding (this “methodicidealism,” as Ricoeur has called it), since the most important thing for him was to effecta decisive overcoming of that most basic conceptual opposition of the metaphysics ofmodernity, the opposition between “inside” and “outside.” “Inside and outside are insepar-able,” he stated categorically and without hesitation. “The world is wholly inside and I amwholly outside myself.” (PP, 407) Such, for Merleau-Ponty, was the true meaning ofphenomenology’s great discovery: intentionality.

In the Preface to his major work,Phenomenology of Perception, in which he soughtto respond to the question (put to him by his thesis supervisor, Émile Bréhier) “What isPhenomenology?” and in the course of which he presented his own existential reading ofsome of the major themes in Husserl’s phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty stated what hehimself saw to be the most important lesson to be learned from putting into play thephenomenological reduction. “The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us,”he said, “is the impossibility of a complete reduction.” (PP, xiv) In this much remarked-upon 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 thebeing 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 describedin the preceding paragraph). While, for Merleau-Ponty, the reduction was indispensablefor overcoming the metaphysics of modernity and leading us back to our lived experienceof the world, it does not, and cannot, afford us access to a “pure,” monadic ego whichwould be the absolute source of all that is, and can be for us, an absolute consciousnesswhich would be coextensive with being itself.

And in rejecting Husserl’s “idealist” presentation of the reduction, Merleau-Ponty wasalso thereby ruling out the possibility of our ever achieving the kind of apodictically certainscienceof being that Husserl had dreamed of. Like Heidegger,64 Merleau-Ponty believedthat 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 itsinitial situation, unchanging, given once and for all.” (PP, xiv)

The greater part of thePhenomenology of Perceptionwas devoted to an explorationof this unreflective or prereflective life which underlies and supports that of the reflectingsubject, 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 after-thought, as it were, is here trying to find a place in his own transcendental-idealist conceptual frameworkfor Heidegger’s existential concerns.

64 As Ricoeur observes, the “horizon” of thePhenomenology of Perceptionis “nothing other thanHeideggerian care and being-in-the-world.” IA, 11.

65 This is what elsewhere Merleau-Ponty refers to ascontingency, which was for him the most basicof all phenomenological facts.

21

perceived world” (PP, 25), Merleau-Ponty, contrary to what is commonly thought, soughtnot so much to put forward a theory of his own as to the nature of perception, as tocriticize various objectivist theories of perception characteristic of the metaphysics ofmodernity.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 thingor else one exists as a consciousness.”67 (PP, 198) This is, of course, the metaphysicalassumptionpar excellenceof modern philosophy constitutive of the subject/object split,and in attempting to deconstruct this metaphysical assumption, Merleau-Ponty’s goal wasto effect a “return to the phenomena,” to our actual lived experience (“the phenomenalfield”). This “reduction” to lived experience was meant, in turn, to serve as the means forelucidating 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, asnaturalistic realism or materialist neuroscience would have it, but it is also not the self-conscious, transparent subject of idealist philosophy (the pure spectator of its own bodilyexperiences). Asubjectit most definitely is, but a unique, philosophically ambiguous sortof 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 anembodiedsubject, abody-subject, so to speak. Inasmuch, therefore, as I am aware of the world, Ido not merely “have” a body (as modernist philosophers tend to say), Iam a body -- anoften overlooked yet, as regards the overcoming of modern epistemologism, crucial insightthat Merleau-Ponty took over from Gabriel Marcel’s existential phenomenology of em-bodiment (for his part, William James had said that our bodies are not simply “ours,” theyareus68). The perceiving subject is one’s own body,le corps propre. This is not the purelyobjective body that appears in the pages of anatomy textbooks and which is the body ofnobody in particular; it is, as it were, a “subjective” or “lived” body. As Sartre said, Iexistmy body; my body is my unique point of view on the world, one on which I cannotmyself 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 actingand moving about bodily in this world (in lived space) -- is that body which, as humansubjects, each and every one of us is. While the notions of the lived body (Leib) andaction (motility -- “I can”) were not absent from Husserl’s work, Merleau-Ponty felt thatthe 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 theframework of a philosophy of consciousness, as essentially a kind of psychic phenomenonor “mental process” (a feature of Husserl’s way of approaching issues that Charles SandersPeirce had objected to earlier on).

Following up on clues provided by Husserl,69 Heidegger had already pointed out thatall higher-level knowledge of the world is founded on our “prepredicative” being-in-the-world, 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. Buschand 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 tosome kind of reproductive, mirroring process, whereby what is ‘outside’ is duplicated ‘inside,’ the concept‘perception' does not figure in thePhenomenology.” Ibid., 93-94.

67 See also PP, 37: “Everything that exists exists as a thing or as a consciousness, and there is nohalf-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 wentconsiderably beyond Heidegger in spelling out what it actually means to be in a world, tohave a world (a “world,” Merleau-Ponty said, is “a collection of things which emerge froma 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 Merleau-Ponty’s early defenders, observed:

Heidegger always situates himself at a level of complexity which permits imaginingthat the problem which concerns us here is resolved. For it is at the level of perceptionand the sensible that the problem must receive its decisive treatment…. But inBeingand Timeone does not find thirty lines concerning the problem of perception; one doesnot 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 ableto elucidate in a concrete way the interpretive nature of perception and to show how thereare no “pure sensations” (“Pure sensation…, this notion corresponds to nothing in ourexperience.” [PP, 3]), and how all seeing is a hermeneutic seeing-as. (Like other Frenchphenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty had no sympathy whatsoever for Husserl’s attempt tosalvage modern, epistemological philosophy’s notion of “sense data” [“sensualism”] byarguing that the meaningful objects of consciousness [noemata] are arrived at by meansof 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 essentiallyambiguousmode of being of the body-subject,71

Merleau-Ponty was attempting to take seriously something that the mainline tradition inphilosophy had always passed over in silence.72 Contrary to the impression created insome 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 un-reflected life. He was most certainly not advocating -- as others have -- that we renouncethe reflective or philosophical life and seek to coincide with immediate experience;“without reflection,” he insisted, “life would probably dissipate itself in ignorance of itselfor 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,TheStructure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), xviii-xix, hereafter SB. Oneof the earliest published studies of Merleau-Ponty’s “philosophy of ambiguity” was De Waelhens’sUnephilosophie de l'ambiguïté, L’existentialisme de M. Merleau-Ponty(Louvain: Bibliothèque philosophiquede Louvain, 1951).

71 Cf. PP, 169: “Ambiguity is of the essence of human existence”; and PP, 123: “This ambiguity isnot 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 Phenomenologyand (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 inhis attempt to overcome the discrete, oppositional categories of modern philosophy and, indeed, of theentire metaphysical tradition.”

73 See Merleau-Ponty’s reply to his critics in his “The Primacy of Perception and Its PhilosophicalConsequences,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty,The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomeno-logical Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill.: North-western University Press, 1964), 19, hereafter PriP.

23

in the unreflected, in “perception,” purely as such; his overriding concern was, rather, withreflective consciousness itself, with what, in line with the tradition of French reflexivephilosophy, he called theCogito (the presence or “proximity” of the self to itself). Thewhole 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 philo-sophy, a resolute abandonment of the philosophy of consciousness and a thoroughgoingreconceptualization orrefonteof what it means to be a self-conscious, rational subject.Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and the body-subject was, as Ricoeurnoted, “entirely in the service of a philosophy of finitude.”74 It is important to note, how-ever, that in criticizing Husserl’s transcendental idealism, Merleau-Ponty was not in anyway (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 definetranscendental philosophy anew.” (SB, 3)

In this he was not altogether successful, for, as he subsequently realized, thePhenomenology of Perceptionretains significant (residual, so to speak) traces of the philo-sophy of consciousness. In his later writings, therefore, Merleau-Ponty sought to “deepenand rectify” (VI, 168) his earlier phenomenological investigations into our bodily being-in-the-world and to reconfigure the notion of subjectivity in a much more radical way.76 Inthis regard, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical development was quite different from that ofHeidegger.77 Unlike Heidegger who, afterBeing and Time(in his famous “turning” orKehre), sought to overcome the “dominance of subjectivity” by “leaving behind” not onlymodern subjectivism but also the very notion of subjectivity (“des metaphysischen Subjek-tivismus”), Merleau-Ponty remained committed to the notion of the subject and thetradition of Western humanism that Heidegger criticized in hisLetter on Humanism(acriticism that was part of his attempt to come to terms with his earlier embrace ofNazism78).

Heidegger’s attempt to overcome the very notion of subjectivity (as well as, it may benoted, philosophy itself, which Heidegger came to equate with metaphysics pure andsimple, i.e., the “forgetfulness” of Being), was, in fact, something Merleau-Ponty cri-ticized; in his political philosophy,79 Merleau-Ponty reaffirmed those basic principles ofthe 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, 209.75 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 consciousnessand take as their datum one of its results.”

76 For a study of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical development and his attempt to escape from theconfines of a philosophy of consciousness, see myThe Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search forthe Limits of Consciousness.

77 For an overview of Heidegger’s work, see my “Heidegger’s Dialectic,”Reflections1, no. 1(Summer 1980).

78 As regards Heidegger’s Nazism and his hostility to liberal democracy and the values of theEnlightenment, see Tom Rockmore,On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy(Berkeley, Calif.: Universityof 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 World26 (1993): 19-44, and “The Ethics and Politics of the Flesh,” inGary B. Madison and Marty Fairbairn, ed.,The Ethics of Postmodernity: Current Trends in ContinentalThinking(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999) (reprised in Duane H. Davis, ed.,Merleau-Ponty’s Later Works and Their Practical Implications: The Dehiscence of Responsibility[Amherst, N.Y.:Humanity Books, 2001]).

24

subject cannot be defended philosophically, neither can the idea of democracy80) andadhered to the age-old cosmopolitan ideal ofhumanitas-- an ideal that, in contrast withHeidegger 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 wasto overcome modern metaphysics by reconceptualizing or reconstructing in a resolutelypostmetaphysical and non-foundationalist fashion the modern notion of subjectivity.Merleau-Ponty’s work was, in fact, a life-long attempt to explore subjectivity to itsdeepest depths, in search of what, in his late work, he referred to as the foundational (“lefondemental,” a “transcendence within immanence”). Unlike the later Heidegger, he didnot think that modern subjectivism (“anthropocentrism”) could be overcome simply bydissolving subjectivity and returning to a pre-Socratic age of ontological innocence beforethe advent of self-consciousness, and in this Merleau-Ponty anticipated both Gadamer’sguiding notion of effective-history and Paul Ricoeur’s conscientious attempt at effectinga hermeneutic decentering and non-idealist retrieval of the notion of the subject.

Throughout his work Merleau-Ponty anticipated the interpretive turn in phenomenologyin a number of ways, not the least of which had to do with the emphasis he placed on theissues oflinguality and intersubjectivity. In his on-going battle with the philosophy ofconsciousness, Merleau-Ponty argued that both language and intersubjectivity are not, asmodern philosophy had generally assumed, secondary phenomena but are, instead, abso-lutely 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 (Bedeutungs-lehre) and who maintained in a very traditional manner that language (speaking) is amerely secondary phenomenon in relation to thought (the “stratum of expression—and thisconstitutes its peculiarity—…is not productive”),81 Merleau-Ponty insisted in thePheno-menologyon what Gadamer would later refer to as “the indissoluble connection betweenthinking and speaking.” (RPJ, 25) Rejecting Husserl’s “mentalism” (or “logicism”) andHusserl’s modernist way of separating off thought from expression (redolent of the meta-physical opposition between mind and body), Merleau-Ponty maintained that expressionis productive of meaning.82 The thinking subject, he insisted, is none other than the speak-ing subject (there is no thought, properly speaking, without speech; “inner experience…ismeaningless.” [PP, 276]), and, in his later work, he went so far as to maintain that lan-guage is coextensive with our very being (“Language is a life, is our life and the life ofthings…. [W]hat is lived is lived-spoken…. [V]ision itself, thought itself, are, as has beensaid, ‘structured as a language.’”). The later Merleau-Ponty would have had no objectionsto Gadamer’s famous dictum: “Being that can be understood is language.”

80 Given Heidegger’s one-sided view of modernity as the rise to prominence of instrumental-calculative reason (the Will to Power or Will to Will)and nothing more, he rejected both Western liberaldemocracy and Eastern communism in favor of an idealized Nazism, since in his eyes both liberalism andtotalitarianism were part and parcel of the modernist metaphysics of unbridled subjectivity and its projectaiming at the technological domination of the earth.

81 Husserl,Ideas, sec. 124, 321; as Jacques Derrida observed in his translation of Husserl’sL'originede la géométrie[Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962], 61): “Aux yeux de Husserl, il seraitabsurde que le sens ne précède pas…l'acte de langage dont la valeur propre sera toujours celle del'expression.”

82 Nothing could be further from Husserl’s logicist approach to language -- according to which wordsor “verbal expressions” are “signs” whose referential function or “signification” is bestowed on them bymental acts of “intending” -- than Merleau-Ponty’s maintaining that speaking (signifying) is in the natureof a bodilygesture. (PP, 183-84) Both Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer insisted, against both Husserl and thelogicians (logikous), that words are not mere “signs”; for a discussion of the phenomenological-hermeneutic view of language, see my “Being and Speaking,” in John Stewart, ed.,Beyond the SymbolModel: 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: “Onlythrough others do we gain true knowledge of ourselves.”83 For Merleau-Ponty, the issueof intersubjectivity (“other minds,” as modern philosophy referred to it) was never, as itwas in modern philosophy, just a marginal issue, a kind of after-thought as regards theconstituting activity of a pure Ego. In contrast with Husserl who, in the fifth of hisCartesian Meditations, had experienced great procedural difficulties in dispelling thenotion that his transcendentalism, like that of his Cartesian predecessor, leads to solipsismby 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 theOther 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’sown is never just “one’s own”: “We are mixed up with [mêlés au] the world and othersin an inextricable confusion.” (PP, 454) Merleau-Ponty always insisted that subjectivityis, at its most primordial level, an intersubjectivity, and in his later work, with his notionof the “flesh,” he was able to show how the reflecting subject is already, as it were, anOther for itself and how, accordingly, the Other is inscribed in, is woven into, the veryfabric of the subject’s own selfhood -- is part of its own flesh.84 The title of Ricoeur’s1990 revised Gifford lectures,Oneself As Another, has a distinctly Merleau-Pontyan ringto it (not surprisingly, perhaps, since for Ricoeur Merleau-Ponty was “the greatest ofFrench phenomenologists”).

Hermeneutic Phenomenology

If Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology was already to a great extent hermeneutic, as itundoubtedly was,85 the accomplishment of Hans-Georg Gadamer was to have trans-formed phenomenology into an explicitly hermeneutic discipline. Although Gadamer wasnot familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s work at the time he was preparing hismagnum opus,Truth and Method(first published in its original German version 1960), his own workwas, like Merleau-Ponty’s, solidly grounded in the phenomenology of Husserl andHeidegger. What Gadamer learned from Husserl and Husserl’s aversion to idle meta-physical 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 phenomeno-logical principle that one should avoid all theoretical constructions and get back ‘to thethings themselves.’” [RPJ, 105, 113]). And it was this concern for the concrete, as wellas for the practical issue (one that Heidegger ignored86) of phronesisor prudentia(“thesense 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 preoccupa-tion 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 WilliamM. 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 “disregardedphronesisand raised the question of being in itsplace.” Hans-Georg Gadamer,A Century of Philosophy: A Conversation with Riccardo Dottori, trans. RodColtman (New York: Continuum, 2004), 127.

26

alleged, in a kind ofSeinsmystik-- and to focus directly on human understanding itself,explicating just exactly what it means to maintain, as Heidegger had in his existentialanalytic inBeing and Time, that, as existing beings, an understanding of being is what wemost essentially are.

With Gadamer, phenomenology fully accomplishes its interpretive turn and also withhim 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 thisold discipline. He did, so, as Husserl had earlier on, by breaking with the preoccupationsof the modern “era of epistemology [l’ère de la théorie de la connaissance]),” ones whichhad set the parameters for earlier hermeneuticians like Schleiermacher and Dilthey.87 AsGadamer stated in the Foreword to the second edition (1965) ofTruth and Method, “I didnot intend to produce an art or technique of understanding, in the manner of the earlierhermeneutics…. My real concern was and is philosophic.” (TM, xxviii) Gadamer’shermeneutics is indeed “philosophic” in that he was concerned not with technical issueshaving to do with correctness (“objectivity”) in matters of text-interpretation, but withclarifying “the conditions in which understanding [itself] takes place.” (TM, 295) Hisintent, in Truth and Method, was not epistemological (prescriptive, in the manner oflogical positivism) but phenomenological (descriptive),88 in that he was concerned withascertaining what, in actual fact, has occurred whenever we claim to have arrived at anunderstanding of things, other people, ourselves (“what always happens whenever an inter-pretation is convincing and successful.” [RAS, 111]).

Truth and Methodis in this sense a transcendental (reflective) inquiry, not into thelogical “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 speculative-deductive transcendentalism à la Kant (transcendental-logical), but a reflective andinterpretive transcendentalism (transcendental-phenomenological). Because Gadamer’shermeneutics is a reflective inquiry concerned with “our entire understanding of the worldand thus all the various forms in which this understanding manifests itself” (PH, 18), itis not so much a theory of text-interpretation, as was the case with Romantic herme-neutics, as it is a general, all-inclusive philosophy or ontology of human existence. Sinceit 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 infundamental phenomenological ontology.

Because Gadamer’s concern was with the human lifeworld, with “all human experienceof the world and human living,” and because he wanted “to discover what is common toall modes of understanding” (TM, xxx, xxxi), he could rightly claim that the scope ofhermeneutics so conceived is genuinelyuniversal.89 Faithful to his mentor Heidegger,Gadamer’s main thesis in this regard is that all human experience of the world isessentiallylingual in nature; language “is the fundamental mode of operation of our being-in-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 philosophie151(1984): 334.

88 See TM, 465: “Fundamentally I amnot proposing a method, but I am describingwhat is thecase.”

89 See in this regard my “Hermeneutics' Claim to Universality,” in Hahn, ed.,The Philosophy ofHans-Georg Gadamer; and PH, 25: “The phenomenon of understanding…shows the universality of humanlinguisticality as a limitless medium that carrieseverythingwithin it—not only the 'culture' that has beenhanded down to us through language, but absolutely everything—because everything (in the world andout 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) Inputting forward this claim, Gadamer was opening himself up to the criticism (coming fromHabermas) 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. Neitherof these interpretations hold, however, for the relation between language and the worldin Gadamer’s thought is of the same “intentional” nature as is the relation between con-sciousness 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 isto say, language is not something of a “subjectivist” nature standing over against theworld and barring us from access to it; language is the world itself insofar as it is presentto us and inasmuch as we have meaningful experience of it (“what the world is is notdifferent from the views [language] in which it presents itself.” [TM, 406]). As Gadamerremarks, “language has no independent life apart from the world that comes to languagewithin it” (TM, 401); and, as he also says, “things bring themselves to expression inlanguage.”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 samething.” (PH, 69) In short, language is the means by which our mute experience of theworld 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 notdenythe meaningfulness ofnon-lingual modes of experience; rather, itaffirms that meaningfulness, by maintainingthat 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 bemeaningless to speak of it as having any meaning at all. The important thing to note inthis regard is that, as Ricoeur says, the language of phenomenology “is a language whichexpresses that which precedes language.” (MTP, 126)

Thus, unlike the structuralists and poststructuralists who came upon the scene a shorttime later and who set themselves up as implacable foes of phenomenology and thephenomenological approach to language (and whose views on language Ricoeur would sethimself the task of contesting), Gadamer was most definitely not maintaining that lan-guage is a kind of “prison,” as Derrida would imply (“Il n’y a rien hors du texte”), or some-thing we cannot “break out of,” as Rorty would say. Unlike them, he was not seeking tocall 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 metaphysicaltrappings by bringing them down to earth.91

What Gadamer’s emphasis on the linguality of our experience of the world clearly didcontest is the modernist metaphysics of referentialist-representationalism, i.e., the notionthat understanding (“knowledge”) consists in forming “inner representations,” mentalcopies of an “external” in-itself reality (“philosophy as the mirror of nature”). To maintainthat “language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs” (TM, 389),amounts to maintaining that understanding is not “representational” butinterpretive innature: “All understanding is interpretation.” (TM, 389) And interpretation itself is nevera merely reproductive activity but is always transformative of that which is to be inter-preted: “[U]nderstanding is not merely reproductive but always a productive activity aswell.” (TM, 296)

90 See also PH, 77: “Is not language more the language of things than the language of man?”91 For a more detailed treatment of Gadamer’s position in this regardvis-à-vis both Rorty and

Derrida, see my “Coping with Nietzsche’s Legacy: Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer,” in Gary B. Madison,ThePolitics of Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermeneutics(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2001).

28

In regard to the more specific area of text-interpretation, and in opposition to theobjectivistic assumptions of traditional, Romantic hermeneutics (and to contemporaryrepresentatives of it like Emilio Betti and E.D. Hirsch, Jr.92), Gadamer insisted that“understanding” (subtilitas intelligendi, subtilitas explicandi) and “application” (subtilitasapplicandi) cannot be separated. The text is not an “absolute object” (as if it were some-thing existing “in itself,” like the “external world” of modern philosophy), whose meaningone first grasps and then only subsequently “applies” to the situation at hand, for it is onlyin 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 somethinglike 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 (Schrift-lichkeit), 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 thesubject in search of understanding, and this is because, as Merleau-Ponty had already ob-served, 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 amountsto an overcoming of an age-old metaphysical opposition, one as pernicious as theopposition between mind and body or between reality and appearance, viz., the oppositionbetween theuniversal(the timeless and invariant) and theparticular (the local and merelycontingent). 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 definedin its own right but always only in its varying instanciations -- which is not to say thatin 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)sametext that we necessarily always understand indifferentways, he wasseeking to move beyond both objectivism and relativism. From a strictly phenomeno-logical point of view, the universal cannot in fact be separated from the particular; “it’ssimply the case,” Shaun Gallagher observes (invoking Gadamer’s notion ofphronesis),“that we have no way to understand the universal except from within the particularsituation in which we happen to find ourselves.”95

Gadamer’s way of reconceptualizing the age-old philosophical problem of the relationbetween universality and particularity by means of his notion of “application” (“applica-tion—that is, …bringing the universal and the individual together.”96), has, it may benoted, a great deal of relevance to the global lifeworld that is now everywhere emerging.Speaking of the phenomenon of globalization (“the world-wide interwovenness ofeconomies”), 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

92 For a critique of Hirsch’s positivist-style version of hermeneutics from a Gadamerian point ofview, see my “Eine Kritik an Hirschs Begriff der ‘Richtigkeit,’” in Hans-Georg Gadamer and GottfriedBoehm, ed.,Seminar: Die Hermeneutik und die Wissenschaften(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1978); Englishversion in myThe Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and Themes(Bloomington, Ind.: IndianaUniversity 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 actof “violence” but presupposes “good will” aiming at genuine dialogue.

95 Shaun Gallagher, “Hegel, Foucault, and Critical Hermeneutics,” in idem, ed.,Hegel, History, andInterpretation(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 whatsome have referred to as a global “clash of civilizations” -- is to a large extent a herme-neutic one, having to do with reconciling universality and particularity, that is to say, thelifeworld reality of cultural diversity, with a philosophical need for a common, globalethic 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 chieflegacies of Gadamer’s “philosophy of conversation” undoubtedly lies in the way it canserve 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 away which is decidedly “non-hegemonic.” Ricoeur, it should be noted, has also been keenlyaware 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 problemsof 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 thatpresuppositions or prejudgments (“prejudices”) play in understanding, and thus also ourunavoidable “belogingness” (Zugehörigkeit) to our own particular cultural/historical tradi-tions -- all of which is summed up in his key notion of historically-effective consciousness(das wirkungsgeschichliche Bewusstsein). As Ricoeur would later point out, effective-history (Wirkungsgeschichte) is “the massive and global fact whereby consciousness, evenbefore 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 “typicalconstructs” that are “the unquestioned but always questionable sum total of things takenfor granted until further notice.”103 Like language itself, effective-history is the onto-

97 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 World3, no. 1 (1970): 13; for a furtherdiscussion of this matter, see my “Gadamer’s Legacy,”Symposium6, no. 2 (Fall, 2002). It should be notedthat Gadamer’s attempt to revise the notions of “universal” and “particular” has been greatly expandedupon 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 notionof 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 Wiercinski, 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 positionin 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’shermeneutic theory; see Busch’s entry “Marcel,” inEncyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embreeet 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, andhave our being.”

Gadamer’s hermeneutics is grounded in Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness” (Geworfen-heit),104 and thus, as Ricoeur also makes clear, the notion of effective-history means thatwe can never achieve a bird’s-eye overview of our historical situatedness in such a wayas to realize the metaphysical ideal of an all-encompassing science -- “To exist historicallymeans that knowledge of oneself can never be complete.” (TM, 269) “Between finitudeand absolute knowledge,” Ricoeur observes, “it is necessary to choose; the concept ofeffective history belongs to an ontology of finitude.” (HHS, 74) Gadamer’s ontology offinitude is not, however, a version of relativism, as I mentioned above. To say thatunderstanding 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 horizonis not a wall or a barrier (an absolute limit) that closes us off from what is “other.” Onthe contrary, horizons, being mobile, invite exploration and allow us to move about in theworld and make contact with what is distant and alien (the world itself being, as Husserlsaid, 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 pointsbeyond 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” (andthus also the notion that different cultural lifeworlds are “incommensurable”) is, asGadamer says, “artificial” (see TM, 304), a metaphysical construction without any basis inlived 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 in-finite 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 amatter of “adequation” between an isolated, cognizing subject and an objective, in-itselfworld (adaequatio intellectus et res), but is a matter of mutual agreement between actualhuman subjects freely engaged in dialogue, and seeking -- oftentimes painfully -- a com-mon understanding of things. We are “in the truth” when, through a “merging of horizons(Horizontverschmelzung),” the “hermeneutic experience”par excellence, we are able toencounter other people and other ways of life and to arrive in this way at mutual under-standings 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 needbe, no contradiction between “openness” and “belongingness” (between tradition andemancipation) -- which is what allowed him to assert that there is “no higher principle ofreason” with which to think our effective-history than that offreedom.106

In maintaining that the locus of truth -- of reason (thelogos) -- is not the isolated,monological subject of modern philosophy but the dialogical encounter between situatedhuman beings, Gadamer’s hermeneutics effected a decisive break not only with modernepistemologism but also with the quasi-solipsism of Husserl’s philosophy of conscious-ness. Merleau-Ponty had said that the “germ of universality” lies not in a transcendental

104 See Gadamer,A Century of Philosophy, 130.105 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 20thCentury; for a more succinct overview of philosophical hermeneutics, see my “Hermeneutics: Gadamerand 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.

31

“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 wason the speaking subject, for Gadamer, too, language lives only in speech, such that, whatas lingual, rational beings we most essentially are, is, as he always liked to say, a con-versation (Gespräch). Because Gadamer’s hermeneutics is a “philosophy of conversation”(RPJ, 36) and is animated by an ethics of communicative rationality,108 he could rightlysay 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 ofdis-ponibilité), 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 trans-subjective and transcultural community of all reasonable beings.

Paul Ricoeur (who discovered Gadamer in somewhat the same belated way thatGadamer discovered Merleau-Ponty) was no less sensitive to the finitude of the humancondition than was Gadamer, as is amply attested to by his early work in the 1940s and1950s on human fallibility, frailty, suffering, passivity, and the mystery of evil in theworld. Ricoeur’s early writings on philosophical anthropology (the kind of philosophicalanthropology that Heidegger dismissed but that Gadamer thought was called for byHusserl’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 Merleau-Ponty’s magisterial work on perception, and in them he sought to extend the Husserlianmethod of eidetic analysis to a dimension of human existence that Husserl, given his“cognitivist” preoccupations (or what Ricoeur calls “Husserl’s logicist prejudice”109), hadlargely 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’stranscendental 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 separatethe phenomenological method from Husserl’s idealist interpretation of this method (“Iattempted to dissociate what appeared to me to be the descriptive core of phenomenologyfromthe idealist interpretation inwhich this corewas wrapped.” [IA,11]). Subsequently, andin conjunction with his “lingual turn” in the 1960s, he attempted to “graft hermeneuticsonto phenomenology” and entered into an on-going debate with various disciplines orintellectual trends such as Freudianism and structuralism which -- functioning as a kindof “hermeneutics of suspicion” -- seem to undermine the primacy that a reflexive philo-sophy such as Ricoeur’s accords to the subject (“A reflexive philosophy considers themost radical problems to be those which concern the possibility ofself-understandingasthe 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 myTheLogic of Liberty(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), chap. 10; and, for an analysis of the notionsof communicative rationality and practical reasoning in both Gadamer and Ricoeur, see Paul Fairfield,“Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Practical Judgment,” in Wiercinski, ed.,Between Suspicion andSympathy.

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 hisPhilosophy of the Willto Marcel) asreinterpreted through the lens of Husserlian phenomenology; for an insightful discussion of Ricoeur’srelationship with Marcel, see Boyd Blundell, “Creative Fidelity: Gabriel Marcel’s Influence on PaulRicoeur,” in Wiercinski, ed.,Between Suspicion and Sympathy.

32

Ricoeur’s overall work follows a rather complicated trajectory and undergoes numerousshifts in direction, all nevertheless “nesting one within the other.” (IA, 38) Subsequent tohis early writings on the will, there is a gradual progression in his work from ahermeneutics of the symbol through a confrontation with Freudian psychoanalysis andstructural linguistics to a hermeneutics of the text, and from there to a hermeneutics ofaction and intersubjectivity (passing by way of an analysis of metaphor, time, and nar-rativity) and culminating (at the time of this writing) in a renewed concern with ethics andpolitics (with issues such as justice, responsibility, remembrance, andphronesisorpractical wisdom) -- Ricoeur’s overriding concern throughout all of this having been theacting person (l’homme agissant), a concern which reflects his indebtedness to the per-sonalist philosophy of Emmanuel Mounier, a philosophy, in Ricoeur’s words, “of man’srecurrent protest against being reduced to the level of ideas and things.”111 (MTP, 356)Although Ricoeur, like his phenomenological predecessors, was always highly critical ofHusserl’s philosophy of consciousness or what he generally refers to as Husserl’s“idealism” (“transcendental subjectivism” might be a more appropriate term), he never-theless always considered the heritage of Husserlian phenomenology to be “the unsurpas-sable presupposition of hermeneutics.” (IA, 36; it was, indeed, Ricoeur’s early work asa translator and interpreter of Husserl that firmly established his academic creden-tials.112)

Because the particular shape Ricoeur’s work has taken is the result of the debates hehas engaged in on numerous different occasions with proponents of other views withwhich he felt he had to come to terms, his philosophical development is extremelycomplex 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 proceedscontinually by way of detours).113 There is nonetheless a kind of Ariadne’s threadrunning 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 theproper expression of its own meaning. As he stated in an early work, the vocation ofphilosophy, as he sees it, is “to clarify existence itself by use of concepts.”114 Ricoeur’sphilosophical motivation in this regard is his fundamental belief that our existence isindeed meaningful, and thus expressible (dicible) -- this belief in the expressibility or“sayability” (dicibilité) of experience corresponding to Gadamer’s thesis as to thelinguality or “speakability” of the world (die Sprachlichkeit der Welt). “There is no humanexperience that is not structured by language” (BSS, 680), Ricoeur maintains, echoing asit were Merleau-Ponty.

Ricoeur’s philosophizing has in this way always been a search for meaning and hasthroughout been guided by a “central intuition,” or basic conviction, viz., that, notwith-standing 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’sIdeen I: Ideés directrices pour unephénoménologie(Paris: Gallimard, 1950), a work that Merleau-Ponty used and cited in his lectures at theSorbonne 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 thematicoverview of Ricoeur’s work, see Domenico Jervolino, “The Unity of Paul Ricoeur’s Work,” in Wiercinski,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 Theunderlying 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 isnot to change it into something else, but, in articulating and developing it, to make itbecome itself. (HHS, 115)

In connection with his work on metaphor and narrative, he has stated that “theseanalyses continuallypresupposethe conviction that discourse never existsfor 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 besaid.” There is always, Ricoeur asserts, “abeing-demanding-to-be-said(un être-à-dire)which precedes our actual saying.” (OI, 196)

Ricoeur’s dual concern withmeaningand existence116 makes for an overarchingthematic unity to his work; as “a hermeneutics of the ‘I am,’” its focus has consistentlybeen on the issues of subjectivity and self-understanding. “[I]t is indeed the fate of humansubjectivity,” 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 traditionalidea of reflection, as he remarks, “carries with it the desire for absolute transparence, aperfect coincidence of the self with itself, which would make consciousness of selfindubitable knowledge.” (OI, 188) And as he freely admits, with regard to his presup-position of meaning, “It is difficult, admittedly, to formulate this presupposition in a non-idealist language.” (HHS, 115) It was, accordingly, in order to counteract the idealisttendencies of reflexive philosophy that Ricoeur insisted that “a philosophy of reflectionmust be just the opposite of a philosophy of consciousness.” (CI, 18) For the phenomeno-logical fact of the matter is that the consciousness of self is, proximally and for the mostpart, 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 mustbe “indirect” and that the passage from misunderstanding (“inauthenticity”) to understand-ing 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/historicalsigns, symbols, and texts in which get expressed the human “effort to exist and desire tobe.” (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 bareego can become agenuine, humanself.

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 thenotion of intuitive self-knowledge is an illusion (for Ricoeur, the truth of theCogito -- “Ithink-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.: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1974), 411, hereafter CI.

116 These two terms are ones that Ricoeur himself suggested as the title for the Festschrift in hishonor 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; seealso 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; itis 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 drawn-out process of semiosis, a “reappropriated” subject that is both interpretive and interpreted.Being of a “mediated” nature, genuine self-understanding always involves a correctivecritique of misunderstanding and can only be envisaged as a kind of “distant horizon”: “Ahermeneutic philosophy is a philosophy which accepts all the demands of this long detourand which gives up the dream of a total mediation, at the end of which reflection wouldonce again amount to intellectual intuition in the transparence to itself of an absolutesubject.” (OI, 194)

In his attempt to work out a hermeneutics of self-understanding, Ricoeur always hadto do battle on two fronts. On the one hand, and in the name of a phenomenology ofhuman finitude and “fallible man,” he had to resist the idealist tendencies in traditionalreflexive philosophy and in Husserl’s transcendentalism by, so to speak, “desubjectivizing”subjectivity (“phenomenology is always in danger of reducing itself to a transcendentalsubjectivism.” [HHS, 112]) “Subjectivity,” he said in this regard, “must be lost as radicalorigin if it is to be recovered in a more modest role.” (HHS, 113) On the other hand, andin order to defend the very notion of the subject, he had to contest all those disciplinesand intellectual trends of an objectivistic or naturalistic sort which would make ofsubjectivity an illusion pure and simple. Subjectivism and objectivism were alwaysRicoeur’s twin foes. Typical of his polemic with the latter was his dispute with thestructuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the stated goal of which (anticipatingthe “death of ‘man’” theme in French philosophy) was not to understand better that entitywe call “man” but, quite simply, to “dissolve” him, to reduce him to his “physical-chemical conditions.”118 Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist reductionism (wanting to “study menas if they were ants”) extended even to the very notion of meaning. As he said to Ricoeurin the course of a famous debate:

Meaning (le sens) is always the result of the combination of elements which are notmeaningful (signifiant) in themselves…. In my perspective, meaning is never a first-order phenomenon; meaning is always reducible. In other words, behind all meaningthere 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 inself-understanding, I don’t know what it is.” (What in that case it is, as Ricoeur himselfsaid, 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 thatthe point of all attempts at understanding the world around us (such as those evinced inLévi-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 mostpowerful insight in this regard is that self-understanding is never a given but always atask, 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), 246-47.119 See the text of the debate inEsprit 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 theirdiscourse can be subjected to a structuralist analysis.”

35

crucial “other” in our becoming who we are is the textual other, which is to say, theportrayal 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” (anotion that he shares with Gadamer), the subject is exposed to other possible selves andways of being -- “imaginative variations of the ego” (HHS, 94) -- and is able to emerge witha “refigured,” enlarged, more meaningful self: “To understand oneself is to understandoneself as one confronts the text and to receive from it the conditions for a self other thanthat which first undertakes the reading.” (OI, 193) The great lesson of Ricoeur’s herme-neutic phenomenology is that what we as human subjects most essentially are is what wecan become, the being-otherwise and being-more that are the objects of the effort to existand the desire to be.

Ricoeur’s vital contribution to an interpretive, postmetaphysical phenomenology is tohave shown how -- Heidegger’s belief to the contrary notwithstanding -- it is indeed pos-sible 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 ornon-substantialist notion of subjectivity itself -- a notion which Merleau-Ponty viewed asone of the great discoveries of modern philosophy (albeit, as he acknowledged, one thatwas of a decidedly creative nature, Montaigne being a key figure in this regard) andwhich, flawed though it may have been in its modernist version, he thought it wouldnevertheless 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 beerased by it). By means of his work on selfhood, narrativity, and creative expression (lapoétique 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’swork, by fully accomplishing the interpretive turn in phenomenology, provides an out-standing example of how post-Husserlian phenomenologists have struggled not only tobreak 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 plagueHusserl’s presentation of phenomenology.

Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences

If, as philosophical hermeneutics maintains (akin in this way to Jamesian pragmatism), themeaning 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 ofpraxis -- thedomain of the human sciences could be said to reveal the true meaning of hermeneuticswhich, as Gadamer always insisted, is itself ascientia practica(“hermeneutics is philo-sophy, and as philosophy it is practical philosophy.” [RAS, 111]) To employ a Husserlianexpression, the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) can be viewed, to a great extent,as being so many “regional” hermeneutics; as interpretive sciences (die verstehendenWissenschaften), it is the function of the human sciences to bring general hermeneutictheory to bear on the different realms of human action and endeavor in an interpretiveattempt to discern the meaning of human being-in-the-world that transpires in thesevarious lifeworlds. To a significant extent, the various human sciences are nothing otherthan “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 notonly a problemfor philosophy, on the contrary, they represent a problemof 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. Hermeneuticsis nothing other than, as Gadamer says, thetheoryof the practiceof interpretation, thereflective 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 justa theory.” (RAS, 93) Hermeneutics, one might say, is theory “with practical intent.” Inthe last analysis, the ultimate justification of hermeneutic theory, as a theoryof practice,is its significancefor practice.

Just as Merleau-Ponty went further than Heidegger in the exploration of the bodilynature of our being-in-the-world, so likewise Ricoeur has gone further than Gadamer indealing with methodological issues confronting the human sciences and in entering intoa full-fledged debate with various human disciplines such as psychoanalysis, linguistics,historiography, and literary studies. He has always held the conviction that “philosophycannot exist on its own” (BSS, 653) and that, in fact, it “perishes if its dialogue with thesciences…were to be interrupted.” (IA, 39) He has in this regard voiced a criticism ofGadamer’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 thetitle of Gadamer’smagnum opusfunctioning in fact as a kind of disjunctive) seemed toRicoeur to have the unfortunate effect of continuing the “anti-methodological conclusionsof Heideggerian philosophy.”120 Thus, Ricoeur viewed his own endeavors as fallingmore under the heading of “methodological hermeneutics” than that of “ontologicalhermeneutics” and defined his own approachvis-à-visboth Heidegger and Gadamer aswanting to contribute “to this ontological vehemence an analytical precision which itwould otherwise lack.” (OI, 196) Although Ricoeur fully subscribed to the basic onto-logical concerns of Heidegger and Gadamer, he nonetheless felt that their preoccupationwith fundamental ontology tended to hinder philosophical hermeneutics from entering intoa productive dialogue with the more empirically oriented sciences. While, as he once said,ontology may be the “promised land” of phenomenological reflection, “like Moses, thespeaking and reflecting subject can only glimpse this land before dying.” (CI, 24)

In attempting to work out a methodological hermeneutics in dialogue with the empiricalsciences, 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 “onto-logism.” Whereas Heidegger’s religious-like preoccupation with “Being”121 effectivelyprecluded him from taking much of an interest in the social sciences and the moremundane realm of human affairs, Merleau-Ponty’s concern to explore the bodily natureof our being-in-the-world with the aid of the empirical sciences led him to devote a greatdeal of attention to the relation between phenomenology and the human sciences in hislectures at the Sorbonne in the early 1950s.122 And when, in his later work, Merleau-Ponty turned his attention to explicitly ontological issues (under, in part, the influence ofthe later Heidegger), his way of doing so again contrasted with that of Heidegger. Unlikethe later Heidegger who wanted to think Being directly, to “think Being without regard

120 See Paul Ricoeur, “Langage (Philosophie),” inEncyclopaedia Universalis(1971), 9:780; see alsoRicoeur,Main Trends in Philosophy, 268-69.

121 As Gadamer observes, Heidegger’s preoccupation with “Being,” with theSeinof Da-Sein, “meantthe 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 Merleau-Ponty thought that the only appropriate way of pursuing the Being-question was by meansof a “methodological” ontology or what he called an “intra-ontology.” (VI, 179) Remin-iscent in a way of Marcel’s “concrete approaches” to ontology, Merleau-Ponty sought tothink Being indirectly and only insofar as it manifests itself in beings -- in Nature and inthe various realms of human expressivity conceived of as various “regions of Being” (“themirrors of Being,”124 “the topology of being.” [S, 22]).

Central to Ricoeur’s own endeavors to develop a methodological hermeneutics was theway, starting in the late 1960s,125 he sought to overcome the classical hermeneuticdistinction between “explanation” (Erklärung) and “understanding” (das Verstehen). Thisdistinction was the centerpiece of the earlier hermeneutics of Wilhelm Dilthey, and, in-asmuch as it paralleled the clear-cut distinction he made between the natural sciences(Naturwissenschaften) and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), it reflected themodern, Cartesian split between mind and nature (Gadamer speaks in this regard ofDilthey’s “latent Cartesianism.” [PHC, 124]). Ever the dialectical thinker, Ricoeur soughtto overcome Dilthey’s dichotomous distinction between explanation and understanding byarguing that “objective” explanation is not something purely and simply antithetical to“subjective” understanding, and that, as the science of linguistics clearly demonstrates, itssphere of validity is not limited to the natural sciences. While for Ricoeur (as forGadamer) self-understanding is the ultimate goal of all attempts at understanding,126 itnevertheless remains, Ricoeur argued, that objective-type “explanation” has an importantrole to play in the overall understanding process.127

In the case of text-interpretation, for instance, the ultimate goal is that of appreciativelyentering 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 theway it can be quite helpful to treat the text as a “worldless and authorless” object and toengage in a purely objective, semiotic analysis of the text’s linguistic and structuralfeatures, or to analyze the text in a strictly empirical manner by focusing on historical andphilological factors (Ricoeur refers to this as “the statics of the text”). For Ricoeur, purelyexplanatory procedures, although “secondary in relation to understanding” (OI, 185), havenonetheless 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 understandbetter. “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 oddswith one another, the “detour by way of objectification” (IA, 48) can -- most importantly --help a reflexive-transcendental phenomenology to circumvent the pitfalls of a merephilosophy 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 ofa 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, PeterWinch, who, round about the same time, attempted to revive in an Anglo-Saxon format the Diltheyan di-chotomy between the natural sciences and the social sciences, between (causal) explanation and (empa-thetic) 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 andindubitable knowledge (Ricoeur refers to this as “the narcissistic ego.” [HHS, 192]). Thedetour by way of methodic “distantiation” is the key to overcoming what William Jamescalled “vicious intellectualism” and is the means, as Ricoeur sees it, for achieving a lessdistorted self-understanding than the one we invariably start out with.

Richard Rorty notwithstanding, the hermeneutic theory of Ricoeur and Gadamer hasproven, 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 animportant source of support in their struggle to overcome the stifling and dehumanizinglegacy of logical positivism in the human sciences. In this connection, hermeneutics couldbe said to constitute the most recent, the “third wave,” of influence and inspiration thatphenomenology has had or visited upon on the human sciences, the “second wave” havingcome several decades earlier, pursuant to the existential phenomenology of Heidegger andMerleau-Ponty, and the “first wave” having originated in Husserl’s own phenomenologyand the influences this exerted in the fields of psychology and sociology.

By drawing out the methodological implications of Gadamer’s ontology of humanunderstanding, Ricoeur was able to extend the scope of hermeneutics from its traditionalbase in text-interpretation to the wider, overall realm of the social sciences, i.e., to thosesciences, such as sociology or economics, which are concerned primarily not with textsbut with humanaction.128 (Heidegger’s preoccupation with “Being” -- his “ontologicalvehemence” -- and the quietist position he adopted in this regard [“Gelassenheit”] led himto ignore completely the notion of action [or practical thinking], which he tended toreduce to mere technological busy-ness [“calculative thinking”], while at the same timeasserting 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 actionis that to the degree the social sciences seek, interpretively, to discern themeaningofhuman action, action itself can be viewed “on the model of the text,” as a kind of “quasi-text” or “text analogue.” The reason for this -- in terms of the hermeneutic theory of bothGadamer and Ricoeur -- is that, in the case of both text and action, meaning cannot bereduced 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, sinceindividual action takes place in a cultural/institutional context and thus has an irreduciblysocialdimension to it. As Hannah Arendt, who, unlike her mentor, Heidegger, was greatlyconcerned with the issue of action (thevita activa) said, “no man can act alone, eventhough his motives for action may be certain designs, desires, passions, and goals of hisown.”129

To the degree that human action is social in nature, it cannot properly be understoodin terms of individual psychology alone (actors’s intentions), since in the social realm “ourdeeds escape us and have effects which we did not intend.” (HHS, 206) The meaning ofour deeds escapes us in the same way that, as Ricoeur has argued in his theory of text-interpretation, “the text’s career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author” and em-bodies 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 doingopens up a public space in which its meaning or significance (its significative effects, asit 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: MeaningfulAction 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 toMerleau-Ponty, only humans, strictly speaking, have a history; history, as Alfred Schützsaid, is the “sediment” of human action), and, as the “record” of human actions andtransactions, history is, effectively speaking, a text to be interpreted. As one commentatorsums up the matter: “Hermeneutics is concerned with the interpretation of any expressionof 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 beinterpreted.”130 Thus, in his application of Ricoeur’s reflections on the relation betweentextuality and action to the field of anthropology, Clifford Geertz states: “Doing ethno-graphy is like trying to read (in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a manuscript --foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentiouscommentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transientexamples of shaped behavior.”131

One “reads” the traces of human agency and behavior in much the same way as onereads a text, for, as both Geertz and Ricoeur maintain, the realm of social action isthoroughly “symbolic” in its make-up.132 Now, what makes a text a text in the propersense 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 hasa certain logic to it, as Merleau-Ponty ever insisted (there is, as he said, a “logic immanentin human experience.” [SNS, 65]). The phenomenological fact of the matter is that historyis 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 chrono-logically, 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 listingof disparate events.133 As Ricoeur says, history (“social time”) is “the place of durableeffects, or persisting patterns,” these patterns becoming “thedocumentsof human action.”(HHS, 206) Hermeneutics, conceived of as the interpretation of history, is nothing otherthan the attempt to discern -- amid what Kant called the seemingly “idiotic course ofthings human”134 -- various patterns of action, and to interpret these as to theirsignificance.

This sort of pattern-analysis (the discernment of what Geertz calls “structures ofsignificance”) is a form of eidetic analysis. Patterns are “essences” of a sort, and, whenwe attempt to understand anything, we must have recourse to essences or universals(individuum ineffabile est). This is something Merleau-Ponty fully realized; speaking ofHusserl’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 CharlesE. 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 hisLectures on Ideology and

Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), chap. 15, hereafter LIU. Foran exposition of what he calls “semiotic anthropology,” which is in effect fully hermeneutic, see MiltonSinger, Man’s Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology(Bloomington, Ind.: IndianaUniversity Press, 1984).

133 See in this regard Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” inW.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 thefield 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, forthat 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). Everythingis always, inextricably, part of a larger process, and the essence of any historical courseof events is simply the way (Sosein) in which, in retrospective hindsight, i.e., narration orstory-telling, it appears to the story-teller to have unfolded:Wesen ist was gewesen ist, asHegel remarked. Essences are not things that can be “seen” or,faute de mieux, deduced;they are not mentalistica 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 theyare semantic, interpretive -- which is to say, also, imaginative --constructsof what hasbeen and what, in light of a discernible pattern, is quite likely to be in the future.136 Inshort, 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-definitionalstatements 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 wayin which, by means of language, we interpret them (for whatever purpose), and the“essential relationships” (Wesenszusammenhänge) between things (that metaphysiciansbelieve are simply “there,” waiting to be discovered) are a function of the particularpointof viewwith which we approach them. (The “correctness” of these points of view -- which,as Alfred Schütz observed, are never absolute but are always expressive of particularinterests, 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 ofexperience to another.)

The point I wish to stress in all this is that essences, so conceived, are the only meansby which we can prevail over our facticity (our lostness in the everyday world) so as tothink 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 remainan unbearable sequence of sheer happenings.”137 To allude to an ancient maxim (sapientiaest ordinare), the function of interpretation is precisely that of discerning, amid what isoften 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 thusalways revisable in the light of further experience. It should also be noted that, althoughthese essences oreidèare not “metaphysical entities,” they are also not (as Husserl rightlyobserved) mere generalizations or “inductions,” in the empiricistic sense of the term, andthat, 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 “Phenomenologyand the Sciences of Man.” (PriP, 54-55 and passim) In this lecture course Merleau-Ponty states that “aknowledge 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 logicaldemonstration but by rhetorical persuasion (on the intimate relation between hermeneutics and rhetoric,see myThe Politics of Postmodernity, chap. 4; on the heuristic and cognitive function of metaphor, seemy 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 patternsthat we might not otherwise have noticed).138

One could equally well in this context speak of “ideal types,” a key notion in thephenomenology of the social lifeworld of Alfred Schütz that he took over from MaxWeber.139 For Schütz, who remained faithful to Husserl’s transcendental turn and forwhom 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 humanaffairs 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 socialhermeneut must view the results of human agency through the lens of “ideal types,” thesebeing “constructs of the second degree, namely constructs of the constructs made by actorson the social scene, whose behavior the scientist observes and tries to explain inaccordance with the procedural rules of his science”140 -- the assumption being that thefunction of the social sciences is that of attaining “objective,” i.e., intersubjectively verifi-able, knowledge of the “subjective” meaning structures that guide and inform the actionof individual agents.

The reason why the social scientist must have recourse to second-order constructs, suchas these, is because, as Ricoeur would say, the consciousness actors have of themselvesis often a false consciousness, and the meaningful consequences of human action are oftennot the ones consciously intended by these actors. Because we are not sovereign con-sciousnesses (“a pure consciousness is capable of anything except being ignorant of itsintentions,” as Merleau-Ponty said [PP, 440]), we do not have full control over themeaning of what we do and are liable to be surprised (often unpleasantly so) by theconsequences of our own actions. In any event, depth psychology has sensitized us to thefact 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 ob-servers of the human condition (or folly, as Erasmus called it) have remarked, humanbeings seem to have an undeniable talent for duplicity -- even, and perhaps especially, asregards themselves. Genuine self-understanding isalwaysan arduous undertaking, as GabrielMarcel indicated, when he stated: “The task of the profoundest philosophic speculationis perhaps that of discovering the conditions (almost always disconcerting) under whichthe real balance-sheet [of one’s life] may occasionally emerge in a partial and temporaryfashion from underneath the crooked figures that mask it.”141

138 As economists Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Zilich have shown, “statistical significance” inpattern-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 Regres-sions,”Journal of Economic Literature34, no. 1 (March 1996), and idem, “Size Matters: The StandardError 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 scienceand to work out a phenomenological grounding for Austrian economics, the most prominent school ofeconomics at the time, see my entry “Economics” in theEncyclopedia 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 analysisthereof inExperience 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 none-theless 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 physico-mathematical type, discoverable by objective [objectivistic] thought, but that formulawhich sums up some unique manner of behaviour towards others, towards Nature, timeand death: a certain way of patterning the world which the historian should be capable ofseizing upon and making his own.” (PP, xviii)

Given the hermeneutic difficulties alluded to above, Ricoeur was assuredly right whenhe 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,” asGadamer says, “that we can in a certain sense always say, We don’t know what is happeningto us.” (RAS, 36) But this is precisely why something like Schütz’s “typification” isindispensable 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 seekto 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 thecase of the evolution of language or morals (moeurs), these orders are indeed spontaneousand not consciously designed and technocratically maintained -- an “invisible hand” orstructural logic is always at work and (for better or worse) produces its effects independ-ently 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 orientationof 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 forRicoeur’s aversion to them) are highly useful ways of viewing cultural and intellectualhistory, i.e., historical and sociologicalprocesses, for, as Ricoeur does recognize, there are“certain trends in the history of philosophy.” (BSS, 665) It is the function of ideal-typeanalysis 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. Like-wise, 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 onedidn’t know that one of the essential characteristics of mainstream modern philosophy wasits preoccupation with, as Gadamer would say, the “epistemology problem,” one could neverappreciate 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 themodern “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 takenby Richard Rorty in this regard), hermeneutics staunchly defends the exercise of theory asdescribed 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 thepresent 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 myThe 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 Politicsof Postmodernity.

43

and they are such, precisely because “humans are the beings who have thelogos,” i.e.,language/reason.145 The hermeneutic fact of the matter is that we cannot make sense ofour practices, or what Geertz calls our “shaped behavior,” without having recourse totheory (to typifications, periodizations, pattern-analyses, etc.) Without theory (the “fieldof ideality,” as Merleau-Ponty referred to it), experience would be meaningless. Withouttheory, we would have no well-formulated questions to put to our own mute experiencethat would allow us to bring it to the proper expression of its own meaning (“We cannothave experiences without asking questions” [TM, 362]), and thus, without leading questions,there would be nothing for us to learn. Moreover, without theory, without an interpretivegrasp of the structural logic of the various realms or orders of human agency, we couldnot intervene -- in a responsible manner, that is -- in the empirical arrangement of thingsin such a way as, on the one hand, to enhance the likelihood of achieving the beneficialresults we desire and, on the other hand, of decreasing the chances of inadvertently pro-ducing undesirable, counter-productive results. Without theory, there would be no socialscience and thus no means for bringing reason to bear on human affairs in such a way asto 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 humanevents seem to unfold, we could never have any realistic hope of successfully making thekind of structural or institutional changes that are likely (subject, of course to the vicis-situdes ofFortuna) to make for genuine progress and the greater freedom of all.146

As the preceding remarks indicate, the operant presupposition of hermeneutic reflectionis that there is always a kind of objective logic at work in human affairs -- “objective” in thesense that this logic is not the result of mere human willing and wanting, and is, in thisway, expressive of an element of “necessity” (necessità, as Machiavelli called it) in humanaffairs. This logic is, as it were, a logic that is the result of human action but not ofhuman design. The logic at work in human affairs (Hegel referred to this as “objectivespirit,” a notion that greatly fascinated Merleau-Ponty147) is objective in the sense alsothat 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, “outthere” in theintersubjectiverealm of social practices and cultural/political/economic in-stitutions (the social/historicalintermonde, as Merleau-Ponty called it).148

The fact that various such logics exist, renders vain the modernist, utopian idea thathumans can arrange things however they see fit, so as to achieve total mastery over theirown destiny (Ricoeur refers to this pathological form of utopianism as “the magic ofthought”). Even Kant, that great believer in the ability of enlightened humans to take theirdestiny in hand and better their condition, recognized that “from such crooked wood ashumanity is made of nothing perfectly straight can be built.”149 Although hermeneuticsis 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): 88.146 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’ssaying, that power tends to corrupt and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, counts as a universal lawof a particular type (echoing Montesquieu, Gadamer observed that “every form of power, not just that ofa tyrant or an absolute ruler, is dedicated to increasing its own power” [In Praise of Theory, 94]). For adiscussion of the role of hermeneutic theory in the understanding of social practices, see my “BetweenTheory and Practice: Hayek on the Logic of Cultural Dynamics,”Cultural Dynamics3, no. 1 (1990).

147 A key factor in the development of French phenomenology was the “existentialized” Hegel of JeanWahl and Alexandre Kojève.

148 See Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in idem,Philosophy and the HumanSciences, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 36.

149 Kant, Idea for a Universal History, Sixth Thesis.

44

misunderstanding of the hermeneutic position to think that it implies some kind ofdeterminism and undermines the reality of human freedom.

Freedom and necessity (le volontaire et l’involontaire, to allude to the title of one ofRicoeur’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 justanything is possible at any moment. Since we are not pure consciousnesses fully awareof 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 neverin such a way as to be able to change them, just in any way we please. Just as, in replyto 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 thelogic of things is beyond the ability of humans deliberately to control, it is neverthelessalways possible, through the creative power of the imagination, to introduce into this orthat order of human behavior new structural/institutional constraints or incentives (in theeconomic sense of the term) which operate not in a moralistic (“subjectivistic”) waythrough an appeal to people’s “good intentions” but in a thoroughlypraxial manner, bydirectly affecting people’sbehavior. The same thing is true on the personal level. In bothinstances, social and personal, human freedom is the freedom to create new habits andnew constraints, thereby alteringla force des chosesand opening up new directions forour being-in-the-world.150 As Merleau-Ponty pointed out in this regard, “Our freedomdoes not destroy our situation, but gears itself to it.” (PP, 442)

Human freedom is never absolute, nor is it merely “necessity understood,” freelysubmitted 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 thelogos (language/reason),151 of intervening judiciously in thecourse 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), bringingabout new beginnings. The “gift of freedom,” as Arendt observed, is “the mental endowmentwe have for beginning something new, of which we know that it could just as well notbe.”152

The crucial thing is that we exercise our limited freedom in a reflexively enlightenedway.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, inThe Principles of Psychology.151 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 isseemingly predictable, given the dynamics of a given state-of-affairs, humans can, by that very fact, alterthe course of events in unanticipated ways. Predicting the behavior of the stock market, for instance, cansignificantly affect what that behavior turns out to be. This has to do with what financier-philosopherGeorge Soros calls the “reflexivity” of human behavior (George Soros,Soros on Soros: Staying Aheadof the Curve[New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1995], 72, 209-220), a phenomenon that Ricoeur also talksabout 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 anessential difference between the human order of symbolic interaction and the natural order of deterministiccause and effect.

45

interpreted the world, and that the point is to change it, the fact is that if we want tochange the world for the better, we must first interpret it in the appropriate way. Thereinlies the essence of human freedom. History is never rigidly determined, but neither is itever simply invented -- “out of whole cloth,” as Marx would say. Historical forces(necessity) are something to be interpreted, and, in being so interpreted, transformed. Theimportant thing is to think well. As Pascal said in his famouspenséeon “man, the think-ing reed, the weakest thing in nature,” the uniqueness (grandeur) of human beings inregard to nature is that they are reflective, thinking beings who, as such, know full wellthe great, crushing advantage that natural forces have over them, whereas nature knowsnothing of this -- from which he concluded that “all our dignity consists in thought” andthat, 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, self-interpreting, questioning animal -- is in fact nothing other than freedom itself. Necessitynotwithstanding, we are, ultimately, as Dostoyevski said, responsible for everything wedo. The fact, however, that our freedom, though real, is finite and that we are not pureconsciousnesses, fully aware of our own intentions and thus fully in control of themeaning of what we do, introduces an element of tragedy into the human condition. It isespecially tragic when we have no other option but to choose, freely but with heavyresponsibility, not between the good and the not-quite-so-good, but between what aremanifest 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. Assuch, and as is the case with all attempts at understanding, it is guided by certain presup-positions. The most important of these is what Ricoeur calls the “postulate of meaningful-ness.” That our lived experience is indeed meaningful and can, accordingly, be broughtto the proper expression of its own meaning, is a “prejudice” or, as Merleau-Ponty calledit, a “presumption on the part of reason,” but this presumption is not at all of an idealistnature (having to do with an “idealism of meaning”) and does not presume that thereexists some kind of pre-established harmony between the rational and the real, or eventhat the notion of total intelligibility is at all meaningful. Hermeneutics’s postulate ofmeaningfulness is not metaphysical but phenomenological in nature, in that it is groundedin our own lived experience and is nothing other than the articulation, on the level ofreason or reflection, of what Merleau-Ponty called our “primordial faith” (Urdoxa) in theexistence of the world, a “faith” which is constitutive of what, as perceiving beings, weessentially and inescapably are. As Merleau-Ponty said in this regard, the “ever-reiteratedassertion” 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 herme-neutic 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 meaningfulpatterns in the traces of human life. It is, of course, also a fact that no interpretation canever legitimately claim to be “final,” to be the definitive truth of things, the one and onlycorrect interpretation, for, as we also know from experience, there is no interpretation that

154 Pascal,Pensées. no. 200; see alsopenséeno. 620: “Man is obviously made for thinking. Thereinlies 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, moredeveloped and sophisticated interpretations. Any given interpretation, no matter how satis-fying, is only, as James said, a provisional resting-place. “The very idea of a definitiveinterpretation,” Gadamer insists, “seems to be intrinsically contradictory. Interpretation,”as he goes on to say, “is always on the way” -- such that “the wordinterpretationpointsto the finitude of human being and the finitude of human knowing.” (RAS, 105) It is, inshort, the nature of experience and interpretation that there can be no such thing as “thelast word.” (Cf. GOC, 60). As the phenomenological psychologist Eugene Gendlin hasshown in a revealing study of the relation between experience and expression (based on hisown clinical experience as a practicing psychologist), it is the very nature of experiencethat the “felt meaning” of any experience can always be articulated in ever more refinedways; one “vital characteristic of experiencing,” as Gendlin points out, is that “any datumof experiencing—any aspect of it, no matter how finely specified—can be symbolized andinterpretedfurther and further.”155 Adding to Gendlin’s observations on this matter,David Michael Levin points out that “the relation between experience and the languageof its articulation is an ongoing process of hermeneutic disclosure, whereby (1) languageforms the experience it is articulating in the process of articulating it and (2) experiencecontinues 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 theproper 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 asuper-abundance of meaning to the abundance of non-sense (there is no experience thatcannot 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 chaoticjumble of discrete “sense data” that British empiricism took it to be (or as James said ofKant’s metaphysical epistemology, “There is no originally chaotic manifold to be reducedto 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 arecondemned to meaning.” (PP, xix) “The sensible,” as he also said, “is, like life, a treasuryever full of things to say.” (VI, 252) This is, of course, something that poets and greatnovelists like Marcel Proust have always known.158

In an arresting image, Merleau-Ponty once provided this description of the humansituation: “Instead of an intelligible world there are radiant nebulae separated by expansesof 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 notpreclude it from recognizing the existence of a kind of radical ignorance and uncertaintyin human existence; there is, as Jean Grondin rightly observes, “no triumphalism ofreason” 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 Psycho-logical 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 treesnear 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-GeorgGadamer, 167.

47

is not rationalist or idealist in that it is not simply a version of Leibniz’s “principle ofsufficient reason” (nihil est sine ratione). In human affairs there are many things whichare without reason or are resistant to reason, such that there is, and can be, noultima ratioto which human beings could have access and which would bring their search for meaningto a happy conclusion. Apart from the absolute or “apodictic,” but empty, certainty of theEgo cogitotype, the only kind of certainty available to humans is of a strictly relative andconditional sort, the kind of certainty Husserl called “empirical” or “presumptive.”160

Hermeneutics, as Ricoeur says, echoing Merleau-Ponty, is thus “a philosophy without anyabsolute.” (IA, 13) The highest knowledge we can attain to is the knowledge that thereare many things we do not know and likely cannot ever know, or even know that wedon’t know. As Pascal remarked, reason is nothing if it does not go as far as to recognizethat.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.” Hermeneuticenlightenment is not philosophicalgnosis; it is, rather, as Gadamer said, “sophia, aconsciousness of not knowing…. [H]uman wisdom is…the awareness of not-knowing [dasWissen des Nichtwissens], docta ignorantia.” (RPJ, 31, 33) “There is,” as Gadamer alsostated, “no claim of definitive knowledge with the exception of one: the acknowledgmentof the finitude of human being in itself.”162 To be reasonable is “to know the limits ofone’s own understanding.”163

To emphasize, as hermeneutic phenomenology does, the unsurpassable finitude ofhuman 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, “unremittingvirtù(la virtù sans aucune résignation).” (S, 35) The search for meaning can never be anythingother than a constantstrugglefor meaning, a struggle against our inveterate tendency tomisunderstand things -- as well as against what James called “a certain blindness” asregards the Other, and to which we are all prone -- by keeping ourselves open to new ex-periences, to further expansions in our horizons. When Gadamer said that “Being that canbe understood is language,” he was not making a metaphysical statement and was notclaiming that being could ever be made fully intelligible or that our life-experience couldever be fully explicated. He was, rather, pointing to what is morally incumbent on anyreflecting subject: “The principle of hermeneutics simply means that we should try tounderstand everything that can be understood.” (PH, 31) “A hermeneutically informednotion of truth,” as Calvin Schrag observes, is one “liberated from its traditionalepistemological paradigm,”164 which is to say that, for hermeneutics, “truth” is not so mucha cognitivist-epistemological concept as it is an existential-moral concept and refers to away of living, a resolutely communicative mode of being-in-the-world. Truth, for herme-neutics, is always of a “processual” nature and is a matter of “openness.” “The truth,” asRicoeur says, “is…the lighted place in which it is possible to continue to live and tothink.”165 Or, as Gadamer said, “The truth of experience always implies an orientationtoward 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 infinitenumber 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 Husserliana2 (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 byexperience itself.” (TM, 355) As a young Lithuanian phenomenologist has correctlyobserved, “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 inwhatever comes to understanding in our speaking of it there are always many things thatnecessarily remain unsaid. The most profound insight of Heidegger, who pursued withdetermination 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 adventof truth (unconcealment,a-letheia), always has the dual character of both revealing andconcealing. That being so, the self in search of self-understanding never experiences a“full” presence of itself to itself. Being in the nature of aprocess, human understandingis always only “on the way.” The important thing, that which allows for a certaincoherence and meaning in our lives, is persistence in the asking of questions, for asMerleau-Ponty remarked, “Every question, even that of simple cognition, is part of thecentral question that is ourselves.” (VI, 104) Or, as Ricoeur’s mentor, Gabriel Marcel, hadsaid earlier on, the question concerning the self is the question on which “all otherquestions hang.”167

An ancient Chinese sage once said: “The various artisans dwell in their workshops inorder to perfect their craft, just as thejunzi [the “gentleman” or wise person] keeps onlearning in order to discover the truth [to reach the utmost of the Way].”168 Thispersistence -- “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), whichconsists in “awaiting one’s destiny (ming)” in “steadfastness of purpose.”169 This is theWay (Dao) of understanding and the basis of humanness (ren; humanitas) and the morallife.170

Postscript

In this paper I have sought to cast a retrospective glance over some one hundred years ofphenomenology, taking as my theme the interpretive turn in phenomenology. Despitesignificant differences between the leading figures I have considered (and despite the factthat 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 tohave shown in this “phenomenology of phenomenology” (limited, as it necessarily hasbeen, to a select number of general themes), a certain logic -- dictated by the thingsthemselves -- in the way in which phenomenology has unfolded over the last manydecades and during which time new themes and concerns have appeared at this or thatmoment and some older ones have faded away.

Given the protean way in which phenomenology has developed, it would undoubtedlybe best to avoid speaking, as is often done, of “the Phenomenological Movement” (the

166 Saulius Genusias, “Analysis of Historically Effected Consciousness,” manuscript (2003).167 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 theDao of humanistic self-cultivation (Bildung) of the

early Confucians and should not be confused with the mystical and anti-humanistDao of Laozi, i.e., of“Daoism,” which was, not surprisingly, theDao invoked by Heidegger (see Martin Heidegger,On the Wayto Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz [New York: Harper and Row, 1971], 92).

49

title Herbert Spiegelberg gave to his monumental history of phenomenology). Not onlywas phenomenology never a “school” of philosophy (as Spiegelberg readily allowed), itwas 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 onemight say, “hard core” being for Spiegelberg the disciplined, disinterested, and patientsearch for “essences” by means of a direct, intuitive grasp or “seeing” (Wesenschau) andfaithful 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 ultimatescience of being would be carried on after him by a dedicated group of researchers whowould, in concerted teamwork, penetrate ever deeper into the field of pure subjectivity,mapping out ever more completely its essential,a priori, necessarily determined configura-tions. But this was not to be. In contrast to certain other trends in philosophy, there wasnever anything like a phenomenological orthodoxy -- or even a phenomenological ortho-praxy. Certainly, there is a particular way of doing philosophy which is recognizably“phenomenological” and which makes for a definite set of “family resemblances” amongits practitioners, but this is not to say that there is anything like a specific and commonlyaccepted “phenomenological method.” Perhaps the most that can be said in a general wayabout phenomenology as it has unfolded over the course of the last century is that, to usea term of Merleau-Ponty’s, phenomenology is a certain “style” of thinking (expressive ofa “phenomenological attitude”), the “essentials” of which are an unremitting aversion toall forms of metaphysical reductionism and an abiding concern for the integrity of ourown lived experience of things both human and natural. Whether this particular style ofthinking -- this tradition -- can be expected to survive or even to flourish in this new centuryis another question. In the realm of human affairs, nothing is certain, but, given the recentrenewed interest in the leading figures of classical phenomenology, and given also thesignificant number of new phenomenological organizations continually springing up, thereare 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 conceptualapparatus than that of existential-hermeneutic phenomenology for counteracting the ever-present and seemingly ineradicable, naturalistic tendency on the part of humans to reducehuman beings to that which is purely objectifiable (and thus manipulable) about them. Thetask of contesting this scientific-technocratic, anti-humanist, or “engineering” approach tothings human, and recalling humans to their own humanness remains the indispensabletask of any phenomenologically-inspired philosophy, both as a “pure” or general philosophyand in its “applications” to the different realms of the socio-cultural, the political, and theeconomic lifeworlds. In all these domains the supreme theoretical/practical task must bethat of defending the claims of communicative or dialogical rationality (Vernüftigkeit) overthe imperious demands and one-sidedness or “monologic” (as Gadamer called it) of merelyinstrumental 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 nothave passed its zenith, but indicates, rather, what remains one of the most crucial tasksof thinking and which, as such, is something that, as Merleau-Ponty would say, still hasall of its life before it (see PriP, 190). By its very nature, the truth of the phenomeno-logical project can never be a “completed” truth (une vérité accomplie) but must remainalways what Merleau-Ponty calledvérité à faire.

171 At the present time, there exist some 117 phenomenological organizations world-wide. Forinformation on developments in phenomenology, contact the web site of the Center for AdvancedResearch in Phenomenology (CARP) directed by Lester Embree <http://www.phenomenologycenter.org>.

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 towhat Marcel referred to as the “mystery of being” and who, however errant he may havebeen 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 alreadytaken as something past which is only recorded historically along with other schoolsof philosophy. But in what is most its own phenomenology is not a school. It is thepossibility of thinking, at times changing and only thus persisting, of corresponding tothe 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 manifestnessremains 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 philosophicalchallenge. On the one hand, its importance for the development of the Existentialistmovement is undeniable: the first edition of theMetaphysical Journalis published in1927, the same year in which Heidegger publishedSein und Zeiton Husserl’s reviewJahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, but the early notes ofMarcel’sJournalare 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 philo-sophers who attended these gatherings at one time or another. On the other hand, althoughhe did not like to be labeled as an “existentialist,” referring to his own way of thinkingas “Christian socratism,” the label of “Christian existentialist” which was attributed to himdid 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 profes-sion of faith; thus it is rather a “philosophy of religion,” because his thought opens ontotranscendence); other kinds of “existentialist” thought were preferred, and his thought hasbeen 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 ofshared values and by the confrontation (if not conflict) between different cultures, seemsto issue to philosophy the challenge of expressing itself on the possibility of a thoughtable 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 whichexcludes the possibility of a return to traditional metaphysics (which cannot be easilyconsidered as shareable by different cultures and which, moreover, always hides withinitself the risk of the assumption of a “violent” point of view) and the secular possibilityof an absolute relativism (which renounces the search of a truly shareable sense, andwhich always hides the risk of a fall into complete aphasia). I think that a re-examinationof some aspects of Marcel’s thought can help contemporary philosophy in setting out theboundary markers of this space.

In what follows, I will try to make the point about the relationship between Marcel andphenomenology. 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 theconnection will be clear at the end of this paper, when I will treat the problem of univer-sality. Finally, I will try to answer a question: is it possible to speak of a “Marcellianhermeneutics”?

1 Acknowledgment: part of this paper was written when I enjoyed the hospitality of HeythropCollege, University of London, UK, and has been presented -- together with a previous version -- at thePhilosophy Research Seminar (Heythrop College). Helpful comments from Peter Gallagher, MichaelKirwan, and seminar participants are gratefully acknowledged. I would like also to thank Tom Michaudand Brendan Sweetman for their suggestions.

2 See Maurizio Pagano, “La dimensione dell’universalità e l’esperienza ermeneutica,” in GiuseppeNicolaci 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. Thefirst one is Henri Bergson, who was Marcel’s teacher.3 The second is British andAmerican Idealism: Marcel studied deeply the thoughts of Coleridge, Bradley, Royce, andhe often cited them in his works. The possibility of an influence of the phenomenologicalschool of Edmund Husserl could be considered a problem, but this problem has beenalready solved, partially thanks to some explicit considerations formulated by Marcelhimself, and partially thanks to the monumental work by Herbert Spiegelberg,ThePhenomenological Movement,4 and the fundamental article by Paul Ricoeur,GabrielMarcel and Phenomenology.5

Marcel “never claimed to be a phenomenologist.”6 On the contrary, in hisReply toPaul Ricoeur, he wrote: “I am barely acquainted with Husserl’s philosophy. I rememberreading theIdeensome months before the beginning of the First World War and not under-standing a word of it. I had not yet read theLogical Investigations. Much later I listenedto the first Cartesian Meditations, when Husserl himself came to deliver them at the Sor-bonne. At first I found them interesting, then tiresome.”7 The year of Husserl’s Sorbonnelectures was 1929; on August 5 of the same year, he wrote an entry of his secondJournal,later published with the titleEtre et avoir, which clearly shows his awareness of Germanphenomenology.8 And in The Mystery of Being, which contains the two series of GiffordLectures given by Marcel in 1949 and 1950 at the University of Aberdeen, “he remarkedtwice with approval that Husserlian phenomenology had developed the conception of con-sciousness as intentional, i.e., as referring to something other than itself.”9 But we cannotspeak of an “influence” in any case: “the truth seems to be that he is a largely underivativethinker.”10 Jean Heing, in his pioneering work entitledPhénoménologie et philosophiereligieuse, wrote: “We believe we may affirm that, even if German phenomenology (tosuppose the impossible) had remained unknown in France, nevertheless a phenomenologywould have been constituted there; and this, to a large extent, would be due to the in-fluence of Gabriel Marcel.”11

Thus, where can we find a similarity between Marcel and phenomenology? We canfind it in the philosophical approach and in the method of research. It is not by chance thatMarcel uses the wordphenomenologyin the title of a lecture given to the PhilosophicalSociety 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 onlyone whose thought and words took a sure and lasting hold on me.” Gabriel Marcel, “An AutobiographicalEssay,” 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: MartinusNijhoff Publishers, 1982), 446-469.

5 Paul Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” in Schilpp and Hahn, ed.,The Philosophyof 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 inBeing and Having.12 This work is cited by Ricoeur as evidence for the factthat “The refusal of system . . . is . . . what places Husserl and Marcel in the same philo-sophical 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 ofdiscursivity” and the famous “‘zu den Sachen selbst’ of Husserl.”14

The refusal of the system led Marcel to become an unsystematic thinker. But even anunsystematic philosopher needs a method -- maybe he needs a method more than a sys-tematic thinker. Thus, the problem of a proper method became “more and more urgent forMarcel.”15

Marcel’s philosophical approach deals with the attention to the concrete experiencerather 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 isessentially a concrete rather than an abstract approach, the use of examples is notmerely an auxiliary process but, on the contrary, an essential part of our method ofprogressing. An example, for us, is not merely an illustration of an idea which wasfully in being even before it was illustrated.16

The definition of his own thought as a “Christian socratism” is in fact linked with theattention to concrete experience and to the proceeding through examples. The use ofexamples is considered by Ricoeur as a point of contact between the Marcellian and thephenomenological method: “Again like Husserl, Marcel strives to decipher meanings onthe basis of well-chosen examples and significant cases, and this implies that the essence-example relationship is irreducible to any inductive generalization and consists in a directreading of meaning in a singular fact.”17 This approach explains the skeptical attitudewhich Ricoeur always assumes when he examines the attempts of the abstract reason toexpress itself about the concreteness of existence: the objective constitutesfor me (witha meaningfuloverturning) what is onlyapparent, thus unreal, and which constitutes forMarcel the sphere of the problematic.18 From this point of view, “His stake in phenome-nology . . . represented a stage in his search for a concrete philosophy and for concreteapproaches to it and to the ‘ontological mystery.’”19

Nevertheless, in order to analyze deeply the relationship between Marcel andphenomenology and, above all, in order to understand whether his thought can reallyrepresent a fruitful contribution to contemporary hermeneutic philosophy and to the ques-tion of universality, it is necessary to focus our attention on the notion of body and thenon 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 aboutbody. In fact, if we want to beconcrete, we cannot leave this out of consideration. Inorder to clarify the relationship between me and my body, we have to use the notion ofCoenaesthesis.Coenaesthesisis the common sensation of general and immediate perceptionof our body, an elementary form of bodily awareness.Coenaesthesisis the internal sen-sation of one’s body: in fact, the body is continuously perceived as one’s body by theperson 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 Marcelwrites, “then existence is first of allincarnation.” Marcel explains: “the term ‘incarnation’. . . applies solely and exclusively in our present context to the situation of a being whoappears to himself to be linked fundamentally and not accidentally tohis or her body.”22

If Coenaesthesisis the perception of my body as mine,incarnation is the conscious-ness that I cannot see the world but with my eyes, through my eyes. I can never “jumpout of what I am.”23 My body is the insuperable border which distinguishes me and therest of the world.

It is clear that the starting point of Marcel’s way of thinking is very different from thephenomenological approach. As Ricoeur stresses, “Husserl’s first philosophical gesture isreduction. Marcel’s is diametrically opposed. . . . Marcel embarks on his itinerary by intro-ducing the idea of ‘situation.’ . . . First and fundamentally, being implied or involvedexcluded both the distance characteristic of reduction and the promotion of a ‘disinterestedspectator,’ the very subject of phenomenology.”24

The next step should be to analyze our consciousness. But this is not possible, accordingto Marcel, because to develop a real analysis, our consciousness should bemorethan whatit wants to analyze. This is not the case, because the subject of this analysis is conscious-ness, and the object is consciousness itself. Marcel writes: “we must be wary of the ten-dency that leads us to place ourselves as it were outside consciousness in order torepresent 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 afact indeed. So, how do we develop it? We develop it as we perceive that there is some-thing outside us. In other words, I understand that there is an “inside us” because thereis an “outside us.”26 It is the perception of the “rest of the world,” of all which is beyondmy 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 relationthat I form with myvécu, 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 aboveall consciousnessof 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 ofwhatever it is that we mean byself.”27

It is important to note that to understand that there is something outside me and that I canbe 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 wholeto which I am related but which is separate from me; I see nothing but other bodiesaround me. Only subsequently, once I have developed my consciousness, and thanks tothe perception of this indistinctive world, I can, so to speak, “argue from analogy” and graspthat the bodies of the other human beings hide a consciousness in the same wayI hide itto their eyes. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that a difference between the way inwhich I perceive myself as consciousness and the way in which I perceive other humanbeings as consciousnesses, always remains. This happens just because the perception ofmyself as a consciousness isimmediate, whereas the perception of other human beings asconsciousnesses ismediate; I distinguish them by analogy. This is also the reason why ahuman being always runs the risk of considering others simply as bodies, as tools whichI can use.28

This conception of body is very important within Marcel’s thought and has a lot ofconsequences within his way of thinking. In this regard, Paul Ricoeur has spoken aboutan absolute “Copernican revolution” which “returns to the subjectivity its privilege.”29

This is, in fact, a quite unique conception within Existentialism and within that Continen-tal thought which Existentialism has generated. Let us sum up: “The body that I call mybody is in fact only one body among many others, in relation to these other bodies, it hasbeen endowed with no special privileges whatsoever. It is not enough to say that this isobjectively true, it is the precondition of any sort of objectivity whatsoever, it is thefoundation of all scientific knowledge (in the case [sic] we are thinking of anatomy, ofphysiology, and all their connected disciplines).”30

From the other side: “The purely private self is an abstraction: the ego given in experienceis a being-by-participation. . . . we cannot effectively divorce the self from that in which itparticipates, because it is only the participation which allows there to be a self. Participa-tion, in other words, is the foundation -- the only foundation -- for my experience of exist-ence.”31 In other words, as Ricoeur emphasizes, “the first ontological position is neitherI existing nor thou existing but theco-esse.”32

At this point, the question is: how can I conceive myself as a unique and unrepeatableexistent and, at the same time, aim at a real sharing of judgment with other existents?33

Even if the first ontological position is theco-esse, how does this position legitimate thepossibility of any universality whatsoever?

27 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 1: 52.28 It is interesting to note that in the Foreword to the English translation of hisLa 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 cor-relate 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.

59

We have seen that we do not originally perceive our body as “a body among manyothers.” 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. Thefirst one argues that “this body has just some properties, that it is liable to suffer the samedisorders, that it is fated in the end to undergo the same destruction, as any other bodywhatsoever”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, asfinal.”35 According to Marcel, the “fulcrum,” or the “springboard,” of this different kindof reflection is a “massive, indistinct sense of one’s total existence.” And here we can notethe profound difference between Marcel’s and Husserl’s philosophical approaches: “itconcerns the very relation of human beings and the world. For Husserl this relation maybe raised to the rank of spectacle for the disinterested eye of the meditating ego. ForMarcel the questions of suicide and of death impose on the human relation to the worldthe fundamental characteristic of concern. On this point Marcel is incontestably closer toHeidegger than to Husserl.”36

Our existence isincarnation. We cannot “define” it (“for, as the condition which makesthe defining activity possible, it seems to be prior to all definition”); we only try to giveit a name and to locate it “as an existential center.” The name given by Marcel to thiskind of reasoning is “secondary reflection,” or “second degree reflection” (réflexionseconde). But, before we consider this kind of reflection as such, we have to clarify firstwhat exactly Marcel means by “existence.”

Existence

Approaching the notion of existence, we cannot forget theCoenaesthesisand the bondwith my body. It is difficult, because we always have the temptation to keep outside theproblem, but we cannot in any way: this problem, in fact, inevitably invades the wholescenario. In a certain sense, I am part of the problem that I am trying to analyze.37 It isimportant to resist this temptation, because to forget the bond with my body, whichgrounds 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 fromthat existent the existence of which I cannot deny in any sense. Marcel writes: “This cen-trally significant existence, my denial of which entails the inconceivability of my assertingany 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, withthe expression “I exist,” Marcel means something more than the simple presence of abiologically 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 thatthe question is badly put. We read:

If, in the question, ‘DoI exist?’ I take the ‘I’ separately and treat it as a sort of mentalobject that can be isolated, a sort of ‘that’, and if I take the question as meaning ‘is’

34 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 1: 92.35 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.

60

or is not existence something that can be predicated of this ‘that’? the question doesnot seem to suggest any answer to itself, not even a negative answer. But this wouldprove simply that the question had been badly put, that it was, if I may say so, a viciousquestion. It was vicious for two reasons: because the ‘I’ cannot in any case whatsoeverbe treated as a ‘that’, because the ‘I’ is the very negation of the ‘that’ whatsoever andalso because existence is not a predicate, as Kant seems to have established once andfor all, in theCritique of Pure Reason.39

Marcel stresses two points here. The first one is that theI is not a that, it is not a“mental object.” Of course, Marcel is not denying the possibility of thinking the I andtreating it as an object, as a psychologist could do, when writing an essay about “psycho-logical disorders of the I,” for example. To be honest, we are talking about the I as a men-tal object even in this moment. What Marcel wants to emphasize is that if I ask the ques-tion “Do I exist?,” I cannot considermy I as an object and, if I do this, what I am doingis a mere fiction. In other words, if I consider the I as an object within this question, I amnot talking aboutmy I, in fact, rather, I am talking about aconcept.

The second point stressed by Marcel is that existence is not a predicate. I cannot conceivethe existence without the I -- or, better, withoutmy I -- in any case.

This is also the reason why Marcel strongly criticizes Descartes and the argument ofcogito. Marcel sees, in this argument, the danger of a dissociation between the gnoseo-logical subject, as an organ of an objective knowledge, and the vital element in our being.In other words, Marcel emphasizes thesumrather than thecogito; we cannot dissect theaffirmation “I am,” because it refers to existence, and we argued that it is impossible totreat it correctly when using the traditional rational categories.40

Therefore, we established that “I exist” and that existence is, so to say, an “opaquedatum.” The reason why, according to Marcel, we cannot use the rational in a scientificsense instrument to analyze it, is that existence is not aproblem: it is a mystery. In Beingand Having, Marcel explains: “A problem is something which I meet, which I find com-pletely before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery issomething in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as asphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its mean-ing and initial validity.”41

Thus,Having is the way to solve the problems I find in the world. But what isBeing?We could answer, in a speculative way, that it is the way to treat the mysteries I find inlife, but this does not seem to help very much. First of all, we have to say that Being issomething which deals with the notion of existence. In which sense? As a matter of factwe cannot use a rational, analyzing, dissecting, isolating language, we have to resort toa metaphor, so we can say that Being is the light and beings are illuminated by thislight.42

It is interesting to note that Marcel adopts a “simpler” and “more concrete” solutionthan Heidegger’s one, about the relationship between Being and beings.43 One could also

39 Ibid., 90.40 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 SeeEntretiens 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 themost profound of our time, but the least capable of formulating anything resembling clear directions whichcould orient effectively the youth that turns to him as a guide.” Gabriel Marcel,L’Homme problématique,

61

say that Marcel’s solution is more simplistic than Heidegger’s. It is true that the metaphorof Light is classic within the Western philosophical tradition, from Plato onwards. Never-theless, there is an element distinguishing Marcel’s use and the classic use of this meta-phor. This metaphor is used by classic metaphysical philosophers to explain that beingsexist only because there is a Being conferring an ontological status on them. On thecontrary, according to Marcel, “There is no way in which we can conceive of being assomething cut off from existence.”44 Continuing to use our metaphor, we can say that wecan see the light only in beings, which are illuminated by it. In other words, Being is akind of horizon formed by the existences of all beings, of all individuals. Marcel does notdistinguish between Existence and Being. Being is “being in a situation,” and thus isalways 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 fromthis 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), whereasin Marcel’s view my historical collocation is important, but not fundamental: my existenceis singular and unique becauseI am I, thanks to my self-consciousness, because I see theworld with my eyes.

It is clear that, since the beginning of his philosophical work, Marcel confers onexistence and consciousness a value which transcends the mere biological life and eventhe 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 demon-strated, just because it is not aproblem, in the meaning of the word that we have seenbefore; it is not something which deals with the scenario of Having.

Is this anact of faith? The answer depends on the point of view. A materialist surelywill answer that it is. For his part, Marcel probably retorts that the materialist is simplyguilty of naivety, as he wants to apply to the sphere of Being a method of survey whichis instead valid only within the sphere of Having. Moreover, scientific thought is univer-sally valid just because -- Marcel says -- “science does not speak about the real, but in thethird 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 towonder if there are not concrete experiences which can lead one to consider the plausib-ility of a speech on Being. It is not an act of faith: it is, rather, awager.

But if existence becomes, within Marcel’s thought, the indispensabledatumof everyconcrete philosophical reflection, it cannot constitute the backbone of this reflection --otherwise philosophy could fall into vitalism or intuitionism. Therefore, it is necessary tofind a philosophical strategy in order to formulate a thought which is concrete and never-theless shareable, not merely subjective.

(Paris: Aubier, 1955), 147; quoted in Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 449. About therelationship between Marcel and Heidegger, seeDialogue sur l’espérance, in Gabriel Marcel et la penséeallemande. 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 phraseêtre-au-mondein this sense, i.e.,

of “having business with the world” (“avoir affaire au monde”), while expressing his reservations aboutHeidegger’s too “spatializing” conception ofêtre-dans-le-monde(in-der-Welt-sein).” Spiegelberg,ThePhenomenological 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 thecogito, but rathercommunication is constitutive of my very existence. Finally, attesting to the presence of the other dependson my degree of ‘defensiveness’ and therefore on my «unreadiness» or my ‘openness.’” Ricoeur, “GabrielMarcel and Phenomenology,” 484.

62

Reflection

Philosophical thought is reflective. Reflection is the recall or re-examination of experiencein order to understand or to comprehend it. Experience transforms itself into reflection.

Reflection, according to Marcel, operates on more than one level. Marcel writes: “thereis 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 completebefore me, but which I can reduce. Each problem can, in principle, produce verifiable solu-tions. We have to get sufficient distance from our own, subjective selves, in order to posean objective problem, and thus we can get a verifiable answer. This is basically a pheno-menological method, and Marcel believes that it will drive man to the right position. Butit must also be emphasized that this kind of reflection -- first degree reflection -- “breaks theunity of experience,” as the subject does not enter into the object investigated. It is clearthat Marcel, here, for “subject,” does not mean the body, but the I. When an experiencedeals with my I, I necessarily enter into the object investigated. But first degree reflectiontends to ignore this. If we treat these experiences as problems, first degree reflection tendsto 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 ourexperience: “To reflect, in this kind of case, is to ask oneself how such a break can haveoccurred.”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 cor-respond anymore to the real, to the concrete. In this act, akeeping distance from the im-mediatehappens; and this is the essence of the second degree reflection, and constitutes thecondition of the possibility of thinking aconceptual universalitywhich concedes nothingto 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 travelingon 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 nothinghad happened: there really is something that necessitates an act of readjustment on mypart.”52 First degree reflection tends to break down the unity of experience, whereas seconddegree 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 thestandard English translation of the two levels of reflection we are talking about. In French, Marcel callsthem réflexion primaire and réflexion seconde. He does not usesecondaire, which would translateperfectly into the English term secondary but means “subordinate,” “dependent.” These are not the mean-ings in the French termseconde; in fact, theréflexion secondeis not subordinate to theréflexion primaire:it is sufficient to note that Marcel sometimes defines theréflexion secondeas “reflection to the power oftwo,” which is very far from being “subordinate” or “dependent.” This is the reason why I prefer to trans-late réflexion primaireand réflexion secondewith “first degree” or “first level” reflection and “seconddegree” or “second level” reflection. I will continue to use “primary” and “secondary reflection” in thequotations. It is interesting to note that Marcel himself, who often used English words or phrasal verbsin order to explain his thought better, considering the English language more “concrete” and more closeto 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 ofsecondary reflection is essentially recuperative; it reconquers that unity.”53

It is important to note that second degree reflection does not goagainstthe data of firstdegree reflection, but goesbeyondit by refusing to accept the data of first degree reflec-tion as final. According to Marcel, the level of second degree reflection is the area ofmystery 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 anexample of second degree reflection in Marcel’s discussion of man’s relationship to hisbody. According to first degree reflection, “the body that I call my body is only one bodyamong others.” We have also already seen that the second degree reflection “does not setout flatly to give the lie to these propositions; it manifests itself rather by a refusal to treatprimary 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 reflectionconsiders existence aproblemto be solved, secondary reflection considers it amysterytobe revealed.

Before continuing, it would be worthwhile emphasizing two points about second degreereflection. First of all, it is important to underline that first degree reflection is a legitimateand 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 absoluteabout 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 fromthe moment when we seek to transcend abstract thought’s proper limits and to arriveat a global abstraction, we topple over into the gulf of nonsense – of nonsense in thestrict 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 canclimb by means of abstract thought, there to rest for ever; for our condition in thisworld does remain, in the last analysis, that of a wanderer, an itinerant being, whocannot come to absolute rest except by a fiction, a fiction which it is the duty ofphilosophic reflection to oppose with its strength.

But let us notice also that our itinerant condition is in no sense separable from thegiven circumstances, from which in the case of each of us that condition borrows itsspecial character; we have thus reached a point where we can lay it down that to bein a situation and to be on the move are modes of being that cannot be dissociatedfrom 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 orderto use them. But I cannot “freeze” the experience dealing with my existence, because Iam “on the move.”

The second point: it is also important to emphasize that second degree reflection isindeed 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 reflec-tion has itself had recourse; seeking, as it were, to restore a semblance of unity to theelements which primary reflection has first severed. However, even when engaged in this

53 Ibid., 1: 83.54 Ibid., 1: 92-93.55 Ibid., 1: 133-134.

64

attempt at unification, the reflective process would in reality still remain at the primarystage, 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 theseoppositions into question.”56 Therefore, second degree reflection does not represent aflight into a kind of irrationalism or mysticism.57 Second degree reflection makes use ofconcepts, but these concepts are expressions of concrete experience and are not formulatedas abstract solution strategies to problems. Problems are indeed problematic preciselybecause 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 taskof going beyond the problematic. And it means, at the same time, “a return to the im-mediacy of lived experience, though on a higher level.”58 Therefore, if first degreereflection can partially be identified with the phenomenological method, second degreereflection can also be seen, in this light, as an attempt to develop second degree reflectionitself. 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 ona higher level; but it is also an ontological approach, because the concepts used in the firstdegree reflection are still there in the second degree reflection, but they are transformed.They are not weakened; on the contrary, they aremore concrete. From the instant inwhich first degree reflection applied to the real, to the instant in which Ilook backre-flecting on that reflection,timehas passed; and time has, paradoxically, made the conceptmore concrete, exactly as it has revealed its substantial fiction and fallibility.60 In otherwords, time has produced anoverturning of concept, eliminating its abstractness andrecovering 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 andignore the essence of man as a “being on the move,” an existent who lives in time, andthose nihilistic thoughts which, even if they recognize theGeworfenheit, in one way oranother, turn out in identifying the most authentic dimension of time in the future. ForMarcel, the dimension ofplan (Entwurf) must not be rejected; nevertheless, favoring thefuture always implies the risk that the plan “devours,” so to say, the existence which itshould address. In this case, the plan becomes the “postponement of existence to later”:

56 Ibid., 1: 93.57 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 degreereflection.”

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 ofBeing and Having, and particularly in the notedated 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, broadlyconceived, see the recent and illuminating work of Ugo Perone,Il presente possibile(Napoli: Guida,2005).

65

it means inviting a being to planinstead ofliving. In this sense, the “prevalence of thefuture” is always a sign of nihilism.61

Marcel addresses his preferences to the past rather than to the future. In this preferencethere are, obviously, no Romantic tones, but there is a consideration of the past as thewhole 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 mypresent, of my “being on the move.” Therefore, such dynamics constitute the starting pointof second degree reflection.62

Nevertheless, according to Marcel, neither the future nor the past are the truly authenticexistential dimension. The past, in fact, can always be “immobilized” and “frozen,” andthe more we immobilize the past, the more the future appears as a pastante litteram, apast for anticipation. The past can be grasped in its profoundness only by linking it to thepresent, 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 oftime if not the present.”63 Only the present owns, in fact, that feature of concreteness whichallows me to plan myself authentically, whereas the past and the future have to be con-sidered simply as a support and a reinforcement of it. Of course, also the present must notbe “frozen,” but rather lived like “time on the move.” Only by planning a sense thatbegins 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., everythingI have been) represent the object which mypresent Iinterprets, while addressing them to myfuture I. It is the “being on the move” of thepresent which allows second degree reflection; and it is always atime lagwhich allowsfor a reflection, a reflection which can be considered a process ofinterpretation.

At this point, it is important to note the relevance of Josiah Royce’s thought inMarcel’s development of this dynamic. An interpretation is real, according to Royce, onlyif the interpreters, i.e., the communicating subjects, constitute a real and concrete com-munity, that is, only if the object does not remain extraneous, but is participated in by theinterpreters. And it is important that this happen, especially if the interpretative processoccurs in the intimacy of my I, because if the I who I amhic et nuncremains un-connected with everything which I have been and which leads me to be what I am, if itdoes not really participate in that heritage of memories, then myfuture I will also beexcluded from it, outlining a process of totalalienation.64

Marcel makes use of Royce’s theory of interpretation, but transfers it into a pureexistentialist context. By using another notion introduced by Royce,65 he emphasizes thatwhat is demanded, in the exercise of second degree reflection and in the interpretiveprocess, is an act ofloyalty to thisconcreteness. The penalty for a lack of loyalty to con-creteness is the relapse into first degree reflection: the concept will “get cold” and willbecome again an “empty container,” without any concrete relationship with reality. To be“witness of concreteness” means precisely to recognize the second degree reflection andthe fallibility of any concept which it shows, and to accept it consciously.66

The freedom of accepting or refusing second degree reflection presents two inseparableaspects. Anontologicalaspect: 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 anethical aspect: that relationship is also, especially in its failures, theoriginal interpretation of the truth. Moreover, such an ethical aspect of second degreereflection is linked with a constant attention to a theme which Marcel, in theJournal,labeled “the question of totality” and which, later, can be identified with the pursuit of atheoretic space where it can be possible to conceive an universal clearly personal but notexclusively subjective. In this sense, theprivilege of universalityis peculiar also tophilosophy, and springs from an element which precedes every experience and which isat the origin of it: that “new immediate” which, for Marcel, is existence. This is whyMarcel introduces second degree reflection: whereas first degree reflection tends to“freeze” the universal beyond every concreteness deriving from existence, theconcreteuniversal, which constitutes the aim of Marcel, restores the connection between existenceand concept, returning concreteness to concept. Precisely for this reason, this universal canbecome visible only in these intersubjective, historical and concrete experiences whichactualize it.67 This is a clearly personal universal, as it roots in “my” concrete and par-ticular 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, in-stead, 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 thephenomenological movement -- guarantees that “convergence of looks” which constitutesthe concrete universality.68

In his paperGabriel Marcel and Phenomenology, Ricoeur writes:

Thus for Husserl the concept of subjectivity is divided between ade jureuniversality,which fulfills its epistemological function of final justification, and a de facto singularityresulting from its thoroughly temporal constitution. It is the paradox that gave rise tothe question of intersubjectivity. If the subject must be the final foundation and if thesubject must be singular, there remains only one possibility: a kind of collegial or ecu-menical foundation in which the virtually unlimited community of subjects carries theweight 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 theparticular by adopting an “intermediary level,” which is illustrated by aesthetic ex-perience.69

Clearly, theaesthetic experienceis not limited to what is usually considered a “workof art.” In some way, the experience of second degree reflectionis an aesthetic experience,precisely because it is, essentially, an interpretative act. There is, in Marcel, an attemptof 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 lostin 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 eludesfirst degree reflection: second degree reflection reaches its aim precisely when it showsus the failure of reason.

67 For a general introduction of this topic, see Pagano,La dimensione dell’universalità e l’esperienzaermeneutica, 67-68.

68 See theConclusionof 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, itdeals with transcendence. Using second degree reflection, it is possible to look at whatcannot be conceptualized. It happens when first degree reflection reaches its limits; thussecond 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 ledto acknowledge that it inevitably bases itself on something that is not itself, somethingfrom which it has to draw its strength.”70

According to Marcel, transcendence is not something different from, or separate fromexperiences; 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. Marceluses another metaphor here: “One might say, for example, that experience has varyingdegrees of purity, that in certain cases, for example, it is distilled, and it is now of waterthat I am thinking. What I ask myself, at this point, is whether the urgent inner need fortranscendence might not, in its most fundamental nature, coincide with an aspiration to-wards a purer and purer mode of experience.”71

As a conclusion, it is worth examining Ricoeur’s shrewd criticism of Marcel’s oppositionbetween mystery and problem. According to Ricoeur, this opposition “could not be estab-lished without immediately destroying the philosophical enterprise as such, threatened witha shift to a philosophico-religiousfidéisme.”72 But, as we have seen, Marcel’s thought doesnot require an “act of faith;” rather, it requires a wager. Using second degree reflectionmeans precisely to accept this wager. Marcel explains: “Thus one may see fairly clearlyhow secondary reflection while not yet being itself faith, succeeds at least in preparing orfostering what I am ready to call the spiritual setting of faith.”73 A wager is not a shiftto somefidéisme; or better, it is not an act of faith more than the opposite choice. In otherwords, 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 affirma-tion were in no way an intellectual act, then it could not be elevated to philosophical dis-course.”74 In fact, if Being is the “uncharacterizable,” “the unqualifiedpar excellence,”it risks becoming also “the pure indeterminate.” It is true that Marcel, in his “Reply toPaul 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 byMarcel in Being and Havingand sounds in this way: how can something which cannotbe reduced to a problem actually be thought?

The question profoundly implies the essence of an existential philosophy which, asRicoeur stresses, “cannot . . . limit itself to a critique of objectivity, of characterization, andof the problematic; it must be supported by the determinations of thought and by concep-tual work whose resources are exhausted neither by science nor by technology.”76

70 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 1: 38.71 Ibid., 1: 55.72 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 489.73 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 2: 66.74 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 489.75 Marcel, “Reply to Paul Ricoeur,” 495.76 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 491.

68

According to Ricoeur, “It is here that Husserl’s work recovers its legitimacy.”77 As amatter of fact, second degree reflection, seen from this point of view, holds a fundamentalfeature of the phenomenological dynamics, that is, the capacity to reconquer “a secondnaïveté 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, theproposal of a solution? A possible answer can be that offered by Spiegelberg, who ex-plains: “Ricoeur makes it plain that he considers his epistemology “imperfect” . . . ThusRicoeur was clearly unprepared to go to the full length of Marcel’s “mystic” anti-rationalism 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 seconddegree reflection seems to be very far from every form of “mystic” intuition, and Marcelhimself writes: “The incomparable merit of Kant and, I might add, of Fichte as well wasto be fully aware of the dynamic character of reason, even if they were wrong in tryingto fix it within immutable categories or within a dialectic that ultimately risks becomingtyrannical. This is sufficient to explain why I will never allow myself to be called an ir-rationalist.”80 Marcel keeps his distance from Husserl, saying that his own philosophicalthought 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 away to keep distance from any form of reason whatsoever. Second degree reflection is in-deed “a second naïveté”; it is not based on a phenomenological “epoché,” but on awagerwhich rises from theparadoxof existence and manifests itself asinterpretation. In thissense, we can speak of a “Marcellian hermeneutics,” but a specification is necessary.Marcel “accuses” Husserl’s phenomenological perspectiveand Heidegger’s “mystic” philo-sophy 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 essentialconstituent of his thought.”82 And Marcel argues: “I insist very firmly that all this mustnot be interpreted in an irrational sense: or rather, that such an interpretation would pos-tulate a degraded conception of reason which would amount to identifying it with under-standing.”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 nevercompletely elaborated. The ‘blinded intuition,’ which depends on second degree reflection,constitutes the height of the failure of reason but, with a paradoxical movement, con-stitutes also anoverturningof reason; in fact, there is no doubt for Marcel that the analyt-ical 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 Thepassage from the former to the latter level of reflection is therefore characterized as anoverturningof the conceptual activity, with ceases to proceed in the “traditional” and“rationalistic” way and becomesexistentialandpractical. When reason reaches its own

77 Ibid., 492.78 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 theSchellingian “ecstasy of reason.”

69

limits, it paradoxically reaches also its landing place, i.e., authentic reality. This is thecritical moment in which reason stops and is overturned; while forced to acknowledge itsfailure in front of the mystery of existence, it nevertheless approaches a deeper and richerreality. Therefore, blind intuition is also the beginning, theincipit of another reason,different from the rationality which has preceded it exactly because this “new” reason hasits roots in the existential experience.

Through second degree reflection, Marcel tries to set out the boundary markers of anew philosophical proceeding, a new language -- and here, in our opinion, Marcel is notvery far from a certain part of contemporary hermeneutics.85 The “surveillance” and therigor of reason cannot consequently be detached from existence and concreteness, andthese cannot be detached from thatflickering of sensewhich we can find in the funda-mental human feelings -- those which Marcel calls “concrete approaches” -- like love orfriendship.

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 “Iflife has a point” inThe Mystery of Being, he adds to the French expression the Englishsentence “if there is a plot.”86 This expression is more than a metaphor: it represents theaim of his whole thought. Questioning if life has a point, not renouncing it to pursue thesense of existence, means properly to believe that there is a plot and that, though it cansometimes appear absurd, we can always choose or, better, wager on sense or on nothing-ness. But it also means that, if we wager on sense, this demands an effort -- existentialand philosophical at the same time -- in order to attempt to understand existence, startingfrom that “concrete approach” which, alone, can indicate the directions.

In the current context, dominated on the one hand by the crisis in traditional meta-physics and, on the other hand, by the constant risk of an acceptance of the absence ofsense (which is, in the last analysis, always a choice for non-sense), the perspectiveopened by Marcel’s thought can be fruitful for a philosophy which intends to re-appropriateits own speculative vocation, helping to delineate suitable limits for a space of possiblesharing (within universality), while at the same time remaining faithful to the concretenessof existence.

85 See Paul Ricoeur,Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers. Philosophie du mystère et philosophie duparadoxe(Paris: Editions du Temps Présent, 1948); Marco Ravera,Introduzione alla filosofia dellareligione (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 interestingto note that the English expression has been maintained in the French edition, whereas in the English edi-tion we find an ellipse which inevitably damps the strength of the expression: “If life has a point – or aswe 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 someambiguity in what emerges as hermeneutic phenomenology. One must still question whetherthis is the product of a fruitful graft or, rather, a subversion that requires more attentiontoday. In this context there are two particularly relevant paths from phenomenologythrough hermeneutics to ontology that are of special interest, those of Martin Heideggerand Paul Ricoeur. It is the thesis of this paper that these two quite different paths to onto-logy, directed by choices of method, require that we take a position between the two ofthem. The exclusions entailed in such a choice become exacerbated in light of furthersubversions produced by deconstructive enlightenment of recent postmodern thinking, thechallenge of which is so fundamental that it threatens the entire project of any such philo-sophy.

These developments away from the pure form of early phenomenology spring fromcertain realizations, which have been reinforced by recent postmodernists: that Husserlianintuition of presence contains an absence; that the living present contains alterity (retentionsand protentions); and that the univocity of meaning gives way to the enigma and am-biguity of symbols, myths, or story. Hence, strict Husserlian intuition falls apart. Suchalterity in the actual grafting of hermeneutics onto phenomenology, however, is not a starkotherness in sense and in the living present, but, rather, allows for continuity, richness andfluidity. This grafting of hermeneutics onto phenomenology is an attempt to read the deeperdimensions of the senses of existence beyond univocity, but without making the alteritytoo alien to the full sense of existence; and without making the living present a concatena-tion of discrete moments now. Thus, rather than a regression, this graft of hermeneuticsonto the wild stock of phenomenology in the approach to existence preserves and extendsthe main gains of phenomenology: phenomenological primordiality in relation to livedexperience, the priority of the holistic living present over a reduced discreteness in relationto its retentions and protentions and the priority of the semantic over the syntactic inlanguage. Thus, I am defending the grafting of hermeneutics onto phenomenology as anextension of a method in the attempt to do greater justice to its ability to make sense outof experience, language, and Being. Rather than a subversion, this conflation of these twotraditions reveals a recognition of early phenomenology’s myopic hope and weakness inover-playing the role of intuition, the cogito and the univocity of sense, especially as thedeveloped method focuses on the complexities of human existence.

Such a graft or conflation of hermeneutics and phenomenology cannot be allowed toconfuse method and content, as Descartes and Husserl do. Anyphilosophical method, strictlyas a method, while needing to be attuned and responsive to that which it interprets andexplicates, cannot allow the very appropriation of method to predetermine the philosophicalposition. Such prejudiced appropriation of method must be considered to have forcedDescartes 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 appro-priating method: in Descartes’s case, presuming that nature is what the slanted perspectiveof a mathematical physicist sees -- mechanism; and in Husserl’s case, presuming that thetranscendental as method has to be assumed in any derivation of a sense of Being -- thebringing about of a closure within the brackets of transcendental phenomenological methodthat 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, evenwithin the context of the postmodern situation. Perhaps one must at this point admit that theopening of phenomenology to hermeneutics cannot constitute the entirety of philosophy, but,rather, it is merely a necessary stage through which any serious contemporary effort passesfor 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 attemptat a more far-reaching reading and writing to avoid over-simplification and to do justiceto the richness of existence without reducing it to a false unity or univocal sense. I believethat it is obvious to any serious scholar in contemporary thinking that such a grafting ofhermeneutics onto phenomenology is not only viable but necessary. Yet there is more thanone way for this to be worked out, and I believe that somewhere within the contrastingapproaches of Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur lies a very viable way of actualizingthis renewed method, and one which responds well to the challenge of deconstruction inits tendency to subvert sense or meaning and the living present. I consider the subversionof such deconstruction to lie in a simplistic dichotomy between the living present and itsconstitutive elements of retention and protention, and the closure entailed in any sense ormeaning at which one arrives. While it may be the case that I am over-interpreting thisdichotomy in deference to hermeneutic phenomenology’s reading of sense and the livingpresent, it is clear from his texts that Derrida tends toward the extremes, even though thesemay 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 decon-struction can be redirected.2

In order to prevent these extremes, the enlightening ways of such a graft by MartinHeidegger and Paul Ricoeur can be invoked. The outcome of their expansion in relationto one another pushes to the fore a path for philosophy today that is open to the traditionboth of the past as well as of the future as one aspect of the ongoing and living traditionunfolds. The stark contrast between their appropriations of hermeneutics and phenomeno-logy must be clear in the effort to work out a unified and consistent method. The reci-procity that Ricoeur admits between phenomenology and hermeneutics, in acknowledgingthe influence of Husserl and at once that of the tradition of Biblical hermeneutics, mustbe considered in contrast to Heidegger’s attempt to develop phenomenology in such a wayas to coordinate hermeneutics with the internal development of Dasein’s understanding,thus supposedly deepening the arc of hermeneutics to the point where the previously hid-den pre-comprehension of Being emerges as the guideline for focusing on human exist-ence in ontical terms. In his pivotal essay “Existence and Hermeneutics,” Ricoeur con-trasts his own “longer way” to ontology to Heidegger’s “shorter way,” contending that heremains on the level of epistemology of interpretation and its conflicts of hermeneuticmethods 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 thatis, for him, more an aim than a given, as for Heidegger. In addition, he avoids the facileand prejudiced interpretation of human existence as essentially constituted by finitude atthe expense of the infinite. Thus, Ricoeur avoids the typically Heideggerian move tocollapse 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 RicoeurianAlternative,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly(1993): 261-279; idem, “Trace, Semiotics, andthe Living Present: Derrida or Ricoeur,”Southwest Philosophy Review(1993): 43-63.

2 See Patrick L. Bourgeois, “Hermeneutics and Deconstruction: Paul Ricoeur in Postmodern Dia-logue,” in Andrzej Wiercinski, ed.,Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equi-librium (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003), 333-350.

72

Although there seems to be a wide gulf between the hermeneutics of Ricoeur andHeidegger, their views are close enough so that an encounter between them proves to bequite profitable for hermeneutics today in the postmodern situation. What will becomeclear is that each can learn a lesson from the other: the Heideggerian short way learns thatthere is an advantage to dwelling on the ontic level in order to resolve conflicts and tosolve problems often overlooked in attempting to trace the most direct route to thequestion of Being; and the Ricoeurian long way learns that the short way must be ques-tioned in terms of a vision of a certain existential neutrality. The ensuing discussion willfirst turn to Ricoeur’s critique of Heidegger’s short way in favor of his long way beforeentertaining the possibility ofinvertinga basic dimension of that criticism from Heidegger’sdirection 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 quicklyreaches a unity of Dasein, which Ricoeur considers not to be forthcoming, and whichremains for him problematical in the sense that the unity of man can be considered onlyas 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 tornexistence which supports the conflict of the hermeneutics of existence that have pre-occupied Ricoeur for so long. The question for us now is whether the Heideggerian shortway provides a guidance to Ricoeur’s long way, or, rather, whether it subverts Ricoeur’sefforts to read various and conflicting aspects of existence. Thus the question must be con-fronted as to whether it is necessary to take Ricoeur’s long way without the Heideggerianpre-comprehension as guide. Which is more fundamental? This inevitably leads us to thequestion of the priority of the epistemic or ontological in this context. This will be seento be a false question in that the epistemological and ontological are equi-foundational andare merely two possible methodological focuses on the same phenomenon. This point willnot be easy to establish in any Heideggerian context, but Ricoeur’s emphasis is instructivein helping us expand on both his and Heidegger’s limited view of the problem.

Ricoeur emphasizes the conflict of interpretations as revealing differing aspects ofexistence that ontically found various hermeneutic methods.3 Further, on this ontic leveland in an extended ethics, he has focused pointedly upon the problem of the place of evilin freedom within human existence and upon the ontic relation of human existence to theSacred, which is central to his whole philosophy. Thus, for Ricoeur, pausing to dwell on theontic has fostered an integration or a dialectizing of the symbols which support a pheno-menology of spirit and a psychoanalysis of desire, with their respective orientations toteleology and to archeology, both of which prepare for the relation to the Sacred withina phenomenology of religion and its eschatology. These advantages of the long way, forRicoeur, militate against Heidegger’s short way. Although his myriad writings on the her-meneutics of existence and its conflict of interpretations in a philosophy of limits withinthe boundary of reason seem to entail a lengthy detour in dwelling on this ontic level be-fore reaching the promised land of ontology, their resolution still indicates the advantageof dwelling on the ontic level further than Heidegger does.

The fundamental justification of the long way over the short way to ontology is theunderlying difference in the fore-comprehension of human existence. For Ricoeur the unityof man can only be a regulative idea, not achieved in existence and not easily accessibleto 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 inHermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 19.

73

rival hermeneutics that we perceive something of the being to be interpreted: a unifiedontology is as inaccessible to our method as a separate ontology. Rather, in every instanceeach 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 afundamental ontology emerging from an existential analysis of Dasein properly graspedin fore-comprehension. In addition, his view of the fallenness of human existence, inavoiding the ontologization of fault by placing evil in the disproportionate existential syn-thesis between the infinite and the finite, militates against the quick move from the con-crete 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 byRicoeur 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 andquestions of method, which arise from that conflict. It is here that the Heideggerian wayneeds 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 mereanalysis 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 ina 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 thatRicoeur’s view is in need of a partial adjustment. The adjustment, however, is demandedby the exigencies of the fore-comprehension of concrete human existence reaching towardontological understanding. Yet a delay or detour is needed before reaching it. This pause isa necessary one, and not done merely for the sake of rendering two disparate philosophiescompatible. The consequence of these adjustments is that the respective passages to onto-logy by Heidegger and Ricoeur become somewhat more compatible and reciprocally bene-ficial, and at once mitigate the distance between the hermeneutics of existence and herme-neutic ontology. This discussion will turn now to Ricoeur’s view of human existence asfallen in order to provide an adjustment which removes, in part, an unnecessary limitationto existence and hence to its interpretation.

Ricoeur’s philosophy recasts the Kantian view of the demand on the part of reason fortotality, as well as reason’s placing of a limit on experience, in terms of his own develop-ment of a view of the quasi transcending of this limit as boundary through indirect expres-sions such as symbols and metaphors. In addition, for Ricoeur, such a demand for totalityin a philosophy of boundary requires that ethics be extended beyond the Kantian formalethic 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 tothe synthesis between the infinite and the finite as the existential structural place for thepossibility of evil. It is from that view of evil in freedom and existence that the view ofhope emerges. It is likewise from that view that the necessity for speculative philosophyand its condition of possibility arises from the innovation of meaning engendered by theproductive imagination in affording schemata for the rules of understanding and theextension of this function.

This broadened ethics is understood as a philosophy that leads from alienation tofreedom and beatitude, attempting to grasp the “effort to exist in its desire to be,”5 andopposing any reduction of reflection to a simple critique or to a mere “justification ofscience and duty as a reappropriation of our effort to exist; epistemology is only a part

4 Ibid.5 Paul Ricoeur,Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 45.

74

of this broader task: we have to recover the act of existing, the positing of the self, in allthe density of its works.”6 Hence it can be seen that Ricoeur has corrected Kant’s viewof the place of evil in freedom. He has, however, considered the locus of evil to stemfrom the disproportion in the synthesis between finitude and infinitude on the theoretical,practical, and especially affective levels which come to expression in the fullness ofsymbolic language. It is from the symbols of evil that thought reaches the notion of theservile will or the will in bondage.7

Ricoeur’s recourse, in a philosophic reflection, to religious symbols and to their under-lying 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 herme-neutic situation of his philosophical fore-comprehension. Thus, religious content is notsimply 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 interpretationof radical evil as a necessary and constitutive aspect of existential freedom, requiring thathuman existence be fallen. It is precisely this assumed stance, within which Ricoeurbegins 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 orderto liberate existencephilosophicallyfrom its prejudice of a specific faith option, withinwhich his reflection operates. Within that context radical evil must be extricated from itsnecessarily constitutive role in existential freedom. The resultant moral neutrality of exist-ence must liberate human existence from fallenness as its necessary constitution, so thatexistence as innocent, fallen, and recreated can be seen to share the same existentialstructure. Thus, while Ricoeur has avoided, in his ethical account of freedom in terms ofevil, the ontologizing of fault, he has, within the prejudice of his hermeneutic situation,made necessary to existence aspects which Heidegger has diligently avoided. The questionthen becomes whether and to what extent Ricoeur’s own long way, which initially aimsat resolving the problems which the short way ignores, must accept some prior guidancefrom the ontological level, in order to accentuate certain dimensions of human existencewhich are first encountered ontically. Failing to accept such guidance, reflection on theontic may result in exaggerating the importance of certain less essential aspects of the humancondition, but in no way mitigating the need and advantage of his long way to ontologyor his distinction between the essential and the existential dimensions of the humansynthesis of the finite and infinite in relation to evil.

By contrast, Heidegger’s hermeneutics of existence arises at the point of avoiding theoption which Ricoeur exercises, in developing a philosophical anthropology.8 Heideggerfrequently emphasizes that the definitive characteristics of the human are not at issue, butinstead the “understanding of Being” which is constitutive of it, thus showing a funda-mental prejudice toward reaching the ontological at the expense of a certain richness ofthe ontic accessible to methodological openness in another direction. This is clearly oneplace where Heidegger’s quick move to ontology precludes a certain necessary and bene-ficial investigation into concrete human being. In this context, what is so pivotal forHeidegger is the fact that the capacity for understanding Being as such emerges as thephenomenon 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 towhom this question is decisive, Dasein. But even within that reciprocity there is an even

6 Ibid.7 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 theconstitution of Dasein’s Being as ex-istence, and the attempt to define existence as theway Dasein enters into communion with itself and other beings entails the disclosure ofunderstanding.9

According to Heidegger, the very possession of understanding exhibits the innermostdimension of human existence, namely, the “potentiality to be” (theSeinkönnen). Yet,what comes under scrutiny as the essential unity of understanding and existence, at firstonly vaguely accessible pre-conceptually and pre-ontologically, will in the end determinethe theme of fundamental ontology, i.e., Dasein’s manner of uncoveredness. The decisivechallenge for Heidegger’s hermeneutics of existence hinges on clarifying this event of dis-coveredness in ontological terms, in such a way that the consideration of the phenomenonwhich 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 be-tween that which is “ontically closest” to Dasein and that which is “ontologically farthest,”hermeneutics succeeds in pealing back the successive layers of the fore-comprehensionin order to arrive at Dasein’s thrownness into the “there.”10

Heidegger’s unique contribution lies in bringing forward the unexceptional, undif-ferentiated mode of Dasein’s existence, and, by making an adjustment to accommodatethe marginally intelligible character of its “everyday” comportment, then distinguishing thestructures that make everydayness possible. Through this approach Heidegger not onlybetrays a certain preoccupation with finding the roots of ontology, but also a definite in-tent to lay bare thephenomenonof everydayness in respect to its “intrinsic possibility” or tocorrelate it with specific ontological structures which are analyzable in their own right.The overriding concern for what “makes possible” has made Heidegger subject to thecritique of adapting or adjusting a Kantian transcendental philosophy to fit an inquiry intothe more concrete and essentially finite dimension of being-in-the-world at the expenseof the Kantian infinite and reason. It likewise, in reflecting on the essential unity of under-standing and existence, fails to distinguish on this level of human existence the furtherabstraction of the essential dimensions, by moving immediately to ontology. This againshows Heidegger’s failure, in deference to a quick move to ontology, to face up to some-thing essential to human being, the clear and radical distinction between the essential andexistential dimensions of the synthesis between the finite and infinite. Yet, Heidegger’sfore-comprehension can be instructive here for Ricoeur’s project, preventing it from acertain 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 fromBeing and Time, “Why does the understanding... always press forward into possibilities? It is because the understanding has in itself theexistential structure which we call ‘projection.’” 11 Upon coupling this factor with the mostelemental feature of interpretation, i.e., in addressing the presuppositions which governany 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-structureof 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: IndianaUniversity Press, 1985), 257-261.

10 Heidegger,Being and Time, 359. This statement occurs in what is perhaps the most significantmethodological discussion inBeing and Time, the analysis of the “hermeneutical situation” encompassingthe entire inquiry (section 63).

11 Ibid., 184-185.

76

comprehension. The implementation of the strategy constitutes hermeneutic phenomenologyproper.

Hermeneutic phenomenology addresses Dasein in all its concreteness as the being whois in each casemine; this approach involves appreciating the drastic switch from a concernfor what Dasein is, as one being among others, towho it is, as possessing the feature ofexistentiality. To be sure, the selection of a more phenomenologically direct approach toaddress man -- pursued intentionally apart from any interest in developing a philosophicalanthropology -- may not seem to change much, since, after all, the “nature of man” remainsin question.12 Yet this step has tremendous significance, both for the task that Heideggerundertakes and for determining the direction of his own hermeneutics. Specifically, thepre-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 notinadvertently slip into the analysis. While this move does prevent making certain aspectsof human existence essential, it at once prevents a more enlightening detour to that verylevel 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 betaken not to give it too much play, or the loss entailed in Heidegger’s way will infringeon the many rich advantages of the longer way to ontology. Once again we see that thetoo 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 manin the abstract, Heidegger’s concentration onexistencestill requires addressing Dasein’sessence. The proclamation fromBeing and Timestates:The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in itsexistence” 13 and later, in undoing Descartes’s misconception, “the substance of man isexistence,”14 showing that Dasein finds itself in terms of a comportment in which it holdsforth its own potential to be, and the recognition of this “can be” provides the clue forlaying out the hidden facets of Dasein’s own understanding of its Being.15 The latterconsideration becomes particularly crucial insofar as the attempt to explicate the essentialstructures of care proceed from the projective understanding which is definitive of Dasein.Hermeneutics as an interpretation of human existence, then, develops the pre-comprehensionof care issuing from Dasein itself, in such a way that its very execution converges on thedimension of human existence which is the internal root of interpretation -- the laying outof the horizon of intelligibility precisely as its originates from the “there” of Dasein.

Heidegger himself traces the reflexive structure of interpretation and delineates itscharacter as “self-interpretation.” Yet, a casual reference to this phenomenon can provokeprecisely the opposite connotations than those which are otherwise intended. For herme-neutics, in Heidegger’s sense, is surely not an attempt on behalf of the interpreter to singlehimself out, i.e., his nature, as constituting a specific area of inquiry within the order ofbeings. Herein lies the crux of Heidegger’s criticism of philosophical anthropology, in-cluding that of Ricoeur. Thus, on the one hand, Heidegger’s hermeneutics of existenceaims 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 basicdetermination of existence.”

77

these structures throughout the whole of Dasein’s Being is not decisively comprehendeduntil the existentialia are correlated with the structures that define Dasein’s comportmenttoward beings, including itself, namely, those which are constitutive of the “there,” under-standing, states of mind, and discourse. The deepened inclusivity of Heidegger’s herme-neutics further emphasizes the importance of affirming thepriority of the understandingof Being within the existential analytic. The ontological focus for hermeneutics emergessimply by recalling that understanding is itself a primary component within the disclosed-ness of the “there,” and that it is in the process of considering the existential constitutionof the “there” that the issue of interpretation first emerges. From this hermeneutic situationarises the clue for discovering not only that interpretation is a radicalization of Dasein’scapacity for self-disclosure, but that, as mentioned before, disclosedness encompassesDasein’s Being as care. Heidegger’s so-called critique of philosophical anthropology infavor 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 takingthe short cut to the ontology of Dasein.

But this short cut to ontology overlooks a possible distinction between the essential andexistential aspects of man’s being as a synthesis of the finite and infinite.16 By dwellingon and emphasizing the statement inBeing and Time: that “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies inits 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 constitutiveof his Being as Dasein, this existence can still be looked at and analyzed from the point ofview of its concreteness. Thus, Ricoeur’s long way does not entail so much a denial ofthe existentiality or the ontology of Dasein as much as it is corrective by pausing in adetour to reflect on some existential aspects before indulging Heidegger’s prejudice towardthe prior necessity of ontological reflection. Thus, Heidegger’s short way prejudices theissue 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 humanbeing. This long way, in distinguishing certain existential dimensions from essentialaspects of human being, affords a great advantage in dealing with human evil. Yet thisdetour 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 ontologythrough his brand of hermeneutics, in order to set the stage for this gain from Heidegger’sway.

To address interpretation in this Heideggerian way as a phenomenon is to becomeresponsive to a movement which already oversees the deeper integration of all the com-ponents of Dasein’s Being and brings to the forefront its own initial dependence on theadvance comprehension of existence, which is ontological at the expense of ontic aspectsof existence. An opportunity is thereby created for arriving at the disclosedness ofexistence 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 fore-comprehension; this appropriative process, which is directed from the center of Dasein’spotentiality to be, implicitly establishes the interpreter’s own entrance into the truth priorto 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 analysisturns 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-articulatedlevel of and a predisposition toward comprehension which is grounded in Dasein’s every-dayness. The radicalization of this everyday comprehension, which is a task reserved tohermeneutics, involves bringing into speech the unification of the structures of care whichare already enacted concretely in the individual’s existence. Accordingly, the existentialanalytic, as Heidegger emphasizes, occurs when interpretation becomes the forum wherebyDasein “can put itself into words for the very first time.”18 The thematic of human exist-ence then serves as testimony to Dasein’s own disclosedness; to interpret means to gathertogether the presuppositions that make human existence comprehensible in its own right,so as tolet be seenthat which shows itself in the most direct way possible, i.e., discloseit in its Being. Hermeneutics originally belongs to phenomenology or is the vehicle forits 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 asAletheia.

The arrival at this crucial juncture helps to establish that the analysis has traced theunification of Dasein’s Being back to a sufficiently original level. Only by attending tothe project of Heidegger’s hermeneutics is it possible to ensure that no extraneous con-siderations or excessive assumptions have inadvertently been adopted from the fore-structure of understanding. Heidegger questions in an ongoing way, inBeing and Time,whether he has adequately taken into account the totality of presuppositions of the herme-neutic situation. This precaution applies to the intrusion of terms which refer no deeperthan the initial familiarity that everyday Dasein displays towards itself and that wouldartificially restrict the horizon of intelligiblity to what can show itself in terms of theready-to-hand or the present-at-hand. Thus steps are taken to avoid defining Dasein’sBeing inappropriately in terms of such categories as that of substance. Yet, the initial her-meneutic situation is already ontological even in the fore-comprehension, thus movingaway 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, Being-There, already bespeaks this prejudice in the initial hermeneutic situation.

Yet, there is a precaution that arises from the Heideggerian short way that may berelevant to a Ricoeurian analysis of the human that circumvents the too quick analysis ofthe understanding of the Being of Dasein, and which elects to spell out an exclusive setof ontic human problems. To be sure, Ricoeur practices such a concrete hermeneutics. Hisemphasis is on the various hermeneutics which capture a specific dimension of humanexistence and the integration of existence thus revealed. In this way, he refuses to riskmissing aspects of human existence not coming into focus in a too quick move to directontological disclosure of Dasein’s Being. However, he runs the risk of exaggerating cer-tain aspects of human existence. Such an exaggeration is imminent when Ricoeur identifiesa set of allegedly perennial and premier kinds of experiences pertaining to the humanexistential predicament and seeks to paint a holistic view of human nature. All of Ricoeur’sprotracted analyses of the use and misuse of the will need to be tempered by an explica-tion 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 thisstance of neutrality does it becomes possible to appreciate the transformation occurringwithin the structures of everydaynesswhich brings forth the extremity of Dasein’s thrown-ness into its situation (of which human corruption formsoneside). Conversely, abandoningthis stance of neutrality which is a trademark of a more classical phenomenology, leavesRicoeur vulnerable to endorsing naively a certain religious profile that envisions humanexistence 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 exclusiveof all ontical considerations, Heidegger’s hermeneutics is able to avoid some of thetendencies that stem from characterizing the nature of man primarily in terms of a presetextended 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 theunity of care on the level of existence, thus leading him to affirm the coincidence ofDasein’s existence and essence in contrast to Ricoeur. Thus, the short way misses themore complex ontic dimensions of human existence which should have some play in amore explicit ontological focus. As will be seen further, it likewise misses, as sometimesdoes Ricoeur, a certain equi-primordiality of the epistemic and ontological at the funda-mental level of human existence in being-in-the-world. For, if it is so that the understand-ing and interpretation of its own being is so fundamental to human existence, it is likewisetrue that the difference between the ontological and the epistemological focuses, overcomingtraditional restrictions and limitations, are merely two distinctively differing focuses onthe 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 andshort ways to ontology. For, Ricoeur’s short way can be guided by an adjusted Heideg-gerian pre-comprehension and the attempt to get Dasein properly within the focus of fore-comprehension of the hermeneutic method, now taking into account human being as asynthesis of the finite and infinite; and then a pause and detour become necessary pre-cisely at this point, in order to reflect further on human existence in its desire and spiritleading to the Sacred. This will bring to light the disproportion in the synthesis betweenthe finite and infinite on the cognitive, practical and especially affectively levels of thissynthesis, which is something to which Heideggerian analysis is totally oblivious, due toits 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 existenceare, like the eidetic or essential structures, equally foundational for innocent, fallen, andregenerated existence, for it is precisely existence which is neutral to all of these. Thisaltered 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, allwithout over-playing or over-interpreting its place in the philosophical analysis of humanexistence. Far from foreclosing all “specific” analyses of aspects of concrete existencewithin the world, the project of hermeneutic phenomenology opens up precisely thoseavenues by illuminating beforehand the horizon for the understanding of human existencein the synthesis of the finite and infinite in human being. What still needs to be deter-mined, is some of the implication of this correction of Ricoeur’s long way to ontology inhis grafting of hermeneutics onto phenomenology. Now that we have established aneutrality on the level of human existence in this grafting process, we can attempt to bringto light some of the insights for a philosophy that wants to inquire into human evil bylooking at religious language and the experience that underlies it. We must try to flesh outa further presupposition that stands in need of correction if philosophical reflection on evilis to be further grounded, but without an initial unwarranted prejudice.

In order to achieve this end, a philosophical foundation must be provided to supportthe various levels of religious options which are operative in philosophical reflection onreligious existence and which originate from the essential level of openness and prior dis-closure of human existence. In this context much of Ricoeur’s philosophical reflection onthe religious realm of the Sacred and on evil is, however, philosophically ambiguous. Hisenthusiastic openness to the sciences on the ontic level implicitly allows for a possiblerapport with such philosophical reflection on the Sacred and on the religious dimensionsof 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 hisphilosophical thought are brought to their proper explication in the depth of human exist-ence, at a level below specific faith concerns.

For Ricoeur, there is a certain continuity between hermeneutics of existence and aphilosophical reflection on religious existence that leads to the expression of the Sacredin symbols and myths, or to the place of evil and fallenness in human existence. Ricoeurmight well regret Heidegger’s too quick move to the ontological origins of theology andepistemology. In contrast to Heidegger, Ricoeur remains on the ontic level, perhapssometimes not heeding the need for its prior disclosure, which might well serve as a guidefor his own analyses of ontic dimensions of religious existence and of expressions andinterpretations of symbols and myths. Indeed, a prior ontological disclosure could providea beneficial preview for Ricoeur’s own ontic focus, allowing its reflection to transpirewithin 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 furtherclarification. This is simply the other side of the required existential neutrality consideredabove.

On this ontic level in an extended ethics, Ricoeur has focused pointedly upon theproblem of the place of evil in freedom within human existence, and upon the ontic rela-tion of human existence to the Sacred that is central to his whole philosophy. It is thusthat for Ricoeur, when pausing to dwell on the ontic, this has fostered an epistemologyof interpretation beneath the subject-object disjunction and has allowed for an integrationor a dialectizing of the phenomenology of spirit with a psychoanalysis of desire, with theirrespective orientations to teleology and to archeology, both of which prepare for the rela-tion to the Sacred within a phenomenology of religion and its eschatology. He has spentvast energies on the consideration of the conflict of interpretations in order to reveal whathe 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 andthe conflict of interpretation delays his ontology, the resolution of the conflict and therevelation of aspects of existence indicate the importance of considering the ontic levelfurther than Heidegger does.

Yet, in spite of these serious advantages of proceeding via the long way to examineontical dimensions of human existence, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics seems to allow specificreligious content to enter into his own philosophical fore-comprehension of humanexistence, which leads him away from the existential neutrality required above. This issomething that has been seen to be corrected by means of a slight adjustment. To accom-modate the radicality implied in Heidegger’s approach, Ricoeur’s view of existence requiresan adjustment beyond the neutrality of existence that liberates human existence fromfallenness as its necessary constitution. There is a further need to explicate the faith optionwithin which much of his philosophy of existence is developed, in order to liberate exist-encephilosophically from its prejudice of a specific religious tradition. This traditionassumes the corruption at the heart of human existence, which is what gives too muchplay to radical evil as necessarily constitutive in existential freedom. The essential dimen-sions 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 thedirection of Heidegger, Ricoeur’s way becomes better attuned to a philosophically radical-ized approach to the religious neutrality at the heart of human existence. Such an approachwould 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 againstthe Heideggerian “short way.” Ibid., 6, 10-11, 23-24.

81

folds a pre-given set of possibilities and which fosters a certain self-concern stemmingdirectly 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 cap-tivity, which makes it so that I must do evil”22 can be replaced or put on a better philo-sophical basis than the Kantian notion of radical evil, or, for that matter, any religioustradition 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 andthat freedom is capable of good as well as evil (or the lesser evil of errors and meremistakes). Thus, reinterpreted, Ricoeur’s statement that “I claim that my freedom hasalready made itself non-free” means that freedom is already human, and thus must beactualized in the finite.23 This reinterpretation recognizes, within the existential structures,a neutrality common to innocent, fallen, and recreated existence.

20 Ricoeur,The Conflict of Interpretations, 435.21 Ibid., 422.22 Ibid., 436.23 Ibid.

82

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 ofphenomenology, hermeneutics, narrative theory, and communicative rationality. Each timehe addresses himself to a subject, it takes the form of a mediation that highlights andpreserves differences between two positions without synthesizing a new unity. Instead,Ricoeur claims only to draw a “hermeneutic arc” between opposites, a metaphor that sug-gests a mitigated version of mediation. A hermeneutic arc, drawn between antitheticalpositions, contrasts each theory as seen from the perspective of the other, linking themtogether in a way that produces no theoretical resolution but only a practical one. Inprinciple, opposites remain unreconciled; in practice there is a way to proceed as if theywere not. Among the arcs Ricoeur has drawn, include those between phenomenology andhermeneutics, hermeneutics and structuralism, narrative theory and communicative ration-ality. On Ricoeur’s own self-interpretation, there is no relation between these mediations:each one addresses a different problem, developed in conjunction with different dialoguepartners, and is limited in scope. He claims only to deal with particular problems, not tocreate systems in a more traditionally dialectical fashion. Yet, Ricoeur manages to doprecisely that: he exhibits the internal connections among phenomenology, hermeneutics,narrative, and communicative rationality, and, in so doing, he suggests a single, promisingmodel of social inquiry. Such a model contains a much stronger theory of truth andvalidity than found in the hermeneutic philosophies of Heidegger and Gadamer, but, at thesame time, is less absolute than Husserlian phenomenology and more interpretive andcreative than Habermasian communicative rationality. Building on the works of Ricoeur,I want to argue that phenomenological description, interpretive narration, and discursiveargumentation are dialectically related; each is a part of a “practical whole” and needs theother 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. Truthas approximation draws on Husserlian phenomenology, in which truth is the fulfilling ofan empty intentionality. Truth as manifestation draws on Heideggerian hermeneutics, inwhich truth is the presencing of being. Ricoeur’s theories of metaphor and narrative ex-tend this tradition. Finally, truth as argumentation draws on Habermasian pragmatics, inwhich truth is a rationally achieved consensus over a validity claim. Yet, for some reason,Ricoeur repeatedly emphasizes the weakest, least adequate, Heideggerian conception oftruth, when he speaks of the world-disclosing character of literary reference inThe Ruleof Metaphor(1978) andTime and Narrative(1984). The Heideggerian conception of truthas manifestation only complements the two stronger conceptions of truth and validityrelated to the Husserlian and Habermasian character of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. These arethe undeveloped elements in Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology that should bebrought out to show that a much stronger conception of truth and validity can be gleanedfrom 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 intentionalityasserts 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 alwayscorrelated with how it is experienced by someone. Intentionality is the fundamental,invariant, transcendental condition for the possibility of experience. The methodologicaltechnique of bracketing, or the phenomenological reductions, are rules for directing ourattention toward experience. What we bracket is the temptation either to make judgmentsabout the ontological status of an object of experience, or to theorize and explain ratherthan describe experience. Instead, we are treating all experience simply as given in con-sciousness as a phenomena, or a meaning presenting itself to a consciousness. Further-more, the reductions are geared toward uncovering essences, or what is invariant inexperience. The goal of a phenomenological description is to explicate experience in termsof the intentional relationship to the world. Ricoeur’s conception of phenomenology ismuch 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 ap-pearance, thus as a meaning to be made explicit.”1

Implicit in the Husserlian conception of intentionality is the notion of evidence as aform of experience that satisfies or fulfills the conditions that guarantee certainty. Thephenomenological conception of evidence is not a set of truth criteria, but rather theexperiences that guarantee that an assertion is warranted. Various forms of evidence arepossible, depending on the type of object, or assertion, or validity claim in question. Inall cases, evidence involves the kind of experience that guarantees the reasonableness ofthe assertion, object, or claim. Such justification involves seeing proof with our own eyes.All proofs, arguments, deductions and inferences are derivative from what we perceiveabout the object or assertion. The validity basis for any form of evidence or argumentstems from our direct perception of the matter in question. Evidence is nothing more thana particular kind of experience.

According to Husserl, the condition for objectivity is that the object of consciousnessmust be given in such a way that nothing is missing from the lived experience of thatobject. Truth is grounded in experience -- not the experience of the natural attitude, butexperience that has been phenomenologically reduced. Objectivity is given to a certainkind of consciousness in which the object corresponds with the act that intends it andbestows meaning upon it. Something is given to consciousness objectively, when theexperience satisfies or fulfills an intention. Thus, evidence is a kind of seeing and intuitingthat grasps things that present themselves in full clarity and evident intuition. The thingitself is given in itself to me, but not by means of an idea, a hypothesis, or an emptymeaning. An unverified judgment is a mere opinion that has not been confronted by howthings actually are. The meaning of such an intention is empty; it can only be fulfilled bya confrontation with the things that would satisfy the requirement of validity for thatparticular judgment. A fulfilled intention is the relevant, direct experience of whatever isrequired in order to have a clear grasp of the object in question. The evidence that wouldfill an intention would be different, for example, for a claim about a material object, aremembered 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 objectis meant in presence or meant in absence. For example, an empty, absent intention is aremembered name; the fulfilled, present intention is the experience of perceiving the namenext 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 Conflictof 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 isthe fulfilling of an empty intention with the appropriate experience (i.e., the approximationof 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 ofHusserl. InFreedom and Nature(1950), for example, Ricoeur retains Husserl’s conceptionof the fulfillment of intentionality but applies it to a phenomenology of the will. Hedefines voluntary action in terms of a will that projects and decides the direction of anaction to be done by me that is within my capabilities. To decide is to anticipate the futurebased on my capability or power to execute that action. A phenomenology of voluntaryaction shows that the realization of a decision is the fulfillment of a project or anintention-to-do something that is within my power. The intentionality of a project is athought, but only the execution of a decision fulfills the intentionality of the project. Anaction fulfills a decision somewhat like a perception fulfills an empty theoreticalintention.3

Phenomenology continues to play a role in Ricoeur’s recent major works. InOneselfAs Another(1990), Ricoeur uses a typical phenomenological argument against Parfit, whoquestions the nature of our personal identity with examples of brain duplication, memorytransplantation, and cloning machines. Ricoeur replies that such thought experiments failto appreciate that human beings are not merely their brains and bodies, but corporealbeings who inhabit the world and who have intrinsic, not mere extrinsic, relations to thatworld. Our “belonging” to the world is the condition for the possibility for any reflectionon or discourse about the world. Yet a description of belonging is precisely what isignored by personal identity thought experiments about cloning and brain duplication.Ricoeur turns to phenomenology to develop a notion of the self that is fundamentallyrelated to its surroundings and community.

In his exchange with neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux inWhat Makes us Think?(2002), Ricoeur again returns to phenomenology, this time to correct Changeux’s attemptto 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 brainfunction. Changeux hopes to find a “third discourse” that would reconcile mind and bodyand eventually lead to a “neuronal” link between scientific knowledge (of the brain) andthe normative prescriptions (of human agency). Ricoeur believes such an endeavor isdoomed to fail, because the very premise of connectionism is confused. His argument isvintage 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 oradequate givenness. Adequate evidence is absolute self-givenness, which is beyond question. Suchevidence would be a completely fulfilled intention in which the object is self-given in an absolutelyimmediate seeing. However, such absolute certainty is, in principle, impossible to achieve. Experience isnever completely fulfilled. There are always expectant and attendant meanings that mediate presence withabsence. There are always implicit, co-present aspects of consciousness that form the inner and outerhorizons of experience. Intentionality always intends beyond itself. There are always potentialities, implicitin every intentional act, that can never be completely accounted for. Experience itself provides the cluesfor 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 andabsolute manner. Complete fulfillment is an infinite task that could never be completed, and absolutecertainty can never be attained. Instead, full presence functions as a limit idea that guides the gradualfulfillment 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 aboutone’s experience. What occurs in the brain may indeed correspond to my experience, butmy experience cannot be reduced to what happens in the brain. One must investigateexperience phenomenologically, not through empirical techniques.4

Most recently, inMemory, History, and Forgetting(2004), Ricoeur undertakes a(Husserlian) phenomenological analysis of memory. The phenomenology of memorybegins with an analysis of the objects of memory, the memory-experiences one has beforeone’s mind; it then considers the act of searching for a given memory, of anamnesis andrecollection; finally, from memory as given and exercised, Ricoeur examines reflectivememory, or memory itself. This phenomenology of memory grounds the successivestudies on the epistemological nature of history and the activities of historians, andconcludes with a “hermeneutics of the historical condition” that culminates on the pheno-menon of forgetting and forgiveness. Together they comprise a reflection on the problemof 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 thehermeneutic conception of truth as manifestation. Ricoeur shares with Heidegger a con-ception of truth asaletheia, which means bringing things out from concealment into theopen. According to Heidegger,aletheiameans “taking entities out of their hiddenness andletting 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 occurswhen we understand reference of creative discourses. All imaginative and creative usesof language improve our ability to express ourselves and extend our understanding of theworld. Symbols, myths, metaphors, and fiction can capture experience in ways thatordinary, descriptive language cannot. Ricoeur maintains that the reference of creativelanguage is “divided” or “split,” meaning that such writing points to aspects of the worldthat can only be suggested and referred to indirectly. Creative language refers to suchaspects 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 creativediscourse discloses a possible way of being-in-the-world that remains hidden fromordinary 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 throughmy experience of creative discourse. Reading creates a clearing that opens up newpossibilities of being in the world. Heuristic fictions help us to perceive new relations andnew connections among things, broadening our ability to express ourselves and understandourselves. InTime 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 aPhilosopher 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 togetherinto 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 sumof its parts.

A narrative truth is like a metaphorical truth, which is the ability of poetic discourseto bring to language hidden aspects of reality. A reader or hearer experiences a new wayof seeing -- as through the referential dimension -- opened up by the use of creativelanguage, including sentences symbols, metaphors, sentences, and narratives. Reading andhearing a creative discourse leads me to the (real or imaginary) reference through thesense of that discourse. I experience the world through my experience of listening andreading. Similarly, I experience the world through the unfolding of a narrative.

Reference and horizon are correlative as are figure and ground. All experience bothpossesses a contour that circumscribes it and distinguishes it, and arises against ahorizon of potentialities that constitutes at once an internal and an external horizon ofexperience: internal in the sense that it is always possible to give more details and bemore precise about whatever is considered within some stable contour; external in thesense that the intended thing stands in potential relationships to everything else withinthe 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 graspsthe sense and reference of the text, the reader’s experience is mediated and transformedby 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 oftruth as manifestation. There is no need to recount in detail all of the places it appearedand continues to appear in his work. However, inOneself As Another, he begins to reducethe role of narratives (and hermeneutics, in general) in order to affirm a stronger notionof the universal that would justify our epistemological and normative claims. The criteriafor a narrative truth in literature are inadequate for less creative discourses like moralreasoning or legal interpretation. One must offer valid, relevant reasons for preferring oneinterpretation 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 asvalid 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 ofhermeneutic philosophy and philosophical anthropology. Ricoeur appropriates fromHabermas the transcendental-pragmatic presuppositions of discourse in which competentspeakers can achieve understanding based on the recognition of validity claims. ForHabermas, reaching understanding depends on knowing how to redeem implicit validityclaims in speech. Discourse is the “reflective medium” or what Habermas sometimes callsthe “court of appeal” where participants explicitly raise and contest the validity claimsimplicit 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 argumentand appeal, as opposed to false consensus which is achieved though coercion anddomination. Such communicative competence presupposes familiarity with the conditionsunder which the validity of a claim would be acceptable to another. Together, individualscoordinate action with one another thanks to the validity basis of communication, whichalways permits participants to call one another into question. Communicative rationalityrefers to “the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing forceof argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjectiveviews and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselvesof 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 arationally achieved consensus. Participants must know how to raise and test validityclaims, and they must be committed to reaching agreement rationally before they canestablish something as true, right, or sincere. What determines rational discourse is theregulative ideal of unconstrained communication and the ideal speech situation, both ofwhich function as regulative ideals, establishing conditions for achieving mutual under-standing, establishing trust and good will, and promoting social integration and culturalreproduction.

Ricoeur has an inconsistent take on Habermas. Sometimes he fully accepts andappropriates 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 claimshe has no intention to “fuse them into a super-system that would compass both,” butrather, merely to show how “each speaks from a different place,” so that “each may beasked to recognize the other.”10 Olivier Abel calls this method of non-synthetic reconcil-iation Ricoeur’s “ethics of method.”11 For moral reasons, Ricoeur takes great pains torespect the differences among the philosophies he brings together. By showing how eachcan recognize the validity of the other, there is no reason to create a third perspective thatwould reconcile, hence eradicate, both terms. Instead, Ricoeur’s methodological practiceof drawing a hermeneutic arc that contrasts, relates, and thereby suggests practical (nottheoretical) 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; inpractice, the very activity of recovering a tradition within the horizon of anticipatedunderstanding achieves the practical aim of both. Where theoretical mediations areimpossible, practical mediations are not.

Yet, there are several places in Ricoeur’s works where he very explicitly incorporatesa theory of communicative rationality into a hermeneutic philosophy, creating (implicitly)the very mediation he claims is impossible. For example, in the 1970s he described textualinterpretation 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 ofSociety, 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 UniversityPress, 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 UniversityPress, 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 inexplanations that must be validated by others, terminating in comprehension, which isanother name for understanding that is informed and enriched by an objective process ofvalidation. Determining which interpretations are more plausible than others requires thatwe argue for our descriptions and explanations by offering relevant reasons in order toconvince an other of the superiority of one interpretation over another. Given the rangeof interpretations, often conflicting and contradictory, Ricoeur echoes Habermas, claimingthat “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 ofrationality where universality, verification, and so on are compelling.”13

Again, inTime and Narrative, Ricoeur argues that a regulative ideal of communicationis operative within communication. He agrees with Habermas that any critique of traditionis mediated by a regulative ideal of unconstrained communication, which, in turn, remainshistorically situated in order to be applied in a particular context. The regulative ideal ofunconstrained 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 re-installed in the horizon of expectation, this dialogical idea cannot fail to rejoin thoseanticipations buried in tradition per se. Taken as such, the pure transcendental quitelegitimately assumes the negative status of a limit-idea as regards many of ourdetermined expectations as well as our hypostatized traditions. However, at the risk ofremaining 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 ofexperience.14

Ricoeur appropriates communicative rationality even more explicitly inOneself AsAnother where he incorporates the ethics of communication as found in Habermas’sreinterpretation of the deontological tradition. Ricoeur agrees that communicative ethicsprovides a framework for resolving conflicts and reaching consensus regarding moralimperatives. Communicative ethics preserves both the universal validity and impartialityof moral judgments. Above all, it retains the central Kantian notion of autonomy butreinterpreted as “communicative autonomy,” which is the ability of speakers to expressthemselves freely to others. Ricoeur is in full agreement with Habermas over the basicprinciples of communicative ethics -- that the very process of justifying normative claimspresupposes that speakers have a shared understanding of what norms and reasons are andwhat they expect of us. Valid norms are discursively redeemable, impartial, universal, andrationally justifiable.

His acceptance is, of course, qualified. Rather than contrast, as Habermas does, thedifference between argumentation on one hand, and particular interpretations, personalconvictions, and traditional conventions on the other, Ricoeur argues that argumentationitself is an interpretive practice that leads to a potentially universal practical judgment ina particular situation. As Ricoeur puts it inOneself As Another, “what has to bequestioned 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,” inPaul 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 outcomebut only the practical outcome of the arbitration of moral judgment in situation.”15

Argumentation is a particular, sometimes formalized, practice in which participants clarifytheir convictions in order to resolve conflicts and reach understanding. Argumentationnever stands above our convictions or conventions, but instead is the “critical agencyoperatingat the heartof convictions.”16

In The Just(2000), Ricoeur continues to advance a theory of interpretation andargumentation in the context of legal interpretation and decision-making. Ricoeur concurswith Habermas that the “thesis of a potential agreement at the level of an unlimited andunconstrained community” forms the horizon of universal consensus before which “we areto place the formal rules of every discussion claiming correctness.”17 Argumentation,however, is dialectically related to interpretation. The rules governing discussion go handin hand with a prior meaning-giving context in which the interpretations of our needs andinterests occur.

The notion of an ideal discourse situation offers a horizon of correctness for alldiscourse where the participants seek to convince each other through argument. The idealis not just anticipated, it is already at work. But we must also emphasize that the ideal canbe inserted into the course of a discussion only if it is articulated on the basis of alreadypublic expressions of interests, hence of needs marked by prevailing interpretations con-cerning their legitimacy.18

The relationship between facts and norms in general is a dialectic interpretation andargumentation. Ricoeur goes on to say that the principle of universalization, “onlyprovides a check on the process of mutual adjustment between the interpreted norm andthe interpreted fact. In this sense, interpretation is not external to argumentation. It con-stitutes itsorganon.”19 Claims like these strain the credibility of Ricoeur’s prior claimto 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 theinterpretation and validation of claims raised about human actions involving evidence,narration, and argumentation. Unlike the hermeneutic philosophies of Heidegger andGadamer, Ricoeur’s theory of truth entails the argumentative vindication of claims underthe presupposition of unconstrained communication. But unlike the universal pragmaticsof Habermas, Ricoeur’s theory of truth presupposes not only the prior interpretation of thesubject of discussion within a broader, interpretive context, but also the prior experiencesparticipants bring to discussion. It includes the very descriptive, narrative, testimonialexperiences that a consensus theory of truth forbids. If we were to construct a model oftruth and validity from Ricoeur’s scattered remarks on the subject, we could draw ahermeneutic arc that would have one end anchored in phenomenological experience,passing through a narrative interpretation, anchored at the other end in communicativerationality. The path of the arc from phenomenology to hermeneutics is old route that doesnot 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), 287.16 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.

90

argumentative theory of truth as validity with a phenomenological theory of evidence andwith a narrative theory of truth as manifestation.

The path linking Husserl to Habermas through Ricoeur is the more reconstructive ofthe two. It starts by noting that, Habermas’s theory of communicative competencepresupposes the reflective awareness of the individual participants in communicativeaction to raise and test implicit validity claims. Even though the theory defines truth interms of the modes of argumentation competent speakers engage in together, it still makesreference to the perspectives of the participants in communication who reflectivelythematize the validity claims of one another, who are oriented to mutual recognition, whoindividually and collectively have learned how to communicate competently, and whomust be motivated to accept the force of the better argument. In fact, communicativerationality is, in part, defined in terms of the experience speakers and actors have whenengaged 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 expressionsand 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 theideal conditions under which my claim is accepted. But the formal procedures for reachingagreement in rational discourse say nothing about the content of the agreement. There islittle or no connection between the objectivity of experience and the truth of agreed-uponpropositions. So long as there is mutual, rational agreement, there is no way to mediateconflicting interpretations other than through further rational argumentation. From aphenomenological perspective, the consensus theory of truth entailed by the theory ofcommunicative rationality lacks an adequate theory of evidence. Habermas recognizes thelacuna in a consensus theory of truth, but claims that he is only specifying the idealconditions that must be satisfied in order for there to be any rational agreement. The ideaof truth is transcendental and universally binding; the content of truth is historical andcontingent. He explains that the criteria of truth lie at a different level than the idea ofredeeming validity-claims. In other words, Habermas claims only to specify the proceduralconditions for establishing validity, not to specify the criteria for ascertaining truth. Whatcounts as a good reason is something that depends on standards about which it must bepossible to argue. Nevertheless, Habermas confesses that he regards as “justified theadmonition that I have hitherto not taken the evidential dimension of the concept of truthadequately into account.”20

If a theory of evidence is not incompatible with a consensus theory of truth, and ifHabermas already acknowledges the legitimacy of reflective, first-person descriptions ofexperience, then perhaps it is possible to reconcile a phenomenological theory of evidencewith a pragmatic theory of truth. Ricoeur’s model of textual interpretation as a movementfrom 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 mustbe motivated to accept the better reason, then we can see how subjective experiencecontributes to intersubjective experience. The relevant subjective experience for thevalidation of a truth claim is the experience of evidence. Achieving consensus byredeeming validity claims discursively presupposes that the participants achieve evidentexperience that they test, validate and corroborate with one another. Evidence is thegradual 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 byreading 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 asthere are intentions. As filled intentions, they share a common structural relationship ofpresence and absence, and an approximate correlation between the object and itssuccessive appearances. The closer I come -- or we come -- to having the appropriateevident experiences, warrants an assertion; in turn, reaching understanding communic-atively validates evidence. Establishing the validity of evident experience is something thatrequires intersubjective validation, achieved through a process or rational argumentationthat approximates ideal speech. In turn, evident experience establishes the objectivity ofa rationally achieved consensus. For a claim to be warranted, it must be supported by bothrational argument and appropriate evidence.

The relation of narrative to argumentation is even more clear. Ricoeur himself makesthe connection apparent on a number of occasions.21 Following his lead we can say thata narrative is an interpretation of events that raises claims of truth and normativity andthus presupposes the anticipation of consensus of universally binding reasons, whereasargumentation presupposes a narrative-interpretative framework that delimits a context ofrelevant facts to be subject to justification. “Narrative evidence” refers to the form ofdiscourse we use to make truth claims about human actions. The evidence we bring todiscussion to argue for an interpretation unfolds in a narrative, as participants raise andtest the implicit truth claims contained in an interpretation to reach consensus. Narrative-evidence thus requires a principle of universalization in order to find a fair resolution toconflicting narratives, in the absence of an overarching vantage point that everyone recog-nizes. In turn, the argumentative practice itself -- that would vindicate a validity claim --occurs, in part, through narration. In short, narration and argumentation overlap. Narrationrequires argumentation to redeem its validity claims to truth and normativity, given theinadequacies in a model of narrative truth as manifestation. Argumentation requiresnarration to determine what the validity claim is about, how an event is placed under anexplanatory rule, and to establish generalizable needs and vindicate normative judgments.Argumentation constitutes the “logical framework” and interpretation of the “inventiveframework.”22

The political implications of the dialectic of narrative evidence and argumentationcannot be overstated if an interpretation of history is a retelling of what happened: whatstories are told, how events are organized and assigned significance, to whom and whatresponsibility 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 alwaysinsisted that one can argue for the relative superiority of a conflicting interpretation byshowing how one interpretation is false or invalid, or that the possibility of one inter-pretation is more probable than another. It is always possible to argue for one interpreta-tion over another. To do so, we offer evidence from experience, use creative language toreveal and to show, and rationally debate the implicit validity claims raised. This, Ibelieve, is what is implied in Ricoeur’s theory of truth, developed along the arc fromphenomenology to narrative to communicative action.

21 Ricoeur, “Interpretation and/or Argumentation,” 109-126.22 Paul Ricoeur, “Conscience and the Law,” in idem,The Just, 153.

92

4. THE UNSURPASSABLE DISSENSUS

Olivier Abel

My intention in this paper is to briefly take up a few of the questions thatMemory,History, Forgettingsuggested 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) approachesthe question of credibility, which seems to me to be one of the deepest themes of thebook, with the idea that our era is characterized more by an excess of incredulity anddistrust 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 realsense or topic as a Christian history. Before coming to this place of forgiveness in theeconomy of the book I would like to mobilize, in the central theme of the representationof the past, everything that touches on the problem of the politics of memory andforgetting, and which culminates in the question of the witness’s credibility. In passing,I will try to repositionMemory, History, Forgettingwithin the larger horizon of the otherworks of Paul Ricoeur.

1. The Past Represented

I would say immediately that in distinguishing the cognitive problem (one rememberswhat, how?) from the pragmatic problem (who remembers and why?), Ricoeur repeats anold gesture of his, that of the separation-articulation of the modes (semiotic, semantic,hermeneutic inLa Métaphore vive; or semantic, pragmatic, narrative, ethical, inSoi-mêmecomme un autre). To the power to speak, to act, to impute to oneself actions, here isadded the power to form memory (p. 344) or to remember (p. 57). In this gigantic eideticvariation on the subject that constitutes Ricoeur’s work, we must renounce with him thesearch for a variantidem, and to concern ourselves with the variations themselves, wherethe gaps indicate a selfhood that is never entirely recognized. It enters by way of thetheme, always at once epistemic and ethical, of recognition, of a face for example, of thesense 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 anodysseyof the spirit offorgiveness, and of the incognito of forgiveness (p. 489 and p. 491), to designate preciselyin forgiveness this major theme of recognition, here both paradoxical and negative, notby 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, ofpoints 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 wouldnot be discerned, in a somehow stereoscopic vision that casts the until then unperceivedinto sharp relief. On the other hand, because it is the gap itself that isrepresentativeandnormal language the anomaly, as Ricoeur had already shown inLa Métaphore viveandas he constantly reaffirms:

instead we must return to them from the Bergsonian method of division which invitesus to consider the opposite extremes of the spectrum of phenomena beforereconstructing the everyday experience whose complexity and disorder hinder cleardescription as a mixture. (p.439)

Speaking of the representation of the past by history, he writes:

93

the assertive vehemence of the historian’s representation as standing for the past isauthorized by nothing other than the positive of the event having seen intended acrossthe negativity of the being that no longer. (p.280)

In a similar manner, inLa Métaphore vivehe speaks of:

paradoxe indépassable qui s’attache à une conception métaphorique de vérité. Leparadoxe consiste en ceci qu’il n’est pas d’autre façon de rendre justice à la notion devérité métaphorique que d’inclure la pointe critique du ‘n’est pas’ (littéralement) dansla véhémence ontologique du ‘est’ (métaphoriquement).1

This touches on the proximity and distance between historic representation and poeticfiction: precisely because it is not about the same absence, it cannot be precisely about thesame affirmation, of the same vehemence, of the same attestation. We will come back tothis 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 thedistinction of register is not separated in Ricoeur, as we have just seen, from their re-articulation 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 orderof their reasons, it is necessary to understand their ties and their history woven ofdiscordances 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 thelong time span, to a similar degree microhistory is attentive to the initiative and capacityfor negotiation of historical agents in situations marked by uncertainty. (p. 187)

Ricoeur nonetheless refuses to let uncertainty in its turn become a category that explainseverything. (p. 226) It is why Ricoeur, after having recognized the unpredictability inwhich the historical actor moves,3 faithful to the Arendtian polarity between promise andforgiveness, balances uncertainty and unpredictability by the irreparable and irreversible.At this point he passes perhaps a little quickly over the dispute and the conflict, ir-reducible to a simple rational competition between choices, through which this very actorhas to struggle, to interpret his or her situation and to differ from others. The historio-graphic conflict of interpretations and systems of historicity is thus founded on thehistorical disputes themselves. On the other hand Ricoeur makes, it seems to me, the irrepar-able a central category not only for historic representation but for the historical actorswho, 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 ofMemory, History, Forgetting, to hold (with Michelde Certeau) historical writing as that which makes room for death (p. 550 no. 1), for theirrevocable (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 andDavid Pellauer translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). All secondary quotations havebeen 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 muchof 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 detailthe work of memory, which is also a work of mourning, the acceptance of a purelyinterior 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 inperspective betweenTemps et RécitandMemory, History, Forgetting: the latter exercisesa real uncoupling of imagination and memory. Not that Ricoeur renounces the work ofimaginative 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, takingfrom literary convention the forms that best display the past and absent reality that is tobe retrieved. Ricoeur elsewhere writes of fiction:

La véritable mimésis de l’action est à chercher dans les œuvres d’art les moinssoucieuses de refléter leur époque. L’imitation, au sens vulgaire du terme, est icil’ennemi par excellence de la mimésis. C’est précisément lorsqu’une œuvre d’art romptavec 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 libérerrétrospectivement certaines possibilités non effectuées du passé historique, c’est à lafaveur de son caractère quasi-historique que la fiction elle-même peut exercer aprèscoup sa fonction libératrice. Le quasi-passé de la fiction devient ainsi le détecteur despossibles enfouis dans le passé effectif.5

In these pages ofTemps et Récit, Ricoeur pushes the point as far as investing imaginationwith the difficult task of making room, in a history that explains and rereads, for thehorror that is attached to unique, incomparable events that must never be forgotten andthat fiction designates and keeps:

En fusionnant ainsi avec l’histoire, la fiction ramène celle-ci à leur origine communedans l’épopée. Plus exactement ce que l’épopée avait fait dans la dimension del’admirable, la légende des victimes le fait dans celle de l’horrible. Cette épopée enquelque sorte négative préserve la mémoire de la souffrance à l’échelle des peuplescomme l’épopée et l’histoire à ses débuts avaient transformé la gloire éphémère deshéros en renommée durable; dans les deux cas la fiction se met au service del’inoubliable ... il y a peut-être des crimes qu’il ne faut pas oublier, des victimes dontla souffrance crie moins vengeance que récit. Seule la volonté de ne pas oublier peutfaire que ces crimes ne reviennent plus jamais.6

All this remains in the terms ofTemps et Récit, but I think that inMemory, History,Forgetting, Ricoeur divides up the limits of narrative identity and narration, of which hewrote that it must join the non-narrative components of the formation of the subject thatis acting, suffering, etc.7 What are these non-narrative components? One could introducehere, pointing to another path Ricoeur explores elsewhere, the ample variation of literarykinds 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 Paul Ricoeur,Temps et Récit 3(Paris: Seuil, 1984-85), 198f.5 Ibid., 278.6 Ibid., 274-275.7 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 couldnot be satisfied with a representation that is only narrative. InMemory, History,Forgetting, it is about reclassifying narration among other processes of representing thepast:

But, in reclassifying narrativity in the way we are going to discuss, I want to [put anend to] one misunderstanding suggested by the upholders of the narrativist school andtaken for granted by its detractors, the misunderstanding that the configuring act thatcharacterizes emplotment would as such constitute an alternative in principle to causalexplanation. (p. 186)

It is not that historical causal explanation is a positivistic block inimical to plot. On thecontrary, it is that it includes as much interpretation as any narrative. Ricoeur thus aimsto show that interpretation is in play at all levels, from the documentary research throughto the historiographic representation by way of the various hypotheses that enable us tomake human interactions intelligible. And that narrative is one figure among others of therepresentation of absence. It is perhaps that the epic, that others tell of us in the thirdperson, must sometimes give way to tragedy, where the witness and even the actor comesforward personally, who can say: “I was there,” even though they are no longer there, andto share the responsibility ofgiving backto 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 sightof it from the outset. I spoke of the political problem of just memory, as the second (butnot secondary) thread that runs throughMemory, History, Forgetting. It is here thatRicoeur has attracted the most critical readings to this point, with regard to his notion ofthe “duty of memory.” Not that he rejects it categorically like Todorov. The duty ofmemory has an importance for him, and is a concern for a project of justice, evenimperative if it is about returning justice to the other. (pp. 86-92). Moreover, one willnotice that for Ricoeur there is no symmetry between memory and forgetting, and that heobjects to the idea of a “duty of forgetting,” not only with regard to amnesty (pp. 500-506), but even in the political project of restoring civil peace. I will note in passing thatsomething like a duty to forget still exists, mentioned in the beginning of the text of theEdict of Nantes, which took France out of the wars of religion, or in the oath not toremember misfortunes, which led Athens out of civil war.8 It is why, as a purely politicalconcept, which I would distinguish from a metapolitical or even antipolitical conceptionappropriate to tragedy, I would readily propose a moderate advocacy of amnesty, in spiteof Ricoeur’s criticism.

But this last here prefers to put forward the acceptance of the divided city, if not actualcivic dissensus. We will come back to this. Whence then this polemic against the duty ofmemory, beyond the fact that most detractors didn’t read the book and are themselveslimited to allusions? It is that Ricoeur expresses reservations regarding the duty ofmemory, when it is excessively expanded beyond the sphere that we just addressed: thesereservations arise from the difficulties in controlling memory, and from the danger ofimplementing apolitics 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 ofmemory. There are false memories, cardboard memories. And this is why he prefers tospeak of a “work of memory,” where a memory of misfortune, far from deadening us tothe misfortunes of others, opens us to them. This is how the indispensable and vitalmemory does not short-circuit history and critical distanciation, but rather releasesrepressed memories with its touch.

This is an old theme in Ricoeur, and the heart of his critical hermeneutics (p. 373, seeDu texte á l’action(pp. 101-117 and pp. 362ff.), that is also to say, against a romantic orontological hermeneutics, the autonomy of history in relation to memory, and against acritical positivism, the irreducible dependence of history on memory (Memory, History,Forgetting, p. 106). This double arena of affiliation and distance makes delicate alldiscussion ofMemory, History, Forgettingthat would pick on one of the two sides asisolated 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 itsauthor no longer answers questions that are sedimented and extinct, but opens up to newquestions -- 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, weallowed a protest to be heard, one in which the power of the attestation of memoryconcerning the past is lodged. History can expand, complete, correct, even refute thetestimony of memory regarding the past; it cannot abolish it. (p. 498)

Emancipation never abolishes childhood, and what was but is no more always demandsto 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 dis-continuity of the problems. Not only are the problems of fidelity and truth irreducible, butthey are also inseparable. It is this requirement that refuses the dogmatic synthesis just asit 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 theoverlapping constitution of individual and collective memory: on the one hand one doesnot remember all alone, (p. 121) but on the other hand only singular points of view existwithin the collective memory. (p. 123) The intermediate and central category here is theone of the memory of close relations, those about whom I can offer my testimony, thosewho can attest on my behalf, those that can deplore my death, and those whose death Ican deplore just as they could rejoice in my birth or I could rejoice in theirs. But closerelations are not only in an intermediate sociological category between the individual andthe collective. It is a quasi-ontological dynamic of possible closeness and the remoteness:the close relation is the one whomakesherself close, or who is suddenly drawn close bysome event. Proximity indicates a vital, ethical, or contemplative impulse. Somewhat inthe sense of what Kierkegaard calls thecontemporary, close relations are those that canmake one a contemporary, even if their coexistence seems anachronistic and they belongto different language worlds and generations. Ricoeur goes so far at to define them asthose 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 recountedin diverse ways, represented by others. (p. 299) Moreover, it is in this intermediate timeand the indirectness of the connection to close relations that the range of our differencesof points of view in relation to an event is shaped, a gap that is the very shape of ourtemporality: what makes us contemporary can also make us anachronistic -- and the “petitmiracle de la reconnaissance” or of recollection is perhaps just such an experience ofanachronistic contemporaneousness.

The civic dissensus appears then, just as it does with contemporaries, somewherebetween the judge and the historian, in a common rhetorical space open to discussion. Adiscussion that works our memory, argument, and even our imaginations tireless, and ofwhich we only know that the rules, boundaries, and audience are not the same, dependingon the spheres. The historians and the judges both must certainly at times find support inthe finality of the facts and on this practical perspective according to which history is notfinished; but they do it differently. And there is no absolute third party that allows themto settle this. (p. 314f)

However, it is exactly this dissensus that forms citizens capable of standing in theabsence of a last judgment, capable of holding the tension of the sharing of theresponsibility between the singular imputation of fault to the guilty individuals, and thepolitical imputation to a consenting community. The citizen appears in the refusal thatguilt be so tightly focused that all others can unload it onto a few guilty emissaries. Butthe 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 totake 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 longdigression. One of the main problems that Ricoeur faces in this book, and which is foundas 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 thealternative that frightened Giovanni Levi, that men believe they can know everything,represent everything, say everything, and thus tumble into general skepticism, either byimpossibility or, worse, with the feeling that any hypothesis, if well enough equipped, canbe verified. Ricoeur writes:

What finally brings about the crisis in testimony is that its irruption clashes with theconquest made by Lorenzo Valla inThe Donation of Constatine.Then it was a matterof struggling against credulity and imposture, now it is one of struggling againstincredulity and the will to forget. (p. 176)

It is this remark that I would like to meditate on in the lines that follow, because Ricoeurmakes a sensible point not only about the historic condition, but about the contemporarycondition, and language and politics in general. And I believe it important to point outeverything in the book that bears on it because I believe that it is one of the main ques-tions 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 aboutthe credibility of the testimonies, that asks, beyond the critical confrontation, a minimumof mutual approval, the acceptance that there can be for each something indubitable: “wehave nothing better than testimony, in the final analysis, to assure ourselves thatsomething 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 ofinstitutions that is speech, in the possibility to speak and to act, is woven of a mutual andfundamental confidence in the simple existence of each other.

This mutual approbation expresses the shared assurance that each one makes regardinghis or her powers and lack of powers, what I termed attestation inSoi-même commeun 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 myactions... In my turn, I include among my close relations those who disapprove of myactions, but not my existence. (p. 132)

Testimony presupposes this mutual attestation. This confidence doesn’t disarm criticalthought, 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 internalconsistency of the testimonies, the second is their pluralism, the fact that they shift tomake room for other witnesses:

Before underscoring the most obvious oppositions that distinguish the use of testimonyin court from its use in archives, let us pause to examine two features common to bothuses: the concern with proof and the critical examination of the credibility of thewitnesses. (p. 316)

Common to both the judge and the historian is certainly their practice of confronting andcontrolled 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 courthousescannot decree historic truth, and history, concerned as it is to render to all their due, is notto be decided in a courthouse.

With regard to the credibility of a witness, it is necessary to carry the doubt to theheart of the witness and of the testimony itself, if one wants to get hold of the feeling ofindubitable certainty that carries with it the experience of the recognizing the past:

Upon this converge the presumptions of reliability or unreliability directed tomemories. Perhaps we have placed a foot in the wrong imprint or grabbed the wrongring dove in the coop. Perhaps we were the victims of a false recognition, as whenfrom afar we take a tree to be a person we know. And yet, who, by casting suspicionsfrom outside, could shake the certainty attached to the pleasure of the sort ofrecognition we know in our hearts to be indubitable? Who could claim never to havetrusted memory’s finds in this way? (p. 430)

It is not by chance that Ricoeur begins this chapter on “Forgetting and the Persistenceof Traces” and the small miracle of recognition (p. 427) by expansive discussion on theconfidence and distrust in the possibilities of memory, that accompany and mutuallyapprove each other without definitively overriding the other.

4. The Historic Dissensus

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

99

What confidence in the word of others reinforces is not just the interdependence, butthe shared common humanity, of the members of a community. This needs to be saidin fine to compensate for the excessive accent placed on the theme of difference inmany contemporary theories of the social bond. Reciprocity corrects for the unsubstitut-ability of actors. Reciprocal exchange consolidates the feelings of existing along withother humans –inter homines esse, as Hannah Arendt liked to put it. This “between-ness” opens the field todissensusas much as toconsensus. And it is thedissensusthatthe critique of potentially divergent testimonies will introduce on the pathway fromtestimony to the archive. To conclude, in the final analysis, the middle level of securityof language of a society depends on the trustworthiness, hence on the biographicalattestation, of each witness taken one by one. It is against this background of assumedconfidence that tragically stands out the solitude of those “historical witnesses” whoseextraordinary experience stymies the capacity for average ordinary understanding. Butthere are also witnesses who never encounter an audience capable of listening to themor 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 suspenseand requires the courageous response of attestation: to testify in spite of the feeling thatit 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 theirexistential consistency as listeners while really taking account of what they heard, andcapable of making it so that this experience, far from closing them, opens them to thepossibility of other experiences of listening. The reception of the testimony is as importanta critical element as its reliability. The whole question is to increase the public’s abilityto actually receive the testimony. This point seems quite important to me, and it seemslegitimate to me to consider that Ricoeur suggests it implicitly.

In the lonely anguish to which we have just pointed, a thoroughly terrible philosophicalquestion slips in, the question of skepticism, that is also the one of solipsism. One comescloser here to Wittgenstein, and to the question of skepticism, i.e., the withdrawal of eachinto one’s private language, doubting that whatever it is can really be known or com-municated. We need not believe that we can share our experiences so easily, and even lessto impose them on others. However, one does not remember all alone, and history is thework 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”). Theyallow us to affirm that “in reality, we are never alone”; and in this way the thesis ofsolipsism is set aside, even as a temporary hypothesis… In other words, one does notremember alone. (p. 121-122)

It is precisely in the section on the exteriority of memory according to Maurice Halbwachsthat this formula intervenes. Ricoeur follows this up with the important remark that “it isthe connectedness of memory, dear to Dilthey…that has to be abandoned” and by thequasi-Leibnizian idea that “each memory is a viewpoint on the Collective Memory, thatthis viewpoint changes as my position changes.” (p. 122, 124)

Credibility appears from then on as indissolubly linked to the test and exercise ofdissensus, of the feeling of discordant voices. This discordance can be mapped onto thegreat historical processes:

Osiel is drawn to thedissensusprovoked by the trials’ public proceedings and to theeducational function exerted by this verydissensuson the level of public opinion and

100

collective memory, which is expressed and shaped on this level. The trust he places inthe benefits expected to follow from this culture of controversy is related to his moraland political credo on behalf of a liberal society – in the political sense that English-speaking authors give to the term “liberal.” (p. 323)

It is, however, not only about the credibility of the testimonies in the juridical space ofa lawsuit, but also about the reciprocal credibility (and of the incredulity) of history andmemory. Here we find once again Ricoeur’s classic oscillation between a hermeneuticpole of belonging to the world already and a critical pole of distance and pluralism -- withthis double connection of the autonomy of critical and comparative history with respectto memory, and of the dependence of history with respect to the memory of the incom-parable, of that which was and “demande a être raconté.” The rehabilitation of memoryin history proposes to find a point of balance, before the excess of credulity in the onedrags 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 thecritique of suppressed dissensus:

Of course, not everything historical can be included within situations of conflict ordenunciation. Nor do they all come down to situations of the restoration of confidencethrough the creation of new rules, through the establishment of new uses, or therenovation of old ones. These situations only illustrate the successful appropriation ofthe 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 ofrelevance are there to attest that the present of history does include a dialecticalstructure. (p. 226)

It is because of this delicate balance between trust and dissensus that the historian mustbroaden the range and what Ricoeur calls “l’échelle des aspects non quantitatifs des tempssociaux.” He thus mentions authors such as Bernard Lepetit to show how the slowcontinuity and discontinuity of changes, with regard to the agreements and deepdisagreements 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 ofinitiative than a theoretical representation, acts as intersection between the horizon ofexpectation and the experiential space so dear to Kosseleck, but without being able todesignate, at the intersection of the legal and the historical, an absolute third party. Thejudicial lawsuit proposes a form of a third party, and historiographic narration also,certainly. To retrieve and pursue the four categories of responsibility that Ricoeurpreviously borrowed from Jaspers, there would also be the narrative one tells a friend, andthe somehow metaphysical responsibility of the “survivors” before God. But thesedifferent faces of “party” do not comprise a system: “The vow of impartiality must thusbe 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 foundin an assured certainty, but in the confident acceptance of this uncertain situation, of thistroubling strangeness of the ordinary, in the wonder that we nevertheless so often mangeto 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 assureourselves that something did happen in the past.” (p. 147) I would gladly bring it closerto the famous words of J. L. Austin, inHow to Do Things with Words: “Our speech is ouraction.” How to trust language, but not to put our trust in it? How do we not credit thecapacity of the ordinary actors, speakers, and narrators to express more or less what theydo 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...hasmotivated our entire undertaking... On the one hand, it is the enigma of a fault held toparalyze the empowerment to act of the “capable being” that “we are”; and it is, inreply, the enigma of the possible lifting of this existential incapacity, designated by theterm “forgiveness.” This double enigma runs diagonally through that of therepresentation 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 goingto 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 theepilogue ofMemory, History, Forgetting, touches very near to some very old concerns ofmine, and I am very sensitive to the remarkable ambiguousness in which Ricoeur placesforgiveness, because he situates it well inside his book as something that comes downfrom 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 orderto be bound by a promise, the subject of an action must also be able to be released fromit through forgiveness. (p. 459) In this difficult moment, forgiveness must pass throughthe test of justice, not short-circuit it, (p. 473) and Ricoeur speaks of the conditionality ofthe 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) Hespeaks of gestures incapable of being transformed into institutions (p. 458), and he speaksof abuses of forgiveness just as there are abuses of memory. (p.469) The link between tothe book’s epilogue is then very uncertain, like a supplement where one does not knowif and how it is connected to the rest: Ricoeur announces immediately that it is a questionother than the one of representing the past that motivated the book as a whole: ifforgiveness 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 itexists, constitutes the horizon common to memory, history and forgetting. Always in re-treat, this horizon slips away from my grasp. It makes forgiving difficult: not easy butnot 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 ofthe text.” In the optics of the book, the depth of “fault belongs to theparerga, the‘asides,’” (p. 461) like all limit situations he addresses in the epilogue. We might objectthat if it is no longer about the major question of the representation of the absent past, weare nevertheless involved in the other big question, the one of a just politics of memoryand 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 knowledgethat 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 distrustwith respect to love, and more precisely with respect to all premature synthesis betweenreligious ethics of reconciliation or even merely of the compassionateagape, and theethics of the magistrate. If there is no politics of forgiveness, it is because love “provesto 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 thisdistrust 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 aboutbringing back all unity in history or justice under the sign of synthesis; it is precisely thatthere are different forms of impartiality, there is no absolute third, as if it were soimportant to allow room for an antipolitical fringe. The gap is irreducible, and perhaps itis this anachronism that makes time human.

I would guess, and this is what I would like to explore in the pages that come, that theword parerga, parergon, can help us to think through the ambiguous position of forgive-ness and love in the epilogue. An epilogue is not a conclusion. Ricoeur speaks of incom-pleteness. I will add that it is less about a step in the same direction or a reconnection thatenables a consolidation of all that has been achieved along the way, than of a kind of “de-totalization,” of a return to the beginning -- but of course then, one does not begin againin the same way. The term ofparergais used by Kant in the final note that completes thefirst of the four general remarks that finishes the four parts of TheReligion within theLimits of Reason Alone. These four remarks are about grace, understood as that which isconfined to religion, and give it its frame but would not know how to become an integralpart of it. The inactivity of grace must remain an outside limit to religion. In the sameway, it seems to me that Ricoeur places his epilogue under the title of forgiveness (andof an economy of the gift and the loss), to situate it on this margin that is neither insidenor outside.

In a small book on the ethics of Ricoeur,11 I myself slipped in an epilogue on “Loveand Justice” where I tried to show this ambiguity, the living tension, the twist he puts onthe 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 proceduraljustice:

détachée du contexte de la règle d’or, la règle du maximin resterait un argumentpurement prudentiel, caractéristique de tout jeu de marchandage. Non seulement lavisée déontologique, mais même la dimension historique du sens de la justice, ne sontpas simplement intuitives, mais résultent d’une longueBildung issue de la traditionjuive et chrétienne, aussi bien que grecque et romaine. Séparée de cette histoireculturelle, 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 theopposition of the legal and the good, and sometimes be opposed to the good that wouldthen 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).12 “Une théorie purement procédurale de la justice est-elle possible?” Paul Ricoeur,Le juste(Paris:

Esprit, 1995), 96.

103

Sans le correctif du commandement d’amour, en effet, la règle d’or serait sans cessetirée dans le sens d’une maxime utilitaire dont la formule seraitdo ut des, je donnepour que tu donnes. La règle: donne parce qu’il t’a été donné, corrige le “afin que” dela maxime utilitaire et sauve la règle d’or d’une interprétation perverse toujourspossible.13

Likewise, here forgiveness works horizontally like a demand of reciprocity submitted torules and conditions. Sometime it works vertically as the unconditional that can appear butcannot be forced to appear, but is attempted -- thinking ourselves capable. It is thusnecessary 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 timealso to accept oneself as incapable, impotent (it would be necessary for the forgivenessto be entirelyselflessand one never knows if it is).

As always, and a little like a Platonic dialogue, Ricoeur stages this disproportionthrough readings that he opposes and conjoins, by which he lets them somehow conspirebefore arranging them and bending them to his plan. It is in this way that he borrowssome elements of my analysis of the moral dilemmas of horizontal forgiveness, andborrows from Derrida some of the essential characteristics of the height of verticalforgiveness. And this is how he constructs his frame, which is like the limit idea of thewhole book. It is a Kantian idea, and it is as if he defended a Kantian concept usinghuman history.

6. A Kantian Frame

Now Derrida some time ago wrote a very beautiful text on theparerga, by which I wouldlike to make a detour. There he analyzed the notion of disinterested pleasure, defendingthe disinterestedness against Nietzsche and the pleasure against Heidegger; but he alsonoted Kant’s distrust of theparerga, this non-organic supplement to the work, as theframe for the pictures or the garments for the statues, this superfluous supplement. Thisframe, that is neither interior nor exterior, a little like the player who is neither inside hisgame nor outside his game if he is really playing, Derrida recovers it in the very structureof theCritique of Judgment, where Kant imports into the analytics of aesthetic judgmentthe set of judgments that issued from theCritique of pure Reason. The frame fits poorly:

on transpose et fait entrer de force un cadre logique pour l’imposer d’une structure nonlogique, une structure qui ne concerne plus essentiellement un rapport de l’objetcomme objet de connaissance. Le jugement esthétique, Kant y insiste, n’est pas unjugement de connaissance.14

According to Derrida, the only justification of this transposition resides in a hypotheticallink with understanding. Making allusion to theCritique of Judgment(paragraph 1, p. 49),Derrida comments:

13 Paul Ricoeur,Amour et justice(Paris: PUF, 1997), 56-58.14 Ibid., 81.

104

Le cadre de cette analytique du beau, avec ses quatre moments, est donc fourni parl’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 toutce discours; et en lui le discours sur le cadre ... tout le cadre de l’analytique du beaufonctionne, par rapport à ce dont il s’agit de déterminer le contenu ou la structureinterne, comme unparergon.16

The frame becomes in its turn an example of that which permits its consideration as anexample, aparergaof that which permits its consideration as aparerga. It is toward thisbizarre composition of settings in the depths that Derrida is heading. For him, if Kantdismisses a supplementary frame based on another supplementary frame, it is because thejudgment of beauty remains spellbound by the model of pure presence, released from allsupplement, and that this presence gives way -- from whence the mourning, that meansdisinterestedness (the possible).

Derrida speaks of a kind of grief-stricken connection to beauty -- a theme extensivelydeveloped on pages 92-94, where aesthetic experience, “a tulip without color and withoutperfume,” is already itself a work of the mourning. A little later, Derrida, observing thatthe beautiful no longer depends on empirical existence (neither that of the object, nor thesubject), writes:

le plaisir suppose non pas la disparition pure et simple, mais la neutralisation, non passimplement la mise à mort mais la mise en crypte de tout ce qui existe en tant qu’ilexiste.17

We know, we have just recounted, that Ricoeur considers the notion of a “work ofmemory” as more sufficient than one of a “duty of memory.” He relates it to the work ofmourning, and we have seen how pervasive the notions of mourning and burial were inMemory, History, Forgetting. There would be thus, as inLa Recherche du temps perdu,a kind of memory that comes back from mourning, an orphism of memory. We recoverin memory only that which was truly lost. There is however another side of the work ofmemory, more lively, inchoate, a side of memory somehow newborn. And it is there thatRicoeur parts ways with Derrida: one could bring the work of memory, of that which heesteems inLa Métaphore viveas the work of resemblance -- which in turn does not seemto be very far from what he calls “the small miracle of recognition,” closer to thisfundamental 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 deRembrand,”18 Ricoeur suddenly asks what allows thought that the represented face is thatof the painter himself. Because the date and the signature of the picture say the painter’sname, but it is an external legend that indicates that it is regarding a self-portrait. Thecanvas represents one who is absent, the author of the canvas died, and we are told thatthey are identical. What is this identity? Faithful to his hermeneutics, Ricoeur insists onthe fact that while doing this “painting examination” (in 1660, a difficult moment in his

15 Ibid., 83.16 Ibid.17 Ibid., 54.18 Paul Ricoeur,Lectures III (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 13f.

105

life), Rembrandt proposes an interpretation of himself, and that the work is henceforthorphaned from its author and its context.

Just as living speech made room for writing, the work is unglued, unmoored, and thereis nothing to look for around or behind it other than the absence of the one that renderedin this portrait what he saw of his face, and that he died. And this portrait, preciselybecause it is orphaned (I would say unmoored), looks at us today, made of us its contem-poraries. It makes us see new resemblances.

There is, in the numerous attempts of van Gogh to paint some shoes, the pairssometimes lovingly odd, something that is at the level of a self-portrait. That is theappraisal of Jacques Derrida, in the text of “Restitution”:

Dans un autoportrait, on se rend soi-même. À soi-même. … Mais rendre n’a pas lemême sens dans les deux locutions: se rendre en peinture et se rendre quelque choseà soi-même, se payer. … et se rendre à quelqu’un serait pour qui se livre dans unereddition, un quatrième sens. Van Gogh a rendu ses chaussures, il s’est rendu dans seschaussures, il s’est rendu avec ses chaussures, il s’est rendu à ses chaussures, il s’estrendu ses chaussures.19

What would be thedifferendbetween Derrida and Ricoeur? I don’t know. Mourning isnot the same, maybe, but do we ever have the same mourning, and is it not just this thatmakes it irreparable? InLa métaphore viveRicoeur discussed the deconstruction by whichDerrida, in hisMythologie blanche, sees a western metaphysical bias acting on the wholeof 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 lanaissance, mais, si j’ose dire, par la porte de la mort. Le concept d’usure implique toutautre chose que le concept d’abus que nous avons vu opposer à celui d’usage par lesauteurs anglo-saxons.21

But it is not enough to resuscitate metaphor under a concept, to show its reproductivemechanism: first because, it seems to me, wearing down itself could produce new signif-ications, through the crumbling of semantic spheres, or setting in relief the sense thatemerges in ordinary use. And then there is that which Ricoeur, in a sort of secondaryKantianism, calls “le schématisme de l’attribution métaphorique,” the possibility thatoriginal gaps slip into an old metaphor, reopening it, and to making it say something quitenew; finally because thereexists, constantly, always already taking support from thenetwork of sedimented metaphors, the invention of new living metaphors.

Ricoeur’s protest would be that one cannot separate mourning and birth, and that underhistory and forgetting themselves there is life. We can here recall that birth is a decisivephilosophical theme on which Ricoeur rejoins Arendt:

must this not be understood as a discreet yet stubborn protest addressed to theHeideggerian philosophy of being-toward-death? Should we not see action as “an ever

19 Jacques Derrida,La Vérité en peinture(Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 435.20 “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.

106

present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but inorder 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 themastery of time be joined to the miracle of natality? It is precisely this question that setsour entire enterprise into motion again and invites us to pursue the odyssey of forgivenessto the center of selfhood. In my opinion, what is lacking in the political interpretation offorgiveness, 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 ofbinding.” (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 thepoint of making it a triumph of life, like an unending process of renewal, which wouldcompletely lack the tragic.23 The theme of birth appears sinceLe volontaire etl’involontaire as even more radical than that of death, and comprised at the same time ofthe vigorous joy in the new, and of mourning. Birth is also orphaned, it is a necessaryfacet of all experience, a fundamental limit. And I would quickly point out that the lastpages ofMemory, History, Forgetting, which foreground the undecidable character of thepolarity that divides forgetting between the grief-stricken entropy of erasure and the joyfulconfidence in that which he calls the forgetting in reserve, brings this equivocation to itsparoxysm.

If we give credit to the competence of ordinary beings in the face of time, we will notthen think of mourning without thinking of birth, that is to say the desire to be -- it is herethat the Bergsonianism probably conceals a discreet Spinozism, a deeply affirmativeorientation, approving of the thought of Paul Ricoeur, who ends his book on the notionof life, of incompleteness. But this living continuity that one recovers with the astonishingidea of a forgetting in reserve that he opposes to the forgetting of erasure, to thediscontinuity of deaths and births, as being of the same strength, does not designatesomething that would be at our disposal (otherwise this would not be of the order offorgetting), but something that arranges us. Moreover: in this respect, there is norepresentation of the past that could be a resurrection of it, that would no doubt requirea finished work of memory (p. 499) -- mourning is there to separate the past from thepresent and to make room for the future, that is to say for being carefree, for forgettingoneself. Whence comes the final Kierkegaardian note.

It is indeed a point where one can speak of a stilled forgetting, (oubli d vr) andRicoeur then cites the magnificent pages of Kierkegaard on the lilies of the field and thebirds of the sky, who do not work, do not compare, who forget themselves. Thisinsouciance, this unbinding of the care of self, is again a theme of the forgiveness, not

22 This unbinding is a completely primarymetapolitical theme, hearkening back to the PuritanReformation, on the right of breaking alliances and contracts. At the same time it is a comic theme, atheme of wisdom: thus Ricoeur develops elsewhere more tragic and epic theses, which do not allow usas easily to think the binding of the agent and his act that Badiou attributes to Ricoeur as a Christianconception of the subject. Since then I have explained this in an article appearing in theHerne 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 beforeanother, and who comes to be, to appear in world.

It is exactly because there is the melancholy, the very impossibility of completing thetask of mourning, that there is birth that neither finishes nor supplements this work, butstills it. The difficulty of forgiveness is to yield neither to the vertigo of entropy, the wearof 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 memorywould 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 thatit seems to me possible to drive the idea, that the epilogue on forgiveness inparergonofMemory, History, Forgetting, is a limit, a paradox, a horizon, the place of tension, oftorsion or the about-face of all discourses.

Ricoeur’sepilogueputs 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 philosophicalapproximation of the theological vocabulary ofReligion Within the Limits of ReasonAlone, we could say with Ricoeur that: “forgiveness offers itself as the best eschatologicalhorizon of the entire problematic of memory, history, and forgetting.” Would forgivenessfinally be like the eschatological horizon of the appeased memory, of the happyforgetting? But this must immediately be understood as a limit idea, which is why Ricoeurcontinues: “But this approximation ofeskhatonguarantees no happy ending for ourenterprise 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, soto 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) Theeskhatonis not the LastJudgment, which Ricoeur greatly mistrusts (it is for him a contradictory notion, and eventhen there is no absolute third). And the odyssey of forgiveness ever reaches the promisedland. 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 forgivenessat all as the crowning or teleological reconciliation of history, but as aneskhaton, aconstituent limit, and I would almost call it anordinary 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 Schopenhaueriandetachment.

25 It is by this double movement, no doubt also influenced by a reading of a great essay by Jean-François Lyotard on Hannah Arendt (entitledSurvivant, in his Lectures d’enfance), that I achieved my“Tables de Pardon,” in the appendix toLe 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 sonprincipe, pour qu’il soit pur.” And radical evil “n’aît sur la voie de la totalisation, il n’apparaît que dansune pathologie de l’espérance, comme la perversion inhérente à la problématique de l’accomplissementet de la totalisation.” See Paul Ricoeur, “La liberté selon l’espérance,” in idem,Le Conflit desinterprétations(Paris: Seuil, 1969), 407, 414.

27 Grace does not come as the crowning moment of nature or history, it precedes them as a firstunbinding, a recommencement, a first gift, a free giving, an offer where forgiveness is but gratitude andrecognition. It is why, during a 1996 course I gave in Lausanne on “Le pardon, l’histoire, l’oubli,” Iadopted this alternate syntax (also used in myEsprit article in 1993: “Ce que le pardon vient faire dansl’Histoire”). Starting from an unconditional and impossible forgiveness, passing by way of the pragmaticsof conditional forgiveness, I then moved toward an anthropology of a necessary forgiveness. It is this firstforgiveness that I then confronted with two kinds of tragedy, the tragedy of conflict with respect todisagreements in history, and the formidable work of emplotment they require. The tragedy of theirreparable with respect to the double work of memory and forgetting culminated in moderate praise forforgetting.

108

small article on “Le pardon ou comment revenir au monde ordinaire,”28 I protest againsta 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 lessdramatic. Theeskhaton, in fact, is not the end of the world, just the opposite. It iselsewhere also the main argument of Ricoeur against a deconstruction that wants to betotal: it is not necessary to construct a metaphysics of the original and the metaphoricalon the duality of the figurative sense and the literal sense, because the latter means onlycurrent, usual.29 And if ordinary language is likewise entirely metaphorical, how do weget out of it, how do we not trust these normal anomalies of language that are ourmetaphors, all not-yet-lexicalized usage?30

I wrote above that if forgiveness appeared as this detotalization, a return to thebeginning, one did not begin again the same way. If it was necessary to begin again, Iwould begin with Kant’s emphasis, inThe Critique of Judgment, on the questions ofreceptiveness. This is not only the feeling that beauty speaks, but that we do not knowwhat it says (this is no doubt hope). This is not only that in the absence of a third we canmake room in ourselves for the possibility of another point of view, in a sort of enlargingof the imagination. (p. 414) It is the fact that my judgments, my memory, even mytestimony, cannot be forced, obligated, ordered, nor imposed, and that their credibility andtheir very communicability rests, fragile, on the manner of which they are confided intheir 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 anassured and absolute confidence, but toward a confidence in the possibility of acting andspeaking, and the indubitable recognition that “this was.” (p. 429-430) This zigzag ofconfidence in one’s own testimony, which renders to the testimony of others theconfidence that is due, seems to me the beating heart the work that has been given us hereto discuss and reflect on together.

Translated by Boyd Blundell

28 Esprit (août-septembre 2000).29 See Ricoeur,La métaphore vive, 369.30 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 ofvécu-- a live reality, reality as “lived” -- at the forefront of hisinvestigations, that Maurice Merleau-Ponty examines (among other notions) the “originalexperience 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 intrusionof some quantitative, measurable, and geometrical scheme; it makes us think of a realityin which I can move corporeally, by means of an original and invisible connection. Quali-fying space aslived corresponds to discovering it as a “perceptual ground,”2 in so far asit is neither constituted from an objective quality belonging to things with their relationsof size or distance, nor from a ‘decree’ issuing from a subject. By “perceptual ground”we must understand the very relation of coexistence by whichthe one who thinks aboutspacerealizes thathe already belongs to that which he thinks. Thus the deep reality ofspace offers itself up to discovery only in those qualitative experiences where a locus orlocality makes our gaze quiver with emotion3 and turns itself into deep intimacy andevidence of belonging. In other words, it needs to be said that the “ensemble of ourexperiences … is permeated throughout by an already acquired spatiality,”4 in which we“discover ourselves already under the influence of”5 an atmospherethat is not, bydefinition, entirely thematizable. Therefore, to state that a space islived means, equally,to presuppose that, through my body, I have already established with the world apact,more ancient than any other pact, i.e., a pre-thematic connection grounded on acommunication that is “older than thought.”6 When we interrogate this pact, we learn thata concept of space purely founded on knowledge of spatial relations, between objects thatare geometrically held like abstract functions, is very far from being impartial and fromcovering the whole of our experience concerning space.7 And this, because from the verystart, and for a body situated in the world, the technical question of how to determine thespatial relations of defined objects is invariably tackled with a view to the originalpresence 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 weremade 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 spaceand,for that reason, each thing I see, in the world, acquires itssensefor me in the midst of anensemble that seems to establish each and every thing in the encounter with my gaze; anensemble, which is always already what I see. My home town, to which I return after atrip, 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 oneanother. This feeling, imposed upon us by our experience of space, and which Patocka

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty,Phénoménologie de la perception(Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 287.2 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.”

113

consolidated by terming it an “unmistakable withdrawal of phenomena (un retrait àdécouvert des phénomènes),9 is often compared to the idea of night. As for those who areplunged 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 whichunbalances and disorientates us but is, at the same time, the condition of our situation. Weare referring here to an experience of space that is distance in the closest proximity:proximity, because space envelops me and I amonewith it; distance, because I cannotever fully coincide with space.

Vitally, the ultimate truth of perceived spatial relations depends on whether they subsistin the natural world in non-thematic form, while keeping a sense of interpenetration withthe perceiving subject that corporeally inhabits the world. In this sense, the ghosts ofdream 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 spaceitself. Many examples could be cited here, and the search for thepresence of spacecouldbe explored with each impressive expression that depicts space as a reality which cannot bereduced 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 per-sistent, underlying question: is the specific character of the human being-in-the-world arelation to space asdwelling, a relation that expresses the inhabiting and the livingin andwith the world? Indeed, it is as if, besides a physical and geometrical distance existingbetween me and things, there is also alived distance, uniting me to what matters and whatexists for me. The experience ofbeing in spacemakes us recognize ‘expressive experiences’“before the ‘signification acts’ of theoretical and thetical thought; it is prior to thesignified sense, as the expressive sense; prior to the subsumption of the content under theform, the ‘fullness’ of form in the content.”13

On account of all these reasons,lived spacewill always remain alien to any philosophicalposition ultimately oriented toward the pure domain of experience, and, therefore, alreadyoblivious of all that isirreflectedand yet nourishes all thinking. It is my contention that

9 Cf. Jan Patocka,Papiers phénoménologiques(Grenoble: Millon, 1995), 64.10 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 anallegorical clothing of truthbut a peculiar

form of language with which manseeks to overcome his original strangeness to the world. This path,opened up by Vico, was later followed by Ernst Cassirer, who sees myth as anexpressive comprehension,capable ofconveying an ultimate layer, which is an act of assuming an attitude, an act of affection andwill, a dynamic of vital sense. It is in this light that myth can be said to reveal a way of being in the worldrooted in what is affective and impressive, and coloring it in tones of trust, intimacy and care. Thismythicalpresencein space is discovered at the centerof the very presence of space. Cf. Miguel BaptistaPereira, “O Regresso do Mito no Diálogo entre E. Cassirer e M. Heidegger,”Revista Filosófica de Coimbra7 (1995): 7.

12 Here, we could first concentrate on what is “poetic,” not as meaning the attainment of aestheticenjoyment, but as a sign of something that opens us up toward the world and gives rise to the presenceof things, making us participate in the living mystery of the real and, thereby, in the vital experience ofa space lived out in its density anduntamed brilliance. Yet “poetic” also describes the space that can beexpressed poetically, in other words, a space that consists of a tissue of the symbolic and mythical, acultural entity, a throbbing texture symbolizing itself as enigma, a place containing incarnated allusionsto each and every possible thing. Cf., for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,Résumés de cours – Collègede France, 1952-1960(Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 26.

13 Merleau-Ponty,Phénoménologie, 337.

114

the model ofplay14 can help us understand what is at issue here, sincebeing in spaceis to be implicatedin the multiplicity of its symbols and rules. In other words, we cannotbehave toward space as we would toward an external object, we can only participate ina process that draws us to itself and forms us, enveloping us in total fascination andsurprise, and entailing great risk.15

2.

Words such asmythical, poetic, playful, speak of a space that eludes being measured orany other kind of calculation; better words may say about space what can only be knownthroughlived experience. We should, however, take note at this point and discern some-thing essential: the “lived” that is comprised in space is far from representing any kindof psychological experience or any subjectivism that would interpret in individual termswhat comes to the human being through the senses. This “lived,” of space, is notsome-thing livedbut, rather,the liveditself, thus translating the very mode of man’s embedded-ness in the world in terms of an integral presence that reveals a pre-possession of spaceover body. In other words, if there is ‘alived’ concerning space, it is what space throwsback at me as a reflection, by way of surmounting the traditional split between interiorand external world. It is as if a very particular mode of being a body (my own body) isthe very place where space gets to be experienced and expressed, i.e., where space comesto exist as sense. And this is far from saying too little: the subject as body knows theworld 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 asindwelling, in the sense that the bodyis embedded or inlaid in space, “frequents” it, is present to it, simultaneously integratingthat “outside”16 which is always already an “inside.” Therefore we can discover, in this in-dwelling which is also anintertwining, the body’s responses to the enticement ofthings.17 From a phenomenological point of view, there are several equally importantimplications to such an assumption. First of all, they allow us to conclude that space putsmy whole body into play, in the same manner that my body puts the whole of space intoplay, given that no other affinity with an external aspect is conceivable here. Moreover,if this is so, it will be equally clear that I amLeib rather thanKörper, i.e., a living bodythat, as Marc Richir rightly remarks, never leaves us,18 being the framework of ourcondition 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 ispossible to affirm, more precisely, that no place could ever be understood, unless it alsowere of an affective or ante-predicative character, for body and space are always borninone 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 inits rational plenitude, reflects a form of symbolico-metaphorical coincidence of that existence with the to-tality which animates it. In brief, play is truly an existential act characterized by the welcoming and reflec-tion 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 MiguelB. Pereira, ed.,Tradição e Crise(Coimbra: F.L.U.C., 1986), 358ff.

16 Henri Maldiney, “À l’écoute deHenri Maldiney,à propos decorps etarchitecture,” in ChrisYouènes,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 paradoxicalcondition in so far as it is marked by the “slippage” of physical space into a non-coincidencewith itself. Through a “metamorphosis” achieved by means of a strange exchange system,physical space “slips” into theUmweltof an expressive, significant body; a body which,reversibly, ceases to be in homogeneous spaceonly. This possibility is demonstrated bythe fact that a thing never appears as spatial without at the same time receiving from -- orgiving to -- the beholder the whole of space in the evidenta priori of its symbolism.Now, when we speak in this fashion about a lived experience of space, what we are talk-ing about is not related to possession, but rather to reciprocal belonging. It is a relationby which I discover myself as a world-bound body, in the sense that we are no longer refer-ring to a relationship between a subject and an external object, but to a living body thatfeels the worldfrom the insideand his or her owninsideasoutside of the world; a worldwhoseoutsidepasses through theinside of the bodyas an ante-predicative reference forall comprehension. In brief, for the body,being in space is not an exercise inprecisionbut a gesture of immersion in what is perceptible by the senses, an immersion always al-ready perceived, always alreadyfelt. The presence of the body in space is hence, to a largeextent, 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 in-spires19 the body and, however much the body may be mingling with objective space,it is nevertheless characterized byverticality 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 objectivebody, when seen from the outside. Yet a body, when livedfrom the inside, fuses with theobjects and prolongs itself in them without ever discovering where it itself ends and thosebegin. In other words, it is a body harboring from space a knowledge without place, wherethinking and perceiving cannot be told apart.

This constitutive ambiguity reveals the body’s capacity for reflexivity, asserted byMerleau-Ponty in hisPhénoménologiewith 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 toknow itself in the world, notjust an object. Being a being that knows itself (to be) in theworld, it is a subject, but notjusta subject, since that knowing, far from driving it away fromthat world, plunges it right into the world. Widely known, in this context, is Merleau-Ponty’sfamous formulation on the question of atouching-touchedbody: “whenever I touch myright 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 toeach other,touching and touched, we must conclude that the issue is the hand’s capacityof being alternatelytouchingandtouched. 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 betouching. And thus, for a brief moment, we catch a glimpse of an involvement orincarnationof the hand that, setting out to touch, finds itself being touched. At that moment, “thebody 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), 31-32.20 We could also consider in this regard thekinesthesesof the body’s eyes and limbs. In spite of the

fact that the body can see and feel itself as an appearing body, suchkinesthesesbelong to an order whichis not just the one of physical sensations, as they precisely reveal that body to itself as an excess. Cf. MarcRichir, “Nature, corps et espace en phénoménologie,” in Chris Younès, ed.,Ville contre-nature. Philosophieet architecture(Paris: La Découverte, 1999), 38. Cf. Merleau-Ponty,Phénoménologie, 278.

21 Merleau-Ponty,Phénoménologie, 109.22 Ibid.

116

itself touching, it attempts a ‘sort of reflection.’”23 When I feel andfeel myself, that isdue, first of all, to that constitutive ambiguity by which the body cansimultaneouslybesubject and object. Whentouched, I am an object, without entirely coinciding with it; andwhentouching, I am a subject, without, as well, fully coinciding with it. And this occursbecause it is always thesamebody in both situations. But if this is so, everything will ul-timately depend on the unavoidable incompleteness of that type ofreflexivityby which thebody-object awakens in an instant as animble and livelybody-subject. “This reflexivityof the body -- casting a reflection on itself -- always fails at the last moment”24 in a two-fold way: in the gesture of touching there is always something that is ultimately left un-touched, 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 dueto the very fact that this incarnation is not entirely “thinkable,” since it is always alreadyexperienced 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 thebody does not embrace the whole sphere of the sensible. That which is not reflected bythe 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 recognizesitself as living in the world on a previous experience of space, whichsuggests to this bodya special mode of existence. Theirreflectedof the body is hence an icon for a space thatdoes not stop at the physical boundaries of the body,25 but rather invades it and prolongsitself in it in a multiplicity of extensions and intensities.

In each perception of space, the body carries within itself a latent knowledge that subvertsany clarifying effort coming from consciousness, by revealing that effort to itself as rootedin 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 afeeling prior to what is experienced by each of those senses in particular. We are speakinghere of an esthesiology substantiated in a principle of anonymity or depersonalization. Ineach sensation, “I experience that it does not concern my own being, the one I am respon-sible for and over which I decide, but rather another (my)self who has already sided withthe world, who is already open to some of its aspects and synchronized with them.”26 Onlythis can explain the fact that, whenever I listen to a piece of music, I do not merely recog-nize a sum of notes, but declare myself seized by an echo that runs through my wholebody, allowing me tore-encounterit, always already in a space where unsuspecteddimensions are suddenly disclosed. Music, as Merleau-Ponty significantly observed, is notin the visible space, but rather undermines it, invests it with itself, dislocates it at the verymoment that it summons our whole body in a special way:

In the concert hall, when I reopen my eyes, the visible space seems constricted inrelation to that other space where, just a moment ago, the music was unfolding; andeven if I keep my eyes open during the performance of the piece, I have a feeling thatthe 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 cannotbe presented (“an impresentable”).

23 Ibid.24 Maurice Merleau-Ponty,Le visible et l’invisible(Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 24.25 Cf. Merleau-Ponty,Phénoménologie, 250.26 Ibid.27 Ibid., 256.

117

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

3.

It would be interesting to confront the idea of aninside of the bodywith the analogousconcept of anextension 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 1947-48at the École Normale Supérieure, and which address the problem of the union of body andsoul. The question of an “inner space of the body,” related to the theme of immediate apper-ception, is underlined by Merleau-Ponty as a decisive moment in that distinctive philo-sophical endeavor undertaken by Maine de Biran. In so far as de Biran’s work allows usto thematize a “space of the body preceding objective space, as well as a presence of theexternalat the very heart of self-awareness”31 that thus simultaneously discovers itself asconsciousness of the body, this philosophical enterprise was regarded by Merleau-Pontyas a radical departure.32 It should actually be regarded as a real “pre-empting of phenome-nology.”33 This cannot but arouse the interest of those who seek to mark the relation be-tween theinterior and theexternalas representing, and being at, the core of the problematicof space.

At this point, Merleau-Ponty is analyzing the fact that de Biran, in reflections he de-veloped in his later life, did not start out from a position that says all there is to say aboutthe human being in its self-awareness. Rather, that de Biran began with the reality of abeing “who is becoming aware of his or her existence and therefore struggles against a pre-ceding opaqueness, i.e., a being who is trying to ‘become a self.’”34 In fact, de Biran presen-ted the identity of the idea -- with itself as a simple boundary, or the reflective unity ofexperience as familiar -- with the temporal unravelling of that experience.35

For Maine de Biran, the necessary background to this question is the search for thebeginning 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 pene-trates its relations with itself in a more intimate way.”36 At the center of this debate liesthe notion of “cause,” whose original sense de Biran seeks to unveil in the individuality

28 Ibid., 271.29 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.

118

of a self-aware being. In this context, Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734) appears as a decisiveinterlocutor. 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 causeof 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 thecause of vital and intellectual activity, what he previously excluded from the activities ofthe self.39

Now, what de Biran indicates, first of all, is that the sum ofventuresomeways ofsearching for causes from anexternal point of viewis insufficient and far from coveringthe whole experience called “cause.” This is confirmed, straight away, by the fact that themodel of thinking that is taken on by those who subscribe to this point of view rests ona forgetfulness: it is from the personal individuality, just as it is felt, that one borrows thenotion both of an objective individuality and of an individual cause. For de Biran, thereis an experience of “cause” which is first in view when thinking of the causality of thenew sciences, that is, the experience ofbeing cause. This is seemingly strange when wetry to find it in objective grounds for something, but clear and familiar when we recognizethe chosen model in the required effort. In other words, “the act or movement that followsor accompanies the effort (of thinking) created by theselfcan only be perceived as a volun-tary product in the feeling of its cause or in the reflected idea of thewill .”40 Consciousness,self, person, or will, are consequently many ways of understanding one fact: the intimatefeeling of personal existence, gained in an immediate apperception that includes a “hyper-organic” force and the resistance of the body to it. Ultimately therefore, to the search forthe beginning of thinking should correspond the task of inquiring into the nature of theboundaries that “separate” the human being as studied by physiologists in his or her simplevitality, 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 atransition, whosereach few have understood thus far. A transition, on the one hand, between the exteriorityof physiological conditions and the sensible experience they induce, and on the other hand,the reflected idea of will comprised in the apperception which establishes conscious-ness.42

The analytical path thus proposed must therefore be capable of enlightening us as tothe roots of that particular (andsui generis43) power of the will and of action, whichbelongs intrinsically to the person. In order to achieve this, it is not enough to follow thecriteria adopted by the physiologist, who is solely concerned with theexternal aspectsofthat action, seeking to determine, by way of experiment, the organic causes contributingto the interactions of, for instance, the muscular contractility susceptible to being trans-lated into objective images. Instead, it is the point of view concerned with theinner aspectsthat we must follow, that is, “the one that does not search, in those muscular functions, foranything other than the part likely to be played by consciousness in all this, namely, theperception corresponding to this interplay, or to the power of theself… which manifests it,

37 De Biran,Décomposition, 33. In the reflective feeling of his own existence, Stahl finds a forcethat 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 theactivity, extending it, as a power and entirely observable henceforth, to themost 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 thefeeling for what is its causeand the knowledge of itsmilieu and its object.”44 To dig deeper in the direction of thatsui generispower of thewill, transmutes the very endeavor of extending the concept ofexperienceto a feeling ofbeing cause, lived in the effort as a concrete and singular “given,” simultaneously distinctfrom the causality obtaining in modern natural sciences and that obtaining in ancientmetaphysics. 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 weare is not unknown to us, since it is somehow exercised in the very reflection upon itselfor, in other words, it happens in the very movement that, as de Biran put it, retrieves itsnatural base. And that is the reason why this philosopher uses the expressionsentimentd’être causerather 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, andalready 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 causeare 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 thebody to the power of the will. Therefore, de Biran allows us to demonstrate that the powerof thinking always already intrinsically comprises the power of the will and the presenceof the body, of asubjectivebody, of acorps propre. On the other hand, the relationbetween will and body, long forgotten in the history of philosophy, is now breaking intothe very heart of thought that thus discovers itself as contemporary to “a first effortconnecting 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 theact of “ex-isting,” an outward movement that cannot make do without the presence ofcorporality, that is, one that discovers the beginning of its existence in an immediateapperception that has the body as its main element.46

4.

For Merleau-Ponty, these considerations would be complete, if it were not for the necessityof extending them to the idea of a chiasm between the interior and the external. Theimage of an “outer space” wherein an “inner space” moves, does compel us to recognize inthe latter anintrusionof the opaqueness of the former. This in turn compels us to meditateon thereflexivity of “corporeal thinking” as a manifestation, icon, figure or element of awider reflexivity, which comes from the sensible itself. Merleau-Ponty would thereforeargue, first of all, that the natural attitude of seeing, by which I make common cause withmy ‘Look’ and give myself up to the spectacle of the visible, must be underlined, andsecondly, that this reveals an original layer of feeling whose correlate is the “corporealpresence”47 of space. It must, however, be noted that this analysis would be incompleteif we did not return to that “my own body” (which harbors, at itsinterior, the very ambi-guity of existing), while starting now from the sensible,48 through which its mode of beingas a decentering force will be radically elucidated.

44 Ibid., 100.45 Montebello,Décomposition, 79.46 Pierre Montebello, “Le corps de la pensée,”Les Études Philosophiques(2000): 207.47 Ibid., 269.48 Cf. Merleau-Ponty,Le visible et l’invisible, 304.

120

In order to go deeper with this possibility, Merleau-Ponty assumes the necessity ofexplaining ontologically the results of phenomenology and of thematizing Being -- withwhich we make contact -- a task, which the full range of Phenomenology is not entirelycapable of accomplishing. It is quite clear, which way we should follow: to lay aside thepoint of view of consciousness and all the presumptions still founded on “echoes” of thesubject-object dualism, and to return to the original nature of perception, materialized inthe natural and intentional life of the human body in the world. In this radical course, thesignificance of being-in-the-world will acquire a final sense with its immersion andabsorption in “the flesh” (la chair), the ultimate ontological dimension which is the radicalphenomenalization of Being. Pre-empting further developments, Merleau-Ponty (still inhis Phénoménologie) will term as “ontological world and body” the world and the bodydiscovered at the “heart of the subject.”49 Thus he paves the way to our comprehensionof his late works, where he will welcome the nature of Being as “wild,” “brute” and“vertical.”

In everyeffective perception of space, it is therefore necessary to presuppose a deeperfunction that is a movement that takes us beyond (or ahead of) subjectivity and embeds usin the world by means of aperceptual faith,50 which demands, in its turn, a “genealogyof the subject”51 capable of finally answering the question “who sees?” The answer tothis question cannot be “the soul,” nor “the eyes,” nor even “consciousness,” since none ofthese answers recognizes in the visible that which, since the beginning, surrounds and per-meates me. It is for this reason that, inLe visible et l’invisible, thevisible is said to be a“twilight brought on by a wave of Being,”52 whose prototype isfleshand 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 tothings, by its ontogenesis,”53 welding together the two parts that make it up, namely, thegrain of “sensible” that it is, and the “sensible” from which it is born by segregation and towhich 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 thereforea 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 spaceare 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 unfoldsinto itself, and where the flesh of the world reflects and is reflected upon, acquires anultimate meaning in this way. To feel is the very “turning upon itself of the visible, acorporeal adhesion of the one who feels to what is felt, and from what is felt to the onewho feels.”55 ThereforeI live spacebecause (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 Merleau-Ponty chose to name the reality of that dual movement where ‘the look’ and ‘theperceived’ discover themselves as being always already contained in each other. Thus,

49 Ibid., 467.50 Cf. ibid., 17ff.; 209. Cf. Marc Richir,Méditations phénoménologiques – Phénoménologie et phéno-

ménologie 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.

121

what the touched hand recognizes when it becomes atouchinghand, is nothing other thanthe flesh and its reflexive power. The body that I am is a “field of Being,” solelythinkable from the point of view of the flesh. If I feel space and, in that feeling, find thepeculiar mark of my inhabiting it, this always happens in a place of mysteriousinterchange, where (and by which) the traditional meanings of interiority and exteriorityare 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 thefolds of my body, and my body between the folds of the world.57 In this context ofreciprocal encroachment, the phenomenon of the dream appears to Merleau-Ponty as aprivileged mode of comprehending that mysterious corporeal interchange that shapes thevery enigma of space. Already in thePhénoménologiehe states this, when he writes: “IfI wanted to describe perceptual experience accurately, I would say thatit is perceived inme and not that I perceive. Every sensation contains a seed of dreaming.”58 Merleau-Ponty’s work in 1945 could not exhaust the subject of the dream, yet the reference isnonetheless significant. By juxtaposingfeelingwith the phenomenon of thedream, in thecontext of that chiasmatic interchange which takes place inside of the sensible, we are ableto meditate upon theirreflectedof the body in terms of anunconscious of the body inspaceand anunconscious 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 Frenchphilosopher never ceased to insist upon the need to shed light on “the true meaning ofpsychoanalysis,”59 in which meaning he saw an inescapable way of criticizing intellec-tualistic conceptions of consciousness. In effect, if well analyzed, i.e., meditated uponoutside of the dangers of substantialism, psychoanalysis does confirm the teachings ofphenomenology, in that it unveils a “consciousness which, rather than knowledge orrepresentation, is investment.”60 This possibility was already touched upon and broughtcloser in the debate initiated in thePhénoménologieon the subject of desire, as this isparticularly suitable for expressing the “inner intentionality of Being.”61 Thus, thequestion of the dream or feeling is placed within the investigation of what is external inthe interior, and of what is interior in the external.62 However, this possibility implies are-reading of Freudian psychoanalysis, i.e., a reading which is capable of regarding thelibido not just as a sex drive, but as a constitutive mode of being body in the world, andthe unconscious not just as a place for representation, ruled by determinate laws, butrather as a “global and universal power of incorporation.”63 Once these theoretical linesare rectified, we may finally conclude that “the unconscious is feeling (in itself), becausefeeling is not our intellectual possession of ‘what’ is being felt, but rather our divestingourselves 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 “naturalsymbolism.”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 deMerleau-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 thisunderstanding discloses the very invisibility of the visible and the visibility of theinvisible.

What is really at issue in the dream is an unknown system of exchange, through whicha riot of experiences finds shelter “inside of me,” without clear awareness of its relevanceor timing. When Merleau-Ponty talks about the subject of the dream, he accordingly isalluding to acontinuous 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 myactually thinking of it as such, and that now manifests itself -- still without being con-trolled by an arrogant “self” -- in an apparently unarticulated profusion of possibles concern-ing a distant but not absent world.67 More explicitly: “The distinction between the realand the oneiric cannot be the simple distinction between a consciousness filled by thesenses and a consciousness given over to its own life. The two modalities encroach uponeach other,”68 and, for this reason, the real essence of the dream is not a monopoly ofconsciousness, nor a particular case of bad faith, but rather an untamed thought. Therebywe 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, ofunderstanding the world (whenever I see, hear or touch) in what it already isin me assuch a possibility of understanding. Consequently it becomes clear, to what extent the tra-ditional split between interior and external must be modified before we can consider, inrigorous terms, the question of space: the dream is not a translation of latent contents intomanifest ones; in the dream, a latent content is lived through the manifest one, whichproves the capacity of the sensible for feelingitself, and for remaining sensitive in theabsence of the external sensible. While dreaming, the Sensible is manifested in the contentof the dream. The dreaming subject is not in charge of the content of the dream. Thattestifies 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 thatdoes not disappear in its absence, a corporeal reality that goes on existing even in theabsence of its external deployment. But “where” does that sensible become an “innersensible,” where does it appear in the counter-light of its exteriority? We have alreadyseen it: in a (fr.) on, i.e., in abody of flesh, in a Leib that thus reveals itself -- in theapparentépochêof theKörpersituated asobservatory-- as anonymity, dispossession. Thedream is the sensible in the body of flesh, ascompelling.70 It is the mark of a being inspace that it is also a mode of “being in the world without a body,”71 without a body-object but still and never without an own body, never without aLeib. The dream revealsthe 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 hereis the reality of a presence which mere topographic location cannot describe; a presencewhose mode of being is concealment and, thereby only, presence and situation; a presencethat implies a belonging, but not only to theexternalof space, also to itsinterior, to its

66 Ibid., 177.67 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.

123

heart; a presence where alived takes place. Alived, because what echoes in us (insideofour own body) before a beautiful landscape or a welcoming place is not merely somethingwe see, but rather, the very space existingintra-corporeally, blending itself into me, inan intertwining which is the depiction of thenon-depictable.73 To speak of aninside ofthe body, of an unconscious of the body, is thus speaking of a body that acquires itsidentity in complicity with space. That is to say, it acquires identity in the mode of beinga place where space extends itself, extending the limits of the body. Thatthisbody is, forMerleau-Ponty, the place where memory happens74 can no longer surprise us. Being inthe world signifiesliving a spacewhich is always for us a field of vision and a fieldcontaining both the future and the past. Memory as such is proof of a shared belongingof body and space to one temporal schema,75 where it is discovered that allrepresentation 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 onlyin so far as it contains some part of the dream,”76 in the sense that this attraction isgrounded on an original pact. On the one hand, the inside of the body already reflects theoutside of space, in a mixture of strangeness and familiarity. On the other hand, the out-side of space already entails theinside of the body, thereby making the body, in a uniquemoment, body and space.

73 Ibid., 248.74 Merleau-Ponty,Résumés, 71-72.75 Cf. Merleau-Ponty,Le visible et l’invisible, 247-250. Cf. Merleau-Ponty,Phénoménologie, 306.76 Richir, “Corps, espace et architecture,” 38.

124

2. MAN AND HIS DOUBLES: MERLEAU-PONTY’S “MIXTURISM” 1

Leonard Lawlor

In the Ninth Chapter ofThe Order of Things(Les Mots et les choses): “Man and HisDoubles.” Foucault says that “the analysis of lived-experience [vécu] is a discourse witha mixed nature.”2 (MC 332/321, my emphasis) In other words, Foucault is criticizingphenomenology for falling prey to a pre-critical (that is, pre-Kantian) naiveté; the conceptof vécu(Erlebnis in German)mixesthe conditions of experience with experience itself.3

Although Foucault never mentions him by name inLes mots et les choses, it is clear thatMerleau-Ponty is the target here. The idea that guides the essay that follows is thatMerleau-Ponty’s thought might be defined completely, even his late work in “Eye andMind,” 4 as a kind of “mixturism.” The eye, vision, in Merleau-Ponty mixes togetherpassivity and activity. Yet, passivity, in Merleau-Ponty, seems to amount to a sort ofblindness. Indeed, in two working notes toThe Visible and the Invisible(from May 1960),Merleau-Ponty speaks of “punctum caecum,” a “blind point.”5 If we think quickly ofFoucault’s analysis of the Velasquez painting, with whichLes mots et les chosesopens,we see that it too concerns a ‘blind point.’ Merleau-Ponty’s thought therefore seems veryclose to that of Foucault, and of course, it is. After all, Merleau-Ponty dies in 1961 andtwo years later, in 1963, Foucault describes hisBirth of the Clinicas the re-examinationof ‘the originary distribution of the visible and the invisible.’6 Yet, there is a subtle shiftof 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 towhat is invisible, which implies that invisibility is alwaysimminentvisibility (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 andFoucault, a trilogy focused on the concept of life. “Un Ecart infime (Part I)” is forthcoming inResearchin Phenomenology; “Un Ecart Infime (Part III): The Blind Spot in Foucault” is forthcoming inPhilosophyand Social Criticism. These three essays are part of a large research project on the relation of memory andlife. All the essays contributing to this research project will be collected into a volume that FordhamUniversity Press will publish:A Miniscule Hiatus: Essays Contributing to a New Concept of Life. Mythanks to all the students who have participated in three of my recent graduate seminars at The Universityof Memphis: “Foucault's Early Thought up toDiscipline and Punish” (Spring 2002); “Merleau-Ponty'sLater Thought” (Spring 2004), and “The Problem of Vision in Recent French Thought” (Fall 2004). I amespecially 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; anonymousEnglish translation asThe 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 ofL’Œil et l’esprit has frequently been modified.For more on Merleau-Ponty’s relation to Klee, see Galen Johnson, “Ontology and Painting: ‘Eye andMind,’” 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; Englishtranslation by Alphonso Lingis asThe Visible and the Invisible(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UniversityPress, 1968), 247-48. Hereafter cited as VI, with reference first to the original French, then to the Englishtranslation.

6 Michel Foucault,Naissance de la clinique(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998, vii;English translation by A. M. Sheridan Smith asThe 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 onthe basis of blindness, but on the basis of vision, not on the basis of impotence, but onthe 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.” (VI302/248) Because for Merleau-Ponty invisibility is always relative to the visible, becausecoincidence 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 goingto have a strict conceptual difference between immanence and transcendence, theresemblance relation implies that Merleau-Ponty isnot a philosopher of immanence, buta philosopher of transcendence. But even more, the resemblance relation implies that theupright 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 humanis the figure standing out from the ground of the visible; as the figure, man can be studiedas an empirical positivity.And, since the human body sees, the human resembles theground of the visible; as the ground, man can as well be taken as the transcendentalfoundation. As Merleau-Ponty says, “the manifest visibility [of things]doublesitself [sedouble] in mybody.” (OE 22/125, my emphasis) Therefore, and this claim is what I shalldemonstrate in the essay that follows, Merleau-Ponty’s thought, his ‘mixturism,’ is definedby 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 wasalive. Merleau-Ponty wrote it during the summer of 1960 and published it in January1961.7 Immediately after the initial publication of “Eye and Mind,” during the springsemester 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 Contem-porary Ontology”).8 Following the structure of “Eye and Mind,” but also expanding onit, the lectures fell into two parts: fundamental thought given in art, and then Descartes’sontology. The lectures on Descartes were given during April of 1961 right up to Merleau-Ponty’s death on May 3, 1961. At the beginning of the Descartes lectures, Merleau-Pontysays,

If Descartes’s philosophy consists in this, [first, in the] establishment of a naturalintelligible 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, itmust contain … an ambiguous relation of light and feeling [sentiment], of the invisibleand the visible, of the positive and the negative. It is this relation or thismixture [cemélange] that it would be necessary to seek.9 (NC 1959-61, 222, my emphasis)

7 In 1961, it appeared inArt de France. In 1964 it appeared as a small book with Gallimard.8 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 latentcontent. Merleau-Ponty makes the same comments about Descartes in the first nature lectures course. SeeMaurice Merleau-Ponty,La Nature. Notes de cours du Collège de France, établi et annoté par DominqueSeglard (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 36-37, in particular; English translation by Robert Vallier asNature: CourseNotes from the Collège de France(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 17-18. In the

126

At the end of his life, Merleau-Ponty himself is seeking the mixture of the visible and theinvisible. We can already see the pursuit of this mixturism in his 1947-48 lectures on theunion 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 aspeculative difficulty as is often assumed. For him, the problem is to account for aparadoxical fact: the existence of the human body. In the Sixth Meditation, the unionis “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 inThe Visible and the Invisible,Sartre starts from abstract concepts of being and nothingness, that is, concepts abstractedfrom 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 logicalconsequence 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. AsMerleau-Ponty says, “as absolutely opposed, being and nothingness are indiscernible.” (VI94/66) For Merleau-Ponty, Sartre’s dialectic is only so called; it is in fact a philosophyof identity. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty’s mixturism is opposed to Sartre’s philosophy ofidentity, Sartre’s, we might say, “ontological monism.”11 So, we can see already thatMerleau-Ponty’s mixturism will have to be something like a philosophy of difference.

In order to understandpositively the difference in which Merleau-Ponty’s mixtureconsists, we can make use of three conceptual schemes from Merleau-Ponty’s writingsprior to “Eye and Mind.” Thefirst comes from Merleau-Ponty’s 1942The Structure ofBehavior.12 As is well known, inThe Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty appropriatesthe idea of Gestalt -- the form or the shape -- in order to overcome the dualism of thephysical and the psychological; here too, even earlier than in the lectures on the union ofthe 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 asThe Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, andBergson 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 Haldaneand Ross translation of the Meditations (The Philosophical Writings of Descartes[London: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1973]). See alsoMeditationes de prima philosophia, Méditations Métaphysiques, textelatin 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” inThe Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader,35-55. Here Johnson claims that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the flesh, the philosophy opposed to greatrationalism, is not an ontological monism, not “a metaphysics of substance and sameness, a monism ofthe One.” (49) The concept of sameness that I am attributing to Merleau-Ponty, his mixture, is not areductive identity, as I am trying to show through the three conceptual schemes. It is the sameness ofidentity 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 asThe Structure of Behavior(Pittsburgh: DuquesneUniversity Press, 1983). Hereafter cited as SB, with reference first to the French, then to the Englishtranslation.

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-Pontymakes 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) Hereis the definition Merleau-Ponty provides of a whole: a whole is an indecomposable unityof internal, reciprocal determinations, meaning that if one of the parts changes, then thewhole changes and, if all the parts change but still maintain the same relations amongthem, then the whole does not change. (SB 50/47) In other words, not being the sum ofits parts, the whole is not an aggregate; there are nopartes extra partes, no parts outsideof one another, and therefore the whole, the relation of figure and ground, is alwaysambiguous. (Cf. SB 138/127)

Now, the secondconceptual scheme for understanding this ambiguous or mixedrelation of parts and whole comes from the beginning of his 1952 “Indirect Language andthe Voices of Silence.”14 It is well known, of course, that in “Indirect Language and theVoices of Silence” Merleau-Ponty introduces Saussure’s linguistics into French philo-sophy. Thanks to Saussure, we know that linguistic signs such as phonemes reciprocallydetermine one another by means of “diacritical differences.” The reciprocal determination,which refers us back to the Gestalt, implies that Saussure cannot base language on asystem of positive ideas. Due to the fact that Saussure is rejecting any other sense thanthe diacritical sense of signs, he must, according to Merleau-Ponty, be rejecting two waysof conceiving the whole and therefore two ways of conceiving the parts in relation to thewhole. On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty tells us that the whole of language cannot be “theexplicit and articulated whole of the complete language as it is recorded in grammars anddictionaries.” (S 50/39) On the other, the whole of a language cannot be “a logical totalitylike that of a philosophical system, all of whose elements can be (in principle) deducedfrom a single idea.” (S 50/39) Instead, as Merleau-Ponty says, “The unity [Saussure] istalking about is aunity of coexistence, like that of the sections of an arch which shoulderone another. In a whole of this kind, the learned parts of language have an immediatevalue as a whole.” (S 50/39, my emphasis) Merleau-Ponty’s comparison of the part-wholerelation 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 butmaintain the relations between them, then you still have the arch. The arch is not a mereaggregate 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 ofidentity and difference defines Merleau-Ponty’s mixturism; indeed, in “Descartes’s Onto-logy and Contemporary Ontology,” Merleau-Ponty says that “the visible opens upon aninvisible 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 differenceis precisely how Foucault defines the modern reflection on finitude: “towards a certainthought of the Same – where Difference is the same thing as Identity” (vers une certainepensée 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 thatthe 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 ofSilence,” inSigns(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Hereafter all essays inSigneswillbe 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 asabsolute. (S 185/147) Today’sscience has become absolute by means of working on indices, models, and variables thatit has made for itself. In contrast, what Merleau-Ponty calls “large rationalism” (le grandrationalisme), which is the philosophy of the Seventeenth Century, in a word, Cartesian-ism, takes its science and its artifices or techniques asrelative, relative to somethinglarger, to God or to the “infinite infinite” or to the “positive infinite.” Merleau-Ponty callsthe positive infinite “the secret of large rationalism.” The positive infinite is not numericalindefiniteness; rather, the positive infinite contains everything within itself: “every partialbeing directly or indirectly presupposes [the positive infinite] and is in return really oreminently contained in it.”15 (S 187/149) Every part being eminently contained in Godmeans that all beings resemble God. Or, there is a relation of analogy between thecreatures and the creator. Resembling God, every partial being would have to be a totalpart. With large rationalism, we are very close to Merleau-Ponty’s own thought,16 andwe have already noted that the concept of the mixture comes from Descartes.

Indeed, in “Everywhere and Nowhere,” Merleau-Ponty expresses some nostalgia forlarge 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 toget to the philosophy that rejects large rationalism.” I do not think it is an exaggerationto say that “Eye and Mind” is Merleau-Ponty’s precise attempt to go through thisnecessary 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, whichhe calls “operationalism,”relativeonce more to something other and larger than itself. Inother words, he is trying to make us understand that “small rationalism” (which again ismodern 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 byus, and that this ‘not’ expressed a privation and a defect in us.18 The modern Cartesiantranslates: the infinite is as muchabsenceaspresence, which makes the negative and thehuman enter into the definition of God.” (S 189/150, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis) In aword, the translation makes the finite enter into God. Then the living ontology of largerationalism 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. SeeGilles Deleuze,Spinoza et le problème de l’expression(Paris: Minuit, 1968), 22; English translation byMartin Joughin asExpressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza(New York: Zone Books, 1990), 28. It is alsoclear that this distinction between positive infinite and the indefinite maps onto Hegel’s distinctionbetween 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 faras 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, especially296-97; 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 systematizeMerleau-Ponty’s analysis of Descartes’sOptics. Galen Johnson’s introduction to “Eye and Mind” inTheMerleau-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-Pontyhere is describing. Foucault says that the relation to the infinite in the Classical epoch (Cartesianism), wasa “negative relation.” See MC 327/316.

129

out in “Eye and Mind.” So, let us now turn to “Eye and Mind,” in particular to PartThree, which discusses Descartes’sOptics.

Descartes’s Classical Ontology19

According to Merleau-Ponty, in theOpticsDescartes wants to conceive vision as thought,and,at the same time, Descartes wants to conceive vision as touch. (OE 37/131) Thoughtand touch are not just two models of vision for Descartes, as some Merleau-Pontycommentators have claimed.20 Vision in Descartes, according to Merleau-Ponty, isarelation betweentouch and thought. We can see the systematic relation between thoughtand touch in the following passage. This is Merleau-Ponty speaking: “Painting for[Descartes] is … a mode or a variant ofthinking, where thinking is canonically definedas intellectualpossessionand self-evidence.” (OE 42/132, my emphasis) Intellectualpossession relates the immanence of consciousness, the cogito, or even the concept -- andthis 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 complementarymistakes. (VI 168/127) These complementary mistakes are “fusion and survey.”22 (VI169/127) 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 anabsolute proximity somewhere. If one conceives sensibility as survey (survol) -- the viewfrom nowhere -- one intuits and sees pure essences; in this case, “sentir” takes place atan 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. Themistakes reside inboth the purity of touch, fusion and absolute proximity,and in thepurity of vision (which in The Visible and the InvisibleMerleau-Ponty calls the“kosmotheoros,” VI 32/15), survey and infinite distance.

This double mistake orients Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Descartes’s conception ofvision in the Optics. What Merleau-Ponty is trying to show here is that Descartes’sconception moves from one mistake to the other. And Descartes is able to make this movebecause 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 thattouches and enters into our eyes from the outside. (OE 37/131) In other words, Descartesconsiders 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 thingwhich is only reflected light rays and which happens to have an ordered correspondencewith 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, “TheDimension of Color,” 293-308, especially 296-97; also Cavallier,Premières leçons sur L’Œil et l’espritde M. Merleau-Ponty, 38-46. Some commentators recognize that for Merleau-Ponty vision in Descartesis conceived as thought (Silverman), while others stress the model of touch (Fóti). Cavallier notes thatMerleau-Ponty discusses Descartes’s different “models” for vision (touch and thought), but does not seethe different models as being related (38).

21 See also Mauro Carbone,The Thinking of the Sensible(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UniversityPress, 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 twointer-related consequences.

First, and this is most important, causal contact eliminates resemblance; even theresemblance of the mirror image becomes a projection of the mind onto things. For theCartesian, according to Merleau-Ponty, the image in the mirror is an effect of themechanics of things. For Merleau-Ponty, because Descartes wants to conceive light on thebasis of causality, a conception that requires no resemblance between a cause and aneffect, we do not in fact have an image in vision, but rather a representation. A represent-ation, such as an etching, works as signs do; signs in no way resemble the things theysignify. Here, in the signs that do not resemble, we see the origin of the indices withwhich, according to Merleau-Ponty, today’s science works. (OE 9/121) Merleau-Pontysays, “The magic of intentional species—the old idea of efficacious resemblance sostrongly suggested to us by mirrors and paintings—loses its final argument if the entirepower of the picture is that of a text to be read, a text totally free of promiscuity betweenthe seeing and the visible.”23 (OE 40/132)

This citation brings us to thesecondconsequence of Descartes’s conception of lightas causal contact: vision in Descartes is the decipherment of signs. This move, whichstarts with the conception of light through causality, to vision as decipherment, leads tosurveying thought (la pensée en survol). Since vision is the decipherment of signs, itthinks in terms of a flat surface; signs on the page for instance (like writing) are flat. Butalso, according to Merleau-Ponty, the representation, which is the effect of the mechanicallight, immobilizes the figure so that it can be abstracted from the background. In thecourse from 1960-61 (“Cartesian Ontology and Contemporary Ontology”), Merleau-Pontysays: “This presence of the figure is all that [Descartes] retains from vision. The rest ofthe field is composed of such figures that are not present. The visible world is for me [thatis, for a Cartesian] a world in itself upon which the light of the gaze is projected and fromwhich the gaze cuts out [découpe] present figures. That eliminates the relation to thebackground which is a different kind of relation.” (NC 1959-61, 229) And it seems thatthis “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 ofthe figure from the field is why for Descartes, according to Merleau-Ponty, drawing iswhat defines pictures. (OE 42/132) Because the flat representation presents only theoutlined figure, for Descartes, depth is a false mystery. (OE 45/133) Cartesian space is initself, one thing outside of another,partes extra partes, and thus depth is really width. Ifwe think we see depth, this is because we have bodies (which are the source ofdeceptions); 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, whois 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 usedtheSumma Philosophica Quadripartitaof 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 ofan individual thing; it is an exemplar or species, aneidos, the Greek equivalent of species. Apparently,the discussion of ideas throughout the Scholastic period always referred to painters, or more generallyartists. The model would be the exemplar or idea or intentional species, while the painting would be theimage, the particular. Referring back to theTimaeus, this discussion conceived God as an artificer. SeeRoger 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 ofresemblance relation.

131

God creates, or better, draws, a “géométral,” a surveying plan.24 So, we can see now thatMerleau-Ponty’s analysis of vision in Descartes’sOpticsgoes from fusion, at one extreme,to the other extreme, i.e., surveying thought, (OE 48/134) thekosmotheoros.

Merleau-Ponty’s analysis is complicated. So, I am now going to reduce it down to itsmost basic steps. According to Merleau-Ponty, Descartes starts from the conception oflight as a cause contacting the eyes. The contact of light with the eyes is the absoluteproximity of fusion. Because the contact with the eyes is causal, there is no resemblancebetween the image and the thing. Instead of images that resemble, we have signs. Signsare the figure without the background, immobile, and they are flat, like writing or adrawing. Vision in Descartes, then, becomes the decipherment of signs. And the decipher-ment of signs leads to the intellectual surveying plan, the géométral. The géométral is adrawing according to rectilinear perspective, with nothing hidden. It is surveying thought.Now, before moving onto what Merleau-Ponty says about painting, we should note twothings about this analysis.

First, the movement from fusion to survey is Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation ofDescartes’s dualism of substances. Thus, how Descartes conceives vision in theOpticsreally 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 twosubstances, according to Merleau-Ponty, interact by “découper,” a cutting out or apart, adividing. Therefore we can now provide a more conceptual determination of Merleau-Ponty’s mixturism. Like Sartre’s ontological monism, Descartes’s dualism of the divisionis opposed to Merleau-Ponty’s mixturism. In contrast, for Merleau-Ponty, in sensibilitythere is an “indivision” between the sensing or activity and the sensed or passivity. (OE20/125) The move from division to indivision is Merleau-Ponty’s translation, as mentionedearlier, i.e., in “Everywhere and Nowhere” (S 189/150), of Descartes’s ontology ofsubstances into the ontology of sensibility.

The secondthing we must note before we depart from Merleau-Ponty’s analysis ofvision in Descartes’sOpticsis that Merleau-Ponty is making a distinction between imageand representation. As we have seen, according to Merleau-Ponty, the positive infinitecontains the properties of all partial beings in an eminent way; in other words, Godpossesses the same properties as the creatures but only more so.25 Thus, following thetranslation of the positive infinite, an image is always based on resemblance, on thesameness not of God and man, but on the sameness of seeing and seen. In contrast, arepresentation is a sign; it involves no resemblance between the representation and therepresented. So we must anticipate, once again, the intersection with Foucault. InLes motset les choses, the final sentence of his description of the structure of Velasquez’s paintingis: “This very subject [ce sujet même] – which is the same [qui est le même] – has beenelided. And representation, freed finally from the relation [that of the same] that wasstructuring it [l’enchaînait], can give itself off aspure representation.” (MC 31/16, myemphasis)

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 enigmais 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 Merleau-Ponty, 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 conceptsfondamentaux de la psychanalyse(Paris: Seuil, Essais, 1973), chapter 2; English translation by AlanSheridan asThe 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 itbut not conceive. As Merleau-Ponty says, “The truth is that it is absurd to submit the mix-ture [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 aredisqualified 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) Ofcourse, 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, theremust beathought of that composite. The thought of the composite would be as much opposed tosmall 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 fundamentalthought, into this philosophy “still to be made,” only through art, only through thepainter’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 con-ception of vision, profane vision, according to Part Four of “Eye and Mind” (which isprobably the most famous part), consists in two extreme views. On the one hand, thereis 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 sleightof hand,” by means of which one thing is replaced by another, as in a perspectivedrawing. (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 distancefrom 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 Frenchword “effilocher,” which means to unthread or untie something that has been woven to-gether. We can see now that both the sleight of the hand and the view from the airplaneseparate things and make them bepartes extra partes. This maneuver and view are theopposite 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 oneanother; it is that they are rivals before my sight precisely because each one is in itsown place. The enigma is their known exteriority in their envelopment, and theirmutual dependence in their autonomy. Once depth is understood in this way, we canno longer call it a third dimension. (OE 64-65/139)

We can see the oxymoronic formulas by means of which Merleau-Ponty is defining theenigma: exterior -- known, they arepartes extra partes-- and yet in envelopment --dependent in autonomy. But we can see as well the reversibility. Each thing is in its ownplace -- exterior to one another -- because they hide one another -- envelopment; they arerivals -- mutually dependent -- because each is in its own place -- autonomous. While forDescartes depth was a false problem, for Merleau-Ponty, as this quote indicates, depth isthe whole question. As is well known, for Merleau-Ponty, depth is the first dimension orthe 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) depthis the experience of the reversibility of dimensions, of a global “locality,” where all thedimensions 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 backto his early work inThe Structure of Behavioron the Gestalt, to the relation of figure andground (le fond). Therefore, we can see how Merleau-Ponty is proceeding here (in PartIV). With the enigma of vision we have depth and therefore we have the background; nowwe need the figure.

For Merleau-Ponty, the figure is generated by color and line. But, color and line, likeall the other dimensions, are not based in a “recipe,” as Merleau-Ponty says, for thevisible. It is not a question of adding other dimensions to the two of the canvas. The lackof a recipe means that painting, or more generally pictures, for Merleau-Ponty do notimitate nature. He is rejecting the traditional concept of imitation, which implies an ex-ternal relation between the painter and something outside of him or herself. For Merleau-Ponty, the painter is not viewing something else from the outside. Instead, the painterisborn in the thingsby the concentration and coming to itself of the visible. This “beingborn in [dans] the things” is what Merleau-Ponty means when he speaks of the picturebeing “auto-figurative.” (OE 69/141) But, what is most important about this discussion inPart IV of “Eye and Mind” -- it seems to me that pages 69-72/141-42 are the heart of theessay; they overlap with the final pages of Chapter 4 ofThe 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 languagearts 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 thatseem “to have formed themselves.” (OE 69/141)Then, second, Merleau-Ponty quotesMichaux as saying that Klee’s colors seem to have been born slowly upon the canvas, tohave emanated from “a primordial ground” (un fond primordial), “exhaled at the right spotlike a patina or mold.”Betweenthese two comments we have an “et,” an “and,” whichimplies a comparison or better acompatibilitybetween the colors forming themselves onthe canvas and the words forming themselves on the page, a compatibility between theeye that sees and the eye that reads. Here we must also refer to the intersection withFoucault. On the one hand, Apollinaire of course composed his poems as a calligram, thecalligram being what Magritte “unmakes,” according to Foucault, inThis is not a Pipe.On the other, in Chapter Nine ofLes mots et les choses, Foucault will say that an “et”connects the doubles that define man’s ambiguous existence. The “et” means thatMerleau-Pontywants the painter and the poet -- in a word, man -- not on the insideofGod (this would be large rationalism),but on the inside of the visible. Merleau-Ponty’sdefinition of art shows us that this “et” implies a mixture, an ambiguous relation of lightand feeling, of the visible and the invisible. Art, for Merleau-Ponty, is not a “skillfulrelation, from the outside, to a space and a world.” Instead, “art is the inarticulate cry, thevoice of light,” “la voix de la lumière.” (OE 70/142) In the course from 1961, “CartesianOntology 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 ofThe Visible and the Invisible. (VI 201-02/153-54 See Gilles Deleuze,Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986), 119 no. 39; English translation by SeánHand asFoucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 149 no. 38.

27 For more on Klee, Merleau-Ponty, and auto-figuration, see Stephen Watson, “On the Withdrawalof the Beautiful: Adorno and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee,”Chiasmi International5 (2003): 201-21.See also Galen Johnson, “Thinking in Color: Merleau-Ponty and Klee,” in Veronique Fóti, ed.,Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting(Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996).

134

is literature, and the unveiling of the visible, the speech of things. Merleau-Pontycomments 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 inter-weaving, 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 isstill concerned with a figure-ground relation, since he is speaking about the bottom (lefond) of the pool. Here is the description:

If I saw, without this flesh, thegeometryof the tile, then I would stop seeing the tiledbottom as it is, where it is, namely: farther away than any identical place. I cannot saythat the water itself – the aqueous power, the syrupy and shimmeringelement– is inspace; all this is not somewhere else either, but it is not in the pool. It dwells in it, ismaterialized there, yet it is not contained there; and if I lift my eyes toward the screenof cypresses where the web of reflections plays, I must recognize that the water visitsit 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 swimmingpool 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, butdwelling (habiter) means that the water is not contained in the pool but is itself thecontainer. Or, as Merleau-Ponty says here, it is an “element.” Now inThe Visible and theInvisibleMerleau-Ponty also calls the flesh an element, saying “to designate the flesh, wewould 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 spatio-temporal individual and the idea.” (VI 184/139) Without the flesh of the water, we wouldbe able to grasp the tiles with our hands and hold them in one identical place, but thenwe would not see their geometry, or, more precisely, geometry. The flesh allows us to seethe geometry, since the water’s distortions function as a sort of variation of the spatio-temporal individual. The variation makes that the geometry is “farther away than anyidentical place.” But, being midway, the water makes that the geometry is not so far awayas to exist in a second world of forms without any support from the visible; (Cf. OE91/149) again, we see here that Merleau-Ponty’s thought is an anti-Platonism. Thegeometry reaches only as low as the bottom of the syrupy element and only as high as thescreen of cypresses.

You can see, I hope, that with this description of the swimming pool Merleau-Pontyis no longer speaking of voice. The geometry of the tiles refers us to the line. It is wellknown that Merleau-Ponty says, in this context, that modern painting contests the “prosaicline,” the line between a field and a meadow which the pencil or brush would only haveto reproduce. Again, we can see that Merleau-Ponty is not interested in the traditional ideaof art as imitation or reproduction. It is also well known that in this context Merleau-Ponty turns to Klee again. For Klee, according to Merleau-Ponty, the line is the genesisof the visible, and then, still according to Merleau-Ponty, Klee “leaves it up to thetitleto 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 ofThe Visible and the Invisible’s fourth chapter.29 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.

135

free to function more purely as a painting.” (OE 75/143, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis) Inthe course (“Cartesian Ontology and Contemporary Ontology”), Merleau-Ponty also speaksof 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 alogicalessence of the world which … is not empirically in the world and yet leads the worldback to its pure ontological accent, [it puts] in relief its way ofWelten[worlding], ofbeing world.” (NC 1959-61, 53) This citation means that the title designatesthe thingwhose 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 leavesexactlyin 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 theempirical object called holly leaves; the title instead designates this empirical object whichhas been generated. It is important that Merleau-Ponty does not say that the title in Kleedeniesthat the painting is of holly leaves. Klee does not say, “This is not two hollyleaves,” “ceci n’est pas deux feuilles de houx.” The title affirms that they are indeed hollyleaves, which implies that the title, like the phrases in the poem, like the geometry of thetiles at the bottom of the pool, is the outgrowth of the genesis, its final stage, its patinaor mold, its exhalation. We might go so far as to say that the relation between the titleand the painting in Merleau-Ponty is that of a calligram: the lines emerge from the depthand then they become words which stillresemblethe depth from which they came. Thus,recognizing the weaving of the words into the things, we can interweave the twoquotations Merleau-Ponty uses to frame Part IV of “Eye and Mind.” The first, which com-pletes Part IV, is from Klee: “I cannot be grasped in [dans] immanence,” in the im-manence, that is, of consciousness, of the cogito, of thought. (OE 87/148) The secondquote, 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, “penseenpeinture,” expresses, for Merleau-Ponty, the indivision of the invisible and the visible, of words and things. Therefore, whatis at issue in this philosophy that comes from painting, is the connection between thesetwo, (OE 64/140) the “between,” and the “entre-lacs,” the inter-weaving, as Merleau-Pontysays inThe Visible and the Invisible. Being a “thought of the inside,”31 Merleau-Ponty’sphilosophy is always trying to moveinto this “between.” This interiority is why Merleau-Ponty rejects the traditional concept of imitation, in which the imitation is between twothings 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 theground (le fond). If we are correct about the conceptual schemes for Merleau-Ponty’smixturism, then we must recognize that the logic of the positive infinite implies a relationof eminence between the figure and the ground. Of course, again, what Merleau-Ponty isspeaking about isnot traditional imitation, not a copying relation, but he is speaking ofresemblance and images. In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts about resemblanceare especially guided by the specular image. (OE 28/128) Resemblance therefore seemsto 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, 206.31 See Françoise Dastur’s “La pensée du dedans,” in idem,Chair et langage(Paris: Encre Marine,

2001), especially, 125-26, where she compares, but nota contrario, Merleau-Ponty’s “thought of theinside” to Foucault’s “thought of the outside.”

136

outside, I recognize my inside (an inside which, if I am a child, had hitherto beenconfusedly felt affects). But, this recognition does not occur before the mirror image, andit occurs only on the basis of that specular image that is outside. Then, I can transfer thisrecognized inside to other outsides, which are like the specular image I had seen of myselfoutside. In other words, on the basis of the specular image, I can attribute my inside toanother’s flesh, even though the inside of another’s flesh remains invisible, even thoughit is Nicht-Unpräsentierbarkeit.32 (VI 292/238-39) As Merleau-Ponty says, “They [thatis, the image, the picture, and the drawing] are the inside of the outside and the outsideof the inside, which the duplicity [duplicité] of sensibility makes possible and withoutwhich we would never understand the quasi-presence and imminent visibility which makeup the whole problem of the imaginary.” (OE 23/126) It is significant, of course, that hereMerleau-Ponty is alluding to Lacan’s mirror stage, about which Merleau-Ponty hadlectured 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 visibleexistence to what profane vision believes to be invisible…. This voracious vision, reachingbeyond [par delà] the ‘visual givens,’ opens upon a texture of Being of which the discretesensorial messages are only the punctuation or the caesura.” (OE 27/127) Because paintingreaches beyond and gives visible existence to what was invisible, for Merleau-Ponty thereis only ever “the invisible of the visible.” (VI 300/247) The invisible is always relativeto the visible and is always on the verge, imminently, of being visible, of coinciding withthe visible. (Cf. VI 163/122-23) The invisible is never a teeming presence but always onthe horizon of the visible. (VI 195/148) And even if we can speak of a “blind spot” (VI300-01/247-48), an “impotence” (impuissance) of vision, (VI 194/148) Merleau-Pontyalways 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 shiftof emphasis between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. This subtle shift of emphasis reallydoes 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, theinside, have the signification of resemblance. If we are going to have a strict differencebetween immanence and transcendence, then the resemblance relation implies thatMerleau-Ponty isnota philosopher of immanence, but a philosopher of transcendence. Weshould 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 Phenomenologyin 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), Iwas 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 DocumentationUniversitaire, 1960), 55; English translation by William Cobb as “The Child’s Relation with Others,” inMaurice 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 thesymbolic, see Gilles Deleuze, “A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?” in idem,L’île déserte et autrestextes(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 ofcypress trees and the bottom of the pool, there is the vision of the eyes. The eyes see thatthings are not flat and juxtaposed; one thing stands behind another and is thereforeobscure and hidden. But, the eyes see in this way only if the body is upright with the feeton the ground.35 The verticality of the upright body is not, of course, vision absorbedinto the cogito, as in Descartes. Nevertheless, I think that it is necessary to recognize thatwhenever Merleau-Ponty speaks of verticality, as he does so often in the working notesto 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 thesensible and the sensing] does not precede the material arrangement of thehuman 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 theanimal -- body. 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 bodyis visible, the human is the figure standing out from the ground of the visible; as thefigure, 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 takenas the transcendental foundation. As Merleau-Ponty says, “the manifest visibility [ofthings] doubles itself [se double] in my body.” (OE 22/125, my emphasis) Therefore wemust conclude by saying that Merleau-Ponty’s thought, his “mixturism,” is defined by thephrase “l’homme et ses doubles.”

35 For more on verticality and vision, see Erwin W. Strauss, “The Upright Posture,”PsychiatricQuarterly 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 withMichel Henry’s The Essence of Manifestation1 is illustrative of the reaction that theHenryian 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 isnot 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 morepositive and fruitful engagement both with it and with the rest of the Henryian œuvre, canbe considered paradigmatic of the character of the reader’s successive moments ofengagement 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 toengage it for the first time. The encounter is perhaps necessarily traumatic in character atthe outset, but this “traumatic experience” [le traumatisme],4 to borrow the expression ofFrançois-David Sebbah, contains in itself the power and condition of possibility for thereader’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 appliesnot only to EM, but to all of Henry’s philosophical works -- is perhaps more ultimatelyrooted in its being always “an operation carried out on language” [un travail sur lalangue], practiced to excess, an activity of excess that is intended to do violence to theapophantic character oflogosprecisely by means both of apophanticlogos itself and ofthe text that is its expressiveGestalt.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 RecentFrench Moral Philosophy,” in John J. Drummond and Lester Embree, ed.,Phenomenological Approachesto Moral Philosophy: A Handbook(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 521.

3 Cf. Jean-Luc Marion,Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Pheno-menology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), xi. Marion’sattestation of Henry’s “example of philosophical probity” is a provocative estimate of the Henryianœuvre,especially given the fact that Henry is about to be characterized as a writer of “violence” and “excess”with respect to apophaticlogos.

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 thetraumatic character of the reader’s initial encounter with the texts of Henry -- the violent and excessivecharacter of whose writing gives it a “family resemblance” with the work of Levinas and Derrida -- andto the philosophically fruitful character of the reader’s sustaining of the “traumatisme” provoked by theHenryian text. Rolf Kühn also underscores the violent character of the Henryian text. Cf. “Réception etréceptivité. La phénoménologie de la vie et sa critique,”Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger3 (July-September, 2001): 295-297.

5 Cf. EL, 1.6 Ibid. I of course derive the idea of the visibleGestalt that is really expressive of an invisible

ground from the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar. For an excellent introduction to the Balthasariannotion 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 hesays:

Because the act of knowledge which divides up and yields an unreal object inotherness fails to reach the essence which is primordially in the act itself, viz., theessence of Being and life, that which the act of knowledge determines does not bearin 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 whatit 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 isdirected, 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, andtext, 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 originarilypowerful.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 ofcircumstance, according to the vicissitudes of the story, but for reasons of principle:because language, or text, leaves true reality outside itself, thus finding itself totallyimpotent 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 itsown:

The powerlessness of language to posit a reality other than its own does not leave ittotally bereft. One power remains to it: to speak this reality when it does not exist, toaffirm something, whatever it may be, when there is nothing, to lie. Lying is not onepossibility of language alongside another with which it might be contrasted—speakingthe truth, for example. This possibility is rooted in language and is as inherent in it asits very essence. Language, as long as there is nothing else but language, can only belying. . . . To the powerlessness of language are added all the vices belonging topowerlessness in general: lying, hypocrisy, the shrouding of truth, bad faith, theoverthrowing of values, the falsification of reality in all its forms—including the mostextreme form, that is, the reduction of this reality to language and ultimately, in thissupreme confusion, their identification with each other.10

Henry thus concludes:

Language has become the universal evil. And we can certainly see why. Whatcharacterizes any word is its difference from the thing—the fact that, taken in itself,

7 EM, 405.8 Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianitytrans. Susan Emanuel

(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 8, hereafter IAT. Here Henry is citing 1Cor 4:20: “Forthe kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power.”

9 Ibid.10 Ibid., 8-9.

140

in its own reality, language contains nothing of the reality of the thing, none of itsproperties. This difference from the thing explains its indifference to the thing. . . .Emerging from its own powerlessness, the power of language suddenly becomesfrightening, shaking up reality, twisting it up in its frenzy.11

Henry asserts that “language cannot blaze a trail to either reality or truth,” and thatlanguage’s claim to be “the means of communication par excellence” is in fact “itsgreatest 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 andprior to language.”13 For Henry, truly radical philosophical reflection on the powerless-ness of language reveals that “philosophy always comes along too late because what itsays was at the beginning.”14 That which is at the beginning is Being; understood pheno-menologically, Being is the essence of manifestation.

The essence of manifestation is the originary phenomenon that coincides absolutelywith its phenomenalityor mode of appearing. The essence of manifestation is Being,insofar as Being for Henry necessarily events only in the absolute coincidence of pheno-menon and phenomenality. The essence of manifestation exists in itself and by itself, incomplete ontological independence of everything for which a difference remains betweenwhat appearsandthe appearingof what appears. The essence of manifestation thereforeeffectively manifests itself to itself quite apart both from the operation of language andfrom the transcendental horizon to which language is tributary. As long as the relationshipbetween language and this originary manner of Being and phenomenality is not articulatedproperly, language can only be the “negation” of all reality save “that pallid reality thatpertains to language as a system of significations and that finds itself in principle to bean unreality.”15

Henry thus uses apophantic logos to do violence to apophanticlogos itself -- that onwhich Western philosophy depends and which it so highly esteems. Such an operation onlanguage cannot do otherwise than provoke indignation in the heart of the reader schooledin the very logos that Henry engages only in order, at least at first, to refuse it. Theviolence that Henry inflicts on thelogos, however, is in fact intended ultimately torenewrather thansuppressthought, language, or the text. The Henryian attack on the place ofhonor accorded to language is not in fact an attack on the primacy of languageper se,butonly on the primacy of language as understood from within the perspective of what Henryterms “ontological monism.”16 Henry’s attack on language is thus only a moment withina more ultimate effort to situate language otherwise than it is situated within a monisticunderstanding of Being, phenomenality, and human reality.

Henry’s theory of textuality is “post-modern” in the sense that he refuses to valorizea “metaphysics of objective conceptual presence” in the name of the always excessivecharacter of human reality with respect to this horizon. Relative to human reality, Henryemphatically refuses to grant the horizon any role in the self-manifestation of humansubjectivity. Henry submits the horizon itself to the blow of the phenomenologicalreduction in order to examine its structure and ultimate conditions of possibility. Henrygrants 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 Ibid., 9.12 Ibid., 10.13 Ibid.14 EM, 169.15 IAT, 10.16 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 standardpost-modern thought dismisses as impossible of attainment. Henry refuses the rationalistand idealist metaphysics of presence precisely in order to attest to the reality and powerof the Presence, radically subjective in structure, that both distinguishes from itself andunites to itself the transcendental milieu of objective presence in which things deprivedof ipseity appear.

Henry’s theory of textuality is thus rooted in a radical metaphysics of Presencing, withPresencing now understood as the original affectively structuredenergeiaor essence thatboth eludes the reach of intentional consciousness and makes intentional consciousnessitself effectively possible. Henry therefore resolutely develops his theory of textualityoutside of the post-modern ambit in seeking to secure the effective possibility both of thehorizon and of our intentional consciousness of everything that appears within it. Hiscritique of ontological monism is in great part motivated by his realization that the monistperspective takes for granted, but cannot itself secure, the effective possibility of thehorizon of objective conceptual presence upon which it would found human thought andhuman action.

That which Henry wishes to indicate by means of the term “ontological monism” is infact a constellation of assumptions concerning the ultimate ontological structure both ofBeing and of the essence of manifestation. Ontological monism’s central thesis is that“Being” is homogeneous.17 Phenomenologically speaking, this thesis means that thereis only one ontological mode of phenomenality, only one essence of manifestation, bymeans of which all ontic things are rendered manifest. From this perspective, humanreality is assumed to be an ontic reality like any other and as such dependent upon the oneessence for its own promotion into presence. This ontological essence is “transcendence,”which generates the transcendental horizon of objective visibility in which all thingsappear 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 privativesense.18

From the monistic perspective, the essence of manifestation is thus an impersonal andaffectively indifferent foundation of an equally impersonal and indifferent horizon ofobjective visibility in which all things are equally and indifferently rendered manifest inthe form of objectively structured intentional correlates. The subjectivity of the humansubject is thus in fact no subjectivity at all, but only a transcendental objectivity that isrelated to human reality in a manner that is extrinsic, aporetic, and ontologically violent.

From within the perspective of ontological monism, the relationship between tran-scendence and its horizon also remains aporetic, volatile, and unsecured. Insofar astranscendence shows itself to be dependent upon the horizon it deploys, it also attests tothe fact that it is not itself the ultimate condition of possibility of the horizon. From withinthe perspective of monism, human reality is simply assumed to depend for its mani-festation upon a horizon of visibility with which, however, it has an uneasy relationship,and the horizon itself depends upon the ontologically shaky foundation of transcendenceto which the horizon is likewise uneasily related. Within monism, therefore, it is not onlythe case that human reality is deprived of its subjective character in its being subordinatedto transcendence. It is also the case that transcendence cannot in fact play the ontologicalrole assigned to it with respect both to its horizon and to human reality itself.

17 Ibid.18 Cf. EM, Section I, “The Clarification of the Concept of Phenomenon: Ontological Monism,” 49-

133.

142

From the perspective of ontological monism, there is no such thing as an “immediateknowledge” of the human self by itself. All knowledge is always in fact “mediate,”constituted through the mediation of the “phenomenological distance” or transcendentalhorizon that itself is a function of transcendence.19 In order that Being be manifest toitself, 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 ofpossibility for the manifestation both of Being and of beings.

The human subject is therefore nothing outside of the event of alienation and distancingthat permits the subject, which is phenomenologically impotent in and of itself, to take onthe condition of an objectively structured phenomenon.20 From the perspective of monism,therefore, there is really no such thing as an irreducibly singular and ontologicallydetermined human subject at all.

The Henryian “excess” with respect to language and the text, at least insofar aslanguage and text are understood from within the perspective of ontological monism, isintended to be expressive of what Paul Audi describes as the ontologicalexcédenceoftranscendental subjectivity and ipseity with respect to transcendence and its horizon, anontological “excess” that is at once both radically foundational of and absolutely hetero-geneous to the ontologicalexcèsof transcendence and objectivity with respect to theontathat 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 toovercome the empirical self’s state of dissipation with respect to itself.21 Over and aboveboth the empirically experienced self and the transcendental horizon of visibility withinwhich the empirically experienced self is assumed to appear, each human subject im-mediately 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 whenhe naively assumes that his being manifest to himself is simply a function of the horizonof objective visibility.22

The Henryian approach to language and the text, characterized by violence and excessthus understood, is furthermore intended to be philosophically fruitful not least by reasonof its eliciting from the reader a phrone sis, a prudence, on the basis of which the reader

19 Ibid., 71. Cf. ibid., 60-66.20 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 ofamour de soiin its radical distinction fromamour-propre,Audi writes: “Or, cela signifie également que l’amour de soi est ‘excédent’ par essence, qui’il s’excèdeen lui-même et par lui-même, et que c’est pour cette raison, parce qu’il s’excède en lui-même, queRousseau peut clairement le qualifier de passionel.” Thatamour de soiis “passionel,” however, does notmean that it is “excessif” in any sense: “la vérité est que l’amour de soi n’est jamais excessif, contraire-ment 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 radicalementpassif, participant d’une passivité qui est sa ‘mesure’intérieure, cette mesure étant elle-même incommensurable objectivement. Aussi est-ce à cette irrémissiblepassivité que renvoie l’excédance ontologique.”

22 EM, 671: “With the becoming of suffering and its interior transformation into joy a new and trulyessential concept for the dialectic is revealed to us, i.e., the concept of an immanent dialectic . . . , whichis the movement of our tonalities, the passage from certain qualitative determinations to others. . . . Thedialectic does not constitute the structure of Being, it is possible only interior to Being. . . . It is upon thefoundation of the unity of Being with itself in suffering that suffering transforms itself dialectically intojoy; in existence the contrary does not proceed from opposition but from identity.”

143

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 torealize that although “textual truth” taken by itself inevitably subverts itself in a destruc-tive manner as long as it remains founded on transcendence and the transcendentalhorizon, this same “textual truth” is able to subvert itself in a positive manner when itsfoundation is relocated in immanence. Immanence isthe essence of manifestation;affectively structured immanence is Being, indeed “the Self of Being,”25 which showsitself to itself in the form of the “archi-impressionality” of the immanent dialectic ofsuffering and joy. Once the Being of the text is resituated in this manner, the “worldlyword” 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 ofLife 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 theRelationship of Strong Reunion of the Self of Being with Itself.27 Both the humansubject and apophantic logos are to be situated in God and not in the transcendentalhorizon. When this truth is understood, the text is able to serve as the veryGestaltof thenow 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 aliving person, “cette violence lui est faite d’être un vivant.” Henry believes it is both just and necessaryto inflict violence on the apophaticlogosbecause violence is what makes the human ego avivant, a livingone. 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 donnertoujours, en dépit de sa propre impuissance, et proportionellement à elle, les moyens de la conjurer en s’endélivrant?”

24 Cf. EL, 282. As Sebbah points out, the Henryian text is precisely atext, relying upon the veryapophaticlogosto which it seeks to do violence. As Sebbah also points out, the reliance of the Henryiantext on the apophaticlogos that it seeks to overthrow raises serious questions about the consistency ofHenry’s philosphical enterprise. I think, however, that Sebbah overstates things when he says here thatone cannot look directly to Henry to answer the questions raised by his dependence on the text, that “pourraisons d’essence il n’y a nulle place dans M. Henry pour une théorie du texte,” so that “il faut se tournervers quelque indications, comme telles indirectes.” To the contrary, in connection with a consideration ofthe meaning of the truth of the Christian scriptures, Henry in fact explicitly discusses the inadequacy ofthe text as such relative to the Absolute Reality to which the text is subordinate. Cf. CMV, 7-19. Henry’sdirect remarks regarding the inadequacy of the text might seem only to serve to render more pressing thequestion regarding his philosophical consistency. Henry himself points out that neither the ChristianScriptures nor the text as such is the object of his study in CMV. Cf. ibid., 286. Nonetheless, the wholeof chapter 12 of CMV is dedicated to articulating the manner in which human language and the writtentext 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 thenature of the relationship between human language/the human text and the originalLogosof la vie. Infairness to Sebbah, however, it is of course necessary to point out that this last work was not availableto 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 exem-

plaire, ce dehors consenti, cette percée chez l’ennemi, qui ne peut se faire sans risque, qui ne peut se fairesans le risque . . . d’opacifier, de rendre ambiguë la Parole de la Vie? Plus radicalement, le texte n’est riend’autre que ce risque. Le risque du texte, n’est-il, comme M. Henry semble implicitement le penser, qu’unsacrifice provisoire et contrôlé pour la Parole de la Vie, ou bien en aura-t-il toujours déjà assombril’immédiateté?”

27 Cf. EM, 167 et passim.

144

As Sebbah points out, the Henryian text is thus an instance of a new genre of protrepticor hortatory philosophical discourse, such that it is “less descriptive than indicative, oreven prescriptive,” prescriptive of a task that is also an experience [une épreuve] to whichthe reader must submit himself precisely in order tobe himself.28

Ultimately, therefore, the “trial” to which the reader is submitted by means of the textis something more and something other than the text itself. The trying experience to whichthe reader is submitted by means of an encounter with the text is in fact the readerhimself, who necessarily experiences himself and is given to himself originally as theundergoing of an “internal ordeal.”29

As Audi explains, the self’s original experience of itself is that it is given to itself inan “irremissible passivity” that for the self is the experience of the self’s being absolutelyoverwhelmed 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 alreadyundergone; it is precisely this “agonic” character of human self-manifestation that is thesource 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 thatis not human.31

My experience of being given to myself as myself in a radical passivity in which I amoverwhelmed by my own ontological excessiveness is something of which I am alwaysalready aware. As self-aware, I do not simply “know the truth”; rather,I am the Truthina participated manner with respect to the divine Ipseity. I am identically “the primordialtruth,” from which I am consciously estranged only in a contingent and surmountablemanner. TheTruth 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 andviolent character of the Henryian text is intended precisely to help me “remember” myselfin a consciously achieved reunion of intentionality and affectivity. The “agonic” characterof 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 detextes auxquels cette étude s’est intéressée comme relevant d’une protreptique d’un genre nouveau: cestextes, en cela fidèles à la tâche phénoménologique bien comprise, et malgré l’apparence de paradoxe, sontmoins descriptifs qu’indicatifs ou même prescriptifs: ils indiquent une tâche, et même—et c’est là leurspécificité 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 ofSebbah’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) thenon-ecstatic transcendence that obtains within God himself, (2) the non-ecstatic transcendence of God withrespect to human reality, and (3) the possibility of human reality’s misuse of its freedom in order to sinand 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 ofamour de soiin itsradical distinction fromamour-propre, and comparing this distinction to that of Henry between immanenceand transcendence, Audi writes: “Qu’est-ce qui en nous atteste de cette passivité-la? Nous disions àl’instant: la passivité du moi à l’égard de soi est un débordement absolu. De par son débordementexpansif, cette passivité se révèle à jamais plus forte que tout.” This theme of the self as a trial to beundergone, on account of the ontological excessiveness that characterizes the Being of the ego, pervadescontemporary French “theological phenomenology.” Cf. also Jean-Louis Chrétien,The Unforgettable andthe 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 tothe excess of a human being over himself, an excess of what one is and can be over what one can thinkand comprehend. . . .”

31 Chrétien also evokes the theme of theagonwith 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 “alwayshas, 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 transcendentalself’s ontological excessiveness, I receive it anew as asurprise, as a jolt,32 as a“shock.”33

To thus recover myself intentionally and consciously is to be surprised andoverwhelmed by myself in a reflective manner that is itself a trace of my livingexperience of my first being given to myself in the mode of the “saturatedphenomenon.”34

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

For Henry, it is always first and foremost with reference to ourselves -- and this forontological rather than merely methodological reasons -- that we ask the question, “Whatdoes it mean ‘to be’?”35 The question about the Being of the Ego36 is at once both anontological and existential question. It should now be clear that Henry’s manner of thetaking up of theSeinsfragein no way pits Being against the human being in a dialec-tically violent manner. Henry’s manner of taking up theSeinsfragetherefore in no wayentails 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 ontologicalpeace that obtains between “Being in general” and “the Being of the ego.” In readingHenry, one must therefore continually keep in mind that Henry’s violentexistentielltreatment of apophanticlogos is tributary to and dependent upon the foundation of theoriginal ontologicalpeacethat obtains between agonic Being, agonic subjectivity, andagonic textuality.

Henry’s methodological violence is furthermore always motivated by a singleexistentialgoal: the securing of the phenomenological and ontological dignity of human reality in itsindependence of ontologically situated dialectical violence and alienation relative both toits being and to its appearing. Henry seeks to achieve a philosophical and therefore tex-tually mediated articulation of what man is in hishumanity, by which term Henry first ofall 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 seproduit à la manière d’unesurprisequi suspend et déprend le regard de tout ce qui, par principe, lui estdonné 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.,Phenomenologyand the “The Theological Turn: The French Debate,” trans. Bernard Prusak (New York: FordhamUniversity Press, 2000), 176-216. Audi, REP, 241-43, elaborates on the remarkable convergence thatobtains between the thought of Rousseau and that of Henry. Thus, in Audi’s eyes, what is true ofRousseau is true of Henry. As Audi observes, ibid., 232, “la sagesse de Rousseau” has no other goal “qued’inviter l’âme àse re-prendre en soi, en sa propre puissance constitutive, afin d’en déployer les désirset les ‘facultés’ intentionelles conformément à ses possibilités subjectives les plus propres.” The samedesire, that of assisting the human person in the project of self-recovery, is likewise the motive force ofthe 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 ofourselves.”

146

and ontological reality deprived of subjectivity.37 It must also always be kept in mindthat Henry’s overall phenomenological and ontological project, the “whole” of which histheory of textuality is a “moment,” is always also an existential project inasmuch as it isthe effort to clarify the nature of authentically human beatitude.38

We find confirmation of the fact that theSeinsfrage, understood phenomenologicallyas the question concerning the Being of the ego -- of the ultimate condition of possibilityof properly human self-manifestation -- is also for Henry an existential question concern-ing the effective possibility of human beatitude, in Henry’sPhilosophy and Phenomeno-logy 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 themeaning of the Being of the incarnate human ego is intimately related to “the problem ofexistential alienation.”40

In PPB, Henry describes the philosopher’s task as one of developing “a positiveinterpretation of the real alienation of man beginning with the clarification of theexperience in which he lives this alienation.”41 Henry’s effort to clarify the meaning ofthe Being of the human ego is accordingly also an effort to make some sense of the dis-tressing human experience of alienation. Since man’s lived experience of his alienationat least seems to be anexistentialfirst-person experience, the Henryian clarification of theactually existentiellcharacter of human reality’s experience of alienation is thereforenecessarily 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 toclaim that the human experience of alienation is primarily an affectively structured andontologically grounded experience of the self in its first-person mode of self-presence. Toclaim otherwise is really to reduce the ego to “the condition of an effect in the thirdperson”43 that can exist independently of its excessive and ontological first-personfoundation. Such a reduction can only result in the loss of everything that makes the egoto be singular, concrete, living, and effectively real. It is indeed meaningful to claim thata human being can be alienated, even as it is indeed meaningless to claim that a stonecannot be alienated.44 Only the human subject can experience alienation. But to admitthat such is the case is not to admit that the experience of alienation pertains to the veryessence of human self-manifestation.

The experience of alienation is rather a founded and derivative human experience, afounded 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 thetraditional philosophical understanding of the human person as an animal possessinglogos, reason, andlanguage, 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 sentientcreatures, man’s humanity is for Henry betrayed and covered over. Intentional consciousness permits thedevelopment of human “self-consciousness,” but only on the foundation of the specifically human formof self-manifestation that events in the auto-impressionality of humanself-awareness, the “immanentdialectic” of suffering and joy.

38 The concern for the promotion of human beatitude or happiness characterizes the Henryian œuvrefrom its beginning to its end. One need only observe that Henry’s Master’s thesis that he published in1942-43 is explicitly concerned with an articulation of the meaning of humanbonheur. 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 andinseparable from the human subject’s first-person mode of self-presence. The humansubject’s self-conscious experience of alienation is possible only because humansubjectivity’s manifestation in the form of affectively structured self-awareness is alwaysand only a first-person experience that is impervious to the corrosive effects of theexistentiellexperience of alienation that occurs within the third-person subjective mode ofintentionally 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 alienatedself-consciousness, such that the self seems to exist as a self supremely in its experienceof being dissociated from itself; but such can be the case only on the foundation of thehuman subject’s first-person and affectively structured experience of being self-aware, ofbeing always already given to itself as itself in its first-person experience of the “im-manent 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 itsown power. In and of itself, a stone can only appear in the form of an object within anontological horizon in which human subjectivity itself can never appear, no more in itsthird-person mode than in its first-person mode.

Even when a human subject experiences itself in an affectively alienated third personmanner, therefore, its experience of itself as an alienated self is the lived experience ofa subject and never the ontically passive condition of an object. Furthermore, this sub-jective third-person mode of self-manifestation is not itself the human subject’s originalmanner of being manifest. I am specifically different from a stone because while a stonecan only appear tome, and this only in the mode of anobject, I appear tomyself, and Ido so originally in an excessive and first-person manner that excludes in principle all pos-sibility of my living an insurmountably alienated human existence in the third person. Itis on account of my constant lived experience of myself in the first person that I am anego, that I exercise a manner of being and appearing that remains phenomenologicallyheterogeneous to the manner of being and appearing proper to a stone. If therefore I amto be able to give a positive account of the real experience of human alienation, Henryargues, I can do so only from “within” the first-person mode of being and appearing thatI always already bothlive andam.

Because human self-manifestation is a traumatic, first-person manner of appearing tooneself, 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 thanontologically ultimate, precisely because this experience isintentionally rather thanaffectivelystructured. The human ego’s original, traumatic, and first-person manner of self-manifestation to himself as himself, on the other hand, necessarily arrives in the form ofan “affective tonality,” a “mood,” aStimmung.45

Henry illustrates what he means by an alienation that is primarily intentional ratherthan 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’stestimony 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 atone time gay, at other times sad, more often sad, and whose modifications seem to beindependent 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 theultimate power or essence of manifestation with “la vraieStimmung,” 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 self-consciousness is a founded experience that arrives in the mode of the third person, andnot at all a function of the founding first-person experience of oneself as oneself given inthe affectively structured and irreducibly first-person mode of self-awareness. While wemightunderstandourexistentiellsuffering and sorrow as weakness and alienation, we canso understand this founded form of intentionally structured suffering only on the founda-tion of our ontologicaland affectively structured undergoing of ourselves in the form ofa trial that is identically a triumph.48 This dolorous, originarily first-person experienceof self is thus for Henry something that is neitherexistentiellnor negative, but rathersomething whollyontologicalandpositivein nature.49

The whole of EM is dedicated to situating the meaning of the Being of the human egowithin the insurmountably subjective immanent dialectic, the “edificatory integration”50

of suffering and passivity that is always and also the ultimate condition of possibility ofhuman joy and human action. My originary experience of helplessness and sorrow turnsout in fact to be first and foremost an expression of the originaryEreignis, the ontologicaland excessive experience of myself that arises effectively prior to and independently ofany mediation on the part of any ontic or ontological reality deprived of ipseity. It is ip-seity alone that for Henry can truly count as “life.”

“La Vie,” Life, is originally and ultimately God himself.51 In a move that is itselfcharacterized by excess and violence, Henry dares to claim that on philosophical groundsalone, authentically human beatitude can ultimately only be apprehended in terms ofhuman salvation, such that the issue of God is always ultimately what is at issue when itis a question of human life and human destiny.52 God is the Truth andthe Life in whichhuman life is essentially and by nature included, the absolute Life by which alone human

47 Ibid., 155.48 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 inEmile and in theDialogues in which Rousseau comments on the “flux continuel” of our affections, the passage fromsuffering to joy and from joy to suffering which he himself experiences. Audi notes that the “auto-biographical” writings of Rousseau in which Rousseau discusses his own powerlessness relative to hisaffective life are in fact both ontological and ethical in character. As ontological, they concern that whichwe truly are in our original mode of self-givenness. As ethical, they are concerned with the existentialquestions to which our ontological “situation” gives rise. Rousseau’s writings are concerned with myproperly human response to the existential situation in which I find myself always already having beensituated. This existential situation is in truth an ontological “position” that is the ground of my unique andirreducible ipseity, from which I cannot escape, but which requires rather that I “suffer myself” -- permitmyself -- 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 wahrhaftphilosophische Frage nach dem Sinn des Seins im Ganzen wird, auf den Menschen zugespitzt, zurreligiösen Frage nach seinem Heil im Ganzen.” There are many points of convergence between Henry andBalthasar relative to the centrality of the question of the meaning of human reality within their respectivephilosophical and theological projects. These points of convergence are uncanny both in their number andin their similarity of formulation, given that neither Henry nor Balthasar ever acknowledged or appearedto know of the work of the other.

149

life can ultimately be defined in its specific difference from all that is not human.53 Thisoriginal mode of Being and manifestation, which is first God and then also man in asubordinate and participated manner, is characterized for Henry by a concrete and pheno-menologically determined structure of “archi-impressionality” that effectively eludes allpossibility 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 humansubject in its original and affectively structured experience of self-awareness,54 the ex-cessive character of this claim is itself a function of Henry’s understanding of the meaningof textuality. Henry’s theory of textuality, in which the text itself can be a witness to theexcessive character of subjectively structured Being, secures the text in its ultimate con-ditions of possibility even as it secures the phenomenological and ontological primacy ofman relative to the text.

Everything real and living is for Henry indeedhors text; all the same, the text is notmerely an effaced trace of a transcendental signified to which the text itself cannot attain.As situated in Life, the text becomes anexpressive Gestaltof this Life; the “whole” thatLife is can give itself to man in and through the “fragment” of the text. Textuality there-fore shows itself not to be dialectically and therefore violently related either to subjectivityor to Being. Subjectivity ratheris itself Being, the “archi-foundation” of textuality whichsubjectivity unites to itself precisely in establishing a difference without distance betweenthe text and itself. It is on the foundation of transcendental subjectivity that the subjec-tively situated text is able to be the manifestation rather than the occultation both of Beingand of human reality.

Henry’s theory of textuality thus simultaneously serves the self-disclosure ofla Vieandenables human reality to resist the temptation to regard itself, because of itsexistentiellexperience of alienation, as a merely ontic reality related only extrinsically -- and thereforedialectically and violently -- to Being. It is human reality’s surrender to the illusion of itsontological poverty that results in what Henry decries in PC, his final work: man’swillingness to surrender himself to “everything which is less than man,”55 in order thathe 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 lifewhich man constructs around himself in order to shield himself from himself can ul-timately only testify to the unconquerable power ofla Vie in man.57 The Henryian textis thus meant to lead the reader back, by means of the experience of a “traumatic ex-perience” provoked by the text, to the simultaneously traumatic and blissful experienceof la Vie, the experience which the reader in his ultimate and thereforeaffectivebeingalways already is. The traumatizingphenomenologicalreduction that Henry effects provesto be at the service of a liberatingexistentialreduction, a “leading back” of man to him-self 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 deshommes...”

54 I would maintain that human reality’s experience of its ipseity or “I-ness” at the very least pointsbeyond 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 huma-nisme. L’humanitasde 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 andtriumphant “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 dialecticof suffering and joy, powerlessness and plenitude, is so truly the very essence of mani-festation itself that it can even manifest itself both to andthrough that which it alwaysexceeds and eludes. Living ipseity can and does give itselfto intentionally structuredconsciousnessthrough the resituated text. The self-manifestation of existentialpathosinand through the text is one of the many ways in which the Life that manis in a dependentand participated manner overcomes theexistentiellexperience ofalienationthat manhas.As Audi points out, this originalpathosof human reality that Henry evokes through themediation 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 construedby the promoters of “Enlightenment.” The text in its effective conditions of possibilityarises fromandwitnesses tothe manifestation of the “Self of Being” which is always andalso the authentic Life of man. Paradoxically, the text is possible precisely becausephilosophy 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 enterpriseaccomplished 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 vivanteentreprend de se connaître soi-même, se proposant ainsi à elle-même comme son thème propre.” Philo-sophy 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 affectivelystructured 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’obtentionde soi[italics mine], le devenir et le surgissement du sentiment en lui-même dans la jouissance de ce qu’ilest, 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 lamarque 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 fondce que Rousseau évoque sous le nom de ‘bonté naturelle.’” It is worth pointing out here that for Henryit is precisely this “ontological excessiveness” proper to human subjectivity that renders it relational andintersubjective in principle. As Audi goes on to say, speaking both of Rousseau and Henry, thesoi’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, unsupplément, un surcroît, mais un ‘plus’ de soi-même, uneexcédence irréductible de son affectivité, unesurabondance de vie qui rend possibles le vivre-ensemble et la morale. Car c’est sur cette excédenceirréductible de la subjectivité naturelle absolue, qu’un phénomène comme celui de ‘nous’, de la commu-nauté, devient enfin possible. Ou, pour le dire autrement, c’est parce que la vie a pour essence son propreaccroissement ontologique, qu’une communauté d’êtres vivants peu existera priori.”

61 EM, 169.

151

4. THE SUBJECTIVE BODY AND THE IDEA OF HEALTH IN MICHEL HENRY’SPHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE

Stella de Azevedo

Entlebnis Versus Erlebnis

Reflecting at length1 on the disastrous consequences of Galilean science for theunderstanding of life, Michel Henry departs from the “Krisis” to characterize the Galileanlegacy as a “proto-founding act”2 of modern science and knowledge which excluded phe-nomenological life by reducing it to the geometrical mathematization of the materialuniverse.3 The rupture between the knowledge (sagesse) inherited from the Greeks andChristianity, which survived until the eighteenth century, and the aestheticism of modernculture reflected on the opposition between two matrices: that of moral, religious andpolitical unity of the simultaneously sentient and rational being, conceived in the imageof God yet irreducible to all purely conceptual and demonstrable knowledge;4 and thescientific-technical matrix of the vision of the world, nature and man. In the latter, themodern concept ofcogito reflected two major structural epistemological streams ofModernity: the valuing of the ego, the transcendental and timeless subject, with decisiveconsequences both for the devaluing of the concrete man (man builds his identity bytranscending himself through reflection) and for the condition of “incommunicability” ofthe subject; and the discovery of the body-machine that functions autonomously withoutthe contribution of thought. Marked by the rule of appearance and sensuality, the body ofModernity is governed by duality and separation, adopting some ambiguous attitudestowards the body: valuing it on the one hand yet devaluing it on the other. Modernity hasthus radicalized the idea that man is fundamentally a dualistic being, a radicalization thatwas accompanied by the antagonism between subject and object, nature and society,individual freedom and social/communal laws or norms. The rupture or transformation ofthe unity of discourse, such as Modernity conceived it, culminated in the workings of thelinguistic rules that embodied, in the Kantian system, the transcendental structures ofunderstanding. The whole of post-Cartesian philosophy reflects, therefore, the parallelismbetween rationality and the systematic foundation of knowledge, resulting from an onto-logy of transcendental subjectivity and a notion of an all-enveloping human essence of apractical-ethical order. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, according to GeorgSimmel’s analysis, reflected an arduous search for the lost unity of the “transcendence oflife,” the recovery “on a higher basis of the lost unity between nature and spirit, betweenmechanism and inner meaning, between scientific objectivity and the meaning of valuethat we sense in life and things.”5 Johann Goethe’s life and works strongly expressed anevolution in the concept of the individual in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-turies, since they contained various approaches to individuality (articulated in the idea thatman should livefrom 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).2 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 cetteconnaissance procède l’éthique, notre devoir-être et notre devoir-faire. Mais cette connaissance a pour con-dition essentielle le rejet de toutes les formes de connaissance, en particulier celles issues des qualités sen-sibles.” 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.

152

constant flow of life. WithWerther6 and Faust,7 Goethe marked the transition from asentimentalist concept of life to a theoretical-practical concept. It is the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries, however, that take it up again in the epistemic crisis of Physics,shifting the transcendental issue of thecogito theme to issues in which the being is inquestion, i.e. to the thought that is directed at theunthoughtand articulates with it. Thebody 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 philo-sophical thought in areas that science had originally conquered, whose consequencestranslate today into the incompatibility of upholding a subject that asserts universal andabsolute truth, through itssuitability to the object produced in itself, through the act ofunderstanding.8 From the notion of distance between the subject and the object, betweenman and the world, we go on to a notion of familiarity: the world is not the object ofknowledge but the place where I live, where I am allowed to have hope and plans. Theworld is the place of habitation, the world of things, of implements; it is not an object butit is part of man who is, from the outset, thrown into it to face a situation. Another formof knowledge becomes necessary, a sympathetic knowledge, because it is capable of re-lating the subject with the object (the being-another), a relationship in which each is theinterpretation, clarification and translation of the other. Husserl’s analyses ofLebenswelthave shown quite clearly that the concept of objectivity represented by the sciences onlyexpresses a particular instance: “the human sciences and the natural sciencesshould beunderstood on the basis of the intentionality of universal life.”9

Taking Cartesian duality to its ultimate consequences, the mechanistic interpretationhad gradually treated human consciousness as a reflection of the physiological or materialprocesses, enabling the scientific study of the body. But it is the new sciences of the bodythat, 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 ofview of perception, the body (Körper) and flesh (Leib) already conform to the instaurationof 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 egologicalmodalities come, such as for example, getting up, carrying, etc.11 This paradigm, when itdescribed the process of hominization as the instauration of the cultural order, co-impliestwo strands: that man lives his life in a corporal world; and that thought is necessarilylinked to the word as a condition for expression and progress through new significationsin 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 culturalor the linguistic is the point of integration into the world starting from the rupture withnatural order. The devitalization (Entlebnis) proper to theoretical knowledge had led to theoversight of the tension between theproductive body(the object of the science of labor)

6 The pre-eminence of the subjective: “feeling is the whole.”7 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 lesRecherches logiques. Il faut maintenant comprendre qu’en articulant cessignifications multivoques sur la connaissance de soi, nous transformons profondément la problématiquedu Cogito. ... C’est cette réforme interne de la philosophie réflexive qui justifiera plus loin que nous y dé-couvrions 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.

153

and therepresented body(the combination of forces, actions, affections, frailties). Theliving knowledge of life, in its original appearance, would be thought about by Heideggerin his early FreiburgCourses, delivered between 1919 and 1923, in terms ofErlebnisorlived,12 and subsequently, after 1920, as the practical affective dimension of the experienceof life in terms ofBefindlichkeitandStimmung, starting from the reading of Aristotle.13

The essentially affective knowledge of life, proper to all that is lived, is not only charac-terized by a certain passivity but also, and mainly, by the absence of distance thatseparates the cognizant subject from the object known within theoretical knowledge,because to live something is tobe it. Erlebnis does not mean the contemplation of anexternal process nor an “inner” or “psychological” process pertaining to subjectivity orconsciousness, since the lived knows no internal nor external, i.e., my life is only livingto the extent that it lives in a world, has a world, which is but the world I have and livein.14 Experience being a vital, historical process, its intelligibility does not depend on themere observation of facts but on the blending of memory and expectation, as Dilthey hadalready argued. The ideality of meaning cannot, therefore, be assigned to a transcendentalsubject because it comes from thelived. The experience that offers itself to the subject isfounded on meaningfulness and experiential nexus. Therefore, epistemic consciousnesssimply continues the thought initiated in the experience of life, since it is previouslysituated 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., thesensus communis(Vico),the ground for all ability and legitimacy to think and act (ability to judge). The sensuscommunis, or “common understanding” (der gemeine Verstand), is decisively characterizedby the ability to judge, sojudgementis not a concept created by reflective consciousnessbut indeed a sense of judgement similar to the sensitive judgements that, despite beingformed with some certainty, are not however logically demonstrable. Life itself is theorigin and fundament both of the objectivity of scientific knowledge and the philosophicalreflection to arrive at the truth: the link between Life and knowledge is, therefore, anoriginary given, since consciousness is always incorporated in history, in society, in eco-nomy, in technique and in culture. Since Dilthey, subject/consciousness and object/naturecease to be regions of theMetaphysica Specialis; instead they designate concrete circlesof phenomena, layers of facts, which concrete man describes and observes according tohis position in the world, his experiential, cognitive and volitive attitude. Thelived body(corps vécu) re-establishes the importance of the phantasmic, suffering body in the faceof the dissected body.

Heidegger’s analysis of the structure of man’s way of being meant the overcoming ofa monadological and self-sufficient concept of man, rooting human essence in the connec-tion with the other and others, in tradition, within the framework of societies and theirinstitutions as significant mediations of language. The work of rationalization and sys-tematization of the world, therefore, can only be explained by the hermeneutics of facticityin its capacity to analyze the previous way of being-there of the being in the world, thereason why Heidegger does not talk about the subject as something separated from theworld but aboutDasein-- something that is related to and inseparable from the world. Forits 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 (Frankfurta.M.: Klostermann, 1987), 63-67.

13 Here it is no longer the concept of life that enables existence (Dasein) to be thought, but thebeing-for-death, the ontological difference that brings about anguish.

14 Cf. Martin Heidegger,Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in diephänomenologische Forschung(Wintersemester 1921/22), GA 61, ed. Walter Bröcker und Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1985), 86.

154

as there will be no point in creating alternative horizons of sense or of personal orcollective fulfillment, if these are not appropriable by those for whom they are designed.

The phenomenology of the temporality of perception leads inevitably to the assumptionof the historicity of all experience at the level of theworld of life. Human reality revealsitself as structurally dynamic as Life, or the relationship incarnated from the self with thethings that surround it. What is originary is the relationship marked by temporality (thenew way of being15), “since man, revealing himself to be a being fundamentally orientedtoward the future….”; i.e., an unmade being, who only lives through plans and hopes. Thehuman experience of the meaning of the world is the openness of the being: man issituated“in the openness of the being,” he livesprojectedinto the future and not in thepresent, he is originally a practical being that, through language, memory and his abilityto predict/anticipate, plans and directs all his activity (praxis) towards a concrete, historicaland unfinished existential dimension. The excessive or future, possible and linguisticdimension of the human way of being breaks out against the egological and monado-logical models of the person, taking down the historic-ontological premises of the mo-nadological-modern concept of self-consciousness and its filiation from the Greek meta-physical-cosmological model of considering the real as a given thing.16 In turn, thedecisive contribution of Psychoanalysis to the de-construction of thecogitorevealed a pro-found structure similar to that of the object libido.17 The linguisticity that crosses the wholeenigma of the body imposes on Western contemporary thought18 the non-identificationof the body as an objective thing, as a thing that one has and uses. The body isfiction,a set of mental representations that are prepared, dissolved, reconstructed at the will of thesubject’s history and the mediation of social-symbolic discourse. The body is lived fromwithin as a myself. It is in the word, in the action, that the self is present as a person, inflesh and blood, and it is through it, as belonging to a given culture, that man constituteshimself as the bearer of a vision of the world and things. As the body takes on multiplesignifications, in a symbolic universe, this humanizes itself, also constituting itself as afundamental 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 asexcessin relation to every potential of the organic body; anexcessthat manifests itself inthe 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 connec-tion of language (energeia) as vision and constitution of theworld, in which the originaryhumanity of language simultaneously means the originary linguality of the being-in-the-world of man.20 Consequently, language ismediationand not an instrument (reflectiveor conceptual) of the self- and re-awareness of the subject as a tense unity of organic andsymbolic systems within the historical and communitarian relationship that it establisheswith the other.

15 Silva, “Corpo Vivido: do corpo-objecto ao corpo-consciente,” 65.16 Maria Luísa Portocarrero da Silva, “Retórica e apropriação na hermenêutica de Gadamer,” Separata

(da) Revista Filosófica de Coimbra5, 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.

155

The Oversight of Life’s Oneself

The methodological-scientistic concerns that became predominant since the seventeenthcentury overlooked the fact that formed consciousness (Bildung) overcomes all naturalsense, since, while the latter is always limited by a certain sphere, consciousness “operatesin all directions and, as such, is a general sense.”21 It is within a (formative) pre-understanding horizon that the Greekpaideia is found in the “visual-objective model ofexternality (spatiality),”22 i.e., in the model of the thing,23 in which the categories ofspatiality and temporality are inherent in the thing itself. The classicvisual-objectivemodel of thething restricts reflective consciousness to thefactumand its exact observa-tion; science is the measure of all knowledge where space and time are exclusively asystem of coordinates for accessing exact and accurate clues about all things. At ananthropological level, this model turned the concepts oflogos and spaceinto the com-monplaces between the “world” of nature (the external, the physical) and the “world” ofculture (the internal, the reflective consciousness). Man is since seen as an (objectifiable)corporal or biological thing, as asum, a “pure object of the physical or external world,something that can be touched and objectified, i.e., a body comparable to that of ananimal yet specifically different from it because it is endowed with something that animalsdo not have, thelogosor thenous.”24 The Western model of man, for which Christianityis strongly responsible as the heir of the platonic concept of the body as a “passingcondition of the soul,”25 introduces a deeper and more radical distinction26: “Flesh andspirit are not anthropologically constitutive elements of the human entity but rather waysof being of man in his referral to divinity. Man ... is not an amalgamation of two com-pletely 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 legacygenerated, with the subsequent multiplication of increasingly specialist knowledge, of newmethodologies which opened up new horizons, but whose premises or conditions he didnot theorize: the geometrical-mathematical legibility of the universe requires a transcen-dental performance of consciousness, an act of the spirit creating something that did notexist 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 phenomeno-logical horizon: it reflects on an exterior world, a pure exteriority, since matter isresextensaand only knows idealities if they are presented before its very eyes: “The geo-metric determinations to which Galilean science tries to reduce the being of things areidealities. These, far from being able to account for the sensory, subjective and relativeworld in which our daily activity takes place, necessarily refer to this world of life; it isonly in relation to this world that they have a meaning; it is on the insurmountable groundof 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 theextent that it provides a sense and a consciousness. Scientific idealities always refer, there-fore, 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 theworld-of-life, the sensitive world. In other words, as idealities, the geometric and mathe-matical determinations imply subjective operation, a transcendental consciousness, a prin-ciple which, as it continually engenders the world of science, is a permanent condition forits own possibility: “The transcendental condition of the possibility of the experience ingeneral is the condition of science itself.”30 Continuing on the basis of a technologicalhyper-development, scientific knowledge invaded the entire field of thelogos, of praxis31

andculture with an exclusive claim on truth, and its effects on the notions ofthe world,subjectivityand life often went unnoticed or were not thought through: “To the extent towhich culture is the culture of life and pertains to it exclusively, the science that keepsthis life and its specific development out of its subject matter, which is culture itself, re-mains well and truly alien to it. The relationship between science and culture is a relation-ship of mutual exclusion. … By eliminating … the world-of-life and life itself, science placesitself paradoxically outside the latter and its development, and consequently outside allpossible culture.”32 Culture has originally, in itself, nothing to do with science and doesnot 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 ofthe sensory object or the intellectual vision of an intelligible object. … Now, the knowledgecontained in the vision of the object is not in the least exhausted in the knowledge of theobject. It means the knowledge of the vision itself, which is no longer consciousness, theintentional relation to the object, but life.”33 But if objective sciences have understoodnothing 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 toreduce thought and ideas to the objective body in which the possibility of excess of thequestion of sense is always presented as an illusion. Philosophy does not escape thiseither, as in the form of a classic transcendental phenomenology it does not know anymanifestation other than that produced within the world36: “When subjectivity is nothing

30 Ibid., 104.31 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 savoirpropre 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 univoquedu monde réel, pour ce monde réel lui-même, ce monde que nous ne pouvons qu’intuitionner et éprouverdans 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 doncaucune autonomie, elles ne constituent pas le symétrique des sciences de la nature, leurs recherches appa-raissent provisoires, vouées tôt ou tard à céder la place à un autre savoir, celui qui, délaissant la réalitépsychique, c’est-à-dire le niveau de l’expérience humaine, s’oriente vers ses soubassements cachés, soitl’univers des molécules et des atomes.” Ibid., 17.

36 The clearing (Lichtung) where human existence is truly human (ex-sistence), while belonging tothe 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 ofthe world as a transcendental condition for all manifestation) constituted for Michel Henry the greatestobstacle to a true understanding of Christianity and revelation.

157

more than externality and its unfolding, when it is no longer something alive, and that bywhich it is life is lost sight of, denied or concealed, and this by philosophy and sciencealike, then the former has no lesson to remind the latter, they both live in the same ob-livion, in the same stupor in the face of what is in front, which only qualifies as being intheir eyes. (…) It is also necessary to understand this subjectivity as life, in such a waythat the transcendental contributions which make up, or rather are, science let themselvesbe recognised as modes of absolute life, for the same reasons as the creations of art, forinstance, and in the same way as cultural phenomena for the same reasons as artisticphenomena.”37

Michel Henry’s critique to the egological character of phenomenology is directed at itsinsufficiency 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 absenceof the “Oneself” (Soi), that is, in Henry’sphenomenology of lifethe fundamental issue isthat 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 self-detachment, without the power to escape the deepest layers of its being. “Ontologicalmonism” -- the philosophy that upholds that nothing is given to us except inside andthrough the mediation of the transcendental horizon of the being in general,38 thatsubordinates the given, such as it is, to the order of transcendence or externality -- restedon this illusion of an ontological homogeneity between the plane of immanence, that ofLife, and the plane of transcendence, that of Being. Echoing the concerns of Maine deBiran, who replaced a classic and empirical psychology for a subjective ideology ortranscendental phenomenology,39 Michel Henry breaks away from the whole tradition ofwhat he characterizes asontological monism. The critique of ontological monism enablesthe unveiling of the subjective dimension of the body and its analysis enables the charac-terization of this absolute subjectivity on which all existence is dependent. According toHenry, in a phenomenological ontology the issue of our primary knowledge of the bodyis, simultaneously, the issue of the ontological nature of the body itself since, in such on-tology, theappearanceis the measure of thebeing.40 Distancing himself from Heidegger,Henry defends amaterial phenomenologywhose objective is that of discerning, withinpure appearance and under the phenomenality of the visible, a deeper dimension in whichlife attains itself before the emergence of the world.41 To think sensations, affections, affec-tivity, thoughts, phenomenologically implies that the dimension of the bodiless psyche orof the interpretation of the issue of the body (physical body on the one hand, and psy-chical body on the other) is overcome. It is necessary to holdin suspensionall non-reflectedand non-criticized pre-determination of the “prejudice” about the soul and the body, tostrive to think without a pre-given frame of reference. The chasm meanwhile createdbetween the somatic and the mathematical overlooks two fundamental dimensions of thesingular 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, 105-106.38 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 essen-tielles de la conscience se connaissent originairement dans l’immanence de leur être même et dans leuraccomplissement 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 dimensionplus profonde où la vie s’atteint elle-même avant le surgissement du monde.” Henry,La Généalogie dela psychanalyse, 7.

158

“lived body,” the “incarnated living,”from within, intrinsically, the “excess”in theaffection itself, without reference to the having or the being, but not without reference tothe who. The pure object (which intellectualism and realism want to reduce toown-body)is itself a horizon since it is removed from a purely representative consciousness. This isa fertile idea, in terms of the issue of the body, since it reveals to us the deep reasons forwhich the characterspecific to the body was mostly overlooked in favor of a pure andsimple reduction of the body to the external object: “As regards the theory of the body,ontological monism had this decisive consequence of constantly preventing philosophicalreflection from rising to the idea of the subjective body. The body, a real element in theeffectiveness of the being in general, was necessarily something transcendent. Thusreduced to its subjective manifestation, what constitutes its essential being, i.e., the sub-jective 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., itdoes not belong, in any way, to the order of exteriority. The issue of thefair distancebetween the “self” and its body44 is expressed by the contribution of phenomenology tothe 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 withwhat it senses, understanding it as an intentional relationship: “The body, which is the realsubject of knowledge, knows other bodies by relating intentionally to them. Consciousnessis the setting of this fundamental overflow by which it always throws itself out into aworld, into other bodies and its own. If we keep the word subjectivity, it must be said thatmodern phenomenology interprets our subjective body as an intentional body because ithas 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 bodyas an object, particularly Cartesian philosophy: “The Cartesian cogito should thereforeundergo a radical change in value to adapt to the demands of the fundamental trend ofBiranian 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. Étiennede Condillac) is an example of the knowledge ofown-body: constantly directed, it knowsitself first through the experience of a power of production. As an instrument, it revealsitself within a power of prehension which cannot be given in the element of exteriority.The knowledge of the hand by itself is effected in theeffort as pure auto-affection. Whatis specific to theeffort is that it is given to itself without exteriority: the “content” whichaffects theeffort is no more than the effort itself or, in other words, the being of theeffort isthis profound cohesion with itself, this impossibility of self-detachment, pure immanence,auto-affection, this presence unto oneself, without distance. In theeffort, I propel a move-ment that is such that I do not detach myself from it: the “self” is only at the root of the

42 Ibid., 261.43 “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.

159

effort if this effort gives rise to it. A movement without the least withdrawal, an actionthat compresses itself proportionately to its dynamism, theeffort is the reality of theself.The being of the “self” is the action through which I endlessly transform the world; hence,the cogito does not meanI think, but I can (“je peux”).47 The body is a fascinatingillustration of what Michel Henry calls adouble presence: “The body first presents itselfto us in the world and is immediately interpreted as an object of the world, something thatis visible, that I can see, touch, feel. But this is only the apparent body. The real body isthe living body, the body in which I am placed, that I never see and that is a cluster ofpowers – I can, I take with my hand – and I develop this power from within, outside theworld. It is a metaphysically fascinating reality because I have two bodies: visible andinvisible. The inner body that I am and is my real body is the living body, and it is withthis body that I actually walk, take, embrace, am with others.”48 The being of the body issubjective, is absolute immanence, and is absolute transparency.49 The division of actioncorresponds to the division of the body: on the one hand, the body in the truth of theworld (the real body, the visible body, the body-object comparable to all objects becauseit shares in their essence, theres extensa; on the other, the body in the Truth of Life, theinvisible body, the living body.50 Therefore, the body is placed beside the subject sincethe experience of the subjective movement prevents its reduction to the condition ofobject: the being of this movement, this action and this power is that of a cogito.51 Inother words, the body is a subjective reality, it is not an instrument. The experience wehave of the body, in the sensing of theeffort, is not a simple experience that reveals anobject whose being is an “outside” of itself, in such a way that the body could be un-veiled, for example, from theexterior. The movement, theeffort, is physical,52 and thebeing of this power is that of immanence which, while moving-itself, isex-pression: Thebody moves itself and, in this way, it becomes mobile and enters the world toex-press,to ex-poseitself 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 worldpenetrates immanence as a legitimate extension of themoved-oneself of the subjectivebody. The movement is not an intermediary between theegoand the world: it is theegoitself, and its being iseffort, and it is for this reason that we make our movements withoutthinking about them. Motor functions are, therefore, the condition for the possibility oftranscendence itself53: this pure immanence that theeffort reveals and accomplishes im-plies that the transcendental inner experience is always, too, a transcendent experience:the feeling of theeffort is necessarily the revelation of a term that resists it. This resistingterm is not an object which would reveal itself to be somehow liable to oppose theeffort,which would lead to the separation of consciousness from its own movement. On thecontrary, themovementis a form of specific and originary givenness which does notdepend on any representation, andresistanceis correlatively the modality according to

47 Ibid., 73.48 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 dece 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 inVisible 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 theside of the transcendence that it phenomenalizes.

160

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 foraction or movement considered in themselves, they no longer belong to the sphere of thecogito, they are no longer determinations of thought but rather determinations ofextension.The normal process that takes place, for example, from the idea of a movementto the actual accomplishment of this movement therefore poses a problem which cannotbe solved or even contemplated within the sphere of pure subjectivity, and the body whichis the milieu in which actual movements are achieved can only find its place in a philo-sophy 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 noway achieved.”55 To think about incarnation is to depart either from the resistance of thebody 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 withina sensitivity that is ours and only given to us through the endless game of its ever-changing and renewed subjective appearances.56 It is this subjective life that, in additionto creating the idealities and abstractions of science conveyed by language, gives shapeto the world-of-life within which our concrete existence unfolds. Following the Greco-Hellenistic period, the phenomenological determination of language was held captive bythe insurmountable boundaries attributed to the concept of phenomenality,57 but only theapprehension of pure phenomenality in its originary mode of phenomenalization cantransform our understanding of language. The word of life speaks in every living creatureas the one it engendered at its own creation. It is onconstitutive subjectivitythat MichelHenry founds his philosophy of life as “auto-affection,” an affection not by the world butby oneself, and where all perception, all imagination, all conceptual thought is a hetero-affection: “It is an affection by an otherness, by this milieu of otherness whereby anythingthat is other can show itself to me, give itself to me originally as other. But if everythinggave 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 con-stitution of the other and develop the genetic rooting of the experience of the other asotherness to oneself, in its incarnate and reflective content. Such a return to the im-manentist order therefore leaves inter-subjectivity unresolved. The language of life is thefounder of the language of the world and it is in this relationship that the modes ofphenomenalization of phenomenality are manifested: the language of the world mergesinto the “appearance” of the world (in which everything that it says is shown), and theword of life is the Word, the originaryOne through which life is revealed unto oneself.In other words, “talkative” intentionality aiming at a transcendental signification cannotrefer to the latter other than on the condition that it is already in possession of oneself inthe self-givenness of the pathos that makes it a life. But the pathos that consciousnessexperiences 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 theeffort, of resistant continuum,which does not designate any temporal or spatial extension. According to Henry, the determination of thereal as what resists is ana priori determination which cannot, consequently, be absent from ourexperience.

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 himselfabsolute life, in the self-revelation unto itself.

The objectification of originary affectivity (pathos) is expressed in the thinking of thebody (Leib) as objective transcendent body, as mere physical and biological support(Körper) for an Ego. Ontologically different from subjectivity, the objective body becamea primary material in which personal identity is diluted and no longer an identitarianmanifestation 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, thatthe being of man is a situated being. Rather the contrary, our objective transcendent bodyis only situated in a well-determined sense that is peculiar to it because our absolute bodyis already situated as subjectivity in a transcendental relationship with the world. Thusontological analysis destroys the naive representations which dominate philosophicaltradition, and according to which the metaphysical being of man, understood as pure con-sciousness and as abstract subjectivity, would only be situated, determined, even indivi-dualized by its being brought into relation, a mysterious one for that matter (as the mythsconcerning the “fall” of the soul into the body show) to an objective body. It is not thatthe character of being-in-situation somehow communicates itself from the body-object tothe absolute body, it is in fact in the opposite sense that this “communication” iseffected.”59

Passivity as an Originary Auto-Affection

The emergence of a new concept of subject is linked to the need for overcoming varioussystems of historical and cultural references, definitions and experiences justifyinganthropological coordinates that delimitate human nature, since psychocentric, sociocentric,theocentric and biocentric polarizations have always led to man’s loss ofidentity. Thesubject’s sovereignty used to rest on the sovereign demarcation of its space, from whichit knew and appropriated what in nature, and by nature, was still external to it, giving riseto the great difficulties between theory and practice. The definition of man progressivelyshed the dichotomous, subjective-transcendental, empirical-biological prejudices on whichit was founded. The refusal of the modern concept of autonomous subject in the name ofthe originary passivity and sensitive affectivity asserts the originary One as a self-givenoneself 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 theworld. A pure object only exists in the infinite term of a movement of objectification, whichreveals the originary link between things and my body: the frontal correlation of the con-stituent subject and theblosse Sachenderives from the live unity of the body and itsworld. There is no life without the living, and no living without life; there is no life fora living creature except that lived by him. Life is not an external representation and noliving creature brings himself to life: “If life originally only reveals its own reality, it issimply 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 theimmanence of its own pathos, this reality of life, therefore, is not just any reality. It iseverything 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 self-generation, this Self which only reveals itself in Life as the very revelation of this Life

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

162

to the self – as its Logos.”60 Life in the world can do nothing to relieve us from thesuffering and anguish61 which are the indelible core of our feeling of existence. Theworld does not heal us from our suffering in existence unless it hides our true life fromus 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 theexperience of the Divine in us. The unity of joy and pain is, therefore, an auto-affectionthat testifies to the double phenomenalization of phenomenality: the human and thedivine.62 Far from being transcendence in the face of the subject, sensing is posited fromthe 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 itdoes not ensue from what affects us.64 Michel Henry posits affectivity itself in the dividewhere the dualist perspective would posit the nominative and the reflective subjects:“Affectivity is the essence of ipseity.”65 The ‘being subject’ means suffering, meansbeing: “The constitutive subjectivity of the being, and identical to it, is the being-with-itself, the achievement in itself of the being such that it accomplishes itself in the originalpassivity of suffering. The essence of subjectivity is affectivity.”66 Suffering is a word be-cause it is it that speaks and says, because it is in the flesh of life’s suffering and throughit 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 sayit? In its suffering and by it.”67 For this reason, in this pain, in this suffering, life hasalready spoken differently, in a more primitive suffering: “This suffering, in which lifeembraces itself in the process of coming to itself in the love and joy of itself – thissuffering, which inhabits every mode of life, pain or joy, because in each one it is whatgives life to itself inasmuch as it is in it, this original pathos of life belonging to it, [it isin this suffering] that absolute Life gives itself to itself.”68 The living creature, exper-iencing himself, is this Word of Life which he himself hears: “The possibility of hearingthe Word of life is for each living Self consubstantial to its birth, to its condition ofSon.”69 In his way of living, this fundamentalpassivityis a concrete phenomenologicalfeature of concrete life. This is the legacy of Descartes who, in hisMéditations méta-physiques, defined man as an apparatus which he calls thought, i.e., a being who feels andthis feeling isself-feeling: “Cogitatio is a subjective mode which, like suffering, cold,hunger, heat, etc. experiences itself immediately, regardless of the world, in an a-cosmicway 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 asit experiences itself immediately. (…) Consequently, it is in affectivity that the un-shakeable foundation sought by Descartes lies. I call this life because all that lives is ofthis order. Even seeing, to the extent that it is a living seeing, is always a pathos.”70

60 Henry, “Phénoménologie matérielle et langage,” 25-26.61 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, parcequ’il est en chacune ce qui la donne à elle-même pour autant que c’est en lui, dans ce pathos originel quiest le sien, que la Vie absolue se donne à soi.»

69 Ibid.70 Henry,Auto-donation, 134-135.

163

Transcendental affectivity71 is the original mode of revelation by virtue of which lifereveals itself and becomes possible as it is, as life. Life is essentially affective and affec-tivity is the essence of life.72 Pathos, as originary affectivity, is the mode of phenomeno-logization according to which life is phenomenologized in its originary self-revelation, thephenomenological matter this self-givenness is made of, its flesh: apure transcendentalaffectivityin which all self-experiencing has its concrete phenomenological effectuality.73

Now the objectification of the pathos through contemporary scientific discourse was andis expressed in the thinking of the body as the merely physical support of an ego: “Thewill to consider Nature as simply a “natural being,” alien to life, already witnesses to thedesire of this life to deny itself. … To consider the object in an exclusive fashion and, whatis more, as a pure object, from which everything that would evoke life in it and, aboveall 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 ofthe 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 positednot as the condition of man, but as an existence exterior to the concrete man, another self-same. Ontologically different from the subject, the body becomes aconcern(souci) andan object of disquiet: it is the body asalter-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’smarks on the face and the hair: it is necessary to remain “young.” The finitude of the fleshexpressed by the disease, precariousness and pain which afflict it, its vulnerability andfrailty, originate the objectification of the body, leading man to the “utopia of perfecthealth,” to the pursuit of immortality. The idea ofhealth is reified, transformed into ascientific-technological object, and its dimension of a singularly lived experience is re-duced. It is valued as a purely physiological good within a horizon of reified hopes, withinan objectivist view of the physical and worldly dynamics in which all significations thatmake it a living body or a body-flesh (Leibkörper) are reduced, and in which health ceasesto 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 theflesh, the dis-incarnation of the self, occurs: “The phenomenology of the flesh re-conducts us from ouropenness to the world, in the transcendental contributions of our various senses, to theauto-impressionability of these on the flesh of life. It is only because of this pathetic self-givenness that our senses belong to a flesh, and that all that is given in them, that sensorycontent of our experience that we relate to things as their particular qualities, is found tobe originally and in itself made of “impressions.” Now, this pathetic self-givenness of oursenses 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 theirown impotence in moving away from themselves. Thus, the living cannot remove them-

71 Cf. Henry,La Barbarie, 30.72 Henry,L’essence de la manifestation, 596.73 Henry, “Phénoménologie matérielle et langage,” 25.74 Henry,La Barbarie, 128.75 Cf. David Le Breton,Anthropologie du corps et modernité(Paris: Puf, 1990).76 Ivan Illich, La perte des sens(Paris: Fayard, 2004), 334.

164

selves from themselves, from their Self, their pain or their suffering. If in the world’soutside of itself, which is the place of the separation, our own body cannot place itselfoutside itself, even if it is stretched out and its parts are external to each other, it isbecause 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 contem-porary individualism, i.e., that of a narcissistic sensitivity. The value crisis problematizesthe relationship with the world, and it is in this context that the body becomes a havenand an ultimate value of youth, seduction, vitality, “best friend,” a “capital” that one needsto manage with the best resources, prime value property, an object for great attention, careand treatment: “A ruse of modernity passes off as “liberation” what is no more than praisefor 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 tothe self. The key values of modernity … are those of youth, health, vitality, seduction andhygiene. They are the cornerstones of the modern discourse on the body.”78 The individualis reduced to his organic physicality (corporéité) to such an extent that, when it deterior-ates (old age, illness) he believes that he has lost his dignity: “The weakness of lifeconsists of its will to escape itself – and this is an ever-present temptation. … The impos-sibility of breaking up the string that attaches life to itself, which is to say to escape itssuffering, 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 escap-ing oneself, a feeling which finally reaches its peak and resolves itself in anguish.”79 Oldage and illness mark the progressive reduction of subjectivity to its organic body, reflect-ing the moment when this very body is exposed to the gaze, but without the other’s lenienceon a not too favorable day.80 The temptation to “recycle”81 the body in the denial ofits relationship with pathos, with pain, with anguish, is the reflection of the new represent-ation of a body-object capable of being “dismounted” and “rearticulated” down to its lastrecess. The notion ofperfect healthis subsidiary to the notion of body-object since, likeit, 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 andsuffering (pathos) as originary affection, hence non-objectifiable or representable. Illnessis what becomes opaque, hidden, it is the stalemate and obstacle to the originary exper-ience 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 entirehuman life.82 Like practical experience, the experience of suffering, the state of healthis not objectifiable despite it having been made a sector of appearances.

77 Michel Henry,Phénoménologie de l’Incarnation(Paris: Seuil, 2000), 247-252.78 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 àl’homme normal, pour qu’il puisse se croire et se dire tel, non pas l’avant-goût de la maladie, mais sonombre portée.” Georges Canguilhem,Essai sur quelques problèmes concernant le normal et le patho-logique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1950).

165

The pursuit of health, strongly reinforced by post-war socio-economic and scientific-cultural policies, becomes a social certainty/celebratory liturgy,83 mediated and instrument-alized by technical, social and cultural aspects; technical with the therapeutic synergy thatparadoxically engenders new diseases; social for the existential uprooting and anguish thatthe 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 theconsequent refusal of the precarious, fallible and suffering (pathetic) condition of man.The symbolic institution of modern culture turned, therefore, the notion of health into asocial metaphor, setting it off against the notion of “salvation” (salut), and turning itspursuit into the prevailing “pathogenic” (pathogène)85 factor. Health and disease becomecrossing 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 thissymbolic institutionalization process -- the institution of its identity and the identity ofsubjects -- and is under permanent conceptualization both as a biological being and as acultural product.86 Like the multipletechniques of the body87 (Marcel Mauss), the notionof health is itself symbolically institutionalized, in terms of what objective science, partic-ularly the biological sciences institutionalized as questions to be solved, but then again asan escape from the questions of meaning and excess. To think of this excess means tocontemplate the body fromwithin, as a subjective body, as a living body (chair), no longerbiological. What the conception and knowledge of the biological body showed is that itsperspective 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 decelle du salut, il faut la comprendre comme une liturgie sociétaire au service d’une idole qui éteint lesujet.” 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, plusintensément est ressenti le manque de santé. En d’autres termes, l’angoisse mesure le niveau de modernisa-tion, et encore plus celui de politisation. L’acceptation sociale du diagnostic «objectif» est devenu patho-gène 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 abesoin de santé est considéré comme un sous-système de la biosphère, un système immunitaire qu’il fautcontrôler, régler, optimiser, comme ‘une vie’. … Pour sa réduction à une vie, le sujet tombe dans un videqui 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 formsproposes: “Comme tout organisme vivant, l’être humain est génétiquement programmé et programmé pourapprendre. Tout un éventail de possibilités est offert par la nature au moment de la naissance. Ce qui estactualisé se construit peu à peu pendant la vie par l’interaction avec le milieu.” inLe jeu des possibles(Paris: Fayard, 1981), 126. In this matter, on the other hand, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the fact that theanatomic organization of the body leaves open-ended behavioralpossibilities for the creation ofsignifications transcendent to itself, yet immanent to behavior as such: “Il est impossible de superposerchez l’homme une première couche de comportements que l’on appellerait ‘naturels’ et un monde spirituelet culturel fabriqué. Tout est fabriqué et tout est naturel chez l’homme comme on voudra dire, en ce sensque pas un mot, pas une conduite qui ne doive quelque chose à l’être simplement biologique, et qui enmême 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 pourintervenir ou observer, donc un dedans qui peut toujours lui-même être converti en dehors, à savoir unfaux dedans, un dedans seulement empirique que rien, sinon la limite factuelle de la peau, des muscleset 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 representationsof science reasonably quickly: “It is not that a science like biology can offer us any en-lightenment about it; on the contrary, it is on such knowledge that it itself is founded; itcannot be supposed to explain what it presupposes as its condition for possibility, as theontological horizon inside which it can find its objects, offer its explanations and, aboveall else, pose its problems.”89

The chimeric longing for eternal health results from the modern observation of theprecariousness of human existence: illness (and insanity) draws this same limit in whichhealth is vital illusion, a time outside all temporality, the finished good of the human asthe incarnation of health, constituting itself a posteriori as the space of a human com-munity 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 modernmodus vivendi, and the connection with this notion of health is situated there: a lifetechnique that enables the body to live on, in spite of everything. Definitely and radicallybiologized, 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 partof a social-therapeutic project to normalize everyday life, a sort of negation of thesensuscommunis90: ultimately, the figure of the physician emerges as the constitution of a newpower or authority on life and death, henceforth dictating norms to the symbolic andcultural system (sensus communis). The biological body is the commonplace of the scientificdeterminations that make it up,91 and therefore it cannot constitute itself into originaryground since it is already a product of human reflection: “It is not that a science likebiology can offer us any enlightenment about it; on the contrary, it is on such knowledgethat it itself is founded.”92

The contribution of Henryian reflection to the range of an idea of “health” versusillness was derivatively prolific for the emphasis put on the idea of originally pathic self-givenness (auto-affection) of all transcendental ipseity in the self-generation of Life93 andon that of subjective body despite the implicit Husserlian legacy of anepochéof theworld. 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), thetrue cure supposes a rebirth of ipseity, the resurrection from this life which for a giventime seems to withdraw from itself, to self-deny itself. Modern culture has not only re-ducedknowledgeby 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 worksubordinates constantly cognitive progress to the destiny of the affect and, revealing thetrue nature of all concrete inter-subjectivity, the relationship between the analysis and theanalyser is situated, or rather played, as a confrontation of forces immersed in themselves,

89 Henry,Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps, 5.90 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 aFirst 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 laVérité, 143.

94 “En fin de compte l’autonégation de la vie s’accomplit de deux façons: sur le plan théorique, aveccette affirmation qu’il n’y a pas d’autre savoir que le savoir scientifique; sur le plan pratique, partout oùse réalise, d’une ou de l’autre, la négation pratique de la vie. … Mais la science n’est pas la seule négationpratique de la vie. Dans la signification pathétique, en tant que mise á l’écart par le savant de sa proprevie, elle offre le prototype d’un comportement qui précipite la ‘culture’ moderne tout entière dans labarbarie.” Henry,La Barbarie, 130.

167

each the prey of their own pathos.”95 The truth of pain lies in the one who feels it, forits register is too strong for us to verbalize it and, when there is language, it is meta-phoric.96 If I suffer, it is because it is me that is the one who lives: “It is thereby thatpsychoanalysis separates itself from human sciences and resists Galilean reduction,specifically its linguistic reduction, inasmuch as, in the very heart of the devastation ofhumankind 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 ( alienationof theoriginary auto-affection of the oneself) is today different frombeing ill since, incontemporary terms, the reification of the model of health is founded on common ground,a ground that is originarily uniting, in which the awareness offeelingandbeingbecametwo distant modes of the appearing, going deeper into what Henry sought to overcome:the psychologicalepoché, the distance betweenworld andoriginary truth, enabling theex-sistence of a oneself and a body that no longer belong to the world; in short, theovercoming of the ego’s disincarnation. The incarnate body is a suffering being, animpressional substance, permeated by a series of impressions (desire, fear) associated withthe flesh because it is constitutive of its substance. My flesh is what I experience pheno-menologically, particular to my body (the invisible) and not the mere biological and mo-lecular substratum (corps), the object of treatment, repair or change (the visible). Despitebeing subsidiary to the appearance of acarnality (experience of oneself), of a subjectiveexperience of the body not totally reducible to its corporality (physical materiality), theidea of “health” became an object of instrumentalized appropriation by biotechnologies.The emptying of the originarily impressional (and endless) character of Life by the at-tempt(s) to eliminate pain and suffering is precisely a consequence of this: “The impos-sibility of breaking the string that attaches life to itself, which is to say to escape itssuffering, increases the latter, exasperates the will to escape it and, in turn, and simul-taneously, the feeling of its helplessness, the feeling of Oneself as an originary impossibilityof escaping oneself, a feeling which finally reaches its peak and resolves itself inanguish.”98 Subject to the model of “seeing,” thought overlooks its own living reality,its knowledge becomes a science of objects that disregards man.

95 Ibid., 163.96 Cf. David le Breton,Anthropologie de la douleur(Paris: Metaillé, 1995).97 Henry,La Barbarie, 163.98 Ibid., 129.

168

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 asÜber die Verborgenheit derGesundheit, Hans-Georg Gadamer writes:

It has always been a particular occasion that has prompted me to speak about problemsof health care and the art of medicine. The results are gathered together in this smallvolume. It should not be a cause for surprise if a philosopher who is neither a doctornor feels himself to be a patient nevertheless wishes to participate in the discussion con-cerning the broad range of problems which arise in the field of health in the scientificand technological age. Nowhere else do the advances of modern research enter so di-rectly 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 workconcerned with the philosophy of medicine, but written by a representative of modern her-meneutics, should come as no surprise to the reader. I suspect, however, that many readerswere indeed surprised by Gadamer’s late interest in issues of contemporary medicine andhealth care. Gadamer’s view is that, in questions of the methodology used in the humanities(Geisteswissenschaften) as opposed to the sciences (Naturwissenschaften), the latter servesas a kind of negative antithetical image to the pattern of understanding found in the human-ities. Considering this, is it really possible to talk about a Gadamerianhermeneuticsofmedicine by focusing attention on the activities of contemporary health care? Consider,for example, the following quote fromTruth and Method:

To that extent this seems a legitimate hermeneutical requirement: we must placeourselves 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. Thesame is true of a conversation that we have with someone simply in order to get toknow him -- i.e., to discover where he is coming from and his horizon. This is not atrue conversation -- that is, we are not seeking agreement on some subject because thespecific contents of the conversation are only a means to get to know the horizon ofthe other person. Examples are oral examinations and certain kinds of conversationbetween doctor and patient.2

1 Hans-Georg Gadamer,The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age, trans. JasonGaiger and Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), vii. “Es waren stets besondere Anlässe, diemich bewogen, zu Problemen der Gesundheitspflege und der ärztlichen Kunst mich zu äußern. Die Ergeb-nisse 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 derWissenschaft und der Technik stellt, kann nicht verwundern. Nirgendwo treten die Fortschritte der moder-nen Forschung so sehr in das sozialpolitische Spannungsfeld unserer Zeit wie in diesem Gebiet.” Hans-Georg 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 For-derung, dass man sich in den andern versetzen muss, um ihn zu verstehen. Indessen fragt es sich, ob einesolche Parole nicht gerade das Verständnis schuldig bleibt, das von einem verlangt wird. Es ist genausowie 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 medicalpractice is primarily a strategic move by the doctor, entered into for the purpose of gettingto know the patient and become able to manipulate him; the dialogue is not carried outin order to approach and seek the truth of the matter at hand (the illness)togetherwiththe patient. In contrast to this hermeneutic pattern of the mutual seeking of truth, contem-porary medical practice is taken apart, even dismantled by Gadamer (in works followinguponTruth and Method), not only as a manipulative strategy, but also as an event in whichmedical science and social institutions dominate and thus suffocate the voice and indi-vidual 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 frame-work of pure calculation and manipulation (Gestell).4 Medicine presents no exception tothis technological threat to humanistic values, neither for Heidegger, nor for Gadamer5:

We encounter, for example, the loss of personhood. This happens within medical sciencewhen the individual patient is objectified in terms of a mere multiplicity of data. In aclinical investigation all the information about a person is treated as if it could beadequately collated on a card index. If this is done correctly, then the relevant data willall uniquely apply to the person involved. But the question is whether the unique valueof the individual is properly recognized in this process.6

As we can see, a fundamental critique of (medical) science and technology is undeniablypresent inThe Enigma of Health, but it is supplemented therein by a hermeneutics ofeveryday life, healthy or ill, which makes Gadamer’s contribution to contemporarymedical 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 nichtdie Verständigung über eine Sache gesucht, sondern alle sachlichen Inhalte des Gespräches sind nur einMittel, um den Horizont des anderen kennenzulernen. Man denke etwa an das Prüfungsgespräch oder be-stimmte 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, ratherthan opposed to, “humanistic values.” The pattern of Cartesian subjectivity is the modern “epoch ofBeing” (Seinsgeschick), which rules the Enlightenment as well as the scientific revolution. See MartinHeidegger,Brief über den Humanismus(Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1949). In Gadamer’s dialogic her-meneutics, intersubjectivity and ethics attain far more central and crucial functions than in Heidegger’sphilosophy, and it consequently makes sense to speak of a threat to “humanistic values” (but perhaps onlyfrom Gadamer’s perspective and within quotation marks). See Christopher P. Smith,Hermeneutics andHuman 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 Datenzustande. Das bedeutet, dass man in der klinischen Untersuchung von heute sozusagen wie aus einerKartothek zusammengesucht wird. Wenn man richtig zusammengesucht wird, dann sind alle Werte dieeigenen. Aber die Frage ist dennoch, ob unser Eigenwert dabei auch vorkommt.” Gadamer,Über dieVerborgenheit 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 andRoman thought (see the last two parts ofHistoire de la sexualité(Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1984).Foucault’s earlier critical analysis of modern medical practice, in works such asHistoire de la folie à l’ãge

170

In the realm of medicine, in any case, the dialogue between doctor and patient cannotsimply be regarded as a preparation for or introduction to the treatment proper. Thedialogue between doctor and patient must rather be seen as part of the treatment itselfand as something which remains important throughout the entire process of making arecovery.8

In both cases -- the critique of modern medicine as domination, and the attempt atdeveloping the hermeneutic essence present in a clinical meeting, when approaching aphenomenology of health and sickness -- Gadamer reverts to his Heideggerian phenome-nological roots. In this paper I will try to show how the hermeneutic philosophy developedby Gadamer in his first main work,Truth and Method, is indeed aphenomenologicalher-meneutics, and how one needs to acknowledge this phenomenological heritage in orderto understand the directions taken inThe Enigma of Health.9 This reading will enable usto see more clearly, what kind of contribution (and challenge) Gadamer offers to con-temporary medical philosophy and ethics.

This strategy will also enable us to return to the fundamental question we started outwith above, only better equipped: In what sense could medical practice be considered inany way ahermeneuticactivity? Given that doctors and other health care personnel are,in some everyday sense, “interpreting” their “material,” is this not a kind of interpretative pat-tern, which is fundamentally different from the outline of understanding found in Gadamer’shermeneutics? Or is it rather the other way round? Will medical practice prove to behermeneutic in a more profound sense than the reading of any historical text? HaveGadamer’s attempts to approach medicine within the framework of his own philosophypaved the way for aGadamerianhermeneutics of medicine, which could not only walkin his footsteps, but also try to develop the hints we find inThe Enigma of Healthin amore consistent way?

Hermeneutics and Phenomenology

Richard Palmer has traced for us the roots of the word “hermeneutics,” in his book withthe same title:

The Greek word hermeios referred to the priest at the Delphic oracle. This word andthe more common verb hermeneuein and noun hermeneia point back to the wing-footedmessenger-god Hermes, from whose name the words are apparently derived (or viceversa?). Significantly, Hermes is associated with the function of transmuting what isbeyond human understanding into a form that human intelligence can grasp. The variousforms of the word suggest the process of bringing a thing or situation from unintelligi-bility to understanding. The Greeks credited Hermes with the discovery of language

classique(Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1961) andNaissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regardmédical(Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1963), is here developed in the direction of a phenomenology of everydaylife. As we will see in what follows, Gadamer too returns to Greek philosophy in sketching out a pheno-menology of medicine. Foucault’s philosophy of medicine and illness is actually mentioned by Gadamer,once, inThe Enigma of Health, 169.

8 Ibid., 128. “Auf alle Fälle ist im Bereich der Medizin das Gespräch keine bloße Einleitung undVorbereitung der Behandlung. Es ist bereits Behandlung und geht in die weitere Behandlung ein, die zurHeilung 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, whichmeans that the development of a phenomenological hermeneutics of medicine evolves, in Gadamer’sphilosophy, over a period of at least thirty years.

171

and writing – the tools which human understanding employs to grasp meaning andconvey it to others.10

Keeping this etymology in mind, one can easily understand why hermeneutics beganas a branch of theology, concerned with the principles of biblical interpretation. The holytexts needed to be deciphered in order to make full sense to the reader, and the disciplinedevoted to developing the manuals used in this decipherment was referred to as herme-neutics. We are here able to trace one meaning of the word hermeneutics, which is stillprevalent 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 ambitionsand theoretical background of the interpreter, and they can thus generate different inter-pretations of the same text. Accordingly, in the interpretation of texts and other artifacts,there often arises aconflict between different interpretations, in which it is hard to settlewhich interpretation is the correct one. The outcome of this conflict clearly depends onwhat one means by “correct,” here; but let us at this point note that it is precisely thisseemingly endless battle of different interpretations in the humanities that has generateda certain distrust and contempt among the practitioners of the natural sciences, who claimto aim for objective truth and not simply for different opinions.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century -- at the same time as modern scientificmedicine was making its early breakthroughs -- Friedrich Schleiermacher attempted todevelop ageneralhermeneutics, that is, a hermeneutics that would not be limited to acertain discipline or doctrine, but rather would give the general rules of all interpretation.Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics evolved in two complementary directions, one focusingupon thelanguageof the text, and the other upon empathy (Einfühlung) -- the attempt tofind out what theauthor of a document meant, by trying to imagine oneself in hisposition. Wilhelm Dilthey, at the end of the nineteenth century, was influenced by the her-meneutics of Schleiermacher and tried to reformulate it as the method of the humanitiesdealing 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 (Naturwissen-schaften).11

The idea of hermeneutics as a method peculiar to the humanities in contrast to thesciences found sympathy in many humanistic disciplines. It was used as a theoretical basisfor developing interpretive manuals that described methods for uncovering the intentionsof the author of a text (artifact) or the meaning of the text itself, clear of its author’sintentions. In both cases, however, one is dealing with hermeneutics as a collection ofmethodsfor uncovering hidden meaning in artifacts through employing knowledge pe-culiar to the humanities in contrast to the sciences. Before we go any further, let me saythat this isnot the kind of hermeneutics Gadamer (or I) will claim to be essential toclinical practice. Patients are not works of literature, although, as we shall see, they sharesome important modes of being-in-the-world with the ontology of texts. This similarityis in fact the reason why doctors can learn and perfect their clinical skills by readingnovels and poetry. The knowledge they gain from this reading, however, is not primarilya knowledge of how texts work, but rather a knowledge about human beings and theirways 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 givehere, 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 phenomenologicalhermeneutics 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 asa special form of understanding, which is identical with neither explanation in science norinterpretation in the humanities. Hermeneutics is here an ontological and not a methodo-logical concept; that is, hermeneutics is not taken as a method, but as a basic aspect oflife. The human being --Dasein, as it is famously termed by Heidegger -- understandsitself and its world by way of being thrown into a network of meanings that are referredto as its being-in-the-world. This being-in-the-world is always embodied and alreadyattuned as well as in the process of articulating itself. Articulation in its most explicit formtakes on the mode of being of language. Spoken discourse, however, can also be fixed inthe form of texts, which are then to be read and understood by others. Understanding thentakes on a rather indirect form compared to the more immediate understanding of, forexample, everyday practical activities, but the activity of reading is still tied to the samekind of being-in that is played out in the meaning-structure of the world. Hermeneuticsis thus not only, and not primarily, a methodology for the reading of texts, but a basicaspect of life. To be -- to exist -- means to understand.

The phenomenology of being-in-the-world, in Heidegger’s philosophy, turns out to bea hermeneutics, since the attainment of self-understanding by everydayDaseindemandsanuncovering, a dismantling, authentic interpretation. Heidegger makes clear in the firstdivision of Sein und ZeitthatDaseinis to be thought of primarily as a being-with-others(Mitdasein). In the ensuing analysis, however, he strongly links thisa priori trait ofhuman existence to the inauthentic being-together of “the they” (das Man), and therebycomes close to equating being-with-others with inauthentic existence (Verfallensein).Heidegger’s emphasis on authentic understanding as a solitary pursuit in contrast to theempty and distortive talk (Gerede) of “the they” calls for a critical, supplementary analysisfocusing 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 her-meneutic phenomenology in the very direction of a hermeneutics of being together withothers.

At first sight, Gadamer’smagnum opus(published originally in 1960) --Wahrheit undMethode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik-- might seem rather remote fromthe phenomenology of being-in-the-world that Heidegger is laying out inSein und Zeit.Gadamer’s book is divided into three parts; the first and second parts, which are by farthe most extensive ones, deal with the work of art and with interpretation in thehumanities, respectively. The third part of the book deals with the ontology of languageand can be read as an articulation of the special pattern of understanding found byGadamer to be present in these disciplines. As Gadamer himself acknowledges, however,and as I will attempt to elucidate here,Wahrheit und Methodeis most accurately read asan extension of the phenomenological hermeneutics ofSein und Zeit.13

As many of his readers have remarked, the title of Gadamer’s book should properlyread “Truthor Method” and not “Truthand Method,” since it is precisely the methodo-logical conceptualization of hermeneutics, as formulated by Schleiermacher and Dilthey,that Gadamer is trying to go beyond. Truth inTruth and Methodis meant as a basicexperience of being together with others in and through language, and not as a criterionfor correct interpretations. This conception of truth is completely in line with Heidegger’sinterpretation of the concept ofa-letheiain Sein und Zeit; that is, truth as the openness

12 Martin Heidegger,Sein und Zeit, 16th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986).13 Gadamer,Truth and Method, 259 ff.

173

or disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) of Daseinto the world of meaning in which things canbe found and articulatedas such and such things.14 Thus, for a sentence to describe, tocorrespond to, a state of the world, this prior dismantling of the world as meaningful isnecessary. In Gadamer’s philosophy, however, truth is to be understood primarily as open-ness tothe otherandhis world and not only tomy ownworld. The difference, of course,from Heidegger’s point of view, would not be decisive, because the world of the other isalso mine -- we share the same world in our being-together. Still, authentic understandingis to a much greater extent a shared experience in Gadamer’s hermeneutics than inHeidegger’s philosophy.

Language is emphasized by Gadamer as the key mode of human existence in beingtogether with others. The form of language he concentrates his analysis on, inTruth andMethod, is not, however, the spoken dialogue, but rather the reading of literature and othertexts of the past. Historical texts are separated from us by a temporal distance, whichmakes the meaning incarnated in them more difficult to dismantle. Indeed, what does itmean to uncover the meaning of such a text? When we try to understand a historicaldocument, our lifeworld -- our horizon of meaning -- is not identical with the lifeworld of theauthor of the document. Nevertheless, our horizons are not totally separated, but distantlyunited through theWirkungsgeschichte-- the history of effects -- of the document.15 Itis consequently possible to bring the horizons closer together and reach an understandingof the document (throughHorizontverschmelzung, a merging of horizons). Gadamer ishere not only referring to the necessity of actually learning the foreign language used inthe document; to understand what the words mean, one must also understand theirhistorical 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 notsynonymous with reaching the same understanding of the document as that of the personwho wrote it. The distance that separates and, at the same time, unites the horizons isalways aproductivedistance, in the sense that we understand the document from our ownpoint of view, with theVorurteile -- prejudgements -- of our own time.16 Interpretation,according to Gadamer, is not, however, lawless and arbitrary, since we try tomeetthehorizon of the text -- we submit to its authority; but at the same time we can only under-stand from our own point of view, and will, consequently, always reach an understandingthat is different from -- yet, ideally, richer than -- the understanding reached by the authorand by the text’s original readers. Theplay in language (Sprachspiel) between differentperspectives, the dialogicprocessof developing a rich, enlightened understanding, areindeed 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 ofTruth andMethod, with Gadamer moving from the reading of texts in the humanities to an analysisof dialogue and language, is crucial, if one wants to understand how clinical medicine canbe considered a hermeneutic enterprise. Here Gadamer states that, although his main con-cern in the book is with the humanities, the reading of the text itself -- according to hisconceptualization of it as the merging of the horizons of text and reader -- is fundamentally

14 Heidegger,Sein und Zeit, 212 ff.15 Gadamer,Truth and Method, 300 ff.16 Ibid., 277 ff.

174

dialogic in nature; thus hermeneutics in its purest form is found in the living dialoguestaking place between people of real flesh and blood:

In many respects, the discussion here is much too restricted to the special situation ofthe historical human sciences and “being that is oriented to a text.” Only in Part Threehave I succeeded in broadening the issue to language and dialogue, though in fact Ihave had it constantly in view; and consequently, only there have I grasped in a fun-damental way the notions of distance and otherness.17

In my study,The Hermeneutics of Medicine and the Phenomenology of Health: StepsTowards a Philosophy of Medical Practice,18 I have tried to show in detail how thisdialogue-based hermeneutics is exemplary when it comes to elucidating not only thechosen interpretation (in the humanities), but also the interpretative structure of medicalpractice. The clinical encounter can be viewed as a coming-together of the two differentattitudes and lifeworlds of doctor and patient -- of their different horizons of under-standing, 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 otherhealth-care professions) are thus not scientists applying biological knowledge, first andforemost, but rather interpreters, hermeneuts of health and sickness. Biological explana-tions and therapies can only be appliedwithin the dialogical meeting, guided by theclinical understanding attained in the service of the patient and his health. Gadamer’s phi-losophy of hermeneutic understanding, which has mainly been taken to be a generaldescription of the pattern of knowledge found in the humanities, might thus be expandedto cover the activities of health care, I argued.

Gadamer’s late work,The Enigma of Health, supports this interpretation, addressing thearea of medicine and health care in a more direct way than the philosopher’s earlierworks. Medicine is here characterized as a dialogue (Gespräch) by which the doctor andpatient 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 partof 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, notjust to that of the psychiatrist. Dialogue and discussion serve to humanize the funda-mentally unequal relationship that prevails between doctor and patient.19

What is particularly obvious in the medical meeting is the asymmetrical relationbetween the parties. The patient is ill and seeks help, whereas the doctor is at home -- incontrol by virtue of his knowledge and experience of disease and illness. This asymmetrynecessitates 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 zusehr 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 – unddamit die grundsätzliche Fassung von Abstand und Andersheit.” Gadamer,Wahrheit und Methode, 316-317, footnote 240.

18 Fredrik Svenaeus,The Hermeneutics of Medicine and the Phenomenology of Health: StepsTowards 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 Behandlungdurch den Arzt nötig macht. Zu einer Behandlung gehört das Gespräch. Es beherrscht die entscheidendeDimension allen ärztlichen Tuns, nicht nur bei den Psychiatern. Das Gespräch trägt die Humanisierungder Beziehung zwischen fundamental Ungleichen, zwischen dem Arzt und dem Patienten.” Gadamer,Überdie Verborgenheit der Gesundheit, 144.

175

exclusively from his own point of view, but through trying to put himself in the patient’ssituation. Consequently, that the doctor attempts to reach a new, productive understandingof the patient’s illness in no way implies that he should avoid empathy. It is only throughempathy that the doctor can reach an independent understanding that is truly productivein the sense of sharedand independent.

We can here return to Gadamer’s model of textual interpretation inTruth and Method(something Gadamer himself does not do inThe Enigma of Health), according to whichthe reader must understand the text as authoritative, as posing a question to him that canonly be answered through a meeting with the text -- through a “merging” of the twohorizons 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 areciprocal process of question and answer. The distance between the two parties is not atime-related distance as in the case of the reading of an historical text; it is rather a dis-tance 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 theconsultation, means that the horizons are brought into contact with each other butnevertheless 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 hermeneuticsof medicine is the philosopher’s emphasis upon application (Anwendung). The centralpassage on this theme is the second chapter of Part II inTruth and Methodin which para-graph b) is called “The Hermeneutic Relevance of Aristotle.”20 Interpretation always takesplace in a certain situation and with a special aim in view -- the paradigmatic examplethat Gadamer often gives inTruth and Method(and which we also frequently find inAristotle’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, thusdisplaying the usefulness of his philosophy to the development of a philosophy of medicalpractice. Understanding, in medicine, is sought for the sake of healing -- it is clearly ap-plied 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 goalof hermeneutic understanding is not the discovery of timeless truths that can be reachedby some universal, timeless method. Truth is always particularized, always dependentupon the meeting of two different horizons, a meeting whose purpose is to bring about aconcrete goal. As I have pointed out above, this view of understanding is not meant as adefense of some kind of “anything goes” pattern of interpretation, whereby the reader canalways find whatever suits him best in the text; rather, its purpose is to underscore theview that the patterns of understanding displayed in the various activities of human lifeare put to work with specific goals in view. These goals are ultimately not chosen by theinterpreters, but rather, are embedded in the activities themselves and dependent on thehistory of the activities in question. Thus the hermeneutics of medicine will exhibit anormativestructure; it will aim to understand with a view to achieving a certain goal -- a goalit regards as morally praiseworthy: Let us understand in order to heal, for healing is agood thing.21

20 Gadamer,Truth and Method, 312-324.21 This approach owes a great deal to the path-breaking work by Alasdair MacIntyre:After Virtue,

a Study in Moral Theory(London: Duckworth, 1981).

176

Apparent in the analysis of application inTruth and Methodis the indebtedness ofGadamer’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 chapterdevoted to the problem of application in the second part of the book. When Gadamer herechooses to continue his analysis of hermeneutic practice by turning to Aristotle and theNicomachean Ethics, he does so in order to underline the normative aspect that I havetouched 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 fromTruth andMethod:

To summarize, if we relate Aristotle’s description of the ethical phenomenon andespecially the virtue of moral knowledge to our own investigation, we find that hisanalysis in fact offers a kind ofmodel 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, isphronesis. In the pages that leadup to the quote, Gadamer has developed Aristotle’s views on moral knowledge as a formof practical wisdom, which knows the right ending and not only the means, and which isable to conjoin the general and the particular in judgements where no theoretical lawsapply.

Phronesisis famously thematized by Aristotle in theNicomachean Ethics, and isusually 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 calledintellectual virtues by Aristotle, in order to distinguish them from moral virtues. One mustremember, however, that the termsareteandhexis, which are used in this context, do nothave 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 itpossible for us to think, feel and act in an appropriate way.

Practical wisdom is, according to Aristotle, of central importance in the making ofethical choices. In trying to find out how to act toward, and together with, others in prob-lematical 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 whatgood living consists in, which can only be gained through long experience in life matters(praxis). Accordinglyphronesis, though not a moral virtue in itself (such as are courageor temperance), is the ability to judge the right ending for an action in a particular situa-tion 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 highlightedrecently by many scholars, including Franco Volpi, “Dasein asPraxis: the Heideggerian Assimilation andRadicalization of the Practical Philosophy of Aristotle,” in Christopher MacAnn, ed.,Critical Heidegger(London: Routledge, 1996); Günter Figal, “Phronesisas Understanding: Situating Philosophical Herme-neutics,” in Lawrence K. Schmidt, ed.,The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue and Phronesis in Philo-sophical Hermeneutics(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995); and Joseph Dunne,Back tothe Rough Ground: Practical Judgement and the Lure of Technique(Notre Dame, Ind.: University ofNotre 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 Frage-stellung beziehen, so zeigt sich in der Tat die aristotelische Analyse als eine ArtModell der in derhermeneutischen 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 un-reflectingly.26 Practical wisdom and moral virtues are therefore mutually reinforcingtraits, 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 ownannotated translation of Book VI of theNicomachean Ethics-- that is, precisely the bookthat deals withphronesis.27 This fact is yet another sign of the importance of this conceptfor Gadamer’s philosophy. It is thus clear that Gadamer intended his hermeneutics to bea practical philosophy in the Aristotelian sense, and it is also clear that practical, phroneticwisdom is to be considered a hermeneutic virtue. Accordingly,phronesisis the mark ofa 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 ofmedicine, from such a strong link between Aristotle’s concept of practical, moral wisdomand 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 specificsituations, allowing the possessor of these virtues to make moral judgements.Phronesisis therefore in a sense a moral ability (despite being counted among the intellectual virtuesby Aristotle), since it deals with practical decisions in situations in which not only abstracttruths but also the concrete good are the matter at hand. Thephronimos-- the wise man --knows the right and good thing to do inthis specific situation; in the case of medicine wewould say that he knows the right and good thing to do for this specific patient at thisspecific 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 ofphronesiswith hermeneutics, in the way that Gadamerenvisages, and by extension with clinical hermeneutics. The first thing worth noting is thatGadamer’s reference tophronesismakes clear that applied hermeneutics does not indicatean application of universal rules. Medical hermeneutics is thus not applicative in the sensethat universal, methodological rules are applied to a concrete situation. Rather, the her-meneutics of medicine is grounded in themeetingbetween doctor and patient -- a meetingin which the two different horizons of medical knowledge and lived illness are broughttogether in an interpretative dialogue for the purpose of determining why the patient is illand how he can be treated. This was one of the main points above: medical practice is notapplied science, but rather interpretation through dialogue in the service of the patient’shealth. Within this interpretative pattern, science is made use of in various ways, but thepattern itself is not deductively (or inductively) nomologic in the natural-scientific sense.

The appropriation ofphronesisat the heart of (medical) hermeneutics can also beviewed as a critique of applied (medical) ethics. The idea that ethical principles can some-how 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 ancientphilosophy and has attracted new interest in the medical field -- thanks, in particular, to the works ofAlasdair MacIntyre,After Virtue, and Edmund Pellegrino and David Thomasma,The Virtues in MedicalPractice(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) --phronesishas 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 vonHans-Georg Gadamer(Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1998).

178

reference tophronesis, since Aristotle’s main purpose in developing this concept is thatthe application of abstract principles in the field of practical, ethical knowledge is in-sufficient. Indeed, the appropriation ofphronesiscan be taken as a critique of the idea thatthe profession of bioethics is at all possible, if “bioethicist” is taken to mean a person whohas specialized, theoretical knowledge in medical ethics -- knowledge that is not based onpractical experience. Medical ethics cannot only be “epistemic”; it must also be “phro-netic.”

Gadamerian phronetic hermeneutics of medicine will, in this regard, join an ever-loudening chorus of criticism directed against applied ethics as conceptualized and carriedout during the last two decades in the field of medicine.28 The favorite target of thiscriticism is Tom Beauchamp’s and James Childress’sPrinciples of Biomedical Ethics, awork that has done much to foster the image of medical ethics as a rather mechanicalpractice.29 The view of the authors is that clinical decisions should be made inaccordance with four fundamental ethical principles: do good, do not harm, respectautonomy, and be just. On closer inspection, all four of these principles are seen to requirephilosophical theories for the explication of their fundamental concepts; in addition andneedless to say, there is no neutral way of balancing these four theory-laden principles.Therefore, theprima facieprinciples do not save us the trouble of devising a personalethics that will allow us to choose between different views that cannot be substantiatedin any neutral or objective way. The authors of the book are of course aware of theseproblems and do not regard their book as a road map leading to the only right decisionin every difficult situation; rather, they want to advocate a way of starting to thinksystematically about ethical dilemmas encountered in the clinic. Sadly enough, this is notalways 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 workThe Enigma of Health. How does Gadamerhimself address the issues of medical ethics? I would say that he does so in at least twoseparate yet interconnected ways, neither of which bears much resemblance to mainstreamwork on the contemporary bioethical scene.

The first of these approaches consists precisely in going back to ancient philosophy andAristotle. His discussion of Aristotelian themes and concepts is very similar to the approachwe already find inTruth and Methodand other works of his, except for one thing: he nowexplicitly addressesmedicalpractice (Heilkunst), and not only practice in general. Gadamermakes the point that medical practice -- in its ancient as well as in its contemporary form --never “makes” anything in the sense oftechne, but rather helps tore-establisha healthybalance which has been lost. Medical practice therefore is closer tophronesisthan totechne:

Techneis that knowledge which constitutes a specific and tried ability in the contextof 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 andThomasma,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 obviousthat the art of healing occupies an exceptional and problematic position. For here thereis no ‘work’ produced by art, and no ‘artificial’ product. Here we cannot speak of amaterial which is already given in the last analysis by nature, and from which some-thing 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 tore-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 somethingthat the doctor can bring about by himself, but something that can only be brought aboutby the doctor helping nature healitself. Health is a self-restoring balance, and what thedoctor does is to provide the means by which a state of equilibrium can re-establish itselfby its own powers.

Gadamer’s aim is to investigate the ancient philosophy of medicine in order to findguidance for contemporary medical practice. This is not (only) a nostalgic appeal for apremodern, “humane” medicine, which was not dominated and controlled by techno-science, but rather a strategy that rests, on Gadamer’s insistence, upon the importance ofGreek philosophy for our contemporary thinking and our contemporary way of life. Weneed to address and make explicit this influence in order to elucidate the structure andgoals of contemporary medical practice, just as we need to do so in order to elucidate thestructure and goals of theGeisteswissenschaften. The reason for this is indeed that modernmedical practice is not applied medical science only, but a hermeneutic activity, whichenvelopsthe theories and technologies of science.31

The second way chosen by Gadamer, inThe Enigma of Health, for addressing medicalpractice philosophically, is the way of phenomenology. Phenomena central to clinicalpractice, such as death, life, body and soul, anxiety, freedom and health, are analyzed byGadamer for the most part in accordance with the phenomenological framework developedby Heidegger inSein und Zeit. We have already confirmed the importance of Heidegger’sphilosophy for Gadamer inTruth and Method, and the same holds good forThe Enigmaof Health. Since the phenomenological hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer is itselffirmly rooted in Aristotelian patterns of thought, the marriage between the historical, philo-logical approach and the phenomenological attitude inThe Enigma of Healthshould comeas no surprise at all. What might be more surprising is that Gadamer relies on the patternof understanding developed inTruth and Methodto such a small extent, when analyzingthe dialogue essential to medical practice. He focuses, instead, upon the phenomenon thatis central to thegoal of clinical practice: health. Since this goal is what distinguishesmedicine 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 selbstsicheres Können im Zusammenhang eines Herstellens ausmacht. Es ist von vornherein auf Herstellen-können bezogen und aus diesem Bezug erwachsen. [...] Innerhalb eines solchen Begriffs von “Kunst”, dervor der Schwelle zu dem steht, was wir “Wissenschaft” nennen, nimmt nun offenbar die Heilkunst eineexzeptionelle und problematische Stellung ein. Hier gibt es kein Werk, das durch Kunst hergestellt undkünstlich ist. Hier kann man nicht von einem Material reden, das zuletzt in der Natur vorgegeben ist undaus dem etwas Neues wird, indem es in eine kunstvoll ersonnene Form gebracht wird. Zum Wesen derHeilkunst gehört vielmehr, dass ihr Herstellenkönnen ein Wiederherstellenkönnen ist. Dadurch kommt indas 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 medicalethics, 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 notsimply synonymous with the absence of any disease (i.e., of pathological states or pro-cesses affecting the biological organism). Health has a phenomenological structure initself, as a certain way of being-in-the-world:

So what genuine possibilities stand before us when we are considering the question ofhealth? Without doubt it is part of our nature as living beings that our conscious self-awareness remains largely in the background so that our enjoyment of good health isconstantly concealed from us. Yet despite its hidden character health none the lessmanifests itself in a general feeling of well-being. It shows itself above all where sucha feeling of well-being means we are open to new things, ready to embark on newenterprises and, forgetful of ourselves, scarcely notice the demands and strains whichare put on us. This is what health is. ... We need only reflect that it is quite meaningfulto ask someone ‘Do you feel ill?’ but that it would border on the absurd to asksomeone ‘Do you feel healthy?’ Health is not a condition that one introspectively feelsin oneself. Rather, it is a condition of being involved, of being in the world, of beingtogether with one’s fellow human beings, of active and rewarding engagement in one’severyday tasks.32

In many ways the phenomenon of illness seems to be far more concrete and easy toget hold of than the phenomenon of health. When we are ill, life is often dominated byfeelings of meaninglessness, helplessness, pain, nausea, fear, dizziness, or disability.Health, in contrast, effaces itself in an enigmatic way (the dual meaning of the GermanVerborgenheit). It seems to be the absence of every feeling of being ill, the state or pro-cess which we are in when everything is running smoothly, flowing in its usual way andwithout hindrance.

The conceptual background for Gadamer’s analysis of health is here undoubtedlyHeidegger’s phenomenology of everyday human existence found in Division 1 ofSein undZeit, although Heidegger himself never addresses health and sickness there. Anotherimportant source of inspiration for Gadamer’s analysis is ancient health theory. Theoriesof health in antiquity were built around various conceptions of balance and harmony, themost famous and influential of which was the Hippocratic doctrine of balance between thefour bodily fluids -- blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile.33 In classical Greece, thisbalance between fluids or other elements (such as air, water, fire and earth) in the humanbody was thought to mirror the order of the entire world. Man was seen as a micro-cosmos, built according to the same principles as the order of all things -- as the order ofthe 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, dassdie Bewusstheit sich von sich selbst zurückhält, so dass Gesundheit sich verbirgt. Trotz aller Verborgenheitkommt sie aber in einer Art Wohlgefühl zutage, und mehr noch darin, dass wir vor lauter Wohlgefühlunternehmungsfreudig, erkenntnisoffen und selbstvergessen sind und selbst Strapazen und Anstrengungenkaum spüren – das ist Gesundheit. […] Mann mache es sich nur bewusst, dass es zwar sinnvoll ist zufragen: “Fühlen Sie sich krank?” Aber es wäre fast lächerlich, wenn einer einen fragte: “Fühlen Sie sichgesund?” Gesundheit ist eben überhaupt nicht ein Sich-Fühlen, sondern ist Da-Sein, In-der-Welt-Sein, Mit-den-Menschen-Sein, von den eigenen Aufgaben des Lebens tätig oder freudig erfüllt sein.” Gadamer,Überdie 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 andcosmology of Greek thought; rather, it thematizes the notion of a self-establishing healthyequilibrium in a phenomenological manner. That is, it seeks to analyze health and sicknessby investigating the experiences of these states in everyday life, and not by invoking bio-logy or physiology (in either their ancient or their modern form). Thus the analysis of healthis placed on a lifeworld level and takes into account not only the absence of detectablebiological disease, but also the concrete being-in-the-world of the patient, which includesthoughts, feelings and actions. I have carried on with such a phenomenological analysisof 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 tophronesisasa key concept for medical ethics? In what way do the two roads travelled by Gadamer inThe Enigma of Healthmeet? Precisely by defining the goal of clinical practice as some-thing dependent on theindividual patient. If health is to be understood in terms of being-in-the-world, and not only in terms of biomedical data, then the doctor needs to developan understanding of the patient’s thoughts, feelings and lifeworld predicaments, in orderto carry out his profession. He needs to address the questions around what makes a goodlife and around the meaning of life for this particular person. This is food for thought formedical 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 isanalyzed in the same terms as good living.

But a healthy life, as the goal of clinical practice, can surely not be the same thing asa good life in itself. There is more to good living than health, and a good life may beattainable even by someone who is not healthy. This assertion holds true even when healthis analyzed as something over and above the mere absence of disease -- that is, when it isanalyzedphenomenologically.Thus theemphasisonphronesiscalls foraphenomenologicaldistinction between a healthy life and a good life -- a distinction, which to my mind is notaddressed by Gadamer in any consistent way inThe Enigma of Health. Healthis an enig-matic thing (die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit), but so, indeed, is good living.

Aristotle’s conceptualization of a good life as human flourishing (eudaimonia), in theNicomachean Ethics, is tied up with his analysis of the moral and intellectual virtues. Ifman, who is a socialandan intellectual creature, is to be able to flourish, he needs to culti-vate the virtues, which are present in him as potential forms waiting to be developed. Thisanalysis represents an attempt to find objective criteria for good living. Modern philoso-phical theories about a good life (or “happiness,” as it is more often termed) are as a rulefar more individualistic in nature.35 Utilitarianism, for example, in both its hedonistic andpreference forms, leaves to the individual the question of settling what is pleasurable forhim. As Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out in his influential studyAfter Virtue, this con-ception of autonomy leads to a peculiar, modern form of relativistic nihilism, which hasits roots not only in Nietzsche, but also in liberalism: I choose what is good for me, andthe only justification for this choice is indeed that it is made byme. Autonomy is in itself

34 See Fredrik Svenaeus, “DasUnheimliche– Towards a Phenomenology of Illness,” inMedicine,Health Care and Philosophy3 (2000): 3-16; and “The Body Uncanny – Further Steps Towards aPhenomenology of Illness,” inMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy3 (2000): 125-137.

35 For a survey, see Martin Seel,Versuch über die Form des Glücks(Frankfurt a.M.: SuhrkampVerlag, 1995).

182

a rather weak foundation for ethical theory, especially if it is divorced from its Kantianroots in the categorical imperative.36

I believe phenomenology opens up possibilities for a more substantial theory of whatmakes a good life than liberalism and utilitarianism, just as it opens up possibilities fora more substantial theory of health than medical science by itself does; but these possibil-ities 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 doesnot render the key concepts of these theories vacuous, just as the critique of a notion ofmedical 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, justas the treatment of disease is of the uttermost importance in the struggle for health.

Authenticity is the road most often travelled in phenomenological and hermeneuticattempts to address the question of good living.37 It has its roots in Heidegger’s philo-sophy (ultimately in Heidegger’s reading of Kierkegaard and other Christian thinkers), andit has been the main source of inspiration for existentialist renderings of the meaning ofexistence, such as those found in Sartre or Camus. Authenticity, in its existentialist formas the solution of ethical dilemmas, tends to suffer from the same weaknesses as theliberal tradition’s concept of autonomy. According to these doctrines, the only criterionfor a good choice is that it is my choice (although “my choice” would mean differentthings for an existentialist and a libertarian, since their philosophical anthropologies areindeed very different). If the concept of authenticity is to offer a substantive theory ofgood living, then it needs to be thicker, in the sense of incorporating intersubjectivity -- thatis, in the sense of formulating the concept of a good lifewith others. Indeed, Heidegger’sconceptualization of authenticity -- as a bravely solitary being-towards-death -- has beencriticized 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 atanalyzingphilia (friendship) in the communal life of thepolis, found in theNicomacheanEthics. For Aristotle it is here, inphilia, that phronesishas its roots, as do humanflourishing and happiness (eudaimonia). But we are also back with Gadamer. As I men-tioned above in introducing the main thoughts ofTruth and Method, authentic under-standing in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is a shared dialogic process of seekingthe truth together, in and through language. This process might be taken as a model for agood life, a kind of ethics. Such a concept of good living, however, still needs to be differen-tiated from the concept of health, since they represent different aspects and differentqualities of our being-in-the-world. Authenticity sets higher standards than health, and itcan hardly in itself be the goal of medical practice, although health and authenticity areclearly related.

Concluding Thoughts

Gadamer is hardly the first philosopher in the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition toapproach the issues of health and sickness. But the attempts made for developing theoriesof health and sickness on a phenomenological basis have most often been restricted to theareas 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 ofClinical 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 agood number of the phenomenologically inspired psychiatrists.39

There are some exceptions to this selective focus on psychiatry in the history of thephenomenology of medicine, phenomenological attempts in which the body is given amore explicit and independent place. No references, however, are given by Gadamer inThe Enigma of Healthto thinkers such as F. J. J. Buytendijk and Erwin Straus, and thisis perhaps not surprising given the informal character of the work -- many of the paperswere originally written for oral presentations. Nevertheless, I feel that Gadamer’s manyingenious hints and examples inThe Enigma of Healthneed to be incorporated in a sys-tematic analysis of the living body (Leiblichkeit) and its being-in-the-world in health andsickness.40 In this future project, links could be established with the phenomenology ofMerleau-Ponty (Buytendijk’s major source of inspiration) and/or to theDaseinsanalysenof Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss.41

The thesis that medical practice is a hermeneutic activity in the Gadamerian sense ofa dialogical encounter between reader (doctor) and text (patient) on the way to truth (aboutthe person and his lacking health), tends to expose itself to exactly the same kind ofcritical questions that were put to Gadamer by Jürgen Habermas and others, following thepublication ofWahrheit und Methodein the sixties.42 One must take into account the em-beddedness of clinical activity in the political context, which has a major influence on thestructure of medicine. That analysis would have to be carried out by studying the inter-connection between the more specific meaning patterns of clinical activity and the socio-political 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 hisroots in a Heideggerian phenomenology, which can be (and has been) developed as acritique of modern technology. Discussing the emergence of new psychopharmacologicaldrugs, in a paper dated 1986, Gadamer writes:

I am thinking, for example, of the world of modern psychiatric drugs. But I cannotseparate this development from the general instrumentalization of the living bodywhich 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 asViktor von Weizsäcker and Wolfgang Blankenburg, is no doubt one of the reasons why Gadamer beganapproaching the themes of medicine and health in the sixties. See Hans-Georg Gadamer,PhilosophischeLehrjahre: Eine Rückschau(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977). Weizsäcker, Blankenburg (andJaspers) are mentioned by Gadamer inÜber die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit, but without doubt he alsoknew the works of Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss and other key figures of this German tradition. SeeHerbert 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. Fora 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 theseminars conducted during the sixties by Heidegger, together with Boss and his students, which now havebeen published:Zollikoner Seminare(Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1994). These seminars appear to beone of the very few places where Heidegger addresses not only health and sickness, but also embodiment(Leiblichkeit). Heidegger, otherwise reluctant to discuss thespecificactivities of everydayness, is hereforced to address these themes in the presentation of his philosophy. The encounter between the famousphilosopher and the doctors offers very stimulating reading, since Heidegger (even more than in his lecturecourses) has to mobilize all his pedagogical skills in the face of questions asked by a philosophicallyuntrained 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 areand what we are capable of achieving? Does this not also open up a new threat tohuman life? Is there not a terrifying challenge involved in the fact that throughpsychiatric drugs doctors are able not only to eliminate and deaden various organicdisturbances, but also to take away from a person their own deepest distress and con-fusion? Here we cannot really speak of a simple ‘taking away’ as if we were in totalcontrol.43

Is Prozac the right answer to sadness and depression in the twenty-first century? Or isit, indeed, only the updated form of Heidegger’sdas 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 phenomenologicalanalysis, and nowhere do the results of modern science enter the strained social-politicalfield of our time as much as within this realm, as Gadamer says in the opening quote ofmy paper. In this endeavour we can benefit greatly from dialoguing with Hans-GeorgGadamer’s path-breaking work.

43 Gadamer,The Enigma of Health, 77. “Ich denke an die Welt der neuen Psychopharmaka. Ich kanndies neue Können nicht ganz von all den Instrumentalisierungen von Leiblichkeit in der modernenAgrikultur, Wirtschaft und Industrie ablösen. Was bedeutet es, dass wir dies alles sind und können? Dasbringt eine ganz neue Angriffigkeit in das menschliche Leben. Ist es nicht ein geradezu ungeheurerAngriff, wenn auf dem Wege über die Psychopharmaka nicht irgendwelche organische Störungen behobenund betäubt werden, sondern der Person die tiefste eigene Verstimmtheit und Verstörtheit weggenommenwird – wo doch von einfachem Wegnehmen, als ob wir auch dies beherrschten, nicht gut die Rede seinkann?” 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 thelife-world (Lebenswelt)of the majority of nations that today inhabit the geographicalregion of Europe, was significantly influenced by the evolution of phenomenology1

throughout the twentieth century. Even atrocities such as those committed during the twoworld wars and the most recent Balkan war cannot undermine the credibility of this life-world. However, one needs to question whether phenomenology, during its century ofevolution, has achieved an appropriate critical analysis of the goal value of Europe, aswell as of all the concepts which inhere to thisvalue: “culture,” “sciences,” “arts,”“history,” “politics,” “freedom of religion,” etc. In order to be able to give an appropriateanswer to these questions, even if only approximately, it is necessary to elaborate a specialinsight into the cultural dynamics of the twentieth century, and above all, to draw a broadreview of the findings within the modern and contemporary phenomenological fields. Ofcourse, 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 contemporaryphenomenology intrinsically defines the European life-world and its set of values, whichdeveloped itself alongside history, then this once-allowed phenomenological fact requiresa systematic reflectionon the typology of historicity as an active agent that is immanentin itself. In other words:if phenomenology took a decisive part in the formation of thedifferent meanings of historical culture and if it wants to carry this task even further, thenit is indeed imperative for phenomenology to develop its own sense of historicity.In orderto achieve this, I will try to discern a specifichermeneutic complementof 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 ofscience. “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 withhis Logical Investigations. “Something was born, which would be later on called ‘phenomenology,’ a factthat 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 some-thing 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 breakthroughof 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, thephenomenological method only revealed its complete validity through the “post-modern” cultural move-ments of the last decades. The very fact that the most significant representatives of phenomenology canalso be found outside of Germany, (e.g., in France with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Ricoeur, inItaly with Enzo Paci, in Spain with Ortega y Gasset, in Russia with Schpet, in Poland with Ingarden, inthe Czech Republic with Patoèka, in Slovenia with Veber, etc.) indicates explicitly the pan-Europeancharacter of phenomenology. In the foreground of the actual discussions surrounding phenomenology, thefollowing subjects come across more notably: mainly, the confrontation of the phenomenological methodwith structural, analytical and socio-critical methods, but also its contradistinction with the Europeanintellectual tradition, the various intercultural perspectives, democracy, individuality, with social environ-ments, with religious and artistic wisdom, with the role of technology and the sciences in our modernsociety. In the effort to overcome a contemporary rationality, all of these researches are intrinsically boundby the attempt to develop a new type of thinking, which would not only take into consideration themultifaceted aspects of the notion of man as its own subjective point of reference but also in relation withits cultural and natural surroundings.

189

Therefore, I would like to concentrate on the preparation of this proposed “hermeneuticcomplement.”2 The term “hermeneutics” should be taken here more particularly in thesense that phenomenology primarily constitutes itself by its own active historicalpossibility, i.e., by handing itself over and therein achieving meaningfulness. I thus thinkthat phenomenology, in its actual state of development, has so far not been successful inproducing this, although Husserl had conceived phenomenology as the fulfillment of thehistorical aspirations of every philosophical tradition. Thus, it is also the task of pheno-menology to point out the constitutive role of philosophy, which is historically certified,with regard to the comprehension of culture and for European intercultural communic-ation. In order to clarify this point of view, the project of a hermeneutic phenomenologymust continue its course toward the recognition of a historicity specific to the field ofphilosophy. In addition, hermeneutic phenomenology must not be allowed to rest on anygeneral theories belonging to historical researches. In other words, the hermeneuticsupplement of phenomenology would lead to a conversion ofphenomenology in its activehistoricity.

Only such an approach would make possible a reflection which would simultaneouslytake into consideration the unquestionable results that phenomenology and hermeneuticsachieved during the twentieth century, and which would allow the creation of a newviewpoint on the basis of a critical discussion on the results cited above. In turn, this pointof view could provoke a gathering of the cultural and intercultural “realities” of theEuropean life-world.

Our post-modern experience of these “realities” is itself controversial, since it charac-terizes, on one side, the trend of being connected to a “world,” which from an externalpoint of view was mainly enabled by the development of information technology. On theother side, however, we perceive the tendency toward the acknowledgment of thedifferences and the dissimilarity essentially in terms used by cultural traditions. Obviously,the two tendencies generate a conflict, which will not necessarily remain idle. On thecontrary, it would be unproductive and even harmful to want to suppress this conflict inthe hope of achieving a counterfeited harmony.

Since its beginnings in the ancient Greek world, philosophy has concentrated on thetask of bringing the relationship of the One and the Many, of Unity and Diversity tolanguage. In this respect, Husserl’s phenomenology has reached new heights with histheory of the “intentionality” of consciousness, i.e., each consciousness is a consciousnessof something. In others words, despite the different experiences, languages, and values ofour individual consciousness, there is nonetheless a common world in which we cancommunicate not only about what is universal, but also about what is singular. From aphenomenological point of view, this means that everything, which is somehow given tothe consciousness, is given on the basis of ourtranscendentality in the world, the being-in-the-world.

Therefore, the philosophical “unity of the world” is achievable only through atranscendental project. However, this project should not develop itself through thestandardization and the simplification of differences, but through thespecific historicaldynamism 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 lecturesThe Fundamental Conceptsof Metaphysics World, Finitude, Solitude(WS 1929/30): »Der Entwurf ist in sichergänzendim Sinne desvorwerfendenBildens einer »im Ganzen«, in dessen Bereich ausgebreitet ist eine ganz bestimmteDimension möglicher Verwirklichung. Jeder Entwurf enthebt zum Möglichen und bringt in eins damitzurück in die ausgebreitete Breite des von ihm her Ermöglichten.« Martin Heidegger,Die Grundbegriffeder 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 notoneculture, but there aredifferent cultures, which we can indeed experience from a per-spective on the world which is complementary. We would like to show that a certainflexibility of interpretation is inherent in this uniform point of view. It also constitutes thespecific historicity of philosophy and defines the philosophical sense of tradition. Thephilosophical 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 ofthe world.

In recent times the concept of tradition itself has become one of the most doubtfulconcepts,not only in philosophy, but also in the humanities in general. Indeed, thequestionability of knowledge regarding what is human as suchemerges through thatconcept. Postmodernists increasingly tend to move on toward apost-tradition. This doesnot mean that we don’t appreciate tradition anymore, but on the contrary, tradition iseverywhere held out as either an archetype or as a substitute. It essentially deals with thefact that man understands his own nature less and less on the basis of the events oftradition, in such a way that humanity, as a historical outcome, will transfer “one personinto the other person.” Thus, the integrative idea of the human being has not onlyperished, but the differences between humans are also disappearing ever more rapidly. Aconviction is being created to the effect that the transmission of the nature of the humanbeing and of humanity, in terms of the historical tradition, can, and should be replaced bya technological reproduction of humanity. Everything points to the fact that thisreproduction, which includes the biological and also the cognitive constituents of humanbeings, will take undreamt of proportions in the future. Thus, one must raise the onlylegitimate question that comes to one’s mind: what brings along this progress for ahumanity that formed itself through, and within, tradition? Does that represent humanity’send? Thus, talking about the “historical ends” already assumes a certain understanding ofhistoricity.

It would be counterproductive to try to vigorously defend this understanding with atradition, 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 buildan ideological refuge for a humanistic traditionalism. At this point, one must pose thefollowing question, which seems to be the most adequate to us: whether this radical wayof putting tradition into question does not force us, rather, to consider carefully thesignificance of tradition.

Today everyone can bear witness to the catastrophic social consequences brought aboutby 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 oftradition? Thus, the latter already seems to represent a meaningful task for philosophy, inconnection with its phenomenological-hermeneutic element. Philosophy thus develops itsown 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 canexpress itself in different languages that aren’t necessarily European, without losing itsuniversal 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 dellacultura europea, ed. Renato Cristin (Venezia: Marsilio, 1999), 7-26.

191

classical Greek tradition of thinking.4 At the same time, however, phenomenology wasalso capable of confronting problems inherent in the crisis of this idea.Just as the notionof 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 choiceof methodology cannot and must not be made at random. On the contrary, thiscontroversy, this crisis in itself, should be fruitful for finding our way, especially if weremain within thetranscendental projectof historicity. It is important to underline that bydoing so, we did not determine the character of this “transcendentality” in advance. It hasabsolutely nothing to do with a transcendentality of something which would existsomewhere beyond the world. This transcendentality is distinct by its worldliness, in thesense of thetransient qualityof 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 entityexisting in itself. The world is unambiguously a human world. (I would like to mentionin passing that the German word “Welt” [world] means generation, a life span (Menschen-alter), at least according to is etymology.5) Strictly speaking, a world lacking humanscould not exist at all. Even if such a world existed, it would in some way have to relateto the existence of human beings.

As a result of the way in which my initial thesis was announced, according to whichphenomenological philosophy, or rather the phenomenological movement, is decisivelybound to the cultural events of the twentieth century, the following conception couldensue, namely that we are dealing with a practical development of philosophy. Thus, itis as if philosophy had abandoned its uncorrupted theoretical plane and had passed overto 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 ofpractical experience, and of practicality in philosophy, is irrelevant to phenomenology.Hans-Georg Gadamer, who fashioned his philosophical hermeneutics inTruth and Methodon the foundations of the phenomenological insights of Heidegger and Husserl, hasconvincingly demonstrated that the concept of practical experience is already inherent inthe sphere of the purest philosophical theory. It is another question, however, to askwhether philosophy, as a theory, is conscious of this and whether it takes this observationinto account. In addition to this practical aspect, we could add that there is a poetic orcreative dimension that is also inherent in philosophy. Out of the philosophical systemat-ization 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 becauseof Kant, we still revert to dealing with the relations between philosophy and culture aswell as the feasibility of a cultural hermeneutics. We must take into account the fact thatAristotle gives deeper reasons for such a classification, in the sixth volume of theNicomachean Ethics,in which he develops his understanding of the ontological specificityof human beings as an essential part of practical experience. This suggests clearly enoughthat one should look at (and into) the human beings themselves, insofar as theyphilosophize, in order to find the reason for the practical development of philosophy.Aristotle knew that philosophizing wasn’t an arbitrary or incidental occupation. We couldalso assert thatonly this “occupation with philosophy” constitutes somehow the essenceof human beings, in other words, their culture.

4 Cf. with the phenomenological observations of Klaus Held inLa fenomenologia del mondo e igreci (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’sdevelopment, of that which is instrumental in the ‘becoming’ of humanity (at least asregards European humanity). A person becomes the “I” on the basis of thephilosophicalquestion: who am I? This question accompanies our everyday activities, sometimesexplicitly, but for the most part implicitly. It is impossible for me to give a definitiveanswer to this question, since I respond to it and can only answer it while becomingwhatI am. I must somehow go beyond myself, transcend myself, not in an arbitrary directionbut rather exactly up to my “I am.” The factual and existential concern of my own “I am”pushes mebeyondmy everyday experience,beyondmy self-knowledge. I try to “takerefuge” in the arts, religion and philosophy. Every transcendental project for itself -- asa 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 comprehendourselves.

If we argue around this line, then the following objection quickly overtakes us, namelythat we want to adopt a transcendental and speculative procedure, on which basis thephilosophy of “I” in German idealism principally developed, instead of using anempirically verifiable approach in order to address the question of ‘mankind.’ To someextent, we can find this question embedded in Husserl’s transcendental philosophy. Thedispute between empiricism and transcendentalism still characterizes the actual philo-sophical 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 comeanywhere near to a sensible answer to the question: Who am I? The question regardingman cannot be theoretically tracked down appropriately in this way, inasmuch as wepursue our mental states or lower ourselves down to their level from the higher entity ofa 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, phenomenologicallyspeaking, the experience of the living-world (Lebenswelt). The question “Who am I?” isswitched by its being close to the living-world, i.e., it directly belongs to a possiblefulfillment in one’s life in this world. The ‘becoming’ of man, regarding the humanbeing’s reply to his or her self-questioning, cannot be confined to the simple affirmationof the “I” and of consciousness, as it really represents the affirmation of the world, whichpresents itself to human beings asthe answer to their question. This is one of the mostbasic “theoretical” premises of phenomenology in Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, Fink andGadamer.

As a result, phenomenology developed into a “theory” in the sense of atheoreticalanticipation 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. Thenegation of this affirmation, barely noticeable, sneaks pastthe 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 politicaltotalitarianism, the Cold War, nuclear threats, global environmental pollution, etc., confersupon this negation a discernible, almost tangible magnitude. The negation of the humanliving-world is no longer a mere specter, issuing from some philosophical nightmare. The“European nihilism”à la Nietzsche, the European humanityà la Husserl, the forgetfulnessof Being à la Heidegger, these are components of the reality, which we live and ex-perience. As such, we must partake in it. However, the question remains as to how thisnegation, which we embody, is to be understood. We could dismiss it, put it aside andbehave as if it had never been asked and as if it was nothing to us. By acting thus, weappear 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, hasinspired Max Scheler to observe, very eloquently, that we have never before accumulatedso much knowledge about humankind in the midst of such concurrent ignorance aboutitself.6 Scheler has worked out the details of this statement in order to ground his projectof a philosophical anthropology. However, one can ask whether a philosophicalanthropology 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 subjectmatter, 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 isno 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 humanbeing. However, this moment of initial self-contemplation is not historicallyascertainable. Moreover, it is not clear what is meant by it, as it is ofteninterwoven with a religious theory of the genesis of man.

b) - Philosophical anthropology definitively formed itself up as an independent philo-sophical discipline as recently as the twentieth century. Amongst the protagonistsof this newly-formed philosophical movement, one usually mentions Max Scheler,Helmuth Plessner, Ernst Cassirer, Arnold Gehlen, to cite only a few. At the sametime, the ‘becoming’ of philosophical anthropology will explicitly be associatedwith 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 asa subject. Thereafter, the ‘becoming’ of philosophical anthropology coincides withthe endeavor to found philosophy itself on an anthropological basis. This attemptbegan in the second half of the nineteenth century.7

We must still be confronted with another question: in the end, in what sense is philo-sophical anthropology philosophical? What differentiates it from other kinds of an-thropology, e.g., from cultural anthropology, social anthropology, or from anthropologyas a medical discipline?8 According to the long-standing definition of Aristotle, philo-sophy 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 ofknowledge. The purpose of philosophy is to give a description of the general, not theparticular, 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 essayMensch und Geschichte, Scheler writes: »Wir sind in derungefähr 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 auchweiß, daßer esnicht weiß. Und nur indem man einmal mit allen Traditionen über diese Frage völlig tabula rasa zumachen gewillt ist und in äußerster methodischer Entfremdung und Verwunderung auf das Menschgennante 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 Endedes 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 vonHerrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991).

194

or his social nature. For this reason, the problem of the philosophical project is displacedfrom the transcendental level ofa priori knowledge (Erkennen) to the level of the conceptof Wesensschau, to use Edmund Husserl’s expression. At this point, however, we meetonce again the problem that we discussed above: as the sciences of experience couldalways dispute thea priori philosophical access to man, philosophy could always rejectits pleadings in favour of thea posteriori approach.9 It is impossible to abolish thedichotomy between thea priori and thea posteriori, as we tend to bind the twoapproaches together in man, by inventing a unifying structure to deal with it. It would bebetter to leave open thisdichotomybetween thea priori and thea posterioriand to leta structural resolution be attained by itself within thisopenness.

This would also mean that our subject-matter, the nature of man, would remain anopenproblem. This point of view was put forward by one of the most notable representativesof twentieth century philosophical anthropology, Helmuth Plessner. He did not, however,manage to establish appropriate dynamics for such openness, which consequently remaineda determining factor concerning the problem raised by thea priori quality of anthropo-logical statements.10

Terms such asa priori anda posteriori, proteronandhysteron, do not only possessepistemological validity, but also and above all, a constitutivehistorical validity, as theirlinguistic origins already imply. The historical openness of the difference between anapriori and ana posteriorireaches deep into the interaction between man and philosophyitself. As such, it remains representative for the European type of human being, whichpretends at the same time to be a universal anthropological type (“sciences,” “democracy,”“culturalism”). This interaction showed up originally in the Delphian dictum,gnotiseauthon, 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 wouldotherwise completely misconceive the genuine philosophical dimension of this imperative.This self-knowledge is neither meant to be introspective, nor to be contemplative. It forcesus to view the question of beings as a whole, i.e., the world, as an open question withregard to our own life. Thus, man becomeshistorically responsible vis-à-visthat question.Only in such a way can a theory of beings as such, and as a whole, embody simul-taneously the highest experience and the highest fulfillment of human life. The dynamicsof this fulfillment can be thought out according to the model of the twofoldphenomenological openness, i.e., the apparentness of the world and the openness of manto this apparentness. This modifies substantially the epistemological scheme of thea prioriand thea posteriori. The event of this openness would represent the meditative midwaybetween the viewpoints of Unity and Diversity of the world. The world as a unitaryapparentness would always simultaneously represent a different openness to man. Betweenboth 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 hermeneuticcomplement of phenomenology.

Representing the apparentness of the world and the openness of man, this double-sidedopenness stands for a renowned phenomenological theme. On that account, Husserl’sphenomenology formed itself as the correlative way of the contemplation of “that which

9 Cf. Ludwig LandgrebePhilosophische 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,GesammelteSchriften, 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 thisphenomenological notion. Phenomenology remains open to different implementations andtransformations precisely for this reason, i.e., it is always open to a new and renewedcharacterization of that which appears within its appearance (des Erscheinenden in seinemErscheinen). The experience of reality (the everyday, academic, artistic reality, etc.) formsitself within the interpretative possibilities, which can be historically concealed, or againstill unrevealed, not yet overcome or surpassed, or even inaccessible. This dynamicopenness within the possibility characterizes the living-world as such.

In the term “living-world,” Husserl believes that he has found a grounding for thehorizon of our experience. Thea posteriori experience of historicity and thea prioricritical experience of reason are encapsulated in this notion. By defining the world as atranscendental horizon, Husserl has simultaneously forced reason into its most extremetranscendental possibility, which surpasses all the other possible interpretations of theworld opened to us. It is here that the boundaries of his phenomenology are set in relationto its own historicity, which auto-proclaims itself as a teleology of reason. So doing, wedefinitively shut the door that would give access to a historical openness “between” manand the world.

We could assert the same with regard to Wilhelm Dilthey, who, at the beginning of thetwentieth century, strove to elaborate a hermeneutic methodology for the humanities andfor historical interpretation. Dilthey had great regard for Husserl’s theory of pheno-menology and tried to integrate it into hisCritique of Historical Reason.Dilthey also dealtwith the over-determinedness of historicity on the basis of critical reason. Indeed, heasserted that only history could tell humans who they are. By asserting this, however, hedidn’t mean the historicity of the inter-relation of the world and human beings, but ratherworld-history, which already assumes the openness of the world for humanity. Even ifDilthey did not rise to the level of transcendental reflection, in particular that whichconcerns the world as a subject to be discussed, as Husserl had done, Heideggernevertheless kept Dilthey’s historical hermeneutics before his eyes and later challengedit with Husserl’s transcendental position.

Strictly speaking, inasmuch as the experience of reality, or as Heidegger says, “theunderstanding of being,” relocated itself within the possibilities of interpretation, afinitehistorical thrownnesswithin space (Spielraum) bears witness to these possibilities. Theproject of such a possibility cannot be brought to a uniform transcendental level. It mustagain and again be factually accepted as a pure possibility of the transcendence of being-in-the-world. On a philosophical level, the openness of man and of the world, which turnsagainst itself, is undoubtedly grasped more radically on the basis of this “hermeneutics offacticity.” In turn, it also announces the Heideggerian use of the term “Dasein” for thebeing that we are ourselves, which is open to the world in its being. Heideggerunderstands the openness of the human being and the apparentness of the world on thebasis of an ecstatically horizontal temporality, and on the basis of transcendental reason.Nevertheless, theopennessof the world still remains locked up in finite temporality. Thatis to say that if time originally yielded itself out of the finite temporality of Dasein, onemay ask then, whether it wouldn’t be appropriate to say that historicity -- insofar as it isnot to be understood as the historical time of world history -- apportions itself beyond thisfinite temporality? Do we not thus open a possibility in which we could adequately thinkthrough what formed itself historically as “over-delivery,” i.e., as tradition? Does traditionnot reach into our finiteness exactly when it encroaches upon it?

It seems that Heidegger endorses a vanguard view of tradition, given that he conceivesof historicity from the viewpoint of the finite temporality of Dasein. Accordingly, traditionmust dissolve into its elements (phenomenological destruction), in order to be able thento 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 traditionrepresented by this liberal education has not yet been recognized fully as relevant.12 Thisalso means that the situation concerning our thinking is still rather confused.

In comparison to Heidegger, we don’t take the pure project of transcendence (thepossibility 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 traditionitself. Besides, it is here not a question of a transcendence of the transcendence, or of atranscendence about a transcendence, but of an openness, which occurs in itself (theworld) 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 toapprehend this negativity on the basis of the “finiteness of the Dasein in us.” Thus wecouldn’t agree, for example, with the much debated claim of the Italian philosopherGianni Vattimo, who asserted that Heidegger has went right to the roots of nihilism as aspirit-historical negativity, with his thesis of the finiteness of Dasein. Nihilism no doubtdoes annihilate the finiteness of the human existence, as Heidegger argued in hisBeingand Time.But from the point of view of existential analytics it would not be possible, forinstance, to interpret the phenomenon of the dehumanization of victims as an obviouscynicism of the totalitarian systems of our century, or again, as an audio-visual manipula-tion of the media, which latter seems quite inoffensive to us in comparison with theformer example.

In this context, we would still have to bear in mind how nihilism stands with thephenomenon of historicity in the epoch of thesalutis gratia historical-being changeinHeidegger’s thought afterBeing and Time, when Heidegger actually arrives at the rootsof Nietzsche’s nihilism. We are confronted here with another problem. It seems that thehistorical 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 anappropriation of the philosophical tradition, as well as European humanity and here theefficient (auswirkend) historicity still remains open. Heidegger acts ambiguously towardtradition. He simultaneously approves and refuses it as the “end of history,” which herecan be spontaneously justified in a post-modern situation (ie., after World War II). If wewant to avoid discarding the tradition of European humanity in its philosophical tradition,be this elimination ideological, interpretative, or informative (which, strictly speaking, isagainst what Heidegger tries to achieve), then we must work out its access to itselfappropriately. Husserl tried, with hisErneuerungsbemühungen, alongside Heidegger, whoalso tried, by reflecting on a new start for European humanity, with the aim ofovercoming thecrisis of the notion of tradition. Although they both failed, the fact thatthey persisted and dwelt on this subject forces us to try to figure out a new approach tothe phenomena of historicity and tradition, out of the foundations on which they bothlabored. In doing so, we cannot allow ourselves to be led along a path which would aimfor a modernistic pretension of a radical reformation, or for a post-modernistic pretensionof starting all over and anew. A novel and clear understanding of the historical traditionis 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 advancedas it in fact is.

197

We can sense such a philosophical disposition also in Gadamer’s project of aphilosophical hermeneutics, as expressed in his bookTruth and Method, and in the essaysthat followed it. According to the thesis advanced by his most consistent interpreter, JeanGrondin, Gadamer should have translated the Heideggerian historical-being intotradition.13

I think that this “translation” was successful only because it was able to connect theproblematic of historicity with the problem of language. This connection, namely, makespossible 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 philosophicalperception of the notion of tradition on the principle of theWirkungsgeschichte. From aterminological point of view, we are really close to the concept of historicity, towardwhich we are striving here. It also appears that the proposal for a “hermeneuticcomplement” 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 hisproposition “Being that can be understood is language,” doesn’t only concern philo-sophical 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 possibilityof interpretation, the description of phenomena, ideological criticism, the disclosure of thestructures through an analysis of the act of speaking, etc. Paul Ricoeur developed hisphilosophical hermeneutics as a confrontation within contemporary philosophy betweenthe mainstream philosophies that already differentiated themselves from one anotherthrough the models of interpretation on offer in them. Could these models be raised to auniversal level? The universalization of the hermeneutic aspect certainly conceals in itselfcertain theoretical pitfalls. Therefore, we only accept Gadamer’s conception of “Wirkungs-geschichte” (active historicity) with substantial reserve. Namely, that the universalizationof hermeneutics is only viable if it is built up on a universal anthropological basis. How-ever, Gadamer doesn’t try to consider this critically as such. If we defend this thesis, along-side with Gadamer, namely that humanity is essentially dependent on tradition, then sucha reflection becomes absolutely necessary. It doesn’t suffice to only make a reference toHusserl’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-mentionedhermeneutic complements necessary.

There is a second reason that explains why we cannot accept Gadamer’s philosophicalhermeneutics as a hermeneutic complement as such, without examining it critically.Indeed, Gadamer discusses the concept of tradition, but in doing so, he crucially does notlinger 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, whosephilosophical orientations are known to be post-modern. They have already dealt inten-sively with Gadamer, Husserl, Heidegger and Nietzsche, with regard to historicity. I havein mind the names of Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo.

13 »Die Überlieferung – das ‘Seins-geschick’ – wird als Sinnerschlossenheit und Wahrheitsquelleanerkannt. Erst diese Einsicht Gadamers ermöglicht die Anerkennung des Wahrheitsanspruchs derTradition und mithin ein neues Verhältnis zu ihr. Man merke dabei die hermeneutische Wendung derOntologie Heideggers: Das Seinsgeschick wird von jetzt an als Tradition aufgefasst.« Jean Grondin, “ZurEntfaltung 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 inphilosophy. 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.” Inseveral polemical essays, Hans-Georg Gadamer had indeed already shown that Derrida’sand Heidegger’s positions were not to be equated to one another in spite of a certainresemblance. However, Gadamer did not submit his own position to methodical criticism.He was satisfied with passing comments on what maybe corresponded to Derrida’s earlierphilosophical style. According to the present author, the object of Derrida’s decon-structivist criticism presents itself as the very sense of historicity, above all with regardto the “fact” that it remains immanent in philosophical thinking, especially in a pheno-menological one, which is the basis for Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer.14 Accordingto Derrida, the philosophical propensity to historicity characterizes an aspiration forreturning 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 thehistorical 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 itis used as a theoretical foundation of post-modernistic views. At the same time, itcircumvents the dimension of historicity and tradition.Everyone does firstly so, as onedeals 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 appropriatelyundedrstand 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 withthis, 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, buthe also rejects them, partially, which is directly due to the fact that he recognizes theimportance of moderating such an exclusive point of view on tradition. His demandstoward a “weakening” of thinking must also be understood in this way. Vattimo calls foran ethics of interpretation. In spite of a lot of suggestions and because he is somehoweclectic, his thinking offers mostly no systematic support for the identification of an accessto the problems of historicity and tradition, in contradistinction with the hermeneuticcomplement of phenomenology, which does. In particular, Vattimo has not sufficientlythought through the question that he actually posed himself, with regard to the situationof the ethics of interpretation within the era of a society of information. The transmissionof every shape of knowledge doesn’t strictly happenthrough and via tradition, whichwould 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 JacquesDerrida (München: Fink, 1995).

15 Cf. Daniela Vallega-Neu,Die Notwendigkeit der Gründung in Zeitalter der Dekonstruktion: ZurGründung in Heideggers ‘Beiträgen zur Philosophie’; unter Hinzuziehung der Derridaschen Dekonstruk-tion (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997).

199

the act of interpreting, except when it is already calculated to produce further pieces ofinformation.

We have only been able to take into consideration the authors who belonged to thelimited scope of the thematic that interested us in this present article. For this reason, wecould not take into consideration important philosophers, such as Vico or Hegel, who haveworked on a philosophy of history. Our critical reflection on the possibilities of identifyingan immanent historicity of phenomenology as a hermeneutic complement allows us to goon and treat the proposition of such a project itself.

When we speak about a hermeneutic complement, we mean by it exactly thecompletion of the totality of philosophical experiences; it no longer finds its sense in thecharacter of transferability, but rather in the middle of the openness belonging to the twopoles. In other words, we no longer deal with a justification of experience on the basis ofan integrative truth of experience, but rather with an opentruth of experienceitself. In sofar as we speak here about thetotality of philosophical experience, we rehabilitate theconcept of totality, which had been deprived of its legitimacy by many post-moderntheoreticians.16 However, we must still legitimate such a hermeneutic-phenomenologicalclaim for the whole. It is only implied here that we are aiming at the opened midwaybetween unification and differentiation, between the One and the Many. Moreover, we areno longer concerned by the totality of the One-in-All and the All-in-One, but rather by thewhole of the hermeneutic openness, in which the passage between One and Many wasprimarily founded. This openness, which is not only an apparentness of the world but atthe same time man’s openness to the world, is comprehensible through a hermeneuticpattern of question and answer. As regards philosophy, we can thus assert that itsknowledge develops within the scope of the questions,which its own tradition keeps openand which need us as answer. For this reason, the human race appears traditionally as aself-questioning race. Thus, we can also understand the negativity which breaks into thepositively-composed world of phenomenology, as evidence of this openness, which placestradition 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 (whosefoundation is based on the question about an ‘open’ humanity), but also into the horizonof our knowledge about the open truthof human experience. Here we conceive of theconcept of “historicity” in the sense of the happening of experience as a whole. We mustnot represent it through the model of history proceeding through time. Historicity is adynamically opening integration of experience as a whole. It is itself the hermeneuticexperience, even though we can also regard it as its element, sincethe hermeneuticexperience, 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 ofthe interpreting.

What are the names of the elements, in which the hermeneutic experience can shapeitself? Each one of them requires a particular access. According to a prevalent opinion inhermeneutics, 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. WolfgangWelsch, “Topoi der Postmoderne,” in Hans Rudi Fischer, Arnold Retzer, and Jochen Schweitzer, ed.,DasEnde der großen Entwürfe(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), 38.

17 In connection with the historical formation of hermeneutics, I recommend the famous book byWilhelm Dilthey, Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik(1900): see idem,Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5(Leipzig/Berlin: Teubner, 1924), 317–338, where Dilthey designates hermeneutics as »Kunstlehre desVerstehens schriftlich fixierter Lebensäußerungen.« and adds the remark that »Diese Wissenschaft<Hermeneutik> 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 iscomprehensible and displayable in the widest sense. Everything that is comprehensible anddisplayable presupposes a temporal insertion and a historical distance.Temporality andhistoricitydetermine every understanding and displaying, every textual and lingual aspect.We can only consider temporality and historicity in connection with the opening of humanexistence, in so far as it includes a moment of liberty.Existence and libertyare given tohuman beings, not only based on their possibility, but also according to their capacity, andas such, they prove -- by themselves -- the objectivity ofculture 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 withregard to the concept of experience. They are not attained from experience, but theyclaimexperience for themselves. On that account, we are no longer dealing with hermeneuticfactors, but with notions. This is also valid for the notion of hermeneutics itself, since itconcretizes itself in the interlacing of its factors. We can see from this that the functionof hermeneutics actually aims at theintegration of experience. Since experience nevermeans a single experience, the hermeneutic integrative function doesn’t aim at anamalgamation of experience, but rather at its dis-unification and at its opening. This is thesecond characteristic of the hermeneutic function, which becomes the most apparent in thephenomenon of reading. The totality of experience is never particular things and neveronly one thing: rather it is always simultaneously also something else. This requires acertain openness toward the Other, which consists in the possibility of thedisplacing inthe Other and into that Other. The third possibility of the hermeneutic function rests onthat. Then one is always prone to passiveness. This passiveness represents the opennessof the hearing, which not only makes possible the understanding, but forswears intoleranceand countenances the otherness that is constitutive of communication. Finally, the outcomeof this is that the hermeneutic integration of the totality of human experience is based onthe capacity of communication as constituent of the human community. It also includesthe understanding that composes beyond that which is human, as well as for the “here andnow” of natural law and also for the hereafter of the divine. The five characteristicfeatures of the hermeneutic function, i.e.its integrative character, the dis-unification, thetransfer into the Other, the keeping open of hearing, and communication, comprehend itsparticular 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 hermeneuticfactor, rather its historical manifestation. More explicitly said, the hermeneutic functioncan occur in human experience itself. Within its occurrency, it is at the same time self-announced. Thus, we can understand the hermeneutic function through the main featureof the act of making-known, which originally designated the Greek wordhermeneuein.

We now come back to the relation between philosophy and culture, which weidentified at the beginning as our main problem. This problem needs an immanent

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

201

phenomenological development. The proposed hermeneutic complement should then beunderstood as a contribution to the creation ofa cultural hermeneutics.Such a plannedcultural hermeneutics would have to regard the crisis of the concept of tradition asindicating the fact that all cultural appearances can be apprehended against the backgroundof a problematical understanding of tradition.

We have already raised the issue of the relationship concerning philosophy and culturein the concepts of the unity of the world and the difference of the cultural worlds, and wesuggested at the same time that the main problem lies in the openness between unity anddifference. The relationship between phenomenology and cultural hermeneutics remainsto be observed in respect of its open viewpoint. The open viewpoint of culture meansperspectivity. A culture opens upperspectivesin agreement with its fundamental view-point. When we compare philosophy with culture, we realize that, in contrast, the formeropens thePanorama. We used the names “Perspective” and “Panorama” in the stricthermeneutic-phenomenological sense. In doing so, we do not forget that the concept of“perspectivity” was philosophically already to be found in Leibniz and Nietzsche. Wecannot assert the same with regard to the concept of “Panorama,” which stems from theGreek pan-horao, which means “on the whole, to see everything.” Jakob Burchardtnoticed that the Greeks, who started this philosophy, had “panoramic eyes,” in other wordsthat 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 ofperspectives. Greek statuary and literature, but also philosophy itself, are so many proofsof this fact. Let us only remember this historical and well-known example of the choice-decision in thefirst philosophyby Aristotle.

The extraction of the first philosophy, in the way we encountered it for the first timein Aristotle, later also in Descartes and Husserl, can be understood here as a philosophicalEuropology. By this concept, I mean the project of a European humanity in terms of thetotality of its culture, within the perspectives of theory, experience and poesis. Althoughin the twentieth century we experienced Husserl’s attempt to establish phenomenology asfirst philosophy, it seems to us, nevertheless, that within contemporary philosophy, namelyin all its tendencies, the effort toward thesecond philosophyasserts itself as a priority andalso (with it) another kind ofEuropology. This second philosophy should not only differfrom the first one by the fact that the former doesn’t subordinate the difference of culturalperspectives to the panorama, but also by the fact that it allows an openness between theperspectives of culture and the panorama of philosophy.18 Notwithstanding how wedefine culture, it is nothing else than an opennessof the life-world perspectives. On thecontrary, if we bear in mind philosophy’s immanent historicity, philosophy displays aconcern toward the totality. It is also an effort not to remain locked into one’s ownperspective, but to sense a reciprocal integration in the totality of the world. Only thatwhich 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 activein the open.

Translated by Etienne Charest

18 Manfred Riedel has recently called attention to the concept of “second philosophy” in his treatiseFür die zweite Philosophie(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988). However, he did not elaborate itsystematically 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 anAcademic Problem,” ibid., 30–59, is particularly worthwhile; this “problem” is one that should -- in ouropinion -- 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 toHeidegger, holiness awaits in the being, as the being awaits in the nothingness -- my aim isto discover a connection between death, which is the hiding place of the nothingness, andholiness. At the same time it is a polemic within current opinions about the nihilistic silenceof Heidegger, who clearly stated:

Denn das Verschwiegene ist das eigentlich Bewahrte. Und als das Bewahrteste dasNächste und Wirklichste. ... Was für den gemeinen Verstand wie ‘Atheismus’ aussiehtund so aussehen muss, ist im Grunde das Gegenteil. Und ebenso: dort, wo vom Nichtsgehandelt 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 imNichtigen herumtreiben.2

In this article I first discuss the radical forms of the phenomenological reduction (whichis necessary in order to see the phenomenon in its full dimension); then I try to show thatthere is a connection between a form of radical reduction on the one hand -- which istermed “death” -- and existence as such on the other hand -- which is defined as “presence.”All this, on the basis of the seventh paragraph ofSein und Zeit, where the phenomeno-logical difference (between that which appears and the appearance itself) was identifiedwith 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 theexistence of things. It is accompanied by an act of worship, by the sacred. An act ofworship is therefore a fundamental act of religious experience. Holiness comes from theexperience of presence. This notion (briefly sketched out here) develops Heidegger’s andScheler’s thoughts, to a certain extent; it is also a clear reference to the work of MartinBuber, whose 1922 Frankfurt lectures were originally entitledReligion as the Presence(and later onI and Thou).3

1 Martin Heidegger,Vorträge und Aufsätze, 6th ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1990), 171.2 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 hintin Gerd Haeffner,In der Gegenwart leben. Auf der Spur eines Urphänomens(Berlin/Köln/Stuttgart: Kohl-hammer, 1996), 251-269.

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 ametanoiaof existence, and not a learnedtechnique. Husserl had come to this conclusion toward the end of his philosophical de-velopment. InKrise der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phäno-menologie, he wrote

…daß die totale phänomenologische Einstellung und die ihr zugehörige Epoche ´zunächstwesensmäßig eine völlige personalle Wandlung zu erwirken berufen ist, die zu ver-gleichen wäre zunächst mit einer religiösen Umkehrung, die aber darüber hinaus dieBedeutung der größten existenziellen Wandlung in sich birgt, die der Menschheit alsMenschheit aufgegeben ist.4

And Scheler had analyzed the moral ascent which, in his textVom Ewigen im Menschen,(see note 5 below) includes his philosophical conception of the phenomenologicalreduction. 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 some-thing, that there is presence. A second obviousness concerns an independent and sub-stantial existence, one that does not have any grounding in the accepted way; Schelerdescribed the existence of something so unmediated in terms of absolute existence. Thethird obviousness concerns the experience of existence, the experience of presence assuch:

Freilich: wer gleichsam nicht in den Abgrund des absoluten Nichts geschaut hat, derwird auch die immanente Positivität des Inhalts der Einsicht, dass überhaupt etwas istund nicht lieber Nichts, vollständig übersehen.5

An experience of this threefold obviousness is fundamental to, and must precede, theexperience of liberation which can free the human spirit from two strong fetters thatimpeded the human being’s vitality:

Es bedarf dieser Akte, um den Geist das nur vitalrelative Sein, das Sein für dasLeben…prinzipiell verlassenzu machen, um ihn mit dem Sein, wie es an sich selbstund in sich selbst ist, in Teilnehmung treten zu machen.6

This experience constitutes a phase of self-possession which consists in denying urgesand 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,HusserlianaVI (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 essentialknowledge, which is based on the categorical forms of being. After this phase of self-possession oraskesis, there follows another, a second phase (involving mortification witha view to humility as the proper sphere for self and will). After achieving the defeat ofone’s own egoism, this knowledge leads to a ‘world outlook’ and a view of the world thatmoves within its categorical structures.

Die Verdemütungbricht dennatürlichen Stolzund ist die moralische Voraussetzung desfür die Erkenntnis der Philosophie notwendigen gleichzeitigen Abstreifens 1) derzufälligen Daseinsmodivon den puren Wasgehalten... 2) derfaktischen Verworfenheitdes 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 egoisticdesire to dominate; the fragmentary picture of the world provided by science does not givefull and independent knowledge. In Scheler’s opinion scientific knowledge wants to ruleand not to learn. The fullest knowledge is enabled by love, which here means nothingbeyond the ‘view’ or ‘outlook,’ after which follows the action. “DieLiebe…bricht die imMenschen befindliche Quelle derSeinsrelativitätalles Umwelt-seins.”8 This phase of theselfless 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-physicalone (Leib), but he or she ceases to gain his or her motivation in an uncritical, simple wayfrom these spheres of existence; in this way, he or she become persons.9 Through the actof love a person is correlated with holiness which is understood as the fullest sphere ofreality (given to emotions) and which Scheler described rather sparingly as a person’sworth (Wert). Indeed, here is to be found the most primal emotional experience of theworld, 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, throughspiritual exercises and a consistent moral attitude, a possessing of humility and ofgoodwill toward the world, and in old age this can indeed become a gift of maturity; itliberates 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 individuallife process, which is understood as a realization of possibilities, as a kinesis of life. Inthis 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., 90.8 Ibid.9 See Jaromir Brejdak, “Phänomenologie, Wertethik, Politik,” in Jaromir Brejdak, Werner Stegmaier,

and Ireneusz Zieminski, ed.,Politik und Ethik in philosophischer und systemtheoretischer Sicht(Szczecin:AMP Studio, 2003), 86.

205

denken lässt –, sondern das Leben: und ‘tot’ wird durch Erfahrung ihm das, was sichals lebendig nicht bewährt.10

The psychophysical decline of an organism ensues at the moment when the reproductivedrive (Fortpflanzung) loses the combat against the antagonistic drives (i.e., the drives forpower and food).11 The reduction in the reproductive ability (the cell regeneration) is thecause of old age and death. Physical and psychical death have the same cause -- the lifefactor (with all its functions) withdraws from one set of energy and matter and redirectsits activity to another set. A change in attentiveness, switching from issues of vitality tothose of a spiritual kind -- which was the goal of phenomenological reduction -- accompaniesthis 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 productionof 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 attitudesas surprise, rapture and curiosity. The aged (or senile) consciousness com-pensates for the loss of vital attentiveness with an intensified capacity forcorporeal impressions, but the turn to spiritual values prevails here.

- b.3. Reality: A child experiences the world as anatura naturans, an old man orwoman as anatura naturata, and thus reality becomes static in old age.

Scheler states:

Mit allem Altern ist eine Umbildung derIchkonstitutionverbunden, und zwar des Ver-hältnisses des geistigen Person-Ich zum ‘Leben’ und den vitalpsychischen Vorgängen...Diese Umbildung hat zur Folge einen Wechsel des erlebten Verhältnisses zu allenSphären: Gott, Natur, Leib, Mitwelt.12

Old age and death make, of a human being, an unwitting participant of the develop-ment of life in general. An individual death is a sacrifice for the continuous developmentand 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: “Nurwenn es ein Alleben gibt, erhält er [der Tod] Sinn.”13

The goal of this development is sublimation, that is, the directing of the vital driveswith the help of the spirit. The openness of life to the divine spirit means, on the onehand, that the vital force diminishes, and on the other hand it is the personal individual-ization which goes with the experience of continuous, personal existence, with God beingthe center of acts and action. The immortality of a spiritual person, like the immortalityof 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, PhilosophischeAnthropologie, 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 seidas Opfer für den Werdegang der Gottheit und sein Tod die Ernte und die Genesungder Gottheit an ihm. Wer liebt, stirbt leicht, wer genügend die Welt in sich ein-getrunken und sich seiner Verantwortung bewusst ist und seiner Mitverantwortung,stirbt leicht! Wer die Natur – die ichfremde – schon in seinem Leben als elementareMacht empfunden hat, als diegroße Welle, die ihn trug und die er nur ein ganz wenigzügelte – 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. Godbecomes real perfection through a man, at the end of the dynamic historical process, ratherthan 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 resoluteopenness (Entschlossenheit). Dasein can free itself from its egoistic confinement thanksto 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 andpotentialities. Relentlessly it individualizes Dasein down to its potentiality-for-Being-guilty, and exacts of it that it should be this potentiality authentically. The unwaveringprecision with which Dasein is thus essentially individualized down to its ownmostpotentiality-for-Being, discloses the anticipation of death as the possibility which isnon-relational.16

The guilt here refers to the prime of being-there (Dasein); the factual being-there alwayslags behind its possibilities. This tension between potentiality and realization is describedin 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 originallyan anxiety caused by neglecting or even setting aside the possibilities of a full, authenticbeing; it is an anxiety in the face of being, an anxiety that is not contained by having acalcified outlook on the world or by current interpretations of the world. Only an authenticinterpretation, which forsakes a merely current project (Entwurf), can free the dimensionof true possibility; this dimension is an impossibility for a calculating man, it is in-accessible 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., 338-340.15 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.

207

Sinn” 17 and, following this: “Erst im Sterben kann ich gewissermaßen absolut sagen »ichbin«.”18 This resolute openness, preceded by the advance toward death, has many func-tions. 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 mostproper way; it makes from the being-there a place where being happens, the being-therebecomes the historical entity which answers to the call of being. In this way it opens thetrue sense of being, which is given in the historical being and not in an instrumental, ob-jective being of the world.

There are many facets to Heidegger’s concept of death: death as a personal possibilityagainst a shared one, the indefiniteness of death which is a constant source of danger, thecertain death as afundamentum inconcussumof Dasein. I want to draw attention to twoother 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 aspectconstitutes for Heidegger a fulfillment of the immense impossibility of existence; this im-possibility is essential, because it restores the true dimension of possibility. Kierkegaarddescribed 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 worldis comparable to Scheler’s phenomenological reduction. It opens before the human beinga dimension which was traditionally characterized as the dimension of holiness. RobertSpaemann inGlück und Wohlwollenwrote about it in the following way:

Voraussetzung hierfür ist, dass ein Wesen herausgetreten ist aus der Zentralität desbloßen Lebens, für das alles, was ihm begegnet, nur eine Bewandtnis hat als Funktionfür ein Subjekt, das als bewandtnisloses Selbst verborgen bleibt. In diesem Heraus-treten, in diesermetanoiaerst wird das Selbst als die fundamentale, allen “Wert” be-gründende Wirklichkeit sichtbar.20

For Heidegger, it is an access point into a dimension of ultimate thought (lacking anyreferences) (das letzte Denken). In Was heißt Denken?we read that the ultimate thoughtis 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 withthe conditions of the being-there’s openness, rather, he pays attention to that which thisopenness discloses, as he takes the position of historical adventism, writing about theessence of man:

Weil sein Wesen ist, der Wartende zu sein, der des Wesens des Seins wartet, indemer 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 Szczecinskiego, 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 DamePress, 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 bloßeWissenwollen zu verfallen.22

Thus, in Heidegger’s late philosophy, expectation has no object; it means the openingfor the space for an appropriation (Ereignis) of Being. Expectation does not denote idle-ness: it is the being attentive to the process of appropriation of Being, of its coming-to-light (Lichtung), which motivates us to revere that which emerges beyond the confines ofhuman immanence. This reverence enforces a self-limitation or descent into humility, andthis word depicts quite well the sense of Heidegger’sGelassenheit, in which we hearechoes of St Augustine’shumilitas. The aim of humility is that of allowing for the other-ness of a human being or of a thing; in Scheler’s philosophy it is love which correspondswith this moment. When creating the analytic of being-there (Daseinsanalytik) on thestrength of religious examples, Heidegger stressed strongly the experience of an immediatetranscendental intervention in the life of a being-there; Heidegger turned his attentionaway from the phenomena of experiencing transcendence in a contact with another humanbeing or with nature. Later, inSein und Zeit, he does eliminate this flaw, showing thething as an epiphany of transcendence. In the contact with a thing I am touched by itspresence, which is akin to being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode) and which liberates myexistence, 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 metanoiaof existence. Death is the opening of our outlook above and beyond anyrelations; things, when they are seen from this point of view, are seen as worthy in theirabsolute, relationless authenticity; they are not seen as worthy because of the possibilitiesthey offer of using them as tools,23 in this phenomenological and existential under-standing. Death reveals things in their ‘unbound’ presence, or, if we use Heidegger’sterminology, in their being. Let a verse from the poemOn a Roseby 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 tothe aspect of the content of a concrete thing (freed from human usurpation), i.e., theaspect of presence as such.25 Phainasthai, in its full dimension, cannot be reduced to agiven structural content of a thing; the nature ofphainasthaiis something more, becauseit is the very moment of a liberated and free lighting of presence as the horizon where ourmeeting with the thing takes place. It was Heidegger who discovered the phenomeno-logical difference between that which appears and its appearance as an horizon of meetingwith the thing. He writes:

22 Martin Heidegger,Die Technik und die Kehre, 8th ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1991), 41.23 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 wasGroßzügigkeit 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 wasentitled In der Gegenwart leben[Living in the Present].

209

Wenn ich dieses Buch sehe, sehe ich zwar eine substantielle Sache, ohne jedochdeswegen die Substantialität wie das Buch zu sehen. Dennoch ist es die Substantialität,das in seinem nicht Erscheinen dem Erscheinenden das Erscheinen ermöglicht. Indiesem Sinne kann man sogar sagen, dass sie erscheinender ist als das Erschieneneselbst.26

From the point of view of an objective presence, absence becomes an intensified form ofpresence: it is its appearance, as God’s so-called death is his intensified presence. Thehorizons of meeting with a given thing are responsible for the fact that the same thing canappear 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 (thatwhich was disclosed versus the disclosure) with the ontological difference (Being,Sein)versus the entity (das Seiende)). In the seventh paragraph ofSein und Zeitwe read:

Accordingly theφαινοµενα or “phenomena” are the totality of what lies in the lightof day or can be brought to the light – what the Greeks sometimes identified simplywith τα οντα (entities).27

The experience of a phenomenon is not a construction of it on the ground of a transcendentalego, rather, it is a gift of spontaneous appearance in one of many ways of the granting ofthings appropriate to phenomenology. This occurrent granting and the appearance areidentified with the Presocratic notion of nature, withphysis.28 The experiencing of thehorizons of meeting with the thing has a religious connotation; it is received as a gift. Theappearance of the horizon of Being is for Heidegger a space of holiness which becomesa 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 awayfrom the world, allows the experience not only of the self and of reality in its full dimen-sion, but also of the occurrent appearance of presence as such. This appearance is the ex-perience of Being as holiness.

The resolute being-there and the person (in Heidegger’s and Scheler’s philosophiesrespectively), 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-tongueof 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 -- inHeidegger’s philosophy it is the ontological guilt and in Scheler’s it is the desire toredeem.

Im Gegensatz hierzu ist Religion gegründet in Gottesliebe und in Verlangen nach einemendgültigenHeiledes Menschen selbst und aller Dinge. Religion ist also zuvörderst einHeilsweg. Das Summum bonum, nicht das absolut Wirkliche und sein Wesen, ist derersteIntentionsgegenstand des religiösen Aktes.29

26 Martin Heidegger,Vier Seminare(Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1973), 115.27 Heidegger,Being and Time, § 7, 51.28 The physiswas characterized as a poietic extraction and an alethic showing, in Heidegger,Die

Technik und die Kehre, 20.29 Scheler,Vom Ewigen im Menschen, 134.

210

Holiness, in this case, is an anxiety of the human spirit who wants to compensate for thenormative character of things -- free from their instrumental status -- as they are, for aman. Scheler calls this dimension, which is a call to participate in the becoming of being,a dimension ofdeitas; he understands this being as a being as such,ens per se, as a spon-taneous granting of Being (Jean-Luc Marion). The joint point, where in the becoming andhappening God meets man, is called by Scheler a human person.30 The person becomesgodlike, while wounded with a wound that is inflicted upon a man by God himself: “TheGodly 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 theabsolute process of God’s becoming. The reality of God’s becoming does not fade awaywith the death of a man (or with the death of human aspiration), but it is continuous, likethe action of a person, it is perpetual or immortal (as is, forinstance, the action of StMaksymilian Kolbe mentioned in note 30). Through love, and later through the death ofthe body, a person becomes a fragment of absolute reality in that holiness is themoving 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 theessence of the holy is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the light of theessence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word ‘God’ is to signify. … Howcan man at the present stage of world history ask at all seriously and rigorouslywhether the god nears or withdraws, when he has above all neglected to think into thedimension in which alone that question can be asked? But this is the dimension of theholy, which indeed remains closed as a dimension if the open region of Being is notlighted 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 inthe mirror but in the sense of the appearance of Being, the happening of Being, which isincluded in the nature of the phenomenon asphainesthai.

This dimension of Being is the foundation of holiness; within this space the talk aboutGod makes sense. It is so in the present times, but in the past it was so too: God is seenas 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 allhistory. Scheler defines the person through the actuality, that is through a permanent aspiration, and notthrough his or her substantiality (that is, a permanent existence, yet loaned, in a way). The person appearsas such only when its human aspiration is directed toward holiness as the primary value; other valuesshine 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 hislife for the life of another man, out of love.

31 Max Scheler,Gesammelte Werke 12: Schriften aus dem Nachlass, vol. 2: Erkenntnislehre undMetaphysik, 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 gedachtund gesagt werden, was das Wort »Gott« nennen soll. [...] Wie soll denn der Mensch der gegenwärtigenWeltgeschichte auch nur ernst und streng fragen können, ob der Gott sich nahe oder entziehe, wenn derMensch es unterlässt, allererst in die Dimension hineinzudenken, in der jene Frage allein gefragt werdenkann? Das aber ist die Dimension des Heiligen, die sogar schon als Dimension verschlossen bleibt, wennnicht 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 Ursacheeiner Bewirkung, sondern die Vergötterung des Ursacheseins als solchen, des Grundesdes erklärenden Vorstellens überhaupt.34

In Identität und DifferenzHeidegger contrasts the onto-theological God of the philosopherswith the godlike God:

Causa sui. So lautet der sachgerechte Name für den Gott in der Philosophie. Zu diesemGott kann der Mensch weder beten, noch kann er ihm opfern. Vor dercausa suikannder Mensch weder aus Scheu ins Knie fallen, noch kann er vor diesem Gott musizierenund tanzen. Demgemäß ist das gott-lose Denken, das den Gott der Philosophen, denGott alscausa suipreisgeben 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/devotionof 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 desSeienden. ... Das ist die Zwiespalt von Seiendem und Sein. Sie ist das, was eigentlichzu 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 becomesa place where this kairological moment happens. The introductory condition of a religiousact cannot call upon proofs of God’s existence; instead, human beings have the ability tothink reflectively (das sinnende Denken) and to pay attention to everyday matters whilealso 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 Denkennäher als dem Glauben, wenn anders die Gottheit als Wesendes seine Herkunft aus derWahrheit des Seins empfängt und das Sein als ereignender Anfang Anderes ‘ist’ dennGrund und Ursache des Seienden.38

The Nietzscheans’ “death of God” (not the death of God as such, but the death of certainnotions of God) recalls us to the original place where the experience of the presence ofBeing as the holy ‘happens’; without this recall or remembrance, only the void of egoisticreason 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 WolfgangMatz, 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 etwaserfahren, es in einen Bewandtniszusammenhang einfügen? Alle Erfahrung ist kategorialstrukturiert und als solche schon von der Art eines relationalen Gefüges. Die religiösePraxis kennt indessen eine Weise der Zuwendung, die die Wirklichkeit als absoluteohne Bezug auf das Subjekt und ohne sprachliche Vermittlung vergegenwärtigt: denAkt der Anbetung. Wie immer die Religionsphänomenologie diesen Akt genauer analy-sieren mag, er schließt, zumindest in seinem jüdischen, christlichen und islamischenVerständnis die bedingungslose Zustimmung zu dem unbedingten Grund der Wirk-lichkeit ein, ... Bedingungslose Zustimmung hat den Charakter des Dankes für das, wassich in seiner reinen Unbezüglichkeit zeigt, für das, was in der Sprache der Religionenbiblischer Herkunft ‘Herrlichkeit’ heißt.Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriamtuam ist eines der ältesten christlichen Gebete.39

In a similar way, Max Scheler wrote, in his articleZur Rehabilitierung der Tugend, aboutthe 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 groundedin the strength of the act of worship:

Sie [die Ehrfurcht] ist im Gegenteil die Haltung, in der man noch etwas hinzu-wahrnimmt, das der Ehrfurchtlose nicht sieht und für das gerade er blind ist: das Ge-heimnis der Dinge und die Werttiefe ihrer Existenz. Wo immerwir von der ehr-furchtlosen, z. B. der durchschnittlich wissenschaftlich erklärenden Haltung zurehrfürchtigen Haltung gegenüber den Dingen übergehen, da sehen wir wie ihnen etwashinzuwächst, was sie vorher nicht besaßen; wie etwas an ihnen sichtbar und fühlbarwird, 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 setof references and relations, God remains absent, and his absence is not even noticed. Thediscarding of an enslaving interpretation of the world enables us to be open toward theunconcealment of Being (die Unverborgenheit des Seins), which brings the dimension ofholiness back to human beings and to things -- rather like witnessing the appearance orbirth of a “new Adam.” We live in the time of God’s silent return.

39 Spaemann,Glück und Wohlwollen, 128.40 Scheler,Vom Umsturz der Werte, 33.

213

3. A “BETTER” OR JUST“ANOTHER” UNDERSTANDING? SOME REMARKS

ON THE CREATIVE CHARACTER OF INTERPRETATION

Andrzej Przyłebski

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics arose from a generalization of theconsiderations and results of the specific hermeneutic theories elaborated in jurisprudence,theology and classical literature. A milestone in its development was without a doubt thegeneral hermeneutics of Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher. It was he who extended the areaof what could -- and sometimes even should -- be interpreted from the texts on every speechact, including a press article, a speech or a conversation. Belonging to the Romanticmovement in the German philosophy of the nineteenth century he was sure that the objectto be interpreted is the idea born in the head of a writer or a speaker. It is born spon-taneously, in an unconscious way. That is why its creator does not understand its fullrange and meaning. The interpreter is in another position: he analyzes this spiritual productusing the full power of his consciousness and methodological cleverness. Because of thatit 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 Romantichermeneutics, such as abandoning the difference between understanding and interpretation.This difference was usually understood as the difference between a spiritual understandingand lingual articulation of what was understood. Further, Gadamer came to the conclusionthat even a simple understanding act needs a language, and so insisted that there is notany essential difference between interpreting and understanding. But he never accepted theidea that it is reasonable to speak about a better understanding, also in the sense that wecan understand an author better then he understood himself. In a well known section ofTruth and Method, his major work, he writes:

Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. Thatis why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity aswell. 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 theEnlightenment and revised on the basis of the aesthetics of genius. Understanding isnot, in fact, understanding better, either in the sense of superior knowledge of thesubject because of clearer ideas in the sense of fundamental superiority of conscious-ness over unconscious production. It is enough to say that we understand in adifferentway, if we understand at all.1

The following remarks try to reconsider the arguments of Gadamer, joining them with hisown 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 betterunderstanding. Though this does not mean Schleiermacher was right. Indeed, he was in-correct regarding the proper object of interpretation.

The assumption of the Pre-Romantic hermeneutics (Chladenius and others) was thatthe work of interpretation (a hermeneutic act) begins with a sudden break in the under-standing of a text, with a so-called “dark place” in it. Interpretation is an occasionalactivity, required only in cases when understanding stops being immediate. The Romanticperspective 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 anexplanation is understanding. Trying to explain it, he came to the conclusion thatunderstanding is always mediated by interpretation, so it is hardly possible to divide them.

Romantic hermeneutics fuses understanding and interpretation into a unity. But, on theother hand, it has to accept a division between a nearly automatic, lingually mediatedinterpretation, 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 methodologicallycontrolled interpretation to understand a creator of meaning better than he understood him-self. A similar idea was explicitly held by Kant and Fichte, indicating that it was commonin the thinking of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Gadamer accepts the results of the Romantic hermeneutics that concern the unity ofunderstanding and interpretation, but -- as already said -- he refuses to accept any possibilityof a better understanding. The reason for that is that he adds a third element to the above-mentioned unity, forgotten -- in his opinion -- by Schleiermacher and his followers. He callsit “application.” According to him, it is not an additional moment in the process of inter-preting that can be separated from a real, full understanding, or relegated to an ancillaryposition. For him the hermeneutic act is the triunion of understanding, interpretation andapplication. He himself, as well as his critics, show that this important change isconnected with including in his theory the hermeneutics of law and holy scriptures, inwhich 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 hermeneuticsituatedness or -- speaking with Heidegger -- established by the “giveness” of the HumanBeing (Dasein). Because every interpretation contains a moment of application and we cannot assume or prove the identity of two hermeneutic situations, it is impossible to say thatone can understand better than the other. It is enough to say that one understands dif-ferently when he understands at all.

This statement, although we understand its origin and ground, seems to be counter-intuitive, against any evidence offered in our experience. Even in Gadamer’s own workit is possible to show that he does not act according to the principle. Why should we, forinstance, accept his hermeneutic theory as a proper description of understanding if it hasthe same failing as that developed by Dilthey, Betti or Schleiermacher? This is a kind ofan implicit argument. But there are also explicit arguments by Gadamer against thisstatement. He criticizes, for example, some of Heidegger’s analysis of Greek philosophyand German poetry, saying they are not totally wrong, but not good enough, and soproposes instead his own, better interpretations.2

The problems with the better versus different interpretation are evident. It is not easyto 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 andinterpretation but also to insist that despite of the comparison problem it is in principlepossible to speak about better and worse interpretations.

The existential moment of understanding by integrating the application in the unity ofunderstanding and interpretation is a specifically Gadamerian transformation of Heidegger’stopic fromBeing and Time. In his magnum opusHeidegger introduces a completely newnotion of understanding that for him means a kind of “know-how.” Knowing how to dealwith something is the original form of understanding in the life world. It is also a kind ofapplying 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 sameinstrument we will even be able to foresee, who of them “understands it” better. Whyshould 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 thespiritual states or ideas in the mind of the author of the text, but his work as it exists inthe intersubjective world, open to any kind of understanding. The author has no authorityover his creation. In interpreting his work he is one of many interpreters, each equal inprinciple.

One can understand the reasons that led Gadamer to abandon the distinction betweenunderstanding and interpretation. It is true that every interpretation is directed by some-thing Heidegger called the pre-structure of understanding (Vorstruktur des Verstehens).But it not true that every understanding is connected with the elaboration of an explicitand lingually articulated interpretation. There are automatic understandings, especially inbanal cases of everyday communication. Further, it is useful to distinguish between inter-pretation and understanding by presuming that a formulation in the words of a commonlanguage is a conditionsine qua non,to speak about an interpretation. It forbids us tocompare between an understanding and an interpretation and permits it in the case of twointerpretations, in the above defined sense. Thus we are allowed to assume that there issomething like a quality of interpretation.

The phenomenological evidences show us very often that we can talk about better orworse interpretation. Assume that we go to a theater to watcha piece by Pirandello.Dramas and texts of that range demand interpretation. Without it they can be amusing butthey will not form themselves into a unity of meaning. Given that not every possibleinterpretation is a good one, what is decisive here?

In the seventies, during the long debate on Gadamer’s theoryof understanding,Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel elaborated their own transcendental hermeneutics. Apelespecially defended the possibility of better interpretation. Developing Apel’s argumentsand trying to mediate between him and Gadamer, the philosopher Albrecht Wellmerdevoted an important text3 to this subject. Let’s have a look on the line of his argument-ation. To escape the dilemma between a “better” and a “different” understanding, Wellmermakes a distinction between two types of interpretation that are in principle different. Henames the first one an “intern” or “immanent” interpretation. It is irreducible to the secondone that he calls “extern” or “productive.” According to him, their difference is pheno-menologically 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 bea new, very critical reading of this text, in the manner of Heidegger’s or Adorno’sproductive (mis)readings of the classical works of philosophy.

Both kinds of interpretation demand intellectual activity and creativity of the inter-preter. The type of creativity and the conditions of it differ according to the different aimsof 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 interpretationtries purposefully to be critical about the truth of the analyzed text, hoping to discover itsdeeper meaning through a kind of deconstruction of it. According to Wellmer,

we can speak about understanding if the interpreter succeeds in transcending the textaccording to his/her own authority (Massgabe) in the direction of his/her truth claims

3 Albrecht Wellmer, “Zur Kritik der hermeneutischen Vernunft,”Lingua ac Communitas5 (1995).

216

(Wahrheitsanspruch), i.e., when the truth and untruth of the text can be seen throughthe 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 under-standing, against the explicit formulation of Gadamer’sTruth and Method. This progressis a relative one, because the pure existence of the above-mentioned two profoundlydifferent types of interpretation -- and we cannot be sure that there is not a third or fourthone -- shows us that any comparison of interpretation is possible only in the frames of agiven type. It would hardly be possible to compare an interpretation that is looking for amessage of a text with the one that is seeking to disclose its unconscious element orstructural features, conditioning the place of it in the universe of meaning. That’s why itis not easy -- also for Gadamer -- to accept a separate existence of the short, existentiallymotivated, hermeneutic way of Heidegger and the long, methodologically mediated wayof Ricoeur. They need to be integrated.

We can assume that Gadamer’s call for the supremacy of hermeneutics over aestheticscould be enlarged also on the subject we discuss here. He might say that a scientificallysupported interpretation is acceptable only as an enrichment of the “normal,” message-searching interpretation. That is precisely what he means by saying the role of psycho-analysis is to return the patient to a society and its communication.

Resuming, we can say that it is safer for philosophical hermeneutics to speak aboutdifferent 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 theback of Gadamer’s conception; both types of understanding work in accordance with hismetaphor of fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung), though each makes it in adifferent way.

In the intern, interpretation dominates the horizon of the text. The interpreter has toawake in himself the prejudices (Vorurteile) that enable him to reach the message of thetext. His creativity relies on a kind of subordination of his own subjectivity to the possibletruth 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 hisprevious prejudices.

The second type of interpretation assumes the domination of the horizon of the inter-preter. He critically questions the truth of the text’s message, trying to dig out the un-known dimension of its origin, its meaning and cultural position. This will be an inter-pretation of a given text -- and not a free creation of a critic -- as long as it keeps in touchwith 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 aboutthe right to speak about a better understanding. Schleiermacher was right about the generalpossibility of speaking about it, but he was wrong in his thinking about the genuine objectof the interpretation. Only in special cases are the subjective intentions of the author theobject of interpretation. Gadamer is correct to stress this. On the other hand, interpretationis determined and expressed in language, and as such, can be intersubjectively discussedand compared in a conversation, making an agreement about a better or worse interpreta-tion possible. The reason why Gadamer overlooked this possibility lies in the startingpoint of his analysis of understanding and interpretation: it is not the Heideggerianunderstanding of instrument (das Zeug) in everyday life, but the never ending inter-pretation 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’sbook The Gnostic Religion, is the hermeneutic reversal between the main corpus of thework itself and the additional chapter “Gnosis, Existentialism, and Nihilism,” written abouttwenty years after the first draft of the book and published as an epilogue to a later re-edition.1 As Jonas himself puts it, the more thoroughly he analyzed the structures ofancient Gnosticism by means of the categories of existential ontology, the more he becameaware that this hermeneutic choice -- though perfectly explicable, at a more superficiallevel, by his being a disciple of Heidegger’s and Bultmann’s -- had been implicitlymotivated 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 fundamentalontology and this ancient dualist line of thought which conceives of human being in termsof absolute incommensurability with the rest of the universe. Not only does the abysmaldifference between Dasein’s “ek-sistence” and the “being-ready-to-hand” or “being-present-at-hand” of natural or cultural objects parallel the gnostic dichotomy between the“pneumatic” and the “cosmic” sphere but the permanent risk of “authentic” existencelosing itself in its preoccupations for merely inner-worldly things also seems a modernversion of the struggle, within human being itself, of its “true” other-worldly essenceagainst the continuous threat of its “psychic,” i.e., sensible inclinations.

Although Gnosticism has exercised a hidden influence throughout the history ofoccidental philosophy from late Antiquity onwards, modern philosophy proves to have aparticular proclivity for some of its main motives, especially for the radical dualismbetween spirit and nature. For Jonas, Pascal’s famous formula of the “thinking reed” isthe paradigmatic expression of the radical homelessness of man in front of the emptyuniverse of pure extension developed by the (modern) natural sciences. Nevertheless,concerning the more recent philosophical ancestors of gnostic tendencies in existentialontology, 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, isthe abandonment of the theological dimension of dualism and the reformulation of theprinciple of “evil” in terms of neutrality and indifference.3 This elimination of the originalantagonism between the divine sphere and the world is prepared by Nietzsche’s conceptof 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 ofabsolute (though unworldly) values serving as a guideline for human existence. Accordingto Jonas, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology keeps using certain formal schemata, like“being-thrown,” “fallen-ness,” etc., without maintaining the background of an extra-humanprinciple of absolute goodness, which alone could account for the unconditional existentialclaim of these categories. In this perspective, Heidegger’s conception ofDaseinappearsas 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 ofChristianity, 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 atranscendent sphere.

Without denying the fundamental pertinence of Jonas’s analysis, as far as the existentialontology of Being and timeis concerned,4 we would like to call into question theexhaustiveness of his approach with regard to the historical context. In reading Jonas’sbook, one could come to consider Heidegger as the only philosopher of his time whodeveloped a radically dualistic vision of human subjectivity, the idea of ametanoiafroman inauthentic form of existence, or a more or less gnostic concept of temporality. Noallusion is made, either to the neo-Kantian school, or to Husserl’s phenomenology, thoughboth have much in common with these Heideggerian topics and could be ranked asbelonging to modern “Gnosticism,” according to the criteria established by Jonashimself.5 In the following, we will limit ourselves to the phenomenological aspects of theproblem and will point out in what sense Husserl’s transcendental approach -- crystallizedin the notion ofepoché-- could be considered an even more radical example of modern“Gnosticism” than Heidegger’s existential ontology. In the second part of this paper, wewill try to show how -- by assigning to transcendental phenomenology a leading functionin the teleological (but inner-worldly) achievements of humanity -- Husserl avoids thedisastrous 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 tendenciesessentially in the context of a theory of scientific thought. At least in its primary sense, therift between “naive belief” and “true knowledge,” between “fallen-ness” and “conversion”or “awakening,” does not divide into two forms of existence -- concerning all humanbeings alike -- but rather, into two fundamentally different ways of realizing the scientificideal 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 hecontinues to insist on Dasein’s particular mode of being, the philosophical concept of “world,” conceivedas 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 ofSt John or in St Augustine. See Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen des Grundes,” inWegmarken, GA9(Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1976), 144-145.

5 Concerning the gnostic structure of temporality, that is essentially based on the devaluation of thepresent in favor of the future and the past, one is astounded to read in Hermann Cohen’sLogik der reinenErkenntnisa passage that could almost have been taken for anante litteramquotation fromBeing andtime: “It is the future which contains and reveals the characteristics of time. The anticipated future isclosely followed and trailed by thepast. What comesfirst, is not the pastbut the future, against whichthe past stands out. … But then, where do we find thepresent, which we are used to think of as a fixedpoint? It is anything but that; ithoversbetween points in a row, a row formed from such fixed points, andconsists 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 sichdie Vergangenheit. Sie war nicht zuerst; sondern zuerst ist die Zukunft, von der sich die Vergangenheitabhebt. …Wo bleibt denn aber die Gegenwart, die man als den festen Punkt anzusehen pflegt? Sie istnichts weniger als dieses; sie schwebt in der Reihe, welche von jenen Punkten lediglich gebildet wird, siebesteht in dem Schweben zwischen der antizipierten Zukunft und deren Nachholung, deren Abklang, derVergangenheit.” Hermann Cohen,Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 2d ed. (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1914), 154-155; the translation is ours, the italics are Cohen’s.

222

From the very beginning, Husserl’s phenomenology is characterized by its oppositionto all kind of contemporary scientific reductionism. If the qualitative distinction betweenpure logic on the one hand, and applied logic or psychology on the other, is theleitmotivof the first part of hisLogical Investigations,6 his Ideas I establishes phenomenologyitself as an absolutely autonomous kind of science that differs both from formal logic andfrom the various material and formal ontologies which govern the object-regions of thenatural and the human sciences.7 The “region” proper to phenomenology is no longer justpart, a more or less fragmentary part, of a homogeneous extension: it is the result of aradical change in attitude with regard to the order of dependence between “pure con-sciousness” and the “world” as the totality of all possible objects. Whereas “reality,” inits broadest sense, is “purely nothing”8 apart from also being a phenomenon perceivedby consciousness, the immanent sphere of the pureego is radically heterogeneous anddifferent from everything that is “transcendent,” i.e., from everything that is not intrinsicto the act of consciousness itself.

The fundamental gnostic concepts ofkosmos, psychéand pneuma(or their GermanequivalentsWelt, SeeleandGeist) also play a key role in phenomenology; their signific-ation and mutual relationship, however, is slightly different from the classical gnosticschema. Though Husserl, on the one hand, does not fail to emphasize the differencebetween transcendental phenomenology and psychology as the science of the empiricalego, he maintains, on the other hand, an important distinction between empirical psych-ology and the rest of the natural sciences: both phenomenology and psychology deal withinternal perceptions, which, unlike the external objects of the natural sciences, are in-accessible to inter-subjective verification. Without relapsing into psychologism, Husserlgoes so far as to say that psychology is in a privileged relation to phenomenology, sinceall of its phenomena have their correlate in the sphere of pure subjectivity.9 Thus, insteadof the ancient dichotomykosmos / psyché versus pneuma, Husserl introduces a tripartitedivision by establishing first a distinction between the “natural” and the “intentional”before separating the intentionally structured, empirical subjectivity from the pureegowhosea priori structure includes the possibility, in equal measure, of being intentionallyrelated to transcendent or to transcendentally modified phenomena.

The radical asymmetry -- between the “immanent” and the “transcendent” within thesphere 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 differentrealms of phenomena. If “nature” does not mean anything in itself, but is the name givento 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 nomosor heimarmené,11 Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity is free of anycausal 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,HusserlianaXVIII (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), 44-62, §§ 13-16. (Henceforth quoted as Hua.)

7 See Edmund Husserl,Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischenPhilosophie, Erstes Buch, HusserlianaIII/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 transcendentphenomenality that can possibly be given to pure consciousness.13 In this sense, Husserl’spoint of view is even more radical than ancient dualism: for him, the “world,” from whichtranscendental subjectivity has to be distinguished, includes not only the whole of thematerial or cosmological universe but also the “ideal” sphere of intelligible -- i.e., mathe-matical 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 theknowing subject.14 Therefore, the “world,” in which theoretical subjectivity always riskslosing itself, does not coincide with the sum of all “external,” material things; it ispotentially present also within the sphere of subjectivity itself, under the disguise of animmanent, 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 theparticularity of transcendental phenomenology in terms that cannot be derived from a mereradicalization of fundamental scientific concepts. The “bracketing off” (Einklammerung)of the world and the empirical subject is much more than a temporary methodologicalstratagem that could be abandoned once transcendental phenomenology has accomplishedthe task of creating a new and definitive foundation for knowledge.15 If undertaking thisradical modification of attitude is a free -- and, to a certain degree, perhaps even an“irrational” -- decision,16 then, once theepochéhas been carried out, it has eliminatednot only the general thesis of our worldly existence, but also the very possibility of a realand 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 progressin profound ignorance of the innermost sense of their own activities, but one cannotrealize the possibility of a radically different approach to reality as given by theepochéand go on persisting in this innocent naïvety. The obligation imposed by theepochéis asineluctable 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 iscomparable 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 terminologythat reveals the quasi-religious dimension of phenomenological existence itself, incomparison 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 (TheHague: 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 notradically, and once and for all, committed to the particular profession of transcendental philosopher. SeeEdmund 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 inthe realm of pure spirit” (Kinder im Reich des reinen Geistes).21 These two modes ofbeing do not coexist in the common sphere of merely different but still comparableattitudes; the passage from the one to the other implies a change of paradigm that Husserldoes not hesitate to call by the Nietzschean name ofUmwertung(“reversal of values”).22

To neutralize a general theory about the world and the scientific attitude related to it, isin itself not a matter for neutrality or indifference, but one for taking up a stance, not withregard to the contents of a “thesis” or theory, or any other “conviction” whatsoever, butwith regard to the sense given by the philosophical subject to its own functional “I.” Byrecognizing itself as the primordial origin of any phenomenal sense, transcendentalconsciousness 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 somany incarnations of the old philosophical Adam, who has to die in order to be rebornin the stream of the transcendental life which incessantly springs from the centre ofabsolute consciousness.23

However universal the structures of transcendental subjectivity are intended to be,Husserl’s approach, inIdeas I, is still characterized by a rather elitist vision of pheno-menological rationality, as far as its concrete realization is concerned. Given the absenceof logical continuity between the methods used by the “worldly” sciences and those of thephenomenologicalepoché, the latter will necessarily be attained by a still further reducednumber of persons than the different forms of pre-transcendental theoretic knowledge. Inthis sense, the “philosophical conversion” involved in transcendental phenomenologyseems less akin to the authentically Christian notion of “rebirth” than to its gnostic equiv-alent, which considers itself as a form of knowledge reserved to the “illuminated few.”At the same time, despite the empirically small number of transcendental pheno-menologists, their work cannot simply be reduced to being ‘one activity among others.’Husserl’s indignation -- when he became aware that phenomenology was being charac-terized 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 non-phenomenological existence, a difference which Husserl conceives of as “the greatestpossible one.”25 Thus, the radical incompatibility of the phenomenologicalepochéwiththe value-system of the “natural,” “objective” attitude accounts both for the absoluteclaims made for transcendental phenomenology and the extreme rarity of its existentialrealization.

“Factual History” Versus “Hidden History”

During the “static” period of Husserl’s elaboration of phenomenology, the dualisticstructure of his approach concerns the sphere of subjectivity in its “transcendental

20 See Edmund Husserl,Natur und Geist, Hua XXXII (Dordrecht/ Boston/ London: KluwerAcademic Publishers, 2001), 7.

21 See Edmund Husserl,Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß. ZweiterTeil (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 concernsthe passage -- in the inner life of an individual subject -- from the “mundane” to the“transcendental” attitude. The history of humankind, however, and including the inter-subjective communities that exist in a variety of subordinate forms, are part of the “naturalworld” parenthesized by the transcendentalepoché. It is not until the 1920s that Husserlcomes to deal with the problem of history in a way which repeats, very much likeclassical Gnosticism, the dualism between “mere fact” and a “hidden significance,” on aglobal 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 andphilosophical thought. Nevertheless, he does not treat the history of science and ofphilosophy as a mere subset of the historical development of humankind in general. Thisapparently very restricted chapter of history concerns all human beings alike, its intrinsiclaw 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 isworth noting that the possibility of such a reading actually lies in his own phenomeno-logical approach, which appears to represent the crucial point in modern occidental philo-sophy.29 Transcendental phenomenology is not justone historical form of philosophyamong other forms of philosophy; it is the historically incarnated possibility of endowingthe history of thought with a sense that is more than the sum of its concrete, factualincarnations. Again, like in ancient Gnosticism, the event of “conversion” that enables thepneumatic neophyte to decrypt the “true,” hidden sense of history, is part of this historyitself 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 philosophicalapproaches and what holds this series together as a whole.

If the gnostic schema of parallelism between the principles of universal history andthose of individual existence also appears in Husserl, it nevertheless proceeds exactly inthe opposite direction. Whereas traditional Gnosticism considers the dualism betweenpsychéandpneuma(in human beings) as a reflection of the macrocosmic strife betweenthese two principles,31 Husserl projects the possible breakthrough of transcendentalreason -- in the single thinking subject -- onto the universal context of human history. Thisapproach 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 disastrousethical consequences as traditional Gnosticism. Where the “world” (including its “nothing-ness,” as arrived at from the viewpoint of thepneuma) is considered to be a pre-givenontological domain, the actions of the “pneumatic man” inside this worldly sphere becomecompletely irrelevant and are abandoned to arbitrariness. If, on the contrary, “world” isanother name for a certain form of horizontal finality in the self-presencing of phenomena

26 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 Phäno-

menologie, 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” anda static-ontological notion ofpneuma, in Husserl we have a still perfectly transcendentegowhich nevertheless recognizes in a dynamic-horizontal “world” a genuine, if limited,offspring of its own finality whose infinite openness exceeds the limits of individualthough transcendentally modified phenomena.

On Overcoming Transcendental Dualism: the Rational Generativity of History

Without giving up, at any time, the radicalism of the transcendentalepoché, Husserlsubsequently develops his phenomenological approach in a way that can no longer beconsidered a modern version of ancient Gnosticism. His approach to the question of inter-subjectivity, as well as his concept of historical time and the role of the divine in thecontext of human history, give much scope to showing up the differences which, in theend, actually do separate Husserl from the traditional forms of philosophical dualism. Inthis context, one of the basic concepts of phenomenology undergoes an important semanticshift: the initially purely theoretic meaning of “world” as synonymous with the totality ofnatural beings no longer occupies the position of theanalogatum primariumfor everypossible kind of phenomenality. WhileIdeas Iconsidered natural objectivity as the mostfundamental and essential form of the givenness of phenomena to the subject,32 the laterHusserl 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 stepproves 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 developthe idea of an original relation between transcendental subjectivity and the “world”without having to deny to the pureego 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 inconferring upon the notion of “organism” a meaning that goes clearly beyond the purelynatural dimension of this term. Indeed, Husserl’s analyses of the different forms of humaninter-subjectivity largely make use of the organic paradigm in order to express both theparticular interplay between the parts and the whole and the teleological character of theirchronological development.

According to the gnostic schema, the common tripartite distinction between body, souland spirit is meant to indicate the complete strangeness of thepneumato the rest of theindividual. 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, DritterTeil (1929-1935), Hua XV (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 300, and Husserl,Die Krisis der europäischenWissenschaften 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 einereale, 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 thedifferent super-individual entities. This principle is not only applied to inter-subjectivestructures -- 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 abook has something like a “double-sided bodily-spiritual objectivity” (zweiseitigekörperlich-geistige Gegenständlichkeit),35 Husserl insists on the fundamental differencebetween artefacts and objects pertaining to the realm of inanimate nature. This does notmean, of course, that he upholds a kind of animism with regard to products of culture. Ifthe book is said to have a “soul” or a “spirit,” this amounts to saying that its property ofbeing a cultural object cannot be perceived in the same way as its physical qualities butonly “apperceived” analogously with our empathetic apperception of the psychical sphereof another subject.36 This analogy between the “animated body” (Leibkörper) of a humanindividual and the “body of sense” (Sinneskörper)37 of a cultural product is neitherarbitrary nor merely poetic. A cultural object can be credited with a “soul” insofar as itappresents analter ego, i.e., another human being whose sphere of consciousnessnecessarily implies a spatiotemporally individuated, bodily existence which, in its ownturn, tends to express itself and to find its continuation in artefacts, i.e., in objects whosemere perception already carries in itself a sort of universalizing finality that exceeds andsupplants 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 oftasks, within humankind, and thus indicate the necessity for collaboration from all humanbeings with a view to their self-conservation. Nevertheless, the “organic,” “bodily”character of cultural objects cannot be reduced to their functional contribution tomankind’s biological persistence in an infinitely repeated “now.” In virtue of theirparticular intrinsic intentionality, cultural objects inaugurate a form of phenomenologicaltemporality that is no longer subject to the dominance of the present. Just as the absentcraftsman or artist in his particular historical world horizon endows the object in questionwith the dimension of the past and hence of tradition, the universal concept underlying thespecific finality of the artefact implies the possibility of its being used successively by avirtually infinite number of different persons -- a feature that projects the essence of thecultural object out of the present of its natural, physical givenness toward the future of itsteleological 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 commonplaceof traditional political philosophy. Nevertheless, Husserl draws a distinction betweenorganisms of a higher order, whose teleology is confined to mere self-conservation, andinter-subjective structures, which are endowed not only with a certain unity of conscious-ness, but also with the will to affirm themselves -- in the pursuit of a goal which is notalready an intrinsic part of their own essential determinations. Only structures of this kindmerit, apart from the name “organisms,” also that of “persons” or “personalities” of ahigher order.38 Among these inter-subjective entities, the “state” constitutes a limiting

35 Edmund Husserl,Phänomenologische Psychologie, Hua IX (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962), 111.36 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 derIntersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß. Zweiter Teil, 206; 220; 406; idem,Zur Phänomenologie derIntersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß. Dritter Teil, 154, footnote 1, and Husserl,Aufsätze und

228

case, since its existence depends at least partially on the natural tie of biologicalgeneration, while its concrete form and development are no longer determined by naturebut subject to political decisions.39 This double characteristic reveals the borderlinebetween natural generation, which consists in the diachronic process of reproduction ofindividuals of the same species, and another, non-biological form of “generativity,” whichrefers to the transmission of the collective human consciousness, whose contents arecontinually enriched and transformed by means of historical memory and tradition.

The application of the concept of “organism” to cultural and inter-subjective entitiesresults in a fragmentation and multiplication of the phenomenological notion of “world.”This concept no longer denotes, in its primary sense, the homogeneous, totalizing horizonof sensible phenomena, but rather, the horizon of comprehension ofany kind ofphenomenon 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 theunifying notion of “the” world, which, however, is neither an actual totality nor a pre-given horizon of totality,41 but the idea of an active overcoming of the limited “environ-mental worlds” (Umwelten) by a graduated approximation of human subjectivity to theinfinite ideal of transcendental reason.42

In the case of artefacts, the teleological openness was still limited to the regionallydetermined finality of each cultural product. In a similar way, the teleology of“organisms” and “personalities of a higher order” remained inside a finite horizon ofdevelopment, according to their specific and more or less universal goal. For the teleologyto be infinite, it has to refer, not to this or that domain of rationally guided, humanactivity, but to rationality as such, in the plenitude of its historical development. And forHusserl, this new insight implies the necessity of reformulating his own approach oftranscendental phenomenology in terms that take into account the essentially historical,generative dimension of human rationality without ever renouncing reason’s claim touniversality.

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, pastfacts -- was considered a mere “spectacle” (Darbietung) like art and poetry, whose onlyutility consists in providing our imagination with the largest possible number of eideticvariations 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 onehand, 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 derIntersubjektivität. 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 Phänomeno-

logie, Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, 310, and idem,Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjek-tivität. 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 otheregos, who appear to him, in a way,to be irreducible to theoretic intentionality. When considered from this perspective, thehistory of mankind is no longer a series of philosophically neutral, factual events. Byintegrating the different forms of finite teleology (art, religion, regional sciences, politicalstructures, etc.) into the open horizon of an asymptotic ideal of rationality, Husserl doesmore than trace back the regionalized historical manifestations of the spirit to theircommon source. What is in question here, is not the mere extensional generality of theguiding principle of history, but its formala priori necessity. Husserl’s interpretation ofhuman history as the gradual breakthrough of the ideal of transcendental reason is notlimited to what the progressive unfolding of thoughthas in fact been like, within theboundaries of European culture and philosophy, but is essentially concerned with whathuman reasonought to be, as seen from the absolute viewpoint of its ultimate ethical andpractical fulfillment. Hence, the facticity of the past is no longer something thattranscendental phenomenology is entitled to neglect or to parenthesize. Historicalphenomena have to be considered, not as perceptible empirical facts, but as factualinstances of an only apperceptible but ethically obligatory, transcendental ideal.

As we have already pointed out, this concept of a “hidden” aspect of history bears astrong resemblance to the gnostic dualism between a “foreground” and a “background”dimension of historical events. This formal analogy, however, is no longer valid where thefuture dynamics of history are concerned. As Husserl sees it, the “hidden” aspect of philo-sophical history is not essentially and permanently hermetic. Indeed, his interpretation ofhistory as the gradual coming-to-light of a universal principle aims at showing this veryprinciple not as a pre-given, ineluctable law, but as an idea constituted by transcendentalreason itself.47 Knowing what constitutes the hidden motor of history is not a matter ofan inexplicable personal “call” or “illumination,” coming from outside and setting therecipient apart from the non-illuminated masses, once and for all. With Husserl, the dis-tinction between those “who know” and those who do not is not ontologically founded butmerely functional. Although initially articulated only by Husserl himself, and then onlyby a small following of phenomenologists, his insight into the secret, transcendentalmotivation within the history of occidental philosophy is considered to be potentiallyattainable by every human being, since it consists in nothing beyond an articulation of thegenerative structures of reason -- by reason itself, when considered from the viewpoint ofits final perfection.

The main difference between this approach and that of the earlier Husserl concerns theconcrete determination of “absoluteness” and “infinity,” with which transcendental reasonis now credited: whereas inIdeas I the carrying-out of theepoché-- by individualphilosophers was considered to be the only requirement for bringing out the unvaryingstructures of virtually any, even the divine rationality,48 the later Husserl no longer placesthe infinite telosof absolute rationality within reach of the transcendentally singularized,philosophical subject. Once the essence of rationality is located not only in the subject-pole of noetic activity but also in the noematic object-pole of the historical intentionalityof human consciousness, the idea of transcendental phenomenology itself requires aprogressive, inter-subjective realization in the sphere of a virtually perfect, rationalcommunity. As Husserl himself puts it: “I, isolated as I am in my finiteness, cannot getfar in knowing infinities. Philosophy is a task of infinite cognition within the infinitude of

46 See Husserl,Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, 230.47 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.

230

humankind.”49 With regard to Husserl’s earlier insistence on the purely formal,performative character of transcendental subjectivity,50 one is somewhat taken aback byseeing him define philosophy as a knowledge whose infinity refers to both the intrinsicdynamism and the more or less remote object of its teleological movement.

The need for actualizing an ideal, transcendental inter-subjectivity proves that, thoughthe phenomenologist has to renouncechildhoodwith regard to a transcendentally unmodifiedworld, he does not have the right to refusecitizenshipin the all-encompassing world-horizon of mankind. In other words: the radical, apparently Manichean separation betweenthe “transcendentally purified” and the “worldly” attitude becomes pointless, whentranscendental philosophers recognize themselves as the first-born of a community ofrational subjects, whose infinite task consists in the asymptotic assimilation of everypossible kind of transcendent phenomenality with a variety of essentially inter-subjective,transcendental constitutions.51 If transcendental philosophers can be called “functionariesof humanity,”52 this means that they are the first to realize that there is no need forhuman subjects to separate themselves from the world, provided that they re-assign tothemselves the origin of the phenomenal sense of “nature,” “culture,” “society,” etc. Totranscendental reason (in its historical dimension), the very notion of “alienation” -- andhence the necessity of regaining the original “integrity” by cutting oneself off from theinner-worldly sphere -- becomes not wrong but simply meaningless. Indeed, the infinitelyopen horizon for the development of human reason even allows for the constitution ofthose most universal forms of phenomenality which cannot possibly be derived from thepartial 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 elementin 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 separationdo not shrink from taking away from God (considered as the principle of the Good) thequality of Creator with respect to the material world, his activity as sovereign Maker beingrestricted to the realm of pure spirits.

In truth, Husserl is one of the few philosophers who fully separate the philosophicalnotion of God from the idea of causality.54 Far more radical than Kant, on this point, hedoes not simply deny to the cosmological argument its coercive quality: the very notionof God as Creator of the natural world is not even mentioned by him as a possibility orby way of an hypothesis. During the “static” period of his transcendental phenomenology,characterized by the radical application of theepochéto every form of positive, “thetic”facticity, the question concerning the “origin” or “ground” of natural, empirical existenceis of course quite meaningless and therefore remains outside his consideration. Yet,without ever analyzing the pre-transcendental mode of natural existence (from theviewpoint 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.” EdmundHusserl,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 hypotheticdivine consciousness.55 The absolute ineluctability of the transcendental structures ofconsciousness with regard to sense perceptions seems to deprive even the potential ideaof a divine being of the possibility that this divine being might have an intuition that isnot only “original” but “originating,” i.e., “creative.”

Concerning God’s relationship with the already “existing” world, however, Husserldoes 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 adifferent sense than the noematic transcendence of phenomena inside the sphere of pureconsciousness or the simple negation of mundane phenomenality as a whole.56 If God is notpart 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 empiricalegos.57

In the context of Husserl’s transcendental interpretation of history, this merelyfunctional, non-factual notion of God undergoes a noticeable modification. On the onehand, God is still defined in relation to human consciousness, and never with regard toa “nature” of any kind. As internalentelecheia-- i.e., as the governing principle -- ofhuman reason in its history, God is the “sovereign” in the kingdom of transcendentalsubjects. On the other hand, Husserl does not simply make God coincide with the meredynamic of humanity’s progress toward transcendental reason. Given the double, noetic-noematic structure inside the historical intentionality of reason, the notion of God is at thesame 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’sintention and fulfillment, the “transcendence” of the divine is, if not altogether overcome,constantly diminished by the asymptotic realization of a perfectly rational form of humansociality. Here, the difference from the gnostic division of reality is quite obvious: insteadof opening up an abyss -- first between God and the world, and then between the worldand human beings -- the later Husserl tries to bring these three instances as closelytogether as possible by interpreting them as so many eidetic variations of the genetic-historical intentionality of transcendental reason.

The perspective of a theo-teleological perfection of mankind by means of tran-scendental rationality, confers upon the temporality of history a meaning that is radicallyopposed to the gnostic interpretation. If on the one hand, Husserl seems to credit tran-scendental 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 propheticundertones in his reading of the historical present,60 Husserl never goes as far asconsidering history as a history of original disaster. His approach is in no way centeredupon an “unforethinkable” past, be this initial moment of history identified with anoriginal 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), 116-117.56 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.

232

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 imperfec-tions and shortcomings of human life to an original principle of “evil.” Inside transcen-dental phenomenology, “evil” has no name other than that of a provisional inadequacybetween the present state of human consciousness and its foreshadowed, but never actuallyfulfilled, intention. This “de-cosmologization” of evil, however, does in no way diminishits phenomenological reality and ethical impact. Whatever abyss may be observablebetween factual human behavior and the transcendental ideal of human reason, its origincomes within the limits of the sphere of subjectivity itself, and apart from the insufficienttranscendental élan of human consciousness, there is no one, or nothing that could beblamed by human conscience.

Telos and Kairos: History of Thought and History of Humanityin the Later Philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger

At this point in our reflections on Husserl’s phenomenological reading of history, wewould like to conclude with remarking on a few of the resemblances and differencesbetween his approach and the later Heidegger’s conception of the “history of Being,”whose possible gnostic dimension -- given the posthumous publication of the correspondingHeidegger manuscripts -- could not be commented upon by Jonas himself.

Having dedicated himself, inBeing and Time, to the destruction of the fundamentalconcepts of the ontological and metaphysical tradition, the Heidegger of the late 1930s isno longer committed to reading the history of occidental philosophy as the history of themanifold forms of a “forgetfulness of Being,” within the different relevant Schools ofPhilosophy or Philosophical movements. The very fact of philosophy having forgotten thequestion of “Being itself” is no longer considered to be a matter of subjective, philo-sophical shortcomings, in fact the history of occidental metaphysics is even accorded somesort of inherent “truth,” insofar as its different approaches to thinking the “Being ofbeings” -- or ‘Being’, in a merely functional, onto-theo-logical, key -- is recognized as anadequate 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, notto the development of philosophy itself, but to an apparently “hidden”63 principle, wefind that philosophical rationality has not constituted itself, and Heidegger does what hecan -- or so it seems -- to justifyaprès coupthe charge of latent Gnosticism, asformulated by Jonas. Indeed, the problem is no longer limited to showing a structuraldualism with respect to Dasein’s ontological status, rather, it concerns the possibility ofa radical elimination of human responsibility in the name of the global principle of whatis hidden and nevertheless compelling (das verborgen Zwingende).64

61 See (for instance in: Husserl,Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922-1937), 4) Husserl’s disapproval of thefatalistic 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 theHeidegger of the 1930s gradually tries to develop a philosophical notion of God withouthaving recourse to the traditional concepts and schemata of natural theology. His readingof 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 Onthe one hand, the conception of this “ultimate God” reveals a strongly eschatologicalcharacter; on the other hand, the dimension of certainty -- or even that of a more or lessgreat probability -- for this manifestation to take place, is completely ruled out byconceiving the coming of this God as a sudden and unforeseeable “event.” Despite theneed 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 divineis not a future ideal human reason, or even the thought of Being as “event” -- couldgradually come nearer. Even though, during the 1950s, Heidegger explicitly reintegrateshis notion of the divine into the context of the “world” as the finite yet all-encompassingframe 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 notionof the divine, the more it seems to constitute asui generisform of the “event,” withoutany necessary relation to the future history of thought and the empirical development ofmankind. 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 tothe 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 matterof constitutive thought but of poetry. Within the frame of this poetic foundation of theworld, philosophy is not only separate from the ideal of asymptotic infinity, but proceedsunder 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 ofhuman 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 withregard to the possibilities of reason. There is no need for a rupture with respect to themetaphysical tradition of the past. On the contrary, what is at stake is the definitivecoming-to-light of the transcendental principle whose dynamic already underlies the pre-transcendental forms of European philosophy. Husserl’s view is profoundly marked by theidea of an asymptotic infinity, the essential mortality of animal monads73 -- being nomore than the necessary stimulus to join the non-empirical, immortal life of transcendental

65 See Martin Heidegger,Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in diephänomenologische 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 transzendentalePhänomenologie, Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, 338.

234

reason.74 To the degree in which humanity conforms itself to this rational ideal, thephenomenological God cannot fail to become real; God’s appearance depends exclusivelyon the future development of reason, while the question of concrete forms of humanlanguage is confined to the contingent domain of the “home-world” (Heimwelt).75

During their later years of thinking, both Husserl and Heidegger show a markedtendency toward an originary “ethics,” developed from within a singular re-reading of thehistory of occidental philosophy. But, whereas the idea of a perfect community of rationalsubjects 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 idealrealm of rational beings. In Husserl’s eyes, the teleological realization of a transcendentalcommunity of human beings is in itself a warrant for the constitution of a world in perfectharmony with the requirements of reason. For Heidegger, the “world as ‘event’” is entirelydependent on the poetic foundation of language, which, given the exceptional characterof poetic existence, can at any moment fail and withdraw.

For Husserl, the historical time of transcendental rationality -- especially that whichconcerns the future -- is permeated with a non-empirical dynamic, which, despite alldifficulties and contingent obstacles, cannot fail to carry humanity toward its teleologicalfulfillment. The facticity of this historical process is nothing other than the garb of finitudethat will gradually be undone by philosophical reason, in direct proportion to its growingapproximation to the ideal of a divinized, i.e., fully rational, humanity. The phenomeno-logical God knows no time than the time of philosophical reason, and, if it is true thattranscendental reason can at most approach its divine ideal asymptotically, it can also besure that the God will not tear or break into the tissue of the rational progress that hasalready been achieved. Being finite only in its need for factual, historical progress, tran-scendental phenomenology never runs the risk of losing its past results. Inside the Janus-like, finite-infinite structure of thought, the weight shifts continually from the balance-scale of finitude to that of infinity -- an infinity that already gilds the past, that is, thehistorical 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 philosophicalthoughtandthe divine in the key of a discontinuous, non-progressive and non-cumulativetemporality. The discontinuous, incalculable structure of time, which Heidegger assignsto both the philosophical and the theological dimension of thought, is a hallmark of radicalfinitude -- 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 acomplete arbitrariness of human behavior, then one is bound to conclude that both Husserland Heidegger, having both come perilously near the region of structural philosophicaldualism, struggle to overcome this danger by trying to establish a relation between theessence of philosophy and the manifestation of the divine in the historical context ofhuman life in the world. This relation, however, will always remain frail, since neither theconstitutive, genetic approach of transcendental rationality, nor the concept of world andGod as so many forms of the “event,” will ever convey the same existential certainty asthe static ontological categories of the ancient Gnostic worldview.

74 Ibid., 332.75 Husserl,Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, Dritter Teil (1929-

1935), 224-225.

235

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 Sciencesand Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl is generally acknowledged to have led hisphenomenological project into a somewhat new direction, a more historical and perhapshermeneutic direction.1 Phenomenology is here introduced from within an historicalaccount of the evolution of philosophy in the modern times, starting with Galileo andDescartes. But, more important than the factual historical content of the presentation, isHusserl’s emphasizing that phenomenology must understand itself from within such anhistorical context; it cannot assert its radicalism without a certain historical consciousness,transformed into aSelbstbesinnung.2 On the face of it, this seems to indicate a radicaldeparture from the standpoint developed until then, and most recently in theCartesianMeditations, where the primacy of the phenomenological reflection is confirmed withoutany such detours.

In an early essay on Husserl’s understanding of history, Paul Ricoeur -- in a very clear-sighted manner -- raised the question of the status of historical reflection within Husserlianphenomenology.3 He showed there, how it grows partly from a personal disillusionmentwith the contemporary historical situation, but also how it arises from within the pheno-menological project itself. He notices how, in one sense, the historical considerations arenothing but a natural and parallel extension of the reflexive philosophy which had alreadybeen achieved on the interior level (pp. 299-300). Ricoeur carefully displays some of theproblems and inner workings of this historical extension, and towards the very end of hisessay, he makes a few remarks which make up the starting point for my reflections in thepresent essay. There he focuses on what he holds to be the principal enigma of Husserl’sdiscussion inThe Crisis, viz., the relation between the individual reflectingcogito in theshape 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 isencompassed.” (p. 314) This paradoxical notion, which operates throughoutThe Crisis,is not explicitly treated within the context of that same work. However, according toRicoeur, its clues are to be found elsewhere, viz., in the Husserlian analysis of thestructure 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 asCrisis. The evaluations of the larger implications for phenomenology andHusserl’s own self-interpretation have widely differed. For a brief summary of the discussion up until thelate sixties, cf. Carr’s introduction to the translation, xxx-xxxi. For a very recent monograph on thisparticular work, see James Dodd,Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the EuropeanSciences(Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2004).

2 Carr translates this expressive German notion as “self-understanding” and Dorion Cairns, in histranslation of theCartesian Meditations, as “self-examination.” Edmund Husserl,Cartesian Meditations,trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1988). However, neither of these alternatives is reallyable to bring out the full meaning of a thorough coming-to-terms-with and grasping oneself that is impliedby the original expression.

3 Paul Ricoeur, “Husserl et le sens de l’histoire,”Revue de métaphysique et morale54 (1949): 280-316.

236

worked on all along his later philosophical period (i.e., following theLogical Investigations),and which found its most famous expression in the fifth of theCartesian Meditations.4

Referring to the latter text, Ricoeur writes: “this eruption toward the ‘foreign’ in thevery 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 itsclarification. In following this path, we have an opportunity to reflect on what it meansfor Husserl and orthodox phenomenology to widen its scope toward a hermeneuticphilosophy, 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 themanuscripts that make upThe Crisis, and in many ways it catches the spirit of this workin a condensed and slightly popularized way. I will use it here as a sort of introduction tothe problem I wish to discuss.

The principal idea of Husserl’s lecture is to present Europe as a unitary spiritual formin imminent danger of losing its own direction. The notion of “spiritual form,” which iselaborated to some extent, is said to denote a historical community bound together by acommon goal. In the case of Europe, this community must be seen as more than just anyother spiritual constellation which has inhabited the earth. What is significant about thisparticular form, is that it is bound together by the idea of what Husserl calls an “infinitetask.” The ultimate expression of this task isscienceand the corresponding “theoreticalattitude” to the world. This project has its historical origin -- viz., the Greek culture as ittook shape in the sixth and fifth century B.C. -- but from then on its status is that of a univer-sality which inevitably transgresses every national and cultural border. It distinguishesitself from any other cultural expression or praxis, precisely in this autonomy with respectto time and place. It represents a certain maturity of mankind, which in the decision toknow itself and its world takes on the responsibility for its own cultivation. The goal of thisscientific attitude is “absolute responsibility,” but as an infinite task of internal critique ofits own life. In other words, it is the original establishment of a community of truth andrationality 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 naturalevents. The task of philosophy, in this situation, is to articulate a true understanding of thespirit 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 constitutionof the other and the notion of “empathy,” and the three volumes of published manuscripts concerning inter-subjectivity:Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Husserliana, vols. XIII-XV. The amount of workwhich Husserl devoted to this subject is quite remarkable, and thus it is no coincidence that the last andlongest of the meditations in theCartesian Meditations(which was meant to serve as an introduction tohis 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 re-flections and the problem of history within phenomenology in general; e.g, David Carr’sPhenomenologyand the Problem of History(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press 1974), Ludwig Landgrebe’sPhänomenologie und Geschichte(Güterloh: Güterloh Verlagshaus, 1967), and also Jacques Derrida’s intro-duction inL’origine de la géometrie(Paris: P.U.F., 1962). In more recent years, the topic has been raisedagain by, among others, Renato Cristin, in hisFenomeno storia: fenomenologia e storicità in Husserl eDilthey (Napoli: Guida, 1999). However, to my knowledge no one has yet further developed the particularpoint 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 thespirit 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, presentedin a non-specialist context. Husserl simply states, in his particular version, what anyserious general philosophical theory, secure in its own outlook, would try to do in a similarsituation: he presents a historical context and an analysis of what he perceives to be a seriousspiritual problem, and from there he suggests in what way his own philosophical attitudecould serve as a liberating therapy. But in the particular case of phenomenology, such ashallow understanding of the intentions of the author is not sufficient. What is said andsuggested, in this public lecture, in fact stems from the deepest layers of the phenomeno-logical project, in ways I will now try to develop.

First of all, Husserl’s language in this lecture immediately strikes one as surprisingly non-phenomenological. 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. Onthe other hand, the underlying scheme remains very much the same. “Objectivism” needonly be replaced with the “natural attitude,” and the whole discussion of the need for a cer-tain change in attitude (in understanding the spirit) with that of the need for a transcen-dental turn. Finally “spirit” could in this context very easily be substituted for “transcendentalsubjectivity,” and immediately the continuity would appear obvious.

Other authors have already pointed out that, what seems to be operating throughout thewritings connected toThe Crisisis a peculiar new kind of reduction, closely affiliated withthe transcendental reduction but arising from a different context, viz., what David Carrcalls an “historical reduction.”8 Phenomenology had already, from its early beginning, de-fined itself as a radical reflection, seeking legitimacy in its determination and ability toattain a truly original stratum of experience of pure givenness, where every unreflected pre-supposition was to be set aside, in favor of an account of how things manifest themselvesin noematic variation. This ambition found its formal expression in the transcendental orphenomenologicalepochéor reduction, by means of which the reflecting ego -- to use theformulation of theCartesian Meditations-- “posits exclusively himself as the acceptance-basis of all Objective acceptances and bases.”9

The principal target of the transcendental turn is the so-called “natural attitude,” inwhich the ego does not perceive itself as the ultimate acceptance-basis, but rather as onlyone among many psychic egos inhabiting the world. The reduction transforms this self-understanding of the personal ego by means of a fundamental gestalt-shift. Suddenly all fac-ticity, which was up till then seen as existingin itself, is encountered as sense and validityfor the intending ego. What was hitherto perceived as external transcendency, suddenlyappears as immanent transcendency, and the former isolated psychic ego is at once dis-closed 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 materialobjects, accessible to experience. Once they are seen as appearing within the field of in-tentional subjectivity, their givenness can be interpreted and explicated in a new fashion.But how much does the reduction claim to encompass? In §11 of theCartesian Medita-tions, Husserl expresses himself in the following way: “That I, with my life, remain un-touched in my existential status, regardless of whether or not the world exists.”10

8 Carr,Phenomenology and the Problem of History, 117.9 Husserl,Cartesian Meditations, 26.10 Ibid.

238

If thus the world in its entirety is affected by the reduction, then obviously it affectsthe 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 differentlevels. In one sense, “pastness” should pose no particular problem to phenomenology. Onthe contrary, the theory provides exemplary means to analyze the intentional structure ofthe flow of time, its dialectic of presence and absence, etc., which was demonstratedvividly already in the early lectures on internal time consciousness.11 Yet time and tem-porality constitute perhaps the most serious threat to the self-assertion of phenomenology.Husserl raises the question himself, when he asks, inCartesian Meditations: “Does nottranscendental subjectivity at any given moment include its own past as an inseparablepart, which is accessible only by way of memory?”12

This question seems to open up an abyss in the center of the whole project. Thereduction has disclosed the field of transcendental subjectivity as a fundamental ground,from which all human experience can be assessed and explicated as to its intentionalstructure. But with the continuous passing of time, this very same ground seems to haveaccess not even to itself, except indirectly (like any other empirical subjectivity) throughmemory.

From this sketchy background one can see how the phenomenological project, as aresult of its ambitions to reach a radicalSelbstbesinnung, carries with it an inner momen-tum, so to speak, which forces it, at one point or another, to face the necessity of a reduc-tion operating not only on the World but also on history, as the history of transcendentalsubjectivity itself. And it is from this viewpoint that one can affirm, with Ricoeur andothers, the continuity of Husserl’s reflections as they are presented in the Vienna lecture.Somehow the voice of transcendental subjectivity, speaking from within the individualphilosopher, must claim to have a privileged access to the past, in order to be persistentin its original ambition.

The next step in my argument is to look at some of the problems and conflicts whichseem 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? Thisis the question I now wish to turn to, by initially looking at some of the general ways inwhich phenomenology classifies the given.

The phenomenological description operates from within the stream of transcendentalsubjectivity, 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 (derGegenstand überhaupt), but from there on down, one can distinguish any number of moreparticular types, such as formal, material, animal, etc. Every object has its own mode ofgivenness, and as such it signifies a rule-structure of transcendental subjectivity, which canbe displayed in intentional analysis.13

The most easily exemplified mode of presentation is of course the visible physicalobject, 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 isalways an alternative perspective to be taken, from which they can be viewed. This, how-ever, does not diminish their accessibility in any essential way. It is part of their meaningthat whatever is absent from one perspective can be made present from another, or bymeans of some manipulation of which I am (in principle) capable.

The situation is somewhat different, when it comes to that which is not immediatelypresent, but only indirectly so through memory. The time which has passed can never be

11 Cf. Husserliana, vol. X.12 Husserl,Cartesian Meditations, 22.13 Ibid., § 21.

239

brought as such into the present, it is essentially tainted by an uncertainty. It has whatHusserl calls a “presumptive” character, meaning thereby that it presents itself as inprinciple not fully presentable.14 But precisely this presumptivity constitutes the particular“horizon” of expectations and possible transformations which surrounds it. With the notionof 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 sur-rounding the givenness of the material object (in all its possible transformations) and theinaccessibility of the past given in memory. The present has a distinct way of receivingand 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 timespast, the experience of the other person involves a certain “absence.” The other is nevergiven to us in evident intuition, as a natural object of experience. Only the body of theother is present in this way, but the sense of his being as an other person is neverexhausted by this bodily presence. This fact never leads Husserl to raise the traditionalphilosophical question of how one can really know that there is actually someone “inthere.” Such a question already presupposes a distinct division between objective andspiritual being, and how they are linked, a presupposition which should have been elim-inated with the transcendental reduction. But even in the reduced state, the contrast re-mains. There remains something about the way the other is presented to me, which seemsto 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, notas the inaccessible side of the material object, which is always potentially presentable. Forit is given only in, what Husserl calls, “appresentation.” In a sense, this is a parallel to thesituation 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 lacksthe peculiar phenomenological sense of that which is truly other. The transcendental fieldsplits, at this point, in a “division into the sphere of his ownness ... and the sphere of whatis ‘other.’”16

Instead of probing deeper into the detailed analysis of the different levels of sense throughwhich 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 ofThe Crisis, this question does not seem to have been raised assuch, i.e., as a phenomenological problem in its own right. In § 15, where one finds per-haps the most condensed account of the whole project of an historicalSelbstbesinnung,the access to history (and its true interpretation) are taken for granted. The methodologicalquestions 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 theunity of history.”17

Still, I believe there is such an answer to be found from within the phenomenologicalhorizon, and I will take the risk of suggesting what it could be.

Initially, one must distinguish the different levels on which the phenomenon of historyappears. 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 Imyself have experienced. It is preserved by means of memories and material souvenirs,

14 Ibid., §9.15 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.

240

including the personal body, with its scars and wrinkles. This history is the infinitehorizon of the, in principle, re-enactable experiences of my personal past. The other his-tory is that of others, either singular or in communion, or of a community consisting ofmyself and others. It necessarily includes experiences which I have never had. To thishistory, I stand in a mediated relationship. It is given to me, initially, as a story told bysomebody else about how it was or what happened. Thereafter, I can of course, to a grea-ter or lesser extent, try to find out for myself what actually took place. But whichever wayI go about this, the knowledge will be mediated by some kind of cultural object; a manu-script 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 bymeans 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 suchsomething learned from another by means of a signifying act. And this is, of course, par-ticularly true of the philosophical-scientific history of which Husserl speaks inThe Crisis.History is the life of others, mediated to me by means of signifying objects that were com-posed by others. History, I would dare to say, is essentially other.

But if this is the case, how can phenomenological reflection expect to have directaccess 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 intheir otherness, as essentially non-present, how could it possibly get around this situationin the case when the other appears as history? In order to address these questions I thinkit is necessary to look again, more closely, at the structure of the transcendental ego thatis 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 thestructure of intersubjectivity. The transcendental is intersubjective; it represents a level ofconstituting subjectivity in which every human being partakes and to which everyone, atleast 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 notin the name of himself, but in the name of any possible human center of experience, ex-posed to any possible other human being. In a sense, this is obvious, but it is still impor-tant to keep in mind. For, the question at issue -- viz., the possibility of a phenomeno-logical philosophy of history -- points precisely to the problematic notion of a center ofreflection.

When the other appears within the sphere of ownness, it is always as a “there,” asanother possible center of reflection. This other center is one which I, from my centeredpoint of view, could in principle occupy as another possible orientation. In this sense, theother is another I. His perspective of the world is in principle open to me, as just anotherversion of my own. And yet he (or she), in his (or her) sphere of ownness, is notpresentable 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 tofulfillment by presentation.

On the face of it, this reflexivity is perfectly consistent and in line with the generalattitude of phenomenological analysis. Phenomenology concerns itself with essentialstructures 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 certainproblems with regard to the relation between the individual ego and transcendentalsubjectivity. Before the relation to the other is brought up, it is not necessary to dis-tinguish 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 obtainsaccess to the elementary levels of constituting subjectivity. And speaking in the reducedstate, 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. Everyrational human being has part in this structure, and anybody (who is sufficiently trainedin reflective thinking) can articulate it.

But, with the introduction of the theme of the other person, this structure is immediatelymade more problematic. The other constitutes, so to speak, a gap or a void within tran-scendental subjectivity itself. The aspect of the other, which can not be made present frommy subjective point of view, is precisely their subjectivity. This subjectivity, which to meis 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 can-not be realized or fulfilled in the same individual subject at the same time. I cannot fail tohave 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 re-duced intuition there is a distinct stratum of experience whose meaning is never immed-iately given, viz., the content of the other’s mind. By means of analogical representation Ican 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 samecertainty as my own inner experiences.

Thus one could actually say that the transcendental ego produces from within itself anunsurpassable level of uncertainty, which is experienced as a certain absence or lack ofpresence in human encounters. This, in turn, points to a further question: to what extentdoes this unsurpassable uncertainty contaminate experiences that are not directly ex-periences of the other person as present in the visual field of the ego? The other can be pre-sent in mediated ways, e.g., in the form of a written statement or a material creation of somesort. In all such cases, the ego encounters a bodily manifestation of some kind, whichpoints beyond itself to a known or unknown alien subjectivity, from whose internalhorizon the ego is essentially excluded. Ultimately, the whole of nature is colored by thisalien subjectivity, something which Husserl readily recognizes, when he speaks of an everpresent “appresentational stratum,” viz., “the same natural Object in its possible modes ofgivenness to the other Ego.”19

It is with these considerations in mind that I now wish to turn back to the problem ofhistory and the possibility of a historicalSelbstbesinnung. If history is indeed the bodilyand spiritual activities of other people, as reported and inherited by means of signifyingobjects, what are the possibilities of a radical unifying intuition of this heritage?

In one of the introductory paragraphs ofThe Crisis, entitled “The ideal of universalphilosophy and the process of its inner dissolution,” Husserl speaks of his philosophicalattempt as on a par with that great movement of a “humanity struggling to understanditself.”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 wasoriginally and always sought in philosophy, what was continually sought by all the philo-sophers and philosophies.”22

I have tried to argue that these extremely general claims, bold as they are, are naturallygenerated from within the original ambitions of phenomenology. Now it must be shown

19 Husserl,Cartesian Meditations, 125.20 Husserl,The Crisis of the European Sciences, 14.21 Ibid.22 Ibid., 18.

242

how they complicate certain other key findings of phenomenological analysis in the theoryof 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 notonly marks the beginning of the modern philosophy of nature, but he also enacts the veryblindness which is immediately present in this development. Galileo, in Husserl view, wasnot aware of the full implications of his work. Therefore he must, in a sense, be deconstruc-ted. Or, as Husserl himself puts it:

In order to clarify the formation of Galileo’s thought we must accordingly reconstructnot only what consciously motivated him. It will also be instructive to bring to lightwhat was implicitly included in his guiding model of mathematics, even though, be-cause of the direction of his interest, it was kept from his view: as a hidden presup-posed 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’sassessment and criticism of Galileo and the ensuing philosophy of nature. Husserl’s grandover-all interpretation is so convincing, in many ways, that it tends to ward off a criticalexamination of its presuppositions. Among these presuppositions we find the convictionthat it is indeed possible, by means of a special type of reflection, to restore and re-articulate an original meaning within Galileo’s thinking, which was not even fulfilled byGalileo himself. This is nothing but a very radical hermeneutic claim, to have reached anarticulation of sense beyond -- and yet operating within -- the constituting subjectivity ofan historical agent.

Underlying this claim is the idea of a certain “task” which is articulated -- during thecourse of history, in a dialectical manner -- through internal critique, until it reaches alevel of “perfect insight.” It is something that the spiritual forefathers have all sought toexpress, but in an incomplete manner, and which now has to be adopted in full respon-sibility. Whoever is able to articulate it, does not receive it as something alien, but as theinnermost articulation of his own self:

A historical, backward reflection of the sort under discussion is thus actually thedeepest kind of self-reflection aimed at a self-understanding in terms of what we aretruly 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 inthe 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 hiddenpresuppositions are operating from within it, as eventually was the case with both Galileoand Descartes. Thus, in the historical reflection envisioned by Husserl, the transcendentalego -- 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 hisinvestigation of Descartes, of whom he says: “It is with good reasons that I now devote considerable spaceto my attempt at a careful exposition, not repeating what Descartes said, but extracting what was reallyinvolved in his thinking and then separating what he became conscious of from what was concealed fromhim, 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, perceivingone another. In the end though, he says that they are not sufficient for describing thesituation we are in. There is something particular or unique about the Greek-Europeanheritage, which explains, why it can never remain within this relativistic opposition. Itcompels other cultures to follow in its path, not by means of force, but by means of anentelechy operating within it. Translated into the technical terms of intersubjectivity, itwould seem as if this particular heritage ultimately can preserve its interiority in the faceof the exteriority of the other culture. Whenever a true interiority manifests itself, seem-ingly speaking from the outside of this interiority, it has in fact already placed itself withinthe very same ideal entelechy. Thus it seems, that the eye and voice of this interiority inthe 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. When-ever they speak truly, they speak with the voice of the same transcendental “we,” forwhich phenomenology is the ultimate articulation.

The absolute ego is, as Husserl repeatedly states, the location where the distinctionbetween inner and outer disappears. Outer transcendency becomes, in the reduced state,immanent transcendency, and thus transcendental interiority. But still, as seen from theanalysis of the other, transcendental subjectivity is also the place where inner and outerare ultimately constituted in the encounter between two distinct subjectivities. In Husserl’sapproach to history, however, he seems to be working with an even broader notion of tran-scendental 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 men-tioned at the outset of the present paper. Ricoeur spoke precisely of the notion of a historywhich encompasses that by which it is encompassed. We are now in a better position toassess this formulation. The inner dynamics of the search for a radicalSelbstbesinnungrequires that the reflecting ego is able to descend to a level of pure intuition, where itfully encompasses the field of all that is given, including the ultimate sense of its ownhistory (not, of course, the content of the past individual facts of this history) and des-tination. But this history is not its own, in the sense of its own life history. The historyit seeks to encompass is a history constituted by the alien intentional acts of others. It cannot claim to know the immediate sense of the content of these past egos; that is somethingwhich 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 actsof these alien subjectivities. It must claim to have access to the workings of a subjectivitywhich is located at no particular place, and from within no particular ego, whose heritageit thus claims as its own.

On this supreme level of meaning-constitution, the split between different subjectivitieshas supposedly disappeared. Its voice is the voice of an impersonal reason or spirit, whichprogresses 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; andin its self-sufficiency, and only in this way, it can be treated truly rationally, truly andfrom the ground up scientifically.26

25 For a good discussion of these categories, and an interpretation of Husserl focused aroundproblems of history, community and generativity, see Anthony Steinbock’sHome and Beyond. GenerativePhenomenology 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 thespiritual sphere. Also, the ego is then no longer an isolated thing alongside other suchthings 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-anotherand mutual interpenetration.27

Perhaps the extension of a radical historicalSelbstbesinnungrequires such a level ofsubjectivity, since it requires that all exteriority can in principle be organized within onesingle subjective economy. But with this move, phenomenology also clearly starts outfrom a position where it can refer to entirely fulfilled intuitions. Certainly this ultimatesubjectivity, towards which the individual reflection points, can not remain anything elsethan an infinite idea. For how could the individual reflecting ego possibly claim to haveintuited history from a viewpoint that encompasses every -- essentially alien -- perspec-tive?

The problem of history is essentially related to the problem of the other. The analysesof intersubjectivity, on which Husserl spent so much time, clearly indicate that even theclaim to perform analysis from within the constituting stream of transcendental subjec-tivity, must admit an important limit. This limit is formally articulated within phenome-nology with the idea of the appresentability of the other. But in terms of content, it marksan indefinite horizon of uncertainty, pertaining not only to the actual content of the sub-jectivity of the other person in their bodily presence, but also to every culturally generatedobject. And this includes history as it is inherited, in the form of written documents of ourspiritual ancestors.

Husserl, in one way acknowledges this, indeed he provides the formal tools forexpressing 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 exper-ienced this inner conflict in himself. We have the -- often quoted -- pessimistic fragment,included as an appendix toThe Crisis, which begins with the saying that philosophy asscience is a dream which is over.28 There again, Husserl defends the importance of his-torical reflection but, at the same time, he seems to seriously doubt that any historicalinterpretation can ever reach beyond the level of “poetic invention.” And yet, this very un-certainty 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 ofphilosophy, as the goal and field of my work. And yet I do not know. What autonomousthinker has ever been satisfied with this, his ‘knowledge’? For what autonomousthinker, 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 otherparts ofThe Crisis, and particularly the Vienna lecture. Should one seek a reconciliation?Or must not perhaps the range and applicability of phenomenological analysis remain un-certain? Beyond the apparent tensions built into Husserl’s understanding of history as both

27 Ibid., 298.28 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. Thecontext indicates that he is there talking about the spiritual situation in general. The more personal pessimistictone appears further down in the text.

29 Ibid.

245

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

246

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 beenformulated by him, in the first place, to contest the Neo-Kantian tradition that had pene-trated German philosophy and was altogether dominant in it at the turn of the nineteenthcentury. Its adherents attempted to reinterpret Kant’s philosophy in epistemological terms,thus preoccupying themselves -- according to Husserl -- with abstract conceptual schemesthat have nothing to do with the factual way in which “things as such” present themselvesto the human consciousness.

Husserl tried to resist the (Neo-Kantian) philosophical discourse then current by meansof a program of presumptionless phenomenological description that apprehends “things”as they really are, i.e., irrespective of theimagesthat appear in response to an epistemo-logical subject. Yet it became clear to him, in the course of time, that this radical pheno-menological program of describing a thing’s primordial appearance without any presump-tion can, literally, not be realized; that is to say, the thing’s appearance is subject to theparticular intentional structure of the individual consciousness of the one who is describingit.

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 hisBeing andTime. According to Heidegger, the main task of the phenomenological method is “to letthat which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself fromitself.”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 describingthings as separate entities. Heidegger goes further still, in this respect, and says that thedescription of things should apprehend them as they appearvon ihnen selbst her, that is,from themselves. It seems that it is the one who describes things, who should bend overbackwards and look at them not from his or her “subjective” viewpoint, but from theirsalone.

The desired (and also expected) identity between the way in which things appear and theway in which they are seen by the one who describes them, as postulated here, promptsHeidegger to say that “Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible.”2 According to thispostulate, the description of things by the one who looks at them is identical with the wayin which they appear “from themselves,” thus being the only “measure” that can be ap-plied to their description.

However, Heidegger’s identification of ontology with phenomenology goes well beyondthe traditional understanding of the term “ontology.” In the metaphysical tradition, onto-logy was conceived as a theory of Being, which, while investigating the possible structureswithin Being and characterizing their properties, is situated at a different level from Beingas such. On this assumption, any person wishing to engage in ontological reflection doesso 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 under-

1 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 sehenlassen.” Idem, Sein und Zeit(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1972), 34.

2 Heidegger,Being and Time, 60. “Ontologie ist nur als Phänomenologie möglich.” Idem, Sein undZeit, 34.

247

stood “from itself.” As a result, the very understanding of Being then seems to exemplifya unity with the appearance (the showing) of Being as such.

And yet, how is it possible to “describe” Being? How is phenomenology possible atall, if what it describes is meant to be identical with what is described? How is it sup-posed to be possible for the gaze of the person describing things to change its directionin 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 conceptfunctions in Husserl’s early program of phenomenology. According to him, descriptionis the basic procedure used within phenomenology, consisting in a perspicacious andprecise grasp of how things are given over to consciousness:

If phenomenology, then, is to be entirely a sciencewithin the limits of mere immediateIntuition, a purely “descriptive” eidetic science, then what is universal of its procedureis already given as something obvious. It must expose to its view events of pure con-sciousness as examples [and] make them perfectly clear; within the limits of thisquality it must analyze and seize upon their essences, trace with insight the essentialinterconnections, formulate what is beheld in faithful conceptual expressions whichallow their sense to be prescribed purely by what is beheld or generically seen; and soforth.3

This concept of description presumes an adequate rendering of the thing described bythe one who describes it, which implies the total absorption of the very description intothe described thing. Yet, although the basic characteristic of consciousness is “intention-ality,” i.e., its direct,a priori orientation to things as they appear in its visual field, onecan always differentiate between the “subjective,” noetic side of description (the foundingintentional structures of consciousness) and its “objective,” noematic side (the foundedthings themselves as they appear in consciousness), which need to be coordinated witheach other. This distinction gives to the Husserlian phenomenological method a particulardynamic, since, to reach the ideal of an adequate apprehension of the things described, thephenomenologist advances in disclosing the founding intentional structures of conscious-ness again and again. One could say then, that it is precisely because the phenomenologistis not placed on the side of the described things (but describes them from the subjectiveviewpoint of his or her own intentional consciousness) that he or she can make progressin the “making clear” (erhellen) of the conditions of possibility of the “givenness” (dieGegebenheit) of things described.

When compared with Husserl’s early program of phenomenology as a descriptivescience, the radicalized Heideggerian concept of description encourages one to have somebasic doubts about this matter. Does not the author ofBeing and Time-- by postulatinga 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 imRahmen bloßer unmittelbarer Intuition sein, eine rein “deskriptive” Wesenswissenschaft, so ist das All-gemeine ihres Verfahrens vorgegeben als ein ganz Selbstverständliches. Sie hat sich reine Bewußtseins-vorkommnisse exemplarisch vor Augen zu stellen, sie zu vollkommener Klarheit zu bringen, an ihneninnerhalb dieser Klarheit Analyse und Wesenserfassung zu üben, den einsichtigen Wesenszusammenhängennachzugehen, das jeweils Geschaute in getreu begriffliche Ausdrücke zu fassen, die sich ihren Sinn reindurch das Geschaute, bzw. generell Eingesehene vorschreiben lassen usw.” Idem,Ideen zu einer reinenPhänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, ed. Elisabeth Ströker (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1976),153.

248

demand something impossible? Does his concept of phenomenology not defy the veryessence of phenomenological description as conceived by Husserl?

Heidegger maintains that quite the opposite is the case. InBeing and Time, and in hislectures from the twenties, he underscores again and again that his “analytic of Dasein”still represents the true descriptive (phenomenological) method. Yet his understanding ofthis concept differs from Husserl’s in that he maintains that the phenomenological descrip-tion does not so much understand the described thing adequately, but rather, interprets it(auslegt). Hence his assertion that “the meaning of phenomenological description as amethod lies ininterpretation.”4

The Husserlian postulate concerning the adequate, transparent description of theappearance of things, described as per original, essential insight [Wesensanschauung], hasbeen transformed here into postulating an understanding that realizes itself as inter-pretation (die Auslegung).

This radical transformation of the very procedure of the phenomenological methodresults, first of all, from the fact that Heidegger conceives of the described “thing” in avery different way than does Husserl. As Pöggeler writes, Heidegger’s phenomenology

hat nicht auszugehen von der “Anschauung,” wenn diese Anschauung gedacht wird alsAnschauung von “Objekten,” sondern vom “Verstehen.” Die “Beschreibung” darf nichtals Beschreibung von Objektartigem, von dinglich Seiendem gefaßt werden, sondernmuß 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 describesthe “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 thisimplies and makes possible the very way in which it is described. This difference resultsfrom the fact that the “thing” is conceived by Heidegger neither as the way in which theobjects of the outer world appear in the consciousness of the phenomenologist, nor as thestructural component of consciousness itself; the “thing” is the very “meaning of Being”that is always already understood/interpreted by the Dasein that describes it:

Theλóγοςof the phenomenology of Dasein has the character of aερµηευειν , throughwhich the authentic meaning of Being, and also those basic structures of Being whichDasein itself possesses, aremade knownto Dasein’s understanding of Being. The phe-nomenology of Dasein is ahermeneuticin 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 existentialstructures 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 istdie Auslegung.” Idem,Sein und Zeit, 37.

5 Otto Pöggeler,Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers(Pfullingen: Neske, 1963), 68.6 Heidegger,Being and Time, 61-62. “Derλóγοςder Phänomenologie des Daseins hat den Charakter

desερµηευειν , durch das dem zum Dasein selbst gehörigen Seinsverständnis der eigentliche Sinn vonSein und die Grundstrukturen seines eigenen Seins kundgegeben werden. Phänomenologie des Daseinsist Hermeneutik in der ursprünglichen Bedeutung des Wortes, wonach es das Geschäft der Auslegung be-zeichnet.” Idem,Sein und Zeit, 37.

249

makes possible the further interpretation of Being -- does not aim at the adequateapprehension of how things appear to Dasein, but arises as a direct account of how Daseinunderstands “the thing” called Being.

Consequently, Heidegger transforms the Husserlian idea of phenomenology, as anadequate description of how things are given (appear) in the consciousness of the one whodescribes them, into a “phenomenology of Dasein,” who always already understandsBeing, and whose understanding of his own being results directly from an interpretationof Being. In this sense, phenomenology reallyis hermeneutics, since its “description” con-sists in the interpretation of Dasein’s understanding of Being. If, then, for Husserl, themeaning of “the thing” is identical with the way in which it is given in the consciousnessof the phenomenologist, and could therefore be adequately described by him or her, forHeidegger, the meaning of “the thing” is identical with the “meaning of Being,” whichis always already understood by Dasein, and could only be hermeneutically interpreted(ausgelegt).

By analogy, if for Husserl the phenomenological description of “the thing” representsthe transformed form of transcendental cognition (in which the transcendental ego playsthe role of being the fundamental condition of possibility), then, as Pöggeler writes:

Heidegger setzt an die Stelle des transzendentalen Ichs das Leben in seiner Tatsächlich-keit. Dieses “faktische” Leben ist Leben in einer Welt; es ist letzlich “historisch” und“versteht” sich “historisch.” So wird die Geschichte zum Leitfaden der phänomeno-logischen Forschung.7

The notion of factuality (Faktizität) refers to the way in which Dasein exists in theworld as always already understanding its own being. This presupposes that if one triesto describe adequately the way of being that appertains to Dasein, one should not resort tosophisticated methods like the “phenomenological reduction,” which guarantees the essen-tiality of one’s insights: it is sufficient to apprehend the factual way in which Dasein re-lates to itself and to the world. Precisely in this sense, the phenomenology of Dasein isthe “hermeneutics of facticity” that is based on its understanding of Being, and its propertheme -- as it will show itself in the last chapters ofBeing and Time-- is the historicityof the way of being of Dasein.

Let us sum up these considerations. For Husserl, the best guarantee for a trulyphenomenological description is the essential insight (Wesensanschauung) of things, which“makes clear” how they are given to consciousness (i.e., the postulate of adequate descrip-tion that preserves the originality of their being-given). In contrast, I have tried to demon-strate that Heidegger maintains that what underlies the relation of Dasein to the world, isitsa priori understanding of Being, through which understanding the Dasein also interprets.According to Husserl, a phenomenologist first perceives and originally apprehends thethings as given to his or her consciousness, then tries to describe this understanding ade-quately, 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 inter-pretation (Auslegung). The interpretation of Being is not an additional activity super-imposed by the phenomenologist on the understanding of Being, it is not even a modifi-cation of this understanding, but is precisely the way in which the understanding of Beingrealizes itself. If, then, Heidegger shares with Husserl the assumption that there is no gapbetween the original phenomenological apprehension of things and the language in which

7 Pöggeler,Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, 70.

250

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

***

Let us now return to Heidegger’s formula for phenomenology. It says that -- let me repeatthis -- the main task of phenomenology is “to let that which shows itself be seen fromitself 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 andtried to answer the question of how it is meant to be possible for the phenomenologist todescribe the appearance of “the thing” precisely as it shows itself “from itself” (von ihmselbst her). I had not yet taken up the question of how to conceive of this particularlydirect way in which “the thing” shows itself to Dasein -- so Heidegger -- and in whichhis idea concerning the phenomenological description/interpretation is rooted.

“That which shows itself” is, according to Heidegger, the very Being, to which Daseinis always already related while “understanding” it. In the introduction toWhat isMetaphysics?he describes Being, metaphorically, as “the openness” (Offenheit) towardwhich Dasein is always already open, and where he contradistinguishes this relationshipfrom 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 Daseinrelates to Being while experiencing Being in its understanding, conceived of as: “ecstaticthrown projection, ecstatic here meaning: standing in the realm of the open.”9 Whereasconsciousness “does not itself create the openness of beings, nor is it consciousness thatmakes 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 itsa 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 withregard to what it is always already open to, that is to say, with regard to Being as open-ness. Strictly speaking, then, it is not primarily Dasein that “opens” itself to Being, withBeing, as a result of this, appearing in its visual field, but rather, it is the very opennessof 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” (vonihm 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 itto itself, thus opening the endless space of its relation to itself and to the world. Or, to putit 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 lattercannot 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 ofpossibility” 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 1.9 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 Bereichdes Offenen innenstehende geworfene Entwurf.”

10 Heidegger,Pathmarks, 284; idem,Wegmarken, 370. “[...] schafft weder erst die Offenheit vonSeiendem, noch verleiht es erst dem Menschen das Offenstehen für das Seiende.”

251

of Being -- already grown into Being. That is to say, it is Da-sein (“being there”) only inso far as it opens itself to the openness of Being. Or, to put it the other way round: Daseinis Da-sein only in so far as he is opened to himself by the openness (die Offenheit) ofBeing. Consequently, there is, in the openness of Being, no space that would be separateor transcendent with regard to Dasein and thus hidden from its sight. There is nothing inBeing -- as openness -- which Dasein would not understand and would not interpret in hisunderstanding.

Clearly, this apprehension of the relationship between the openness of Being andDasein (which latter ‘stands open’ in Being) excludes the possibility that a phenomeno-logist 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 thatwhich makes his standing open within himself possible? How can he discard his ownOffenstehenin 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 sortof descriptive mysticism, contradicting the fundamental presumptions of the analytic ofDasein, and the phenomenologist would be the one who endeavors to reach something thatis impossible to reach: while seeing things “from themselves” (von ihnen selbst her), heor she would also have seen right through them. Any given ‘thing’ would be absolutelytransparent to him or her, because their gaze would melt into one with “the thing” andwould shine through it from inside it.

In a way, and as a whole,Being and Timeis an attempt to demonstrate, step by step,the impossibility of such a going beyond Dasein to reach Being. This is already excludedby the fundamental existential structure of Dasein, conceived by Heidegger as a “thrownproject” (geworfener Entwurf). This formula implies that Dasein, as always already opento Being, relates to Being from the perspective of his “thrownness,” that is to say, fromthe perspective of hisa priori being-open to Being.

The “thrown” character of the relationship of Dasein to Being also implies that otherwell-known Heideggerian assertion, which maintains that Dasein’s way of being consistsin the understanding of Being. According to this assertion, Dasein’s understanding of Beingdoes not represent an additional activity, superimposed on the primary way of Dasein’sexistence, but is identical with his existence. In other words, Dasein does not so muchexist “as” the one that understands Being, as it is his understanding of Being that representsthe way in which he exists. Hence, not only does Dasein always understand Being (whileinterpreting it), but his prior understanding of Being also presupposes Being in his self-understanding, his understanding of others, and his understanding of the world. In short,only because Dasein always understands Being (while interpreting it) can Dasein under-stand anything at all.

Yet if this is so, then the phenomenologist, in striving to describe/interpret Being, doesnot 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 under-standing) to its meaning. The circular structure of the relationship between Dasein andBeing comes to light when phenomenologists ask their question about the meaning ofBeing. It appears, then, that they are not able to answer this questionbecausetheir veryquestioning is already a way of being. For, how can one characterize the “meaning” ofsomething that presupposes this thing in one’s self-understanding?

***

252

The next question is, how should one characterize the “meaning of Being.” In order toanswer 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 whichhe 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 Beingdoes not consist in the recognition, in Being, of any “concrete” meaning and, as a resultof this, in the putting forward of a definition for this meaning. It consists, rather, inDasein’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 veryrelationship that holds Dasein together with Being. Phenomenological description assumesthe form of an analytic of Dasein, in which latter Heidegger discloses the existential struc-tures 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 ofthe consecutive “conditions of possibility” that underlie the understanding of Being byDasein. One could say, then, that Heidegger explores, in his analytic of Dasein, the verystructure of the circular relationship in which Dasein remains with Being and thus makespossible Dasein’s understanding of anything at all.

Heidegger’s assertion, that Being appears “from itself,” now means that it appearsalways in light of thea priori relationship of Dasein to it, i.e., of its “standing open” inBeing 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” Daseinis open to,a priori, and as what constitutes him in his “standing open” in this ‘thing.’ Inthis sense, the phenomenological “description” of the relationship as an apprehension ofthe showing (appearance) of Being “from itself,” does not mean that the one who de-scribes Being has -- literally -- changed over to its side. It only means that the phenomeno-logist tries to explore the pre-ontological structure of Dasein’sa priori relationship toBeing 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 theconception of the descriptive method, secondly in the understanding of the position of thephenomenologist toward the described “thing,” and thirdly in the understanding of thevery nature of the described “thing.” However, there is still one fundamental assumptionthat is common to both philosophers, and it is the postulate concerning the description ofthings simply as they appear to the one who describes them. Yet again, when one takesa closer look at how they both understand this postulate, there is a fourth essentialdifference to be noted. According to Heidegger, phenomenological description cannot just‘happen’ after the phenomenologist has given up his or her thesis concerning the existenceof 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 preciselythe fact of Dasein’s “being thrown” (“thrownness”) into the world that is the most originalphenomenon, which the phenomenologist needs must take as his or her starting-point forthe description.

For, this “fact” -- unlike the concept of fact as understood by the positivist -- hasnothing empirical in itself. Rather, it has the status of unquestionable evidence, since italways “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 exploringthe “essence” of things, is transformed by Heidegger into a “hermeneutics of facticity.”Thus the postulate concerning the description of ‘things from themselves’ now meansnothing 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. Forit implies that the phenomenologist must start with the description/interpretation of hisfactual relationship to Being, a relationship that has been given up on by the author ofIdeas, for methodological reasons. In other words, the phenomenologist must, inHeidegger’s view, start with Dasein’s “fact” of being in the world, and not with the pre-sumed ideal “essence” of this world, which is achievable only by a methodical denial ofthe very fact of being-in-the-world. Heidegger would then have to say that Husserl cuthimself off, right from the start, from having access to “things” as they really showthemselves ‘from themselves’ to whoever is looking at them.

The phenomenologist then has to stay where “things” have always been, without needfor suspending his or her belief in the existence of the world, with the result that theattitude of intuitive insight will be inflicted upon “them (things)” instead. For it isprecisely due to that attitude that they are not able to experience the most original andhermeneutic evidence of Being as given (die Gegebenheit) and as always alreadyunderstood by them. It is hard to imagine a greater difference in the understanding of theword “phenomenology.”

***

Heidegger’s conviction that a properly phenomenological description/interpretation shouldstart with the analytic of the factual way in which Dasein is related to Being, prompts himto describe/interpret -- as his first move -- Dasein’s way of being. This description/interpre-tation, while relying on the assumption that Dasein fundamentally understands Being,takes the form of systematically exploring his successive existential structures, whichmake this understanding possible.

And yet, at the point where Heidegger reaches the ultimate existential structure, whichhe calls “temporality” (Zeitlichkeit), and tries to disclose its relationship with Being, hiswhole phenomenological undertaking undergoes a radical change. He identifies a problemwith the fundamental feature of this structure inzeitigen, that is to say, in its permanentself-differentiation in relation to itself and with respect to Being. How, then, is one to de-scribe the relationship of Dasein with Being, since its structure characterizes a permanentinfraction that points beyond itself? The phenomenological description of this circularrelationship cannot proceed further, since there is no “deeper” existential structure under-lying it. The temporality of Dasein can only be described by exploring his circular con-nection with Being, in which they permanently displace one another even while referringto each other. Heidegger, who in his analytic of Dasein proceeds in the manner adoptedby 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 un-awares”11 and that consequently “everything is haunted by theenigma of Being.”12

11 Heidegger,Being and Time, 444; idem,Sein und Zeit, 392. “[...] gerät ständig unversehens in denSchatten.”

12 Heidegger,Being and Time, 444.

254

A good starting-point for Heidegger’s attempt at clarifying the particular circularstructure of this situation is his metaphorical designation of Being as “openness” (Offenheit),as elaborated above. This designation implies that the openness of Being represents somesort 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. Bythat understanding, Dasein is an “opening” only in so far as there is always already anopenness of Being which opens him to himself. Expressed differently, Dasein is alwaysalready 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 “standingopen” in this openness are still not sufficiently precise, since they do not take a properaccount of the characteristics of “displaceability” in this relationship, such as implied by theanalytic of temporality concerning Dasein. Taking the characteristics of being “displaceable”into account means to designate Dasein as the being-open that permanently opens him tothe openness of Being. But then, by analogy, one would also have to say that Being cannotitself be identified as a stable point of reference for the being-open of Dasein and shouldtherefore be conceived as an openness that permanently opens itself in the never-endingmovement of self-exceeding or going beyond oneself.

If this is how the matter stands, then we enter into a “correlation” between the being-open of a Dasein in operation and the permanent opening of the openness of Being. Yetwe must also remain aware that this “correlation” does not consist of a correspondencebetween the two kinds of “opening” movements mentioned above: that of Dasein and thatof Being. It is, rather, that the movement of Dasein’s opening -- hisZeitigung-- takes placeonly when, and in so far as, Dasein opens himself to Being as-an-openness. ThisZeitigungor 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 open-ness.

In this sense, Dasein wholly “depends” on the openness of Being (which permanentlyopens itself to itself. Dasein is an “opening” only in so far as it is always already opento the openness of Being. One could say, then, that Dasein -- in its temporality -- is alwaysalready part of, or grown into, the movement implied by the openness of Being. Theprocesses 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, theyrepresent two differing aspects of the one process of “opening” (in relation to the opennessof Being), which, in their radical otherness, are nevertheless indissolubly intertwined witheach other. Gadamer, therefore, while commenting on the particular relationship betweenDasein and Being, says that it isthis (complex) very Being that is time.13 This assertionimplies that Being is experienced by Dasein as the movable horizon of time, with regardto 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 themovement of Being-as-openness, this does not mean that Dasein mystically dissolves intoBeing. Rather, the being-open of Dasein represents an ontologically privileged “place”within Being itself; it is a kind of aperture, which ensures that Beingcan only open to-ward itself. In other words, the movement implied in the openness of Being can occuronly 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 itsabsolutely negative characteristics.

The negativeness of Dasein’s “opening” is borne witness to by Heidegger’s helplessnessin the face of Being, which now appears to him as an “enigma,” when interpreted from theperspective of the temporality of Dasein. Up to this point in his work, Heidegger had en-deavored to describe Being from the viewpoint of Dasein, uncovering Dasein’s successiveexistential structures at the same time, and had prepared, in this way, what he presumedto be the “proper” description of Being “from itself.” But now it appears to Heidegger thatthere can be no direct “exceeding” (or going beyond himself) to lift the “negative” levelof the temporality of Dasein to the “positive” meaning of Being. What remains as an onlypossibility is the description of Being from the negative perspective of the temporality ofDasein, which perspective cannot, in essence, adequately depict the very process impliedin 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, inBeing and Time, the term “the historicityof Dasein” (die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins). At first glance, this term appears to desig-nate an existential structure in Dasein, underlying Dasein’s temporality and thereforebelonging among the successive existential structures of Dasein. After closer inspection,however, it seems that the ‘historicity’ in question represents an “aspect” or “dimension” ofBeing itself, which latter is experienced by Dasein from the perspective of his ownZeitigungor “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 inDasein’s temporality, is due to the self-transcendent structure of Being, only the latter en-suring that Dasein exists historically.

But history (Geschichte), in its most fundamental dimension, is also the history ofBeing (die Seinsgeschichte). History is the result of the process of self-differentiationwithin Being, a process that carries along every Dasein that experiences it, in a kind ofencompassing 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 veryperspicaciously grasped (in Heidegger’s view) by Graf Yorck, who writes, in his letter toDilthey: “Concerning history, what comes to one’s attention and catches the eye is not themain thing. The nerves are invisible, just as essentials in general are invisible.”14

***

The author ofBeing and Timethus himself attests the insight that the historicity of Daseincannot be put forward adequately by the quasi-transcendental scheme of an existentialanalytic as presented in his book. In other words, the historicity of Dasein cannot bedescribed/interpreted as a successive existential structure of Dasein, merely underlying allprior structures, since Being too has its own history that cannot be regarded as a functionof human cultural activities, but must, on the contrary, be regarded as the source of theseactivities (which are an “effect” of Being). In consequence, the historicity of Dasein doesnot now appear to be founded in its temporality. Rather, it is the temporality of Daseinthat has its basis in the historicity of Being, that is to say, in what occurs within Beingitself.

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

256

Despite this, Heidegger, while himself pointing to this aspect of the phenomenon (inthe last chapters ofBeing and Time), still “interprets” the historicity of Being as comingfrom the quasi-transcendental perspective of the temporality of Dasein. He seems to bebound, in his phenomenological description, by and to the traditional metaphysicalterminology.

A radical break with this terminology will occur only after Heidegger’s “turn” (dieKehre). 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 inhis discourse. He will then be able to apprehend the historicity of Being from itself, thatis, from the perspective of Being as “occurring” (ereignen). One needs to understandGadamer’s statement -- that Heidegger’s thought after the “turn” can still be called phe-nomenology -- in this sense. Indeed, Heidegger’s thought adheres to the phenomenologicalrule of “demonstration” (die Aufzeigung) when he examines the described “thing.”

However, one should here add at once that, in consequence of the very “thing” nowhaving changed, the idea of phenomenology too has undergone a transformation. Thedescription of the historicity of Being does not come about as an exploration of Being’ssuccessive existential structures -- which presupposes some kind of reflexive distancebetween 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 alreadyisthe “occurrence” of Being. While describing Being, he also testifies to it in his ownunderstanding, 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 nowovercome the quasi-transcendental perspective, which required of him that he shouldquestion the meaning of Being (and which had dominated his discourse inBeing and Time).It does not mean, however, that there is no difference, at this point, between the one whodescribes Being and Being as a described “thing.” It means only that it is not possible todraw a clear distinction between these two, since now it is the “thing itself,” i.e., Beingas it occurs in language, that dominates over the one who merely describes Being. In otherwords, Being is not only what is described by the phenomenologist, but Being occurs inthe very process of its description.

In his comments on this transformation, Heidegger says thatwhat -- inBeing and Time--appeared to him as the way forward to truth, now manifests itself as being ‘truth on itsway.’ In other words, what was being looked for, in the existential analysis, as the truthof Being -- whose meaning has to be interpreted -- now comes to light as a truth that isnot 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 itoccurs in language, where it takes possession of the one who speaks about Being. In thissense, then, Heidegger’s discourse can be conceived of as a phenomenological descriptionthat apprehends “Being from itself.” Such a description does not describe Being as anoccurrence, butis 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 isthe house of Being, in which the human being ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to thetruth of Being, guarding it.”16 This saying implies that language is not a medium that isseparate from Being, a medium in which Being is expressed, but that it is Being itself thatoccurs in language. In other words, language, as the house of Being, is the occurrence ofBeing, since it is only in language that Being appears and stays preserved. As a result, thefabric of language-with-Being as occurrence calls for a different type of “description” thanthat which is still dominant inBeing and Time. This new type of description -- as the de-monstration (die Aufzeigung) of the thing from itself -- assumes the form of a permanentmeta-phorization of Being in language. This results in the tendency to “poetize” thelanguage 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 describeBeing as an occurrence enjoys quite a different status from that accorded to it by Husserl’sphenomenological 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” comesto light in its very occurrence. Accordingly, the phenomenological description assumes aperformative character. It realizes in itself what inBeing and Timestill appeared as themere horizon of language (which makes possible the description/interpretation of anythingat all). In this sense, Heidegger does not abandon the idea of phenomenological descrip-tion, but realizes it in its most radical form: as a factual description of “the thing fromitself.”

The idea of phenomenological description as formulated inBeing and Timethus comesto 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 trans-formed into the thing’sdirectoccurrence inwords.Differentlyexpressed,phenomenologicaldescription has become a direct “activity” of the thing itself. It is, literally, the thing itselfwhich calls phenomenological description into being. We are not speaking only of a par-ticular fusion between phenomenological description and Being itself, as the new charac-teristic of the philosophical language used by the later Heidegger. We are now speakingof the transformation of the very “description” into the occurrence itself of Being. Con-sequently, the early Husserlian idea of phenomenology as a “descriptive science” hasmetamorphosed into phenomenology as a “performative science,” in which the descriptionof Being becomes the occurrence of Being itself in the process of being expressed.Phenomenology has become language, and language comes into being in the veryoccurring 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 bookDe 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 un-expectedly been charged with participating in a conspiracy against King Theodoric, wasidentified as godless and was condemned to death. His death occurred, probably, in theyear 525. While imprisoned in Pavia (Italy) and waiting to be executed, Boethius tried toexamine his own existential situation, calling for aid on a lady with “bright [and] glowingeyes,” namely philosophy. She, ignoring all circumstances, chased away the Muses oflyric poetry from Boethius’s side, calling them “harlots” and “mermaids” who would onlyadd to his suffering, and decided, by herself, to be the one who would take Boethius outof the sickness named coma, i.e., Plato’s oblivion of oneself. Her therapy brought aboutthe intended effect. Boethius, having listened to philosophy’s arguments, concluded thatthe essence of happiness is to be found only in experiencing God; and, that philosophizingitself is not just a search for the ultimate good, which is God, but also a step towardpreparing for a dignified experience of death. Therefore, philosophy includes the functionof consoling and bringing alleviation to human beings.

Could Boethius’s experience be repeated now, when philosophy has been transformedto such an extent? Karol Tarnowski noted, in his essay aboutThe Consolation of Art, thatphilosophy today consoles hardly anybody any more, mainly because our contemporaryculture has entered the so-called “postmetaphysical” phase. And although thequestionsthat gave rise to metaphysics as philosophy have not disappeared -- questions, which canbe defined as “metaphysical” in a broad sense and concern the deepest sense of the humanbeing in the world -- something worse has happened. On the one hand, theanswerstothese questions, expressed in the spirit of the Western rational optimism, are no longersatisfactory, and on the other, the basic key to a metaphysical intuition of reality has beenlost.3 In spite of this, I still believe that philosophy is not something that belongs to a lostpast. It invariably stands a chance of expressing reality in some degree, unless deceivedby post-modern delusions or the perils of scepticism, provided that it trusts in experienceand the intellect. The latter has the power of approaching what is true, or even of reachingout to the transcendent and, as such, it can open up to Revelation, which is capable ofconsoling the mind.

This is why it is necessary to reflect upon the “essence” of philosophy. The history ofculture proves the indispensability of philosophical tools in the process of formulating a

1 Edmund Husserl,Kryzys europejskiego człowieczenstwa 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 (Kety: 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.,Wielkosc i pieknofilozofii (Kraków: Collegium Columbinum, 2002), 317.

259

“knowledge about the world.” In ancient times, the philosopher was, or rather, he wassupposed to take on the role of, a priest, a wise man [magus], a seer, who, while distancedfrom the crowd as an erudite man, is at the same time an intellectual and political leaderfor 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 ofexplaining reality. In our own day, the preponderance of a liberated imagination allowsphilosophers to create works that are independent of existing thought-patterns: the greatertheir apparent irrationality, the greater the publicity for post-modern trends, and the higherthe recognition given to what preceded those trends. Philosophy has cut itself off from thephilosophical tradition, aesthetics has lost the classical sense of beauty, and consequentlyart has abandoned moral principles and truth. Yet God did appear in philosophical re-flection, though not always in an open way, as He is, more often than not, hidden in theinterior workings of a system or becomes, as in Kant’s thought, the threshold beforewhich the human mind remains silent and does not inquire beyond.

Some representatives of the school of philosophy established by Edmund Husserl, thatis, phenomenology, were interested in more than philosophy; they were also interested inissues concerning religion. They perceived that the methodology used in phenomenologyis equally conducive to the study of religious experience. This is evident, for example, inMircea Eliade, whose search focused on archaic and archetypal traces of religiosity in thehistory of religion.4 Perhaps one should therefore ask, whether Husserl regarded himselfas a religious man, or rather, as a “man on the way,” who did not exclude the problem of Godfrom phenomenological research as such. However, does the version of phenomenologysuggested 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), phenomenologistsattempt 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 thethreshold of the cognitive spheretout court. Phenomenology is therefore the science ofphenomena, the so-called primary philosophy, which wants to remain autonomous and freeof all assumptions, thereby providing a theoretical basis for scientific cognition or, for thatmatter, 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 aspecial procedure, i.e., ideation (built upon the notion of what is individual), we im-mediately and spontaneously grasp what is fundamental. As a result of assuming an eideticattitude (i.e., by focusing on the essence), the object of cognition is changed. It is nolonger the concrete, the individual (i.e., something existing in reality -- for instance, as abody -- 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 obtaindirect 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 necessaryknowledge, which is concerned with the objectively existing ideal sphere. It is not createdby human consciousness; it exists, but not in reality (it is out of time and space, and does

4 See Andrzej Bronk,Zrozumiec swiat współczesny(Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KatolickiegoUniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 1998), 257-282.

5 See Jean-Luc Marion,Fenomenologia donacji a filozofia pierwsza, trans. Włodzimierz Starzynski(manuscript, 2).

260

not participate in causal connections existing in the real world).6 This implies that theobjectives of phenomenology come down to initiating a cognitive contact with what isdirectly given, without any mediation, “face to face,” so to speak. Therefore, there aremany 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 experiencedare objects of conscious experiencing. As a matter of fact, when practicing phenomeno-logy, 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 instanceepoché,eidetic reduction), in order to grasp necessary truths that go beyond the casual characterof 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 idealismof Husserl shows the “power of consciousness,” which constitutes the sense of objects. It isthe “origin” of the evident character of all concepts and all beings. At the same time, itis intentional, and this means that it always refers to phenomena. Consequently, in orderto reach for scientific and “absolute” knowledge, we need to rely on intentional conscious-ness. Due to Husserl, the scholastic termens intentionalegained a new meaning. A humanbeing is no longerres 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 createsthe “sense of the world,” and this means that it constitutes the meaning of things. To behuman means to be able to constitute sense. More specifically: Husserl attributes theconstituting 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 theorigin is given in a fundamental way, depending on “how” it is presented to the exper-iencing subject. With consciousness, a philosophical importance attaches to the humaninner 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. Andit 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 thoughtdealing 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. Stepien, “Zagadnienie Boga w fenomenologii (Kilka uwag wstepnych),” in BohdanBejze, ed.,Aby poznac Boga i człowieka. Czesc pierwsza – O Bogu dzis(Warszawa: Wydawnictwo SióstrLoretanek, 1974), 86; Jan Krokos, “Metody fenomenologiczne i ich aktualnosc. Zarys problemu,”StudiaPhilosophie Christianae34, no. 2 (1998): 103-111.

7 See Józef Tischner,Swiat 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 fromtheology. He nonetheless supposed that phenomenological studies could be of some im-portance 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 searchingfor the truth, wanting to hold “the crown of truth.” And in order to do so, he abandonedmathematics in favor of philosophy and also converted to Protestantism. From then on --as formulated by Manfred Sommer -- Husserl thought in the Cartesian manner and livedthe life of a Protestant.10 Of Jewish origin -- which led to some dramatic existential con-sequences for this philosopher -- Husserl was baptized on 26 April 1886, being namedEdmund Gustav Albrecht, in the municipal church of the Evangelical Augsburg parish inVienna. This was for him the fulfillment of what he perceived to be his calling: to builda philosophy in the manner of mathematics, a serious science. Whereas a philosophy ofoptimism and peace -- like Mach’s philosophy -- was perceived as a kind of deviation fromthe proper calling of the professional philosopher, something sinful even.11 Thus it wasphenomenology, 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 theGod of philosophy? What was it that checked his acceptance of a religious lifestyle, whilemany of his disciples (apart from Roman Ingarden) were brought to God or even tosainthood (as recognized by the Catholic Church), like Edith Stein, by philosophizing “inthe spirit of Husserl”? Perhaps the main reason for this lies in the character of pheno-menology itself, which confines experience within the borders of consciousness. If the“transcendental Ego” category were to refer to an even more primary “source” than con-sciousness, then the foundations of phenomenology as such would be destroyed. ThereforeHusserl 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’stexts, 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 intellectualexperiment, marginal figures understood asfictum. In Husserl’s texts it even happens thathe refers absurd, blasphemous, or contradictory expressions to God himself -- after theearlier example of Pseudo-Dionysios Areopagita -- though, at the same time, they havenothing to do with any form of negative theology. Calling God “boundlessly stupid” onlysuggests that this God is not one that could be blasphemed against. The egocentrism ofphenomenology makes consciousness “absolute,” even in the sense that it has the capabilityof “self-creation.”12 And it can be called God. In no way, however, is this the God ofScripture, 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 powazna praca i pogodna pasywnosc,” in StanisławCzerniak and Jarosław Rolewski, ed.,Studia z filozofii niemieckiej, vol. 3, Współczesna fenomenologianiemiecka(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 uspay attention to Augustine’s achievement. Husserl was to find there a way of reachingGod, similar to his own and consisting in going deep into one’s own subjectivity. Theauthor of theConfessionsemphasized 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. WhereasHusserl was not looking for God, but for the truth:

We find different transcendence, which is not like pure Ego directly given with reducedconsciousness, but which we experience very indirectly.... I mean transcendence thatis God.... He would be transcendent not only for the world, but certainly also for the“absolute” consciousness.... We are naturally spreading phenomenological reductiononto this “absolute” and “transcendence.” It should be excluded from this field of studythat we are to create from scratch since this is supposed to be a field of pure con-sciousness only.13

Since God is not just a phenomenon, He cannot be placed at the same level as pureconsciousness, and -- even more so -- this consciousness cannot be made into a placewhere God is manifested and to be found. He is not reachable by the human mind assuch, and this is why God reaches the dimension of the idealtelos -- divinity. Husserlhimself stressed that God -- if God exists -- is “absolute” in a completely different sensethan consciousness, and that the “absolute experience” available to the human being hasa finite dimension.14 For this reason, some researchers say that Husserl’s phenomenologywas, in its assumptions, egocentric, and theocentric in its purpose.15 Therefore, Augustineis closer to Husserl’s standpoint than Thomas Aquinas. But Husserl himself knew that, inorder to resolve the “issue of God,” he had to go beyond the phenomenological structureof philosophy and turn toward metaphysics. The issues around the fundamental characterof transcendental consciousness cannot be easily avoided. Yet he did not leave pheno-menology, since he was looking for what it was possible to achieve while staying in itsconfines, namely, the building of a philosophical method that would ensure that a properfoundation can be created for human culture in general. Therefore, reality is for him onlya 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 notexamine God as an object of religious or para-religious acts, but he did point to God asa theoretical possibility. Nevertheless, only a possibility. When stressing the role of “thehighest innner concentration,” he perhaps left a space for “the silence of faith.” He knewthat religious experience can be described only as far as it is really experienced. Contraryto 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 withoutGod,” without recourse to the tools of metaphysics.16 While unable to overcome subjectiv-ism, he could nevertheless accept that looking for truth is inseparably connected with God.

13 Husserl,Idee czystej fenomenologii, 110-111.14 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 Narbonneand Luc Langlois, ed.,La métaphysique, son histoire, sa critique, ses enjeux(Paris; Sainte-Foy: Vrin;Presses de l’Université Laval, 1999), 129.

263

And this proved, probably, to be a form of consolation, though not the kind of consolationas 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. Itturned out that “things,” after becoming phenomena, remained powerless -- as phenomena --as against reality. He also did not make any attempt at answering the question concerninga foundation for all possible phenomena. Some of Husserl’s disciples and followersbrought a breath of life (and faith) to phenomenological studies: Husserl did not do thishimself. He remained throughout a philosopher who claimed exclusivity for his descriptionof what is real, inside and out. He did not wish to talk about things that do not presentus 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 dedicatedSein und Zeitto Husserl “in friendship and admiration” and generously acknowledgedHusserl’s positive influence on his work.1 Heidegger and Husserl agree that the propertheme of phenomenology is the meaningful as such. Heidegger departs from Husserl onthe structure and mode of access to the meaningful. Neither Heidegger nor Husserl aresystem 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 workof 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 areflectivephenomenologist and Heidegger as ahermeneuticphenomenologist is not withoutits problems. Nevertheless, it succeeds in underscoring Heidegger and Husserl’s divergenceon the question of the structure and access to the meaningful. By absolutizing the theoreticalcomportment to beings, Husserl compounds Western philosophy’s forgetfulness of thefore-theoretical (“factical”) sources of thinking, and therewith, the forgetfulness of being.Husserl re-inscribes the prejudice in his contention that intentionality, directedness to anobject, is the essence of thinking. According to Heidegger the subject-object relationshipis 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 thelanguage of subject / object or noesis / noema. Prior to the project of knowledge, Daseinis immersed in everydayness, lost in practical concerns, which are determined by its un-thematized pre-occupation with its own death. In everydayness Dasein is disclosed, notas a subject / ego, but rather, as being that is always outside itself in the temporalizingpractical, 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’stranscendental phenomenology, with attention to those details of it which Heidegger foundmost problematic. I then sketch Heidegger’s 1925 critique of Husserl. The paper turnsfrom this more familiar terrain to the young Heidegger’s early innovations in phenomeno-logy: his effort to return to the fore-theoretical, and the method of formal indication. Inthis way I hope to shed light on what Heidegger means when he accuses Husserl offorgetting being.

1 Heidegger’s uncharacteristically generous tribute to Husserl inSein und Zeit(Martin Heidegger,Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh [Albany, N.Y.: SUNY, 1996], hereafter SZ, 400, n. 5) must beread in context.Sein und Zeitwas originally published in Husserl’sJahrbuch für Philosophie und phäno-menologische Forschung. That Heidegger is to some degree playing a political game here is clear fromscathing remarks about Husserl which appear in his correspondence at the time. See for example MartinHeidegger to Karl Jaspers, December 26, 1926 in Martin Heidegger / Karl Jaspers,Briefwechsel 1920-1963, ed. Walter Biemel and Hans Saner (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990), 71. Recent studiesof Heidegger’s relationship to Husserl include, Stephen Galt Crowell, “Heidegger and Husserl: The Matterand 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. PathsToward Transcendental Phenomenology(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001). My readingof 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), 174-186; idem, “Heidegger (1907-1927): The Transformation of the Categorial,” in ibid., 84-100; idem,TheGenesis 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, theproject of establishing “apodictic” foundations for the sciences. Philosophy was to be a“rigorous science” grounded in indubitable evidence, an objective analysis of the mostbasic ground of experience and thought. Through a prejudice-free return to “the thingsthemselves” -- the given as it appears under methodologically controlled conditions -- pheno-menology would clarify the epistemological foundations ofother sciences. Husserl’sphenomenology is “reflective” because it is based upon this Cartesian style examinationof the immanent contents of subjectivity. With Descartes, Husserl presupposes a self-transparent ego. Husserl suspends or “brackets” (epoché) the “natural attitude,” the com-mon sense assumption that objects of knowledge exist independent of consciousness.Everything known is a datum of consciousness. Being cannot be conceived apart fromconsciousness. The “phenomenological reduction” returns to the “most basic field of work,”the sphere of “absolutely clear beginnings.”2 We ‘reduce’ thinking orlead it back (re-ducere) to its original source, from the so-called ‘independent world’ to the immanentcontents of consciousness. The reduction reveals that the original data of thinking are notobjects but intentionally structured meanings.

Within the realm of the purely given, every object shows itself as a correlate of asubjective act, theintentumof an intentio. Intentionality was originally a Scholastic con-cept retrieved by Husserl’s mentor Franz Brentano. In order to find a scientific basis forexperimental psychology, Brentano distinguished psychological from non-psychologicalphenomena on the grounds of the psyche’s ineluctable directedness, its essential referenceto an object.3 All consciousness is “consciousness of.” The known is acogitatumof acogito, the intentumof 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 thereification of the ego in modern philosophy. For Brentano and Husserl, consciousness isneither a substance with the accident of rationality, nor a thinking thing. It exhibits afeature found in no substance or physical thing:directedness. Consciousness is an activity,a relation. “Eachcogito, each conscious process . . . ‘means’ something or other, and bearsin itself, in this manner peculiar to the meant, its particularcogitatum.4

Intentionality means that thehowof a phenomenon can be distinguished from itswhat.Husserl introduces a new set of inseparable terms to elaborate this distinction:noema, thatwhich is intuited, thewhat of an intention, andnoesis, the way of intuiting, thehow ofan 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 meaningis holistic and contextual; everynoemahas a noetic “horizon” constitutive of its meaning.We synthesize one-sided views of things into anticipated wholes. Intentional analysisexplicates these implicitly given ‘wholes,’ constitutive a priori horizons or eidetic contexts,

2 Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” inEdmund Husserl: Phenomenology and theCrisis of Philosophy, ed. Quenten Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 146.

3 See Franz Brentano,Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Oskar Kraus and LindaMcAlister (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 PhenomenologicalPhilosophy, 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 ofanything that can be thought. Husserl writes, “For psychology, the universal task presentsitself: to investigate systematically the elementary intentionalities and from out of theseunfold the typical forms of intentional processes, their possible variants, their synthesesto new forms, their structural composition, and from this advance towards a descriptiveknowledge of the totality of mental processes, towards a comprehensive type of the lifeof the psychic.”6 In a return to Kant and Fichte, the foundation of all intentional struc-tures 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, areoriginally constituted.

The Forgetfulness of Being in Reflective Phenomenology

In a largely sympathetic 1925 overview of Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger identifiedthe 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’sdiscovery that theNeo-Kantiandisjunctionbetween intuitedcontentsof consciousness (sensedata) and spontaneously generated formal structures (the categories) has no warrant inexperience. The assumption that categories, ideas, and expressions areimposedon thegiven by a synthesizing consciousness is phenomenologically unjustified. We have no in-tuition 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 notconstitute the ‘hard wiring’ of subjectivity. Rather, categories are derivations from a fore-theoretical 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 thedesk 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 experienceof a thing, but in the sense that experience presupposes them as possible ways of inter-preting a thing. Foremost among pre-categorial structures is being itself. The being of thesensible is given with the sensible, without however being itself sensible.

And yet, Husserl remains blind to the implications of his discovery. The derivativenature of categorial language is left unaddressed and the ambiguity in the meaning ofbeing is not engaged. On the contrary, a traditional understanding of being is uncriticallyassumed. “Being for Husserl means nothing other than true being,objectivity, true for atheoretical scientific knowing.” (GA20 119). The question of the meaning of being cannoteven be raised when being is identified with objectivity. In a letter to Husserl, Heideggerunderlines the difference between Husserl’s reflective approach and his own: “We agreethat 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 forPhenomenology2, no. 2 (1971): 87.

7 Martin Heidegger,Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, GA20, ed. Peter Jaeger (Frankfurta.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994); English:History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. TheodoreKisiel (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992), 135-6.

8 See Edmund Husserl,Logical Investigations, trans. John N. Findlay (London: Routledge & KeganPaul, 1970), vol. 2, sec. 40-48.

267

to beings of the same nature. But this does not mean that what determines the location ofthe transcendental is not a being at all. Rather, it leads directly to the problem: What isthe kind of Being of the being in which ‘world’ is constituted? That is the central problemof Being and Time; that is, a fundamental ontology of Dasein. It tries to show that thekind of Being belonging to human Dasein is totally differentfrom 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 ofthe intentional object, the intentional act, and the intentional subject are brought into ques-tion. “To the intentionality of perception belongs not only theintentio and theintentum,but also the understanding of the Being of that which is intended in theintentum.”10

What is the being of the being that is constituted by intentionality? How does it differfrom other beings? What do these multiple ways of being indicate about the meaning ofbeing itself? “Phenomenological questioning in its innermost tendency itself leads to thequestion of the being of the intentional and before anything else to the question of themeaning of being as such.” (GA20 136)

Rather than exploring the differences between the being of theintentio and the beingof everyintentumHusserl imposes upon consciousness a notion of being derived from thedomain 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 thebeing of intentionality, but hyperbolic extrapolations from the domain of objectified being.Husserl had not remained true to his own principles; he had defined the phenomenologicaltheme “not out of the matters themselves but instead out of a traditional prejudgment ofit.” (GA20 128) Intentionality indicates an essential ambiguity in the notion of being, theunthematized divergent ways in which beings can be. Yet because Husserl’s bracketsexclude ontological considerations, this ambiguity cannot be engaged. “It [Husserl’sphenomenology] disregards not only reality but also any particular individuation of livedexperiences. It disregards the fact that acts are mine or those of any other individualhuman beings and regards them only in theirwhat. It regards the what, the structureof the acts, but as a result does not thematize theirway to be, their being an act as such.”(GA20 152/109-10)

The questioning of the being of the intentional thrusts reflective phenomenology intocrisis. Being cannot be accessed through direct examination of conscious acts; it demandsan interpretive method that works with indirect manifestations and hidden meanings. Thehistorical self, who always already understands being, is not a “transcendental ego”; itdoes not reflectively possess itself a priori, but only encounters itself insofar as it enactsits pre-comprehension in living.

Heidegger’s Return to the Fore-Theoretical

From the beginning of his apprenticeship to Husserl (1919), Heidegger suspected that theeidetic reduction to pure intuition remains trapped in the tradition of privileging theoreticalseeing over concretely and historically embedded understanding. Where phenomenology

9 Heidegger, letter to Husserl of October 22, 1927, inHusserl and Heidegger: The Question of aPhenomenological Beginning(Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1983), 95-6.

10 Martin Heidegger,Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA24, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm vonHerrmann (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 onconscious acts, phenomenology under Heidegger becomes hermeneutical, the provisionalthematization of that which is hidden, that which cannot be directly accessed through re-flection but must be “formally indicated.”11 Kisiel characterizes this as a move from“intuition” to “understanding.” For Husserl intentions are fulfilled in intuitions, where theparadigm for an intuition is a sense experience, the immediate grasp of content. The inten-tion heads for the intuition. If it is not fulfilled it is an “empty” intention. Heidegger findsthis view artificial, struggling under the epistemological construct of experience as asubject / object confrontation. Intentionality analysis remains inadequate to phenomenologyre-conceived as “the hermeneutics of facticity.” Heidegger’s phenomenology would digbeneath intentionality, and the cognitive-paradigm implied by it, into the fore-theoreticalfoundations of all human experience.

For the young Heidegger experience is always already structured before it becomes theterm of an intentional act. Consciousness does not “intuit” things, but “understands” them,that is, itfindsthem understandable, laden with meaning, and appearing within the horizonof Dasein’s practical involvement with them. A thing is not first ‘given’ to us as an in-tentional 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 humanbeing. According to Heidegger, Husserl’s intentionality analysis never accesses the mostbasic level of lived-experience because it remains stuck in a theoretical paradigm, whereDasein is interpreted as primarily a knower / perceiver. For Heidegger the practical con-cerns of life precede knowing and perceiving. Knowing is an act characteristic of a specialkind 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 under-standability.12 Heidegger speaks, not of consciousness, but ofExistenz, thrownness intoa world. Whatever intentions may emerge in the ‘subject’ are always already preceded bynon-intentional horizons of meaning, “the ecstatic structures of worldly existence.”13

As early as the 1919/1920 courseGrundprobleme der Phänomenologie(GA58)Heidegger was radicalizing Husserl’s notion of intentionality in terms of factical life. Nolonger understood as the convergence of subjective acts with intended objects, intention-ality becomes indicative of life and its motivational tendencies. Every life-tendency is di-rected toward a certain content, but this is not originally an object, a thing with a distinctessence. Rather the term of a tendency is a concretely determined, historically singularizedlife-world, a meaningful-whole that motivates the self to behave in a certain way. By 1921Heidegger had introduced the notion of “comportment” (Verhalten) into his lectures as aterm for fore-theoretical intentions, underscoring the factical involvement of the self withits world. The situational connotation of the German wordVerhaltencorrects the

11 The key discussion on formal indication occurs in Martin Heidegger,Phänomenologie desreligiösen Lebens, GA60, ed. Claudius Strube (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995); English:ThePhenomenology 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 FormalIndication: A Question of Method inBeing and Time,” Man and World30 (1997): 413-30; John vanBuren, “The Ethics ofFormale Anzeigein Heidegger,”American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly69,no. 2 (1995): 157-170; Daniel Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Method: Philosophical Concepts as FormalIndications,”Review of Metaphysics47 (June 1994): 775-795.

12 Kisiel precisely formulates the difference between Husserl and Heidegger on this point: “TheHeideggerian retrieve opposes Husserl in situating the understanding and exposition of meaning not in actsof consciousness but first of all in a pre-conscious realm of being-in-the-world, which is already pervadedby ‘expressivity.’” Kisiel, “The Transformation of the Categorial,” 98.

13 Ibid., 100.

269

worldlessness of Husserl’s intentionality.Verhalten is an attitude, a behavior adoptedunder particular circumstances. Thus understood, a comportment occurs in a determinatelife-context. On the most basic level of experience, the self is indistinguishable from itshistorical 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’ some-thing, living ‘from’ something. We define the ‘something’ . . . with the term ‘world.’”(GA61 53, 85-86)

Heidegger elaborates four moments in comportment: content-sense, thewhat of atendency (Gehaltssinn); relational-sense, thehow or form of a tendency (Bezugssinn);enactment-sense, the actualization of the historical tendency in a concrete situation(Vollzugssinn); and temporalizing sense, the temporal significancewhich makes the tendencypossible (Zeitigungssinn). (GA58 260-61, GA61 52-53) Content-sense and relational-sensecorrespond to Husserl’snoesisand noema. Enactment-sense is roughly analogous toHusserl’s notion of intuitional fulfillment. However, Heidegger places the emphasis on theway the fulfillment occurs, holding that each enactment brings with it a unique shade ofmeaning. Temporalizing-sense exceeds anything developed by Husserl. For Heidegger thewhole 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 isolateessences. But according to Heidegger, this is a distortion of the phenomenon. A meaningenacted today is different from a meaning enacted yesterday. The accommodation to theheterogeneity of history is crucial if phenomenology is to stay true to its theme, life as itis lived by us.

The distinction between the theoretical and the fore-theoretical in the early Freiburglectures develops intoSein und Zeit’s distinction between the “present-at-hand”(Vorhandenheit), and the “ready-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit). Vorhandenheit, from the com-mon German word for availability (literally, “being-before-the-hand”), means objectifiedbeing, 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 relationsin which they originally show themselves. The form of the present-at-hand bears tracesof the deeper fore-theoretical ground, the thing as “ready-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit), nestedin the contextual whole of my living. The hammer, which weighs such and such, has acertain shape, and belongs to a class of artifacts,representsthe tool swinging in my handas I build my house, and the referential whole within which such activity is possible, theworld of human construction, planning, and sheltering. A tool is fore-theoretically de-termined by what it serves to do. As such, it cannot be understood apart from those whomit serves, their purposes, and the other things to which it is related. By contrast toVor-handenheit, Zuhandenheitcannot 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 itbefore myself as an instance of a class. Without the fore-theoretical context I would haveno acquaintance with the thing whatsoever.

Formal Indication

The indirect nature of Heidegger’s language stands in marked contrast to Husserl’sscientific discourse. Where Husserl expresses himself in direct and categorical language,Heidegger employs elliptical, often tortuous neologisms to make his point. Early on in hiscareer Heidegger came to see that if phenomenology is to thematize life as it is lived byus, it must share in the being of the historical. It must become itself historical. Thisinvolves 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 thereforeinescapably provisional. Apodicticity is sacrificed for the sake of remaining true to things.Hermeneutic phenomenology’s ‘results’ are not definitions of essences but formal in-dications, that is, empty directives for thinking, which remain open to diverse historicalapplications. Formal indications are never set in stone, they are subject to continual re-vision.

Provisionality does not undermine rigor. Rather, it makes phenomenological analysisan act that must be perpetually re-enacted. It is difficult to hold fast to thinking, when thatwhich 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 itselfby allowing it to live in our speaking and thinking. The task cannot be completed (tospeak of completion makes no sense here). But its significance does not stand or fall onits 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. Thequestioner must experience a re-direction of inquiry if the hermeneutics of facticity is tosucceed. We, the questioners, are the ones who are put into question. The safe impartialityof a theoretical inspection is no longer possible. To make facticity questionable is to resistthe subtle substitution of general ideas for concrete experience. We are called to think ourown existence. In the interest of staying as close to life as possible, Heidegger works withhistorically situated and provisional expressions (formal indications). The goal is to estab-lish 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 disappearsfrom Sein und Zeitas an explicit methodological technique, the reasons which ledHeidegger to articulate the notion remain central to his phenomenology.14 The idea was tofind a non-invasive way into the fore-theoretical, to philosophize, without disturbing “thestream of life.” A formal indication does not dictate the theme in advance (it does notdefine content), but invites the thinker to discover the theme for him or herself. One couldargue that the methodological discussion disappears as Heidegger’s discourse becomeseven more indirect and elliptical. The whole ofSein und Zeitis formally indicative.Formal indication is necessary because of the singularity (Jemeinigkeit) of Dasein. Thebeing 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, toexhortatively point to it in such a way that we are drawn to perform the act of thinkingwhich will light up the being for ourselves. Read as formally indicative,Sein und Zeitisa practical manual of exhortations which call us to a hermeneutical performance of think-ing. It is “an empty book,” as Ryan Streeter puts it.15

Heidegger’s development of the method of formal indicationis rooted in his 1915Habilitationsschriftand its examination of the problem of the ineffability of the singular.16

14 Heidegger uses the termformale Anzeigein Sein und Zeitwhen an articulation of anexistentialstructure of being-in-the-world is needed without committing to any particularexistentiell(ontic) inter-pretation 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 andLanguage,”Review of Metaphysics, vol. 57, no. 2 (December, 2003): 323-343, idem, “The Forgetting ofHaecceitas: Heidegger’s 1915-1916Habilitationsschrift,” in Andrzej Wiercinski, ed.,Between the Humanand 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 intellectiondepends upon sensation. While we cannot think without the singular, we never cognizeit as such. Individual things are cognized only insofar as they are instances of a universal.Scotus’s work on this problem generated the doctrine ofhaecceitas, the notion of theconcrete intelligibility of the singular. For Scotus, Aristotle’s doctrine of the ineffabilityof the singular exposes the limits of the mode of thinking constituted by defining andjudging universals. Ineffability does not signify unintelligibility but the limitations oftheoretical cognition. If the singular exhibits an intelligibility which eludes abstract intel-lection, we must speak of a fore-theoretical stratum of intelligibility. When we look athow we use language, Heidegger says, we see that defining content and judging are not theonly ways of expressing intelligibility. Where definitions are not possible, language canperformatively and exhortatively point to that which cannot be named. The exhortationcalls the recipient, not to think certain thoughts, but to perform away of thinking.

Formally indicative language is a spur to existential self-engagement. To understanda formal indication, I must break out of the self-forgetfulness of theoretical speculationand apply it. Formal indication highlights historically differentiated semantic structure bysuspending the relational-sense, thehow of the phenomenon.17 We are not told how tointerpret the matter. Rather, we are invited to interpret the matter ourselves. Formal indic-ation is an exhortation to apply a way of thinking, without any clear directives as to howthinking is to be applied. Thus the formal indication puts the recipient into crisis. It is anintentional and strategic ambiguity.18 Determinate meaning is in some way withheld andapplication (the enactment-sense orVollzugssinn) is highlighted as the locus of significance.The formal indication is therefore semantically unsatisfying yet formally charged withsuggested and possible meaning.

The formal indication is analogous to the ironic speech act. The semantic gap in theformal 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 acontextual significance that exceeds the content of the individual words. In order to under-stand the expression, I must enact it. I have to put myself into the situation of the speakerand see what it could mean for him or her. The understanding of irony is only possiblethrough self-transposition: we see the expression through the eyes of the one who uses itand only then grasp its meaning. But to ‘see something through the eyes of another’ is tosee 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 theopening pages ofSein und Zeit, Heidegger shows how we cannot ask the question aboutthe meaning of being without already understanding something about being. (SZ 4) Yetwe 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 ofthe phenomenon, in a negative sense at the same time as a warning! A phenomenon must be pre-given in sucha way that its relational sense is held in suspense. One must guard against assuming that its relationalsense is originally theoretical. This is a position that opposes the sciences in the extreme. There is noinsertion into a content-domain, rather the opposite: the formal indication is a warding off, a preliminary pro-tection, so that the enactment character remains free. The necessity of this precaution lies in the decadenttendency of factical life experience, which forces us into the objective, from which we must neverthelessdraw the phenomena.” GA60 44.

18 “The formal indicator, although it guides the consideration, brings no predetermined opinion intothe problem. . . . The formal predication is not bound to any content, however it must be motivated some-how. How is it motivated? It arises from themeaning of the attitudinal relationitself. I do not look fromthewhatdetermination to the object, rather I view the object in a manner of speaking in its determinate-ness. I must look away from the given what-content, and instead seethat 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. “Whatis decisive is not to get out of this circle but to get into it in the right way. . . . A positivepossibility of the most primordial knowledge is hidden in it.” (SZ 143) The possibilityopened up by the circularity of the inquiry is the opportunity to shape pre-judgment orVorhabe(fore-have), the anticipated totality of relevance from which perspectives andconcepts are drawn, and which determines what is unconcealed and what remains hidden.Hermeneutic phenomenology makes the implicit explicit in order to see how habitual pre-judgments unveil and conceal being. Our “average everydayness” is interrogated in sucha way that the pre-judgments pre-reflectively operative in all our thinking and speakingare permitted to show themselves. As Pöggeler puts it, “Phenomenological philosophizingis traveling along with life.”19

We are now, with the publication of the early Freiburg lectures, beginning to understandthe methodological care with which the young Heidegger experimented with language inorder 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, mid-stream as it were, tolive phenomenologically. This is not something the phenomenologistcould do for anyone. Heidegger’s phenomenology is an invitation to apply a way of think-ing, to think, on the assumption that every application will yield a different result. It is aphenomenology that is not only open to revision; it deconstructs itself in a struggle to staywith the stream of history. For it is in the haecceity of concrete historical existence thatbeing is disclosed in its most primordial sense, as time. None of this would have beenpossible without Husserl’s work, especially hisLogische Untersuchungen. But it was clearto Heidegger from the beginning that the hermeneutics of faciticty represents a trans-position of phenomenology into an existential key, a transposition which significantlytransforms 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 (inHusserlianaandthe HeideggerGesamtausgabe) allows us to see and explore the connection between thesetwo 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 ofphenomenology that binds them together. Both Heidegger and Husserl would havequestioned any loss of strictness or scientific rigor, if such were found in a philosophicalwork 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 showup all that clearly in work done in 1928, nor in somewhat later work,1 but is indeed latentin 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 aconcern for philosophy to be scientific in character, an issue that surfaces in their earlywritings. In the case of Husserl, my analysis will focus on theLogische Untersuchungen,and regarding Heidegger I shall look to hisFrühe 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 textPhilosophie alsstrenge Wissenschaft. Husserl’s aim is evident from the very first sentence:

From its very first practitioners onwards, philosophy has laid claim to being an exactscience, namely one that would meet the highest theoretical demands and would enablelife, in respect of its ethical-religious aspects, to be lived according to purely rationallaws.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 bescientific.” This guidance has been followed throughout history with varying degrees of

1 We remember Husserl’s remark inFormale und transzendentale Logik, first published in 1928/29;seeHusserlianaXVII, 7 (henceforth quoted as Hua): “philosophy has come to be some sort of theoreticaltechnique.” Ten years later, Heidegger would question the same thing in his famous text “Die Zeit desWeltbildes,” published inHolzwege.

2 Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,”Logos1 (1911): 289, hereafter PhSW.“Seit der ersten Anfänger hat die Philosophie den Anspruch erhoben, strenge Wissenschaft zu sein, undzwar die Wissenschaft, die den höchsten theoretischen Bedürfnissen Genüge leiste und in etisch-religiöserHinsicht ein von reinen Vernunftnormen geregeltes Leben ermögliche.”

3 PhSW, 293.

274

intensity, yet the search for philosophy as a strict science has nevertheless been constantlyrenewed.4

It is in this light that Husserlian phenomenology attaches to this philosophical quest tobe scientific. Through reflexive phenomenology, Husserl attempted a radical turn inphilosophy, or at least attempted to break new ground by trying to found philosophy asa strict science. However,scienceis not to be understood here as one among many, butinstead as the “most elevated and rigorous science of them all.”5 Several questions arisenow: What is scientific at all about this newprima philosophia? How is it scientific? Howcould it possibly be the “most elevated and rigorous science”? What does it mean not tomistake it for other particular sciences?

Husserl had been thoroughly convinced that phenomenology is a science -- and a par-ticular one at that -- since writing hisLogische Untersuchungen. As such, to grasp a morecomplete picture of phenomenology as a strict science, we shall direct our attention to thefinal section of theProlegomenaand to theIntroduction to the second book of theLogische 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. Evenin theProlegomena, Husserl’s enterprise is displayed as a search for pure logic, logic asa mathesis universalis.

For Husserl, science has two fundamental features: every science is a set of groundedknowledge, and they (the sciences) are all linked by a certain grounding unity. He wrote:“scientific knowledge as such isgrounded knowledge[wissenschaftliche Erkenntnis ist alssolche Erkenntnis aus dem Grunde].” (Hua XVIII, A 231.) Knowing the reason for some-thing means “to appreciate the necessity for something to be this way or that [die Not-wendigkeit 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 desbezüglichen Sachverhaltes].” Nevertheless, it is imperative that a principle of unitycorresponding to such scientific pretensions be found. Whatever it is that makes thisprinciple of unity possible can be given either as essential or nonessential. In the formercase, 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 theknowledge of grounding laws is understood as knowing the fundamental basis, then theexplanatory unity will be a unity built from the totality of grounding laws, that is, a unitydevised as a unity of theory, a theoretical unity. Hence this kind of science ischaracterized as theoretical or abstract.8

4 According to Husserl, the desire to attain to proper ... with philosophy lies within the Socratic-Platonic turn, as well as in the Cartesian turn. Conversely, Romantic philosophy shows a tendency towarda “weakening or faking of the desire to achieve the strongest philosophical constitution of science.” SeePhSW, 292. To find more concerning ‘strictness,’ ‘exactness’ (Strenge), see Martin Heidegger,Gesamt-ausgabe, 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 callednomologicalsciences,

“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 theone hand it consists in the unity of the thing. Here, truth would relate to “one and thesame objectivity (Gegenständlichkeit) or to one and the same genre.”9 As such, scienceswould not explain anything through groundwork, but rather, they would merely describesomething. They would be descriptive sciences inasmuch as their “descriptive unity wasdetermined 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 thebelonging together (Zusammengehörigkeit) of truth-content or unity within the realm ofnormative disciplines.”11

This truth/unity constitutes theory. From this perspective, philosophical inquiry into theconditions of possibility of science becomes the question after the conditions of possibilityof general theory, that is, of theoretical knowledge as such.12 Owing to that, philo-sophical inquiry is actually a form of meta-theorizing, or a theory of theory. This ‘theoryof theory’ idea is only possible through a “completely different revisiting of forms andlaws, and of the theoretical links of the level of knowledge they belong to.”13 “A pure logicwould be hence something to clear up the idea of theory.”14

This attempt, as shown in theProlegomena, will be continued by Husserl in theIntroductionto the second book of theLU, without, in this case, staying with the questionafter 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 theLU, Husserl clearly points out the scopeof phenomenology: “Pure phenomenology shows a field of neutral research upon whichdiverse sciences are rooted.”16We have already indicated that, even though phenomenologyis presented inLU as a phenomenology of life-experiences (Erlebnis), it ought not to bemistaken for psychology. Instead, it should be understood as a purely eidetic science. Thatis 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 isfueled by the analysis regarding theory and the essence of science that was done in theprolegomena. But the limits set in theProlegomenaonly started a push forward, due tothe development of pure logic as amathesis universalis: “the great task of clearing up anddistinguishing, 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 ordescriptions, as they indeed are in particular sciences. Phenomenology ought to be “ascience standing on a fundamental basis.”18 The theoretical-cognitive task of reflexivephenomenology turns up instead well before any given descriptive or explicative sciencedoes.

9 Hua XVIII, A 235.10 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.

276

Phenomenology does not concern itself with knowledge as a temporal happening. Itdoes not handle knowledge as either a psychological or a psychophysical affair; what itwants is to clear up the idea of knowledge in terms of its constitutive elements and itslaws. . . it wants to raise pure forms of knowledge (and its pure laws) to a never-beforeachieved level of clarity and distinction, folding back to a plain, whole and fittingintuition.19

If phenomenology could reach the aforesaid clarity and distinction (clara et distinctaidea) through intuition, we must stress the fact that, for Husserl, such intuition would beapprehended reflexively, that is, it would be a reflexive intuition. In other words, the wayclarity and distinction are to be obtained is possible only by means of a reflective ‘object-making’ (vergegenständlichen), through reflecting on it. Phenomenological clarity anddistinction are obtained during different levels of reflection. That is why a theoretical-cognitive 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 firstlectures. Inasmuch as this intuition grants knowledge, it was considered by Heideggerfrom the very beginning to be a theoretical intuition.20

It can be easily understood, from this perspective, why Husserl spoke about aphenomenology of knowledge, that is to say, a phenomenology “directed toward pure lifeexperiences and whatever meaning-constituents might belong to these.”21 It is an eideticscience that goes after clarity and distinctiveness in theoretical knowledge through areflexive intuition (Anschauung). However, it will only unfold itself completely, findingits fundamental basis, through a final step: by discovering the transcendental realm basedon the epoché and the phenomenological reduction: “Only with a transcendental-phenomenological approach can philosophy begin to develop as science in any laterscientific 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, butrather, as we rigorously require here, intellectual awareness [Wissen], it must thereforebe carried out based only on both mental and cognitive experiences that are given tous [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 sixthLU,a knowledge-providing intuition is characterized as fulfillment. By ‘fulfillment,’ whatHusserl 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, inpsychologischem order psychophysischem Sinn erklären, sondern die Idee der Erkenntnis nach ihrenkonstitutiven Elementen, bzw. Gesetzen aufklären [❼ ] die reinen Erkenntnisformen und Gesetze will siedurch Rückgang auf die adäquat erfüllende Anschauung zur Klarheit und Deutlichkeit erheben.”

20 What Heidegger mentioned in theKNS-lecturesregarding the features of knowledge of theHusserlian point of view (GA56/57, 65) was formulated with greater clarity a few years later. Forexample, see GA21, 109. Heidegger mentioned that according to Husserl knowledge (Erkenntnis) isintuition (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 sixthLogical

Investigation, mustn’t be mistaken for intentional essence, which was developed by Husserl in the fifthLU. 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. Onlythose acts characterized by the fulfilling intuition would be cognitive. Fulfillment thusshows that acts of knowledge are stratified in such a way that they take place throughouta modification of meaningful acts or “empty intentions,”25 that is to say, by means ofmodifying the meaningful intention.26 In other words: when, during a statement, meaningis ‘free’ from what is being meant, an ‘empty meaning’ (Leermeinen) hence takes place,or, as Husserl stated in hisMéditations cartésiennes(MC), “to mean a thing” (Sach-meinung). No knowledge is acquired in this case. However, if a meaningful intention is‘attached,’ then a modification might happen just where theAdäquationappeared: betweenwhat was meant and what was intuited. Only through this modality of fulfilling intuitionis knowledge possible.

Adequatio is also characterized as evidence. Science’s founding task is to have atendency toward evidence. This was cleared up by Husserl in theMC: “Instead of thething’s being present as a mere assumption made from “a distance,” to evidence that thething is there, present, “itself,” the objective fact “by itself.”27 Further ahead it will beshown just how this scientific tendency of Husserl’s grounds itself in such a principle thatis, however, de-formalized within the framework of theoretical-cognitive scientificity.

It is henceforth shown that reflexive phenomenology is rooted in its attempts to achievea theoretical-cognitive objective, or as Husserl put it in theMC, a realm of knowledge.28

Husserl stressed this objective in hisLogosarticle, taking a firm stand against historicismand naturalism. Husserl showed that philosophy alone, as a rigorous science, can solve theenigma of knowledge, this being possible if philosophy becomes a transcendental pheno-menology.29 Naturalism cannot solve such an enigma as it necessarily originates with anaturalization of consciousness and ideas. Historicism, and most ‘world-view (Welt-anschauung) philosophies’ aim at a ‘striving for knowledge’ (Weisheitsstreben),30 bymeans of which philosophy’s scientific aspect withers: “True science knows no deepmeanings, as they are not within the scope of its true doctrine ... deep meaning belongs towisdom, but clarity and distinction belong with strict theorization.”31

Grounded on what has so far been worked upon, we can now understand Heidegger’slater remark about Husserl’s being guided by the decisive idea of Philosophy as a strictscience, an idea that “has guided modern philosophy ever since Descartes.”32 The ideaof Philosophy as an absolute science follows the Cartesian idea of science,33 while beingfounded upon intuitive evidence.

25 Hua XIX/2, A 568.26 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 otherhand, do entail fulfilment. To these both imagination and perception belong. We can find different degreesof fulfilment within the intuitive act. The task of phenomenological knowledge will examine the mutualrelation 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 theDie 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 aSophiabut rather assciencein the way we nowadays understand this concept. WalterBiemel, “Die entscheidenden Phasen der Entfaltung von Husserls Philosophie,” inGesammelte SchriftenI, 86.

32 GA20, 147; GA17, 72. Also refer to GA32, 14 onward. See J. F. Courtine,Heidegger et laphénoménologie(Paris: Vrin, 1990), 192ff.

33 Hua I, 52ff.

278

d) Features that are Fundamental to Philosophy as a Strict Science

Phenomenology’s already mentioned (in theLU) non-theoretical character is branded,in the Logosarticle, as a “scientific knowledge of the essence of consciousness” that isto be unfolded.34 The basis on which science rests is, for Husserl, its hidden pre-scientific essence. This basis is indeed interpreted as a consciousness constituent. In thislight, for Husserl, the field of effectively originary science, or first philosophy, shall bethe realm of the transcendental. That’s why it’s possible to say that Husserl’s radical twistwas the discovery of a science of transcendental subjectivity, since transcendentalsubjectivity rises as theUrstätteof all meaning-giving and meaning-keeping.35

It has thus been noted elsewhere that an immense field of research is opened throughphenomenological reduction and ‘epoché.’ Were we to live in a naïve natural attitude, theworld and worldly things would simply lie before us. By giving the world up, that is, bygiving naïveté up and retreating to originary life consciousness, we discover the sourceof the meaning of worldly facts. The world and worldly things are discovered asphenomena constituted within pure consciousness. However, this shift from a naturalattitude to a transcendental attitude doesn’t convey “fleeing from the world toward aspecialization that is alien to it, and therefore theoretical and uninteresting.”36 Such anshift is rather something which makes a radically different investigation of the absolutepossible.

Based upon what has been said so far, it is now possible, by means of Husserl’sphilosophy, to answer the question regarding how philosophy might be scientificallyfounded. 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, philosophyought to be understood as a theoretical discipline from the very beginning.

3) Methodologically speaking, philosophy in its entirety is possible as a transcendentalscience alone. That happens through a change of attitude, through reduction andphenomenologicalepoché.

To recap, it might be thence stated that for Husserl first philosophy must be understoodas 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 meretransposition of the pre-scientific character of phenomenology that Husserl mentioned inthe LU? How can Heidegger’s position shed new light unto thought concerning pheno-menology’s scientificity?

The answer to these questions will be shown by glancing at Heidegger’s radicalposition regarding tradition and, particularly, regarding Husserl. This is why we should

34 PhSW, 300.35 Hua VIII, 4; Hua V, 139.36 Husserl, “Phänomenologie und Anthropologie,” in Hua XXVII, 178.37 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 limitsto the slogan of Heidegger’s “originary a-theoretical science.”

Pre-theoretical,’ when used by Husserl, can be understood in the following way: Onthe one hand, ‘pre-theoretical’ refers to the fundamental feature of the natural attitude, inwhich the general thesis of the world’s ‘being-there-simply-for-me’ and mundane thingsis valid. An attitude shift from naïveté to the transcendental realm by means of reductionand phenomenologicalepochécan also be understood as a shift from pre-scientific to ascientific attitude. Only through the discovery of transcendentalism can the world and themundane thing cease to be merely a theme for discussion. Scientific work as such needsto sort out what is otherwise merely discussed. On the other hand, we have discoveredpre-theoreticality in a pre-transcendental level in theLU, at the point where phenomenologyis, so to speak, sorted away from any particular science. Phenomenology is not scientificin the way explicative or descriptive sciences are, but rather, and to put it in Kantianterms, it is focused on the conditions of possibility of knowledge of whatever be regardedas ‘scientific.’ This is why Husserl says that particular sciences are rooted in pheno-menology.

The first meaning of ‘pre-theoretical’ points to a transition, the transition from pre-scientificity to scientificity. This can be regarded thus as the ‘thematic transition.’Something being scientific shows therefore that phenomena as such pertain only to thetranscendental realm, as that is where they become properly thematic.38

The second meaning of pre-theoretical points to an essential structure or determinationof Husserlian phenomenology, and philosophy in general. These must not be mistaken forany particular science, not even psychology. Phenomenology entails rather its own wayof being determined throughout a search to comprehend how the world is constituted. Itis originally pre-scientific, as it establishes the groundwork for particular sciences.

However, both meanings of ‘pre-scientific’ are to be understood within the frameworkof their determining scope: theoreticality. Pre-scientificity (understood as pre-phenomeno-logicality), it being a step toward scientificity (as phenomenologicality), has already beendetermined 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 lifeassumed 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 thisas a strengthening of the scientificity of particular sciences. That’s why he would laterspeak of prescientificity as a ‘theory of theory.’39 Heidegger’s achievement is thereforea radical overturning of this theoretically coined scientificity. This radicalism is shown inthe concept of ‘originary a-theoretical science.’ In this light, we can already tell thatwhatever Heidegger called ‘originary a-theoretical science,’ is neither pre-scientificity asunderstood by the ‘natural attitude’ nor in the way it is understood by the theoreticalstructure of Husserlian phenomenology.

38 See Eugen Fink, “Reflexionen zu Husserls phänomenologischer Reduktion,” in idem,Nähe undDistanz(Freiburg i.Br.: Alber, 1976), 113. In that work, Fink demonstrates that we can truly speak ofthree concepts of ‘phenomenon’ in Husserl. The first of these must be understood as the thing groundedwithin its appearing. The second is the result of the eidetic reduction, that is, its essence. And the thirdis what remains after the phenomenological reduction and theepochéhave taken place, that is, the thingin 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 objectsor of a certain realm. It’s been so far shown that for Husserl science obtains its scientificstatus by knowing its groundwork and through a unifying principle. However, philosophyis geared toward clearing up knowledge in itself, and toward the mutual relationshipbetween knowledge and that which is known. Therefore, we can feature the structure ofHusserlian phenomenology as pre-scientific, as it points specifically to the conditions ofpossibility 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 towardthe condition of possibility of knowledge. We can thus say that by keeping the conceptof ‘science,’ Heidegger refers to something that stands in a given relationship withknowledge. It will later be shown, by Heidegger, that knowledge is something groundedon the originary realm of life and life experiences, in the life experience of the surround-ing world. The apparent obviousness of the scientific determined by theoretical knowledgeis followed to its origin, that is, radicalized through a more originary scientificity. Thisway, the relation with knowledge expressed by the concept ‘science’ is aquestionedrelation instead of being an understood founding relation. If knowledge is to be revealedas founding through a radical, originary science, the question about how this originaryscience should take place arises. Could it possibly be without knowledge? Were this tobe the case, originary science wouldn’t have any scientific-methodical features and itwould thus become, as some improper interpretations would want it, irrationality ormysticism.40 We will therefore state without hesitation that originary science isscientifically and methodologically directed, in so far as it entails ‘knowledge.’ It is nota mystical or mythical construction, but instead, radically scientific. Its knowledge is moreoriginary and radical than the knowledge of a theory of knowledge or of the conditionsof possibility of transcendental philosophy. If we comprehend the scientific with regardto 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 entailspecifically theoretical-cognitive features, owing to the fact that intuition is understood byhim as knowledge. This way, the manner in which something is seen has been determinedtheoretically beforehand. Further ahead we shall see that this yields a deformalizing of themain phenomenological principle. If Heidegger, however, tries to show the foundedfeatures of knowledge through the idea of an originary science, this means, thus, thatHusserlian intuition should already be a founded intuition. “Intuition” is shown forHeidegger then as the most originary founding ground, that is, even more originary thanthe theoretic-cognitive intuition. Its source of knowledge would not be a theoreticalintuition, but rather a comprehending intuition. The comprehending intuition would bemore originary than the theoretical one, inasmuch as the latter would always be amodification of the former. Heidegger already had this theory of comprehension in mindeven as he gave his first course asPrivatdozent: “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, mysticismpoints to the object’s opening into subject, that is, the lack of a boundary between them. This objectionmisses the mark as well, as in originary science the concept of science is understood in a completelymethodological fashion. That is, there is no mystical fusion of the object with the subject in originaryscience. Rather, originary science goes beyond this difference and shows that the origin of such adifference is a theory of knowledge grounded upon subjects and objects.

281

things, we shall comprehend by intuition and intuit by comprehending.”41 In the nextlecture course, he would refer to philosophy as a hermeneutic phenomenology,42 and in1923 as a hermeneutics of facticity.43 Heidegger’s terminological modification throughouthis 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 andfounding 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 arejection of a theory of knowledge. It rather places a theory of knowledge within itsdetermined main feature: it is derivative. The possibility of an originary a-theoreticalscience hence shows that “Whatever be theoretical in itself always refers to the pre-theoretical.”45

Heidegger’s aim is precisely to free pre-theoreticality or a-theoreticality from the rule ofthe theoretical: “This rule ought to be broken…,” but this then also needs another openingof realms that had remained untouched up to that point. The realm of life-experiences inthe surrounding world as a realm of science, can’t be opened in a theoretical fashion, onlyaccording to the life experience in itself. Originary science as such and its research fieldcan’t be reached in a theoretical way, neither transcendental nor pre-transcendental. Onlyby comprehending, that is, hermeneutically, can it be accessed. In the 1920 summersemester, Heidegger outlined this matter more clearly: “This explaining and determiningthe essence of philosophy (as originary science) shouldn’t be apprehended as a taskperformed 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-theoreticalscience and philosophy as a strict science. We’ve shown that what makes up the scientificaspect 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 asa transcendental theoretic-cognitive science.

Heidegger saw beyond these features, by radically overturning the scientific characterof science while discovering its originary pre-theoretic-hermeneutic field of work.Philosophy as an originary science in Heidegger must always be ahermeneutic and pre-theoretic science.

c) The Object of Science

If our starting point is to be scientifically determined in its own way, then thefollowing 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 objectand how shall the way it is bound to its object be understood? Can we still talk aboutobjects 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 thussaid that it is not possible to speak of objects regarding originary science, inasmuch aswhatever it is that ought to be our research subject, it is that in which we always findourselves: namely, life itself. The latter cannot name any object in the theoretic-cognitive

41 GA58, 19ff.42 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.

282

sense: My own life, at its origin, is never understood as a “what,” in the way the objectsof particular sciences are. It’s not a “what” we could observe or ponder on. That is whyin 1919 Heidegger wrote that originary science did not set its sights on the object ofknowledge, but rather in the knowledge of the object.47 Heidegger makes a similar re-mark in a letter sent to Jaspers in 1922: “There are objects that one does not have, whichrather ‘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 theoreticaldiscipline indicates that this ought to be understood in a quite different way. That’s whyKovacs 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 aimsat the manner in which life is unveiled, and not at life understood as a theoretic-cognitiveobject. That is why originary science should be understood as a method of researchdetermined by that very “object.” Is this not anin probandocircle, even if a completedevelopment of philosophy takes place, grounded on that yet to be discovered realm? Howcan the object of originary science become accessible, given that its unveiling as a methodof 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; itrather constitutes a unique feature of the philosophical method, as Heidegger would laterstate. 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 particularproblem within an object-realm.”50 That’s why Husserl stated that the method consistsin clearing up problems.51 The philosophical method is thus not a technical means ortool; 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 thatthe “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 in1922 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 onboth of his “roads to knowledge,” seeking to actually know the object. However, we ought not to forgetthat, in his view, knowledge of an object consists in building a bridge to connect the gap between thetranscendental validity of truth and the immanent being of a statement. Rickert attempted, by returningto a view of knowledge, not to go back to an originary opening of the object, but instead just to ensurehis own approach to the theory of value. That is why Heidegger wrote that, for Rickert, knowingsomething 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, “HeideggersLogische Untersuchungen,” Heidegger Studies6 (1990): 87ff.; J. F. Courtine,Heidegger et la Phénoménologie, 172.

49 G. Kovacs, “Philosophy as a primordial Science (Urwissenschaft) in the Early Heidegger,”Journalof the British Society for Phenomenology21-2, 1990: 121-35. Kovacs grounds his principle on Heidegger’sstatement that “instead of adjusting myself to the object of knowledge, I can set to the knowledge of theobject.” GA56-7, 28. That is why Kovacs writes that “the idea of philosophy as a primordial science doesnot 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 phänomenologischenHermeneutik,” 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 anattitude orbehavior, that is, “the way in which the humanDaseinbehaves towards himself and towards the world.”Ibid., 216; Istvan Fehér, “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics,Lebensphilosophie: Heidegger’s confrontationwith Husserl, Dilthey and Jaspers,” in Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren, ed.Reading Heidegger fromthe 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 ofphenomenology is thus placing the phenomenon up front, it consists in discovering thephenomenon in its unveiledness (in dessen Unverhülltsein).

Secondly, obtaining the realm of originary science as the main duty of hermeneuticalphenomenology 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 understoodas aprincipium and not asprincipium, in the way particular science does.54 Inasmuchas science is featured as life, it is then featured as self-contained, as Heidegger did in thewinter semester of 1919.

All of Heidegger’s later work would then be based upon this determining focus. It caneasily 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 whetherphilosophy as such is to live or die, at an abyss opening up before Nothingness, thatis, the nothingness of total realism/reality, or we will succeed in taking a leap intoanother 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 thetheoretical view, which has guided Western philosophy, or else we leap toward theunveiled pre-theoretical realm through a radical opening. The latter can give philosophylife, that is, it can save her from the agonizing state in which she lies, owing to the reignof 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 scientificresearch, or we have a self-understanding as scientifically-minded human beingscapable of a most grievous lapse, in that we play around with casually picked upconcepts and dabble in undefined trends, working only with our bare needs in mind.56

53 Martin Heidegger, “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles,”Dilthey-Jahrbuch6(1989): 257.

54 GA56/57, 24. Heidegger explicitly deals, in the Winter Semester lectures of 1928-1929, with thisissue, that is, how philosophy should define itself. The concept of scientific philosophy is thus put intoquestion, which might be understood in a metaphorical way, as in a ‘rounded circle.’ The circle is notrounded, as something rounded is simply a failed adjustment attempting roundness proper. Besides, thecircle is round by definition, it perfectly represents the idea of something round. “Concerning theexpression ‘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, isattributed to it. Philosophy is more originary than science, as every science is rooted in philosophy. Theysprouted from philosophy.” GA27, 16. In this case, Heidegger rejects from the start every interpretationof philosophy that might try to see it as a science. However, what Heidegger remarks in hisKNS–Lecturesasoriginary science, is to be understood in a completely different way. The concept of ‘originaryscience’ (Ursprungswissenschaft) is grounded in the fact that philosophy is essentially a kind of originarybeing of every individual science.

55 GA56/57, 63: “Wir stehen an der methodischen Wegkreuzung, die überLeben oder Tod derPhilosophie überhaupt entscheidet, an einem Abgrund:entweder ins Nichts, d.h. der absolutenSachlichkeit,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 ihrenMöglichkeiten als prinzipieller wissenschaftlicher Forschung, oder wir verstehen uns als wissenschaftlicheMenschen zur schwersten Verfehlung, dass wir in aufgegriffenen Begriffen und halbklaren Tendenzenweiterplätschern und auf Bedürfnisse arbeiten.”

284

d) Methodical Thematization of Life Throughout Originary Science

It has been pointed out already that the “scientificity” (Wissenschaftlichkeit) oforiginary science points toward a given methodical process: it sets up a ‘how,’ as we arealready immersed within the object. We can neither escape it, nor can we set it inopposition to ourselves. Rather, a philosophical thematization of pre-thematic life takesplace. However, by speaking of methodical theme-making, the question whether everytheme-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 pre-theoretical from happening take place as well, in the shift from that which is pre-thematicto 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 thatcould make any object thematic in an arbitrary way. For that reason, we can state nowthat making life thematic is itself a making-thematic that does not necessarily fall withinthe realm of objectual-theoretical making-thematic. In this light, any non-explicitmodifications that life might undergo in its explicitness doesn’t necessarily take placethroughout a process of objectivity. Someone might suspect here that this explicit making-thematic also belongs to a different way of understanding explicitness and concept-forming. That is what Heidegger means when he said in 1919 that any explicitness thatmatches originary science ought to be understood as a concrete feature of the apprehen-sion of life itself.57 Still submerged in this context, he would later write in his followinglecture that: “The main problem when forming philosophical concepts is not posterior orscientific in nature, but rather, it is a philosophical problem at its core.”58 Traditioncouldn’t show this possibility of thematizing because it was always guided in a way thatconcentrated 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 tookplace in the context of tradition, it happened always in a theoretical fashion. It was thisblindness that made a non-theoretical access seem impossible.

If the scientific aspect of originary science points to its methodical aspect, which alsoincludes its object, we might as well say that originary science likewise points to both amethodical way of accessing as well as to a thematic realm. The access happens in ahermeneutical-phenomenological fashion. That’s why, in 1919, Heidegger spoke about acomprehending science.61 The hermeneutic aspect of the “access” entails phenomeno-logical features, which are nevertheless interpreted in an even more originary way. It isthroughout a more originary characterization of phenomenology so that its methodicalinstances are thus unveiled. They are not, however, unveiled reflexively but herme-neutically. Hermeneutics determines the way phenomena will be dealt with, somethingwhich leads us to a modification of the methodical aspect: the phenomenon of life. Forthis reason Heidegger would characterize philosophy as a comprehensive guideline duringthe winter semester of 1919-20.62 That is, the phenomenological reduction and the

57 GA58, 139, 232.58 GA59, 169.59 GA56/57, 59.60 GA59, 8.61 GA56/57, 208.62 GA58, 150.

285

epochéin Husserl become a hermeneutic reduction and co-author reconstruction and anaccompanying destruction in Heidegger.

Regarding the realm of research, we have already pointed out that this is constitutedby the non-theoretic realm of life and life-experiences, which must be highlighted as partof life itself. It has an ‘objective feature.’ Heidegger put it this way in 1920. “Objectivityin philosophy does not have the theoretical feature of being a thing, but instead it is meaning-fulness. ...”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 unfolditself adequately as related to a theoretic spawning, as a thing, but rather it’s bound to itsown features of meaningfulness. This cannot merely be exposed through an objectifyingreflection. Instead, life itself must be accessed hermeneutically as an “execution” (Vollzug)by means of its features of meaningfulness. The primal science (Urwissenschaft) that canmake this possible shall be understood, as Heidegger has it, as a hermeneutical-originaryscience. 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 objectthat is being researched. That’s how we should understand the reflexive character of hisphenomenology.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 willdirect ourselves to the underlying distinction between philosophy, world-view andscience.65

For Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians, such as Rickert, philosophy can be seen as a world-view, whereas for Husserl its purely scientific features should be really insisted on. Howdoes Heidegger understand philosophy?

Rickert’s position is grounded on values, that is to say, that life’s groundwork only hasmeaning insofar as it is related to a transcendental validating duty, and in the values andgoods that are attached to it. In other words, life’s groundwork can only be understoodthrough culture. According to Heidegger, this comprehension aims at being “the inter-pretation of the meaning of human existence and human culture in light of values that areabsolutely 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 thatas a starting point, the different life-figures or lifestyles that are related to the world thusare formed: “within the edge of such fundamental views of the world can men, theirparticular existence and their social lives experiment ‘explanation’ and matchinginterpretations.”68 By discovering the fundamental world and life conceptions isphilosophy 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 hisSubjekt 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 Neo-

Kantians, 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 fixingof something definite in the world and in life.”69

Throughout this double featuring, it is clear that the relationship between a world-viewand philosophy has paved the way of Western philosophy. This relationship was in facttaken 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 theLogosarticle, Husserl pits world-view against scientific philosophy. A philosophy of world-views, being as it is the showcase of the pondering on the process of the temporal spiritualbecoming that are tied to a given cultural community, is “daughter to historicist skep-ticism.”70 In other words, this philosophy is representative to a temporally oriented ideaof change. Scientific philosophy, on the other hand, would be ‘supratemporal,’ as “it isnot 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-viewtogether, 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 wouldnevertheless indicate that: “a philosophy of life [that is, a philosophy oriented within lifeconceptions, A. X.] was a necessary phase in philosophy’s path.”73 How should thisbe understood?

In a footnote in hisHabilitationsschrift, Heidegger points out the importance ofHusserl’s treatment of the overcoming of psychologism, while at the same time criticizinghis transcendental phenomenology, citing the possibility of abandoning this transcendentalpoint of view. This can be accomplished “only throughout the systematic means of aphilosophy oriented towards the world’s life-views.”74 However, this philosophy orientedtoward the world’s life-views shall be understood only as an impulse to Heidegger’s laterthought. When he points out that a philosophy of life understood as a world-viewdescribes a necessary phase, we shouldn’t take it as an isolated phase. We should rathersee this phase within its context, that is, as bound to the question after an ontologicalground that has to be sought from the start. Heidegger made this very clear in his firstwritings, when he asked for the categories and life.75

69 Ibid.70 PhSW, 328.71 Ibid., 332.72 GA56/57, 12.73 GA59, 154.74 GA1, 205.75 Istvan Féher follows the path from theHabilitationsschriftto the first lectures in Freiburg and to

what later would becomeSein und Zeitin his “Zum Denkweg des jungen Heideggers II,”AnnalesUniversitatis Scientiarum Budapestinensis22-23 (1990): 127–153. Regarding incorrect interpretationswhich speak of “phases” and “changes” in Heidegger’s first works, see Theodore Kisiel, “Das Entstehendes Begriffsfeldes, ‘Faktizität’ im Frühwerk Heideggers,”Dilthey–Jahrbuch4 (1986-7): 91-119. Kisielarticulates Heidegger’s path of thought towardSuZ in two main lines: a “philosophy-of-life”(Lebensphilosophie) phase, and an “ontological” one, p. 116. However, Heidegger’s path shouldn’t be seenjust as related to a determinate terminology, like Dilthey’s conceptuality, which was used to supporttradition. We should see, as well, phenomena at the most originary point, which have already beenexamined through a methodological access that is established through the object. Fink mentioned that it

287

When Heidegger characterizes world-view as something extraneous to philosophy, in1919, his ‘alienation’ takes place in respect to the boundaries of world-view. This is notsufficiently unveiled, philosophically. This way, it cannot offer an adequately originaryaccess 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-viewwhen 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 asa 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), asit can be thus seen, is not merely rejected. What is rather rejected by Heidegger is just themanner by means of which world-view makes life accessible. It doesn’t apprehend life asit “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 sciencethat can open life within its primitiveness (Ursprünglichkeit).

This means that philosophy, seen as an originary science, should depart from itsrelation with world-view, a relation that has always been taken for granted. Shouldphilosophy ask for the originary groundwork of world-view, for its essence, then quite adifferent link between them is given: “World-view becomes a problem for philosophy ina very different way.”79 This tells us two things: on the one hand philosophy cannotafford being merely a world-view anymore, and, on the other hand, the very essence ofworld-view hence becomes a philosophical problem in itself. This separation thus demandsthat such relationship be understood in a radically different fashion, and that a new kindof philosophy be undertaken. That is to say, that philosophy itself becomes now aproblem. 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 wehave so far analyzed under the name oforiginary pre-theoretical science. Philosophy isdetermined at its core as an originary science. The main drawback of philosophy as anoriginary science dictates that it be always understood within its tradition as aprotephilosophia, prima philosophia, metaphysics, transcendental philosophy (Kant), a sciencedoctrine (Fichte), absolute science (Hegel) or transcendental phenomenology (Husserl).The originary science that Heidegger sought is to be understood as a new radical figureof a Western first philosophy. In other words, the very same intentions that characterizedWestern 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 latermanifestations, including hisEreignisperiod.

Philosophy as an originary science points to an originary comprehension of life. Thisis the same as a different way of opening life itself. This way is shown as an apprehensionof life, as a ‘deepening of the origin.’ This ‘deepening’ entails three specific features: self-sufficiency, expression, and meaningfulness. It is possible to foretell that within thesethree features the radical characteristics of originary science make themselves known inscience. We have already shown self-sufficiency as a self-grounding of life and its ownaccess. 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’sreferences 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 aspart of life itself, that is, it’s founded on another “objectivity” that isn’t theoretical:meaningfulness.

Translation: Jonathan Camargo

289