Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twentieth Century: Book II. Fruition - Cross-Pollination - Dissemination (Analecta Husserliana)

PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

A NA L E C TA H U S S E R L I A NA THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

VO L U M E C I V

Founder and Editor-in-Chief: ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning Hanover, New Hampshire

For other titles published in this series, go to http://www.springer.com/series/5621

PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Book Two Fruition – Cross-Pollination – Dissemination

Edited by A N NA - T E R E S A T Y M I E N I E C K A The World Phenomenological Institute, Hanover, NH, U.S.A.

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning A-T. Tymieniecka, President

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Editor Prof. A-T. Tymieniecka The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning 1 Ivy Pointe Way Hanover NH 03755 USA [email protected]

ISBN 978-90-481-2978-2 e-ISBN 978-90-481-2979-9 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2979-9 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2009926825 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Theme

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KONRAD ROKSTAD / Was Merleau-Ponty a Phenomenologist? Some Reflections upon the Identity of Phenomenology

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WILLIAM D. MELANEY / Sartre’s Postcartesian Ontology: On Negation and Existence

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ANGELA ALES BELLO / “Brute Being” and Hyletic Phenomenology: The Philosophical Legacy of Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible

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RAJIV KAUSHIK / Physis and Flesh

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PETER REYNAERT / Embodiment and Existence: Merleau-Ponty and the Limits of Naturalism

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SECTION II JUAN MANUEL BURGOS / The Method of Karol Wojtyła: A Way Between Phenomenology, Personalism and Methaphysics

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CARMEN BEATRIZ GONZALEZ / The Role of Experience in Karol Wojtiła’s Ethical Thought

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MARIA BIELAWKA / Camus and Tischner: In Search of Absolute Love

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ANNA MARIA PEZZELLA / Edith Stein and Jean Paul Sartre: A Possibile Comparison?

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SECTION III ERKUT SEZG˙IN / The Dimension of Existence Disclosed by Unraveling the Intentional Structure of Imagining

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ANTONIO DOMÍNGUEZ REY / Phenomenological and Poetical Grounds of Linguistics

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MINA SEHDEV / Perception, Textual Theory and Metaphorical Language

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BIANCA MARIA D’IPPOLITO / La phénomenologie et le problème de l’imagination

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SECTION IV AMMAR ZEIFA / Merleau-Ponty and the Eternal Return to the Life-World: Beyond Existentialism and Phenomenology

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ILARIA RICCIONI AND ANDRZEJ ZUCZKOWSKI / Dis-identity as Living Identity

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MING-QIAN MA / De-Situatedness: The Subject and its Exhaustion of Space in Gilles Deleuze

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BRIAN CHRISTOPHER KANOUSE / The Post-Structural Effect on the Life-World: Re-Thinking Critical Subjectivity and Ethics Through Existential Performance and the Constitutive Power of Performativity

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SECTION V ANGELE KREMER-MARIETTI / Jean Wahl the Precursor

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IGNACY S. FIUT / Albert Camus: Phenomenology and Postmodern Thought

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MAO CHEN / Jan Kott and the Aesthetics of Reception: Aspects of an Existential Theatre

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ANNA MAŁECKA / The Existential and Aesthetic Aspects of the History Museum at the Turn of the Century

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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

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SECTION VI LIINA UNT / Playing with Places: The Aestethetic Experience of Place in a Play Situation

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KAIA LEHARI / Mythopoetics of Stone

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ALESSIA RITA VITALE / Towards a Phenomenology of the Instrument-Voix

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MATTI ITKONEN / Hors d’oeuvre Revisited: An Existential Exchange

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SECTION VII FRANCESCO TOTARO / The Human Telos Beyond the Instrumental Closure: The Contribution of Phenomenology and Existentialism

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NAME INDEX

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AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

This collection of studies expands on the theme of the World Phenomenology Institute’s Fourth World Congress of Phenomenology – “PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.” On that auspicious occasion we attempted a philosophical appreciation of the origins, growth, dissemination of phenomenology and existentialism and of the metamorphosis they brought about in our culture in the twentieth century. The Congress was held at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Poland on August 17–20, 2008. The studies presented there are here appropriately divided in three, according to phases in this history. The present volume bears the title Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twentieth Century, Book Two: Cross-Pollination – Dissemination – Fruition. This Congress was hosted by the Department of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University, and we owe our gratitude to the Dean, Professor dr. hab. Maria Flis, for the most friendly hospitality with which we were received. Our special appreciation goes to our local co-organizers chaired by Professor dr hab. Piotr Mroz, who was ably assisted by Dr. Joanna Handerek, Mgr. Maciej Kaluza and their coworkers, who with sustained effort gave great care to all the details of the local organization of so complex a gathering of participants from all parts of the world and numerous fields of research. They truly felt at home in Krakow and Poland. The beautiful historic location of the event, the pleasant receptions, and the sightseeing, gave a special charm and aura to this conference. I owe special personal thanks to Professor Thomas Ryba, Vice-President of the World Phenomenology Institute, who in my absence assumed the directing role at the Congress, and to Professor Piotr Mr˙oz, who with the assistance of Konrad Rokstad carried out the Conference with masterly coordination. Last, but foremost, our thanks go to the Jagiellonian University, to its rector, Professor dr. hab. Karol Musiał, for having received us with open doors. I am particularly sensitive to this, being an alumna of this university and feeling ever to belong to it.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Our faithful associate Robert Wise Jr. and our editorial assistant Jeffrey Hurlburt deserve our appreciation for the editorial preparation of this volume. And we are indebted to our publisher, Ms. Maja de Keijzer of Springer Science+Business Media B.V., for her sympathetic encouragement of our work. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

THEME

F R U I T I O N – C R O S S - P O L L I N AT I O N – D I S S E M I N AT I O N

The use of the terms “phenomenology” as well as that of “existentialism” has grown so popular in the world’s cultural circles, in the West and in other cultures as well, that they are used vaguely as connotations for rather unclear and unspecified meanings and purposes. Our Occidental culture is, indeed, permeated by the originary philosophical illuminations of these philosophies and their successive rays. In fact, we may say that their philosophical convictions, insights, inspirations associated with the concepts designated by the two terms have penetrated our culture to the very core. They have transformed our culture as such. However, where the question arises of what these two concepts stand for, of what their philosophical significance is, of what role they play in our understanding of life in the world, and then of what their boundaries and links with each other are, we become perplexed, so melted are they into our interpreting the world and our thought. What was sharply delineated of the time of their emergence, of their proclamations and their forceful impact on scholarly minds at that hour, that is, at the end of the nineteenth century and through the middle of the twentieth century, would become blurred as these movements spread, intergenerated, mixed insights, intuitions, etc., and so lose their contours, motivations, originary concerns. With the distance that we have now from the origins and unfolding of these inspired movements, we may now more clearly penetrate their philosophical quest and concerns. These are as old as philosophical meditation itself. But in phenomenology and existentialism they received new prompting force and a transformatory expanse, being sharpened and refined by centuries of queries and debates and enriched through the progress in all fields of knowledge and experience. A succinct survey of the main issues that these two major protagonists, Kierkegaard and Husserl, seek to disentangle will yield for us the chief perspectives had by the leading adherents of these movements. It is their enriching insights that are presented in this collection. xi

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Let us first mention briefly their root philosophical concerns. To begin with, let us bring out that the crucial issue that both Husserl and Kierkegaard, and indeed numerous thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century, were struggling to rethink anew was rationality. Rationality means understanding of cognition, of the world as we know it, of personal and societal existence, and the human personal search after the meaning of life. Our two protagonists sharpened these concerns, Kierkegaard plumbing the subterranean source of subjective experience and Husserl focusing on foundational rationality. Already, just before the First World War, the foundational ideas introduced forcefully by Husserl and pursued by his first students at Göttingen germinated and developed in their main outlines toward the expansion of a Leibnizian mathesis universalis wherein a foundational a priori revived the PlatonicAristotelian insight into forms (ontology). While phenomenology aimed to restore faith in rationality, as transcending the rampant scientific empiricism of the day, by presenting its foundations in objective and unchangeable forms, the revival of the Kierkegaardian spirit, issuing from a philosophical tradition extending back as far as Socrates and to St. Augustine, Pascal, Nietzsche was proceeding in a seemingly opposed direction. Followers of this latter inspiration proposed approaching life, the world, oneself through the lens of human subjective experience. For “existentialists” – we put the word in quotes for the majority of them rejected being labeled – the foundation for any understanding of these realities stems from restoring the experience of the feeling and thinking subject to its appropriate prominent place, that is, in seeing rationality’s genesis within the subject. II

Meanwhile, the eager and curious minds of the phenomenological movement could not catch up with the inquisitiveness of its master Husserl and digest his further meditations. Indeed, it is only with the publication of Husserl’s manuscripts that began decades after his death, that we may follow the unfolding of his thought, which he originally expounded orally. While the striking features of his developing thought were fascinating, and with new inquisitive research moved forward melting with already developed and absorbed ideas, the force of his philosophical intuitions was such that they broke through to primary attention so that his students’ theorizing to some degree held to his insights and even struggled to find solutions to the problems he posed. Even before the first revolutionary foundational ideas that Husserl advanced in his eidetic period became assimilated as the foundational a priori

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ontological cornerstones of rationality, the master’s intrepid exploration moved on to a progressive exposition of the cognitive field of the genesis of meanings, of the intentionality of consciousness as the transcendental constitutive source of the lifeworld, and then of the lifeworld itself. These successive phases of simultaneous and interlocking exploration prompted, on the one hand, the broadening and deepening of individual inquisitive minds as seen in thinkers like Scheler, Stein, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, who developed philosophies with doctrines of their own that reflected the basic thrusts of Husserl’s projects. And yet these originary phenomenological or existential tendencies became so individualized that we have to take care in tracing them back to Husserl. Elaborations of first principles laid down by Husserl as well as those voiced by Kierkegaard’s followers – respectively, the rationality of foundations and the subterranean source of subjective feeling/experience – became mixed in the whirl of enthusiastic probing of reality in cognition, of the validity of values, and of subjective/individual freedom, all within innumerable perspectives of thought, styles of reflection, scientific probing, and social endeavor. While spreading through further and further regions of thought, the burgeoning philosophical systems became the two leading beacons throwing rays of inspiring light on life. III

As Husserl’s philosophical evolution stretching from Brentano’s empirical psychology discerning the eidetic foundations of reality and down to the conscious genesis of cognition/meanings, from the “object” to its genesis in the subject, bridges were thrown out to the other vanguard philosophy’s privileging of existential subjectivity and to numerous fields of knowledge. The essential principles of the phenomenological innovation, such as the so-called “phenomenological method” of a presuppositionless approach to the subject matter, remained while numerous doctrinal innovations flourished in the now cross-pollinated field of ideas, and those principles are still in various interpretations and guises providing a common link of objectivity, bringing together the universally accepted phenomenological approach, whether in philosophy, scientific research, or cultural realms. The focus on the subjective, on the genesis of constitutive processes, has spread so perceptibly through the general spheres of thought that in the resulting philosophical influences on other fields of research, the ways in which the rationality of cognition and argumentation is understood goes in both directions: that of experiential expansions of thought as well as in that of unprejudiced, “objective” appreciation of reality. Both lines of phenomenological reduction, seen as the foundational level of considerations, and the transcendental origination of pure consciousness have continued

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still to be seen as being in general valid, as characterizing phenomenology at large, as identification with some adherence to its “method.” Furthermore, the later Husserl’s theory of the lifeworld, the culmination of the main body of his theory, was disseminated universally in innumerable approaches and interpretations. We find its inspirational force in a number of essays on Merleau-Ponty in this collection. Being impregnated by phenomenological inspiration and by the existential quest after the ultimate concern of the human being (that is, by the values informing one’s conduct, the sense of one’s endeavors, freedom or constraint in human action and choice, in brief, by the meaning of life urging, prompting man to be free between life and death and to question the longing to transcend futile earthly concerns), the intellectual, social, spiritual vanguard of the twentieth century would leave behind the prevailing naturalistic, positivistic, and relativistic prejudices to fly upon the uncharted currents of human bonding.

IV

On the other hand, with the flux of the existential influence of Kierkegaard of the liberating revaluating the role of the subterranean push of emotions, passions – and concordant emotional and sentient moments of experience together with the essential role of description in contrast to the despised (rejected speculations, reasoning . . .), the Husserlian aspiration for intellectual rigor embodied in the “phenomenological method,” its strict rational formulation of concepts, categories, evaluations, definitions, etc., underwent a liberating revaluation in the light of Kierkegaard’s existential appreciation of the role of the subterranean flux of emotions, passions, of powerful concordant emotional and sentient moments in experience. Appreciation of the essential role of phenomenological description and the rejection of speculative reasoning that it represents underwent a deep transformation in the popular universalization of phenomenology when existentialist validation of the experiential came to permeate thought, inducing deeply critical skepticism over rationality itself. The very foundational nature of language had already been under attack by precursors of Kierkegaard a propensity later represented by thinkers figuring in the first book of this collection like Jean Wahl, Gabriel Marcel, Mounier who crossed the frontiers of literature and philosophy. Others, like Wittengstein, turned to theoretical investigations of “the language game”, further promulgated by thinkers like Derrida, under the appeal of “deconstruction”. Distrust of logical articulations in the linguistic expression of reality combined with the Gadamerian hermeneutic pursuit after originary meanings, the sense of expressions, etc. inter-fused with the quest after originary experience, the uncovering

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of what may be obscured behind the “veils” of the “hidden”, etc. so that philosophical reflection was impelled toward originations, beginnings, glimmerings from the unknown. We have thus devoted a special section of this volume to this renovating stream of thought. (See infra, pp. 181–241). The research in this collection focuses on the main philosophical issues raised by and queries pursued by the innovative currents of the moving wave thrown up by the encounter of these two movements of thought. The research of this kind by major philosophers taking inspiration from them not only led to the fecundation and metamorphosis of our culture, but has simultaneously nourished by the concurrent enrichments of this latter in its natural evolution so that through a reciprocal exchange a wondrous fruition is aborning. We refer the reader to complete the account of this fascinating metamorphosis towards the New Enlightenment, which we are today reaching out toward to our Encyclopedia1 . In this work we have presented in a preparatory fashion the numerous fields which were fructified by the phenomenological-existential innovations to a rich yield to be harvested. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

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Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ed. Phenomenology World-Wide. Foundations, Expanding Dynamics, Life-Engagements. A Guide for Research and Study. Analecta Husserliana, Volume LXXX (2002).

SECTION I

K O N R A D R O K S TA D

WA S M E R L E AU - P O N T Y A P H E N O M E N O L O G I S T ? SOME REFLECTIONS UPON THE IDENTITY OF PHENOMENOLOGY

ABSTRACT

The paper interrogates into the identity of phenomenology and it is some kind of comparative study, reflecting what both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty say about phenomenology. Based on a perspective provided by Merleau-Ponty’s article “The Philosopher and his Shadow” (which in my view is highly inspired by the historicity of the Crisis), more specifically his conception of philosophical interpretation as (re)thinking the un-thought of in a great philosopher’s thinking, the paper advocates and tries to demonstrate that this is not a “mechanism” only for interpreting another philosopher; in regard to Husserl it might as well appear an internal structure (“mechanism”) in his entire researchwork – Husserl himself at the different levels in the development of his phenomenology trying to think the till then un-thought of in his philosophy. Thus Merleau-Ponty is not only a phenomenologist, but perhaps in a somewhat paradoxical manner also the “truest” of hears after Husserl, not only explicating what Husserl said (and wrote) but also what he actually did do. (It is “durch die Tat”, “through its execution” (Crisis, pp. 17/18) – and this might appear paradoxical since Husserl seems to have been doing what Merleau-Ponty says he – M-P in his article – and not Husserl?, is doing.) In his article “The Origin of Geometry” Husserl characterizes History in the following manner: “[. . .] history is from the start nothing other than the vital movement of the coexistence and the interweaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning”.1 In my paper I will lay this statement down as a pivotal point for reflecting on the issue of the identity of phenomenology: What is phenomenology? – then using Merleau-Ponty’s (hereafter: M-P) well known question as a leading clue for analyses. It is, perhaps, not so very much originality about this, but at least M-P’s answer was considered original as it was presented.2 And it is, of course, his answer that will be of interest – and not only in the context where it actually was given. Another context that might appear even more promising, is the one provided by his article “The Philosopher and His Shadow”,3 in which M-P starts by repeating something 3 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 3–36. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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the aging Husserl used to say – namely that “[e]stablishing a tradition means forgetting its origins [. . . .] Precisely because we owe so much to tradition, we are in no position to see just what belongs to it” (PhaS, p. 159). This statement together with the one we presented at the beginning directly from Husserl him self, will now provide clues for our reflective interrogation in regard to the identity of phenomenology. My paper, thus, will appear as some kind of a comparative study, reflecting on both what Husserl and what M-P say about phenomenology. But it will not be comparative in the usual external manner, comparing two different positions from outside; rather it will seek to reflect from “inside” and try to explicate the meaning of this. Both statements, Husserls on history and M-P/Husserl on tradition, provide clues making this possible. The context set by the total theme for the Congress – not only including the Phenomenology but also the Existentialism of the Twentieth Century, might, however, call for a reservation in regard to our endeavour: Our opening question – “Was Merleau-Ponty a phenomenologist?” might, of course, right away call for another question: But, was not Merleau-Ponty rather an existentialist? Thus, in a way the total issue of the identity of these both positions comes into question. I will not, however, try to decide anything in regard to the identity of existentialism per se. I will rather, by examining some texts by these two philosophers in a perspective provided by the two quotations we started from, advocate and try to demonstrate the following, namely (1) as regards Merleau-Ponty, these two positions crystallize in a manner that transcends the distinction between the two (at least as commonly understood), and (2) as regards Husserl, it will be essential conceiving an “internal” (transcendental) development (and history) that takes place during the long and extremely productive development of his phenomenology (moving from the descriptive into the pure and transcendental, and then again, the life-world and historicity, the genetic, generative etc.). This might also enable genuinely to understand how Merleau-Ponty might be among the “truest” of hears after Husserl – as he appears to wish, especially in his “The Philosopher and his Shadow”.4 Let’s now start by taking a closer look into “The Philosopher and His Shadow” – neither forgetting his answer to his question “What is Phenomenology?” given some 15 years earlier.5 Mainly the article provides M-P’s interpretation of Husserl’s Ideas II 6 , but it is not an interpretation in the ordinary sense. It is a highly reflected phenomenological interpretation that takes both the statement on history (Husserl) and on tradition (M-P) into consideration. M-P tells us that genuine philosophical interpretation is not about [either] “inevitable distortion or literal reproduction”, it is not [either] strictly objective or “a meditation disguised as a dialog (in which we would ask the questions

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and give the answers).” (PhaS, p. 159) These two options really are abstractions that do not fit in with the meaning of a great philosopher’s work – it is not wholly positive setting forth what is and what is not in those [his] works. M-P then uses the words of Heidegger telling us “the greater the work accomplished [. . . .] the richer the unthought-of element in that work.” There always will be a “shadow” essentially belonging – also motivating; this is about “problems of communication between egos” which perhaps no one was more aware of than Husserl, and M-P now wants to establish a “middle-ground” for genuine communication with him, also commenting on the difference between having experienced Husserl (his conversation and teaching) “live” and learning from him by studying his works. There are challenges both ways, and M-P is, of course, left to his works – as Husserl then also had become tradition.7 What, then, could the middle-ground be if it is not “tradition” in the sense explicated right at the beginning of M-P’s article: The origins that have been forgotten as it has been established as a tradition (which is ours and we owe so much), which we are not quite able to see just what belongs to it (and what belongs to actuality apparently independent of that tradition in an objective historical sense), these has to be regained – we have to re-think them and think our selves (within our actual situation), also making space for the unthoughtof element in Husserl’s thought. And even further, maybe just this element – the unthought-of now concretely embedded in our situation – is the primary objective of our thinking – at least as it comes to our motivation.8 And now, then, Husserl again on history (not quite different from tradition), it is from the start nothing other than the vital movement of the coexistence and interweaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning. And then, what is required from us – in our rethinking, seeking to re-activate the thoughts and insights of Husserl – is original formation of meaning (with evidence). But, of course, it is the thoughts of Husserl such as he has written them that have to be re-thought. The thinking of Husserl is “sedimented” in his writing, and our (re-)thinking has to get involved in it, so it is not quite original formation, after all. Nevertheless, the evidence might be original, given as itself each time it is repeated – not however, without some developmental involvement. Since original formation and sedimentations belong inseparable together, it is never a quite identical repetition – a repetition “only”. If you do get hold of the evidence, it also involves bits of the un-thought of in the written thoughts of Husserl. It is due to this interweaving which is in fact a transcendental fact (something which can be realized by studying internal time-consciousness, its core “the living-flowing-presence”, urimpresion, retention, protention etc.) that both history and tradition are possible and (can) have meaning for us. The presence of Husserl’s works (when Husserl himself is not present live) reasonably reveals the most concrete possibility for grasping his thought – even with all

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those unthought-of elements that might (now) be quite motivating. And as this is in accord with Husserl’s conception of history (and also M-P’s of tradition), the whole interpretation-process will be finding itself actually in the middle of history – encompassing not only present and past but also the future dimension (that in its actual appearance constitute the space enabling, now in our present with its always actually reappearing possibilities for revealing sedimentations and traces form the past, ourselves working concretely into and on the unthought-of in Husserl) and the whole project actually becomes a project of transcendental historicity. Thus, we might say: Between philosophers like M-P and Husserl the “middle-ground” (for communication) really is the transcendental historicity and, taking part of it, is really required from us too if we are genuinely to understand the “original” meaning of it all. Interpretation involves all this, and M-P now sets out for reactivating the thoughts and insights of Husserl especially the way they were originally formatted in the Ideas II. But before we move further into this, let us remind ourselves about some major features in the development of the phenomenology of Husserl. Let’s then – perhaps a bit paradoxically, start with how it ended, with what we will call the Crisis-perspective. After more than 40 years tiresome research work, more than 40,000 pages written in shorthand, big books published, teaching etc. the phenomenology of Husserl ended with reflecting the project of philosophy within a historical situation marked by a profound crisis, effecting the European kind of life and civilization severely (this is a description situated in Germany in the mid-30s, but it is meant for the Western civilization quite generally at that time). In the Crisis Husserl very clearly makes this crisis-situation some motivational horizon for engaging the project of philosophy the way we have to engage it if the teleos philosophy has always been conducted by, is to be fulfilled (even if it never will be completely fulfilled). What this crisis more specifically is all about pertains to how our thinking – our “rationality” especially now in regard to the sciences, are effecting the whole way of life, more specifically in regard to the meaning and our understanding of both our selves and the total historical situation in which we are living our lives. Husserl is not concerned with critic against the sciences per se, but against some way of thinking, “naturalism” or “objectivism,” which has pervaded modern culture and is closely connected with the development of the sciences and their apparent unquestionable and all-dominating success, as it also radically has influenced modern philosophy. This then, is more about philosophy than the particular sciences, and the major issue is about the sound and valid founding of the sciences which, according to Husserl, is one of the primary challenges philosophy is facing in our time. If, then philosophy is to handle this challenge, it has, however, itself to become a rigorous science. And this has been one of the major motives in

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the whole development of his phenomenology, but is now explicitly reflected within this crisis-horizon, thus motivated in the historical situation characterized by this “Crisis of the European Sciences” – which, thus, according to Husserl, is effecting severely the life-situation of European Mankind as well.9 The “cure” Husserl now recommends is a profound rethinking of his own phenomenology, and then explicitly in the light of this crisis-situation. From examining “The Crisis of the sciences as Expression of the Radical Life-Crisis of European Humanity”, it is continued by a “Clarification of the Origin of the Modern Opposition between Physicalistic Objectivsm and Transcendental Subjectivism”, being the second part. The major objective is then to conduct a (critical) historical reflection into the genesis of the actual situation characterized by that opposition, examining how its historical origin developed and was motivated. Very briefly described, it starts with the analysis of Galileo, how his work is laying the grounding for the development of modern science, especially the mathematical natural science and modern philosophy. Already in the analysis on Galileo we find reasons why this important project ended in the crisis of our time. As Galileo used geometry and mathematics in his description (and explanation) of nature, he overlooked major aspects making this possible. He did not realize the profound historical character which also geometry embodies; Galileo viewed geometry as totally unhistorical and its topic pertains to idealities which are “only given” (some kind of naïve Platonism) and are at the same time perfect for describing nature (because, as is said, the “book of nature is written in mathematics”). Husserl on the other hand, views the idealities of geometry, which he accepts as idealities, as essentially historical, belonging to a tradition, which again is embedded in human practical life, within the life-world of historical Mankind. Then, to make a long story short, Galileo does not recognize either the life-world or the historical dimension as preconditions – or even as relevant for science, and this also applies to the tradition that afterwards is established upon his achievements. The critic is then carried on through the modern history of philosophy in some zigzag movement between the actual and the historical with a critical unveiling of the ambiguities characterizing the development: Descartes both the founder of the transcendental motif and the founder of objectivism, Hume founder of sensualism but also the discoverer of the “world-enigma” and finally, then, Kant the first real transcendental philosopher – but he too unable to get hold of the most essential preconditions for a genuine transcendental philosophy. The point now is, then, that this historical exposition provides a foundation for Husserl’s rethinking of phenomenology as a genuine transcendental phenomenology in this manner in its origin grounded in history, as the historical reflection at the same time is essentially connected with and motivated by the actual crisis-situation. This is major features (which in a way are “parallel”

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to an ordinary history of Philosophy) of the historicity Husserl now speaks of and – after having brought it at a genuine transcendental level, characterizes as itself transcendental in its essence, thus, unveiling even the transcendental as essentially historical – something which again enables an examination of the life-world not only as a partial but as a universal problem (in the context of philosophy and science). Thus both the life-world and the historicity have, in a systematic manner, become essential moments in the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl, and examining the impact of this is what the rest of the Crisis is about (Part IIIA&B). It also belongs to the story that the quotation on the essence of history, which this paper started with, is to be most adequately understood within this context. And let us now continue by establishing an overview of the development that led to this crisis-perspective. In regard to viewing the development of a philosophy from its latest and most mature perspective (as we now are doing), Husserl himself says the following: “[. . . .] a genuine elucidation of the historical development of a philosophy (in the philosopher) can only be given on the basis of the way its meaning takes shape in its full maturity, only then can one understand the structure of the dynamic in each lower stage.”10 And given this, the perspective of the Crisis – how did it start? Very briefly described, it started with philosophical investigations pertaining to the foundation of arithmetic; these were, however, criticized for being too much psychological in character, and then it continued with “logical investigations” that starts by criticizing all attempts to provide a foundation for any science psychologically, and on that grounding it seeks to investigate into the philosophical foundation of the science of logic in a philosophical way that opens for phenomenology. As the investigations themselves are phenomenological (at least they are tending in that direction), they draw up the field of phenomenology itself, descriptively making consciousness a sort of grounding-field for logic in a manner quite different form the psychological.11 This is how the phenomenology of Husserl started – and now he is also in a way starting a new philosophical movement – the phenomenological, obtaining many followers making the descriptive approach the mark for what phenomenology was all about. But for Husserl himself this was only a beginning; what he had thought so far also did embody much unthought-of, and Husserl both felt and, after a while, enabled himself to start thinking and investigate into this new field for justifying philosophy’s legitimacy in trying to provide foundation to the sciences. This new field was not, however, quite new – since it still was the consciousness of humans – and Husserl, of course, was living and thinking within a tradition, in which it might be difficult to see just what is coming from it and what is provided by him self.12

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Anyway, what we now are talking about is the transcendental approach, and in time we have moved from the early 1890s till around 1913. During this span of time, the year of 1900 is especially important, and then, 1905 might be considered as a beginning of the new approach culminating with the Ideas. It is not the purpose of this paper to discuss details about all this, but we have to comment a bit more specifically on the Ideas-complex, now containing three volumes.13 The first, which was the only one published by Husserl himself (1913), is about the reduction, or the reductions, as a – or rather – the methodic device for getting the transcendental established. The second and the third are respectively about the problem of constitution and the foundation of the sciences, but they were not published during the lifetime of Husserl – only known by a close circle of collaborates. Now very many of the major topics for phenomenological research had been established and both Husserl and his collaborates were working on them – although Husserl himself maybe felt a bit obstructed by circumstances, as the First World War was going on effecting Husserl also personally. Something Husserl says, addressing German field-soldiers on leave during this time might – especially in the light of the Crisis-perspective – appear quite interesting. It is a comment in regard to the (inter)relation between actual circumstances and the conceiving of history, which Husserl is thinking about in a manner pointing directly toward the Crisis and the problem of historicity. In my translation it might be presented this way: Every age is moved by what is its own driving forces characteristic for itself and, has organs only for that which is consistent with and needed for its developmental lines. That is the mist which simultaneously stream into every presence and conceals total epochs with great personalities, cultural pictures and stiles. [. . . . .] Every eternity is wrapped in the form of finitude and it appears never purely given, but is colored by manners of talking, thinking and feeling and it might appear disturbed in a manner which will be steadily more difficult to regain as the distance in time increases. Therefore, [we have] the great tasks of historical and philological critic. This double concealment explains the changes in the judgment on past times in the run of different times. Therefore, [we have] occasional variation between extreme admiration and honor and complete lack of acceptance and contempt. The most characteristic example for this is the change in the way the German Idealism was evaluated. The rule of this philosophy over the spirits was exchanged by the rule of the new exact sciences and the technical culture constituted by them. [. . .] And then, we have this War, which is inconceivable as a big and difficult fate. [. . . .] But such a time [of crisis], as it cannot be otherwise for all people who are sound and of good will, will appear a time for internal rethinking and change. It is a time for the renewal of all the ideal sources of power that are in our own people and is generated by the deepest layer of their soul. [. . .] The one sided naturalistic way of thinking and feeling looses its power. [. . .] And so are there again provided organs for seeing the German Idealism.14

And in the continuation (in the 20s), the history of philosophy had become central as it also is linked up with First philosophy both historically and transcendentally, phenomenological psychology, but of course, all those topics of

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“deep” phenomenological reflection, such as inner time-consciousness, intersubjectivity etc. all of which had been introduced much earlier. And then, also logic and its foundation, or as it now in the 20’s is called, its genesis – formal logic presupposes transcendental logic. And, finally in this turn, the Cartesian Meditations, which for Husserl is now representing an attempt to summarize in form of a systematic introduction to his phenomenology. Thereafter, all those attempts to get that work in order, also all those things on intersubjectivity, life-world, history, historicity, generativity etc., all of which will, of course, be surrounding and are embedded in the middle of the Crisis-project.15 We have now moved in time from about 1913 to the middle 30s and it is, however, interesting to notice that all those topics have been touched upon and thought about in more or less immature form previously, intersubjectivity very early (1905 and maybe before), the life-world from 1917, historicity and generativity not so far from that (1921/22), at least the beginning of the 20s.16 And strange enough, all of this might be – it seems – related to the Ideas II. What does this mean, what is the impact of it? Some comments making up some kind of a “hypothesis” might prove helpful in this regard. As we know, Husserl never himself published Ideas II. But he did not either stop working on the manuscripts pertaining to it. What can the explanation for this be? Now, then, I will like to suggest – why not link up M-P’s concept of the “unthought-of” in Husserl’s thinking with this? The case being that the Ideas II is loaded, perhaps overloaded, with very concrete analyses, thoughts and perspectives in which there were lots of more to think about. That is the one side of it; another could, then, be that Husserl not was quite comfortable with how the methodical framework with the reduction(s) from Ideas I fitted in with those very concrete constitutional analyses of the Ideas II manuscripts. Did the methodical apparatus and perspective fit in with what is constitutively concrete and thus primary? Did Husserl, then, realize he could not close up this perspective by publishing it as a (finished) book but rather had to go on now following those leads exposed – trying to catch up and think what till now was unthought-of? Was this what motivated Husserl? Well, given these reflections on the motivation for what Husserl actually did (or did not) together with those sketchy lines of the development of Husserl’s phenomenology provided, how could all these influence our understanding of what M-P is about to interpreting the Ideas II? We will now be using this as our interpretational horizon. The interpretation starts by taking the phenomenological reduction as “example”,17 and M-P says this was an enigmatic possibility for Husserl which he always came back to and never gave a final presentation. And he further asks if this is the sign of a failure? M-P actually argues for the opposite; this is not the proof of the failure in ensuring the bases of phenomenology – rather

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it is (both) the beginning of inquiry and inquiry itself, since it is (as Husserl says) a continuous beginning, and locating obstacles is the very meaning of inquiry. What according to M-P, happens is that “Husserl rediscovers that identity of ‘re-entering self’ and ‘going-outside self’ which, for Hegel, defined the absolute.” (PhaS, p. 161) Thus now the reduction is related to Hegel and his “the absolute”, which Husserl rediscovers as an “identity of re-entering- and going-outside self”, which again, then, has to be a dynamic – or even a dialectical or communicative identity. How does this then more specifically concretize? It is without further ado related to reflection as M-P (as he is referring to Husserl’s Ideas I) says: To reflect [. . .] is to unveil an unreflected dimension which is at a distance because we are no longer it in a naïve way, yet which we cannot doubt that reflection attains, since it is through reflection itself that we have an idea of it. So it is not the unreflected which challenges reflection; it is reflection which challenges itself. For by definition its attempt to revive, possess, internalize, or make immanent has meaning only with respect to an already given terminus which withdraws into its transcendence beneath the very gaze which has set out in search of it in this attempt”. (PhaS, p. 161, my italic)

M-P comments on this which he obviously considers essential to the core of the reduction, and our challenge now is to expose the content and interpret it – first, then, not by reading M-P, but by comparing it to a part of the Ideas II, in which Husserl is concerned with the constitution of the personal ego. It will provide a frame set by Husserl himself, which, however, is not explicit in M-P’s text.18 But there also is another aspect which is decisively interesting in our view, especially in regard to what this already given terminus which withdraws into its transcendence – what this could be? Our first now quite tentative answer is, it is the historicity that is interwoven within the structures of history and tradition such as they have been exposed at the beginning of this paper. And given this, we will return to his text and, then, in M-P’s spirit expose how he actually discusses this dynamic correlation between reflection and the un-reflected, as reduction is carried out. In regard to Husserl’s analysis of the constitution of the personal ego in Ideas II, first, then, let’s start by looking at one aspect of what we ourselves – who is able to reflect and to whom identities and intelligibilities are given – are. In the world in which we live, our “life-world”, we are, in quite natural terms, humans, living subjects and personal egos living in a world. And in the perspective of the Ideas II there also is a pure ego executing constitutive functions thus yielding the ultimate grounding for cognition and understanding. And, then, as Husserl says, “[the] course of the lived experience [. . . . of] pure Ego must assume the apperceptive form of the personal Ego, hence must

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become the nucleus of all sorts of intentions which would find their demonstration or their fulfillment in series of experience [. . . .].” (II, p. 263) Pure Ego thus “materializes” in the personal Ego, the living, bodily subject, situated in and having an environing historical world etc. One important point, however, is that there seems to be some constitution of the personal Ego prior to reflection. Even though the I in reflection [. . .] always finds itself as a personal Ego, it is originally constituted in the genesis pervading the flux of lived experience. – Husserl himself states all this in the Third Section (§ 58, p. 263, my italics) of his Ideas II, and he further states asking, the “crucial question here is this: is the personal Ego constituted on the basis of Ego-reflection, hence completely originally on the basis of pure self-perception and self-experience?” But it is not. The main point is rather that “[. . . .] the Ego constituted in reflection refers back to another one”.19 Thus there is “something” pre-given and maybe even pre-constituted, and it is comparable to how there are unnoticed aspects in regard to sensuous and thingly backgrounds. And this might be the object of further reflection, and may even display itself as a presupposition for explication and the “fully conscious” exhibition. How is that possible and understandable? Husserl is very explicit about this as he further states: Properly spoken, I am originally not a unity composed of associative and active experience [. . .]. I am the subject of my life, and the subject develops by living: what it primarily experiences is not itself, but things for work. The Ego does not originally arise out of experience – in the sense of associative apperception in which are constituted unities of manifolds of a nexus – but out of life (it is what it is not for the Ego, but it is itself the Ego) (II, pp. 263/64, my italics)

Even though reflection and experience have decisive significance, it is life that has priority in regard to the constitution of the personal ego. It is by living that the subject develops itself, by experiencing “things for work” and not primarily itself. Thus we might say that life with an active [in regard to intentionality this includes passivity as well] and creative living – perhaps the whole lifeworld, enter the field of constitution, and the intentionality which actually is “first” appears to be the one “only” functioning, the one named by the concept of functioning or operative intentionality. It constitutes a “core” that basically “connects” and, as we previously quoted, the personal ego is originally constituted in the genesis pervading the flux of lived experience – and, we might add – within the actual historical Life-world. But then, we have to realize the following as well: The Ego can be more and can be other than The Ego as apperceptive unity. It can have latent capacities (dispositions) which have not yet appeared, have not yet been apperceptively Objectified, just as a thing has properties that have not yet been drawn into thing-apperception. (II, p. 264, my italic)

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And there is nothing odd or mysterious about this. It is similar to what happens in regard to thing-apperception, and, as Husserl further says: “We make all these distinctions even in ordinary, personal way of considering a man and consequently they are there in the human-scientific (e.g., historical) approach, in ordinary experience.” One implication is thus that “[n]o one ‘knows’ himself or has ‘knowledge’ of what he is, without learning to know him self.” And some other implications might be the following: Self-experience, self-apperception, is constantly expanding. The “learning to know oneself” is one with the development of self-apperception, with the constitution of the “self”, and this development is carried out in unity with the development of the subject itself. (II, pp. 264–65, my italics)

How can we make sense of those statements, interpreting them in a manner that (also) connects back to what was first quoted from Husserl? Are we now able to conceive of those two options (with or without reflection, i.e. by living) so that they don’t exclude each other, but instead, on the contrary, rather are interwoven and are conditioning each other within the constitution of the personal ego? – I would say so, and explain this by first ask why is it that selfapperception is constantly expanding? It is because we are facing a concretely living human being who at the same time is able to experience both itself and the world it is living in. It is a subject for the world – even with the potential for constituting it. But it is – or, rather, can become this only if it itself is “constituted” by (the living in) the same world (with “things for work”) in which it is living. In this “pre-constitution” by the living in which the ego finds itself pre-given, we find the key. The development of self-apperception, with the constitution of the “self”, is something “immanent” and displays some “internal” – perhaps even transcendental historicity.20 But as it is carried out in unity with the development of the subject itself, it belongs as well to the actual historical world. And, thus, this “key” is about what the later Husserl (in the Crisis) explicitly speaks of in terms of Historicity and the Life-world. Thus – and now quite explicitly, learning to know oneself can become one with the development of self-apperception since it is carried out in unity with the development of the subject itself, which, as we previously learned, originally develops by living. The pre-givenness (of the personal ego) with the content that is already there and that reflection must encounter as something already formed, displays something which in its essence and own constitution is historical. In regard to the person and the primal constitution of her ego (in which she encounters what is real as formed), that ego is not “personal” only. It belongs to a historical world and is formed by other humans as well – both actually and previously living human beings, both those who are anonymous and those well known. And it is formed in and by the personal life, living incarnated in situations, in a nature, having a body that I live “through”, situated in the world etc. The Body

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is perhaps the primal aspect of a personal ego’s identity, not only in its physical aspects, but in its comportment and as a point for orientation, the permanent opening towards the world, how it behaves and (re)acts – quite generally how it functions, senses and feels etc., has its animal nature and embodies psych and soul, lives as incarnated person in situations, takes part in a spiritual (cultural) world, actually, as a whole, in the historical Life-world.21 Now, then, the question is – how does this exposition, actually my interpretation22 of Husserl, fit in with what M-P says about reflection in relation to the unreflected dimension? Are they compatible and consistent? I would say they certainly are: In regard to the personal ego its primal constitution is founded in the living and not in reflection – yet it is reflection (reduction) that reveals how all this is interwoven and is functioning together; by doing this it also challenges itself because reflection (reduction) always will be directed towards the un-reflected to obtain its content. In it – those “things for work”, as Husserl said, as the personal ego lives her life and the functioning intentionality is working there always will be some transcendence and some expansion – also some history – both (re)gaining and forgetting. We live our lives in time, and life is historical, and transcendentally it is our living that constitutes time. This we can, however, realize only by reflecting, conducting reduction, but the ultimate precondition for this is the more or less un-reflected living in the first place, as we in the living always is also remembering, foreseeing etc. which are functioning interweaving in that attention embedded in normal living. In the Ideas II Husserl seems pretty clear on that, and this carries us back to MP’s statement on reflection, in which he said that its attempt to revive, possess, internalize, or make immanent has meaning only with respect to an already given terminus which withdraws into its transcendence beneath the very gaze which has set out in search of it in this attempt. Thus, that “already given terminus” – is it not actually the historical in the sense of historicity – the vital movement of the coexistence and the interweaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning? Is it not this that constitute the “inside” (the “invisible”?) of that always moving already given terminus? Embedded in life this will then be something dynamical also filled with tension and perhaps even contradictory, and M-P’s first comment is that it is not through chance or naiveté that Husserl assigns contradictory characteristics to reduction: Husserl knows what he is doing because this is a result of what is imposed by the factual situation [. . .]23 Besides M-P has, in accordance with the above stated, observed that from Ideen II on it seems clear that reflection does not install us in a closed, transparent milieu, [. . . . .]. What is at stake is rather that the function of reflection unveils a third dimension in which the distinction between objective/subjective becomes problematic.24 From Ideen II on, says M-P,

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Husserl’s reflections escape this tête-à-tête between pure subject and pure things. They look deeper down for the fundamental. His thought does not disregard the ideal correlation of subject and object; it very deliberately goes beyond it, since it presents it as relatively founded, true derivatively as a constitutive result it is ommitted to justifying in its proper time and place. (PhaS, p. 163)

The above stated reveals some of the most basic concerns M-P has with his analysis, and it definitively points towards a perspective incorporating body, life, life-world, historicity etc. which all of them in their manner might prove to go beyond the subject/object distinction. And, of course, it might be a matter of discussion whether M-P’s analysis so far provides convincing evidence for stating what he says. My position in regard to this is that M-P is quite right, and not only as he also thinks what was un-thought of in the Ideas II text itself. And besides, this by no means is ending his exposition – it continues by concretization into the impact of it, in regard to the concepts like “objective material thing”, “body”, “inter-corporality” etc., which of course, is reflecting (some of) the content and structure of the Ideas II itself. But first of all M-P asks for the starting point for this new turn in Husserl’s thought, and what is the deeper urgency behind it25 ? Let’s take a look into his answer to this. According to M-P, what is false in the ontology of blosse Sachen is that it makes a purely theoretical or idealizing attitude absolute, neglecting or taking as understood a relation with being which founds the purely theoretical attitude and measures its value. This false understanding might, of course, in realizing it, motivate another different, but does M-P now at the same time say that this was what motivated Husserl in his working on Ideas II? If yes, then further on: Relative to this scientific naturalism, the natural attitude involves a higher truth that we must regain. – Is this the motive of Husserl or of M-P, and is it the motive of Husserl in the context of the Crisis, or already in that of Ideas II? Now we have to believe the answer is “yes” to all the alternatives, and the motive should also become ours, we should regain it.26 This is one of the leads M-P now wants us to follow and realize the impact of. But there right away comes another – digging deeper also indicating difficulties, namely: Reflection speaks of a natural relationship to the world as an “attitude,” that is as an organized totality of “acts”. But this is a reflection which presupposes that it is in things [. . . .]. At the same time Husserl’s reflection tries to grasp the universal essences of things, it notes that in the unreflected there are “syntheses which dwell this side of any thesis”. The natural attitude really becomes an attitude – a tissue of judicative and propositional acts – only when it becomes a naturalist thesis. (PhaS, p. 163)

It is not that “tissue of judicative and propositional acts” that constituted the deepest layer, it is those syntheses that dwell this side of any thesis, and these has to be regained by avoiding naturalism – especially the confusion

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of the natural within a manner of thinking which belongs to naturalism, and instead entering (and living) the natural attitude which, according to M-P, itself emerges unscathed from the complaints which can be made about naturalism, because it is “prior to any thesis”, because it is the mystery of a thesis prior to all theses. It is [. . .] the mystery of a primordial faith and a fundamental and original opinion (Urglaube, Urdoxa) which are thus not even in principle translatable in terms of clear and distinct knowledge, and which – more ancient than any “attitude” or “point of view” – give us not a representation of the world but the world itself. (PhaS, p. 163, my italics) Now again, what could this mysterious Urdoxa which is more ancient than any “attitude”, be – if it is not that primordial time (pre)constituted by living the way this has been done since the beginning of history, historicity – which, according to Husserl, is nothing other than the vital movement of the coexistence and interweaving of original formation and sedimentation of meaning? This seems to be the opening to the world that reflection cannot “go beyond” except by making use of the powers it owes to this opening itself. There is, M-P says, [. . .] a clarity, an obviousness, proper to the zone of weltthesis which is not derived from that of our theses, an unveiling of the world precisely through its dissimulation in the chiaroscuro of the doxa. Even though phenomenological reflection begins in the natural attitude, this does not mean that we must necessarily begin with and go by way of opinion before we can attain knowledge. (PhaS, p. 164)

The doxa of the natural attitude is Urdoxa, says M-P, which, then means: “To what is fundamental and original in theoretical consciousness it opposes what is fundamental and original in our existence. Its rights of priority are definitive, and reduced consciousness must take them into account.” (PhaS, p. 164, my italic) But anyhow, to realize this you need reflection – you cannot either do without it. So the relationships between the natural and the transcendental attitudes, says M-P, are not simple, [. . .]. There is a preparation for phenomenology in the natural attitude. By reiterating its own procedures, it seesaws in phenomenology. It is the natural attitude itself which goes beyond itself in phenomenology – and so it does not go beyond itself. Reciprocally, the transcendental attitude is still and in spite of everything “natural”. There is a truth in the natural attitude – even a secondary in naturalism. And then res extensa in its essence, contains neither anything which arises from mind nor anything which medially requires connection with a real mind; we find on the contrary that real mind, according to its essence, can only exist tied to materiality as the real mind of a body. [. . .] In the last analysis, phenomenology is neither a materialism nor a philosophy of mind. Its proper work is to unveil the pre-theoretical layer on which both of these idealizations find their relative justification and are gone beyond. (PhaS, pp. 164/65)

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What about this – now reflection is starting to reflect itself in its essential correlation with the un-reflected – identifying difficulties, and trying to catch up problems not yet explicit but being there as un-thought elements anyhow? What reflection now is trying to do is the catching up with itself in its always pulsating inter-relation with the un-reflected – thus constituting itself in the “middle-between” opening itself as the field of historicity, grounding itself in the always pulsating historical human life within the life-world that belongs to each and everyone, and is both universal and (only) one. This is what M-P will call an “infrastructure” being closely connected to what Husserl in the Crisis speaks of as the “world enigma”.27 And this is what M-P now further interrogates in regard to what this will do to reflection and the absolute consciousness itself. He asks: How will that infrastructure, that secret of secrets this side of our theses and our theory, be able in turn to rest upon the acts of absolute consciousness? Does the descent into the realm of our “archeology” [historicity] leave our analytical tools intact? Does it make no change at all in our conception of noesis, noema, and intentionality – in our ontology? – Are we still entitled to seek in an analytics of acts what upholds our own and the world’s life without appeal? (PhaS, p. 165)

And M-P further states that Husserl never made to himself too clear about these questions. A few word are there [. . .] signaling un-thought elements to think about. [. . .] the element of a “pre-theoretical constitution”, which is charged with accounting for “pre-givens”, those kernels of meaning about which man and the world gravitate.

And those “[..] are [. . .] either always ‘already constituted’ or ‘never completely constituted’ – consciousness always behind or ahead of them”. And [. . .] Husserl was thinking of these singular beings [. . .] in another context – not grasping a content as an exemplification of a meaning or an essence – but spoke of an operating or latent intentionality like that which animates time, more ancient than the intentionality of human acts. [. . .] not grasping a content in a thetic consciousness (singular thing) – it is a distant meaning [viz. depth of time or horizon?] [. . ..] In such cases we still have a grouping of intentional threads around certain knots which govern them, but the series of retro-references which leads us ever deeper could not possible reach completion in the intellectual possession of a noema. There is an ordered sequence of steps, but it is without end as it is without beginning. Husserl’s thought is as much attracted by the haecceity of Nature as by the vortex of absolute consciousness. In the absence of explicit theses about the relationship of one to the other, we can only examine the samples of “pretheoretical constitution” he offers us and formulate – at our own risk – the unthought-of element we think we see there. There is undeniably something between transcendent Nature, naturalism’s being in itself, and the immanent mind, its acts, and its noema. [and this really is the life-world and historicity]. It is into this interval that we must try to advance. (PhaS, pp. 165/66, my italics)

This long sequence is loaded with very deep insights and a highly reflected reflection that probably is inspired E. Fink and is also pointing in the direction of his own The Visible and the Invisible. What M-P has presented us here is

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about the un-thought-of embedded in the reduction-work and it is not as much explicitly taken from Ideas II, but it is inspired by it, as it also is inspired by and founded in the contexts of both the Crisis and the Ideas I.28 The reflection now continues more concretely, taking in the analyses of Ideas II which, according to M-P, brings to light a network of implications beneath the “objective material thing” in which we no longer sense the pulsation of constituting consciousness. What is happening, then, is that [. . .] reflection brings to light what is concealed in the natural un-reflected experiential life. And thus I realize that the relation between my body’s movements and the thing’s “properties” which they reveal is that of the “I am able to” to the marvels it is within its power to give rise to. But I do also realize my body [must] itself [be] meshed into the visible world; its power depends precisely on the fact that it has a place from which it sees. (PhaS, p. 166, my italics)

Thus it [the body] is a thing, but a thing in which I dwell in, says M-P, and he continues saying that the subject is not a stranger to the locality of things and [m]y body is the field within which my perceptive powers are localized. And he also asks, what is the connection between my body and things if it is not one of objective co-variation? The answer is provided by pointing at “a relation of my body to itself which makes it the vinculum of the self and things.” How is that so? M-P’s now uses an example of Husserl and explains this way: When my right hand touches my left, I am aware of it as a “physical thing.” But at the same moment, if I wish, an extraordinary event takes place: here is my left hand as well starting to perceive my right, es wird Leib, es empfindet. I thus touch myself touching and accomplishes “a sort of reflection” which is not a unidirectional relationship since it is reversed, the touched become the touching hand, and [. . .] the sense of touch here is diffused into the body – a “perceiving thing,” a “subject-object.” (PhaS, p. 166)

This might perhaps seem a bit puzzling for was not it the bodies relation to things that should be explained, not its relation to itself? But the point is that this “demonstration” actually undermines the whole of traditional subject/object dualistic thinking and, according to M-P, results in an ontological rehabilitation of the sensible. Space itself is known through my body. And further on, “[i]f the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body, [. . .] it is also blurred in the thing, which is the pole of my body’s operations, the terminus its explorations ends up in, and which is thus woven into the same intentional fabric as my body.” This then, makes it possible for M-P to underline the following: When we say that the perceived thing is grasped “in person” or “in the flesh” (leibhaft), this is to be taken literally: the flesh of what is perceived, this compact particle which stops exploration, and this optimum which terminates it all reflect my own incarnation and its counterpart. Here we have a type of being, a universe with its unparalleled “subject” and “object”, the articulation of each in terms of the other, and the definitive definition of an “irrelative” of all the “relativities”

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of perceptual experience, which is the “legal basis” for all the constructions of understanding. (PhaS, p. 167, my italics)

And M-P continues saying that “all understanding and objective thought owe their life to the inaugural fact that with this color [. . .]”, and he further explains what this entails29 , which is a reflective description of how my experience is running along embodying both presences and absences interweaving in the run and duration of my experience. And he admits that there is a problem here, because of the following question: “What will intentionality be then if it is no longer the mind’s grasping of an aspect of sensible matter as the exemplification of an essence, no longer the recognition in things of what we have put into there?” But this problem is, however, generated by “[. . .] forgetting that the sensible order is being at distance – the fulguration attestation here and now to an inexhaustible richness – and that things are only half open for us, unweiled and hidden”. [. . ..] “The solution,” says M-P – “if there is one – can only lie in examining this layer of sensible being or in becoming accustomed to its enigmas.” (PhaS, pp. 167/68) The first alternative is what M-P now reflectively is about to do, and the second, is what we in natural, un-reflected life quite normally do. So as we normally have become accustomed to these “enigmas,” they really are not enigmas in un-reflected life; they become enigmas, however, as soon as we encounter obstacles, start wondering30 etc. which happens in natural life and might be the beginning of reflecting – thus the natural might seesaw (quite “naturally”) in the philosophical, in phenomenology. And the point might well be that these two alternatives are functioning together in an open-ended correlation which in a dynamic manner is historical. This might also very well be in accordance with (and an explication of the meaning of) how reduction and the relation between reflection and the un-reflected were described in the beginning of this exposition. “This is, however, still far from Cartesian blosse Sachen”, says M-P. And what he now goes into is how some problem of solipsism might be entailed in the analysis of Husserl. This is, however, not any real problem neither in Husserl’s analysis nor in that of M-P. The solipsistic perspective is present only for methodical reasons, making the viewing of what happens in our experiential life more adequate. In Ideas II Husserl is often conducting his enquiry in two steps, first the one conducted in a “solipsistic” perspective, then in a perspective embodying the intersubjective and objective as well. In the very similar manner as regarding the body and thing in experiential life, M-P now will expose how this whole “thing” might develop into the intersubjective, including empathy too. In Husserl this really is not two different independent kinds of steps in the analysis of world-experience, and what M-P’s analysis now seems to aim at is to demonstrate an even closer interconnectedness,

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which now are to be revealed as the so far un-thought-of in Husserl. As his reflective analysis both reflect the relevant text(s) of Husserl, and also the phenomena of the life-worldly, natural social and historical human life itself, this will also provide something un-thought-of in Husserl (which he, however, has actually thought of in the Crisis-context?). M-P’s analysis starts by pointing out that “in the context of my body, which itself pertains to the order of things only through its fringes or periphery, the things it perceives would really be being only if I learned that they are seen by others”. But now M-P tells us, “the constitutive steps which still separate us from being in-it-self are the same type as the unveiling of my body as they make use of a universal which my body has already made appear.” He repeats the example of my right hand thatching my left, and says, [i]t is in no different fashion that the other’s body become before me when I shake another man’s hand or just look at him. In learning that my body is able to be stimulated – it, and not just my “consciousness” – I prepared myself for understanding that there are other animalia and possible other men. And this applies neither comparison, nor analogy, nor projection or “injection” since the other’s hand is substituted for my left hand, and the body annexes the body of another person in that “sort of reflection” it is the seat of. My two hands “coexist” or are “compresent” because they are one single body’s hands. The other person appears through an extension of that compresence; he and I are like organs of one single intercorporality. (PhaS, p. 168, my italics)

And this is so, according to M-P, because “[f]or Husserl the experience of others is first of all ‘esthesiological’ [. . ..] what I perceive to begin with is a different ‘sensibility’, and only subsequently a different man and different thought.” M-P discusses problems that might be entailed in this and he explains how they are generated by some naturalistic preconditions which are not Husserl’s – and “[. . .] above all, this objection [these problems] would ignore the very thing that Husserl wanted to say; that is, that there is no constituting of a mind for a mind, but of a man for a man.” (PhaS, p. 169) And what is the impact31 of this? It is – the descriptive analysis getting more life-worldly: “[. . .] true”, says M-P, [. . .] that I would not recognize him if I were not myself; and that if I did not have (or think I had along with myself) the absolute contact of thought, a different cogito would not spring forth before me. But these catalogues of absence do not translate what has just happened inclusively; they note down partial solidarities which stem from but do not constitute the advent of the other person. (PhaS, p. 170, my italics)

Even though I as a man meeting an other man, and this provides only partial solidarities that do not constitute the advent of the other person (viz. the other constitute her self by living in the world), it is these kinds of elementary events that constitute the most “fundamental” preconditions for the possibility of our existing together. Of course, life-worldly, living strait-forwardly, this is what

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normally happens in the experiencing each other; in her presence there are absences which normally, then, are compensated by trust – which is a mode of the fundamental doxa. According to M-P: If the other person is to exist for me, he must do so to begin with in an order beneath the order of thought. On this level, his existence for me is possible. For my perceptual opening to the world, which is more dispossession than possession, claims no monopoly of being and institutes no death struggle of consciousnesses. My perceived world and the half-disclosed things before me have in their thickness what it takes to supply more than one sensible subject with “states of consciousness”; they have the right to many other witnesses besides me. (PhaS, p. 170, my italics)

And further on, now so to speak M-P’s analysis “shadowing” Husserl’s (which mostly methodically starts in a solipsistic perspective only to systematically transcend it into the intersubjective), it continues by saying: So from the “solipsist” layer on, the other person is not impossible, because the sensible thing is open. The other person becomes actual when a different comportment and a different gaze take possession of my things. [. . . . . ..] Man can create the alter-ego which thought cannot create, because he is outside himself in the world and because one ex-stasis is compossible with other ex-stasis. And that possibility is fulfilled in perception as vinculum of brute being and a body. The whole riddle of Einfühlung lies in its initial, “esthesiological” phase; and it is solved there because it is a perception. He who “posits” the other man is a perceiving subject, the other person’s body is a perceived thing, and the other person is “posited” as “perceiving”. It is never a matter of anything but co-perception. I see that this man over there sees, as I touch my left hand while it is touching my right. (PhaS, p. 170, my italics)

M-P further elaborates on this, describing the moments constituting the sensible being, moving from “my most strictly private life” – as what is announced to me there, “summons up within that life all other corporality” and ending by saying that “[t]he whole of the objects which may be fundamentally and original presence for all communicating subjects, is Nature in its primary and fundamental and original sense.” But he also points to that definite transcendence characterizing the other’s life in relation to me,32 and finally, then, asks what the result of this will be as far as constitution is concerned? And his answer is this: By moving to the pre-theoretical, pre-thetic, and pre-objective order, Husserl has upset the relationship between the constituted and the constituting. Being in itself, being for an absolute mind, from now on draws mits truth from a “layer” where there is neither absolute mind nor the immanence of intentional objects in that mind, but only incarnate minds which through their bodies “belong [. . .] to the same world”. (PhaS, p. 172, my italics)

And this is not to move from philosophy to psychology. What M-P now discusses further, is the relationship between logical objectivity and carnal intersubjectivity which he characterizes as “one of those double-edged relationships of Fundierung Husserl has spoken of in another connection”. “Intercorporality”, says M-P

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[. . .] culminates in (and is changed into) the advent of blosse Sachen without our being able to say that the one of the two orders is primary to the other. The pre-objective order is not primary, since it is established (and to tell the truth fully begins to exist) only by being fulfilled in the founding of logical objectivity. Yet logical objectivity is not self-sufficient; it is limited to consecrating the labors of the pre-objective layer, existing only as the outcome of the “Logos of the esthetic world” and having value only under its supervision. Between the “deeper” and the higher layers of constitution, we perceive the singular relationship of Selbstvergessenheit that Husserl already names in Ideen II, and that he was to take up again later in the theory of sedimentation. (PhaS, p. 173)

As M-P thus makes thematic that Selvstvergessenheit and the theory of sedimentation, we now more explicit enter the field of historicity again. It is highly relevant in regard to the (living) inter-relationship between intercorporality and logical objectivity. That relationship of interdependence is fundamentally historical in the sense that Husserl describes it as the vital movement of the coexistence and the interweaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning. Thus, as M-P says: Logical objectivity derives from carnal intersubjectivity on the condition that it has been forgotten as carnal intersubjectivity, and it is carnal intersubjectivity itself which produces this forgetfulness by wending its way toward logical objectivity. Thus the forces of the constitutive field do not move in one direction only; they turn back upon themselves. Intercorporality goes beyond itself and ends up unconscious of itself as intercorporality; it displaces and changes the situation it set out from, and the spring of constitution can no more be found in its beginning than in its terminus. (PhaS, p. 173, my italics)

And M-P now discusses aspects of these relationships – they are found again at each stage of constitution – they interweave and coexist the way M-P describes it: The perceived thing rests upon the proper body [. . .] the entire functioning of the body proper hangs upon the perceived thing the circuit of behavior closes upon. The body is nothing less but nothing more than the things’ condition of possibility. When we go from body to thing, [. . ...we] are present at a kind of propagation, encroachment, or enjambment which prefigures the passage from solus ipse to the other person, from the “solipsist” thing to the intersubjective thing. [. . ...] the “solisist” thing is not primary for Husserl, nor is the solus ipse. [It is a] thought-experiment, constructed subject [. . ..] isolating method [. . ..] more to reveal than to break the links of the intentional web. [. . .] In reality the solus ipse does not merit its name. (PhaS, pp. 173/74, my italics)

That kind of propagation, encroachment, or enjambment which prefigures [. . .] could actually also be described as the work of the historicity, and M-P now continues by concretizing the constructed “illusion” of solipsism – it does not represent anything that is possible in the concrete human existence. As he discusses it, he says (among other things33 ): We must conceive of a primordial We that has its own authenticity and furthermore never ceases but continues to uphold the greatest passions of our adult life and to be experienced anew in each

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of our perceptions. For as we have seen, communication at this level is no problem and becomes doubtful only if I forget the perceptual field in order to reduce myself to what reflection will make of me. Reduction to “egology” or the “sphere of belonging” is [. . .] only a test of primordial bonds, a way of following them into their final prolongations. The reason why [. . ..] is that “I am able to” and “the other person exists” belonging here and now to the same world [. . ..] the Einfühlung an echo of my incarnation, and that a flash of meaning makes them substitutable in the absolute presence of origins. (PhaS, p. 175, my italics)

That “primordial We” M-P now talks about might reasonably be regarded as the transcendental ego but, then, in its concretizing as transcendental intersubjectivity, or perhaps even better, in its concretization as transcendental historicity. Then, the context clearly would be the Crisis-context in which the life-world has explicitly obtained its transcendental status and character embedded in the historicity of human existence. And this will also be in accordance with how M-P continues, as he says: Thus all of constitution is anticipated in the fulguration of Urempfindung. The absolute here of my body and the “there” [. . ...] are in the relationship of the “fundamental and original” to the “modified” [. . . . . .] along with the “here”, the near and the self, there is set forth over there the system of their “variants”. Each “here” [. . ..] bears witness beyond itself to all the other ones which are not for me compossible with it and yet, somewhere else, are at this same moment are being lived in absolute presence. Since constitution is neither just the development of a future which is implied in its beginning, nor just the effect which an external ordering has in us, it escapes the alternative continuous or discontinuous. It is discontinuous, since each layer is made from forgetting the preceding one. It is continuous from one end to the other because this forgetting is not simply absence (as if the beginning had not existed) but a forgetting what the beginning literally was to the profit of what it has subsequently become – internalization in the Hegelian sense, Erinnerung. From its position, each layer takes up the preceding ones again and encroaches upon those that follow; each is prior and posterior to the others, and thus to itself. (PhaS, pp. 175/76, my italics)

Thus, by reading this quotation we may follow the concrete reflected transcendental leads which are grounded in the fulguration of Urempfindung, the absolute here of my body and the bringing forth of a “there” (horizon), multiplying into many (possible) “here(s)” making up the system of their variants, in which each “here” points beyond itself to all the other ones, however not compossible with each other – even though they somewhere else, at the same moment are lived in absolute presence. The whole “thing” is life-worldly and historical, however not in the traditional objective sense; constitution is historical in the sense of historicity escaping the alternative continuous or discontinuous which is explained by the forgetting of the preceding one as each new layer is made from it. But this forgetting is not simply nothing, absence – or better, this absence in relation to its presence is not simply nothing; it is forgetting what the beginning literally (“objectively”, “in-it-self”) was to the profit of what it has subsequently become etc. – And now we might very well

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recognize what M-P started by saying in regard to the concept of “tradition” – it is what it has become that constitutively (“fundamentally”) counts, not primarily what it started from (in the objective sense), which really means: we should try to regain it even with evidence, but at the same time fully realize how this now is rooted in our actuality, which thus itself becomes genuinely historical. As tradition and history are inescapable in the life and existence of humanity, they also reflect that dynamic dialectics of historicity and tradition such as M-P has described it as forgetting of origin, not quite being able to see just what we have got from it – as it actually is of decisive importance in our lives. Now, then – starting in the Urempfindung, as M-P here does, the transcendental reflection in its constitutive steps takes in the life-world and leads us into the historical which originally, from its beginning is nothing but the living movement of the coexistence and interweaving of original formation and sedimentation of meaning. So in the true and original transcendental view nothing can be more closely inter-related than Urempfindung and history. They are the same in this dynamic pulsating manner extending itself beyond itself characterizing the life of humans; they are, as life is, intertwined in the (one) world which, however, is given to each one of us in our already inter-corporal individuality which is, however, already sociality functioning here and now, both within and around me, thus also historical in the sense of historicity which finally, then, “starts” and is grounded in the Urempfindung of each here and now – within the life-world.34 M-P now speaks of “[t]hese adventures of constitutive analysis [. . .]” – thus in his manner characterizing constitutive analysis as adventures. And this might be so since Husserl even “[. . .] after having shown that the world of Copernicus refers to the world of lived experience, and the universe of physics to that of life, he calmly says that this view will undoubtedly seem rather excessive, and even completely mad.” The substance of this does, of course, reflect the Crisis-perspective, and so does also the motivation for this ontological priority – because “[. . .. the] only function is to enable us to examine experience better and follow its intentional implications more closely. Nothing can prevail against the clarity of constitutive analysis.” And this is not “philosophical hubris”; it is, M-P now insists, [. . .] experience that Husserl appeals to as the ultimate basis for law. So his position would seem to be that since we are at the junction of Nature, body, soul, and philosophical consciousness, since we live that juncture, no problem can be conceived of whose solution is not sketched out within us and in the world’s spectacle – our existence should provide means of arranging in our thought what is all of a piece in our life. [. . . . . .this is] not madness [. . ...] and it means that the transcendental field has ceased to be simply the field of our thought and has become the field of the whole experience, and that Husserl trusts the truth which we are in from birth and which ought to be able to contain both the truths of consciousness and the truths of Nature. The reason why the “retro-references” of constitutive analysis do not have to win out over the principle of a philosophy

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of consciousness is that this philosophy has been sufficiently expanded or transformed to be the match for anything, even for what challenges it. (PhaS, p. 177, my italics)

This quotation now very instructively explicates what the inter-constitutive work of reduction and constitution is all about. They are working “together” – by “retro-references” in regard to truth which we are in from birth, and thus it is historicity (and not only thought) working within this pulsating and dynamic unity of reduction/constitution. And, as M-P views it, this is already so in Ideas II, even though, [. . .]it was later on that Husserl spoke of the possibility that phenomenology is a question for itself, of the existence of a “phenomenology of phenomenology” upon which the ultimate meaning of all foreseeable analyses depends, and on the continuing problematic nature of integral, self-contained, or self-supporting phenomenology, these possibilities can already be seen in a reading of Ideen II. (PhaS, pp. 177–78)

Then, one point being that M-P’s analysis thinking the unthought-of in Husserl has been exposing what is embedded in that space of the “phenomenology of phenomenology”; another, then, is that this was obviously what Husserl himself also had been doing – after the Ideas II, firstly, however, not quite able to realize what he was seeking. But this might also mean that Husserl never really stopped working on what is embedded in that work. Perhaps even he was working on the unthought-of in that work the rest of his life? Thus the distinction now between the two philosophers is not that clear after all!35 And maybe, then, M-P’s argument really takes in what was his grounding point in regard to the problem of inter-subjectivity – as it inevitably presupposes some (preconstituted) inter-corporality; there has to be some “middle-ground” which is prior, pre-given in the form of tradition in which they have and hold some fundamentally common, which, however, they have to work on, not necessarily synchronized in the same (objective) time, even though in common by examining that historicity which encompasses them both. I am perhaps now pulling this “over the edge” but in regard to what Husserl and M-P is saying about “[. . .] the fact that intentional analytics leads us conjointly in two opposite directions [. . .] toward Nature, the sphere of the Urpräsetierbare [and . . ..] toward the world of persons and mind.”, this is not irrelevant regarding our problem of historicity. It will also be including issues in regard to not only human life but also death, the phenomenological historicity extends into the field of generativity, how we each one of us, bodily situated in the world, space and time, how this challenge us to reflect concretely into how our thinking develops between generations – and even between “worlds”. “World” might then concretize as our “home-world” which is contrasting an “alien world” beyond what is ours, “home”.36 Open-minded and free as genuine philosophers have to be, we will always engage challenges

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of this kind, having to engage problems of mediation, for example in regard to “[. . .] not only ‘grasp’ but to ‘understand from within’ the relationship between the ‘world of Nature’ and the ‘world of mind.’ But, then, as M-P further says: At least this difficulty is overcome practically in our life, since we drift constantly and without difficulty from the naturalist to the personal attitude. It is only a question of making reflection equal with what we do with complete naturalness in going from one attitude to another – of describing alterations of intentional apprehensions, articulations of experience, and essential relationships between constituting multiplicities which give an account of differences of being among what is constituted. (PhaS, p. 178, my italics)

Then it is clearly stated that it is what we practically in our life do with complete naturalness that provide some grounding, which, however, involves challenges to phenomenology: In this respect phenomenology can clear up what is confused and eliminate misunderstandings which are precisely the result of our going naturally and unknowingly from one attitude to the other. Yet there is no doubt that these misunderstandings and this “natural” transition exist because clearing up the connection between Nature and persons involves a fundamental difficulty. How much more difficulty will we have when we must understand from within the passage from the naturalist or personal attitude to absolute consciousness, from powers which are natural to an “artificial” attitude – which really should no longer be an attitude among others but the comprehension of all attitudes, being itself speaking within us? (PhaS, pp. 178–79, my italics)

Here is the crucial problem constituting the major challenge to phenomenology explicated. It points back to what M-P stated at the beginning of his exposition of the reduction, and now grounded in what have happened in-between in the run of the constitutive analyses into “objective material thing”, “the body”, “inter-corporality” etc. it ends up asking some decisive questions into the issue of what is most “internal”. M-P asks: What is this “internality” which will be capable of the relationships between interior and exterior themselves? The fact that Husserl at least implicitly and a fortiori raises this question means that he does not think that non-philosophy is included in philosophy from the outset, or that the transcendent is “constituted” in the immanence of constituting consciousness. It means that he at least glimpses, behind transcendental genesis, a world in which all is simultaneous, everything belongs together. (PhaS, p. 179, my italics)

Thus, M-P himself answers by speaking of what Husserl glimpses, behind transcendental genesis, as a world in which all is simultaneous, everything belongs together, and he also speaks of some natural being, the “barbarous” source (Schelling) [which] cannot remain outside of phenomenology. That may well be so – we don’t disagree with M-P on this. But we ask: Has he really answered the question about that “internality”? Could not it rather have been described in terms of historicity and life-world? That seems to be what Husserl himself does in his Crisis. Besides in M-P’s analysis of the Ideas II, he does not either pay much attention to the constitution of the “spiritual” as such –

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at least not as much as he does in regard to nature. And then, finally, what should “the barbarous source” be if it is not that transcendental genesis within and behind everything human, mostly hidden and forgotten, but possible to reveal by reduction? Right enough, we might never wholly be one with constitutive genesis and, as M-P says, we barely manage to accompany it for a short segment.37 But, anyhow, we will fully agree with M-P as he states: “[. . .] the ultimate task of phenomenology as philosophy of consciousness is to understand its relationship to non-phenomenology.” This “non-phenomenology” is, of course, “very much” and it is without limit, as life it is always beyond it self, it is nature, sociality, history, home and alien, always transcending, beyond. And phenomenology also exists in the middle of all this – seeking to reflect, catching up all these moments in human existence in their grounding, for example, by stating, as M-P in accordance with Husserl does: The Earth is the matrix of our time as it is our space. Every constructed notion of time presupposes our proto-history as carnal beings compresent to a single world. Every evocation of possible worlds refers to a way of seeing our own world. Every possibility is a variant of our reality, an effective possibility of reality. [. . ..] These later analyses of Husserl’s are neither scandalous nor even disturbing if we remember everything which foretold them from the start. They make explicit that “world’s thesis” prior to every thesis and theory, this side of understanding’s objectivations, which Husserl has always spoken of, and which has simply become in his eyes our sole recourse in the impasse into which these objectivations have led Western knowledge. (PhaS, p. 180, my italics)

And then M-P tells us that [. . .] Husserl awakens a wild-flowering world of mind. Things are no longer there simply according to their projective appearances [. . ..]; but on the contrary upright, insistent, flying our glance with their edges, each thing claiming an absolute presence of the other things, and which they nevertheless have all together by virtue of a configurational meaning which is in no way indicated by its “theoretical meaning”. Other persons are there too (they were already there along with the simultaneity of things). To begin with they are not there for minds, or even as “psychisms,” but such for example as we face them in anger or love – faces, gestures, spoken words to which our own respond without thoughts intervening, to the point that we sometimes turn their words back upon them even before they have reached us, as sure as, more surely than, if we had understood – each one of us pregnant with the others and confirmed by them in his body. (PhaS, p. 181, my italics)

And M-P further tells us This baroque world is not a concession of mind to nature; for although meaning is everywhere figurative, it is meaning which is at issue everywhere. This renewal of the world is also mind’s renewal, a rediscovery of that brute mind which, untamed by any culture, is asked to create culture anew. From then on the irrelative is not nature in itself, nor the system of absolute consciousness’ apprehensions, nor man either, but that “teleology” Husserl speaks about which is written and thought about in parentheses – that jointing and framing of Being which is being realized through man. (PhaS, p. 181, my italics)

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This last statement – now based on descriptions which transcend the distinction between materiality and spirit, object and subject etc. and go “beneath”, beyond all of these distinctions of traditional philosophy, then unveiling what M-P now calls “this baroque World”, carry us into the middle of the life-world and historicity – since “the irrelative is not now nature in itself, nor the system of absolute consciousness’ apprehensions, nor ether man, but that ‘teleology’ [. . .] that jointing and framing of Being which is being realized through man.” This is M-P’s final word on the issue (in this context) – and so be it. – But we might also remark – reading parts of his “What is Phenomenology?” – written some 15 year earlier, you find quite explicit indicators38 pointing towards the same conclusion – it is that teleology – Being [. . .] realized through man, that constitute the bottom line. And even (more) remarkable is it that Husserl himself already in 1921/22, in a text which was part of “Vorbreitungen für das (systematiche Werk)”39 is starting his analysis by talking about the “Untrennbarkeit von Ich und Nicht-Ich”, on the background of the transcendence(s) of nature and alien subjects, and then he is ending it with an analysis into “Die absolute Wirklichkeit als ein Ganzes gemeinscaftlicher und teleologischer Entwicklung”.40 Maybe this was not thought quite this way in the Ideas II, but it indicates that you have no need to go to either the Crisis or, for that matter, to M-P, for enabling thinking the unthought-of in Ideas II, Husserl himself was more or less continuously seeking to think it. This is the “structure” of his research-work, and phenomenology could simply not do without the teleological moment and the historicity embedded in human existence. What is, then, the result and outcome of our analysis? We have reflected M-P’s analysis of Husserl, in which M-P was to unveil the unthought-of especially in Husserl’s Ideas II, then regaining it, thinking it himself. M-P’s strategy in this regard seems to have been extremely successful – really exposing the dynamic in both Husserl’s and his own thought in a most eloquent manner. We have been trying to follow a similar strategy in regard to both Husserl and M-P himself not, however, having any ambition following his eloquence. Rather we have made thematic some developmental dynamic which seems to be embedded in the development of the phenomenology of Husserl himself. This is in no way incompatible with the project of M-P, but it is not quite the same, since it also takes those motivational forces working within the development of Husserl’s phenomenology into consideration – at least it tries to do so. Husserl himself was also always trying to think (and regain) what was unthought-of in his thinking (that far as it on each level had reached). Thus, thinking the un-thought is not the challenge only of another; the great thinker (such as Husserl and also M-P) will always challenge himself – so, as his phenomenology tirelessly through its entire development challenged itself, it has also become the challenge of very many other thinkers. . . .. And the answer to

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our initial question will be – yes, M-P was a phenomenologist, even maybe a phenomenologist more genuinely so, than most of those having taken scholarly possession over that label. University of Bergen, Norway NOTES 1

Edmund Husserl: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, hereafter Crisis, Northwestern University Press Evanston 1970, p. 371. 2 For example in his Introduction to Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation R. Bruzina has a footnote (119, p. ixxxiii) quoting from a letter from Van Breda to Merleau-Ponty commenting on his newly published book the Phenomenology of Perception saying that M-P has been more under the influence of Fink than Husserl. 3 M. Merleau-Ponty: Signs, pp. 159–181, “The Philosopher and His Shadow” (afterwards: PhaS) Northwestern University Press, 1964. 4 Reading both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in the perspective provided by this article (which also is highly inspired by Husserl), we will try to demonstrate something which is of the greatest importance for understanding both the Phenomenology and the Existentialism of the Twentieth Century. 5 This is, og course, the “Preface” to M-P’s The Phenomenology of Perception from 1945. We will not in this context be giving a substantial examination of this text. 6 E. Husserl: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy Second Book. Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Ideas II), Dortrecht: Kluwe Academic Publisher 1989/1998. 7 It is not quite correct to say M-P was only dependent on Husserl’s works; M-P also did have close connection with Eugon Fink who had been Husserl’s assistant in the last period of his research-life, and as Fink had probably influenced Husserl during this time he afterwards (after the death of Husserl) influenced M-P. In his article “Eugon Fink and Merleau-Ponty: The Philosophical Linage in Phenomenology” (in Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Husserl, eds. T. Toadvine and L. Embree, Kluwer Academic Publisher 2002) R. Brozina wrights very instructively and well documented about this, also more generally pointing to other possible sources for influence in the situation M-P was working. 8 If we take what M-P says about communication seriously, then M-P as the reader (the “secondary” thinker) and Husserl as the writer (the “primary” thinker) now might concretize a potentiality in the situation for correlating the unthought-of not only “in” the text itself, rather also “in” the reader – the unthought-of thus becomes the reader’s task as s/he both transcends and continues the writer’s thought. But the puzzling thing is that this seems to apply to the writer, the primary thinker himself, as well; Husserl himself might have realized the unthought-of in his own thinking – not perhaps continuously as he was thinking it, but anyhow, as we follow the progression in his writings and the development of his phenomenology, this appears to be a highly relevant key for understanding the development itself. Maybe we now are pulling M-P “over the edge”, but what we are suggesting is that the communicative dynamics M-P views in between two subjects also might be working inside one and the same subject, as his work continues on – in and over time. Pretty similar to how some “inter-corporality” enable different subjects to perceive the same objective thing and each other, there also is some “inter-spirituality” – or should we rather say inter-subjectivity or historicity, that by having a function as precondition for the

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constitution of any identity what so ever, will make the distinction between you and me diffuse – and thus enable the transition of what is going on between two individuals into what is going on in one (and back again) – as s/he lives over time (which is the definition of living). I think this can prove to be a key for understanding very much of what follows. 9 This is my overall interpretation of the so called Crisis-perspective here referring especially to the First part of the Crisis and we also now continue developing this in regard to the Second part. 10 Letter to Father Daniel Feuling, March 30, 1933, Briefwechel, VII, p. 89, now quoted from R. Bruzina’s Introduction to E. Fink Sixth Cartesian Meditation, Indiana University Press 1995, p. xxvi. 11 This might, of course, appear as a matter of discussion, and it also was an issue Husserl returned to during most of his lifelong work – and it still was a major issue even in the Crisis. 12 We might perhaps, also say this is about some “[. . .] vital movement of the coexistence and the interweaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning”. This is the quotation we started with, and what now will be relevant is the tradition, from Kant, Descartes, the ancient etc., thus in a way structuring our interpretation of the development of Husserl’s own philosophy after the structure of the historical reflection in the Crisis itself. 13 We will now be referring to the English versions, namely Edmund Husserl: Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Respectively: First Book. General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (Ideas I), Dortrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher 1983/1998. Second Book. Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Ideas II), Dortrecht: Kluwe Academic Publisher 1989/1998. Third Book. Phenomenology and the Foundation of the Sciences (Ideas III), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1980. 14 We have now translated this from Rudolf Boehm: Vom Geschictpunkt der Phänomenologie, Martinus Nijoff, Den Haag 1968, pp. 30–31. The italics are mine underlining what is especially relevant in regard to the Crisis-perspective. 15 We are now, of course, only very loosely drawing up some lines which, nevertheless, might provide an instructive picture of what happens in the 1920s. 16 I have published two articles that are of relevance for sustaining this. The first is K. Rokstad: “Nature, Subjectivity and the Life-world: Elements in a Comparative Perspective on Husserl’s Ideas II and the Crisis”, and the second is K. Rokstad: “Meditations on Intersubjectivity and Historicity in Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology” published in Analecta Husserliana, respectively vol. LXXVII and vol. LXXX, ed. A.-T. Tymienniecka, Kluwer Academic Publisher 2002. And, of course, all those texts by Husserl on Intersubjectivity published by I. Kern in the Husserliana, starts in 1905. 17 Starting with this is very much in accord with Husserl himself and with our talking about transcendental historicity here, since in the Crisis Husserl explicitly says we need the reduction for being able to enter the transcendental historicity (pp. 208–209). It is also interesting to notify that M-P chooses Ideas II for his examination and not Ideas I which normally is considered the “authorized” source for understanding the reduction(s). 18 Thus, the frame and content set by Husserl himself, not being explicit in M-P’s text, but now taken directly from Ideas II might provide some highly relevant ground for examining the “authenticity” of M-P’s analysis (thus maybe exposing some unthought-of in the text of M-P as well – which actually is thought by Husserl him self already in the Ideas II). It might, perhaps be suspected that M-P too much is thinking and exposing the unthought-of in Husserl (viz. what he is thinking “only” himself), but it might as well be revealed that the “unthought-of” which

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M-P exposes, really is embedded in Husserl’s own text – even though it might appear (too much?) colored by the Crisis-perspective, so to speak anticipating it already in the Ideas II perspective. And we could also refer to something from “Epilog” from 1929, Husserl’s own comment regarding Ideas, in which he says – talking about philosophy: “It is, I emphasize, an idea, which as the further meditative interpretation will show, is to be realized only by way of relative and temporary validities and in an infinite historical process – but in this way it is, in fact, realizable”. (Ideas II, p. 406). And further also from quotation from that speech to soldiers (1917) in which Husserl says that every eternity is wrapped in the form of finitude and appears never purely . . . . (previously in this paper). 19 In Husserl’s text in between his question and his answer we have the following analysis: So the question is whether, [. . .], apperception in general can develop and, in particular, those of the personal ego in its regulated comportment relative to subjective circumstances, in such a way that reflection on cogitations play no privileged role there, or whether precisely the reflection have here a special and altogether essential constitutive function. Is it necessary that I, in reflective experience, run through my modes of comportment in order for the personal Ego to be able to come to consciousness as the unity of those modes, or can it already be “conscious” in pre-givenness, before it was given originally through such series of identifying and realizing experiences, which as reflection on the cogitations, focus on the comportment in relation to circumstances? (II, pp. 263–64, my italics) By reading this, we might, perhaps, get the impression that we are dealing with two mutually excluded options: it is either reflection and self-experience that constitute the personal ego, or it is already there in some pre-givenness that does not need any reflection. But this is not what Husserl actually states. In the continuation, as he obviously accepts some pre-givenness, he further asks: But in that case what is it which is organized in the pre-reflective sphere? Surely, “associations” are formed, references back and forth develop, just as they do with the unnoticed sensuous and thingly “backgrounds”. Thus the content is already there, and in the subsequent reflection, in the remembering, I can and I must encounter something already formed. This is the presupposition for the “explication”, for the “fully conscious” exhibition, of the “if” and “then”, the associative nexuses, the Ego constituted in reflection refers back to another one. (II, p. 264, my italics) 20

In the Crisis Husserl talks about “die transzendentale Geschichtlishkeit” and we now quote (in English) the whole context in which the expression appears, pp. 208–09: “In psychology the natural, naïve attitude has the result that the human self-objectifications of transcendental intersubjectivity, which belong with essential necessity to the makeup of the constituted world pregiven to me and to us, inevitably have a horizon of transcendentally functioning intentionalities which are not accessible to reflection, not even psychological-scientific reflection. “I, this man,” and likewise “other men” – these signify, respectively, a self-apperception and an apperception of others which are transcendental acquisitions involving everything psychic that belongs to them, acquitions which flowtingly change in their particularity through transcendental functions which are hidden from the naïve attitude. We can inquire back into the transcendental historical dimension [Geschichtlichkeit, historicity], from which the meaning and validity-accomplishment of these apperceptions ultimately stems, only by breaking with naiveté through the method of transcendental reduction. In the unbroken naiveté in which all psychology, all humanistic disciplines, all human history persists, I, the psychologist, like everyone else, am constantly involved in the performance of self-apperceptions and apperceptions of others. [. . .] Also the Cartesian two-substance-doctrine [. . .]”

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What now has been exposed will in my view appear very much in accordance with what Ludwig Landgrebe is doing in his article “The Life-world and The Historicity of Human Existence” (in Research in Phenomenology XI 1981) in which he programmatically says: “I want to argue for a transcendental theory of the life-world and of historicity, and I want to do so by suggesting that a phenomenological reflection upon the transcendental ego – once correctly understood – is the proper procedure for constructing such a theory”. (p. 112) 22 I have actually also used this interpretation in another article called “The historicity of Body and Soul” which is published in Analecta Husserliana XCIII 127–159 ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka, Springer 2006. 23 PhaS, p. 161, and it continues this way [. . .] even though the reduction goes beyond the natural attitude and constitute the “nature” (M-P’s example is the concept of “nature” and not the “personal ego”) as the “ideal meaning of the acts which constitute the natural attitude” and become once more the noema it always has been – reintegrated to the consciousness which has always constituted it. So nature is relative to mind, and that nature is relative and absolute. And as reduction goes beyond the natural attitude, it also preserves “the whole world of the natural attitude” (Husserl) and the very transcendence of this world retains a meaning in the eyes of “reduced” consciousness, so again transcendental immanence cannot be simply its antithesis (my paraphrasing pp. 161–62, very much the same in Preface). 24 This observation further enables to avoid the confusion of the “indifferent pure knower” and the philosopher. Philosophy should not be modeled after the science of Nature; there is, of course, a certain philosophy which gives birth to the natural sciences and comes back to the pure I and its correlative, “things simply as things”, stripped of every action-predicate and every value-predicate, but this is not the philosophy of Husserl. (PhaS, pp. 162–63) 25 Of course, in the Crisis Husserl has a very explicit motivational horizon embedded in the historical situation of both scientific- and life-crisis, but this does not mean he did not have had explicit motivational horizons previously as well, as he had both in Ideas I, “Philosophy as rigorous science” and in his Logical Investigations, but these were more epistemological than historical and “existential”, such as it had become in the Crisis. 26 Then we will realize [. . .] the natural attitude is nothing less than naturalistic. [And] Prior to all reflection [. . .] we maintain a “personalist attitude” that naturalism cannot account for, and here things are not nature in itself for us but “our surroundings”. Our most natural life as men intends an ontological milieu which is different from that of being in it self, and which consequently cannot be derived from it in the constitutive order. [And] we know far more about things in the natural attitude than the theoretical attitude can tell us – and above all we know it in a different way. (my paraphrasing p. 163) This certainly fits in with both Ideas II and the Crisis, the personal prior to reflection, things not in-themselves, but our surroundings, actually our life-world, horizon and ground etc. 27 Husserl is, of course, using this expression several places in the Crisis, and one of the more interesting is in regard to Hume making him so to speak the discoverer of this enigma. Husserl says: “The world-enigma in the deepest and most ultimate sense, the enigma of a world whose being is being through subjective accomplishment, and this with the self-evidence that another world cannot be at all conceivable – that, and nothing else, is Hume’s problem”. (C, pp. 96–97) 28 That previously mentioned article by R. Buzina could sustain what we are stating here, see note 7. 29 M-P’s exposition continues like this: “a singular existence which suddenly stopped my glance yet promised it an infinite series of experiences, which was a concretion of possibles real here and now in the hidden sides of the thing, which was a laps of duration given all at once. The intentionality that ties together the stages of my exploration, the aspects of the thing, and the two

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series to each other is neither the mental subject’s connecting activity nor the ideal connections of the object. It is the transition that as carnal subject I effect from one phase of movement to another, a transition which as a matter of principle is always possible for me because I am that animal of perceptions and movements called a body”. (PhaS, p. 167) 30 In his “What is phenomenology” Preface to his Phenomenology of Perception (p. xiii) M-P also says that the description of reduction in terms of wondering given by Fink, is probably the best he has seen. 31 The impact is in the text further explicated this manner: “By the effect of a singular eloquence of the visible body, Einfühlung goes from body to mind. When a different behavior or exploring body appears to me through a first “intentional encroachment” it is the man as a whole who is given to me with all the possibilities [. . .] that I have in my presence to myself in my incarnate being, the unimpeachable attestation. I shall never in all strictness be able to think the other person’s thought. [. . .] On the other hand, I know unquestionably that that man over there sees, that my sensible world is also his, because I am present at his seeing, it is visible in his eye’s grasp of the scene. And when I say that he sees, there is no longer here (as there is in “I think that he thinks”) the interlocking of two propositions but the mutual unfocusing of a “main” and a “subordinate” viewing. A form that resembles me was there, but busy at secret tasks, possessed by an unknown dream. [what is embedded in this – is it historicity?] Suddenly a gleam appeared a little bit below and out in front of his eyes; its glance is raised and comes to fasten on the very thing that I am seeing. Everything which for my part is based upon the animal of perceptions and movements, all that I shall ever be able to built upon it – falls all at once into the other person. I say that there is a man there and not the mannequin, as I see that the table is there and not a perspective or an appearance of the table”. (PhaS, pp. 169–70) 32 In the text we might read the following: The fact is that sensible being, which is announced to me in my most strictly private life, summons up within that life all other corporality. It is the being which reaches me in my most secret parts, but which I also reach in its brute or untamed parts, in an absolute of presence which holds the secret of the world, others, and what is true. There are “objects” in this absolute of presence “which are not only fundamentally and originally present to a subject but (since they are so present to one subject) can ideally be given in a fundamental and original presence to all the other subjects [. . .] The whole of the objects which may be fundamentally and original presence for all communicating subjects, is Nature in its primary and fundamental and original sense. [. . .] the dual direction of Husserl’s reflection [. . .] both an analytics of essences and an analytics of existence. [. . .] There are certainly more things in the world and in us than what is perceptible in the narrow sense of the term. The other person’s life itself is not given to me with his behavior. . . . had to be the other person himself. Some transcendence [—] Husserl rediscovers sensible being as the universal form of brute being. — the being that can be given in a fundamental and original presence (das urpresentierbare Sein), is not the whole of being, and not even all being there is experience of. Animalia are realities that cannot be given in a fundamental and original presence to several subjects; — absolutely present beings who have a wake of the negative — I see also a certain absence — it self rooted in the presence [. . ..] “Negativities” also count in the sensible world, which is decidedly the universal one. (From pp. 170–72 PhaS) 33 The solitude from which we emerge to intersubjective life is not that of the monad. It is only the haze of an anonymous life that separates us from being; and the barrier between us and others is impalpable. If there is a break, it is not between me and the other person; it is between a primordial generality we are intermingled in and the precise system, myself-the others. [. . .] The constitution of others does not come after that of the body; others and my body are born together from the original ecstasy. The corporality to which the primordial thing belongs is more corporality in

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general; as the child’s egocentricity, the “solipsist layer” is both transitivity and confusion of self and other. In the têt-à-têt of the Füreinander there is a linkage of egoism and love which wipes out their borders, an identification which goes beyond solipsism in the reigning as well as in the devoted one. Egoism and altruism exist against a background of belonging to the same world; and to want to[. . .] construct this phenomenon beginning with a solipsist layer is to make it impossible once and for all – and perhaps to ignore the profoundest things Husserl is saying to us. The fact that we die alone does not imply that we live alone; and if we consult nothing but suffering and death when we are defining subjectivity, subjective life with others and in the world will become logically impossible. (PhaS, pp. 174–75) 34 M-P now returns more directly to the context of the Ideas II, saying: Husserl is not too astonished at the circularities in the course of his analysis. There is the circularity of the thing and the experience of other people. For the fully objective thing is based upon the experience of others, and the latter upon the experience of the body, which in a way is a thing itself. There is another circularity between Nature and persons. For nature in the sense of natural sciences (but also in the sense of the Urpräsentierbare, which for Husserl is the truth of the first) is the whole of the world (Weltall) to begin with, and as such it encompasses persons who, in another connection in which they are expressly made explicit, encompass Nature as the object they constitute in common. [. . .] a reciprocal relation between Nature, body, and soul – their simultaneity [. . .]. (PhaS, pp. 176–77) 35 And, of course, we do also have Fink in this picture as he was collaborating, communicating with Husserl as he was still alive, and M-P, then, afterwards communicating with Fink – so really it was not only two. (See the previous mentioned article by Bruzina, note 7). 36 These are problems Husserl writes about especially in his Ergäzungsband to the Crisis and in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjectivität Dritter Teil, published by I. Kern. A. J. Steinbock has also in his book Home and Beyond Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Northwestern Univerity Press Evanston, Illinois 1995) written instructively about this. 37 It continues like this: What is it then which responds to our reconstitution from (if these words have a meaning) the other side of things? From our own side, there is nothing but convergent but discontinuous intentions, moments of clarity. We constitute constituting consciousness by dint and rare and difficult efforts. It is the presumptive or alleged subject of our attempts. The author, Valery said, is the instantaneous thinker of works which were slow and laborious – and this thinker is nowhere. As the author is for Valery the impostor of the writer, constitution consciousness is the philosopher’s professional impostor. In any case, for Husserl it is the artifact the teleology of intentional life ends up at – and not the Spinozist attribute of thought. Originally a project to gain intellectual possession of the world, constitution becomes increasingly, as Husserl’s thought matures, the means of unveiling a back side of things that we have not constituted. This senseless effort to submit everything to the properties of “consciousness” (to the limpid) play of its attitudes, intentions, and impositions of meaning was necessary – the picture of a well behaved world left to us by classical philosophy had to be pushed to the limit – in order to reveal all that was left over: these beings beneath our idealizations and objectifications which secretly nourish them and in which we have difficulty recognizing noema. (PhaS, pp. 179–80) 38

In “What is phenomenology” M-P states the following with direct relevance:

Husserl takes up again the Critique of Judgement when he talks about the teleology of consciousness. It is not a matter of duplicating human consciousness with some absolute thought which, from outside, is imagined as assigning to its aims. It is a question of recognizing consciousness itself as a project of the world, meant for a world which it neither embraces nor possesses, but towards which it is perpetually directed – and the world as this pre-objective individual (xviii)

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whose imperious unity decrees what knowledge shall take as its goal. [. . .] Husserl distinguishes between intentionality of acts, which is that of our judgements [. . .] and operative intentionality, or that which produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and our life, being apparent in our desires, our evaluations and the landscape we see, more clearly than in objective knowledge [. . .] our relationship to the world, as it is untiringly enunciating within us, is not a thing which can be any further clarified by analysis; philosophy can only place it ones more before our eyes and present it for our ratification. Through this broaden notion of intentionality [. . .] and so phenomenology can become a phenomenology of origins. Whether we are concerned with a thing perceived, a historical event or a doctrine, to ‘understand’ is to take in the total intention [. . .] the unique mode of existing expressed in the properties of the pebble, the glass [. . .], in all events of a revolution, in all thoughts of a philosopher. It is a matter, in the case of each civilization, of finding the Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, not a law of the physico-mathematical type, discoverable by objective thought, but that formula which sums up some unique manner of behaviour towards other, towards Nature, time and death: a certain way of patterning the world which the historian should be capable of seizing upon and make his own. These are the dimensions of history. Here there is not a human word, not a gesture [. . .] which has not some meaning [. . .] everything seems subject to chance [. . .] but chance happenings offset each other, and facts in their multiplicity coalesce and show up a certain way of taking a stand in relation to the human situation [. . . (xix)] Should the starting-point for understanding history be ideology, or politics, or religion, or economics? Should we try to understand the doctrine from its overt content, or from the psychological make-up and the biography of its author? We must seek to understand from all these angles simultaneously, everything has meaning, and we shall find this same structure of being underlying all relationships. All these views are true provided that they are not isolated, that we delve deeply into history and reach the unique core of existential meaning which emerges in each perspective. It is true, as Marx says, that history does not walk on its head, but it is also true that it does not think with its feet. [. . .] What we should worry about is the body [. . .] the thinker never thinks from any starting-point but the one constituted by what he is. [. . .] all put back in existential structure. There is, as Husserl says, a ‘genesis of meaning’ [. . .] which alone, in the last resort, teaches us what the doctrine ‘means’. [. . ..] there is no pure accident in existence and co-existence, since both absorb random events and transmute them into the rational. The chief gain from phenomenology is to have united extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism in its notion of the world or of rationality. Rationality is precisely measured by the experiences in which it is disclosed. To say that there exists rationality is to say that perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning emerges. But it should not be set in a realm apart, transposed (xx) into absolute spirit, or into the world in the realist sense. The phenomenological world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people’s intersect and engage each other like gears. It is thus inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which find their unity when I either take up my past experiences in those of the presence, or other people’s in my own. For the first time the philosopher’s thinking is sufficient conscious not to anticipate itself and endow its own results with reified form in the world. [. . .] its justification resting entirely on the effective power which it confers on us of taking our own history upon ourselves. [. . .] Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-exisiting truth, but like art, the act of bringing truth into being [. . .] the only pre-existent logos is the world itself [. . .] philosophy does not begin by being possible; it is actual or real like the world of which it is a part [. . .] Rationality is not a problem. There is behind it no unknown quality not by deduction, induction. We witness every minute the miracle of related experience, and yet nobody knows how this miracle worked, for we are ourselves this network

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of relationships. The world and reason are not problematical [. . .] the mysterious defines them. True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world, and in this sense a historical account can give meaning to the world quite as ‘deeply’ as a philosophical treatise. [. . .] – we take fate in our hands [. . .] Phenomenology, as a disclosure of the world, rests on itself, or rather provides its own foundation. (xxi) All knowledge is sustained by a ‘ground’ of postulates and finally by our communication with the world as primary embodiment of rationality [. . .] As it too is in history, it too exploits the world and constituted reason. (pp. XVIII–XXI, my italics) 39

This is published in Hua vol. XIV, more specifically text no. 13, pp. 244–97. I have written about this in an article called “Meditations on Intersubjectivity and Historicity in Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology” published in Phenomenology World-Wide Analecta Husserliana vol 80, ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka, Kluwer Academic Publisher, 2002.

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S A RT R E ’ S P O S T C A RT E S I A N O N T O L O G Y: O N N E G AT I O N A N D E X I S T E N C E

ABSTRACT

This article maintains that Jean-Paul Sartre’s early masterwork, Being and Nothingness, is primarily concerned with developing an original approach to the being of consciousness. Sartre’s ontology resituates the Cartesian cogito in a complete system that provides a new understanding of negation and a dynamic interpretation of human existence. The article examines the role of consciousness, temporality and the relationship between self and others in the light of Sartre’s arguments against “classical” rationalism. The conclusion suggests that Sartre’s departure from modern foundationalism has “postmodern” implications that emerge in the areas of ontology, existential analytics and the ethics of human freedom. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (L’être et le néant, 1943) responds in decisive ways to the Cartesian legacy in developing an original ontology that underlies the philosopher’s commitment to existentialism. In arguing that Sartre is in dialogue with the rationalist tradition, we shall maintain that he is a “postcartesian,” not primarily in the minimal sense of coming after René Descartes, but rather in the stronger sense of responding to the philosophical challenge of his “classical” predecessor. This stronger claim also means that Sartre sometimes adopts an adversarial relationship to Cartesian ontology. Our approach to Sartre’s attempt to address the question of being will allow us to examine four integral concerns, namely, (i) the structure of consciousness as conscious being, (ii) the nature of temporality, (iii) the role of the cogito in clarifying the existence of other persons and (iv) the significance of freedom to “postmodern” accounts of the modern condition. These four concerns will be interrelated in a way that argues in favor of Sartre’s distinctive contribution to existential phenomenology. I

While early commentators on Sartre’s work did not hesitate to discuss the influence of Descartes on Being and Nothingness, we might begin by reconsidering this influence from two different standpoints. First, Sartre’s early philosophy 37 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 37–54. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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is often described as a philosophy of consciousness because of the role that it assigns to conscious reflection in mental life. To the degree that this interpretation can be sustained, Sartre’s work in phenomenology would seem to be Cartesian in the classical sense. Is it not the case that Sartre dismisses the Freudian notion of an unconscious as inherently self-contradictory? Moreover, Sartre’s early rejection of determinism would presumably prevent him from easily accepting the economic orientation of a philosophy like Marxism. An emphasis on consciousness in philosophy would seem to go along with methodological individualism, which would preclude the construction of synthetic concepts like class and social interest that perform a special role in Marxist analyses. Finally, and in a different vein, Sartre’s rationalist tendencies might elevate conscious thought in a manner that would foreclose any serious dialogue with religious traditions. The principle that all beliefs must be grounded in evidence in order to be valid, which is implicit if not explicit in Cartesian philosophy, seems to disallow a respect for the unknown that makes religious life possible. However, these apparent limitations would only become binding if Sartre had adopted Cartesian rationalism as a complete system of knowledge. In truth, while Sartre is concerned with the epistemological status of knowledge claims, the approach to the world that he adopts begins with an analysis of consciousness, rather than with the question of validation through evidence. As a phenomenologist, Sartre contends that consciousness is always consciousness of something, which means that it exhibits intentions in its engagement with the world. Moreover, consciousness is irreducible to objective knowledge insofar as it always presupposes a pre-reflective awareness of its own activity. What this means is that my consciousness of a given entity necessarily carries along with it the awareness that I am conscious of the object intended. To say this much is to propose that consciousness exhibits a tripartite structure, instead of upholding a more restrictive epistemological dualism. Knowledge would occur in a manner that sustained a narrow opposition between knower and known if it did not involve an implicit awareness of what I know. However, Sartre prevents us from accepting an impersonal theory of consciousness in specifying how consciousness embraces self-consciousness. I am present to myself in being conscious of the object intended. Nonetheless, presence to self should not be confused with self-knowledge: what separates these two concepts not only helps us distinguish Sartrian phenomenology from Cartesian rationalism but it also points to a crucial non-objective aspect of consciousness itself. Sartre clarifies this non-objective component in his analysis of how consciousness differs from being as such. In discussing how objectifying intentions are empty ones, Sartre maintains that consciousness produces itself “as

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a revelation of a being which it is not and which gives itself as already existing when consciousness reveals it.”1 However, the division that occurs within consciousness cannot be understood in terms of a simple relation between subject and object. This division presupposes the attempt to lay claim to being that occurs in every objective experience. In criticizing a foundational concept of reason, Sartre argues that pre-reflective awareness is what provides relative security to conscious thought. Cartesian rationalism falls short of its goals when it confuses knowledge with ontology. In taking up this criticism, however, Sartre does not identify his own position with relativism, since consciousness is an experience that cannot be limited in this way. His quarrel with Descartes does not involve the affirmation of a lesser knowledge: “The ontological error of Cartesian rationalism is not to have seen that if the absolute is defined by the primacy of existence over essence, it cannot be conceived as a substance.”2 Sartre’s divergence from Descartes is nowhere clearer than in the role that negation performs in the phenomenon of consciousness as considered in its everyday modalities. The difference between two entities can be grasped in terms of an external negation. Hence the subject, observing that the chair is not an inkwell, judges two objects to be mutually distinct. However, Sartre contends that the subject who reflects on a given entity is present to a self that remains impossible to identify in substantial terms: “The self therefore represents an ideal distance within the immanence of the subject in relation to himself, a way of not being his own coincidence,” which means that negation can be grasped as an internal procedure that occurs within the phenomenon of consciousness.3 Hence, when Sartre contends that the cogito is his point of departure, he is really contending that a movement beyond the confines of Cartesian rationalism is necessary before the “structure” of consciousness can be appraised. It does no good to try to eliminate presence to self as a mere intrusion or as the inessential aspect of a cognitive process for the simple reason that consciousness cannot be identified with itself in a meaningful way. Consciousness is never (mere) consciousness; we cannot claim that consciousness simply maps onto objective reality when a prereflective dimension complicates its interface with the world. This prereflective dimension refers back to a subject, but it cannot be identified as either subject or predicate. Thus, Sartre’s notion of the self brings into play the shifting “space” within which internal negation is carried out in every act of consciousness. Sartre’s phenomenological analysis of internal negation casts light on his unique conception of nothingness, which should not be confused with rival conceptions developed by G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger. Hegel’s dialectical logic attempts to subordinate nothingness to an ongoing movement from abstract to concrete, thus testifying to the power of the negative as what

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generates change itself. However, in opposing being and nothingness as the most abstract moments in a purely logical process, Hegel displaces the cogito as the origin of generation and also obscures the role of nothingness in psychic life. Sartre responds to this instance of logical reductionism when he calls attention to “those little pools of non-being which we encounter each instant in the depth of being.”4 But this metaphorical description should not be restricted to the domain of empirical psychology. Sartre’s deeper argument against Hegel can be related to the way that the cogito is evoked as what produces nothingness, which assumes the significance of anguish whenever the self confronts its own ontological instability. In this regard, Sartre mentions that Søren Kierkegaard was the first philosopher to emphasize how anguish, rather than fear, combines a sense of object-loss with a protective concern for the self in a single upsurge of emotion. And yet, what Sartre contributes to this tradition is a strong insistence on the importance of freedom to the “meaning” of nothingness as it emerges on the margins of the cogito, which had been repositioned as the site of anguish itself. We are now in a much better position to compare Sartre and Descartes as ontologists who, in different ways, confront the relationship between knowledge and being. Sartre takes up the example of Descartes in discussing how the cogito assumes a reflective role in early modern rationalism. In standard accounts of Descartes, the being who doubts is hard to separate from the idea of perfection. Sartre notes that, in the Third Meditation, Descartes uncovers a cleavage or lack of being “that is more revealing than the scholastic terminology that he employs in reissuing earlier versions of the ontological argument.”5 What this means for Sartre is that, when indicating this basic discrepancy, Descartes at least suggests that the being who doubts cannot be its own foundation. Sartre presents this interpretation of Descartes only after he has pointed out that a purely methodological conception of doubt is ontologically problematic. For this reason, the opening of this discrepancy does not reinforce dualism but helps us understand the instability of the cogito from a new standpoint. By placing the cogito in this broader context, we help demonstrate that Sartre’s own thought could never be assimilated in an unambiguous manner to a dualistic philosophy of consciousness. It remains to be explained more exhaustively why Sartre’s philosophy is only inadequately described as dualistic. Certainly Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later criticisms of Sartre, which are based on the role that the “for-itself” (poursoi) and “in-itself” (en-soi) perform in his philosophy, rest on the assumption that an oppositional framework runs through his early work and ultimately prevents him from performing a synthesis of the social.6 While Sartre’s early position strongly depends on a phenomenology of consciousness, we have seen that his departure from Cartesian rationalism allows him to identify

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the prereflective with self-consciousness, and that self-consciousness involves presence to self, rather than self-grounding in the foundational sense. Hence consciousness involves a “structure” in which presence to self testifies to an ontological awareness that accompanies any encounter with the world. When examined from a somewhat different standpoint, Sartre also contends that the non-conscious in-itself in attempting to found itself can only introduce reflectivity into its being and therefore ceases to be self-identical at the exact moment that is undergoes nihilation: “The for-itself corresponds then to an expanding de-structuring of the in-itself, and the in-itself is nihilated and absorbed in its attempt to found itself.”7 What Sartre calls “facticity” is a remnant of being that can only remind the for-itself that it lacks ontological justification. It would seem, therefore, that the for-itself and the in-itself are not mutually exclusive terms but related notions and operate in a way that should caution us against interpreting them as two detachable sides of a binary opposition. In truth, Sartre’s complete rejection of the metaphysical idea that the subject can be detached from the world is what distances him from traditional dualism and qualifies his relationship to most philosophies of consciousness. His early work, The Transcendence of the Ego (La transcendance de l’ego, 1936–37), is based on the radical gesture of placing the ego in the world as one object among others. Hence, in this early essay, Sartre already turns away from the “classical” phenomenological notion of a Transcendental Ego as the seat of consciousness. This does not mean, however, that Sartre conceives of the subject as merely indifferent to an ego over which it presides as a kind of reflective agent. Consciousness is present to a self that is distinct from an ego, just as the movement of consciousness is what allows existence to acquire personal meaning. In Sartre’s phenomenology, the self does not substitute for the subject as a new inhabitant of vacant space; on the contrary, “it is an ideal, a limit” that offers consciousness a reason or motive, without supplying it with an ultimate standpoint on being-in-the-world.8 What might seem to be of minor importance becomes crucial when Sartre develops his own concept of “world” as complementary to selfness. Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of world was presented in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) as an advance over Descartes, whose subject cannot constitute a totality that remains external to it.9 Sartre, however, shows how a new understanding of the cogito can assist in the task of clarifying the nature of a world that is either remembered or always in the process of being constituted. In attempting to satisfy any present desire, I move toward the world as it is retained in some particular instance that haunts self-consciousness. To the degree that it is my own, therefore, I can say that “the world is a fugitive structure, always present, a structure which I live.”10 The evanescent relationship

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between self and world indicates the role of time in presenting the for-itself with distinct possibilities for being. II

Sartre’s view of the self as situated in time also argues that Being and Nothingness must be read in terms of the on-going development of phenomenology, which involves a re-examination of how time itself has been interpreted philosophically. The importance of temporality to Heidegger’s philosophical project can be traced back to his work with Husserl and might be specified as an attempt to radicalize what was already implicit in early phenomenology. In Being and Time, Heidegger makes some headway toward developing the thesis that the question of time requires a critical overview of modern philosophy before it can be freed from the legacies of metaphysics. In this regard, both Descartes and Kant serve as key figures in an analysis of how different conceptions of eternity ultimately came to replace a more fundamental sense of time that permeates Dasein in its being-in-the-world. Heidegger’s “destruction” of metaphysical time, which emerges in his incomplete survey of modern philosophy, can be read as a prelude to Sartre’s confrontation with temporality in a different context. Heidegger contends that temporality provides Dasein with some of its most crucial features, such as finitude, an awareness of death and the need for resolve that is assumed to be the proper response to a sudden moment of vision. Does time perform an equally crucial role in Sartre’s own phenomenology of consciousness? In considering this question, we might recall how Sartre argues against Cartesian rationalism by exploring the meaning of internal negation as a phenomenon that clarifies the structure of everyday consciousness. We have seen how self-consciousness arises in terms of the prereflective, which can be theorized as the site where an internal negation is accomplished within the domain of consciousness. The broader implications of this insight help demonstrate how the for-itself constantly negates the present as it recedes into the past. Sartre contends that this event is continually disruptive so that the process of becoming cannot be conceived as separation from being. The appropriate way of grasping the phenomenon of becoming is through the vehicle of consciousness: “The bond between being and non-being can be only internal.”11 In opposing both Descartes and Bergson, Sartre argues that the past is neither a sequence of time that is discontinuous with the present or a plenitude that subsists without interruption. On the contrary, the past is not isolated either in being unrelated to the present or as flowing beneath the domain of conscious thought. The internal bond that brings the past closer to conscious being also complicates the way that consciousness moves from one moment to the next.

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Our peculiar relation to the past can be disclosed in terms of how the foritself and the in-itself equally engage in attempting to achieve foundational status. The for-itself seems to become its own foundation when the in-itself fails to secure being through conscious activity, but consciousness once again discovers its dependency on the in-itself when it confronts its relationship to the world. The play between these two tendencies does not allow me to imagine a form of consciousness that can simply “leap” into the future. Hence, when applied to matters of temporal concern, the notion of internal negation either demonstrates how conscious being is immersed in being or points to a movement “beyond being” itself. First of all, internal negation cannot simply free consciousness from the past; on the contrary, it demonstrates how the past lives on, haunting the present as the re-entry of displaced contingency: “The contingency of the for-itself, this weight expressed and preserved in the very surpassing – this is Facticity.”12 By identifying the past with facticity, Sartre indicates how conscious being is intrinsically temporal on the level of lived experience. In a similar way, the present can be grasped as “an internal relation between the being which is present and the beings to which it is present.”13 At the same time, this internal relation involves negation insofar as the for-itself bears witness to not being what it experiences in being present to being. For Sartre, this means that the so-called present is more accurately described as a mode of presence in a continual state of dissolution. Finally, the future in not an ideal state that consciousness posits as it attempts to realize itself. The future cannot be understood in the mode of a representation. It is true that the future is the “not-yet” through which the for-itself unfolds as a series of concrete possibilities. Nonetheless, the for-itself is “beyond being” because it implies an enabling distance within which consciousness can approximate presence to self.14 Sartre’s argument against “classical” conceptions of the cogito also underlies his analysis of static temporality. Here Sartre examines how temporal succession requires an original approach to the connection between before and after. Descartes and Immanuel Kant tried to solve the problem of temporal succession by evoking a privileged standpoint on related moments. Descartes refers to the perception of God as witness to a continuous creation, whereas Kant employs the notion of synthetic unity as the basis for understanding the passage of time. Sartre contends, however, that any attempt to establish the unity of time from a non-temporal standpoint is basically in error, since “the problem is not so much to account for the total unity of its upsurge as for the intratemporal connections of before and after.”15 He concurs with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that this external viewpoint has allowed Descartes to forget the continuity of time, but he also argues against Leibniz that the relationship between before and after cannot be grasped unless both terms can be thought

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as separate. Moreover, Sartre’s criticism of Leibniz allows him to argue against Henri Bergson as well, who also fails to recognize that multiplicity can only be organized through a unifying act. Nonetheless, consciousness cannot provide us with the key to temporal succession when it is temporal in its being, that is to say, when consciousness is “a being outside itself.”16 In examining how consciousness is necessarily outside itself in its temporal constitution, Sartre takes us on a remarkable excursion to demonstrate how the past continually haunts the mind as a vestige of what cannot be either left behind or easily accepted. The movement of temporal succession is perhaps inscribed in the nature of consciousness itself, rather than something that occurs as an external passage. The past is a necessary aspect of the for-itself because the act of surpassing implies that something has been surpassed. Sartre does not only contend that the for-itself exists as its past, but that it brings the past with it as it enters the world. The sudden appearance of consciousness is said to be “shocking” in the same way that our need to inhabit the embryo prior to birth is difficult to reconcile with embodied consciousness. Sartre refers to how the original relation between the for-itself and the in-itself can only be thought as an “absolute event” that allows the Past to be constituted in terms of consciousness.17 On the basis of this event, we are able to use the word before in expressing the “profound solidarity” that indicates how the foritself and the in-itself are somehow intertwined. Sartre describes this moment in phenomenological terms: “Through birth a Past appears in the world.”18 It would seem, therefore, that the cogito cannot separate itself from the past in a manner that would allow it to simply eliminate the past as it moves into the future. On the other hand, Sartre also discusses the ontology of temporality as a dynamic process that demonstrates how the present includes the past in its flight from what it was. Sartre insists that the philosophical problem of change cannot be understood according to the classical model that assumes the permanent existence of entities in time. On the contrary, we should instead try to conceive of the present as a single upsurge that separates what was from what will be. The for-itself that lies at the heart of this upsurge is what allows a new present to transform the present that was into a recent past. Sartre describes this temporal phenomenon as a “global modification” because it does not merely concern the past as such but demonstrates how the present bears the past as it moves into the future.19 However, if this is in fact the case, how can we explain change as a dynamic occurrence? Sartre responds to this question by claiming that, once the for-itself is conceived as spontaneity, we must confront the temporality of consciousness as an irreducible aspect of its constitution. Moreover,

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the act of consciousness, as it both posits and refuses its being, has ontological priority over change itself, which “is simply the relation of the material contents of the series.”20 Phenomenology performs a crucial role in Sartre’s subsequent discussion of original as opposed to psychic temporality, just as it prepares us for the discourse of the other that constitutes one of his most important early achievements. Sartre begins this phase of his analysis by criticizing the rationalist tendency to restrict the meaning of consciousness to acts of immediate immanence. He then observes that, while reflection only bears witness on the basis of appearances, whatever is reflected-on is altered when it becomes the object of self-consciousness. Sartre provides a brilliant metaphor to illuminate this internal object of reflection: “It may be compared – to use one example – to a man who is writing, bent over a table, and who while writing knows that he is observed by somebody who stands behind him.”21 Reflection, therefore, opens the possibility of an outside that informs its activity with a “meaning” that throws it off-center.22 Of course, Sartre remains committed to phenomenology: reflection is still a unified activity; however, its “historicity” can be discovered in a mode of dissociation in which both presence to self and the world reflected-on are united in consciousness.23 Hence the ontological status of reflection provides an opening onto the relationship between the for-itself and a world that exceeds it but also suggests the possibility of a new sort of ground. Sartre considers reflection to be a failure in the ontological sense because it seeks a foundation in the mode of existence for-others. However, reflection involves negation in a manner that prevents a movement between the pure for-itself and existence for-others from being accomplished. This means that reflection cannot dispense with the reflectedon as an intermediary that establishes the basis for recognition, rather than for knowledge. Sartre returns to the example of Descartes in reminding us that methodological doubt cannot supply an ontological ground for the cogito: “Doubt appears on the foundation of a pre-ontological comprehension of knowing and of requirements concerning truth.”24 Pure reflection allows preontological comprehension to emerge on the horizon of knowledge, whereas impure reflection occurs as a series of psychic states that are differently constituted. Hence pure reflection is irreducible to matters of psychology. Sartre’s analysis of temporality indicates that the for-itself seeks to found itself as being-for-others, and also that this move is basically mistaken. Is it possible, nonetheless, that the relationship between consciousness and other human beings is in some sense basic to the meaning of consciousness? In order to answer this question, we must now turn to Sartre’s discussion of whether or not the existence of the Other is crucial to the way that consciousness functions in the world.

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We have arrived at the moment in our discussion when we must inquire into the role of phenomenology in allowing Sartre to confront the problem of other minds. Does the sense of self that accompanies the for-itself necessarily presume the existence of others? This very question evokes an old problem that was frequently examined by realists and idealist alike during the modern period. In his original discussion of this problem, Sartre considers how the existence of the external world was only rarely considered in terms of the relationship between Self and Other. While previous philosophers tried to frame exterior existence in regrounding knowledge in either a deeper affirmation of the subject or the object-world, Sartre argues that the Other is encountered but not constituted.25 This does not allow us to either prove that the external world exists or disprove its reality. However, before making this bold claim, Sartre discusses how earlier philosophers have not persuasively argued that the Other is necessary to the existence of the Self. In dismantling various arguments that posit the Other without assigning it definite importance, Sartre prepares us for a phenomenological description of how an encounter between Self and Other can be philosophically contextualized. It might seem that Kant would be a useful ally in this campaign to the degree that transcendental philosophy, properly conceived, entails an ethical agenda that postulates the mutual accord of autonomous subjects. However, Sartre clearly objects to the critical distinction between phenomenon and noumenon, which informs Kantian ethics and epistemology. Kant’s concept of causality cannot be employed in good faith to “unify my time with that of the Other.”26 The failure of the Other to constitute any experience explains why, in Kant’s teleology, the Other is placed among regulative concepts. Sartre, in contrast, cannot risk what Kantian teleology implies, namely, that the Other can be thrust among the concepts that are used to describe nature. The way that the Other confronts me as Other does not permit the Other to be assimilated to an inhuman background. Idealists are generally opposed to pure solipsism, which would abolish the Other in affirming ontological solitude. However, Kant and his followers succumb to a variety of “metaphysical realism” when they tacitly reintegrate the Other in a world of substance that does not allow for genuine communication between members.27 After arguing that Kant has brought us to a philosophical impasse, Sartre turns to more recent attempts to present the ontological status of the Other as somehow basic to our understanding of the Self. Sartre contents that Edmund Husserl’s admirable effort to show that “the Other is always there as a layer of constitutive meanings” not only relates to the perception of subjects but suggests as well that the self is experienced in relational terms.28 Husserl

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has performed an indispensable service in showing us that the question of the Other’s existence cannot be relegated to secondary considerations with regard to existence in general. However, Sartre contends that Husserl shares with Kant a bias toward knowledge as the basic factor underlying my relation to the Other, and that the being of the Other does not for this reason emerge in his thought. Sartre returns to Hegel rather briefly only to criticize tendencies toward totalization that offset any gains that might have been derived from a dialectical approach to consciousness. While Hegel makes considerable progress in positing both Self and Other as mutually related, he fails to describe the precise nature of ontological opposition: Self and Other are not the same when existing separately as they are to one another. The true ground for recognition is not knowledge but being: “Here as elsewhere we ought to oppose to Hegel Kierkegaard, who represents the claims of the individual as such.”29 And yet, we cannot by implication take up Heidegger’s ontological approach to reality as a corrective to Hegel’s logicism. What Hegel’s system lacks but allows us to envision is a position that does justice to the claims of both realism and idealism. While each person can appear as an object to someone else, self-consciousness nonetheless allows for radical interiority. Hegel is not wrong to emphasize the possibility of knowledge but in failing to concede the importance of subjectivity: “In a word the whole point of departure is the interiority of the cogito.”30 It is as a phenomenologist that Sartre provides us with the master metaphor that allows him to reclaim the truth of the cogito while also insisting on the role of the Other in the realization of personal objectivity. In a mental projection of what might be a concrete situation, Sartre invites us to imagine him in a public park. A man passes, appearing only briefly where there are benches. The moment is fraught with ambiguity. On the one hand, the man is not easy to distinguish from the trees and other objects that occupy the observer’s line of vision. What allows us to say that the briefly appearing passerby is a man and not a physical object? Sartre describes both the potential disintegration of the observer’s world as a self-contained totality as well as the partial reconstitution of another world that is no longer the same. Between these two worlds, the observer notices how the man who looks at him does not turn toward him as he might respond to a physical object. On the contrary, his response indicates a veritable refusal to be seen as a mere thing: “A radical conversion of the Other is necessary if he is to escape objectivity.”31 When this same moment of interaction is considered with regard to the observer, we can better understand why objectivity cannot derive from the world since the observer cannot be an object for himself. Sartre might be accused of overdramatizing the significance of this moment in this imaginative version of what is occasionally experienced in everyday life.

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A similar sort of encounter is even presented in another description as dangerous, even life-threatening. Hence the sharp distinction between the observer and the person observed can result in an almost pathological account of the crucial encounter: “He is that object in the world which determines an internal flow of the universe, an internal hemorrhage.”32 The purpose of this description, however, is not to suggest that the encounter with the Other results in a fatality but to show how my objectivity requires the collapse of one world and the experience of another before it can be internalized.33 This does not mean, of course, that objectivity in every case presupposes an overt encounter between unlike persons. But it does mean, quite simply, that I cannot speak of my world until the Other invites me to experience the burden of self-consciousness. Moreover, the sense that this revelation of “mineness” can be dislocating is clearly suggested in Sartre’s peculiar use of language. In a similar way, we learn about how this encounter can be appraised ontologically through the metaphor of an observer discovering that he is being watched, which prompts him to seek cover in a deeper certainty of being that ultimately evades him: “Here I am bent over the keyhole; suddenly I hear a footstep. I shudder as a wave of shame sweeps over me.”34 What this means is not that my relations with others are shameful but that the center of my being has shifted from my own “inner” world to the sphere of the Other through this encounter. This sudden shift in perspective, which deprives me of whatever security my solitude made possible, can be understood in two different ways. On the subjective level, my response to being observed calls attention to the being of consciousness that cannot be identified with knowledge. I do not need to turn inward to realize that, in confronting the gaze of the Other, my being bears a negative relation to objective knowing. On the other hand, I cannot escape the gaze of the Other by returning to my solitude in a spirit of forgetfulness: “My original fall is the existence of the Other.”35 Hence the gaze of the Other is what precipitates the heightening of subjective awareness that accompanies my attempt to twist free from what holds me captive. The Other is originally the being through whom I become conscious of being an object, rather than simply the token of my subjectivity. This experience seems to confirm Hegel’s conception of the relationship between Self and Other on an elementary level. However, consciousness of the Other cannot be known or represented; it lies “behind” my consciousness of being an object, which points elsewhere. In truth, Husserl has already shown us that “the ontological structure of ‘my’ world demands that it be also a world for others.”36 As a phenomenologist, Sartre intervenes at this point primarily to insist that objectivity, whether mine or that of the Other, is the other side of an internal negation that coincides with an original upsurge, that is to say, with being-forothers. If my world escapes from me, I simply confirm the presence of the

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Other in the mode of objective being. I suffer an absolute loss when both self and world suddenly escape me, bringing about the dissolution of my knowledge and the confirmation of a freedom that is not my own. Hence objectivity is less a shared perception than a fragile achievement that can easily dissolve, since it does not solely depend on my consciousness. At the same time, even while conscious of myself as an object, I possess a sense of the Other as other than me and as a kind of “shadow” that relates to my being in the mode of not being me. Sartre does not propose through this description that the Other constitutes a metaphysical unknown that lies “behind” consciousness as a “truer” world. However, the Other is in some respects “behind the scenes” as I act on the stage of life, complicating my attempt to present myself in concrete settings. The shadow that sometimes appears in my midst is not the sign of my own absence but compares to a projection upon insubstantial material that cannot be assigned objective meaning. Nonetheless, the Other bears a relation to my being instead of functioning as an image of my presence. Sartre invites us to envision the Other as the writing of freedom: “We are dealing with my being as it is written in and by the Other’s freedom.”37 How are we to interpret Sartre’s metaphorical attempt to clarify both the being of consciousness and the freedom of the Other? To be sure, Sartre uses this metaphor to emphasize how the nothingness that seems to separate me from my being announces the freedom of the Other, which I hope to enlist in the process of being recognized. The recognition that might be anticipated in this encounter would not be based on any prior knowledge but on a sense of being that has no foundation. In “classical” modern philosophy from Descartes through Hegel, the human subject is said to ground thought and, in different ways, provide the foundation for all that we know. Sartre’s understanding of freedom can be related to a non-foundational understanding of being that places us in a peculiar relation to this modern tradition. Thus, in approaching the question of human freedom, we hope to learn more about how Sartre understands being-in-the-world and also to interpret his philosophy as a unique adventure that unfolds in the vicinity of a basic modern concern. IV

Our inquiry into Sartre’s unique approach to ontology allowed us to return to one of his basic philosophical insights, which maintains that non-being resides in the heart of being itself. My relationship to the Other encourages me to anticipate a type of recognition that would allow the non-being that separates us to form the being of a future recognition. However, this ontological hope does not possess a definite foundation, so once again we are confronted with

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Sartre’s reluctance to use the word “being” as a means for securing a practical resolution to my sense of homelessness. To the degree that the opposition of “being” and “doing” allows us to grasp how “doing” better describes human activity as inherently unstable, Sartre contends that the ethics of Kant is a modern achievement that prefigures his own position.38 In truth, the whole notion that being can be interpreted as a foundation undergoes extensive criticism in Sartre’s phenomenology of consciousness. In confronting various positions that are central to the modern philosophical canon, Sartre demonstrates how the question of being is only improperly reduced to a matter of unchanging presence. Even consciousness cannot be posited as an entity that has the formal meaning that is assumed in statements of abstract identity. Hence, in examining Sartre’s arguments from a historical perspective, we might also consider the possibility that a “classical” conception of being bears a “postmodern” significance that could be further explored in multiple contexts. Louis Dupré has argued that the postmodern turn in recent philosophy can be assessed as a response to a basic inconsistency in the modern épistemé, which posits a sovereign subject on the one hand and static, unchanging reality on the other.39 Thus, from one standpoint, the human subject is conceived as wholly distinct and invested with powers that elevate it over the rest of creation. This tradition arguably culminates in the Absolute Idealism of Hegel, who dispenses with the idea of the external world altogether. However, from another standpoint, the external world is sometimes predicated as identical and finite. Its invariant qualities are handed over to science, conceived as a body of knowledge that more or less excludes the possibility of human intervention. This tradition leads to the positivism of Auguste Comte and his followers who ultimately consider the laws of physics to be those of society. It is obvious that Sartre’s work cannot be placed in either of these two camps, which, taken together, provide is with a useful, if contradictory, image of modernity itself. We now would like to discuss how Sartre, as a precursor to the postmodern, attempts to overcome this philosophical division in three ways. First, Sartre helps us understand that the relationship between the for-itself and the in-itself is basically an ontological one, rather than a matter of pulling together two distinct entities. In the conclusion to his major early work, Sartre raises the question of the ultimate relationship between the two basic terms of his system. He acknowledges that being is not an abstraction but perpetually engaged in the project of founding itself as self-cause (ens causa sui). However, this project can only be glimpsed in terms of an ideal synthesis that cannot be achieved in a manner that would constitute a practical totalization: “Everything happens as if the in-itself and the for-itself were presented in a state of disintegration in relation to an ideal synthesis.”40 If being is in a constant state of destabilization, the best that we can do is simply to acknowledge

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the ideal aspect of our human aspirations while remaining aware that ultimate totalization cannot be achieved. Dupré has argued that modern thought initiated a new stage of reflection when it indicated a disparity in the very nature of the real that Sartre has brought to our attention.41 Hence the irreducible difference between the in-itself and the for-itself, as well as the irresolvable nature of their antagonism, foster a new ethical imperative: we must accept the practical significance of our longing for an ideal synthesis that remains forever out of reach. Such an imperative would be creative because it inscribes the role of freedom in the life that I assume as my own. This brings us to the second aspect of Sartre’s position that distinguishes his thought from the rationalism of his modern predecessors. “Lightness of being” does not allow me to evade my situation in good faith, but it reminds me that my basic life-project does not rest on an external mandate that predates me: “This is because freedom is a choice of being but not the foundation of its being.”42 The past invariably figures in any attempt to “construct” a life that allows my actions to be interpreted in relation to a future meaning. Sartre takes issue with Sigmund Freud’s psychic determinism, but he values the method of psychoanalysis, which he adopts in suggesting how my actions can “turn back” from the future in order to comprehend the present.43 In a similar way, he also argues against all forms of economic determinism, which deprive history of the crucial role that singular individuals perform when “men reassume the past by making it a memorial.”44 It would seem, therefore, that even the past can assume creative importance when its “repetition” allows us to separate ourselves from what would otherwise unfold as an impersonal process devoid of all subjective meaning. The possibility of assigning the past a new meaning and thus transforming the present in relation to future goals brings us to the third and final indication of Sartre’s disagreement with modern rationalism. Sartre’s appreciation for Kant’s ethical system should not distract us from the significance of his departure from the long tradition that interprets freedom in terms of law, if not as equivalent to law. Hence, in Kant’s moral philosophy, freedom is defined as clearly dependent on a concept of causality that derives from the natural sciences. Dupré has remarked that, only recently, a small number of thinkers, including Maurice Blondel, Paul Ricoeur and Karl Jaspers, have “begun to rethink the relation between freedom and causality in noncausal terms.”45 Perhaps in anticipating this recent effort to renew the question of transcendence, Sartre no longer defines freedom as a mode of conduct that follows a causal principle but invites us to imagine how it begins in a situation that does not define it in advance: “Freedom is total and infinite, which does not mean that it has no limits but that it never encounters them.”46 In other words, the limits to freedom are those that it imposes on itself and that derive solely from

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facticity, the surrounding world and the techniques through which we communicate with others. By redefining freedom in this way, Sartre extends the phenomenological critique of the “natural attitude” into the wellsprings of human action. American University in Cairo NOTES 1

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), p. 24. Ibid., p. 17. The notion of the absolute is important to the phenomenological tradition as a whole. Edmund Husserl ultimately defines the absolute as an experience of consciousness in Ideas I. While Sartre’s conception of existence aligns him more closely to Heidegger, we wish to emphasize in this context how phenomenology as a “science of consciousness” is also concerned with consciousness as an experience. By relating consciousness to experience, Sartre establishes an implicit basis for distinguishing his own ontology from that of Descartes and also moves beyond the formalism that besets Kant’s position. 3 Sartre, op. cit., pp. 123–24. 4 Ibid., p. 53. 5 Ibid., p. 127. 6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers sympathetic but stringent criticisms of Sartre’s philosophy in “Interruption and Dialectic,” The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 50–104. His argument is based on the guiding assumption that Sartre’s commitment to the opposition between “in-itself” and “for-itself” distinguishes his position from that of traditional dialectics but also falls short of the “perceptual faith” that provides phenomenology with a more convincing starting-point. While many of Merleau-Ponty’s late criticisms have merit, we believe that the imputation of radical dualism cannot appreciate that no one term in Sartre’s set of opposites can be privileged over the other. Moreover, this criticism does not indicate how Sartre’s ontology can contain an active side that is irreducible to a dualistic opposition. 7 Sartre’s concept of “de-structuring” might remind contemporary readers of Derrida’s “déconstruction,” which is also concerned with showing how the stability of consciousness cannot be sustained as a philosophical thesis. Like Derrida’s déconstruction, Sartre’s concept of destructuring demonstrates how the idea of structure has metaphysical features that reduce the role of temporality in the way that it functions. An important essay and accompanying conversation that clarifies the status of the subject in the poststructuralist camp can be found in Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), pp. 247–72. 8 Sartre, op. cit., p. 156. 9 Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of world is developed in contrast to what emerges in Descartes as “present-to-hand” and signifies the ascendancy of theory over practice in early modern philosophy. For details, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper Publishers, 1962), pp. 122–34. 10 Sartre, op. cit., p. 158. 11 Ibid., p. 171. 12 Ibid., p. 173. 13 Ibid., p. 176. 2

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Ibid., pp. 183–85. Ibid., p. 191. 16 Ibid., p. 195. 17 Ibid., p. 198. 18 Ibid., p. 199. 19 Ibid., p. 205. 20 Ibid., 210. 21 Ibid., 214. 22 The notion of “de-centering” is vitally important to recent poststructuralism. Clearly, Sartre remains committed to the phenomenology of consciousness in a way that would prevent him from interpreting mental activity from some other standpoint. However, Sartrean phenomenology presupposes the continual “decentering” of consciousness and therefore demonstrates a kinship with recent poststructuralism. It is appropriate to mention in this context that Derrida warns us against the dangers that necessarily accompany decentering as a philosophical strategy: “I do not destroy the subject; I resituate it.” Derrida, op. cit., p. 271. 23 Sartre, op. cit., p. 215. 24 Ibid., p. 219. 25 Ibid., p. 336. 26 Ibid., p. 308. 27 Ibid., p. 311. 28 Ibid., p. 316. 29 Ibid., p. 324. 30 Ibid., p. 329. 31 Ibid., p. 345. 32 Ibid., p. 345. 33 We might contrast Sartre’s somewhat “pathological” account of the encounter between Self and Other with Emmanuel Lévinas’s “celebratory” affirmation of the Other as the inaugural site of ethics. However, we might also note that Lévinasian ethics assumes that this initial encounter would have to be traumatic in order to offset the mundane preoccupation with being that allows us to remain ensconsed in limited totalities. Both the affirmative and disruptive aspects of this encounter inform the argument in Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 34 Sartre, op. cit., p. 369. 35 Ibid., p. 352. 36 Ibid., p. 363. 37 Ibid., p. 351. Sartre’s metaphor of writing as a way of communicating the freedom of the Other compares in some respects to what can be found in the work of Derrida, who suggests that the tendency toward “logocentrism” is what suppresses the emergence of the Other as a counter to more centered modes of consciousness. The theory of “logocentrism” is a general one that can be related to déconstruction in its many guises. For a readable account of how writing involves “de-centering” and also opens up a non-totalizable conception of language, see Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context” in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 307–30. 38 Sartre, op. cit., pp. 557–58. 39 Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 6, 162. 40 Sartre, op. cit., p. 792. 41 Dupré, p. 252. 15

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WILLIAM D. MELANEY Sartre, op. cit., p. 616. Ibid., p. 591. Ibid., p. 642. Dupré, p. 163. Sartre, op. cit., p. 680.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Danto, Arthur C. Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: The Viking Press, 1975. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970, pp. 247–72. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Dupré, Louis K. Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993. Hartmann, Claus. Sartre’s Ontology: A Study of ‘Being and Nothingness’ in the Light of Hegel’s Logic. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966. Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Science of Logic. Trans. A. V. Miller. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1969. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Publishers, 1962. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1931. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1964. Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Trans. James S. Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Lewis White Beck. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965. Lévinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Natanson, Maurice. A Critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Ontology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1973. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness. Trans. Forrest Williams and Robert K. Kirkpatrick. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1959. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966.

ANGELA ALES BELLO

“ B RU T E B E I N G ” A N D H Y L E T I C P H E N O M E N O L O G Y: T H E P H I L O S O P H I C A L L E G AC Y O F M E R L E AU - P O N T Y ’ S T H E V I S I B L E AND THE INVISIBLE

ABSTRACT

In this contribution, I want to establish a theoretical confrontation between a certainty not marginal aspect to Husserl’s phenomenological analyses, concerning research on the hylectic, and the dimension that Merleau-Ponty defines as “Brute” or “Wild” Being in his final and unfinished book, The Visible and Invisible. For each of the two thinkers, it is a question of leading all cultural formations, knowledge in its intellectual organization, back to the originary sources of the sense to which their latent intentionality attests. One is able to note that this movement of regression, which is common to both philosophers, leads Husserl to develop a broad reaching analysis of the hyletic dimension. The same is not true for Merleau-Ponty, and this fundamentally for two reasons: on the one hand, because of the impossibility within which he founds himself, not being able to carry out his research to endpoint; on the other hand, because of what is revealed to be in Merleau-Ponty a insufficient methodology in comparison to Husserl’s analysis of the perceptual sphere, in particular, the analysis such as it is done by Husserl in his Lectures on Passive Synthesis. INTRODUCTION

“If it is true that as soon as philosophy declares itself to be a reflection or coincidence it prejudges what it will find, then once again it must recommence everything, reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been “worked over,” that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both “subject” and “object,” both existence and essence, and hence give philosophy resources to redefine them.”1 In his The Visible and the Invisible, which remains unfinished due to his untimely death, Merleau-Ponty explores a fundamental theme, namely, philosophical questioning. Descartes, an exponent of reflexive philosophy, remains the principal conversant in this 55 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 55–76. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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silent dialogue. Here, the question immediately arises concerning the function of reflexivity. If Merleau-Ponty asks what is the meaning and role of philosophy, he has to concede that this type of investigation cannot separate itself from reflexivity. At the same time, he realises that the risk of reflexivity is the closing of philosophy onto itself, a tailspin of philosophy that loses the other. Merleau-Ponty is aware of this paradox. He writes, “This movement of reflection will always at first sight be convincing: in a sense it is imperative, it is truth itself, and one does not see how philosophy could dispense with it.”2 It is clear that the moment of thinking is a fundamental moment. It is also clear that self-consciousness, which Descartes speaks about, is an essential human aspect that is authentically human, distinguishing human beings from all other beings. This is understandable even if one considers reflexivity and self-consciousness as being absolutely valuable. Merleau-Ponty recognises this when he affirms that it is the comprehension from the inside of all that I live that “will always make of the philosophy of reflection not only a temptation but a route that must be followed . . .”3 The question then becomes radical. One must verify if this investigation, that is phenomenology, as it is traditionally understood, truly succeeds in seizing the “natal” link between me, who perceives, and that which I perceive. The term “natal” captures the intention of the author, and I would even say his aspiration. His aspiration is to find a new place for a new initiative with a new mode. It is “perception,” and not thought, that is the first “place” that places me in contact with the world. Here, we have to begin from the notion of the world. I said earlier that behind reflexive philosophy one finds Descartes but also Kant. According to Merleau-Ponty, the proof of this lies in the Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant proceeds from the presupposition of a possible world. In such a way, the reflexive analysis lapses into a naïveté, for in order to construct the world one must presuppose the notion of the world insofar as it is pre-constituted. Certainly, Kant recognises the validity of the non-reflexive, declaring to begin from this very non-reflexivity, but it is necessary to go deep along this path; one has to put reflexive philosophy in crisis and stabilise a reciprocal relation between reflexivity and non-reflexivity, between that which is originary and derived, unconditioned and conditioned.4 Using Merleau-Ponty’s words, one must establish a reciprocal relation between perceptual faith and reflexivity. Merleau-Ponty identifies Husserl as the philosopher who succeeded in understanding and overcoming the weak point of reflexive philosophy. The correlation or coincidence of the transcendental reduction and the eidetic reduction in Section 34 of the Cartesian Meditations is interpreted by MerleauPonty as a new way of understanding reflexivity. “To reflect is not to coincide

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with the flux from its source unto its last ramifications; it is to disengage from the things, perceptions, world, and perception of the world, by submitting them to systematic variation, the intelligible nuclei that resist, and to proceed from one intelligible nucleus to the next in a way that is not belied by experience but gives us only its universal contours.”5 Phenomenology, therefore, is defined as a super-reflexivity that, on one hand, asks the question about the genesis of the existing world and, on the other hand, asks about the genesis of our reflexive idealisation. In this way, Husserl tackles the problem that has eluded reflexive philosophy up until that point, establishing a correlation between spirit and world. For Merleau-Ponty, paradoxically, these are too perfectly coextensive because one can precede the other; they are also too distinct because one can involve the other.6 In this way, Merleau-Ponty truly understands the intention of Husserlian phenomenology, which maintains that it is not possible to think the preexistence of the world as being before-me because the world is always a world for me. This does not entail solipsism. On the contrary, “[T]he private world I divine at the origin of another’s gaze is not so private as to prevent me from becoming at the very moment its quasi-spectator . . .”7 In the marginalia of the text we are examining, entitled “Reflexivity and Questioning”, Merleau-Ponty writes that he intends “to show that reflexivity suppresses intersubjectivity.” In order to demonstrate this it is necessary to return to the notion of “world,” investigating its pre-existence but understanding it in the sense that there is one meaning and one unique identity of the world, even if our lives are not commensurable with it. At the level of sense, my perception of the world and that of the other are the same and, in this way, “. . . with the correlation between thought and the object of thought set up as a principle, there is established a philosophy that knows neither difficulties nor problems nor paradoxes nor reversals: once and for all, I have grasped within myself the pure correlation between him who thinks and what he thinks, the truth of my life, which is also the truth of the world and of the other lives.”8 It seems, then, that Merleau-Ponty’s aspiration has been fulfilled. He has come across a philosophy in which reflexivity, understood in the Husserlian sense, is a gazing reflexivity; Merleau-Ponty finds the gaze or the look. Merleau-Ponty writes here in the margins that he would have wanted to dedicate a paragraph to reflexivity in the Husserlian sense. What we find are only a few lines that are nonetheless eloquent. Merleau-Ponty reads the German phenomenologist as saying that reflexivity detaches itself from the Kantian “link,” which traces only the conditions of possibility and “finds at the origin of every reflection a massive presence to self, the Retention’s Noch im Griff, and, through it the Urimpression, and the absolute flux which animates them.”9 Here we are dealing with “Thematization of the psychological immanence, of the internal time.”10

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From these small clues, Merleau-Ponty’s search for a new dimension draws from Husserl on different points, especially concerning the use of language and the use of concepts. Moving from everyday banal questions like: Where am I? What time is it?, Merleau-Ponty observes that it is necessary to investigate the nature of space and time, moving from the level of “facts” to that of essences. Arriving at this point, however, he has only come part of the way; his route has to be extended until he reaches the question concerning the relation between space and time and their very essences. This means that he has to move form space and time as “beings” to Being. This seems to be a metaphysical-ontological investigation and, in part, it is, even if the term Being, written with a capital “B”, loses its traditional absolute character. In any case, he maintains its absoluteness, going above and beyond facts and essences, opening a new ontological perspective. The newness consists in the adjective he employs to describe this new Being; he described it as “brute” or “raw.”11 In order to understand this newness I think it is necessary to seek out its non-explicit, remote origin in the work of Husserl on passivity. Reference to Husserl’s studies of passivity exist and do not exist in MerleauPonty’s work here under consideration. There are places where the passages are very reminiscent of Husserl and there are sections where the expressions are quite original and appear very far from those of Husserl. In any case, one can rightly presuppose that Merleau-Ponty’s argument was inspired by his reading of Husserl, especially certain manuscripts. Proof of this can be found in his working notes published as an appendix, especially the entry from February 1959 concerning the first sketch of an ontology. The project is clear; an attempt is made to establish continuity between the Phenomenology of Perception and his new ontology or, more precisely, “Disclosure of the wild or brute Being by way of Husserl and the Lebenswelt upon which one opens.” He also asks, “What is Philosophy? The Domain of the Verborgen (philosophy and the occultism).”12 The term life-world (Lebenswelt) in Husserl refers to a territory that includes within itself a complexity that requires patient analysis, containing in itself operations and cultural sedimentations and, at the same time, the pre-categorial sphere that permits one to describe the genesis of these very formations. Merleau-Ponty is aware of this. In fact, on his view, the investigation has to proceed along two lines, namely, that of the essential description of phenomena and that of their pre-categorial genesis. Hence, the response that he is looking for is “higher” than “facts” but lower than “essences” or Being; it is in wild being that they are indivisible and it is behind and under the ruptures of our acquired culture that they continue to be so. This is Husserl’s aim, even if it is carried out in a peculiar way, and I will seek to show this. The two positions

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are distinguished by the critical attitude of Merleau-Ponty concerning the transcendental reduction. It is necessary, therefore, to deepen the meaning of this reduction in order to understand the possible convergence of the two authors here in question. The first similarity between the two thinkers can be seen in Merleau-Ponty’s more or less full acceptance of Section 34 of the Cartesian Meditations. Husserl here treats the relation between the eidetic reduction and the transcendental one; primary is the theme of essence, which is considered necessary for Merleau-Ponty. According to Husserl without the eidetic phenomenology it is not graspable the I and in particular the transcendental I.13 While not accepting the validity of the transcendental sphere, I believe that Merleau-Ponty is still interested in the operation that leads to the transcendental. What is important is the reductive operation that moved from fact to essence, on one hand, and, on the other hand, to brute or raw being. Particularly significant is the following passage from “Interrogation and Intuition”: “When philosophy ceases to be doubt in order to make itself disclosure, explication, the field it opens to itself is indeed made up of significations or of essences – since it has detached itself from the facts and beings – but these significations or essences do not suffice to themselves, they overtly refer to our acts of ideation which have lifted them from a brute being, wherein we must find again in their wild state what answers to our essences and our significations.”14 Merleau-Ponty understands here the sense of Husserl’s thought, which moves from above to below and form below to above. This movement can be delineated in the following manner: 1. The philosophical search is a process of unveiling. 2. It moves from facts to make explicit their meaning and essences. 3. Essences are our acts of ideation that refer non-directly to facts, but also to a “brute” or “wild” dimension, understood in a phenomenologicaltranscendental sense. Let us examine the French phenomenologist’s position concerning essence. THE QUESTION OF ESSENCE

The two levels of “above” and “below” are delineated with reference to the experienceable dimension of the visible, which is actual Being, regarding which the essences are possible variations. Given that ideation is an important and inescapable fact, borrowing from Husserl, one can move directly from ideation to ask about its very nature and how it determines/defines itself; one “descends” toward brute Being in order to once again rise with major awareness of this last dimension of the below, moving toward the above, toward

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ideation. The visible, as Merleau-Ponty notes, opens toward the invisible, which seems to me to be diverging in a double direction, namely, toward essence, ideality, and toward a wild region. Notwithstanding this divergence, there is no separation; all is connected and united to such an extent that he considers the realm in which we live “the environment of brute existence and essence . . .”15 This definition seems paradoxical, if one refers it to essences, but here Merleau-Ponty intends to say that facticity and ideality are indivisible. We are more or less dealing with an architecture, a stratification, of the levels of being in which we are always immersed, immersed as corporeity. The movement is not one of decentring the I in a “meta” reality, a Wesensschau without place and time. This is the case because even thinkers feel the pressure of space, time and the “Being about which they think.”16 This would seem to be a critique of the “vision of essence” that Husserl speaks about, but, on the contrary, one must recognise that “. . . Husserl himself never obtained one sole Wesensschau that he did not subsequently take up again and rework, not to disown it, but in order to make it say what it at first had not quite said.”17 If we distinguish the two reductions, which Husserl maintains are always connected, each having its own specificity, we note the Husserlian demand to strongly emphasise that the role of the knowledge of the vision of essence is born out of insufficiency; this was made evident by Husserl’s treatment of the positivists, who saw the world as purely factual. The big battle that he undertakes with the naturalistic attitude leads him to make evident that even those who maintain that the sciences are the only valid source of knowledge are constrained to employ formal judgements and principles, as treated by formal logic. Every fully developed science, therefore, according to Husserl, “must be universally bound by the laws that belong to the essence of anything objective whatever”,18 be it from the ontological-formal point of view (formal logic, arithmetic, mathematical analysis, etc.), be it from the eidetic-material point of view, because “any eidetic truth belonging to the pure essences comprised in that composition must yield a law by which the given factual singularity, like any other possible singularity, is bound”.19 The link with factuality is retained as necessary on Husserl’ s part, especially and above all in the field of the empirical sciences, which apparently can be considered as being deprived of any reference to the essential. Merleau-Ponty understands well the link that Husserl made between factuality and the eidetic. He does not comprehend as well, however, Husserl’ s other affirmation, as developed in his Ideas Towards a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, that views eidetic variation as a fruit of the imagination and the solitary vision of the philosopher “. . . whereas it is the support and the very locus of the opinion communis we call science.”20

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Concerning the first objection, one notes that in Section 4 of Book I of the Ideas Husserl connects ideation, which is the intuition of essence, to free play of fantasy, yielding the possibility of forging variations with regard to spatial figures, social happenings, melodies, etc. Here, Husserl does not attribute ideation to fantasy, but there is a common work between fantasy and intellectual intuition that does not simply reduce, as Merleau-Ponty claims, to the imagination of the philosopher. Rather, it is present in all human beings, belonging to our transcendental structure that Husserl wishes to make evident. Concerning the relation between eidetic variation and science, I have already indicated that it was Husserl who observed that sciences ground themselves on the vision of essence, adding “De facto the positivist rejects eidetic cognitions only when he reflects ‘philosophically’ and allows himself to be deceived by the sophisms of empiristic philosophers; but he does not do any of this when, as scientific investigator of Nature, he thinks and grounds his thought in the normal, natural scientific attitude. For there he obviously lets himself be guided to a very wide extent by eidetic insights”.21 Husserl, therefore, seems to be in complete agreement with the French phenomenologist, thereby negating Merleau-Ponty’s objection. Let us now turn to the second reduction, namely, the phenomenologicotranscendental one. Even here one can note a certain similarity, but, as noted above, more so with regard to content than with methodological procedure. Basically, the great difference resides in the fact that Merleau-Ponty does not accept the discovery of the transcendental conscious dimension with its Erlebnisse or lived experiences.22 He does, however, agree with Husserl that a tight relationship between passivity and activity in consciousness exists, because this consents philosophy to take account of truth, being and the world,23 thereby considering as necessary the phenomenological regression. This is an excavation that leads to the Lebenswelt (life world), a raw or brute, passive sphere that is discovered moving from corporeity and its kinaesthesis, employing Husserl’s turn of phrase, or from the flesh, as Merleau-Ponty says.24 This is both a point of coincidence as well as a marker of distance, as I will try to show. We must enter into the sphere of hyletic passivity to establish a relation with the dimension of brute or wild Being. W H AT I S T H E “ L I V I N G - B O D Y ” : A L O O K F R O M W I T H I N

For Husserl, entry into the hyletic dimension comes through corporeity. For Merleau-Ponty, through corporeity one enters into brute Being. This is what we must examine. Let us begin with Husserl. There is a temptation that one does not succeed in resisting, namely, placing oneself before the body in order to analyse it, turning “around” it as if it were an external object. It is clear

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that Western philosophy is born from the human capacity to “objectivate”, that is, to treat all that presents itself as an object of reflection and investigation. This is, in fact, achievable, for even the human being has been objectivated, more or less explicitly. The human being from Greek philosophy forward has found him/herself in a paradoxical situation, using Husserl’s language,25 insofar as s/he has been both the one who carries out the analysis while being the very subject of that analysis. The traditional terms that we use to indicate this situation, namely, subject and object, must be made explicit, allowing us to understand the human being as something upon which it is possible to turn one’s reflection; s/he is an ob-iectum and the place where reflection beings, a profound place that finds itself “under/below” insofar as it is the origin of all of its own capacities and determinations. It is sub-iectum. Traditionally, this definition, especially since Boethius, has a metaphysical meaning. The expression “subiectum” translates the Aristotelian “hupokeimenon”, that is, the profound core that underlies all contingent determinations. The word “subject”, which is now part of philosophical language, does not always refer to such an entity described above. We find this word also in Kant and Husserl, who do not employ it as metaphysical term. They are both interested in penetrating this reality in order to uncover its depths, analysing and dissecting it, in order to recognise its active role. This is because it lies at the base of all determinations. Even for ancient philosophy it is not a moment of subjection or passivity, as can be inferred from the passive sense “of the being subjected to” of the term; on the contrary, it is a centre of activity. This was more the case and further developed in modern thought, which focused on the work of critique and analysis. Within this modern context, let us now turn to phenomenology’s classic position, which proceeds with a unique excavation that moves not form the periphery, but from the interior. Here, the entry way is individuated by how we human beings begin to understand ourselves and our surrounding world, from the very dimension and terrain of our own awareness of ourselves and that which lies outside of us. This is the dimension of acts and operations of which we are aware, that we live in every moment of our existence; these are the acts that are lived by us, our “lived experiences”, the very word with which we translate the German “Erlebnisse.” We do not possess a direct equivalent of this term in English. The acts that we live through are consciously seized by us and we are aware that we live them. Such lived acts include, for example, acts of perception, memory, imagination, and thought, etc. Particular importance is given to the perceptual act because it directly and immediately places us in contact with the external world. Perception is the lived experience from which we begin our investigation that leads us to examine the vast gamut of other lived experiences.

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In turn, perception itself can be subject to an analysis; here we realise that we accomplish acts of perception through the medium of sensation, ultimately making explicit the theme of corporeity. It is precisely because Merleau-Ponty believes perception to be his starting point that we can consider his approach as phenomenological. Returning to Husserl, we discover that his analyses carried out in the second volume of the Ideas, transcribed by Edith Stein26 from Husserl’s shorthand notes, prove most useful on this score. As a lived experience, perception refers back to the sensations that constitute it; here tactile and visual sensations are primary. The former is distinguished from the latter insofar as the former can be localised, whereas the latter cannot be. They are both fundamental, however, for knowledge of physical things, and they both refer back to the body. On one hand, this presents as something physical and, on the other hand, it refers back to a sensing body. In the case of the sensing body, the sensations through which we seize an inanimate physical object are different from those that concern the body proper.27 The perception of the body proper, which is in contact with the physical thing, is added to the perception of the physical thing. Here, we can distinguish a series of perceptions that begin to take on extraordinary importance because they constitute the reason why we sense our own bodies and we consider it as our own. In this case, tactile sensations have absolute precedence with respect to other sensations, for example, with respect to visual sensations, because they possess a double reference: “What I call the seen Body is not something seeing which is seen, the way my body as touched Body is something touching which is touched”.28 The role of visual sensation is diverse from tactile sensation. Vision alone does not give the body proper and neither does our hearing; without touch we would never have the sensation of the body that we possess. The analysis we have given up until this point is only the basis for further extremely significant developments. Localised sensations, together with those derived from the other senses, give us the possibility of seizing objects in space. As Husserl noted that the sensations “exercise a constitutive function as regards the constitution of sense-things”.29 We are in that sphere that Husserl largely defined as hyletic, employing the Greek term ule in an attempt to point to a dimension whose possibilities had not been fully examined and which is fundamental for the constitution of physical objects. Such a sphere not only concerns the relations between one’s own body and that which is outside of it but also includes other groups of sensations that are defined as “sensory sentiments”, including pleasure, pain, tension and relaxations, well-being and being ill-at-ease, all of which are at the basis of the life of sentiments and value.

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If the individuation of lived experiences constitutes Husserl’s great discovery, characterising his line of thought, the analysis of lived experiences makes evident the double moment of the noetic intentional and the hyletic or material. This doubleness, already described in the first volume of the Ideas, is deepened, as was said above, in the second volume with the analysis of the living body (Leib), which is not only the site of sensory sensations, carrying out a constitutive function for objects appearing in space, but also of sensations of a completely different type, for example, sensory sentiments. This argument continues to be developed in Husserl’s manuscripts, especially the C and D manuscripts written in the 30s, where the two moments are present and copiously referred to. In particular, Ms. C 10, which is without title and dated form 1931, focuses on the connection between hyletic unity and affectivity. If the hyletic universe is non egological, insofar as it is constituted without an intervening I, nevertheless the I is always present as the locus of affectivity; it is always active. Here, Husserl is referring to a group of localised sensations that are analogically similar to those primary sensations involved in intentional lived acts, including hardness, whiteness, etc. These localised sensations are immediately localised in the body such that the lived body (Leib) becomes immediately intuitable for every human being. One’s own body is seized as a subjective objectivity, which is distinguished from the purely material things through the layer of localised sensations.30 “Difficult to analyse and illustrate,” Husserl remarks, they form the basis of the life of desire, will, sensations of tension and relaxation of energy, feelings of internal inhibition, paralysis and liberation.31 Intentional functions connect themselves with this layer; the material assumes a spiritual function as is the case with primary sensations that are part of perceptions upon which perceptual judgements are constituted, etc.32 We find a stratification that is two-fold. First, there is cognition that is formed by primary sensation, perceptions, perceptual judgements. Second, there is a psychic-reactive element that is formed by sensory sentiments and values. The levels of perception, judgement and value all remain on the noetic side. Clearly, the relation between the noetic and the hyletic is delineated, but the hyletic moment seems to drag with it the noetic moment. Husserl affirms, “Hence in this way a human being’s total consciousness is in a certain sense, by means of its hyletic substrate, bound to the Body”.33 This doubleness is not eliminated. In fact, intentional lived acts are not localised and do not constitute a layer of the body proper. The autonomy of the spiritual moment with respect to the material, which also allows its manifestation, is here confirmed. Perception, insofar as it is a tactile seizing/grasping of form, is not found in

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the finger that touches, in which tactile sensations are localised. Thought is not truly and intuitively localised in the head as are localised sensations of tension.34 Husserl notes that we often express ourselves in this way and one can ask why this happens. One could respond by saying that the attractive force of localising hyletics concentrates attention on the body proper, where the term hyletic does not indicate material in a traditional sense, but a new materiality already proposed in Section 85 of Ideas I. Husserl is seeking a new term and he thinks that he has found it in the Greek hyle. He is trying to individuate a primary dimension that is never well delineated, and this is why words are lacking in order to express it. HYLETICS AND INTENTIONALITY

If the hyletic manifests itself pre-eminently within a theory of knowledge, many of Husserl observations indicate a vaster function. The hyletic first involves, as we have already seen, the sphere of affects and impulses, which is at the base of noetic valuing. Here one can speak of hyle, that is, matter. Analysing human acts in their stratification, Husserl affirms a “blind” and “organic” entelechy is present in them and that acts on the level of impulse. This entelechy becomes explicit on the level of the will, moving from an impulsive intentionality to a conscious one. Following the practical-ethical path and not purely the epistemological one, it is possible to deepen our understanding of the theme of entelechy and its teleological sense. Certainly, Husserl’s insistence on the teleology of history, understood as the discovery of an immanent end and as an ethical appeal of this very end, is better known. The ultimate justification of the existence of this dimension is traceable in that which he defines as the necessary “reference back to the original facts of hyle,”35 which seem incomprehensible if intentionality had not made itself present at the level of impulse. Here, Husserl maintains, that one can refer back from the sphere of awareness, cognition, and ethics, which he defines as categorial, to the pre-categorial sphere. This is the path indicated by Husserl, which moves from formal to transcendental logic (Formal and Transcendental Logic)36 and, concerning a theory of knowledge, it moves from consciousness to passive synthesis (Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis).37 Later, I will discuss how passive synthesis is fundamental for the formation of every form of consciousness that arises between subject and object, even before these two moments are distinguishable. It is not accidental that in the Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis one finds preliminary considerations of Husserl’s lectures in transcendental logic. Through genetic analysis Husserl uncovers the formation of sense and in doing so uncovers the hidden realm of passivity. This path chosen

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by Husserl is focused and he calls it a Rückfrage, it is a stepping back that is difficult to execute because human beings live on the periphery of the process. In order to “penetrate” such results and understand their genesis it is necessary to have an aware, attentive and scientific “gaze.” This scientific gaze must not be constructive; rather, it must be deconstructive not because it renounces the search for sense, but because it digs to find further senses. “Now we want our investigation to go beyond the narrow realm to which it has restricted, [namely,] the realm of thinking as the sense-giving function to statements. Actually, every step of our preceding analyses of interiority functioning in linguistic thinking has already elicited the demonstration of the general character of consciousness, which points beyond the narrow field. We want to enter the broadest generality in which it is no longer a matter of words and statements, although it does concern, in an expanded sense, sense-givenness and furthermore the distinction between what is rational and irrational – distinction that belong to the special theme of every logic”.38 The hyletic dimension is the most beneficial for this kind of excavation because while cultural sedimentations, understood as noetic products, present themselves as definitively structured and as growing through further stratifications, the genetic way, which leads to the passive sphere, remains unknown for two reasons. First, the person who lives at the pre-scientific level, understood as being uncritical or naive, is not aware of the genetic process presupposed by every consciousness and every result obtained at the level of practice. Second, the person who lives at the scientific level, especially because of greater specialisation of knowledge, its ramifications and its complexity, believes that s/he can justify everything by this type of knowledge; s/he forgets to ask the question about the genesis of knowledge. It is in this very context that philosophy has taken on since the ancient Greeks a critical role, but it has not succeeded up until now, according to Husserl, in uncovering the origin of sedimentation.39 Husserlian phenomenology was born with the intention of proceeding forward with this uncovering, examining mathematical sciences, the physical sciences and the human sciences, which were then called the sciences of the spirit (Geisteswissenschaften). Next to and within these sciences the problem of logical processes, that is, the organisation of thought, took on a more important role; they sedimented themselves within formal logic, starting with Aristotelian logic but becoming more refined and abstract as demonstrated by the neopositivists. Husserl agrees that this type of logic could be a useful instrument for the full elaboration of the sciences, but the problem has also shifted: How have the sciences and formal logic configured themselves? This question was always present in Husserl’s philosophical trajectory and his response was not given at the very same level of logic, but at the deeper

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level of the genesis of logical operations working within the transcendental structure of lived experience. Husserl always follows a logical line of thought, a line that is most important because it borders on mathematical sciences, which were so formative for the young Husserl. His two most important writings on this score are Formal and Transcendental Logic and Experience and Judgement.40 In the former, Husserl moves from the already constituted terrain of formal logic in order to move backward to uncover the underlying operations and acts, even if they are not all of a cognitive nature; they must be studied under the rubric of cognition and, therefore, within the framework of a theory of knowledge. The latter traces the path that moves from one’s first perceptual awareness of things to the level of judgement. Here, there is a double, correlative movement of ascent and descent that is capable of moving from already constituted formations to their genesis and vice versa; one can trace the process from the first constitutive operations to the highest levels. Within this framework of digging or excavation we can insert the abovementioned Analyses, which investigate the preliminary operations traceable in the formation of perceptual cognition; this perceptual cognition is not the first step of cognition, that is, it is the primitive operations that allow one to define in the first instance perceptual fields. This is achieved through contrast, succession and coexistence. At this stage, subject and object are still indistinguishable, and it is only at the perceptual level that this distinction occurs. From this perspective, the problem of “sensation” and its origin is reexamined along with the relation between intentional noesis and material hyle that presents itself. It is for this reason that one can trace two ways of speaking of this material of internal and external sensation, which is called hyle. According to a static analysis, carried out in the Ideas, hyle is the material to which noesis gives meaning, becoming material for further operations, for example, the pleasure given seeing a colour pushes me to choose that colour, to value it positively, therefore, becoming a “matter” of judgement. On the contrary, from the genetic perspective, which makes evident the passive sphere, hyle already possesses an intentional structure that permits it too present itself in a configured way. Generally, the “archaeological” excavation, which we are here trying to reconstruct by moving through the sparse analyses of Husserl, assist us in discovering “ultimate grounds” that unite themselves with primary or more clear ones. In order to understand this excavation let us turn to a text written in 1931 entitled “Teleology,”41 which covers the entire trajectory we have sketched here, adding new and yet unpublished elements. The subtitle is: “Implications of the Eidos: Transcendental Intersubjectivity in the Eidos: The Transcendental I.”

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The text that we are examining is particularly significant because it meditates once again on the relation between the existential human condition, the ever human capacity to understand that which is essential and, therefore, to individuate the transcendental sphere, the “transparent pane of glass”, as I would call it, on which lived experiences continually imprint themselves back and forth. Husserl observes that although in general it is possible to seize the essential moment or eidos of whatever reality, separating it from being or from the non-being of the realisation of essential moments, in the case of human beings “the eidos: the transcendental I is unthinkable without the transcendental I as factual.”42 This means that a certain correlation between mundane ontology and absolute ontology establishes itself, that is, a correlation between the existential and essential structures of the world. This correlation finds its core right in the human being. It is right at the level of the transcendental sphere that the structure of “fact” clarifies itself. The fact “human being”, through reductions, is individuated in his or her originary structures, which configure themselves in a primary moment at the hyletic level. Originary hyle presents itself through kinaestheses, that is, originary movements, originary sentiments and originary instincts. All this originary matter is found to be in a form of unity, which is the essential form that precedes the world. Because this shows itself immediately in the human being, it appears already at the “instinctual” level. The constitution of the whole world, which is contained in its “essential grammar,” its essential alphabet in the profound levels of the human being, and that which is shown, is not only a passive structure, unconscious, instinctively unified but it also possesses its own end. Teleology manifests itself at the transcendental level, but it has its origin in facts “of originary hyle (understood in the most ample sense); without these no world would be possible and no total/complete transcendental subjectivity. All things said, can one say that this teleology, with its originary facticity, has its foundation in God? We come to the ultimate ‘questions of fact’ – to originary questions, the ultimate necessity, originary necessity.”43 Husserl does not only generally say that all things have an end, but he also analyses partially the stratification of reality through the stratification present in human beings in order to draw this conclusion. It is with this conclusion that we know not only the works of culture or spirit, voluntary processes that characterise human beings, the examination of organisms and their levels of development and perfection, as Husserl outlines in the Ideas, but also that hidden world of originary instincts, sentiments, unconscious physical and psychological movements. Sense and end, formal and final cause, to borrow from Aristotle, are correlated. This is why teleology is defined as the “form of all forms.” In fact, one can find it all levels of reality.

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In this treatment of hyle, one begins, as Husserl notes, with lived experiences, but one leaves these because the “grounding/ultimate reasons”, even on the hyletic plane, are found in the fact that nothing is “accidental”. On the contrary, it is necessary to trace the deep dimensions of “teleology”; an end and, therefore, the reference back to an “originary facticity” can be understood in its depth, especially if one observes that this has its foundation in God.44

H Y L E T I C P H E N O M E N O L O G Y A N D R AW O R B R U T E B E I N G

How can one establish a relation between the Husserlian analysis carried out above and the theoretical proposal of Merleau-Ponty? On my view, there are three points of convergence that can be traced back to the central theme of the visible and the invisible: 1. Husserl’s analysis of the body with its tactile and visual dimensions can be seen to correspond to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “flesh.” 2. The backward reference to the hyletic dimension with its impulse intentionality echoes in Merleau-Ponty’s wild being. 3. The search for a new ontology that brings the two philosophers together. In the end, we have to examine the content of the two ontologies in order to understand their respective affinities and differences. For Husserl, as we have already seen, the transcendental dimension as a locus of individuation of universal structures that is a tool of comprehension of what is singular and empirical. In his working notes, Merleau-Ponty sees his new ontology as being capable of placing in crisis the notions of transcendental subjectivity, subject, and object, all in favour of the becoming conscious of philosophy as pre-science, understood “as the expression of what is before expression and sustains it from behind.”45 In fact, “all the particular analyses concerning Nature, life, the human body, language will make us progressively enter into the Lebenswelt and the ‘wild’ being, and as I go along I should not hold myself back from into their positive description, nor even into the analyses of the diverse temporalities – say this already in introduction.”46 Two remarkable things emerge at this point. First, the stepping backward that Husserl refers to does not resolve itself in the opposition between transcendental subjectivity and Lebenswelt because the two terms are understood only through a reciprocal referring to one another. Second, Merleau-Ponty establishes a relation of identity between the Lebenswelt and raw being. Moreover, it seems to me that there is a similarity in the way Merleau-Ponty understands Lebenswelt: “The search for the ‘wild’ view . . .”47

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Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the transcendental is not explicitly aimed at Husserl; rather, it could be more directed toward Kant. Husserl, however, considers transcendental subjectivity as an inseparable point of departure and arrival. The newness here is constituted by the individuation of the conscious sphere with its lived experiences, which is not given consideration by Merleau-Ponty. This permits one to understand why he proceeds from individuating the importance of corporeity and why he cannot grasp the ultimate sense of the hyletic dimension. And, yet, Husserl’s analyses of this dimension have an extraordinary affinity with those carried out by Merleau-Ponty on touch and sight. Let us compare the two thinkers. I begin with the analysis of the colour red carried out by Merleau-Ponty in his chapter dedicated to the “Intertwining – The Chiasm.” Concerning many objects that offer us the colour red, he notes that it is: “. . . a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world – less a color or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility.”48 A fabric that lines the visible, sustaining it, is revealed; it is flesh. This occurs because if one takes on the perspective of the viewer – here there is the shift toward the subject that is proper to phenomenological investigation – one notes that the gaze “wraps, feels, weds visible things” not by accident, but according to a “lawfulness”, as Husserl would say, that establishes a correlation such that one cannot say who commands, be it the subject or the things. Such a correlation is understandable through palpation because it is there that the interrogator and the interrogated are closest. If we read the Husserlian analyses of touch, we understand the sense of such a correlation. In fact, not only is the body involved in touch but the body itself is also constituted in it; this is the case because one cannot separate sensations linked to the hand and the whole body. Touch is spread all over the body and is really the origin of the experience of the limits of the body and, therefore, of awareness of the body. I can say that I have a body because there is a tactile experience that is widespread and localised. Localisation is fundamental for understanding the sense of the hyletic sphere within the two streams of the egological and non-egological, touching the external object or that thing that I call my body. My body responds with its sensations to my sensing hand and I feel pleasure or I feel something smooth or coarse, which manifests itself as a psychic reaction and which is part of the hyletic sphere.

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While Husserl maintains the supremacy of touch over sight for the constitution of one’s own body, Merleau-Ponty, who also recognises the surging of a passive sentiment, to borrow his term, of the body and space through touch, establishes a sort of parity or even exchange of validity between touch and sight: “We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out in the tangible, every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible, which is encrusted in it, as conversely, the tangible itself is not a nothingness of visibility, is not without visual experience. Since the same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same world.”49 Undoubtedly, here we are not trying to establish simply the circularity between the two types of sensations. Even Husserl accepts that the same body sees and touches and the visible and invisible belong to the same world. Rather, we are individuating the essential characteristics of the two orders of experience and, therefore, on the basis of rigorous analysis, one could say that he would not accept that vision is the same as palpation with the gaze except in a metaphorical sense. He would accept, however, that “it must also be inscribed in the order of being that it discloses to us; he who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at.”50 Concerning such strangeness, we could say that Husserl, digging deep within the passive sphere, observes the originary indistinguishability of subject and object, making analytically explicit that which Merleau-Ponty posits only as a reference back to the indistinct terrain of “raw” or “brute” being. S O M E F U N D A M E N TA L C O N S I D E R AT I O N S O F M E R L E AU - P O N T Y ’ S O N T O L O G Y

Since the French phenomenologist did not manage to complete his work, we cannot develop an analysis of the region of raw or brute Being. There are, however, a few “working notes” that are very useful in this regard. In particular, there is a passage similar to Husserl’s description of a profound, instinctual sphere that possesses its own intentionality. Merleau-Ponty individuates a latent intentionality that can be identified with the fundamental structure of Zeitigung. Latent intentionality ceases to be the life of consciousness in order to become intentional life. Here we are dealing with what Husserl called Triebintentionalität or drive-intentionality. Merleau-Ponty does not speak in these terms; it is as if he does not know this aspect of Husserl’s thought. Merleau-Ponty does not grasp the archaeological digging that Husserl has done, if he accuses Husserl of having stopped at immanent consciousness without individuating the “double ground of my life of consciousness”.51

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Contrary to what Merleau-Ponty maintains, Husserl did ,in fact, delineate this double ground, comparing it to the unconscious, which psychoanalysis discusses, in his Analyses Concerning Active and Passive Synthesis.52 MerleauPonty, however, does recognise this, especially when he comments on the Cartesian Meditations. A point of convergence concerning the Husserlian transcendental is represented by a note dated February 1959 in which MerleauPonty recognises, always within the framework of the Cartesian Meditations, the validity of the transcendental field as the overcoming on the part of Husserl of the Cartesian conception of mens sive anima (mind or soul;) there is also the overcoming of the same transcendental subjectivity of passive synthesis that in Husserl’s work is linked to knowledge of alterity, which, according to Husserl in Section 51, begins in an originary pairing (ursprüngliche Paarung). Not even making explicit reference to this expression, Merleau-Ponty individuates a passive dimension through the theme of intersubjectivity rather than through knowledge of the physical world. In other words, Merleau-Ponty takes account of the Cartesian Meditations and not the lectures and unpublished manuscripts that were later published as the Analyses. The treatment of the Meditations allows Merleau-Ponty to grasp by means of intersubjectivity an itinerary that Husserl privileged, namely, history. In his notes, he writes: “The passage to intersubjectivity is contradictory only with regard to an insufficient reduction, Husserl was right to say. But a sufficient reduction leads beyond the alleged transcendental ‘immanence,’ it leads to the absolute spirit understood as Weltlichkeit, to Geist as Ineinander of the spontaneities, itself founded on the aesthesiological Ineinander and on the sphere of life of Einfühlung and Intercorporeity.”53 For both thinkers the question of history that leads to the connective fabric of the Ineinander (In-the-Other) opens up. The Ineinander constitutes the worldly dimension of the spirit.54 The sprit refers back to the sphere of the connective intersubjective fabric that is founded on the relation between corporeity of singular individuals. At this point, a term appears that has never been used before, namely, Geist, which explicitly leads back to the analyses of Husserl. In January 1959, Merleau-Ponty writes: “Husserl: human bodies have an ‘other side’ – a spiritual side.”55 He explains his project: “In my first volume – after physical nature and life, make a third chapter where the human body will be described as having a ‘spiritual’ side”.56 Here, we are dealing with a large project that takes up once again and deepens “my first two books,” says Merleau-Ponty, all within the framework of ontology. The Visible and the Invisible represents the completion of Merleau-Ponty’s research agenda as begun in the Phenomenology of Perception. Always describing his project of a new ontology, Merleau-Ponty proposes to make evident all the roots, opening the way to an analysis of language. The

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transcendental is, therefore, understood as the making evident of the sensing agent, which is the body, and the ideal agent, which is the word. 57 The concluding words of Merleau-Ponty’s text are dedicated to the role of language. “In a sense the whole of philosophy, as Husserl says, consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning, an expression of experience by experience, which in particular clarifies the special domain of language.”58 Two points are particularly significant in this passage. First, there is the fact that wild being has sense, and this is confirmed in the theme of latent intentionality, which we already discussed. Second, there is a connection between sense and language and the latter is not only articulated language. Citing Valéry, Merleau-Ponty maintains: “[L]anguage is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of things, the waves, and the forests.”59 The strict connection or, more precisely, the identity between sense and language refers back, even within phenomenology, to the thought of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, who affirms in her Metaphysical Dialogues60 that things speak because they express their essence, their sense, even if no articulated language is present; articulated language is the proper expression of the sense of the human being, who is a corporeal, psychic being, but who, above all, is a spiritual being. Even for Merleau-Ponty the theme of language is linked to the question of sense and spirit. We observe this in the affirmation that linguistics alone is not enough to understand language. If words have a sense, this is not finalised by the fact that linguistics discovers it, but “the operative Word is the obscure region whence comes the instituted light, as the muted reflection of the body upon itself is what we call natural light.”61 The interweaving, the chiasm, institutes itself between signification and the multiplicity of physiological and linguistic means of elocution just as vision brings to completion the aesthesiological body. Merleau-Ponty exhorts us to follow closely the passage from the mute world to the speaking world. I believe that this gives us the possibility of connecting “sense” to “wild,” on one hand, and sense and spirit on the other hand. The new ontology delineated by Merleau-Ponty assumes the qualities not only of a new humanism62 but also of a new metaphysics that bases itself on the observation of an Offenheit, on an infinity that presents itself differently than that which we can define more “classical” opening to transcendence as given by Husserl. The two thinkers, however, see this openness as an overcoming of factualiy that does not exclude factuality itself. May 1960: “I am against finitude in the empirical sense, a factual existence that has limits, and this is why I am for metaphysics. But it lies no more in infinity than in factual finitude.”63

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It is not easy to assess the two philosophers without running the risk of schematising too much the conceptual richness of their analyses. The reading of their texts reveals a familiar air between them, which allows us to maintain that Merleau-Ponty, in certain respects, is one of the most sensitive heirs of Husserl. Lateran University, Rome Traslation by Antonio Calcagno NOTES 1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible Followed by Working Notes. Ed. Claude Lefort, Trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 130. Hereafter referred to as VI. 2 Ibid., p, 31. 3 Ibid., p. 32. 4 Ibid., p. 37. 5 Ibid., pp. 45–46. 6 Ibid., p. 46–48. 7 Ibid., p. 47. 8 Ibid., p. 48. 9 Ibid., p. 49. 10 Ibid. 11 It should be remarked that in English both brute and raw are used to communicate the double sense of the French. 12 Ibid., p. 183. 13 Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Ed. S. Strasser (The Hague, Netherland: Martinus Nijhoff), 173, § 34, p. 106. 14 VI, p. 110. 15 VI, p. 117. 16 Ibid., p. 116. 17 Ibid. 18 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. I. Trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), p. 18. 19 Ibid., p. 20 VI, p. 116. 21 Ideas I, p. 45. 22 VI, p. 181. 23 Ibid., p. 43. 24 Ibid., p. 168. 25 “How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely, constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has already become what it is and continues to develop. Formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?” Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European

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Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. A Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. D. Carr (Evaston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 179. This is a paradox that can be resolved. Husserl reply is the following: “But the great problem is precisely to understand what is here so ‘obvious’. The method now requires that the ego, beginning with its concrete world-phenomenon, systematically inquire back, and thereby become acquainted with itself, the transcendental ego, in its concreteness, in the system of its constitutive levels and its incredibly intricate [patterns of] validity-founding” (Ibid., p. 187). 26 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. II. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1989). 27 Ibid., p. 153. 28 Ibid., p. 155. 29 Ibid., p. 160. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Dritter Teil, in Husserliana XV (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1973), p. 386. 36 Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic. Trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Springer, 1977). 37 Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (The Hague: Springer, 2001). 38 Ibid., p. 28. 39 This has been clearly expressed in that which can be considered Husserl’s spiritual testament. Please see, Edmund Husserl, La storia della filosofia e la sua finalità [The History of Philosophy and its End]. Ed. N. Ghigi, Preface by Angela Ales Bello (Rome: Città Nuova, 2004). 40 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment. Trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1975). 41 Edmund Husserl, «Telologie: Die Implikation des Eidos: Transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Transzendentale Ich» in Intersubjektivität III, cit., n. 22, pp. 378–86. 42 Ibid., p. 385. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 VI, p. 167. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., p. 182. 48 Ibid., p. 132. 49 Ibid., p. 134. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., p. 173. 52 See my treatment of the relation between Freud and Husserl in “Binswanger erede di Husserl [Binswanger as Inheritor of Husserl]” in Ludwig Binswanger – Esperienza della soggetivita’ e trascendenza dell’altro – I margini di un’esplorazione fenomenologico-psichiatrica [Ludwig Binswanger – Margins of a Phenomenological-Psychiatric Exploration]. Ed. S. Besoli (Macerta: Quodlibet Studio, 2006), pp. 261–82. 53 VI, p. 172.

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Ibid. Ibid., p. 168. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., p. 172. 58 Ibid., p. 155. 59 Ibid. 60 H. Conrad-Martius, Metaphysische Gespräche (Halle: Niemeyer, 1921). Here, there is a dialogue concerning the phenomenological analysis of the construction of nature and its spiritual significance. This is carried out with great style and is most original. This first translation of this work into a foreign language is in Italian: Dialoghi metafisici. Trans. Anselmo Caputo, Preface by Angela Ales Bello (Lecce: Besa, 2006). 61 VI, p. 154. 62 Ibid., p. 169. 63 Ibid., p. 251. 55

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PHYSIS AND FLESH

ABSTRACT

This chapter attempts to read Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh in the light of the Greek experience of physis as it is understood by Heidegger. It seeks to show that Merleau-Ponty’s flesh implies a radicalization of the relationship between physis and being in which being no longer has an “abiding meaning” that stands apart, nor a negativity that is distinct from its coming-to-presence. In this sense, the flesh implies an “explosion of being” for Merleau-Ponty, a being that is indistinct from nature’s coming-to-presence. Since physis does not name a different realm than art, language, history etc. but rather a process of co-emergence between all these, this paper seeks to show that an explosion of being is especially evident in Merleau-Ponty’s various treatments of the painterly-work, and in his various treatments of Cézanne in particular. Merleau-Ponty famously writes in The Visible and the Invisible that the flesh does not start “from substances, from body and spirit” and that it is not “the union of contradictories.”1 It is instead, he continues in that same passage, a “concrete emblem of a general manner of being,” “an element.”2 As an element, the flesh starts from “water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being.”3 Older than even the first Christian designation of it, the flesh is thus not an “origin” but, in the pre-Socratic sense of “omou en panta,” an “originating” of being. In referring us back to an ontological naivety, this flesh is no longer merely a moment of trans-subjectivity. Rather, because such an ontology has not yet invoked the officious difference between spatio-temporality and ideality, its rediscovery will “[r]estore this life without Erlebnisse, without interiority.”4 By returning us back to an originating, in other words, flesh names the “reversal itself,” the “Sigè, the abyss”5 —it names the emergent depth at work within the gaps of all determinations, including interiority and exteriority. The flesh is thus intervallic. It is the realm of emergence not only between the subject and world but also between entities, all of which appear on the basis of an originary and operant flesh. The immediate problem with any such restoration of the flesh is that, since this flesh is not itself thematic, it is difficult to address it in its primary and 77 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 77–91. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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originary sense. Either we think of the flesh in its sheer visibility, turning it into the phenomenon of the body, or we reduce the flesh simply to a universal dimensionality, and thus treat it not as the profundity of beings but as the principled foundation of them. It is sometimes charged that it is Merleau-Ponty himself who prevents the recovery of an originary flesh, that his thought itself is a hindrance to achieving its aims. For even if according to him there is a flesh that refers to the originating of being, there is also a flesh of a psychophysical complex through which incarnation appears not as the nullity but as the condition of perception.6 These two “fleshes” seem to end in an exclusion of one another, and thus there is inevitably an openness that cannot be converted to having, a fabric of being into which no human can break, an other vis-à-vis the world.7 In the end, the problem is one of ontological difference and the mutual inter-dependence between the body and its being as flesh. I want to think with Merleau-Ponty through this problem. By announcing the flesh as an “element of being” – water, air, earth, fire – Merleau-Ponty names flesh as physis. By suggesting that the flesh for Merleau-Ponty is an iteration of the Greek experience of physis, I hope to show that, in his return to an ontological dimension of originating, there is in fact no alterity vis-à-vis “the world of flesh,” no gap between the two fleshes, and that they are not essentially different. Bringing difference to the light of day is of course Heidegger’s perennial task. Physis for him names the originary, unitary, eventful process that yields the beingness of beings (ousia). It names the sway abiding in itself out of which beings emerge as beings. Physis points, then, not only to the emergent physical beings but also to the emerging that yields them. But this formulation of physis is still inadequate: physis is the name for the very occurring of the originary difference of determination and non-determination, the very occurrence of an articulation of a primal difference between something and non-thing, and it is both out of which and within which beings come to be. Where Heidegger ultimately fails to think through ontological difference in his recovery of a physis that is always subject to the primacy of Being, MerleauPonty succeeds, for implicit in the philosophy of flesh is in fact a radicalization of physis, an understanding of physis as presiding over being in its originating. After first describing the problem of Merleau-Ponty’s “fleshes” and then Heidegger’s analyses of physis as a proposed a way out of this problem, toward the end of this paper I suggest that the ontological dimension of flesh achieves what Heidegger sought in his meditations on physis, namely, an event of being that is nothing other to an incarnate principle in all its multiformity. One could stress the connection between flesh and physis by showing how the flesh, like physis, does not name a different realm than art, language, history etc. but rather a process of co-emergence between all these. An essay such as “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,”8 which seeks to bring together painting

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with language and the history of being, might be helpful to do this. However, without directly focusing on art-history in his thought, I wish to show that the flesh of the canvas for Merleau-Ponty is itself the betrayal of physis, by which is meant nothing less or more than a “fragmenting” being-process that yields distinct objects on the canvas their beingness. We see in the canvas’ flesh a “cosmology of the visible”9 that was Merleau-Ponty’s last philosophy, far less concerned with a “second, solid and complete nature of being”10 than with being as an “outline or depth of the visible” and its ongoing “latent existence.”11 A. THE PROBLEM OF TWO FLESHES

The problem of “two fleshes” is in fact born out of Merleau-Ponty’s “indirect method” that aims to see “Being in the beings.”12 In keeping with the phenomenological tradition, this method cannot provide a “direct ontology”13 but rather works backward (zurückfragen, literally “asks back for”) from experience, toward the essential structures of a thing and finally into being. But since even this reduction is primarily a humanistic act, it may be charged, it inevitably reinstates subjectivity at the beginning and re-establishes its primacy.14 In fact, precisely by refusing to transgress the reduction MerleauPonty fails to de-sediment the dogmatism of subjectivity, and thus it seems that the metaphysical assumptions lying at subjectivity’s heart remain uninterrogated in his philosophy. Michel Haar points out that, [t]here is not in Merleau-Ponty any radical questioning of subjectivity, in the sense of there being no “deconstruction” of the subject which brings to light its metaphysical presuppositions and which is in dialogue with the tradition throughout which it is constituted: that is, from the mutations of the hypokeimenon into substantia and of the latter into subjectum.15

Although it may be what Merleau-Ponty wanted to “indirectly” provide, nowhere does he actually perform an archeology of the subjectum that discovers, via a substantia which already implies being, its original sense of hypokeimenon (“that which lies under”). As a consequence, according to Haar, it is impossible for Merleau-Ponty to bring the two far apart terms together. Not only does he fail to uncover any ontological subjacency to subjectivity, but he also fails to see this subjacency in any other way than an essentially different, absolute foundation. It could be that Merleau-Ponty simply reiterates, as he puts it, an ontology of the Kosmostheoros on the one hand and a correlative, the Great Object, on the other.16 After all even as invisibility, for Merleau-Ponty being is much more than the opposite to a sensory quality, and much more than a “primordial mineness,” which is oftentimes described as “anonymity,” “indivision,” “Ineinander,” etc.17 Even if there is a consubstantiality of the flesh,

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there is also a flesh of universal anonymity, and it is this symmetry to the chiasm that gives Merleau-Ponty problems. “On the one hand,” writes Haar again, “there is a specific sensible-sensing; on the other hand there is a ‘sensibility in general,”’ which has “before it a sensing in general.”18 Despite what Merleau-Ponty says, therefore, even the description of being as a “depth” is counterproductive: when thought alongside a sensing in general, the depth of being implies an access to being-in-itself and to a universal view-point from which one assists in a total appropriation of being.19 If this is so, then being collapses back into a disincarnated principle that cannot and does not articulate itself through beings. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty’s flesh in fact generates “a fantastic substance,” a “totality underneath beings,”20 or an “il y a” that is itself without reserve and without negativity,21 and it fails to imagine nature in any but a static, general way. This is precisely the difficulty of difference, familiar even to the student of phenomenology, which Heidegger sought to bring to the fore in his later meditations of physis. These meditations attempt to re-emancipate the human’s experience of nature as becoming and appearing in their originary senses.

B. PHYSIS

Heidegger’s etymological analyses show that “genesis,” one of the Greek words for the meaning of physis, and the Roman word natura (from nasci), meaning “to be born,” or “to arise from,” signifies “that which lets something originate form itself.”22 But, according to Heidegger, we no longer hear the connection of nature to this coming-to-be, for by nature we understand it to mean a fixed realm, contrasted with other realms of being – a nature that is not art, not history, etc. Oddly, then, nature comes to imply for us some supernatural realm. In his 1943 epilogue to the essay What is Metaphysics? Heidegger writes that “Being indeed (wohl) comes-to-presence without beings,”23 suggesting that, inasmuch as it requires beings, physis is in fact not originally the same as Being. But in the 1949 version of the essay’s epilogue this very sentence is changed to, “Being never . . . comes-to-presence without beings.”24 The first statement expresses the primacy of the Being-process in the emergence of beings. It indicates an ontological difference but does not yet name it as such. The second, 1949 statement says that, although Being must be thought for itself, to understand the ontological difference we must also understand that Being cannot be by itself. Thus, according to Heidegger, it is possible to claim both that beings cannot be without Being, as well as that Being cannot be without beings. This names the ontological difference as such and, thus understood, it gives importance to a nature in which the difference takes its course, physis.

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Physis refers to what arises from itself, what unfolds, what comes into appearance and endures in appearance. These traits are what Heidegger describes when he says that physis is the name for an “emerging-abiding sway,” where “sway” (Walten) implies the movement of a force relentlessly unfolding in the form of distinctive beings.25 A being whose way of being is physis thus “puts itself forth,” appearing in the open, lighting up, and making itself accessible to an observer. In this way, physis is connected to “phuein,” which means “to illuminate, to shine forth and to appear,”26 and is innerly-related to phainesthai, which is a form of phaino and means “to bring into the light of day.” Physis thus expresses the idea of a “phenomenon” as defined by Heidegger in Being and Time: that which manifests itself or appears in the light, that which emerges from out of concealment in order to show forth.27 In this connection, physis undergoes the same treatment as the phenomenon in Being and Time, which is often identified with ta onta, the Greek word for beings and their beingness. “[P]hysis,” writes Heidegger in Vom Wesen und Begriff der Physis, “is qualified as a mode of ousia (beingness),”28 and thus to be “physis-blind” is “but a variety of the blind to Being.”29 Heidegger thus stresses that the Aristotelian question “ti to on?,” “what is a being qua being in its Being?,”30 is primarily an interrogation of the coming-to-presence of beings in physis.31 It does not essentially ask about a Being “as such,” which founds beings in an ultimate and supreme ground and is neglectful of the originary apprehension of Being. Rather, the retrieval of this “being qua being in its being” requires us to construe a unity between thinking and being, between logos and physis. This is only seen, according to Heidegger, when logos is read in terms of its root meaning, legein. In its primary connection to legein, logos does not mean “thinking” so much as it means something like “readingoff” (Ablese), or selecting various items (wood, wine, etc.).32 In assembling or gathering these specific items rather than others, differences between things become manifest.33 And because it is originally a gathering or gatheredness of things, according to Heidegger logos is equivalent to the surging and prevailing presence that is designated by physis. Just as logos lets something be seen from itself, so therefore does physis. Just as a return to phenomenology in the sense of a phainomenon-logos lets what “shows itself be seen from itself,” and “show itself from itself,” a return to physis allows us to grapple with the problem of preserving a genuine and first vision of what becomes manifest. But, again as in the phainomenon-logos, this return to physis also requires us to recognize that beings can also appear to be what they are not, and thus that showing can also mean what “looks like” or “seems.” We must never forget, however, that this semblance is still a derivative form of self-showing, and that even in the self-showing of the phainomenon as something other than it is, there lies the possibility of a genuine and

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original access to the phenomenon. Only by giving an account of this privative character of beings, as an intrinsic way in which they could be, can we gain a genuine access to the phenomenon itself. In this way, Heidegger leads us back to physis, which refers to a negativity in the sense of steresis or privation at the core of a being.34 For, since physis is the process by which beings and Being are unified, it shows the falsity that beings come from a negative nothing in the sense of an ens rationis. What merits thought is rather the sameness between non-being and Being. An account of physis and its inherently privative character also has to show that “no longer being” and “not-yet being” are fundamental and even constituent characteristics of natural beings. Only by showing how natural beings stand and endure, and thus presuppose a relationality among beings, all the while being subjected to this process from-out-of-which and being-toward, can we achieve the task of clarifying the meaning of the phenomenon. Heidegger had already argued in a lecture delivered at the university of Marburg in 1928 for a kind of negativity that invokes the thesis of coming-to-presence, Upon closer consideration, it turns out that even the not (negation), or the essence of the not, nullity, can only be interpreted on account of the essence of time, and it is only on account of this essence that the possibility of modification, for instance, of that of presence into absence, is to be understood.35

He argues here that nullity is in fact derived from modification, and that there is a nullity, between presence and absence, that is “lanced to the logic of the Same and the Other.”36 In other words, what merits thought in the sameness between a non-being and Being is really the coming-to-presence that this sameness requires. We are thus finally led to think not only of modification but also to the Heraclitean fragment 53, which famously begins “war is the father of all and the king of all.” For the relation between Being and non-being is a relation in which things emerge as such and such from out of a primal strife and struggle (polemos) that initially draws beings out of concealment and lets them come forth as they are, having determinate characteristics in relation to each other. Seen from this standpoint, a world initially comes into being through an “originary struggle,”37 a primordial unfolding of oppositions and distinctions on the basis of which beings come to be. This shining-forth of beings in their ways of showing up is described by Heidegger as the “originarily emergent self-upraising of the violent forces of what holds sway, the phainesthai as appearing in the broad sense of the epiphany of a world.”38 To break the seeming impassability of the two fleshes in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, we must first see that he does acknowledge and even makes explicit (and radicalizes) the

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inner-connection between non-being and being that is characteristic of Heidegger’s nullity and that, along with this nullity, Merleau-Ponty understands being as polemos. C. THE EMERGENCY OF FLESH

Merleau-Ponty’s voracious readings of animal morphologies, evolution, logos and the human body, all of which are evidenced in his Nature lectures, are not merely for the sake of a “proximal thinking,” reducing an organism to “physicochemistry,” but because this way of thinking “is not exhaustion” and because the organism is “not a sum of instantaneous and punctual microscopic events” so much as it is, more profoundly, an “enveloping phenomenon, with the macroscopic style of an ensemble in movement.”39 Here nature itself reveals the “privileged expression” of ontology, the way toward ontology.40 Where even in Heidegger’s reflections on physis there is at least the possibility of thinking Being in terms of a negativity when it is seen from the perspective of beings, Merleau-Ponty’s return to “Nature as a leaf or layer of total Being”41 radicalizes Heidegger’s internal-connection between Being and appearing as expressed by the Greek experience of physis because it places physis within, as a co-constituent moment of, being. To think physis as a layer of being is to return to nature a primacy and productive power of “ontological mutations.”42 Understood as essentially coextensive with this originating, or as an element, I want to say that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh is not ignorant of this primacy of physis. The problem that arises for Heidegger in his 1943 Epilogue to What is Metaphysics? thus does not arise here in Merleau-Ponty’s thought: only when there are beings can there be being, which is defined only by its emergence. As a matter of fact, by arguing for a fragmentation and stylization of being that allows the difference itself to be incarnate, Melreau-Ponty clarifies a basic ambivalence in Heidegger’s meditations on physis and attempts to show that, in a more radical sense, being does not to have an “abiding meaning” that stands apart, nor does it have a negativity that is distinct from its coming-to-presence. Merleau-Ponty writes, for instance, that there is a “Being in promiscuity” in which “the in itself-for itself integration takes place.”43 This promiscuity, he remarks elsewhere, is “no longer a question of origins, nor limits, nor of a series of events going to a first cause, but one sole explosion of Being which is forever.”44 In such passages, Merleau-Ponty considers being not as a universal, general or fundamental order but as confliction, an inherent collision between a multiformity of various orders. Being is, in other words, a primordial production that refuses to be situated apart from the said, the heard and the seen. A “primordial production” of being suggests that our attention should be

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drawn back to a genesis of logos that has a share in producing one thought by deforming and deviating from another. It does not suggest that there is a “pure emergence” of being. Nor does Merleau-Ponty want to say that the flesh is a “first word” or a “pure instantiation.” Rather, being is always already in the midst of entities and bodies, endlessly striving to nestle in their interstices. It is at any time a particular invisible, adhering to the visible as the reverse side of something adheres to the facing side, and yet at the same giving birth to the visible.45 When Merleau-Ponty speaks of the reversibility of a flesh, it is partially to shed light on being’s emergence through the particulars and the inner-struggle inflicted on beings by a genotypic invisibility that is assigned to phenotypic, morphological particulars and able to radiate only so long as there are beings. Being is just the un-sayable, in-audible, in-visible, the reverse side of what is said, heard, seen. It is present in the “excessive claim” of what must be said, heard, seen, and it emerges whenever an existing order stops short and shows its limits and gaps, its tendencies.46 Not “oppositional,” therefore, the relation between the un-sayable, the in-audible, the in-visible, to the said, heard, seen, is rather “conjunctive.” Dufrenne suggests that the “and” of titles like “Eye and Mind” or The Visible and the Invisible cannot signify an opposition in any sense, not a dialectical relation, nor a relation of priority as in cause and effect, nor even as a relation of “complimentarity” as in form and content.47 In his Nature course notes, too, Merleau-Ponty says that, “[t]here is no priority of effect over cause,” and that “[i]t is impossible to distinguish . . . the essence and the existence in it” or “the meaning from the meaning where it is expressed.”48 In the Phenomenology of Perception he already speaks of an “operative reason” in which “[o]ne phenomenon releases another, not by means of some objective efficient cause, like those which link together natural events, but by the meaning which it holds out.”49 It is ultimately flesh that is “held out” in this way. Flesh names the emergency and struggle between what is meant and its locus of expression. It indicates a force through which different things are articulated, a force that is “not yet a body,” not yet even a “determined organ assigned to a precise function, but rather for designating this strange power of opening.”50 While it is true that flesh goes beyond the intersubjective and into a basic anonymity, at same time this flesh does not become disincarnated. The return to the abyss announced by Merleau-Ponty does not indicate a return to univocity and to origins but rather a return to physis. “Depth” is by no means counterproductive, and does not name a completion of a being beyond the world of modification and morpholaxis. For Merleau-Ponty, this depth is particularly radiant in the artwork, which penetrates into the flesh as an element of being and rectifies our inability to refer to the always unthematized flesh.

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D . P H Y S I S, F L E S H A N D A R T W O R K

For Heidegger, the artwork is a place to retrieve an experience of being that has the characteristics of physis. As he says in “Origins of a Work of Art,” for instance, the work inaugurates a struggle between that which is measured and limited, and thus determinate, and what remains indeterminate, “not mastered . . . concealed, confused.”51 The artwork betrays a certain “steadfastness,” appearing on the scene and imparting a determinate meaning to everything around it, allowing a certain world to shine forth in a determinate way. This artwork also therefore illuminates being itself as physis, “the emerging and arising in itself and in all things.”52 Heidegger’s famous passages on the Greek temple highlight that, standing there and resting on the ground, the temple is in sharp contrast with everything else that comes to appear by physis. The temple, too, clears and illuminates and appears as what it is, namely, a place in which the human bases his or her dwelling, the earth itself. By “earth” is meant here: that from which physis brings back and shelters everything that arises; thus the temple, standing there, opens up a world for the human at the same time that it sets this world back again on the earth, which in this way emerges as what it is, namely, native ground. It is worth mentioning here that earth, no longer understood in the modern sense of a “location of a mass in space,” exposes the original meaning of topos. For the Greeks, this topos is primary: the space of the temple is firstly understood in terms of the topos of its being; for the temple arrives in its place, and thus its place comes to be before it has space. In this sense, the temple is not simply reducible to its material extension, but is rather a “this” in relation to its place.53 Following Aristotle, then, the temple’s place is defined as to peras, a limit or boundary of the surrounding body, and is that locus at which something begins its essential unfolding.54 It is well known that Aristotle speaks of relations such as contact, touch and succession whenever he discusses place. He suggests that only an incarnated, physical being can touch and reach into toward its proper realm. It is only because the being is incarnated, and thus determinated, and yet belongs to a community with other beings in such a way that it can interact and exchange with others. In other words, the fundamental cause of the movements of incarnated beings is “the way of being” of those beings that can move. This way of being, I want to suggest, is what MerleauPonty dis-covers in the painting’s flesh, a “natural negativity” and an unfolding of a topos, a “being which is not a hard nucleus”55 but rather a condensing into determinate topoi that determinates the body. When Merleau-Ponty writes of the “depth” of the painterly work it is not to express a totality underneath beings but rather the profundity of beings that works by reeling things back into the withdrawal from which they originally

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arose. Depth in this sense describes what Heidegger calls earth, and indicates a process by which things come to be as they are. We can no doubt hear the echoes of physis in the hollows of this depth, especially when in “Eye and Mind” Merleau-Ponty equates it with a polymorphic56 and deflagrated57 being that does not create things so much as it allows things to form themselves.58 By invoking the elements (particularly the element of fire here), MerleauPonty suggests that the deflagrated being evidenced by the canvas unveils an originary struggle, a being, therefore, that is not “beyond all latency and all depth, having no true thickness [épasseur]”59 but rather able to break the “skin of things” and display “how the things become things, how the world becomes world.”60 It is true, however, that Merleau-Ponty’s obsession with Cézanne in “Cézanne Doubt” is primarily because the voluminosity of his canvases reveals a certain univocity, a Gestalt in which particulars are combined and inserted into a totality that subordinates them. In this case, the perceptual depth that is concealed at the canvas’ surface implies a hidden dimension in which objects and their shapes and colouration compete with one another as “branches,” but of one, singular Being. For instance, one of the canvases on which MerleauPonty reflects in “Cézanne’s Doubt,”61 Nature Morte avec Pommes, portrays objects sharing the same colours intermingled. From the grayish shadow of a plate, mixed largely with ultramarine and white and a complimentary vermilion to dim the hue’s intensity, to the grayish tone in the tablecloth, again mixed primarily with white, ultramarine, vermilion and also chrome yellow, the painting displays a world with little spatial recession, teeming with dense objectivities that are all strangely competing with one another in my field of vision. Differing little from the foreground to the background, the brushwork does nothing to relieve this. It at least tries to re-think the logical relation between the things and to evoke their internal linkage to one another, to exhibit a structure of being that translates itself into the visibility of lines, colour, movement. But by the time Merleau-Ponty writes “Eye and Mind,” his description of Cézanne’s Portrait of Vallier are specifically aimed at deflagration: the painting, he writes, “sets white spaces between the colours which take on the function of giving shape to, and setting off, a being more general than yellowbeing or green-being or blue-being.”62 Cézanne’s last paintings often leave white patches in order to allow them to come alive with the movement of nature and lay bare the painstaking process by which he translated the original shaping and setting of things. These white spaces, dormant between colours, indeed interlock particular events but now also characterize them with a kind of singularity. Particular beings such as a yellow-being, a green-being or a bluebeing are no longer simply subsumed by an individual gestalt-moment in the Cézanne but are rather specific open points of access with particular linkages

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that multiply, branch out, interweave and still ultimately reach back to the nullity of being that shines forth when the particulars are absorbed into their white spaces. These spaces are in a sense determinate, it is true, but they function by determinating particulars and are thus essential for Cézanne to convey nature’s movement. Because of these white spaces, one notices that in one of the portraits of Vallier (there were three, beginning from the end of 1905 or the beginning of 1906) that Vallier, Cézanne’s garden keeper at the time, is painted in similar colours and with similar handling as is Le Cabanon de Jourdan, which is said to be the painter’s last landscape and is no longer a classical view of nature but rather verges on dissolving into indeterminate abstraction. Vallier sits in profile, arms crossed, against the wall of Cézanne’s garden, over which we can just barely see a view of green and what seems to be refracted light. There is a shadowy outline against Vallier’s back but, again, this does nothing to give the canvas any spatial recession so much as it makes the gardener appear in the midst of wood and moss, brick and mortar, and the sense of strangeness in the back, all of which fall back into particular gaps. We might say that Vallier’s body, like the apples of the Nature Morte described above, “swells” and has no exact location.63 But in the portrait in particular this lack is precisely what gives Vallier shape and is in this sense itself made explicit. The painting “is a spectacle of something,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “only by being a spectacle of nothing . . .”64 Vallier’s body, since it is emergent and determinated by something indeterminate, is perhaps on display, but more so in the sense of displicare, which in Latin means “to scatter” or “to disperse” and in Medieval Latin even means “to unfold,” and has the sense of something deploying itself. Merleau-Ponty’s description of the portrait, I want to suggest, implies a depth that goes beyond the “perceptual depth” of “Cézanne’s Doubt,” a depth in the sense of “reversible dimensions” and “global locality,”65 a place from which entities well up and also withdraw and thus bespeak of the very emergency and unfolding of being itself. In connection to this depth, Merleau-Ponty also writes in “Eye and Mind” of “the modes of space,” or of a “prosaic space,” by which he means a space that “radiates around planes that cannot be assigned to any place at all.”66 A long Working Note in the Visible and the Invisible reiterates and expands on this theme of prosaic space: The Euclidean space is the model for perspectival being . . ..Underlying appropriateness of this idea of space (and of velocity, movement, time) with the classical ontology of the Ens realissimum, of the infinite entity. The topological space, on the contrary, a milieu in which are circumscribed relates of proximity, of envelopment, etc. is the image of a being that, like Klee’s touches of colour, is at the same time older than everything and “of the first day” (Hegel) . . . It is encountered not only at the level of the physical world, but again it is constitutive of life, and finally it founds the wild principle of Logos—It is this wild or brute being that intervenes at all levels to overcome the problems of the classical ontology (mechanism, finalism . . .67

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This is a particularly dense Working Note, to be sure. It should be stressed, however, that the phrase “topological space” re-describes for Merleau-Ponty the “prosaic space” of “Eye and Mind” and also, as a “wild” principle encountered at the level of a physical world, constitutive of life, and finally overcoming the finalism of classical ontology, further draws out the implications for a deflagrated being that is “in no place at all” and yet emphatically, primarily topological. This does not mean that being can be understood as a utopia, which, although it has no real locality and is literally a no-where (eu-topos), affords consolation by opening up an untroubled region.68 Nor can being be seen as a “heterotopia” that, as an extra-ordinary order, existing elsewhere, desiccates words by stopping them in their tracks and contesting the very possibility of any language at all.69 In Merleau-Ponty’s notes and in “Eye and Mind,” being instead opens up a prose of the world, and as such must be understood as “radically atopic”70 such that it can manifest itself without becoming a positivity with a certain permanency.71 The flesh, as an element of being, names such a being; by naming a depth in this sense, the flesh, to use Merleau-Ponty’s own descriptions of an “element,” is a “general thing” and a “midway” that is a primordial modification, a process of emerging and determining, a “being before being.”72 Only such a being, a being with a kind of ambivalence, can confer itself on the canvas. Rajiv Kaushik, Department of Philosophy, Brock University, Canada NOTES 1

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, henceforth referred to as VI, Ed. Claude Lefort and Trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 147. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., p. 139. 4 Ibid., p. 243. 5 Ibid., p. 179. 6 Barbaras, Renaud, The Being of the Phenomenon. Trans. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 157. 7 Ibid. 8 Found in Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 39–83. 9 VI, 253. 10 Ibid., p. 167. 11 Ibid., p. 20. 12 Ibid., p. 179. 13 Ibid. 14 Lawlor, Leonard, “The End of Ontology: Interrogation in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze” in Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought Vol. 3, Eds. Renaud

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Barbaras, Mauro Carbone, and Leonard Lawlor (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. VRIN, 2003), p. 244. 15 My translation. The original quote in French reads: “Il n’y a pas chez Merleau-Ponty de mise en question radicale de la subjectivité, au sens où il n’y a pas de du sujet qui mette au jour ses présupposés métaphysiques et qui s’explique avec la tradition au long de laquelle il s’est constitué: à savoir, à partir des mutation de l’hypokeimenon en substantia et de celle-ci en subjectum.” Haar, Michel, La philosophie français entre phénoménologie et métaphysique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), p. 21. 16 VI p. 15. 17 Haar writes: “il y a par contre radicalisation des principales découvertes de la Phénoménologie de la perception et notamment du thème de la et de l’anonymat de la perception . . . (au point qu’il n’y a pas, face à une qualité sensorielle par exemple, un sujet face à un objet ni une mienneté primordiale).” ibid. 18 The whole of the original quotation reads: “D’autre part, il y a consubstantialité, bien que ˙ la chair ne soit pas >, au sense métaphysique, mais >, c’est-à-dire qu’il y a monisme radical. D’autre part, il y a seulement , ce qui veut dire participation à distance de mons corps au visible, à un universel, mais auquel il est difficile de prêter précisément cette > . . .” ibid., p. 18. ˙ implique chez Merleau-Ponty un accès à 19 The original quotation reads: “. . . le sens de l’Être ˙ l’Être en soi et à un point de vue de tous les points de vue (quoi qu’il en dise), à partir duquel on ˙ assiste à un appropriation totale du sujet par l’Être” ibid., p. 22. 20 Ibid., p. 31. 21 Ibid., p. 36. 22 Heidegger, Martin, Gesamtausgabe, henceforth referred to as GA, vol. 9, entitled Wegmarken, Ed. Friedrich-wilhelm von Herrmann (Franfkfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975), p. 309. 23 The difference between the two epilogues is quoted and reflected upon in: Richardson, William J., Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1973), p. 501; cf. pp. 500–1. I am borrowing from Richardson’s argument here. 24 Ibid. 25 Heidegger, Martin, Einführung in die Metaphysik, henceforth referred to as EM (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953), p. 115. 26 Ibid., p. 54. 27 Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962), p. 51. 28 GA, p. 264. 29 Ibid. 30 Aristotle, Metaphysics 1028b. 31 GA 9:274. 32 EM, p. 77–8. 33 Ibid., p. 95. 34 Aristotle, Physics 193 b8-12. 35 Heidegger, Martin, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, in GA vol. 24, p. 444. 36 Ibid. 37 EM, p. 47. 38 Ibid., p. 48. 39 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Nature: College Notes from the Collège de France, henceforth referred to as N , Trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), p. 207. 40 Ibid., p. 204. 41 Ibid.

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Ibid. VI, 253. 44 Ibid., p. 265. 45 Bernet, Rudolf, “The Phenomenon of the Gaze in Merleau-Ponty and Lacan,” in Chiasmi International Vol. 1 (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. VRIN, 1999), p. 111. 46 Waldenfels, Bernard, Order in the Twilight, Trans. David J. Parent (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996), pp. 116–7. 47 Dufrenne, Mikel, “Eye and Mind” in Merleau-Ponty: Perception, Structure, Language, Ed. John Sallis (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1981), p. 256. 48 N , p. 174. 49 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith (London: Routledge Press, 1992), p. 50. 50 Dufrenne, “Eye and Mind,” p. 260. 51 Heidegger, Martin, “Origins of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, Trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 55. 52 Ibid., p. 42. 53 Metaphysics, 1003 a8. 54 Heidegger, Martin, History of the Concept of Time, Trans. T. Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 136. 55 Nature, p. 224. 56 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “Eye and Mind,” in Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, Ed. James E. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 174. 57 Ibid. p. 180. 58 Ibid., p. 181. 59 Ibid., p. 174. 60 Ibid., p. 181. 61 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Sense and Nonsense, Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 9–25. 62 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “Eye and Mind,” p. 181. 63 I am referring especially to the following passage in “Cézanne’s Doubt”: “ If one outlines the shape of an apple with a continuous line, one makes an object of the shape, whereas the contour is rather the ideal limit toward which the sides of the apple recede in depth. Not to indicate any shape would be to deprive the objects of their identity. To trace just a single outline sacrifices depth—that is, the dimension in which the thing is presented not as spread out before us but as an inexhaustible reality full of reserves. That is why Cézanne follows the selling of the object in modulated colors and indicates several outlines in blue. Rebounding among these, one’s glance captures a shape that emerges from among them all, just as it does in perception,“ p. 15 64 “Eye and Mind,” pp. 181. 65 Ibid. p. 180 66 Ibid. 67 VI, pp. 210–11. 68 I am using Foucault’s descriptions of various forms of topos here. Utopias, he says, “afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold.” They “open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy even though the road to them is chimerical.” Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971), p. 48. 69 “[H]eterotopias desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of language at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.” ibid. 43

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See Visker, Rudi, Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), pp. 103–4. See also Waldenfels’ Order in the Twilight: “The extra-ordinary as an existing other order draws its glittering brilliance from an extraordinary that suggests an order possible elsewhere. This elsewhere is not to be understood as pure nowhere, as utopia, but as an atopia . . .” pp. 116–7. 71 Visker, Truth and Singularity, p. 222. 72 “Elements (in Bachelard’s sense), not objects but fields, subdued being, non-thetic being, being before being,” VI, p. 243.

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E M B O D I M E N T A N D E X I S T E N C E : M E R L E AU - P O N T Y A N D T H E L I M I T S O F N AT U R A L I S M

ABSTRACT

The actual debate about naturalizing consciousness is in need of a more comprehensive notion of embodiment. Merleau-Ponty’s existentialism of embodiment is relevant for this project. One can accept the validity of a naturalistic explanation of corporeal functions like perception and movement by correlating them to neurobiological activity. But for Merleau-Ponty, to exist as a human being means something much more complicated than exerting biological functions like breathing, feeding, perceiving and moving. We need to understand man as an embodied sense-giver. For man who “exists” as a corps-sujet, the lived body is not a functional machine that elicits an appropriate reaction to an environmental stimulus. Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty fundamentally challenges this input-output, stimulus-reaction model. Embodiment is for him an essential element of human existence, which is defined by what he calls the symbolic function. Only through an understanding of existential behaviour can we comprehend the specificity of human embodiment, and eventually explain it properly. This entails that naturalistic explanations will have to be integrated in an existential approach. The project of naturalizing conscious embodiment is not invalidated by this approach, but acquires its proper, i.e. limited significance in the context of understanding human existence. I will first sketch, with reference to Husserl, the principles of a naturalistic understanding of embodiment and perception. I will then present Merleau-Ponty’s original analysis of embodied, meaning constituting existence and show its relevance for an alternative, more comprehensive explanation of perception, which is supported by recent cognitive science. One can illustrate this analysis by presenting Merleau-Ponty’s existential interpretation of the various pathologies of war-injured Schneider. One can then formulate conclusions as to the broader concept of embodiment that results from this analysis and point to its implementation in current cognitive research about intersubjective understanding.

93 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 93–104. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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Husserl explains that the naturalistic interpretation of human existence is secondary to the more fundamental natural experience of the normal phenomenon world. The world is originally given in what He calls “natural” experience (natürliche Erfahrung), where it appears in all its richness, displaying not only physical nature but also living creatures and a variety of meaningful (cultural) objects, that we appreciate for their practical, esthetical or ethical value. (Husserl, Hua IV, §49e, pp. 182–183; Hua IX, §6, pp. 103–104) Within the naturalistic attitude abstraction is made from this ideal meaning of cultural objects. (Husserl, Hua IX, §17) This abstraction is constitutive of a specific experience, the so-called experience of nature (naturale Erfahrung) or physical experience, whose object is the totality of physical spatio-temporal things. These natural things appear as “mere objects” (blosse Sachen), because there is no attention for their value. (Husserl, Hua IV, p. 15 note 2, §11) We experience only natural predicates, viz. spatio-temporal properties and sensuous qualities (naturale, rein sachliche Prädikate). (Husserl, Hua IV, pp. 2, 16; Hua VIII, p. 315) Naturalism further apprehends things as realities, which implies a functional definition of nature. We perceive the physical thing in a sequence of temporal states as a bearer of properties and thus as a substantial reality. These states are the result of the thing’s causal dependence upon determining circumstances. For instance only an illuminated object, that is causally dependent upon the light, displays its color. Spatiality, temporality and causal reality are its essential characteristics. The world of physical experience is thus a totality of causal realities. (Husserl, Hua IV, pp. 41–55, §§31, 33) In line with physical experience, naturalism understands the animated body as a physical reality. (Husserl, Hua IX, p. 106; Hua XXIX, pp. 23–26, 90–99, text n 9: Der Physiker und die menschlichen Leiber als Körper) The naturalistic study of the psychical properties requires a counter-abstraction to direct attention away from the physical to the psychical. (Husserl, Hua VI, p. 231) The psyche as a bearer of properties is formally equal to the physical in that internal psychical mechanisms are causal. The laws of functional coexistence and succession of the psychical data regulate internal or idio-psychical dependence, which explains the entire conscious life of an individual. As a reality, the psyche is also causally dependent upon external factors, such as the physical body and through it upon the surrounding material world. The soul is also constituted by psycho-physical dependence. Physiological processes, some of which are induced by external influences, reductively explain all psychical phenomena, from sense data to moral life. (Husserl, Hua V, p. 16) So the psyche is a dependent reality, existing as a layer of the psycho-physical reality “animate being”, and can only be experienced when the physical body is

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given. Naturalism understands consciousness as a causal reality, which exhibits psychical properties constituted by psycho-physical and idio-psychical dependencies. (Husserl, Hua IV, p. 142; Hua XIII, pp. 91ff.) Human being as a reality is thus the causal unity of body and soul. As Husserl formulates it in Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft: “And so the naturalist (. . .) sees nothing else but nature, more precisely in the first instance physical nature. Everything that exists is either in itself physical, and thus belongs to the all encompassing unity of physical nature, or is psychical. But in that case it is still not more than a dependent variable of the physical and in the best case a secondary parallel epiphenomenon. All that exists is of psychophysical nature, which means: unequivocally determined by causal regularities.” (Husserl, Hua XXV, p. 9) EXAMPLE: PERCEPTION

For the naturalist, perception should be treated as an example of psychophysical dependence. After all, what else is perception for him but a process in the brain whereby the perceptual system constructs an internal representation of the external, physical world? This representation is caused by complex physico-psychical mechanisms, and is itself a neurological process. In this view, there isn’t even any reason to understand this representation as something mental. Merleau-Ponty explicitly mentions this comprehension of perception where he says that “physiology thinks it can follow, from the receptors (sensors) to the nervous centres, the projection of the external world in the organism.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 68) The representation is a physical state of the representing organism, caused by neurological input, and causes itself behaviour. As Noë says in his recent book on perception, “Susan Hurley has aptly called this simple view of the relation between perception and action the input-output picture: Perception is input from world to mind, action is output from mind to world (. . .)”. (Noë, 2004, p. 3 citation from Hurley, 1998) The initial idea, that the processor of the input is a black box, whose internal mechanisms we ignore, has long since been abandoned for the functionalist view that has been perfected by computer functionalism. Phenomenology’s attack on naturalism is complex, but its original analysis of perception is a core element of this move. This is perfectly comprehensible, since, as Merleau-Ponty said, perception is our first contact with reality. If a naturalistic explanation of perception encounters difficulties, then it is evident that naturalism is a problematical theory of how man is related to the world. The phenomenology of perception is only possible when the subject as well as the experienced world is described correctly. As Merleau-Ponty said, the first philosophical act is to return to the lived world of daily experience that lies beneath the objective world of science. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 69) This

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requires a distancing from the “scientific” world, because this conception is prejudiced (le préjugé du monde). Science presumes that the world is «readymade», objective, consisting of physical objects; and understands the organism as a special physical object, situated in an objective spatio-temporal environment. This conception founds the traditional epistemological explanation of knowledge, which starts from the result of knowledge, namely the perceived object, and then causally reconstructs the process of perceiving. Merleau-Ponty identifies here what he calls a sensualist conception. The world is the source of physical stimuli which cause sensations, who then by a passive associative mechanism or by an active apperception lead to the perception of the object. It is possible to question this approach on the basis of an interpretation of the results of cognitive science. This interpretation sustains the rejection of a functionalist, causal explanation of perception in favour of an intentional understanding. As a consequence, the subject of perception is not to be understood as an organism that responds to stimuli, but as an embodied subject, that stands in an intentional relation to the world. Phenomena like change and experiential blindness are important data, which help to undermine the naturalistic explanation, because they demonstrate that merely to be given visual impressions is not yet to see. Perception requires an active structuring of the perceptual field which transcends the information contained in the data. Noë gives the evidence of congenital blind people, who after surgery get all the necessary visual input, yet initially don’t see anything (experiential blindness). (Noë, 2004, pp. 3–11) In the case of change blindness, people neglect evident, clearly visible changes in their visual field. Without detailing the interpretation of these phenomena, it is clear that they exemplify cases of input without perception. Other phenomena illustrate the reverse, namely perception without input. One can think here of the famous Kanisza triangle, where people see on the basis of the perception of three triangularly arranged so-called pacmanfigures, a slightly brighter triangle against a background. (Kanizsa, 1955, pp. 7–30) The perception of a homogeneous, filled-in visual field, although there is no input at the level of the fovea and of the so-called blind spot (papila nervi optici), equally illustrates this point. So there clearly is a discrepancy between input and perception, which forces us to conclude that the relation between the perceiver and what is seen, is not a simple causal relation. Percepts do not cause, but are constituted or constructed by the perceiver. This constitutive relation is not causal but intentional. With Merleau-Ponty we may conclude that the naturalistic analysis of perception is highly problematical. “The sense and structure of the perceived are for us not the simple result of psychophysical processes.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 73)

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T H E B O DY A N D T H E S Y M B O L I C F U N C T I O N

The critique of the naturalistic explanation of perception is based on an alternative comprehension of embodiment as the fundamental mode of being of the subject of perception. The subject of this intentional relation is not the brain, nor the mind as causally related to the body, but an embodied, sense-giving existence. Consequently, the comprehension of the perceived world equally differs from the naturalistic approach. The perceived world is not a totality of causally related physical objects, but what we should call, following MerleauPonty, a phenomenal field, which consists of three core elements: the embodied subject, the other person and the lived world (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 73). We can refer to A. Noë again, who adopts this criticism of a naively naturalistic explanation of perception, by further developing this new notion of the perceiving, embodied subject in his so-called enactive approach. I cite him extensively to illustrate this point. “It is a mistake to suppose that vision just is a process whereby an internal world-model is built up (. . .). Vision shouldn’t be thought of as a computation performed by the brain on inputs provided by the retina. There is a solidifying consensus in cognitive science that information available to an active animal greatly outstrips information available to a static retina, and that it is a mistake to suppose that the animal’s data for visual perception are confined to the contents of the retinal image. If we think of the perceiver not as the brain-photoreceptor system, but rather as the whole animal, situated in the environment, free to move around and explore, then we can take seriously the possibility that the data for vision (as distinct from data for the photoreceptor) are not the content of a static snapshot-like retinal image. Perceivers aren’t confined to their retinal images in the way traditional theorists have supposed.” (Noë, 2004, pp. 20–22) So we must reject the input-output picture. “To see is not just to have visual sensations; it is to have visual sensations that are integrated, in the right sort of way, with bodily skills”. (Noë, 2004, p. 29) This leads Noë to formulate what he calls the enactive approach to perception, where the basic idea is that “Perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession of bodily skills. What we perceive is determined by what we do (or what we know how to do); it is determined by what we are ready to do. (. . .) We enact our perceptual experience; we act it out. To be a perceiver is to understand, implicitly, the effects of movement on sensory stimulation.” (Noë, 2004, p. 1) Rectangularity for instance is not captured by specific tactile sensations when you hold something in your hand or touch it. But it is understood by manipulating the object, i.e. by turning it around or by your active explorative touching. It is the experienced movement of your hand over the object that makes you capture its form. This movement causes proprioception

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and more precisely kinaesthesia, the sensation of movement. Only the combination of kinaesthetic and tactile sensations, whereby as Husserl showed the second kind of sensation is motivated by the first, generates this perception of the rectangular form. One can generalize this finding into the principle: No perception without movement. The idea that the perceiver is an embodied subject governing over her body as a freely moveable organ of perception was first formulated by Husserl. (Husserl, Hua I, p. 128; Hua IV, p. 145; Hua VI, pp. 220–221) Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception can be considered as a further development of this analysis of embodied existence. To be embodied means to situate oneself in a specific environment, to engage in a particular situation. The world is for instance visible, can be manipulated etcetera, because I am embodied. Perception has its origin in the vital bond between the perceiver, his body and the world. I perceive, I am sensitive to colours and other sensible qualities, because my body has an original pact with empirical reality. Sensation is a natural co-existence and communion with this reality. (communion, connaturalité, Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 370) This follows from my bodily constitution. Consequently, my natural affinity with the world has to be understood as an impersonal, anonymous pact (on perçoit). Perception is not the result of a conscious, intentional act, but is naturally mine. The perceiving “corps-sujet” is a natural self (moi naturel, Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 250). Sensibility occurs in the margin of my personal live, since I’ve always been an embodied self that sides with the world. Vision is a capacity that is naturally directed at, attuned to a visual field. My organism is originally a pre-personal belonging to the world; it is anonymous and exists in an impersonal mode. (l’anonymat de notre corps, Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 101) Merleau-Ponty calls this kind of embodiment the normal, habitual or customary body, and he distinguishes it from the actual body a person lives. A person who suffers phantom-pain in an amputated limb neglects this amputation, and returns to the habitual body. The person refuses to acknowledge the actuality of the mutilated body. According to Merleau-Ponty, this is neither a conscious nor an unconscious mental act. But this pain can’t have a simple physiological explanation either, since the physical cause is literally absent. In the case of the lived body, we are confronted with a third term, the so-called existential attitude, which supersedes the dichotomy of the physical and the psychical. “To refuse the mutilation is an attitude of our existence.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 102) This lived body is not experienced as an object, nor does it simply function as a cause of sensations. Psychology elucidates bodily experience in terms of a body schema, which means that we have at every moment a global, practical and implicit notion of our proper body, of its posture and its relation to other objects. My body appears as an attitude towards the world, in relation

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to an actual or possible task. I thereby experience my body as dynamical, as what Merleau-Ponty calls an “I can”. It is a capacity, a propensity to do certain things. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 160) He speaks of a practical knowledge of the body, which is not representational: praktignosia. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 114) This practical knowledge also structures the space of my agency. The spatiality of my body and my space constitute a practical system (MerleauPonty, 1945, p. 119). The proper spatiality of my body manifests itself in my activity. If I want to move, I do not first have to locate my body as an object in objective space and situate it with respect to the place I want to reach. On the contrary, my activity itself situates my body in a given world, which is structured around my body, and orients it towards and in a virtual space as the correlate of my actual and possible movement. Mobility is thus essentially linked to a possible space into which the organism can project itself, even in the absence of any concrete, urgent task. The possible, abstract movements and the virtual space that is linked to them, transcend the actual, given world. In that sense, Merleau-Ponty attributes to moving lived bodies the so-called projection-function or the symbolic function, which is essential to embodied existence. (fonction de projection, Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 129–130; fonction symbolique, ibid. p. 141). It is because of this “reaching beyond” that the subject is situated or embedded in its environment. To be situated by definition means to be surrounded by a horizon of what is not (yet) actually there. The symbolic, referring function is in that sense for Merleau-Ponty the expression of a fundamental mode of being, which he indicates with the term “intentional arch”. (arc intentionnel, Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 156) The embodied subject exists as transcendence, as a directedness towards the other, which is symbolically represented, although not mentally, in the present. This transcendence is not confined to movement alone, but characterizes our entire way of being, and projects around us the past, the future, our human environment, the perceived world, our physical, moral and cultural situation, and in that sense situates us in all this respects. The study of war-injured Schneider, whose projection-function is disabled, clarifies what this means. Schneider is unable to situate himself in the practical world, because he became incapable of executing actions which transcend the immediate here and now. For instance, he can indicate his nose when the doctor previously touched it, but doesn’t succeed in putting his finger on his nose when not touched and only asked to do so. Because his nose isn’t tactually or visually given, and to find it requires the execution of a virtual movement of the arm, Schneider is incapable of initiating that movement. The existential diagnosis further indicates that the projection-function is not localised in some particular perceptive system like seeing, although he suffers massive visual deficiencies, which then causes the dysfunctions in other systems. This

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function doesn’t belong to any sort of symbolic consciousness either; it would be absurd to say that Schneider’s lesion is metaphysical. The symbolic function rather founds the subject’s total attitude towards the world; which means it is present in seeing, touching as well as in the explicitly conscious relation to the world. It characterizes and pervades the entire way of existing, and explains the proper synthesis and coherence of all different bodily and existential capacities. The symbolic function founds the crucial notion of meaning and signification, which has a basic existential connotation. To signify means to refer beyond itself. The sense-giving activity of the embodied self presupposes the transcendence that characterizes its symbolic functioning. The presence of this function entails that everything is meaningful for a normal existence, because the world is not confined to its actual, present state. In that sense, the whole of human embodied existence is significant and constitutes meaning. Synaesthesia, Merleau-Ponty claims, should be clarified on the basis of this referring. The senses refer to each other in the sense that an inter-sensorial experience, where e.g. colours are heard or sounds felt or smells seen, is possible and necessary. Sexuality too is a mode of existential being, that implies the projection-function. Merleau-Ponty refuses the causal role of the sexual drive, and hence any reductive biological or psycho-analytical explanation of sexual behaviour, but understands sexuality as a mode of intentionality which bestows a sexual significance on the world by referring to the other on the basis of love or lust. Because of the dysfunction of the projection-function, Schneider’s sexuality is equally deficient. When his partner takes the initiative, he is capable to join in the foreplay, but when she stops, he doesn’t undertake any further action. For Merleau-Ponty, this means that Schneider’ sexual actual state doesn’t refer beyond itself, that it is encapsulated in the here and now, and so that it doesn’t have any significance. Because of this deficiency, the foreplay isn’t lived as what it should normally mean, namely directed at what should follow it: sexual intercourse.

MEANING AND PERCEPTION

Merleau-Ponty claims to give a new, existential analysis of perception on the basis of the central role of the symbolic function of embodied existence. The sense-giving, structuring activity which is the condition of possibility of the appearance of the empirical world is founded on the projectionfunction. Perception is sense-giving by the very mobility of my body. And Merleau-Ponty wants us to understand this quite literally. “So we have to recognize under the name of look, hand and of body in general a system

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that is dedicated to the inspection of the world, capable of bridging distances, of piercing into the perceptual future, of painting a sense in the world. (. . .) Every perception, every action presupposed by it, every human usage of the body is already primordial expression, (. . .) the primal operation which implants a sense in what had none, and which thus (. . .) installs an order (. . .).” (Merleau-Ponty, 1960, p. 108) Expression doesn’t mean here that something is expressed, like for instance a thought in words, but means constitution of meaning, sense-giving. “The most proper characteristic of human gesture is to signify beyond its simply given existence, to inaugurate sense (. . .).” (ibid., p. 109) The world in all its aspects, spatial, visual, tactile etcetera is structured by embodied subjectivity. Reality is spatial because the embodied subjectivity co-exists with the empirical reality. The spatial orientation of the visible world is not determined by the position of my body as an object in three-dimensional space, but by my body as a system of possible action, that is by my virtual body, of which the phenomenal, i.e. central position is defined by its task and situation. My body is there where it has something to do, says Merleau-Ponty. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 289) Emanating and radiating from itself, the body projects an environment in which it can act, and this is the source of space with its subjective orientation, directions and co-ordinates. This system constitutes the phenomenally oriented space. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 291) The perceived world is necessarily oriented around this subject, based on it anchoring (ancrage) in the world. The pre-personal existence opens a structured field of action in which to move. The unity of the object and of the world is not the result of an intellectual synthesis by a knowing subject, but is correlated with the mode of being of the embodied existence. The unity of the subject manifests itself in the body schema, body image and the phenomena of proprioception and synaesthesia. I live my own unity which founds the empirical, experienced unity of the object. The pre-objective unity correlates with the unity of the phenomenal, lived body. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, pp. 276, 363) The perceived object has a form, a location, colours, tactile properties etcetera because my body is situated, I can see, feel, and etcetera. The intentionality of perception is not an intellectual process, but a mode of being embodied. The mobility of my body is fundamental for this intentional relation to the world. Being able to move opens and directs the body to a presumptively totally given object, and to a world wherein this object appears. In this sense movement exemplifies the symbolic character of my embodiment. Because I can move around the object, and complement my limited sight of it with new perspectives, the complete object is the object that I’ve seen from all sides. To move is an original intentional relation to the world. If one accepts that perception is perspectival because of the situation

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of the moving body, one also presumes that different, complementary perspectives of the same object are possible. From my own point of view, I am present in and to the world which is the horizon of my perception, and which as such founds my particular perspective of it. It wouldn’t make sense to speak of my particular view on the world, if this completed world weren’t implied by my proper perspective. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 380) So situated perception and particular point of view mutually co-found each other. The totally given object correlates with my movement, and the specific position I have at this moment can only be identified as a particular view of the object when it is presumed to be more than the object of this actual perspective. The natural world is the horizon of all horizons. To perceive means to engage in the present a multitude of future possible perceptions, which the future cannot guarantee. In this respect, one must understand the object as the target of a bodily teleology. (MerleauPonty, 1945, p. 373) It is the correlate of a practical and horizon-like synthesis. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 376) Temporality is the original essence of being embodied. Time does not belong to the objective world, because past and future do not exist (anymore or not yet). They are both a dimension of our subjective presence in the world. Merleau-Ponty underlines the priority of the present wherein past and future appears. He refers to Husserl’s analysis of internal time consciousness, who understands retention and protention as the conscious modes of past and future, to illustrate this embeddednes of past and future in the present. Time consciousness is a condition of possibility of the subject’s life. Time is in that sense a transcendentale. Perception for instance is only possible when the perceptual presence of the perceived object is sustained by a past and directed at a future. Embodied existence is this openness towards other temporal dimensions, which emanate from the present, but also give it its signification as now. A momentary snapshot of a perceived object is necessarily integrated in a series of experiences which are directed at a presumptively future appearing object that confirms the past experiences of it. So embodied perception presupposes temporality, this mode of existence is necessarily temporal. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 483) Temporality is openness, and precisely this characteristic founds meaning and significance. The significance of the perceived object is precisely that it is only one aspect of a complete object, which appears as goal at the horizon of perception. This sense-giving openness, which coincides with temporality, is the functioning intentionality, another name for embodied existence. The object is more than the correlate of an actual perception, because it is also perceived as really transcending embodied perception. It appears as existing in the world, which presupposes a completed synthesis, which is actually

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impossible because of the facticity of the perceiving subject. This contradiction between the reality of the world and its incomplete appearance defines the phenomenal field, the world as the correlate of embodied perception. Yet at the same time, it opens up another dimension of existence. This new conception of embodied existence enables us to eliminate the classical problem of the other mind that is linked to naturalism and helps to further explicate the symbolic nature of embodied existence. I want to conclude by just briefly indicating this solution. Merleau-Ponty’s main argument for the condition of possibility of intersubjectivity rests on the fundamental epistemological principle that defines Phenomenology. Since nothing can count as real unless it appears in my experience, everything which is true is mine. But precisely this truth or reality also requires its giveness for others. Objectivity means intersubjectivity. These other perceivers are symbolically implicated in my perception, because my perception is necessarily, due to my situated embodiment, only one possible view of the percept, and thus refers in principle to all other possible perceptions of the object. This means that my bodily exploration of the world can be generalised. (Merleau-Ponty, 1969, p. 190) So my proper embodiment, which is defined by the symbolic function, is the transcendental condition of possibility of intersubjectivity. But of course the next question then is how the other can be experienced. This demands an analysis of the phenomenon of bodily expression, which I will reserve for another paper. But the main idea should be clear by now. The subject of intersubjective experience is not an embodied mind which tries to perceive another mind on the basis of her bodily behaviour. Against this theory of empathy, Merleau-Ponty argues that intentions, feelings etcetera don’t lie hidden behind bodily behaviour. The body expresses my existence, and the same holds for another person. Her sad face is her sadness. When she laughs, she is happy; she doesn’t laugh because she is happy. I can encounter another person because we share our embodiment. This sharing entails that my body symbolizes the intentionality of the other and vice versa. I don’t have to compare my bodily behaviour with the behaviour of the other person. Because of our shared embodiment – intercorporéité – everything we do has immediately intersubjective signification, and we do understand directly what the other means. Recent cognitive research confirms this phenomenological claim. Intersubjectivity is fundamentally an understanding of the other embodied self as another situated subject, whose situation is a possibility for me. (see Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008, Chapter 9, pp. 171–196) University of Antwerp, Belgium

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Gallagher, Shaun and Zahavi, Dan, The Phenomenological Mind (London: Routledge, 2008) Hurley Susan, Consciousness in Action (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) Husserl, Edmund, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Ed. M. Biemel, Husserliana vol. 4 (Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff, 1952) Husserl, Edmund, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften. Ed. M. Biemel, Husserliana vol. 5 (Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff, 1953) Husserl, Edmund, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Ed. W. Biemel, Husserliana vol. 6 (Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff, 1954) Husserl, Edmund, Phänomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925. Ed. W. Biemel, Husserliana vol. 9 (Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff, 1962) Husserl, Edmund, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersuhjektivitüt. Texte aus dem Nachlaß. Erster Teil: 1905–1920. Ed. I. Kern, Husserliana vol. 13 (Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff, 1973) Kanizsa, Gaetano, “Margini quasi-percettivi in campi con stimolazione omogenea,” Rivista di Psicologia 49:1, (1955), pp. 7–30. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phénoménologie de la Perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, La Prose du Monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) Noë, Alva, Action in Perception (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004)

S E C T I O N II

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T H E M E T H O D O F K A RO L W O J T Y Ł A : A WAY B E T W E E N P H E N O M E N O L O G Y, P E R S O N A L I S M AND METHAPHYSICS

ABSTRACT

Karol Wojtyła attempted, with his philosophy, to unify the philosophies of being and of consciousness in the field of anthropology and ethics. For that matter he has used a philosophical method similar to the phenomenological method with which he seeks to achieve an ontological access to reality. This text analyzes the characteristics of this method by showing: (1) the method is very close to the one applied by the realistic branch of phenomenology but differs in some significant issues such as its radical realism which can be materialized in the non-use of the epoché and its ontological claim; (2) the method is close, in its presumption, to Aristotelian-Thomistic gnoseology but also differs in substantial issues such as the assertion that intelligence directly grasps the singular. The analysis shows, therefore, that Wojtyła’s method is original and thus, it can establish, from its gnoseological premises, a connection with ontology and, to some extent, with metaphysics, while the latter is more complex and it is not completely solved, as shows the problem of suppositum. 1. INTRODUCTION

The personalist philosophy is in the process of establishing its roots and facing a period of establishing and pondering of the legacy bequeathed by the great Personalists of the twentieth century.1 One of the major issues unresolved is the relationship between personalism and classical metaphysics. The issue is quite complex because, though an essential agreement can be found at what might be called “world view”, the technical approach with which they addresses philosophical issues is very different, if not opposite. Personalism basically uses the phenomenological method, while classical metaphysics begin from the analysis of the being. Phenomenology provides a rich and modern perspective, but it could be criticized for a certain incapability to deepen, or grasping the radical; metaphysics instead not only reaches the radical, but begins there; it is, no doubt, deep but also abstract and anthropologically limited. This complex counter position demands a solution because, if it isn’t accomplished, 107 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 107–129. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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personalism would be unstable. It could be thought that a tendency towards metaphysics would mean to lose its anthropological richness, or instead, an inclination towards phenomenology would mean a lack of ontological scope therefore becoming a superficial and provisional philosophy; it would only be a first approach until reaching the true philosophy: metaphysics. One way to confront this problem is by analyzing the specific characteristics of the philosophical method of each perspective because, without covering completely this broad topic, it provides very valuable indications. The method indicates the pathway to reality that each philosophy uses, and is inseparably linked to the specific conception of reality that is assumed. In fact, according to the place to where a traveler wants to arrive, he chooses one path (methodos) or another to get there, and so, he gets to one or another landscape. The same is true in philosophy; the method determines the type of reality to be studied and, therefore, the philosophical project’s territory. That area, in empiricism has some characteristics, others in metaphysics and others as well in phenomenology. Which are personalism’s own characteristics and what is its relationship with the above? These are fundamental questions because the scientific status of personalism and also its placement in the conjunction of contemporary philosophies relays largely on these answers. They are, however, difficult questions for being borderline and of indirect character: self-reflective. The philosophy of Karol Wojtyła provides an excellent testing ground to investigate this difficult problem because it consists of an attempted fusion between Thomism, or classical ontology, and phenomenology; for that reason he had to consider this issue explicitly. His philosophy doesn’t starts from the being, but from the person while trying to provide the ontological status. Therefore, it constitutes a privileged place to investigate the issue we are raising. Moreover, although he doesn’t consider the methodological issue extensively, he does consider it in an explicit mode. In the following pages we will try to determine his position as precisely as possible in order to elucidate the value of his response. 2. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PROJECT OF KAROL WOJTYŁA

Before confronting directly the question of the method we will indicate the main features of Wojtyła’s philosophical project because it will serve us to focus the question.2 It is well known, that his first contacts with philosophy took place through Thomistic philosophy in particular with metaphysics.3 Later, during his Roman period, he acquired a deep knowledge of this path through a direct study of the Thomistic texts, particularly the Summa, culminating in a thesis, directed by Garriguou Lagrange on the concept of faith in St. John of the Cross.4 Going back to Poland brought him a

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fundamental change of direction, and its origin can be located at the suggestion of conducting a thesis about the ethical system of Max Scheler, and in particular on its legitimacy for Christian Ethics. Such thesis meant an encounter with phenomenology and the discovery of a new philosophical world. Scheler showed Wojtyła that philosophy potentially had more ways other than the Thomistic path, and it also made him realize the reasons of Modernity. This is the beginning of his distinctive philosophical itinerary and, particularly, this is the origin of the Lublin School of Ethics whose main factors are the rejection of Hume’s utilitarianism, the partial acceptance of Kant’s and Scheler’s thesis and also an attempt to reformulate the classical concepts in a personalist way.5 However, as deep he went into that way, more evident it became that ethics implied a previous ineluctable anthropological reflection. While Wojtyła supported the autonomous conception of Ethics, which is based on moral experience, he also understood that this autonomy couldn’t be total. Ethics is not other than an attempt to answer the question about the good of the person and, therefore, is directly linked to an anthropological conception. The deepening awareness of this fact led him to anthropology. It was not only useless but impossible to try to develop some new ethical concepts that surpassed phenomenology and Thomism if the anthropology on which they depended didn’t go beyond that ambiguity. Only when a concept of person that improves on these difficulties was achieved, it would be possible to develop a consistent Ethics. This is the essential motive that led him to elaborate his masterpiece and summit of his philosophical thought: Person and Action.6 This text is presented, in a first moment, as a simple original anthropology essay in which the Classical approach, which goes from the person to the act, was modified for another, new one, which inverts that relationship, from the act to the person. First it examines the act and, under its light, the person is reviewed and discovered (it’s revealed). This is, of course, true, but Person and Act is also a powerful attempt to re-found Thomistic anthropology in the light of phenomenology, being the shift in perspective the tool used to achieve it.7 Indeed, Wojtyła is not simply intending to resolve a specific issue, as the role of the will in the human act, but his aim is to lay the basis of a new anthropological design that articulately synthesized the Thomistic and phenomenological tradition and, consequently, constitutes the basis for founding a similar Ethics. That is why it is very suitable to study the issue we’ve brought up.8 An analysis of Person and Act is suitable to examine Wojtyła’s anthropology, the way he integrates metaphysical, personalist and phenomenological concepts, but, in these pages, we will focus only on the method.9 Its importance is evident and, moreover, it turns out to be a key to understand both the conception of his ultimate personalist perspective and the value and strength of the results at which it arrives. Next we will describe the main characteristics of the

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method and, later we’ll evaluate its properties and their scope in relationship with the phenomenological and ontological-Thomistic perspective. 3. THE METHOD OF KAROL WOJTYŁA

Wojtyła was perfectly aware of the novelty of PA that was presented like an intermediate position between two powerful philosophical branches and, for that reason, he was also perfectly aware that his philosophical method had to be diverse, at least partially. It couldn’t strictly be similar to any of them, because that would lead, inevitably, to the same philosophical results. And it’s that awareness of the problem what impels him to briefly describe it at the beginning of his work. He wanted to make clear his intellectual proceeding so that his reflections do not undergoes the risk of being misinterpreted if they were read from a different point of view from which they were conceived. This facilitates greatly the initial work because it is possible to start from a description done by the author himself, although the last interpretation will give a task by two reasons: the difficulty of the problem and the excessively brief character upon which Wojtyła describes his proceeding. In fact, the elaboration and description of his philosophical method has to be understood as one more element of the whole Person and Act, but centered in gnoseology. What Wojtyła is searching is a re-elaboration of a Thomistic gnoseology that considers the advances of Modernity and mostly the possibility offered by the phenomenology of directly accessing to the subjectivity of the person. For that reason, for example, his departure point is constituted by experience as a way to integrate subjectivity and objectivity. It has, nevertheless, a significant difference with the rest of his work: Wojtyła wasn’t interested specifically in gnoseology, that’s why, he swiftly passes through that introduction pointing out the fundamental ideas, the indispensable traits so that his anthropology does not undergo the risk of being misinterpreted, but he doesn’t pause with sufficient detail to illuminate with clarity all the turns of his original and deep proposal. There is where the problems of interpretation appear. But we will arrive to that latter; let’s start at the beginning.

3 . 1 E X P E R I E N C E A S S TA R T I N G P O I N T The departing point for Wojtyła is the experience of man, comprehending by experience not mainly the objective and external knowledge man has of himself but the rich, complex and direct experience of himself in which external elements to the subject are integrated inseparably. Man “never experiences something outside himself without, in some way, experiences himself”

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(PA 21). In fact, he defines direct experience as “all cognitive act in which the object is given directly, in original form, or, as Husserl says, ‘bodily self-present’ (leibhaft selbstgegeben)” (PA footnote 1, p. 27). In addition, he indicates that experience, although it is formed by precise facts regarding singular experiences, reaches an integrated character; the real experience is the summing up or resulting of individual experiences. He also states that real experience is not reduced, as empirists claim, to sensible aspects over which later intelligence would intervene, instead it extents to all the person, it gets to the essence. Intelligence does not shape man from exclusively sensible data coming from the external world; instead it reaches man as a whole, in all his whole dimensions. What the person elaborates from experience is understanding, which is something very different. He finally indicates, and it’s a keynote issue, that in the anthropological experience, in the experience about man, there is a radical and almost incommensurable differentiation between two types of experience: The experience of the personal self and the experience about other men. The first is the radical experience in a strict sense because it is the only place in which man can grasp subjectivity in a direct and originating way, the irreducible world of the subject that turns him into a person. This is an unavoidable fact. There’s only the original experience of the own subjectivity; about the rest of men there’s a derived experience because “objectivation is not experience” (PA 24). We can presume that the subjectivity in other men is close to the personal experience and of even having a certain access to that world through empathic type processes. That generates unity and continuity between the experience of self (subjective) and the experience of man (external and objective) but that doesn’t completely terminates the tension between both because it cannot surpass at all the incommensurability that occurs between the inner experience of the world and the experience of other men. 3 . 2 E X P E R I E N C E A N D U N D E R S TA N D I N G Experience, which is an existential fact, leads to understanding, consisting in the cognitive formulation of these experiences. The key word that Wojtyła uses to explain this process is consolidation. He admits, first of all, that, in animals there could be a similar sensitive process but then he adds that human comprehension is “substantially diverse”. What constitutes this diversity? Wojtyła is not very explicit but points out – without great accuracy – to a certain significance unification of experiential objects “by its species” through appropriate classifications and mental distinctions. This consolidation is not a cognitive a priori – the reference to Kant is evident-, intelligence “does not construct reality”, but it does take part in the

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consolidation or formation of intellectual objects from the living experiences. Consolidation allows in addition to compare experience of the subject and the one of other men because both share the possession of an eidos, essence or “qualitative identity” similar about the significance units. We will return over this later on because he explains it with more detail when speaking about induction. Now it’s more important to stress that Wojtyła clearly stakes for a direct contact between intelligence and objects. He explicitly rejects the separation between sensible and intellectual knowledge and indicates that knowledge is an integrated sensible-intellectual whole that grasps directly on to experience as much in its singularity as in its complexity. This is specific of phenomenology against phenomenalism. “We cannot artificially isolate this experience from the totality of cognitive acts that precisely have man as object. We cannot either separate it artificially from the intellectual factor. The whole set of cognitive acts directed towards man, being the man that I am or any other man outside of me, has an empirical and intellectual character. Both aspects compenetrate, interact and support one another” (PA 26).

3 . 3 S TA G E S O F U N D E R S TA N D I N G Experience provides the contents that are proposed to understanding. But, which is the process that follows understanding? This is a key factor because it is the moment at which Wojtyła details with more extension the characteristics of his method. There are two fundamental steps: induction and reduction. 3.3.1 Induction and Unity of Meaning Induction is understood as the process by which intelligence consolidates the multiplicity of experience (of self and of the others) establishing a unity of meaning. Some specific aspects that characterize induction are the following: – It’s neither about Mill’s nor about the positivists induction who observe already here argumentation or reasoning; to Wojtyła this phase is, by all means, intellectual, but it does not include logical elements. – he indicates explicitly that the model that he takes is Aristotle’s induction. – there is a critical reference to Ingarden’s version of phenomenology since he would talk about an “a priori” knowledge; for Wojtyła, the apriorism of any kind does not have any type of justification or meaning, experience is what is given or what appears. – there is a significant absence of the term “abstraction”, confirmed by the explicit assert that “to grasp the unity of meaning doesn’t mean to reject the

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variety of the experience, as sometimes the function of the abstraction is erroneously interpreted” (PA 34). – it stresses that induction is fundamental but not to obtain the objectivation of knowledge, something that does not interest Wojtyła because experience automatically would lose its main characteristic: the personal subjective dimension of the self-experience. Induction is fundamental to achieve intersubjectivity, because therefore “the person and the act come into view like objects that everyone can see regardless from the subjective implications in which this object is, at least partially, involved in” (AP 35). Definitively, it seems that a suitable description of induction, in Wojtyła’s terms, would be the following one. The person experiences personal and intersubjective experiences (different in quality) that constitute the material, the departure point of the cognitive process. The person accesses cognitively to those experiences in a direct and integrated way, through a joint and unitary impulse of his intelligence and his senses. The cognitive presence of living experiences impels man to understanding, and the first process that needs to carry out is the consolidation of meanings. Experience is variable, fluid and diverse, and also, it can be internal or external. The person consolidates those experiences and sets them by means of an induction of Aristotelian type in which he seeks to obtain a unity of meaning10 ; it places knowledge “in its species” but taking particular care of not losing the subjective dimension of notions nor the richness of details. Induction is thus far from the classic abstraction, characterized by separation, by the abandonment of cognitive fragments to arrive at universal notions. Induction, on the contrary, consolidates knowledge without leaving the experience, maintaining in some way the unity and the multiplicity. In this way two main objectives are achieved. The first is providing intellectual resources to the person who formulates the induction. The consolidation of the resources of experience lays the path to its more detailed understanding. Second it is the possibility of communication and intersubjectivity. Consolidated experiences include personal elements – self experience – and interpersonal elements – the experience of others. The unification of those elements in an essence or “eidos” allows the creation of a unity of meaning that can be shared, since, if it’s about similar significance units, it’s reasonable to think that the addition of personal and other people’s experiences is similar in every man. The way is paved, like so, towards a shared and communicated knowledge, that is to say, science. 3.3.2 Reduction as “Exploration” of Experience Reduction occurs from induction, as an effort “to examine, clarify and interpret the rich reality of the person who is given to us trough actions” (PA 34), and it only can be achieved “penetrating deeply in the content of experience”. The term reduction

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is ambiguous, as much by its phenomenological connotations as for a possible linguistic interpretation that identifies it with a loss of meaning. For that reason Wojtyła immediately takes care to point out that is not suitable to understand it, in any way, like a diminishing or limitation of the richness of the experiential object; “to reduce means to ‘redirect’, lead to the reasons and the appropriate fundamentals, that is to say, explaining, clarifying and interpreting” (PA 36). And, again, we found a negative mention to abstraction: “even more than about abstraction it is regarding in fact or penetrating in an actually existing reality” (PA 36). Specifying a bit more the brief thesis of Wojtyła, we have that reduction, understood like re-ducere, like leading back to the sources and to the roots, it is the step that takes from the establishment of the meaning to its ulterior clarification. Induction collects the resources, and reduction, as Wojtyła reiterates in several occasions, tries to explain, clarify and interpret them. There is no expressed development of the content of each of these processes but very important aspects can be indicated, mainly the constant priority of experience. The mission of reduction is the most perfect possible intellection of experience which is the originating and irreducible data. On the other hand, it is necessary to stress that the Wojtylian experience possess – a difference, for example, from the Kantian – a plentiful intelligibility. The mission of reduction consists of expressing and specifying that intelligibility, what, by all means, is not in many cases simple nor evident. The richness and complexity of experience motivates the work of reduction because man wishes to comprehend in depth what’s before his eyes, but it also makes it difficult because the deep dimensions of experience do not come out easily nor it’s easy to integrate in a harmonic knowledge the different elements or even opposed ones that experience shows us. Even more, and it is a central fact; the Wojtylian reduction has a vocation for radicality. It is not, by any means, a stroll by the surface of the phenomena. First of all because the Wojtylian “phenomenon” does not consist of a set of elementary and fragmentary sensations but the human experience in all its depth and richness, that is to say, not only in its external and objective dimension (experience of man) but in self-experiential one. But, in addition, because the Wojtylian reduction specifically sets out to penetrate to the deepest possible level of research, that’s to say, to get actually to the essence of man. “By phenomenological reduction, he states, I understand an operation that leads to the most complete revelation and at the same time a more essential than of the data that contains” (PA 104). 3.3.3 Stages of Research The Wojtylian method is, definitively, a joint process of induction and reduction from experience. Experience provides the

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significance resources, induction consolidates meanings and reduction examines, clarifies and interprets them. Wojtyła has neither detailed nor exemplified the mechanism of this process. He just points it out, although, he has added some very important final considerations. First of all, and of somewhat paradoxical form, he indicates that “reduction, and not only induction is immanent to experience, without ceasing to be, in a diverse mode of induction, transcendent. Generally comprehension is immanent and at the same time transcendent to human experience. Not because experience is an act and process of the senses, whereas comprehension and explanation are intellectual processes, but by the intrinsic character of the one and the other. One thing is ‘experiencing’, another one ‘comprehending’ or ‘explaining’ ” (PA 36). Although a development of this idea would have been very desirable, the meaning is clear and is a consequence of a fundamental premise: in experience is everything. Experience is not a sensible-superficial fact; experience gives us reality in all its depth. For that reason, if we are interested in comprehend it, we must never leave it (there the immanent character not only of induction but of reduction as well). But, in spite of that, and in a paradoxical way, in certain manner, there is no other way than “to leave” experience when we analyze it to interpret it or to clarify it. It’s not the same to understand that to experiment. Comprehension is outside experience (and thus it transcends it). But this exiting, according to Wojtyła, cannot be more than provisional and partial. One leaves experience but to analyze experience (for that reason one is not completely outside) to then return to it, to comprehend it better and in more depth. For that reason, not only induction – which exiting from experience is minor because it only consolidates meanings – but also reduction is, at the same time, immanent and transcendent to the living experience. In the last phase of the description of his method, Wojtyła returns on the fundamental reason that has taken him to develop it: the need to represent man’s subjectivity. Classic philosophy has concentrated in man as an object, considered externally, but “in the experience man is given not only from the exterior but also from the interior” (PA 38). Experience, understood as lived experience, takes subjectivity in account from the beginning and not only as an inseparable element but a central one. Wojtyła wants to accede to the basis of that subjectivity, to comprehend, explain and interpret it because it’s fundamental for his anthropological project, but without falling, by any chance, in an idealistic position, in a transcendental subjectivity type. The duality of experience – internal experience of self, external experience of me and the others – appears then like the key factor that avoids the idealistic drift, anchoring the subject specifically in an ontological dimension non-reducible exclusively to subjectivity. The Wojtylian concept of experience is presented then – not only

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implicitly but explicitly – like the gnoseological route that he is going to use to save the stumbling blocks that display the two great philosophical currents without resigning to its positive elements: the objectivity of ontology and the access to the subjectivity on the part of modernity. Wojtyła avoids maximalists excesses indicating that he does not intend to simplify or reduce the whole problem confronting these two great philosophical traditions to this point, but that this doesn’t prevent him to affirm that, in his judgment, duality of experience is one of the reasons of the existence of these two great philosophical currents, the one of being and the one of consciousness, that consider each of them unilaterally one single aspect. There’s his integrating proposal. “I would dare to say that the experience of man, with the characteristic separation, exclusive of man, of the inner aspect of the exterior, seems to be at the root of the potent scission of the two main currents of philosophical thought, the objective current and the subjective one, of the philosophy of being and of the one of consciousness”. For that reason, “that must be born from the conviction that any absolutization of one of both aspects of the experience of man must yield the position to the exigency of its reciprocal relativization”11 (PA 38). The last step in the research process, in which Wojtyła scarcely reflects, is in the “expression”, in the public and verifiable configuration of what is comprehended. “It’s not just about being internally convinced that the acting man is a person, but to give this conviction formal thought and language, an ‘external’ configuration in a way that is fully communicable” (PA 37). 4. THE WOJTYLIAN METHOD AND THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHOD

Once determined the main characteristics of the Wojtylian method it is the moment for trying to establish its relationship with phenomenology as with metaphysics and Thomistic ontology. This will allow us, on one hand, to deepen in its intellection and, on the other, to analyze the relationship between phenomenology and ontology from the methodological point of view, being this our main objective. Let’s begin with phenomenology. It is clear that the proximity of the Wojtylian method with the phenomenological method is very narrow up to the point to which Wojtyła himself uses that name to identify his way of making philosophy. But, is it possible to talk about an identity between both or are there significant differences? It is necessary to also notice, indeed, that in other occasions he speaks of “the phenomenologists”, letting understand implicitly that he does not include himself in that group. The answer to this question passes, first of all, by a precise characterization of the phenomenological method, which depends on the interpretation of

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phenomenology itself, not a completely pacific matter by several reasons: the complexity to define accurately the meaning of the concepts in the Husserlian work; its intrinsic ambiguity in such relevant matters as the constitution of meaning and the transcendental dimension of phenomenology, and the evolution of his thought that demands an interpretation that determines the weight that is granted to works of different perspective (Logical investigations or Ideas, for example). We’re going to confront the matter here in a somewhat brief way for space limitations and, for that reason, we restricted ourselves to indicate the two basic lines of interpretation: the realistic phenomenology with authors like Scheler, Reinach, Von Hidelbrand, Ingarden and others and the transcendental interpretation of phenomenology proposed by Husserl in the second part of its work. Parallel to these two interpretations we find the two types of reductions proposed by Husserl: the eidetic reduction and the transcendental reduction. “Eidetic reduction implies to abstain from all existential position – to exert the epoché in respect to the natural attitude – to make the essences manifest, as they occur in consciousness, like phenomena. But in The Idea of Phenomenology Husserl introduces a second reduction which he calls transcendental-phenomenologyc, by virtue of the peculiarity of the dominion of consciousness; consisting in reducing the acts of consciousness and its correlates to absolute data”12 or, in other terms, avoiding objects and concentrating exclusively in consciousness, in its structures and its acts. This last reduction, although it could be only methodological, in fact, presents in Husserl a transcendental orientation, and was actually the reason of rupture with the realistic phenomenologian that applied only the eidetic reduction. In this crossroad, Wojtyła’s position is doubtless. His departure point is a radical realism and, for that reason, he will decidedly align with the realistic interpretation of phenomenology. From the methodological point of view, this means that he does not consider at any moment to accomplish a transcendental reduction that leads to positions nearer to a transcendental consciousness. In Wojtylian philosophy, radically realistic, this perspective is simply not in question. This attitude even affects – we will discuss it in more detail latter – its relationship with realistic phenomenology. Wojtyła uses the eidetic reduction only partly and in a modified manner, and he never uses the epoché understood as placing the world methodological between parentheses. In fact the only explicit mention of the epoché that he makes in the whole text – and in footnote – is to deny its use. This statement appears in the context of a text that has provoked certain controversy but that, in our estimation, has a quite simple interpretation. When he begins the description of the characteristics of the human act, Wojtyła indicates that one very important is morality but that he’s not going to consider it because he wants to accomplish a study of anthropological order. For that reason he is

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going to leave it a side, “outside the parenthesis”. This is the expression that has provoked confusion by its analogy with the putting between parentheses of the existence of the world characteristic of phenomenology. But Wojtyła doesn’t have something similar in mind. The only thing that he is attempting is to center upon in the anthropological problems because the typical analytical method of philosophy prevents the consideration all questions simultaneously. In Person and Act he wants, mainly, to elaborate anthropology, not Ethics, although both are inseparable. In fact, this work does not avoid fictitiously every ethical consideration; it simply concentrates in anthropology. “We want to exclude the essentially ethical problems in favor of the essentially anthropological ones. But it is not the separation, typical of the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl, of the essence of the actual existence (epoché). Therefore, this study does not follow strictly the principles of an eidetic method; nevertheless, it is the intention of the author to comprehend, with this investigation, man as a person, that is to say, to define the ‘eidos’ of the human being” (PA footnote 4, p. 32). In this text, Wojtyła seems to separate himself not only from the transcendental reduction and epoché, but from the particular eidetic methodology of realistic phenomenology. Is it possible to determine exactly the degree of proximity or similarity between his method and the phenomenological? A definitive valuation would require a more detailed analysis than what we can achieve here, but we are going to attempt a comparison between both positions taking as reference the interpretation of the method by Reinach in a well-known publication.13 For Reinach, phenomenology is considered mainly as a method that allows a privileged access to reality and, specifically, to the psychic field, a merit own to Husserl. Phenomenology is realist and looks for the what, the essence of things, which is not subjective – that’s to say, it’s not constituted by the subject but it is in the thing itself, it’s objective. It differs, therefore, from the psychic act that constitutes it. It is true, however, that phenomenology is not interested in the real existence of essences, but in its occurrence in the subject, and, in addition, it disregards systematically the existence to be able to analyze what’s given with perfection, without interferences and submitting it to free variation, what wouldn’t be possible if the connection with existence were sustained, and the object goes on with the form in which it’s factually given. But Reinach doesn’t question at any moment the existence of a world independent from consciousness. Regarding the research procedure, he indicates that phenomenology proceeds analyzing with the greatest detail and neatness possible everything that’s presented before consciousness, what is given like intuition to intelligence, because its goal, as the phenomenological motto par excellence says, is “going back to the things themselves” purified by the epoché

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(non-transcendental in this case, but simply methodological) of all the impurities adhered by interpretations or prejudices. But, he concludes, intuition is not illumination, and for that reason it is not obtained without effort and communal work.14 What’s given to phenomenological intuition, in other words, is the beginning and the end. It is there, before the eyes, but it must be purified to be appreciated in all its value and purity. It is clear that Wojtyła shares the essential characteristics of this method and, for that reason he will not have any difficulty in talking about the phenomenological method or the phenomenological reduction. The similarities are evident. In both cases the departing point is the data that is presented to the experience of the subject and that, therefore, intrinsically incorporates from the beginning the psychic-subjective dimension essential for Wojtyła. The data is not in question, it’s just there, is the departure point of the investigation and comprehension. But it must be clarified and investigated (Wojtylian reduction). Intuition is not illumination, the phenomenologist is not a seer, but a philosopher who pays attention to what appears, to what his intelligence displays to him in a clear way or, more frequently, uncertain; he is not exempt, for that reason, of the strenuous process of clarification. In fact, that is his main task as a philosopher. Wojtyła, as we said, assumes basically all these elucidations and, that’s why, it is possible to be said – and he said it himself – that his method is phenomenological. But there are also significant differences. It has, first of all, a plus of realism consisting in a radical non-questioning of the data of existence. Reinach is a realist, but his Husserlian affiliation leads him to consider the problem of the contact with the world. His response is that, although he accepts its existence, the fact is philosophically of little relevance because the phenomenological data are given to consciousness in an identical way whether they belong to the world or if they are constituted by consciousness.15 For that reason, it is not necessary to directly confront the question of existence but to proceed to the analysis of what’s given trying to determine its eidos. Wojtyła, nevertheless, views the matter in a different way. Experience is the real contact with the world and what man seeks throughout comprehension is the intellection of that experience. There is nothing, therefore, that separates from the contact with what’s real, not even from a methodological stand point. In fact, as we’ve indicated, the process of comprehension is immanent to experience, it does not leave it, and the experience is a living process. This issue is reinforced in Wojtyła because from the beginning he points out the existence of two types of experience, that is to say, two different cognitive sources: the subjective experience of the self and the objective-external experience of me and of the others. And the mere establishment of the value of the objective experience openly presumes the admission of a realistic gnoseology

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that, in fact, doesn’t want to lose under any circumstance the subjectivity. But subjectivity does not mean subjectivism; the existence of a subjective dimension doesn’t mean that everything can be reduced to the person’s subjectivity nor be understood as constituted by such subjectivity. It also exist an objective dimension to which Wojtyła recourses frequently from an anthropological perspective in which underlines that man is a subject that is an object, or, in other terms, that subjectivity is an objective fact (cf. PA 79–83). In conclusion, we consider that the need to count on the experience of man in its anthropological project causes that Wojtyła didn’t elude the explicit definition on the subject of existence. However, that does not constitute any problem for him. On the contrary, he assumes it as an unquestionable data. It would be possible to say, in addition, of the overcoming or shading of certain essentialism present in Reinach’s position and perhaps, generally, of phenomenology. Indeed, in its description of the phenomenological procedure, the essence appears as an intelligible nucleus with certain existence of its own, independent and autonomic – a truth in itself – what grants it a platonic aura. Everything begins with the de-psychologisation of the cognitive process that opens the passage to objectivation of the intentional contents, but, when these become anthropologically disconnected from existence, they undergo a certain hypostatic process that seems to give them an independent life. Of course, it would be necessary to specify to what extent this description is accurate, particularly in realistic phenomenologists, but that is the inevitable impression that’s left by the description of essences, which seems absolutely not in need of existence, because it doesn’t affect its contents what so ever.16 Wojtyła solves this matter – without entering in details – by means of the idea of the consolidation of meaning as a specific work of the understanding. The construction of that meaning depends on experience, but it is not experience, is the result of induction. Its entity, therefore, is fundamentally intellectual and dependent from the reality from where it’s extracted, which leaves aside all possible Platonism. In fact, Wojtyła specifically states that it is an Aristotelian induction. Finally, it would be possible to point out that from the beginning Wojtyła raises an intersubjective gnoseology in which men communicate among themselves the results of their comprehension expressed in “units of meaning” relatively homogenous elaborated from the two gnoseological sources available. As it’s known, intersubjectivity has raised remarkable problems to phenomenology because the questioning – conceptual or simply methodological – of the world generates a difficult inquiry to surpass about the way to connect with the other subjectivities.

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5. WOJTYLIAN GNOSEOLOGY AND THOMISTIC GNOSEOLOGY

What’s left is the analysis of the other side of the coin: the relationship with Thomism and the scope of the method. The subject is intricate because Wojtyła is less explicit and the matters that must be clarified are many. In first place we’re going to consider the relationship between Thomistic gnoseology and, what could be named, Wojtylian gnoseology that contrary to what could possible be supposed, is not evident at all. On one hand, and from the point of view of the fundamental premises, Wojtyła is entirely Thomistic in the sense that he is absolutely realistic. In that aspect, we’ve seen it already, he doesn’t separate a bit from that fundamental premise of the philosophy of being. But, if we entered in detail, things change substantially. The first difficulty appears in the same departure point: experience. This is neither a Thomistic nor an Aristotelian concept because subjectivity is specifically included.17 It would be possible to accept that the objective knowledge of man can be identified substantially with the traditional gnoseology, but the knowledge of the self subjective inner experience as a departure point of the anthropology can’t be. In addition, there is still another point that perhaps even separates Thomistic gnoseology from the Wojtylian in an even more radical way and affects the interpretation of the cognitive process in a very important way. For Aquinas, the intellect doesn’t know the singulars. Knowledge begins by the senses, the intellectual abstraction generates the universal and by a complex process it comes back – now, intellect and senses together – towards the singular. As we have noticed, Wojtyła rejects this conception. For him, intellect grasps the singular from the beginning, or in other words, is the person, by means of an integrated cognitive process (intellect and senses), the one that accedes completely to the experience that, initially, is, by all means, singular.18 The consequences of this matter can’t be undervalued because they are enormous. The Thomism blockade to knowledge of individual by intellect basically identifies intellectual knowledge with universal knowledge, which gives in turn a tremendous relevance to abstraction, is the one that generates concepts and sets the path for the typical Thomistic formalism. To abstract is to separate, to do without the sensible, and to focus on the intellectual which is universal. This procedure leads inevitably outside the field of experience that, by its own nature is concrete, sensible and existential. Precisely the opposite way (or almost) to the one Wojtyła is interested in. For that reason now it’s possible to understand why Wojtyła practically does not mention abstraction when specifying his methodology and it is possible to understand why, excluding the reference to the Aristotelian induction, he doesn’t mention what so ever any technical term from Thomistic gnoseology. Wojtyła doesn’t reject abstraction but he understands that, in its common

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formulation, it leads to abstract proposals in which, for example, a space for subjectivity is practically nonexistent. The concept, product of abstraction, is replaced by “a unity of meaning”, an eidos or qualitative identity, less precise, certainly, but sufficient to set the basis of a method that doesn’t close the space to the topics he’s interested in. And the same occurs with many other Thomistic gnoseological concepts. Wojtyła would have to modify them to be able to use them without problems, but he doesn’t have enough time for it or, perhaps, interest. The single thing that matters most to him is to make clear the essential issues that – if they weren’t solved – would jeopardize his anthropology. The rest are “problems in the theory of knowledge which are not deepened here” (PA 28). Synthesizing these reflections I would say that, according to my judgment, Wojtyła opens up an enormous and most interesting field in the renewal of Thomistic gnoseology, but with a clear distinction with anthropology. It only provides brief indications. I’ll set a single example. The cogitative, although its precise position in S. Thomas’s texts it’s not very clear, plays a very important role in this gnoseology because it is indispensable to justify an essential step in the cognitive chain: the connection between the sensible singular and the intellectual universal. But, if the intellect grasps directly the universal: (1) The classic process of Thomistic knowledge must be reviewed from top to bottom and (2) cogitation is no longer necessary.19 The problem, as we stated, is that Wojtyła doesn’t mention any of these matters and, therefore, more than contributing with substantial developments he only indicates a direction. 6 . T H E O N T O L O G I C A L S C O P E O F W O J T Y Ł A’ S M E T H O D

We go now to the last issue that Wojtyła considers explicitly: the scope of this method. It’s out of the question, because he specifically affirms it in numerous occasions, that he intends to reach the deepest level possible in his knowledge about man: up to the last turn, to the essence. However, is this possible?, and, secondly, of what order is that essence: anthropological, ontological, metaphysical? Both questions, logically, are related, but it can be given a relatively direct answer to the first, although somehow provisional. Wojtyła’s method can reach a deep knowledge of man because it uses all cognitive capacities (senses and intelligence) and analyzes an ontologically dense experience. We’ve already mentioned it. Induction does not grasp solely sensible type phenomena over which later intelligence would take part to give them form (the Kantian position). In this case, an ontological or Metaphysical analysis would be impossible because the noumenon would be veiled for ever. But this is not the case: induction grasps, from the beginning, reality in its fullness. The phenomenological method “is absolutely not, just one description that registers

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phenomena (phenomenon in a Kantian sense: as the contents that fall under our senses). Supporting ourselves over the experience as something irreducible we strived in penetrating cognitively in all the essence. (. . .) The phenomenological analysis serves, therefore, for the transphenomenic comprehension and is also used to reveal the personal richness of the human being in all the complexity of the compositum humanum”.20 For that reason, the Wojtylian method easily surpasses every criticism that would identify it with a method limited to the sensible-superficial description of the phenomenic world. Once these matter has being established, the thorniest question it’s left to be solved. Wojtyła intends to get to the essence, but, does he gets it in fact or it remains only in a non-sensist but relatively superficial anthropological description? Answering this question is not simple because implies a definition of the essence – something that Wojtyła didn’t do, the eidos he spoke about cannot be identified with the Metaphysical essence – and, at the same time, a standing position about metaphysics. In order to advance in this terrain I believe that’s necessary a distinction between ontology and metaphysics. By ontology we will understand an ontological anthropology, that’s to say, an anthropology that seeks for the last radicality in man and on the structures that give reason of his existence. By metaphysics we will understand the traditional philosophy of the being that propose transcendental concepts that are applicable – in theory to the whole reality: essence and act of being, act and potency, substance, etc. There’s no doubt left about the capability of the Wojtylian method to deepen up to the last roots of man. It suffices by showing, for example, his great profound description of the self-referential dimension of the person, based in subjectivity, by which he determines himself, being capable of partial selfformation. And the same could be said on his attempted search of the final ontic foundation that gives reason of the continued and self-identititarian existence of the subject. It is evident we’re not, therefore, before a superficialphenomenic anthropology but before a radical philosophical analysis of the person. But, it is this analysis ontological or Metaphysical? I would say that is, essentially, an ontological analysis in the sense that the Wojtylian method manages to determine the existence of internal structures, stable and final ones, at least from the anthropological point of view. The structure of self-determination by which the man becomes a person is a concrete case. The merit of the Wojtylian method consists of (1) having discovered it; (2) having described its characteristics accurately. From an anthropological point of view there is not a meaning beyond. Reflection ended here. But is there a meaning beyond in metaphysics? This is a difficult question. From a first point of view there is, because we haven’t reached the level of being. Thus, for example, when Wojtyła uses the

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concepts of being and essence, he does not deduce them from his anthropological analysis (another question is if it could actually be done) but he takes them from the philosophy of being through metaphysics. Therefore here takes place a connection between ontologic anthropology and Metaphysics. But this connection is not at ease. Traditionally, metaphysics has been elevated as the supreme and leading science of all because it establishes transcendental principles and concepts that govern all the order of beings. Being and essence, the four types of causality, the structured dynamicity around act and potency are considered by metaphysics as intrinsic principles to all being.21 But Wojtyła cannot accept this exposition in a non-critical way because (1) is in opposition to its gnoseological method that departs from experience; (2) is not certain that is useful for his anthropology. To start from experience – according to the phenomenological methodology – means that there has to be an assignation of specific categories to each type of being derived from their particular way of being. But, is it possible to arrive from here at the determination of elements common to all? Metaphysics did it, but it ended up generating a leveling down in which the general principles of being have been identified actually with the characteristics of the most elementary beings. In that way it’s has been lost a lot of what’s specifically human.22 One of those particularly valuable characteristics for Wojtyła is the one of subjectivity. “The traditional doctrine of man as a person, whose clearer expression was the definition by Boethius as rationalis naturae individua substantia, mainly expressed the individuality of man as a substantial being who owns a rational or spiritual nature, and not all the specific about the essential subjectivity of man as a person”.23 The problem, therefore, is not unidirectional but bidirectional and it could possibly be expressed in the following way: the ontological anthropology is not capable of reaching the level of metaphysics but, at the same time, metaphysics is either able to reach the radicality in the comprehension of man. Facing this complex dilemma it seems that Wojtyła’s position has consisted of an attempt to make compatible both levels, which can be noticed in an especially clear way when studying the final or ontological substrate of the person.24 Let’s see this matter with some detail. Wojtyła, though he begins his analysis by action, is an ontological personalist and, for that matter, understands that person is ontologically prior to action. This necessarily leads to consider “the ontic foundation” of action and, then, it seems a logical and appropriate thing to turn to the traditional notion of “suppositum” (sub-ponere) that, as its name indicates, reflects what is “underneath” and, in this particular case, what lays underneath each action: the subject. Thus, “the term suppositum indicates the subject being or the subject as being” (PA 98). Wojtyła is

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assuming here the classic thesis of “operari sequitur esse”, although he states that “esse is not the suppositum, only the constituent aspect” (PA 99). If everything stops here we would say that Wojtyła, to support his methodological analysis in an ultimate way has to turn to a Metaphysical concept, the one of suppositum. Such fact would not invalidate his method but it would come to corroborate that it has a limited ontological scope and that’s its ultimate foundation is indeed Metaphysics. It would be, finally, an anthropology founded on metaphysics. But, as we’ve already stated, this is not as simple. Even though Wojtyła understands that the concept of suppositum is very useful for the ultimate foundation of anthropology, also understands that, assumed without any type of modification, is problematic, because it considers neither the subjectivity nor the personal character of man. In other terms, the suppositum, – as it is – is not a person: it’s a cosmological and reductive vision of the personal being. It needs to be personalized, which means we have to distinguish – using the analogy of being – between the appropriate suppositum of things which are something and of those who are somebody, meaning to say, persons. “The person, the man as a person, is suppositum, is a subject of existence and action – with the precision, in every way, that the existence (esse) which is his, is personal and not only individual in the sense of the individuation of nature” (PA 100). In other terms, “to identify the person as suppositum is necessary to consider the difference there is between ‘something’ and ‘somebody’ ” (PA 100). The final result from all these, is that the Wojtylian suppositum is not, as it is, the metaphysical suppositum, but a complex blend of metaphysical subject and ontic subjectivity as he explains, with certain detail, in this text. “The subject of the existence and of the action, which is man, is defined by the traditional ontology with the term suppositum. We can say that the expression suppositum serves to define the subject in a completely objective way, abstracting of the aspect of the lived experience and, in particular, of the experience lived on that subjectivity, in which the subject is given to himself as ‘I’. The expression suppositum abstracts therefore the aspect of consciousness, thanks to which the concrete man – object that is subject – internally lived himself as a subject, lives, therefore, his own subjectivity, and this lived experience serves him to define himself with help of the pronoun ‘I’. It’s known that the personal pronoun ‘I’ always indicates a concrete person. We demand attention on the fact that the term ‘I’ has a wider content than the term suppositum, because it unites the moment of the lived subjectivity with the ontic subjectivity, whereas suppositum expresses only the latter: the being as subjective foundation of the existence and the action” (PA 66).25 Wojtyła is perfectly conscious of the fusion he’s trying to accomplish and there is an especially interesting text from the methodological point of view

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in which he affirms it explicitly. With it we concluded. “From the moments or the aspects of the experience we must pass to the conjunction, and from the moments or the aspects of man as a subject of experience we must pass to the total conception of man. (During the real process of knowledge a step of this type and to a similar direction doesn’t take place; the moments and the aspects are always included there in the cognitive entity. In spite of that, here we considered this step and this direction with the purpose of deepening knowledge. It is also intended to demonstrate that phenomenology and metaphysics study thoroughly the same object, and that phenomenological reduction and metaphysics do not exclude the one or the other)” (PA 105). Wojtyła has not used nor explained the expression “metaphysical reduction” and it brings about a certain perplexity hard to overcome but, beyond this issue, that perhaps is not anecdotal, the rest is relatively clear: in the experience, as initial step of the knowledge everything is given in a simple and direct, but elementary and not analyzed way. The analysis of that experience by means of the phenomenological reduction shows us man as a subject what is also studied by metaphysical reduction. And, in the actual case of the ultimate subject of the action, both reductions help each other to establish the authentic concept of suppositum. The problem, nevertheless, is not completely solved because it has not been reached a unitary definition of the suppositum. His description is dual as it is supported in Metaphysical and phenomenological elements. How are the Metaphysical subject and the ontic subjectivity integrated? Which is the role of the self in all this? Wojtyła, in my opinion, does not respond in a definitive way to these questions, which doesn’t mean that he hasn’t contributed deeply with valuable reflections to this complex problem. I believe that he is totally conscious of both things and, for that reason, in the important article Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man (1978), subsequent to Person and Act, after exhibiting his position once again, he cannot avoid asking himself: “There are always, yet, a series of interrogatives: The ‘cosmological’ comprehension of man and the one of ‘personalist’ type wouldn’t each excluded one another mutually? Will reduction and the revelation of the irreducible in man encounter and how? In what way the philosophy of the subject must show the objectivity of man and its personal subjectivity? These are questions that today outline the perspectives of the thought about man and the perspective of anthropological and contemporary Ethics. They are burning and fundamental questions. Anthropology and ethics must be questioned today from this not easy but promising perspective”.26 University of San Pablo-CEU, Madrid

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NOTES 1 For my interpretation of personalism see Juan Manuel Burgos, Personalismo (2nd ed.) Palabra, Madrid 2004; Juan Manuel Burgos, Antropología: una guía para la existencia (2nd ed.) Palabra, Madrid 2005 and Juan Manuel Burgos, José Luís Cañas and Urbano Ferrer (Eds.), Hacia una definición de la filosofía personalista, Palabra, Madrid 2006. Cf. also Armando Rigobello, Il personalismo, Città Nuova, Rome 1978; Carlos Díaz, Qué es el personalismo comunitario, Mounier, Salamanca 2002; Treinta nombres del personalismo, Mounier, Salamanca 2002; A. Domingo Moratalla, Un Humanismo del siglo XX: el personalismo, Pedagógicas, Madrid 1985. 2 There is already a wide bibliography on the philosophy of Karol Wojtyła. We especially refer to Rocco Buttiglione, El pensamiento de Karol Wojtyła, Encuentro, Madrid 1982, Juan Manuel Burgos (Ed.), La filosofia personalista de Karol Wojtyła, Palabra, Madrid 2007 and to a work that has been dedicated specifically to the study of his method: Rodrigo Guerra, Volver a la persona. El metodo filosofico de Karol Wojtyła, Caparrós, Madrid 2002. In these three texts there’s abundant complementary bibliography. 3 Juan Pablo II, ¡Levantaos! ¡Vamos!, Plaza y Janés, Barcelona 2004, p. 90. 4 Cf. Karol Wojtyła, La fe según san Juan de la Cruz, BAC, Madrid 1979, trad. and int. from A. Huerga. 5 Cf. Karol Wojtyła, Mi visión del hombre (5ª ed.), Palabra, Madrid 2004. 6 There has been an important debate around the determination of the critical text of Person and act originated by the publication of the English version (The Acting Person) in charge of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (there is a synthesis of the debate in R. Guerra, Volver a la persona, op. cit., pp. 198–203). In our opinion, although the debate is significant, it seems to us that it has been overvalued and that, in fact, it is possible to access to the essential content of the book in its English version as in the Italian and Spanish editions. Anyway, by reason of precision, in these pages we are going to quote by the following Italian edition: Persona e atto, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Rome 1982 (from this time forth PA). 7 “This approach to the problem, completely new in relation to the traditional philosophy (and by traditional philosophy is understood here the pre-Cartesian philosophy and mainly of Aristotle’s heritage and, the tradition in the catholic thought of St. Thomas Aquinas), has impelled me to undertake an attempt of reinterpretation of some characteristic formulations of that whole philosophy” (PA, Preface, p. 13). 8 It has been discussed enough if Karol Wojtyła must be suited in a phenomenological, Thomistic or Personalist line. Personally I consider evident that Karol Wojtyła achieves an original fusion of both currents that generates his own original perspective. In that sense, I share the position of Buttiglione, Guerra and of other authors like Tymieniecka (Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and Roger Duncan, Karol Wojtyła, between Phenomenology and Scholasticism, in Phenomenology World-Wide, Kluwer Academic Press, pp. 486–491), Jaroslaw Merecky (The Thomism of Karol Wojtyła, Catholic University of Valencia, Valencia 2007) Tadeusz Rostworowski (Il problema gnoseologico nell’opera Persona e atto di Karol Wojtyła, Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana, Rome 1989) and others. In addition, I understand – with Guerra, Guzowski and others- that Wojtyła’s philosophical position can be defined correctly as personalism: cfr. J. M. Burgos, “La antropología personalista de Persona y acción”, in Juan Manuel Burgos (Ed.), La filosofía personalista de Karol Wojtyła, Palabra, Madrid 2007, pp. 117–143. 9 Parallel to the global evolution of Wojtyła’s thought, there has been an evolution in his assessment of the phenomenological method. In his Ph. D. about Scheler, he considers, indeed, that “the utility of this method is secondary and merely auxiliary” (Karol Wojtyła, Max Scheler y la ética cristiana, BAC, Madrid 1982, p. 218). Later, that method, with the modifications that we’ll

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have the occasion to indicate, becomes a central part of his philosophy. In this text we let a side the evolution to concentrate in its definitive form as it is essentially displayed in PA. 10 Guerra points out one of the most explicit texts that demonstrate the proximity of the Aristotelian induction with the Wojtylan although he aims wittingly that the latter never considers the search of a definition in itself. The fact is that Wojtyła is not a formalist. “To resume our account of the right method of investigation: We must start by observing a set of similar-i.e. specifically identical-individuals, and consider what element they have in common. We must then apply the same process to another set of individuals which belong to one species and are generically but not specifically identical with the former set. When we have established what the common element is in all members of this second species, and likewise in members of further species, we should again consider whether the results established possess any identity, and persevere until we reach a single formula, since this will be the definition of the thing” (Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, II, 13, 97 b, pp. 7–13). 11 Cf. Karol Wojtyła, La subjetividad y lo irreductible en el hombre (1978), in El hombre y su destino, (4ª ed.), Palabra, Madrid 2003, p. 43. This article, subsequent to Person and Act, offers important developments to the understanding of Wojtyła’s methodology. 12 Urbano Ferrer, La trayectoria fenomenológica de Husserl, Eunsa, Pamplona 2008, pp. 40–41. The book constitutes an updated introduction to Husserl’s thought considering his last posthumous written publications. A very detailed study of the phenomenological method in Husserl is provided by Javier San Martin (La estructura del método fenomenológico, UNED, Madrid 1986). This analysis shows the unstable equilibrium of his thought, and the unsolved ambiguity on the transcendental character, or not, of phenomenology. For a global vision of phenomenology cf. Bernhard Waldenfelds, De Husserl a Derrida. Introducción a la fenomenología, Paidós, Barcelona 1997. 13 Cf. Adolf Reinach, Introducción a la fenomenología, Encuentro, Madrid 1986. 14 Cf. ibid., p. 68. 15 “The geometrician can part from a perceived spatial figure, but the position of the experience of perception does not enter with that in action, in anything contributes to the founding, being able to serve the same exact service to him a fantastic formation. Also the phenomenologist can depart from a factually existing perception to make its establishments, but either for him the thesis of experience does not play any role, also being able to serve him as departure point a fantastic perception” (Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge, 1911–1921, pp. 244–245, mentioned by Urbano Ferrer, op. cit., p. 31). 16 In Scheler it produces, for example, the incapability of the actions to reenact on the subject, issue specifically studied by Wojtyła. 17 “The concept of the experience is not known in Aristotle’s metaphysics” (Karol Wojtyła, El hombre y su destino, op. cit., p. 31). 18 He would be, then, close to Zubiri’s positions. Cf. Xavier Zubiri, Inteligencia sentiente, Alianza, Madrid 1984. 19 About this matter cf. Rodrigo Guerra, Volver a la persona, op. cit., pp. 212 y ss. 20 Cf. Karol Wojtyła, El hombre y su destino, op. cit., p. 38. 21 Only as an example I refer to Ángel González Álvarez, Tratado de Metafísica. I. Ontología. Gredos, Madrid 1967. 22 I have analyzed this subject, from the point of view of the analogy, in: Juan Manuel Burgos, “Una cuestión de método: el uso de la analogía en el personalismo y en el tomismo”, in Dialogo filosófico 68 (2007), pp. 251–268. The problems that metaphysics generates to anthropology can be seen from another perspective in Leonardo Polo, Antropologia transcendental. I. La persona humana, Eunsa, Pamplona 1999.

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Cf. Karol Wojtyła, El hombre y su destino, op. cit., p. 30. This same problem, viewed from the analysis of the act is the following one: “The consideration of the actus humanus by traditional Ethics is based on the Metaphysical principles, expressed mainly in the conception: potency and act; for that reason, the action is located in the objective field of principles. When, on the contrary, that is considered as experience, that is to say, from the phenomenological point of view, it becomes particularly relevant his subjective foundation, expressed, on the other hand, already from the data from which it’s part, that is to say, of the ‘agent person’ ” (T. Rostworowski, Il problema gnoseologico nell’opera Person e atto di Karol Wojtyła, op. cit. p. 25). 25 We can find a similar set up in the important article: “Persona: sujeto y comunidad” (1976), especially part I titled: “Between the ‘suppositum’ and human self” where he uses the term “inseidad”. Cfr. Karol Wojtyła, El hombre y su destino, op. cit. pp. 45–71. 26 Cf. Karol Wojtyła, El hombre y su destino, op. cit., p. 39. 24

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T H E RO L E O F E X P E R I E N C E I N K A RO L W O J T I Ł A’ S ETHICAL THOUGHT

ABSTRACT

The getting away from traditional models of legitimization of knowledge and of action—coming from classical metaphysics, realism, trascendentalism, etc—is one of the dominant features of the contemporary intellectual disposition, submerged into what could be called a “crisis of foundations”. The disenchantment regarding the traditional models of laying fundaments, instead of paving the way—as happened in other epochal transitions—for the establishment of new ones, has frequently led to an impugnation of the very possibility of the philosophical enterprise. It is notwithstanding presumptuous, to proclaim the end of the issue of the foundation of virtuous life. This difficulty, far from reducing ethical reflection to a mere procedure or consensual models which are in themselves insufficient, rather calls for a new method of philosophical analysis that could allow for an authentic way of founding human praxis. The phenomenological method offers this possibility, inasmuch as it permits to overcome the solipsism of enlightened conscience that, directly or indirectly, led to this epochal sentiment. Karol Wojtyła offers the possibility of a phenomenological re-thinking of philosophical ethics, from a perspective which is somehow epistemological, but which, at the same time, involves novel anthropological and metaphysical postures. His starting point is the recovery of the experiential foundation of ethics, thus widening the empiricist perspective of ethics, and reestablishing the link between the action of conscience and the data of reality. In the first place, to the data of the acting man’s own experience, to discover the ontological structure which reveals man as a being with dignity, i.e., with an absolute value. The Kantian imperative of regarding the person as an end in itself finds in Karol Wojtyła’s philosophy the acknowledgement that it is still valid as an actually relating principle, and at the same time, the expression of a language close to the concrete life of living men, at tension between emotion and intrinsic moral imperatives. Through the path of personalism, doors open up again to the task of philosophical ethics.

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The fact that moral philosophy has abandoned the task of designing and proposing to man a model of virtuous life is not a fact worthy of demonstration. It is enough to go through what modern philosophers and those who—in a broad sense of the word—may be called post-modern have said in the field of ethical thinking. Nevertheless, not because it appears evident, can a fact like this do without argumentative efforts to bring out the reasons that have lead Ethics to this present state; what is more, to design overcoming proposals. On a first approach, we could point out the pendular movement to which philosophical thinking has been submitted in modern times; while there was a gradual growth of the will to assert the subject, these men’s conscience seemed to close upon itself more and more in that self-assertion, in such a way that “under such heavy weight it has folded upon itself, becoming, day after day, incapable of raising up its eyes to dare reach the truth of Being”.1 The undoubtedly fair critique that classical philosophy had fallen into a certain objectivism by reducing interpretation and comprehension of reality to its specific ontological features had led anthropology, and with it, ethics to an objectivistic consideration that made ought be derived from is. Even when it is true that, if a moral prescription is to reach this character [become an ought], it cannot go against human nature, or in other words, the exigencies of moral duties are compatible with the reality of man in his acting—his conscious, free and voluntary nature—it is also true that the data of this human reality, or of overall reality, do not constitute a sufficient motive for action. While the evidence of ontology proved itself insufficient as a foundation of ethics, attempts were made to show the insufficiency of ontology itself as a possible object of knowledge. Hume’s contributions in this respect ended up in revealing as non feasible every intellectual effort to discern the is of things; and by reducing knowledge to mere knowledge of ideas, they provided the basis for the critique which, under the denomination of “naturalist fallacy”, caused the breaking up of the relation among metaphysics, anthropology and ethics. Thus, it can be seen how the philosophy of the end of modern times directed philosophical thought in a pendular movement from objectivism to subjectivism, of which present day thinking still strives to get out. From these efforts emerges the figure of a thinker, who still remains somewhat unknown as such: the presence of the philosopher Karol Wojtyła, who—from a perspective that could legitimately be called “personalist”—has allowed for the dissolution of the individual, coming from the reduction provoked by objectivism in its efforts to define man as merely another object in the world, as well as from a subjectivism, which, far from rescuing what pertains to each individual, dissolved it in the anonymity of a universal subject bearing no face. As Alfred

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Wierzbicki states, in his Introduction to Wojtyła’s text Man in the Field of Responsibility, the entire thought of Karol Wojtyła makes a contribution to philosophical realism which should not be underestimated, in that it offers a solution to the objectivism-subjectivism controversy as well as to that between realism and idealism.2 But at the same time, Wojtyła’s philosophical production, mainly during the years in which he devoted himself to the teaching of Ethics at the Lublin Catholic University, concerned the efforts to overcome another controversy that cannot be separated from the former, and which originated in the confrontation between an ethical conception of aims and another restricted to duties, in the way it was described by Kant. Modern thought which, as we said before, led to the construction of an absolute subject, also led Kant to the construction of an absolute conscience, which became the ultimate criterion of good, in front of which even will itself had to submit. A statement of this kind was possible only—as Wojtyła himself constantly pointed out— because the starting point was not the consideration of the concrete subject in his acting, but the subject’s a priori. The strength with which phenomenological thinking had shaped Wojtyła’s itinerary of intellectual formation made him turn his eyes towards “things themselves” [zu den Sachen selbst], i.e., to man himself, to himself in first place, to find an intuition more adequate to moral reality. Thus, “personalism, which views the person as the performer of human acts and at the same times sees in the person’s dignity the objective grounding of moral norms . . . solves the controversy between the ethics of aims and the ethics of duty.”3 Therefore, if the panorama of contemporary ethics seems to close itself up in the debates about whether it is or it is not possible to find a foundation for the moral, and how, or to give this attempt up, reducing this task to a merely procedimental issue, then, to turn our eyes to Karol Wojtyła’s thought and acting—precisely from here, his beloved land—seems to offer an appropriate method to overcome the controversies mentioned, and the abysses to which these seem to lead. Picking up Tadeusz Styczen’s words, who has seen Wojtyła’s efforts in this sense, I claim that Wojtyła is “a teacher of the bridge”,4 and as Pontifex, a genial constructor of bridges between the richest philosophical tradition and the unavoidable discoveries of Kant’s thought on the issues pertaining Ethics. 2 . E X P E R I E N C E A S A S TA R T I N G P O I N T

In the domain of the theory of knowledge, from modern times onwards, two big antagonistic fields have existed, in which the cognitive subject seems to be obliged to dwell. These are empiricism on one hand, and rationalistic apriorism

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on the other, which have defined tendencies in the field of ethics as well. While empiricism upholds experience—restricted to sensitive perception—as a source and criterion of objective knowledge, apriorism sustains that certainty is the result of the decisional character of certain judgments called “primary”. This is the way in which the task of every science is understood, in this case, of moral science, depending on which of the two views we adopt as a starting point. For the empiricists, ethics will become an empirical-inductive science, while for those who uphold apriorism, it will consist in the development of a strictly deductive science. Wojtyła has shown how both ways of conceiving ethics, have relegated it to the field of mere description or prescription of moral norms, forgetting its fundamental task, i.e., the ultimate foundation of norms, that which can efficiently show to man, to each individual, the motives for a given action. As we have repeated with Styczcen—Wojtyła being a man capable of settting up bridges—it can be seen how he proposed to get out of the crossroads produced by empiricism as well as apriorism. Wojtyła sees that, even within the radical differences between these positions, the fact of morality is a supposition from which both of them start. He states: “Psychology as well as sociology of morality resort to the set of facts that conform the phenomenon of morality”.5 Nevertheless, this phenomenon is considered as a mere social or psychological fact and not in its specificity; this specific feature can be discovered, if we observe that every fact in human experience is a moral fact. Morality itself emerges, then, as experience in every fact in life; to ask ourselves about good and evil in their moral sense, comes up spontaneously in each of the acts in which we experience ourselves as their actors. Thus, ethics shows itself as a philosophical science of morality in which the philosopher’s role will simply consist in the explanation of the facts of this experience. “Therefore, ethics’ appropriate method will be reductive and not deductive . . . explanation aims at individualizing the adequate reasons, and in this sense, the last ones regarding verification and comprehensibility of the fact provided by experience”.6 We allow ourselves to point here out, how, in his pre-philosophical formation stage, Wojtyła had incorporated to his life, and consequently to his thought, the moment of experience as the starting point for the method of those who seek to comprehend reality, to make it afterwards comprehensible to others. With his own experience of access to Carmelite spirituality, in the order of faith and rhapsodic theatre, Wojtyła confirms that in the living experience of these phenomena—be they religious or ethical in a broad sense—man experiments the revelation of truth. Truth reveals itself to consciousness, neither from a priori abstraction nor from mere sensitivity, but from the experience of going through these facts in life. In his book Volver a la Persona. El método filosófico

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de Karol Wojtyła, Rodrigo Guerra López points out that for Wojtyła “it is necessary to understand not only what happens when an experience takes place, but also to realize how the contents of that experience unfold a feature of truth hardly perceptible from another point of view”.7 Coming back to the analysis of Wojtyła’s philosoply, it may be observed how, in the assertion of experience as a starting point for ethics, the realist and even phenomenological character of the author reveals itself. This appearing of truth or of one of its aspects, as a phenomenon of the experience of morality, shows that experience itself has a sense of reality, inasmuch as it puts the subject that experiences it in contact with something which exists independently from his/her conscience, a sense of knowledge, insofar as it puts us into contact with that reality through the cognitive moment reality carries with it, and in which a certain contact or fusion with the existing is produced, and at the same time, with a moral sense, as it allows us to reach singular moral facts, the specificity of each of them. Consequently, experience does not “create” reality; rather, facing that reality, it sets into action all man’s cognitive capacities. One of these realities is precisely morality itself. Even when it is true that morality becomes manifest inside conscience, this does not occur in an a priori fashion, but only “after” an a posteriori experience of having lived and practiced morality. Wojtyła calls this particular type of practice and experience moral experience, and it refers to the experience each man acquires by living [according to] moral good or evil, within a personal practice of moral good or evil. In this experience, each man acknowledges himself as the doer of his acts, and at the same time as witness, inasmuch as in this experience, he manifests before himself his moral nature. In other words, Wojtyła states, “man lives and suffers the experience of himself through morality, which constitutes a particular foundation for the understanding of human character”.8 Thus, moral experience and man’s experience are two indissoluble aspects of one sole sphere of knowledge of himself that man possesses: his own experience of his own self. In this way, any purely aprioristic effort—as Kant’s—to define morality with no links to anthropology, turns out ineffective. 3. HIS CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE

“. . . the understanding of self is made up of many understandings, just as experience is made up of many experiences. Apparently, every experience is an understanding experience as well”,9 Wojtyła states at the beginning of his major work—Person and Act—statement that obliges us to consider with precision the cognitive scope of experience. In first place the relation comes associated to the concept of experience derived from empiricism; for this stream of thought, data from the senses are

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clearly superior to the intelligible. This distinction between different types of data received in experience, privileging some of them and denying others or confining them to mere intellectual associative results, introduces a partition in the very heart of this source of knowledge constituted by experience. “To Wojtyła experience is something more than the summation of data provided by external senses . . . it is a sui generis moment constituted by the appearing of whatever reality might present itself immediately to our cognitive faculties”.10 He goes beyond both, empiricist and kantian gnoseology, in as much as he cannot accept, that the cognitive subject should receive from outside a set of sensations to be afterwards ordered by intellect, “to him experience is an organically structured whole . . . in the sense that the different acts of experience arrange themselves in an organic whole which is man’s experience”11 and in this same integral experience, an intellective moment already operates decisively. Wojtyła states even further, that “the whole set of direct cognitive acts upon man, be it the man I am, or every man outside myself, possesses a empirical and intellectual character. Both aspects interpenetrate, interact and reinforce one another”.12 Consequently, we can now hold that, undoubtedly, to Wojtyła, the starting point of human knowledge, and therefore of ethics as a science, is empirical rather than empiricist. On the other hand, it becomes now necessary to clarify the relation between this conception of experience—as an inner experience of man’s conscience— and Descartes’ as well as Husserl’s ego cogito. Even when it is true that man’s experience is reached in everything that is given to him, and therefore given to conscience, it does not concern an isolated and self-sufficient conscience which achieves certainty trough self-evidence, but—instead—a conscience that becomes richer in an intersubjective interaction. This is not the case in ecological philosophy of Cartesian shaping, for which conscience itself is the first and founding evidence; the ego cogito, reveals itself immediately as the primary truth, for which sensible data of reality are unnecessary, and so are the other egos, but only conscience itself in front of ideal evidence of the real, be it myself or the world outside myself. Long before Wojtyła, philosophy sought to break the solipsist circle of ego cogito by stating that every cogito is a cogito cogitatum. Thus, under Husserl’s guidance, contemporary philosophy started to move along a road of recovery of the original attitude of a subject placed before the world as an object of knowledge, which Bretano had already characterized as intentionality of conscience. “In this way—states Rodrigo Guerra López—it seemed as if the father of phenomenology’s efforts constituted a true restoration of gnoseological realism”.13 Leaving aside the issue of whether or not Husserl afterwards abandoned this realist claim, in favour of a transcendental idealism nearer Kant’s, there is no doubt that what Wojtyła finds attractive about the phenomenological proposal

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is fidelity “to things themselves”, i.e., the reaffirmation of a cognitive process, which operates after having been affected by the actual “givennes” of things; it is Husserl’s own statement, in Cartesianische Meditationen, that “the starting point is necessarily the given object in each case, in a direct way, from which reflection moves backwards to the corresponding mode of conscience”.14 And it is precisely this aspect of phenomenological philosophy what signals experience as the basis of every knowledge of objects, inasmuch as it is “unrestricted opening up to the given, without ever caring about a previous criterion”.15 Notwithstanding, it is impossible to state that our experience, as experience of conscience, of one’s conscience itself, exhausts the perceptive horizon of the given; man’s experience as source of knowledge, is composed of selfexperience as much as of every other man’s experience, “the greater the number of men who are reached in the experience of others, the larger and richer the experience”.16 Even when it is true that man’s source of knowledge is self experience, it is also true that this knowledge increases in the interchange of life experiences of other men; even when we do not deny the fact that other men are objects of experience in a different way from that in which I am an object of experience to myself. At this point Wojtyła finds himself faced to the difficulty of understanding whether or not they are two different and irreducible experiences: the experience of man and the experience of the self. He himself acknowledges, that “there are reasons beyond doubt which enable us to speak of two incommensurable forms of experience, but their fundamental qualitative identity cannot be denied”; this incommensurability is due to the fact that “man is ‘given’ to himself, and therefore as ‘I’, to a greater or lesser extent and in a different manner from any other man who is not myself”.17 Unavoidably, the starting point of man’s knowledge is self experience, but that knowledge does not remain enclosed in the limits of what is truly experienced; instead, it needs to enrich itself in the interchange of other experiences, of other men, even in spite of the already mentioned irreducibility. “Object of experience is anyone to him/herself in a unique and non repeatable fashion, and no external relation with any other man can substitute that experimental relation which is part of the subject himself. It is possible that this experimental relation with the external might supply a series of cognitive results, which the subject’s experience does not provide. Such results vary according to the degree of approximation and also in the form of implication in the experience of others . . .”18 That is to say, nothing can replace self experience as a direct and original source of knowledge of man, of the man I myself am, but this is not the only source of knowledge, inasmuch as every man experiments what he is and offers a new perspective for the construction of knowledge about man. In a way similar to

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that in which Husserl understood the knowledge of the different foreshortenings of the thing given to conscience, Wojtyła too claims the approximation to the truth of things, of the truth of what man is, in a communitarian way. This revaluation of experience allows Wojtyła to overcome the hard task of approaching the reality of man, and therefore, the knowledge of what is good for him, in an objectivistic way, just as the knowledge of any other object in the world is approached, i.e., ontologically. Not because Wojtyła questions the value of ontological knowledge, but because he understands that this is not the most adequate way of accessing knowledge of man. Nevertheless, he has been able to see, that turning one’s back to an “objectivistic” attitude, enfolds the historical danger of falling into the subjectivism inaugurated by modern philosophy, and of which a considerable part of contemporary philosophy, including Husserl himself—even with the above mentioned assets that Wojtyła acknowledges in his philosophy—does not succeed in avoiding completely. The confrontation between objectivism, backed by a realist conception, and subjectivism, nurtured by idealist positions, has for centuries characterized the dialectic movement of western thinking. Here too, Wojtyła throws bridges to make positions come nearer one another, in the fashion of an overcoming synthesis. “He who this writes, is convinced that the dividing line between a subjective approximation (idealist) and the objective one (realist) in anthropology and ethics must gradually disappear; and it is in fact becoming invalid as a consequence of the concept of man’s experience, which necessarily makes us come out of pure conscience, as an ‘a priori’ thought of and founded subject, and introduces us in the most concrete experience of man, i.e., in the reality of the conscious subject”.19 The meaning Wojtyła finds in experience supplies present day philosophy with the possibility of overcoming any biased effort of understanding man, inasmuch as it allows to acknowledge the reciprocal relativity of subjective and objective aspects in getting to know man, and offers itself with a unitarian character, when pointing out that it allows man to receive the data of external reality and to get to know himself, by placing himself in that reality, and at the same time, conceive himself as man, as that particular being in the world he is. The correct comprehension of man comes from the interrelation of internal and external aspects, from philosophy of being and philosophy of conscience, about man, and precisely this interrelation as constituent of experience, is the basis for the comprehension of the person and of action. 4 . S E L F M A N I F E S TAT I O N O F M A N I N E X P E R I E N C E

“In man’s experience we have to acknowledge that there is a particular moment when its experiential content comes fully into view. This moment occurs in the experience of acting man”.20 It is convenient to make clear from the beginning,

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that even when Wojtyła maintains all the metaphysical and anthropological content about the philosophical explanation of acting coming from St. Thomas’ thought, he conceives a different pathway: he does not aprioristically suppose it, but arrives at it from the observation of the act itself, “[Wojtyła] seeks to understand man in action and to approach his ontological structure through action”,21 because it is there where man shows what most properly pertains him; in action there is such a perfection, that it allows the greatest intelligibility of the subject from whom it rises. Now then, how does this subject appear? Firstly, not as the place in which action develops, but as efficient cause of that action. As has been pointed out, to access the metaphysical principles of potential and act, shows man’s action as a mere occurrence in which the potential becomes freely actual, but does not come up to the understanding of the richness of action, as the phenomenon of a conscious and free subject, who acts as cause. The first datum that shows itself evidently22 is the decisive moment which conscience and self-conscience possess in experience. To Wojtyła, conscience is linked to cognitive faculty but is not identified with it, “it accompanies the cognitive process reflecting it . . . to be conscious implies a subsequent reflection on the material that has already been elaborated by cognitive faculty”.23 Concerning self-knowledge, it shows that self-conscience is always a cognitive act, and therefore objectifies man, turning him into an object of knowledge of his own intellect. “Conscience itself is the object of self-conscience in the sense that, acknowledging himself with the same cognitive act, man acknowledges himself as a conscious subject”.24 It is interesting to note that, with this statement, Wojtyła is not thinking that man’s nature consists in thinking, for one thing is to know oneself as a conscious subject, in which case conscience objectifies itself, and another, is to possess self-conscience. The event provides the self with the cognitive material which reflects in the conscience of the self. Thus, all constituent elements of the human act become objectified in self-knowledge, and so man can have knowledge his own actions and judge about them. In other words, all that man can get to know about man, arises from the experience of acknowledging himself a conscious subject; it is the experience of the self as a subject who knows and possesses self-knowledge, what originates anthropological knowledge, but— we insist upon this—not in the idealist fashion of a conscience that indefinitely thinks itself starting from itself, but about the real data, external to conscience, in the experience of its own acts. “Conscience does not restrict itself to reflect what the self does or what the self is, but allows to draw experience from action, as action that personally belongs to us”.25 Now then, in conscience man does not only reflect the value of moral actions, intellectually, but also emotionally. Nevertheless, it is not to be taken as a purely reflection in conscience of an act the moral value of which is

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already constituted, but it is conscience itself which participates in the constitution of the act from the moral point of view: it is in conscience where that which is objectively good or evil, is experimented as good or evil to man. “In conscience, experience of value takes place along with acting, but the person experiments him/herself as the cause of this acting. This allows to link the objective value of the act (of which the person is cause) provided by self conscience with the subjective experience which occurs in conscience”.26 The sensible and emotional impressions that occur in man are reflected in these, but he experiments not only what occurs in him in a passive way; he also experiments the judgment which self-conscience possesses in relation to what occurs. In this way, conscience reflects emotion and integrates it in the complete experience of man. Thus, Wojtyła overcomes Scheler’s error of having emotionalized conscience and of not having seen that at the same time as conscience reflects emotions, it is capable of judging about them. “Affective perception of values is realized in cognitive emotional acts, even when the ultimate origin of such acts is purely emotional”, states Wojtyła in his work about Scheler’s ethics, and adds, “it assigns the deepest layer of man to the experiences of the emotional sphere and states that those experiences reveal to us some of the primary factors of the objective structure of reality, i.e., value”.27 In this way, Scheler is not bound to discover the character of efficient cause of each subject with respect to his acts, and places the values which emotionally attract or repel this subject, as the cause of moral acts. Universality of moral is thus jeopardized due to lack of foundations which might indicate whether it is good or evil to act in a given way. Wojtyła understands that the nucleus of the ethical issue lies in the correct comprehension of the interaction between reason and will. In a constant dialogue with the thought of the German phenomenologist, as well as with Kant’s, Wojtyła shows how in both, “willpower has been enclosed in the apriorities of practical reason or of emotions . . . it follows that Kant’s apriorism as well as Scheler’s, lead ethics to an essential analysis of aesthetic forms, represented in Kant by imperatives or maxims and in Scheler by values, hindering the objectification of the fundamental dynamic factor for ethics, i.e., the act”.28 Now then, to Wojtyła man’s distinctive dynamism becomes understood in the light of the wider dynamism of being, which correctly comprehended, expresses itself in the classical categories of potential and act: act as the complete realization of a potential. Thus, the acting of man as well as what “occurs” to him, are actualizations of a potential. Nevertheless, Wojtyła’s attention concentrates fundamentally upon those acts in which the subject is conscious of being their efficient cause, i.e., upon human acts, because only in these can a fair moral understanding of the act be realized, and from here from, a deeper penetration of its ontological structure. In the analysis of the ontical nucleus

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of the acting subject, it is understood that self-experience and causality do not substitute the experience of perceiving what occurs to him,29 and this is possible if we admit that our knowledge of man does not simply arise from conscience, but at the same time uses the data that come from our cognitive faculty, as “a mirror of reality”. Thus, as Buttiglione points out, “the knowledge that man possesses of the world cooperates in self-knowledge, as well as his metaphysical understanding of being”,30 insofar as the idea of being in general helps us to understand this particular being that man is, with the irreducible specificity that corresponds to him. It can be seen, that in a phenomenological start from experience, the irreducible nucleous of subjectivity which expresses itself in the concept of person becomes manifest. The previous traditions in philosophical thinking would confront one another in this respect, because of the necessity to understand man, be it as exponent of a species or nature which determines him to be this kind of entity, who enters given situations which set his potentialities into motion— but without the experience of freedom—or as subjective individuality, which determines itself freely to set his capacities in motion, and would, thus, prevent us from discovering, that a real integration of nature and person reveals itself in the acting subject‘s own experience,31 of pure innate dynamism, and characteristic of a certain ontical and liberty-laden structure. Wojtyła shows how being a person belongs to man’s nature, correctly understood in its metaphysical sense, and therefore, being capable of self actualization thanks to his freedom. We can now see, how, by starting from self-experience, man understands himself as a member of a species, whose value lies not in being a mere specimen of the species, but in a personal non-repeatable existence, i.e., man understands his dignity. One final observation we still have to make, related to the confrontation between these positions, this time concerning the issue of normativity. On the side of the objectivist positions, that centre their focus of analysis upon man’s nature, the moral norm derives from the consideration of its ultimate aim, whereas, on the side of the subjectivist positions, the norm is dictated by conscience, before which will itself must submit, as is the case in Kant. In this way, ethical reflection seems to be confined to the field of theology or deontology, but fails to understand the value of the norm itself, which, deriving from experience of morality, appears before man as what is convenient to do. 5. FROM EXPERIENCE TO NORM

“. . . to accept Kant’s starting point in ethics—i.e., to consider the issue of justification of norms as the main ethical problem—does not mean that its solution should necessarily be as well accepted”, Wojtyła says in his article

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“Theological Ethics and Moral”,32 and if the main problem is that of justification of norms, it is because in experience itself, questions of the type “what is it that makes an action fair or unfair?” or “when is a deed good or evil?” arise spontaneously, and at the same time, the question about morality itself as it is given to us in experience. We have an inclination to acknowledge the whole network of facts in which good or evil emerge, as experience of morality in its broad sense (as well as in the everyday sense).33 He himself indicates three different levels that can be described in the experience of morality: an axiological level, in which good and evil appear as states of the person, a praxeological level, in the manifestation of good or evil in acting and its consequences, and finally, a deontological level, moral ought shows itself as a constituent instance of every moral fact. In the field of experienced moral life the question about the ought arises spontaneously; it arises from the necessity to know whether a norm which could allow us to distinguish between good and evil, actually exists. Consequently the moral value of an act and of its author manifests itself in the accordance or not with the norm generalized through duty. Thus, Wojtyła surmounts the apparent dilemma between ethics of values and ethics of duty, showing that in experience of morality both dimensions appear: “when I discover a duty [an ‘ought’] there is always at its basis an unconditional moral value in which it is grounded”.34 Thus, the norm is the expression of duty, but at the same time, inasmuch as it is the principle of good being and good acting, it is shaped by value; consequently, and because this value is a reality acknowledged by intelligence, it can be seen that the task of ethics is not that of creating norms, but of acknowledging them. Wojtyła’s ethical thought turns permanently round the contribution which modern and contemporary philosophers, such as Kant and Scheler, have made to moral philosophy, displacing the classical design of St. Thomas’ ethics from its centrality. However, this is not due to any disagreement of Wojtyła’s with St. Thomas’ anthropological presuppositions, which stand at the basis of his ethical doctrine, but rather to the need he sees for a methodological modification of the analysis and the ethical proposal of contemporary man, much more inclined to think in terms of the experience of living, than in terms of an abstract system. It should be noted, that the development of this issue appears in the framework of a land that has contained a suffering nation, witness of the cruelest experiences of evil, but also of the experience of good men, who in this same context have chosen good.35 In other words, Wojtyła has understood, that starting from the experience of morality, of life itself, leads most successfully to a philosophy of moral. Tadeusz Styczen indicates two reasons that made Wojtyła think of a reform of the methodological structure of ethics: moral duty of which we have experience does not appear linked to the conscience of an ultimate aim or the desire

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to reach it, therefore ethics should not start from a teleological perspective; on the other hand, experience of moral good itself appears to us as unconditioned, “good is everything which is necessary and enough for a duty to emerge”,36 even more, to make the duty of performing an act depend on the desire to reach it—Wojtyła says—deprives it of its authentic countenance. Now then, to reject teleology in ethical thinking does not either lead Wojtyła to a defense of a pure kantian deontology. We can see how he links together duty, value, truth, good. Wojtyła sees that when Kant stresses the apriority of the norm, i.e., its unconditionality against any type of teleology, ethics becomes a pure logic of norms, as a mere deduction of propositions related to what ought to be, and he points out that it is difficult to admit that this obedience to duty because of pure duty, could be really non teleological. He then resumes the pre-critical view of ethics. Within the framework of this tradition, we can now admit that duty retains its ethical value when the norm adjusts to the good as such, and it is evident that there is in every man a tendency or inclination towards knowledge, choice of and doing the good, which becomes the foundation of the norm. This inclination towards knowledge of and doing the good cannot then be placed outside man’s teleology; rather than this, it serves its realization, the accomplishment of his person. When man has manifested to himself in his own experience of acting, as a being with full self-possession, and therefore, self-determination, he has manifested himself as a being summoned to his own perfection, “in this sense morality does not stand in opposition to finality, on the contrary, in a way it emerges from its foundation”.37 Therefore, the norm does not appear as a certain overload upon human nature and human acting, but forms instead part of the same moral reality; it is nothing but the objectification and concretion of truth over good, good linked to a certain action of the person, desired by and realized in the person. In this way, truth above good takes the form of a concrete judgment that orders me to do this or the other, thus manifesting its dynamic character. “It is the dynamism of duty that has its power in the elementary axiology of being a person. I want to be good—I do not want to be evil, is not only an ordinary intentionality, it is the very reason why a person is in the axiological order”.38 The novelty, with respect of Kant and even Scheler, lies in that the discovery of duty as dynamism activated by truth over good, verifies the deep structure of the person’s self-possession and self-control, revealing once more its dignity, precisely there in the world of desires, of will and of an intelligence which is capable of acknowledging good and searching for it. We insist that it is in the field of experience, of his own experience of acting, that every man discovers himself as a being capable of establishing for

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himself his own aims. Starting from this experience, the assertion emerges in conscience, that “anyone who treats a person as a means to an end, does violence to the other’s very essence, to that which constitutes his natural right”.39 It is in self-reflection on free acting that we arrive at the intuition of personal being and the corresponding norm which indicates us the adequate way to treat the person; this is the reason why Wojtyła states that when somebody treats somebody else as a means for his own purposes, he not only injures the other in his freedom, but in his very essence. Thus, the state of freedom manifest in acting reveals not only the personal self, but also the ought that emerges from it. The person who manifests in experience with oneself and with the other men demands, because of its own nature, to be acknowledged through its actions, and this is expressed in what Wojtyła calls personalist norm of action.40 It is then seen, how Wojtyła does not conceive of ethics linked to an ultimate aim, but to obedience to truth above the type of good which is the person considered in itself. 6 . F I N A L C O N S I D E R AT I O N S

To finish with, we coincide with Styczen in the certainty that the methodological postulate of experience as a starting point concerns not only ethics but philosophy in general, gnoseological difficulties, and therefore, its anthropological and ethical consequences could be overcome if we could recover Husserl’s statement that we should return to things themselves, begin “from the experience of what there is, the being of what there is, how it is, how it reveals itself, without any aprioristic conditions imposed by what is experimented or by the act of experimenting it”.41 Even more, Styczen indicates that there is another most valuable outgrowth in this change of method; if the personalist norm, like every moral norm, emerges spontaneously to man’s conscience when he acknowledges as true what he manifests to conscience, “does that which I have verified in my own act of discovery not oblige me and in categorical way?, does that which I have verified with my own eyes not oblige me?”42 Hence, duty can be verified as any other real thing, and in this way, Wojtyła surmounts the problem which has from modernity onwards brought about so many difficulties to ethics and its foundation task, i.e., the abyss between is and ought, ultimately, the problem of separation between ethics and anthropology, between ethics and metaphysics, which seemed no longer to give opportunities to the task of finding a foundation of moral. Thus, starting from the experience of ought, he manifests the equation between is and ought, inasmuch as ought is! Ethics becomes metaphysics of moral, even if it does not derive from it: the ought is captured directly, as a real entity which obliges me, starting from experience.

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In this perspective, the task of ethics, or rather, of the philosopher of moral, cannot be reduced to a mere description of the phenomena of morality, it cannot give up the effort of giving reasons of norms, the philosopher is—Karol Wojtyła said—a man who makes experience from what he is, and seeks to understand in all its depth that from which he makes experience. To restart the task of ethics from the original—and still unknown—contribution of Wojtyła’s, is to recover the conscience that man is the only entity capable of being open to reality, capable of discovering its sense and of giving the reasons why the life of every man, of each man, is worth living. Catholic University of Santa Fe, Argentina NOTES 1

Juan Pablo II, Fides et ratio, 4ta. Ed., Buenos Aires, Paulinas, 1999. Wierzbicki, A., “La persona e la morale”, Introduction to L’uomo nel campo della responsabilità, p. 1219, in Metafísica de la Persona, Milano, Bompiani, 2003. 3 Idem, p. 1226. 4 Styczen, T., “Karol Wojtyła: un filosofo della morale agli occhi del suo discepolo” in the Prologue to Metafísica de la Persona, op. cit., p. CXIV. 5 Wojtyła, K., “El problema de la experiencia en la ética”, p. 327, in Mi visión del hombre, Madrid, Palabra S. A., 2005. 6 Ibid., p. 331. 7 Guerra López, R., Volver a la persona. El método filosófico de Karol Wojtyła, p. 41, Madrid, Caparrós, 2002. 8 Wojtyła, K., op. cit., p. 345. 9 Wojtyła, K., Persona e Atto, Introduzione, p. 832, Milano, Bompiani, 2003. 10 Guerra López, R. op. cit., p. 209. 11 Buttiglione, R., Il pensiero di Karol Wojtyła, p. 149, Milano, Jaca Book, 1982. 12 Wojtyła, K., Persona e Atto, Introduzione, p. 837. 13 Guerra López, R., op. cit., p. 78. 14 Husserl, E., Meditaciones Cartesianas, Buenos Aires, Paulinas, 1979, p. 232. 15 Guerra López, R., op. cit., p. 211. 16 Wojtyła, K., Persona e Atto, p. 832. 17 Ibid., p. 834. 18 Idem. 19 Wojtyła, K., “La subjetividad y lo irreductible en el hombre”, pp. 26–27 en El hombre y su destino, Madrid, Palabra, 2003. 20 Guerra López, R., op. cit., p. 225. 21 Buttiglione, R., op. cit., p. 154. 22 It is interesting to pay attention to the value of evidence in Wojtyła’s gnoseology, although it would draw us away from the central aim of this paper. Cfr. Guerra López, R., op. cit., p. 225. 23 Buttiglione, R., op. cit., p. 155. 24 Idem. 25 Ibid., p. 156. 26 Ibid., p. 158. 2

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Wojtyła, K., Max Scheler y la ética cristiana, p. 17. Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1982. 28 Wojtyła, K. “El problema de la voluntad en el análisis del acto ético”, pp. 165–166, en Mi visión del hombre, Madrid, Palabra S. A., 2005. 29 Here Wojtyła allows us to take up the great dicoveries of ethical thought: Kant’s –conscience of causality– and Scheler’s –emotional affection of values– conciliating them. 30 Buttiglione, R, op. cit., p. 162. 31 It is convenient to point out, that when Wojtyła seeks to integrate “nature” and “person”, he refers to the necessity of integrating two different conceptions of man; the objectivist one (typical of the classical metaphysical análisis) and the subjectivist one (resulting from modern philosophy). 32 Quoted by Guerra López, R., in “Repensar la vida moral. Experiencia moral, teoría de la moralidad y antropología normativa en la filosofía de Karol Wojtyła” p. 92, in Tópicos. Revista de Filosofía, Universidad Panamericana, México, 2006. 33 Wojtyła, K., “El hombre y la responsabilidad”, p. 224, in El hombre y su destino, Madrid, Palabra, 2003. 34 Guerra López, R., op. cit., p. 98. 35 The fact that countless times Karol Wojtyła as a philospher and as Pope has made reference to the testimony of great men and women who, in the midst of terror during nazi occupation and afterwards during communism, have given examples of good and holy lives, has an enormous signification. 36 Styczen, T., “Karol Wojtyła: un filosofo della morale agli occhi del suo discepolo” in the Prologue to Metafísica de la Persona, op. cit., p. CVIII. 37 Wojtyła, K., “El hombre y la responsabilidad”, p. 260. 38 Ibid., p. 261. 39 Wojtyła, K., “Amore e responsabilità”, p. 477, in Milano, Bompiani, 2003. 40 Cfr. Rodrigo Guerra López, op. cit., pp. 156–167. 41 Styczen, T., op. cit., p. CXVII. 42 Idem.

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CAMUS AND TISCHNER: IN SEARCH O F A B S O L U T E L OV E

ABSTRACT

The paper provides a comparison of two chosen examples of searching for absolute love in the twentieth century philosophy. The analyzed thinkers, Albert Camus and Józef Tischner, consider love to be the most important aspect of human existence. However, metaphysical foundations of this thesis accepted by each of them respectively are different. Contrary to the atheistic existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the theistic existential philosophy of Karl Jaspers and Lev Shestov, Camus, despite his strong desire for the higher unity and Absolute, must admit that in his own experience he does not find an answer to the question whether the surrounding world has a transcendent meaning. His agnosticism obliges him to recognize human position as an absurd one, seeing that without the absolute meaning of the world the tragic fact of human death remains unexplained. In the situation of absurdity, love cannot be full, accomplished, and permanent, i.e. absolute; on the other hand, it can still be perfect. First of all, it is a great power which constitutes the basis of metaphysical revolt proposed by Camus. Secondly, perfect love makes the absurd freedom possible, i.e. the freedom from all rules of human acting, as it is only love that can establish any ethical principles. Finally, love can be identified with the passion of life – the fundamental aspect of the authentic existence. Phenomenological personalism of Józef Tischner enriches this concept of love. We can find here a manifestation of contemplative knowledge about the deepest sense of reality, namely about God - the Absolute Love. Thus in Tischner’s conception, caritas possesses two inseparable sides: love of God (agape) and love of our neighbors and the world (Eros in Platon’s terms), whereas Camus considered only the latter. As the follower of St. Augustine, Tischner recognizes absolute Love as a manner of participation in the Absolute Good. Man will be saved, i.e. will achieve eternal happiness only if he persists in true love. The soteriological motif makes Tischner perceive the fundamental task of Christian education in the awakening of hope for absolute love. 147 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 147–160. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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It is worth mentioning that despite their varied metaphysical standpoints, both philosophers appreciate the Franciscan spirituality with its life affirming love. The most outstanding French existentialist Albert Camus (1913–1960) as well as the Polish well-known phenomenologist and personalist Józef Tischner (1931–2000) consider love to be the most important aspect of a human existence. According to them, it is only mature love that enables authentic happiness to arise within our complex and often difficult life. We must keep in mind that Camus and Tischner lived in extremely tragic times – the era of the Second World War, of constraining many nations by communism, when fundamental, traditional values became relative. Both thinkers formulated equally radical and sharp diagnoses regarding their contemporariness. The French writer, from the very beginning of his literary career and especially in The Rebellious Man, criticized a principal nihilism of his epoch. The nihilistic era, that rejected many values crucial for man, permitted false, or even sinister ideologies to arise and expand. At the same time Camus discovers that it is only a concrete human being that constitutes the primal and highest value irreducible to any idea or abstraction. The dignity of every man must be protected in the name of our “human metaphysical solidarity”.1 It means that in our world there is nothing beyond man that is worthy of love, and especially of the higher level of love which arises from the common human condition.2 The Polish philosopher, on the other side, stresses that the world we live in, lost firstly the “body safety”, and, later, was dispossessed of “spiritual safety” (Tischner here uses Chantal Delsol’s terms).3 This resulted in the profound crisis of human hope. In his crucial work entitled My´slenie według warto´sci Tischner agrees with Martin Heidegger’s opinion that “the closing of holiness dimension” turned out to be fatal for our epoch. He calls for the returning to the original “indispensable” source of European thought, namely to love.4 This voice of both thinkers calling for metanoia and actualization of the challenges of love in our lives as the only remedy for all the world’s maladies does not mean that their concepts of love are identical. At some points their respective ideas must differ because the metaphysical foundations accepted by Camus and Tischner are different. Let us begin with Camus. This Nobel Prize Winner of 1957 is usually recognized as a philosopher of the absurd, a devotee of metaphysical revolt who interprets the human condition in terms of mythical Sisyphus. However, despite the abundant literature referring to Camus’s creative output, not much is said on his acceptance of

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the great role of love, with the most significant exception of Thomas Merton’s Seven Essays on Albert Camus.5 Undoubtedly, love is an enormous power not only exerting influence on Camus’s conduct in his private and social life,6 but also constituting the fundamental basis of his philosophical standpoint. Camus does not provide any definition of love. Nevertheless, in his literary works and philosophical essays he implies a certain understanding of love. Generally speaking, he interprets love as an extraordinary affirmative power of emotional nature. Love can be revealed only in situations in which the heart of man is engaged. This power spreads, first of all, among people. Though, it should also occur in human relations with “the unreasonably silent world”, in order to make it familiar and tamed. However, this is not an easy task. Love plays also a crucial role in cognitive processes, enabling profound cognition of all the people and objects to which it is directed. In its very essence love is a creative power. Camus’s understanding of love is close to the ancient Greek concept, and particularly to the Platonic interpretation of love as Eros.7 However, the author of The Plague expresses opinions that differ from Plato’s primarily in respect to the metaphysical background. In Plato’s concept, the supreme love leads to the discovery of arché, the principle of the world, the timeless Absolute called the Idea of Good, Beauty and Truth, while Camus, despite his profound nostalgia for the unity and grasping the innermost meaning of reality, seems incapable of such cognitive and contemplative access to the Absolute. Furthermore, the French existentialist thinker does not perceive the everyday and particularly the material layer of reality as the world of shadows, the place of exile and prison of the soul, as Plato does. For him “feelings, and feelings on this earth” can determine “the purest of joys”.8 This concept of love and the crucial role attached to it is rooted in Camus’s concept of man. He perceives two essential types of a great yearning that can be distinguished in man, i.e. the longings “for understanding and loving”.9 In Absurd Freedom we read: “I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, that need for clarity and cohesion. (. . .) this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me” releases within myself “the specific insistence upon familiarity”.10 In another essay, Absurd Walls, Camus formulates the identical idea: nobody but man, in this marvelous, irrational world, experiences two forms of nostalgia: “the wild longing for clarity the call of which echoes in the human heart and the longing for happiness”, which both “illustrate the essential impulse of the human drama”.11 Is it possible to satisfy these two desires?

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In the case of the first one, Camus searches for help in knowledge created by man. He studies centuries-long endeavors of the human ratio in its attempts to find the raison d’être of the world, all these rational efforts undertaken with the hope to solve the problem. In Absurd Walls he insists that it is not possible to rely upon the physical knowledge or sciences closely related to them because they explain the world by means of the image, which implies a referring to poetry. Thus this kind of knowledge only superficially teaches us anything, as it formulate hypotheses which are not certain.12 Therefore, reference to philosophy is worthwhile. Criticizing the situation of his times when philosophers – as he puts it in his Notebooks13 – become almost extinct, substituted by commentators, the French existentialist thinker refers to the creative output of those who were capable of thinking independently – Plato, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Kant, Kierkegaard, Shestov, Husserl, Jaspers, Heidegger, Scheler, and others. He is particularly interested in the metaphysical consequences of “applying” the reason in Husserl’s phenomenology, and in “the jump into the irrational” in Kierkegaard’s and Shestov’s philosophies, among others. According to his interpretation of Husserlian philosophy which, however, I cannot subscribe to,14 we have to do with the enrichment of the world through the restitution of diversified though equally important and privileged phenomena, and simultaneously the jump into the world of “extra-temporal essences”,15 which imposes the unjustified clarity upon the world. In Camus’s opinion, phenomenology thus becomes the “metaphysic of consolation”, which is not accepted by him.16 Kierkegaard – according to the interpretation offered in Camus’s essay Philosophical Suicide – while accepting “the sacrifice of the intellect” in the manner of Ignatius Loyola,17 unexplainably enters the domain of irrationality. Similarly Shestov, who is critical of Hegelian as well as Spinozian rationalism, “concludes, in effect, in favor of the vanity of all reason. Hence, by a natural and illegitimate reversal”, he devotes all his passion “to the pre-eminence of the irrational. But the transition is not evident”18 – adds Camus. Such interpretations of philosophical theories do not help Camus discover within his own experience the transcendent reason for the existence of the world. It is worth reminding that he remains faithful to the basic phenomenological principle adopted from Edmund Husserl, which imposes the necessity of consulting the immediate experience as the ground for justifying all philosophical statements. The author of The Stranger formulates this thought in the following way: one should observe certainty, and be guided by the lucidity. The motif of this “clearness of vision” appears several times in his works, especially in essays. It is the lucidity which makes him admit that in his own experience

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he does not find the solution to the problem of the Absolute, of God – the transcendent meaning of the world surrounding us. “I don’t know – he writes in Absurd Freedom – whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it”.19 Camus stresses that he is not an atheist in the manner Jean-Paul Sartre was. “I don’t believe in God, and I’m not an atheist” – we can read in his Notebooks.20 On the other hand, in opposition to Lev Shestov or Karl Jaspers, he cannot consider himself, despite his deep desire for experiencing the world’s arché, a theistic philosopher. His agnosticism obliges him to recognize human position as an absurd one, seeing that without the absolute meaning of the world, the strangeness of the world as well as the tragic fact of human death remains unexplained. Is it possible, in this situation, to satisfy the latter kind of human longing, that “for loving”? In other words: What is the matter with this world? Is the experienced strangeness of the world insurmountable? It is important to underline that Camus, like other existentialists, juxtaposes the world with man, in particular with human inner life – the conscious one. “This ridiculous reason sets me in opposition to all creation” – he states in The Absurd Freedom.21 In the essay Absurd Walls, the following point of view is offered: if the world were able to love, the problem of alienation and strangeness would be solved as well. Camus writes: “If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled”.22 But it is not the case. When we experience the “dense” of the world, perceive how “a stone is foreign and irreducible to us”, and how powerfully nature and landscape can negate us, we can also feel that all the beauty of the world hides something inhuman, “and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a paradise lost”.23 The Earth can be glorious, noble, as, for example, “silent Spanish plain”, but without human being contemplating it, the Earth constitutes “a soulless land” – we can read in the essay Don Juanism.24 To refer to the opinion of Barbara Stasik, the interpreter of Camus’s philosophy, the unsatisfied spiritual need for finding the deepest meaning of the world reveals “the tragic contradiction resulting from the clash between affirmation (‘love of life’) and the ‘irrational silence of the world’. However, it also makes man aware of his particular greatness, which manifests itself in thinking. As in Pascal’s philosophy, thinking is understood here as the only testimony of human dignity; therefore it can be said that Camus nobilitates consciousness, this specific human attribute, which releases the absurd, but also makes it possible to dominate it.”25

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In our opinion, Camus finds the possibility of surpassing the absurd and strangeness in the power of love. He believes that human existence, even in the situation of absurdity, should be filled with love. Although such love cannot be complete, accomplished, and permanent, i.e. absolute, it can still be perfect. Undoubtedly, Camus means this perfect love, when he writes in his Notebooks: “Thus starting from the absurd, it is not possible to live revolt without reaching at some point or other an experience of love”.26 There are three complementary elements of the authentic existence proposed by Albert Camus as the manner of overcoming the absurd: metaphysical revolt, absurd freedom and passion for life. According to our interpretation, in Camus’s concept love lies at the foundation of all these elements, but especially of the passion of life, which it can be identified with. Metaphysical revolt is directed against death. “It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it”. “It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. It is an insistence upon the world anew every second. Just a danger provides man the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole experience. It is that constant presence of man in his own eyes.”27 This revolt engaging man’s will and consciousness is, at the same time, a deep loving affirmation of life, in which each experience, even a hard one, has its great value. That is why Camus does not accept a suicide as a possible manner of resolving human problems, while, for example, Sartre does not exclude this possibility. Moreover, Camus declares himself against the spread of terror, brute force, violence, and especially against bloody revolution, such as French or communist ones, when he writes in his Notebooks28 that “(. . .) the logic of revolt rejects blood and selfish motives”, because it “is not that of destruction but of creation”. The absurd freedom, second aspect of the authentic existence declines illusions of common life. It does not pretend to be a full freedom, because “the highest liberty, that freedom to be (. . .) does not exist”. “What freedom – Camus asks – can exist in the fullest sense without assurance of eternity?”29 The absurd freedom is rather a feeling of liberation from everything, also from ethical norms, except for “the pure flame of life”.30 But this disinterestedness with regard to ethical norms which regulate human activity does not mean that injustice or wrongfulness is accepted. When love, and only love, establishes ethical rules, all acts must serve man; and, accordingly, if a man needs bread and justice, one should do everything in order to satisfy this need.31 Moreover, despite the awareness of the fact that “everything is allowed” (Camus quotes here Sartre’s well known statement, referring also to Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov), other people ought not to be judged.32

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According to Merton’s pertinent commentary, love is de facto the source of Camus’s ethic. Merton cites the following significant fragment of Camus’s Notebooks: “If someone have told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: ‘I recognize only one duty, and that is to love”’.33 The third element of Camus’s model of the authentic existence, recognized by him as the fundamental one – the passion of life – consists not only in “being faced with the world” in the continuous experience of the “flame of life”, but, first of all, in the profound affirmation of life and human being. These ideas are best presented by him in The Plague, and are illustrated by the acts of doctor Rieux and Tarrou. The novel explicitly appeals to us for courage and love.34 In his Notebooks,35 Camus concludes that, taking into account both the limitation and passion implied by this term, love is the most human of feelings. Man fulfills himself only through love. In love, even in its short-lived form, he finds the image of his own fate, though deprived of the future. Only due to our tender relationships with other people – whether called love or pleasure – can we escape the great “cold” of the world, illuminate and warm the world with their brightness. However, it is the love capable of sacrifice and the faithfulness, which constitutes the most accessible way of upholding the best within man himself. Camus emphasizes that the vocation of human being is to evoke up the glow of happiness on the faces of persons whom we love. According to the author of The Plague, who proposes heroism without God, and the way leading to perfection without a reward, only the great effort of perfect and mature love helps us reinforce human dignity and achieve a certain kind of happiness in the world surrounding us. The mythical Sisyphus pays for this odd type of happiness with his ever repeated effort, but in the end he concludes that “all is well”. Anyone who has never experienced a relation with transcendence and builds his existence upon this earth only, ought to know that “the struggle itself towards heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” and to “imagine Sisyphus happy”.36 As Camus said in his Stockholm speech, during the Nobel Prize ceremony, by his humanist approach he wanted to show how man can “fashion an art of living in times of catastrophe, and can become reborn ‘by fighting openly against the death instinct at work in our society’ ”.37 The phenomenological personalism of Józef Tischner, the disciple of Roman Ingarden and the friend of Karol Wojtyła-Jean Paul II, enriches the understanding of love. Contemplative mystical knowledge of the deeper meaning of reality, namely about God is revealed in Absolute Love. In the theory formulated by the Polish personalist, caritas possesses two inseparable sides: love of our neighbors and the world (eros in Plato’s terms), and absolute love of God (agape). As it was shown above, Camus recognized only the former.

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We must remark that the author of Filozofia dramatu38 replaces the traditional philosophical distinction between rationalism and irrationalism, adopted also by Camus, by the pluralism of rationalistic types of cognition, which “open before us several levels of wisdom within the world and within man himself”. “That it is from reverence of diversity in the sphere of the rational that phenomenology was born”39 – he expresses. Tischner, on the one hand, appreciates the role of Edmund Husserl’s purely rational inquiries, which he studied thoroughly, interpreting them, however, in a different way than Camus does, and even differently from his master Roman Ingarden.40 On the other hand, he extremely values the “wisdom of love” revealed in mystical experience, which, in his opinion, is also considered the highest rationality by the authentic Christianity. ´ Citing and accepting, in Swiat ludzkiej nadziei and in Drogi i bezdro˙za 41 miłosierdzia, Bergsonian words that philosophy is incomplete without mystical experience, he uses the “data” having their source in the personal contemplative experience to formulate his own philosophical standpoint. Tischner feels that contemplative knowledge, just as faith, is a gift, mercy. It was given to him, not to Camus. That is why he understands Camus’s point of view perfectly. One can say, that he offers the understanding of love extended by the sphere that was unavailable to Camus’s cognition. Absolute love must be identified with God who is the Absolute Loving Good, not the neutral, outer Absolute, the first cause of the motion in the world, as perceived in the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition. That is love which constitutes the aspect that appears to be the deepest nature of God; it is – in other words – the most sacral, divine characteristic of God’s existence. Expressing such ideas, Tischner turns to be the follower of St. Augustine, as well as the whole Christian mystical tradition. Also for him God “exists” in different manner than all entities in the world, and God’s love is full, perfect, accomplished, eternal. Christianity – as Tischner stresses in the book devoted to the interpretation of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church – “possesses only one basic dogma, the dogma of dogmas, from which all formulas shoot up like branches from a trunk”.42 This dogma was expressed in evangelic words of St. John: “God is love”.43 What are other important aspects of absolute love? Absolute love is not a simple bundle of sentiments. Neither is it a resentiment, in Nietzschean understanding. Its highest revelation – Charity – carries the hope “that all can be saved yet.”44 Love constitutes a manner of participation in the Absolute Good. It is also a necessary condition of every type of cognition, especially of contemplative experience – illuminatio, to use St. Augustine’s words. Due to love we can “comprehend everything”, and in

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this sense it is a “sister of wisdom”.45 The state of absolute love, usually named Heaven or the Domain of God, means fullness of joy and happiness. From human point of view it is, using theological terms, Salvation. As we can read in certain Tischner’s texts, Salvation, often called “liberation”, is sometimes understood as the state in which nothing “has to be done”, and “everything can be done”.46 In his opinion, it is not freedom alone, not even liberation, that is crucial. Salvation means, first of all, the state of accomplished happiness which “does not leave us”. God – the Absolute Love – seems “a nest for man”, “the place where domesticated happiness is waiting for him”47 – explains Tischner. In Salvation, the creative power of God’s love can be most fully revealed, leading, among others, to the resurrection of humans, including the sphere of human body. “The resurrected body will be fully subjected to our own will, our own love. Thus, it will probably be the body which corresponds best to our love of the body”.48 We must add that this soteriological motif makes the Polish philosopher perceive the fundamental task of Christian education in the awakening of hope ´ for absolute love. In Swiat ludzkiej nadziei49 he writes: “(. . .) the Christian vision of Eros is strictly related to the dimension which is known neither to the law of nature nor to experimental psychology, namely the dimension of hope for perfect love. That is why “the hope that perfect love lies within the reach of human reason and heart” should be awaken in man. That which Camus considers to be but an ideal, Tischner sees possible to realize. In the opinion of the author of My´slenie według warto´sci, it is only man who possesses a capacity for loving and also for accepting love, absolute love in particular. Love, in the strict sense, is related to persons – human and divine. It shows its dialogical character in the fact – as we can read in Przekona´c Pana Boga – that “autonomous entities could not live without themselves”.50 The concept of human being, reflected in all Tischner’s texts, manifests its affiliation to the tradition of the “metaphysics of light” which culminates in contemporary personalistic trends. Just like other personalists, for example Emmanuel Mounier or Karol Wojtyła-John Paul II, but also existentialists – Albert Camus, among others, Tischner notices: “We are not a part of the Cosmos. We are subordinated to other rules. Other than rocks, stars, and trees”.51 What distinguishes us from the sphere of cosmos? This distinguishing factor is a strict centre of man, “the axiological ego”, which exists “neither in time nor in space”. By reason of its axiological positivity, one can say that it is also un-real, i.e. “transcendent in relation to the world.”52 It means, primarily, that the deepest sphere of man is rooted in eternity, is not subordinated to the power of death. This truth is – as Tischner formulates

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it – justified also by the transcendental rational investigations conducted by Edmund Husserl, especially in his late concept of the timeless, primal Ego (Ur-Ich).53 It seems very interesting that the author of Prolegomena chrze´scija´nskiej filozofii s´mierci, while analyzing the difficult problem of death, cites fragments of Camus’s Man Revolting and indicates the importance of Camus’s remarks on the revolution in the valuation of death as performed by Christ.54 A similar citation can be found in the last book by Tischner Drogi i bezdro˙za miłosierdzia,55 where, answering the question: Why did the love of free God reveal itself in the world and embodied in Christ voluntarily agree to crucifixion? Tischner writes: “We are able, partly, to follow Camus. It was happened for the sake of love of the human being.” But Tischner goes beyond Camus – Christ died in order to reveal the other deep meaning of death, which culminated in Resurrection. In TV Easter broadcast, Tischner’s commentary on the Christian interpretation of death was the following: “It is not man who invented death. It is not God who invented death. Death is devil’s error. God invented life, and He invented love that springs from life, and out of which life emerges. It was said once: ‘Love is strong as death’. And the Cross and Resurrection are to show something deeper – ‘Love is stronger than death’ ”.56 Tischner’s concept of man is optimistic also for another reason. The “axiological”, spiritual ego, existing in the horizon of agaton, is absolutely good. “Goodness is still in man”57 – says he, giving expression to his mystical knowledge. He refers to St. Augustine’s concept of the Inner Teacher – Christ, Who constitutes the deepest layer of human subjectivity (though we are not always conscious of it). Due to this sacral part, man is able to reach the state of absolute love. Possessing “a particle of Heaven” within himself, man should feel not as an “adopted” child of God, as it was proclaimed before the Second Vatican Council, but rather God’s “chosen” child – insists Tischner.58 Egoistic features belonging to a more superficial, psychic layer of human being, cannot destroy that inner goodness, although they can hide it. That is why we do not often meet mature forms of love in the world surrounding us. Love manifests itself most often in its imperfect shape, as pursuance. “Love between a girl and a boy, love between a wife and a husband, love between children and parents, motherly love, fatherly love, love of one’s homeland. Love flourishes in each of the mentioned situations. Apparently, it does not, however, flourish in its fullness, if it has to flourish at so different places” – we can read in Tischner’s Jak z˙y´c.59 Love is usually incomplete in this world – and this is the reason why the absolute love becomes the highest commandment.

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According to Tischner, man is able to, and despite all difficulties, ought to fight for participation in absolute love. Undoubtedly, this challenge requires effort, responsibility, and even sacrifice. The first step to achieve this aim lies in working over oneself, which consists in introducing certain order into love. This endeavor extends throughout the whole life of man, for we have to reconcile three basic types of love: love of ourselves, love of our neighbor, and love of God. “The drama of man consists in the fact that there frequently occurs antagonism between these three types of love” – Tischner writes in Miło´sc´ niemiłowana.60 This conflict often becomes a source of faith in our lives, and unless we solve it, always being ready to redress our mistakes and “start the matters of love from the very beginning”, the sense of guilt will accompany us. Commandments and blessings, considered as belonging to “the language of love”,61 are helpful on this difficult way of “radical inner transformation, metanoia, and conversion”62 leading us to God – the Absolute Love. The understanding of commandments as “the language of love” places Tischner’s approach in the area of open morality, based not upon norms, but upon values, among which love (agape) is the essential one. Agape, while being so crucial, “makes everything else relative”63 . The open morality, which was distinguished from the closed morality, as Tischner reminds, by Henri Bergson, determined “the ethos of great moral leaders of humanity: the ethos of Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, and the mystics”.64 By perceiving the actual source of ethical behaviors in love, the Polish philosopher is close to Camus. He stresses that by listening intensively to the “voice of love”, adopting at the same time the attitude of solidarity – this “social love”,65 we can reduce suffering in the world. It is beautiful – he adds – that even in our imperfect world “Heaven extends its domain together with our acts of love today.”66 It is worth mentioning that despite their varied metaphysical standpoints, both Camus and Tischner, affirm life, and, accordingly, appreciate the Franciscan spirituality. In the manner of St. Francis, in the tragic times of the twentieth century, they both postulate that love should be loved again. University of Science and Technology AGH, Kraków, Poland

NOTES 1 A. Camus, L’homme révolté, in: A. Camus, Essays, Bibliothéque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1965), p. 428. 2 A. Camus, L’homme révolté – Textes complémentaires, op. cit., p. 1686. 3 J. Tischner, Ksiadz ˛ na manowcach [The Wayward Priest] (2nd ed., Kraków: Znak, 2001), p. 173.

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J. Tischner, My´slenie według warto´sci [Thinking according to Values] (Kraków: Znak, 1982), cf., for example, pp. 124–125, 157–158, 446. 5 T. Merton, Seven Essays on Albert Camus, in: Brother Patrick Hart (ed.), The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton (New York: New Direction Publishing Corporation, 1981). 6 The opinion of Czesław Miłosz, the Polish Nobel Prize Winner in Literature (1980), is worth quoting in this context. In his essay devoted to Camus published in French “Preuves” (4/1960) (the Polish translation of which has been included, as an appendix, in the Polish edition of Thomas Merton’s Seven Essays on Albert Camus [Krzysztof Bielawski – ed., Bydgoszcz: Homini, 1996]) Miłosz writes: “Camus was one of these few people who gave me a hand – when I left the Stalinist Poland in 1951, while others were avoiding me like the plague, like the sinner against the Future. (. . .) Camus’s friendship provided me with one of the guidelines which made it possible for me to exist in the maze of the West”. In Miłosz’s opinion, never did Camus surrender to any fashions, and – contrary to intellectuals frequenting Parisian cafés – never did he deride good manners of the classes considered as ossified in their narrow morality. Neither did he believe in universal ideas, such as communism, justifying crimes committed in the name of reverence for post-Hegelian speculations. “Ultimately, the nature of philosophy is corporeal: it ensures calm of the sight, or, as in the case of Camus, equips man with brotherly kindness” – emphasizes Miłosz. 7 In his Notebooks Camus purposefully recalls Plato’s statement that: “If we were Gods, we would not know love” – see A. Camus, Notebooks 1942–1945 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964). It refers to the Platonic conviction that love symbolized by the god Eros, a child of Richness and Poverty, constitutes yearning for compensation of that which we lack. 8 A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage International, 1991), p. 63. All essays cited in the present paper were published in the collection The Myth of Sisyphus. 9 “Philosophy and Fiction”, in: op. cit., p. 98. 10 Ibid., p. 51. 11 Ibid., pp. 21, 28, and 17. 12 Ibid., pp. 19–20. As far as physics is concerned, Camus refers to the images of atoms, electrons and “invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus” (ibid., p. 20). 13 Camus agrees with the statement formulated by Gilson that after the age of philosophers, who dealt with philosophy, the age of philosophy professors followed, who deal with philosophers. 14 Cf. my critique of Camus’s interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology conducted by him in the spirit of simplified Platonism, in: “Husserl and Camus: in Search of Time Accomplished”, A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, vol. XLVIII (1996), pp. 39–40. 15 A. Camus, The Myth . . ., p. 44. 16 Ibid., p. 46. 17 Ibid., p. 37. 18 Ibid., p. 36, cf. p. 35. 19 Ibid., p. 51. 20 A. Camus, Notebooks. 21 A. Camus, The Myth . . ., p. 51. 22 Ibid., p. 17. 23 Ibid., p. 14. 24 Ibid., p. 76. 25 Cf. Barbara Stasik, “Alberta Camusa człowiek paradoksalny” [Albert Camus’s Paradoxical Man], Archiwum Historii Filozofii i My´sli Społecznej, vol. 28, 1982, p. 56. 26 A. Camus, Notebooks 1942–1945, p. 138.

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A. Camus, The Myth . . ., p. 54. A. Camus, Notebooks 1942–1945, p. 125. 29 “Absurd Freedom”, in: The Myth . . ., p. 57. 30 Ibid., pp. 59–60. 31 Cf. Notebooks 1942–1945, p. 136. 32 Ibid. 33 T. Merton, Seven Essays . . ., p. 240. 34 Cf. similar opinion of T. Merton in his Seven Essays . . ., p. 190. “The Plague is a modern myth about the destiny of man.” It “must be read not simply as a drama or as a psychological study, but as a myth of good and evil, of freedom and historical determinism, of love against what Hopkins called ‘the death dance in our blood”’ – he comments (ibid., p. 181). 35 Notebooks 1942–1945, pp. 502–503. 36 A. Camus, Myth . . ., p. 123. 37 Citation in Merton’s translation, Seven Essays . . ., p. 123. 38 Cf. J. Tischner, Filozofia dramatu [The Philosophy of Drama] (Paris: Éditions du Dialogue, 1990). 39 J. Tischner, My´slenie według warto´sci, pp. 434, 439. 40 Tischner is the author of two very important philosophical treatises, not devoid of essential critical remarks: “Ja transcendentalne w filozofii Edmunda Husserla” [The Transcendental Ego in Edmund Husserl’s Philosophy] (Studia Teolog.-Vars., No 1/2, 1964) and “Strukturalne zagadnienia refleksji i spostrze˙zenia immanentnego w s´wietle niektórych tez Edmunda Husserla” [The Structural Problems of Reflection and Immanent Perception in the Light of Edmund Husserl’s Selected Theses] (Studia Philosophiae Christianae, No 1/1996). He devoted his habilitation thesis to Fenomenologia s´wiadomo´sci egotycznej [The Phenomenology of Egotic Consciousness] (1972). While preparing the thesis he completed a yearly scholarly internship at the Catholic University of Leuven, where – as his friend Stanisław Grygiel reports – he spent most time not attending lectures but at the Husserl-Archives, studying the unpublished manuscripts of Edmund Husserl; cf. Wojciech Bonowicz, Tischner (Cracow: Znak, 2001), p. 234. 41 ´ J. Tischner, Swiat ludzkiej nadziei [The World of Human Hope] (3rd ed., Cracow: Znak, 2000), p. 224 and Drogi i bezdro˙za miłosierdzia [Roads and Devious Paths of Charity] (Cracow: Wydawnictwo AA, 2000), p. 57. 42 ˙ J. Tischner, J. Zakowski, Tischner czyta katechizm [Tischner Reads the Catechism] (Cracow: Znak, 1997), p. 61. “There is only one light which shines in many shades” – he adds. 43 Cf. ibid., pp. 76–77. As Tischner puts it, Living God says: Amo ergo sum. In this words the deepest definition of God is implied. He reminds that it was St. Augustine’s opinion that “in this respect man is similar to the Holy Trinity: as he actually is in so far as he loves” (ibid.). 44 Drogi i bezdro˙za miłosierdzia, p. 22. 45 Tischner agrees here with Max Scheler that love is also an act revealing reality, constituting a “kind of intuition leading to all types of cognition, including strictly theoretical knowledge” ´ (Swiat ludzkiej nadziei, p. 223). 46 Cf. Ksiadz ˛ na manowcach (Cracow: Znak, 2001), pp. 74–75. 47 Tischner czyta katechizm, p. 118. 48 Ibid., p. 186. 49 ´ Swiat ludzkiej nadziei, pp. 92–93. 50 Przekona´c Pana Boga. Z ks. Józefem Tischnerem rozmawiaja˛ Dorota Za´nko i Jarosław Gowin [To Persuade God. Józef Tischner Interviewed by Dorota Za´nko and Jarosław Gowin] (Cracow: Znak, 2000), p. 26. 51 Tischner czyta katechizm, p. 19. 27 28

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´ Swiat ludzkiej nadziei, p. 162. Cf. my article “Does Man Co-Create Time?”, in: A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, vol. XLVII (1991), pp. 55–64. 54 “Prolegomena chrze´scija´nskiej filozofii s´mierci” [Prolegomena to Christian Philosophy of ´ Death] in: Swiat ludzkiej nadziei, pp. 249, 264. 55 Drogi i bezdro˙za miłosierdzia, pp. 97–98. 56 Quoted after the fragment of the film directed by Artur Wi˛ecek “Baron” entitled Tischner. Life in Tales (part three). 57 Ksiadz ˛ na manowcach, p. 188. 58 Tischner czyta katechizm, p. 19. 59 Jak z˙y´c [How to Live] (Wrocław, 1997), p. 114. 60 Miło´sc´ niemiłowana [Unloved Love] (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Stanisława Grotomirskiego, 1993), pp. 77–78. 61 Cf. Ksiadz ˛ na manowcach, p. 289 and Przekona´c Pana Boga, pp. 189–191. 62 My´slenie według warto´sci, p. 488. 63 Przekona´c Pana Boga, p. 180, cf. also p. 190. 64 Cf. the text entitled “Wprowadzenie do etyki błogosławie´nstw” [Introduction to the Ethos of Blessings], in: J. Tischner, Miło´sc´ nas rozumie [Love Understands Us] (Cracow: Znak, 2000), p. 154. 65 Let us remind that in Poland of 1980, Tischner was commonly considered the chaplain of the Solidarity movement. He is also known as the author of Etyka solidarno´sci [The Ethic of Solidarity] (Cracow: Znak, 1981). 66 Tischner czyta katechizm, p. 198. 52 53

ANNA MARIA PEZZELLA

E D I T H S T E I N A N D J E A N PAU L S A RT R E : A P O S S I B I L E C O M PA R I S O N ?

ABSTRACT

Edith Stein and Jean Paul Sartre: a possibile compariso? takes into account three possible areas of investigation: their respective visions of the human being or their philosophical anthropology, relation with others, and the problem of God. The Leitfaden of Stein’s speculations are her anthropological investigations, which run throughout her work. And when Stein discusses human beings, she notes that they are a composite of body, soul, and spirit. The Sartrean vision of the human being is profoundly different vis-à-vis the Steinian point of view. Privileging the relation consciousness-world, Sartre empties out the I, throwing it into existence and rendering it a thrown project. With this move, Sartre distances himself from Husserl and draws closer to Heidegger. Stein admits that one cannot speak of an individual human being without thinking of that being as being raised and formed within a community. One is born first as a communal being and then one recognises oneself as an individual. One can choose to isolate oneself or to exit such community, but one can never eliminate this moment insofar as it is that which renders the human being a human being. It is only in the interior of communities that other persons can invite us to become men and women in the true sense of the word. Without the other we would not have the possibility to recognise one another, to grow, understand one another, to become that which we are. Even here the difference with Sartre is quite clear. Others are not hell, as Sartre proclaims at the end of No Exit. In the relations of others for themselves, toward which the I directs itself in order to fill the part that is lacking in itself, the subject continues to discover a nothingness. The other objectifies me, reducing me to a mere thing and negating my transcendence. The gaze of the other, from which there is no escape, is the most atrocious punishment that one can experience. One always feels surprised when one looks in the keyhole. Sartre’s position with respect to the problem of God is articulated and developed over the years. He considers himself an atheist, maintaining that religious sentiment is a useless passion insofar as it is merely the desire of human beings 161 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 161–177. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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to see themselves as a totality. For Stein, God represents that lighthause that allows one to make choices that are always responsible and individual, choices that even God cannot enter into. This question is pertinent insofar as both intellectuals never encountered one another and the paths they chose were very different. In any case, and this is a typical aspect of philosophy, it is possible to compare their differing thought and personalities while maintaining that there is a connection that brings them together, namely, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. We can say, therefore, that there is a shared domain of questions, but the solutions to these very questions greatly differ. We all know the theoretical, existential path of Edith Stein: A student of Husserl, she distances herself from her teacher; she teaches at Speyer and then at the Pedagogical Institute at Münster, finally entering the Discalced Carmelite monastery after the promulgation of racial laws in Germany. She died at Auschwitz in 1942. Sartre, after completing his studies at the École Normale, travels to Berlin to deepen his understanding of phenomenology, which he became better acquainted with during his university studies. After the outbreak of World War II he was taken prisoner and once liberated aided the resistance. He is known for his political and intellectual engagement. We face here very different life experiences, but still a comparison is possible by taking into account three possible areas of investigation: their respective visions of the human being or their philosophical anthropology, relations with others, and the problem of God. Phenomenology is a philosophy that grounds itself in the analysis of the phenomenon essence, whereas existentialism gives priority to existence rather than essence. Despite this distance one cannot remain silent about the fact that existentialism was conceived within the womb of phenomenology. Heidegger’s Being and Time signals the turn that later will be followed by others, including Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Gabriel Marcel. The two leanings lead to two very different Weltanschauungen insofar as they derive from two different anthropological visions, which ground the difference between the philosophy of existence and phenomenology. In fact, it is not unimportant that Simone de Beauvoir considers Being and Nothingness more of a philosophical anthropology than ontology. Concerning Stein, we find ourselves dealing with a philosophy of essence that totally reflects her anthropological vision, which does not negate for human beings possibility, project, freedom and responsibility, all aspects that are normally attributed to the philosophies of existence.

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Stein’s point of departure, similar to that of Sartre’s, has its root in Husserl’s attack of the naturalism of consciousness.1 After a profound study of the psyche, she demonstrates how it cannot be considered in the same way as any physical fact. Furthermore, it cannot be investigated with mathematical criteria because, departing from an analysis carried out on the field, one can describe the close link between natural and spiritual aspects, between causality and motivation. This is why it becomes arduous, even impossible, to predetermine psychic life with absolute and mathematical certainty. The young Sartre, as is well known, deals with this very criticism. Following Husserl, he is very aware of the limits of a positivist psychology. In fact, by following the directions of Husserl, he quickly masters the new principles of phenomenology, emphatically emphasising that facts and essences are incommensurable in psychology; one who starts his or her investigation by turning to facts will never find essences. The Leitfaden of Stein’s speculations are her anthropological investigations, which run throughout her work. Her study of the human being diverges from other conceptions of anthropology, either obvious or accepted ones of the tradition, in order to examine that which manifests itself. She writes: “If we wish to know what the human being is, then we have to transfer ourselves in the best way possible into the situation in which we experience our very being human, that is, that which we experience in ourselves and that which we experience in our encounters with other human beings.”2 And when Stein discusses human beings, she notes that they are “. . . a composite of body, soul, and spirit. Insofar as human beings – according to their essence – are spirit, their ‘spiritual life’ is an outgoing life that enters into a world that discloses itself to them; yet, they retain a firm hold on their own selves. They not only ‘breathe’ out their essence in a spiritual manner – as does every actual formal structure – unconsciously revealing themselves, but they are, in addition, active in a personal spiritual manner. The human soul as spirit rises in its spiritual life beyond itself. But the human spirit is conditioned both from above and from below. It is immersed in a material structure which it be-souls and molds into a bodily form. The human person carries and encloses ‘its’ body and ‘its’ soul, but it is at the same time carried and enclosed by both.”3 Let us begin by examining the first element mentioned by Stein, namely, the bodily aspect. The phenomenologist Stein dedicates a lot of space to these considerations, as did her teacher Husserl. She takes over Husserl’s distinction between Körper, the physical body, and Leib, the living body or the body lived through again intensely in experience. Her detailed analyses focus on a description of the body, its movements and limits, its interaction with the psyche. This is an essential moment for Edith Stein because it is

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through this interaction that we encounter others, their interiorities, their spiritual productions.4 She would have no difficulty in affirming that I am my body. It is this here, and it permits me to say that there is one over there; it is the zero point of orientation. I cannot exit it, and not because it is a prison, but because the human being is a corporeal-spiritual living unity. For Sartre, the body is a lived reality: we do not possess a body, but we are our body. This is why it is only possible to communicate through the transmission of lived experiences. Linguistic mediation is not completely adequate because there is always something that remains incommunicable insofar as not everything is rational for and understandable by consciousness. For Stein, unlike Sartre, the body is the medium through which it is possible to reach the interiority of the other because it is able to bear the traces, the signs of the soul. I can grasp through linguistic communication and mimic expressions the lived experience of the other, that is, that which s/he feels and lives. It represents, therefore, a fundamental element for understanding the life of others because it is the place in which the soul manifests itself. This is also another basic aspect of Stein’s anthropology to which she dedicates a long reflection. She begins to discuss this in her text, On the Problem of Empathy where the concept of soul is little delineated.5 This concept is first extensively developed in her Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities,6 which lacks, however, the metaphysical ground that characterises Stein’s later thought, especially when Stein depicts the soul as the interior castle, the favourite seat, in which God manifests Himself; here Stein is following Teresa of Avila. The soul is the centre of an animate-corporeal-spiritual being, it is a profundity from which the I emerges and in which deepens that which it lives; it radiates life continuously, receiving in itself the world. It neither forms itself nor transforms itself; rather, it grows and matures. It is the source of life and its life is a spiritual actuality. All that is soul is rooted in the core of the person, representing the immutable consistency of its being that is not the result of development, but, on the contrary, it imposes on development a certain way of proceeding. The core, die Seele der Seele, is that irreducible element that belongs to every human being; it is that invariable, immutable part that is proper to every human being. The personal I is not itself without its own I-ness, its own self-ness or ipseity. Rather, it is a being gifted with a nucleus that is inserted in a world, on a foundation of an opening that belongs properly to its being, from which it can obtain content and life.7 When Stein refers to the core of the person she means that which “. . . is in itself and that which prescribes how it ought to run its life and what it can become through itself. ‘Ought’ does not signify a ‘necessary must.’ There is the possibility that the core in its development does not purely manifest itself. The same person has a feeling of how s/he could be and ought to be, which, in fact, s/he is not . . .”8 The core is

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simple and remains so. That which becomes actualised does not detach itself from that which is still potential; in other words, the whole remains behind that which becomes actualised. Stein refers to a spatial image to explain this: “. . . a small part of a surface is hit by a ray of light that emerges from a surrounding darkness without being detached from a remaining surface.”9 While the space continuum can be broken up, this possibility is not given by the core insofar as all that is given by the human being is a unity in actuality and potentiality. The core that the person carries with himself/herself, therefore, predelineates how one’s life must be, what it can and must become. And, that which a person is in him- or herself must be preserved and actualised because only in this way s/he can hold on to it forever. Otherwise “that which could have been actualised and was not is lost forever.”10 Here, Stein makes a useful and interesting comment, precisely noting that if a person commits to realising oneself, for example, as happened to Stein within the university domain, but one fails despite all personal efforts, because external circumstances did not permit such an actualisation, then the damage or harm is not personal; rather, it concerns the spiritual objective world, the community, which could have enriched itself, but which did not make this realisation possible. In this case, the singular person does not bear any responsibility because s/he exerted the greatest possible effort on his or her part in order to realise and actualise internal potentialities, which the community did not accept because it did not permit this very realisation. If, however, the external impediments could have been overcome, but the work was not fully realised on account of the sacrifices that it would have entailed, then the damage or harm is not only external but also internal. The possibility of actualisation remains right to the last instant of earthly life, after which the hidden capacity will be taken away; it will have been lost forever! According to Stein, a being, thrown into existence, can find once again the connection with a being that threw him or her; s/he has the freedom to become that which s/he wants, even if s/he cannot subvert or change those very possibilities that are contained in his or her core – possibilities that when not actualised are lost forever. “That which is the personal I is something in part natural, or even ‘material’ that must and can form; and, in part, it is something that belongs to its spiritual-personal being that is not given to our hands to be shaped, but it is given as form through which it can shape matter. Even still, to the extent that it is properly-speaking the opening of this form, it is mater that must and can let itself be shaped through something that comes from the outside.”11 The “I can” (Ich kann of phenomenology) or “could be” (können), however, cannot be separated from the idea of freedom and the power-to-leave out – something equally belongs to both freedom and the “can” or “could be.” At the base of all this is an “ought.” The power to be able to as well as the “ought” are freely connected to the opening that properly belongs

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to the very possibility of closing oneself off. The human spirit awakens to freedom insofar as it is free and open. It, therefore, can open itself unto the divine life as well as close itself off. But, in this act against God the human being does not nourish him- or herself from the strength that comes from Him; rather, s/he nourishes him- or herself from his or her own strengths, which in the end are all dilapidated, culminating in non-being, that empty being, the nothing that is maintained without a proper substance or potency/power12 . The Sartrean vision of the human being, especially as it is developed in Being and Nothingness, is profoundly different vis-à-vis the Steinian point of view. As is well known, Sartre, though he recognises much of value in Husserl’s thought, detaches himself from Husserl. In particular, Sartre distances himself from the Husserlian emphasis on egology and the transcendental. Admittedly, Sartre’s critiques are certainly debatable, but I do not wish to enter into this discussion here. Privileging the relation consciousness-world, Sartre empties out the I, throwing it into existence and rendering it a thrown project. With this move, Sartre distances himself from Husserl and draws closer to Heidegger. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre writes, “Consciousness is a being whose existence posits its essence, and inversely it is consciousness of a being, whose essence implies its existence; that is, in which appearance lays claim to being. Being is everywhere. Certainly we could not apply to consciousness the definition which Heidegger reserves for Dasein and say that it is a being such that in its being, its being is in question. But it would be necessary to complete the definition and formulate it more like this: consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself.”13 This being, this reality that limits, obliges; it is the being in itself that announces itself in the irreducible existence of a world that surrounds us. This reality that limits us is not foreign or strange to us, because without it our consciousness would be empty; it is always intentional, it is a consciousness of or about something. Consciousness is being for itself. It is in this constant and intimate gap that the existence of nothing infiltrates. “The for-itself, as the foundation of itself, is the upsurge of the negation. The for-itself founds itself in so far as it denies in relation to itself a certain being or a mode of being. What it denies or annihilates, as we know, is being-in-itself. But no matter what being-in-itself: human reality is before all else its own nothingness. What it denies or annihilates in relation to itself as for-itself can be only itself.”14 In this way, consciousness founds the nothingness of being. Consciousness is always lacking something; human reality always goes beyond itself by overcoming that which is lacking, seeking a coincidence with itself, a coincidence that is never given insofar as only a part of reality is made evident by one’s choices. It is right in this lacking and desiring part of the human being that freedom grounds itself. Humans are

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beings that constantly negate and project something; a human is a projecting nature condemned to freedom. Sartre remarks, “Freedom makes itself an act, and we ordinarily attain it across the act which it organizes with the causes, motives, and ends which the act implies . . . I am indeed an existent who learns his freedom through his acts, but I am also an existent whose individual and unique existence temporalizes itself as freedom. As such I am necessarily a consciousness of freedom . . . Thus my freedom is perpetually in question in my being; it is not a quality added or a property of my nature. It is very exactly the stuff of my being . . . Thus freedom is not a being; it is the being of man – i.e., his nothingness of being.”15 The for-itself does not decide to be free; we choose freedom and we do not choose to be free, but “[w]e are condemned to freedom . . . thrown into freedom or, as Heidegger says, “abandoned.” And we can see that this abandonment has no other origin than the very existence of freedom.”16 I do not wish here to discuss the many critiques of Sartre’s vision, many of which after the first few years after the War argued for transcendentality and absoluteness. For Sartre, however, freedom is unconditioned, manifesting itself outside of reason and human motivations. This is so much the case that situations become less important. Facts do not enter into freedom, which is a pure contingency, because freedom negates it by making a choice. It is for this reason that one’s past or history are unimportant insofar as the individual is dependent upon the present project. Sartre writes, “This certainly does not mean that I can make the meaning of my previous acts vary in any way I please; quite the contrary, it means that the fundamental project which I am decides absolutely the meaning which the past which I have to be can have for me and for others. I alone in fact can decide at each moment the bearing of the past. I do not decide it by debating it, by deliberating over it, and in each instance evaluating the importance of this or that prior event; but by projecting myself toward my ends. I preserve the past with me, and by action I decide its meaning.”17 This vision of the human being contains two possibilities: anguish and responsibility. Anguish is born from the awareness that an executed decision does not exclude another. “In anguish I apprehend myself at once as totally free and as not being able to derive the meaning of the world except as coming from myself.”18 It is even possible to escape from anguish because a human being, faced with a multiplicity of possibility of one’s own being, can flee insofar as s/he is not capable of sustaining the proper situation of absolute freedom; this is an attitude of bad faith. Sartre says, “In a word I flee in order not to know, but I cannot avoid knowing that I am fleeing; and the flight from anguish is only a mode of becoming conscious of anguish . . . If I am my anguish in order to flee it that presupposes that I can decenter myself in relation to what I am,

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that I can be anguish in the form of “not-being it”, that I can dispose of a annihilating power at the heart of anguish itself.”19 He continues further, “. . . bad faith does not come from outside to human reality. One does not undergo his bad faith; one is not infected with it; it is not a state. But consciousness affects itself with bad faith. There must be an original intention and a project of bad faith; this project implies a comprehension of a bad faith as such and a prereflective apprehension (of) consciousness as affecting itself with bad faith. It follows first that the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived. Better yet I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully – and this not at two different moments . . . but in the unitary structure of a single project.”20 The other aspect here is responsibility. Insofar as one is condemned to be free, the human being is solely responsible for that which s/he does and, above all, for that which s/he becomes. Everyone is as is s/he wanted and projected to be, circumstances and destinies do not exist. We are that which we wanted to be. “. . .[M]an being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being . . . [T]he responsibility of for-itself is overwhelming since he is one by whom it happens that there is a world; since he is also the one who makes himself be, then whatever may be the situation in which he finds himself, the for-itself must wholly assume this situation with its peculiar coefficient of adversity, even though it be insupportable.”21 Here there is a strong sense of responsibility: the human being thrown into the world is responsible for all that s/he does. Stein’s vision, rooted within Christian phenomenology, is more articulated and adheres more to things themselves than does Sartre’s. The first critique that Stein would launch against Sartre, the very same critique that Stein launched against Heidegger and a critique which is very much in line with the thought of Hannah Arendt, concerns the coincidence of essence and existence. This means that humans are identical with God. Stein writes, “The human being is considered a small god (kleiner Gott) insofar as the human being is seen to be an exceptional being that is above all other beings and from whose being one can derive the only hope for clarifying the meaning of being.”22 As Hannah Arendt notes, Dasein is the “Lord of being,” occupying the place that traditional ontology reserved for God. Sartre’s attempt to create a theology of atheism is evident here. The fact that essence is distinguished from existence does not mean, Stein notes, that a human being does not possess certain distinctive and fundamental characteristics. In fact, Stein’s stress on the importance of having shown

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the human being as thrown is most evident when she claims that Dasein exists without knowing how; it cannot expect nothing of itself or its proper origin. The human being can consider the question concerning its proper origin to be without meaning or it can even silence the question, nonetheless it inevitably emerges, always in a new way, from characteristics present in the human being; it requires a being founded in itself that be the very being of that human being, a being in itself without foundation. The human being is founded and there is someone who throws the thrown. Here, thrownness reveals itself as creatureliness.”23 Even in this case, Sartre’s response will never succeed, as we will see later, to exhaust instances arising from the human soul; one has to affirm that religious sentiment represents a permanent structure of the human person. Sartre’s position with respect to the problem of God is articulated and developed over the years. We can summarise it in this way: He considers himself an atheist, maintaining that religious sentiment is a useless passion24 insofar as it is merely the desire of human beings to see themselves as a totality. Atheism, insofar as it is understood as a sign of human liberation, is met with despair. Sartre comments, “It is the conviction that man is a creator and is abandoned, alone in the world. Atheism is not, therefore, a happy optimism, but in the deepest sense it is despair.”25 In Being and Nothingness, the French philosopher cannot but speak of God as a transposition of the other. “God is only the concept of the Other pushed to the limit.”26 He affirms that there is shame before God because there is “recognition of my being-an-object before a subject which can never become an object.”27 Here, human alienation comes to ground itself, the perennial check of wishing to confer to God the character of an object. In doing so, however, the human being cannot but recognise God as a subject. The idea of God for Sartre, which is not a new idea insofar as it has its roots in Feuerbach, derives from the human desire to see itself as totality. God is the highest hypothesis of objectivation that humans posit of themselves. For Sartre, to be a human being means to project being-God, but the question inevitably arises here: Why does the human being desire to be God and why can s/he not fully accept his/her contingency? In 1946, Sartre affirms in E. Vittorini’s journal, II Politecnico, that even atheism is a faith. He does not fully endorse Marx’s vision, which maintains that religious sentiment is an alibi and a flight produced by historical-social conditions. One does not respond to questions about faith and why the need for faith arises in human beings. Sartre maintains that faith is an aspect linked to the human condition. Religious sentiment is a permanent structure of the human being.28 Hence, the human being is destined to think of him- or herself as if God existed. It is a sort of Kantian transcendental illusion. Notwithstanding atheistic humanism’s acceptance of the fact that

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God is dead and that it is able to uproot from itself this theological reasoning, it can do nothing with respect to the feeling of despair that arises in the human being in the face of such evidence. In Cahiers pour une morale, Sartre probes this question deeper, attempting a theological foundation for atheism. The human being either wishes himor herself to be like God or nature. From this is born the notion of God the Master, whose gaze is revealed as a “must be.” The human being feels him- or herself watched by God, and from this feeling of being bound law and morality are born. But, Sartre continues to perform a vivisection of the category of creation, ultimately affirming that God is nothing other than the human being. The human, not being the foundation of its very own being, can create meanings and modes of being. And, these creations are absolutes that could be misunderstood in moments in which humans allow themselves to hallucinate about an inverted world or life, a world that does not exist. One creates while creating oneself, and in creating oneself one understands that which is. The human being is causa sui, only insofar as s/he creates meanings for oneself; in this way, the human being is capable of only giving life to meanings or ways of being.29 There is a will to project a world without God. The death of God is a sign of human emancipation because it offers the possibility of an infinite openness and freedom. Values are no longer assigned by God the Master; rather, they belong to human society, to History. We have finally liberated ourselves from thousands of years of slavery. Once the question of God is archived along with the death of God, is it truly possible then to close the question of God? Sartre himself never offers a conclusion to the question, as elements about the idea of God always perdure. Given this reality, we could assume that the problem would have continued to be tackled, but in many diverse ways. Stein’s position on the question of God, on the contrary, is less speculative and sticks to the things themselves. She departs from the vision that every human being “. . . in his or her interior world, just as in the exterior one, finds him- or herself referring back to something that is beyond the human and all that exists, upon which s/he and everything else depend. The question concerning this being, the search for God, all belong to the human being.”30 Stein departs, therefore, from where Sartre is constrained to stop, or at least from where Sartre is unable to find an answer. For this reason neither philosophy nor anthropology nor a theory of consciousness are able to release themselves from examining this question, which obviously must be dealt with from the perspective of an analysis of human cognitive possibilities. It is necessary to understand fully to what extent, always employing his or her natural resources, the human being can enter into the hidden way of faith. This exigency is legitimate, and this is why it is not placed apart or subject to the epoché; rather,

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it represents another fundamental stepping stone, if not the most important, for understanding what the human being is, his or her origin, and the ultimate end of his or her earthly existence. If Stein had not dealt with such a question, she would have given us an incomplete anthropology that would never have fulfilled the purpose of a philosophical anthropology that had as its task the understanding of “the structure of the human person and his or her insertion in the forms and regions of being to which s/he belongs.”31 It is for this reason that a general theory of being could not absolutely limit itself to finite being; it had to examine the differences, even the existing analogies, between finite and infinite being. In this respect, Stein’s position is closer to Scheler’s than that of Husserl’s. Even in delineating the traits of his anthropology, Scheler does not forget the question “what is the human being and what place and metaphysical position does s/he occupy in the totality of being, the world and God”32 Despite their evident differences with respect to their conceptions of God, it is necessary to underline the demand that starts with a personal feeling and which later becomes a question that must be dealt with from a philosophical perspective. Stein’s philosophical itinerary is well articulated and complex. She feels the necessity of returning to mediaeval Christian thinkers, even if she cannot but take into account contemporary philosophers that contributed to the specific problems she was investigating, including the meaning of being. This allowed Stein to overcome scientistic and positivist positions that tended to dominate philosophy in the early 1900s. Stein explicitly refers to Husserl’s Wesensphilosophie (philosophy of essence) as well as Heidegger’s Existentialphilosophie (philosophy of existence) and Conrad Martius’ Seinslehre (doctrine of being). Notwithstanding the diversity of the respective positions, they all made possible a certain overcoming of a materialist position. Within the school of phenomenology religious questions were not absolutely tabù; they were, in fact, a subject of frequent discussion. Stein testifies to this fact with a letter written to Roman Ingarden where she describes her walk with Heidegger and Husserl where philosophical religious questions were discussed.33 Husserl relegated such questions to the private sphere, whereas for Stein such questions took on a philosophical character, even if many years had to pass before she could confront them from a more speculative perspective. In fact, the question of a Christian philosophy was raised some 14 years after her conversion, and this occurred for various reasons, including a lack of time as her teaching load was completely absorbing as well as her reading of Christian thinkers had not been sufficiently deepened at the time, especially Saint Thomas Aquinas. Her encounter with Thomas allowed her to metabolise a certain theoretical shyness in dealing with questions that did not seem to belong to philosophy, for example, the very possibility of a Christian philosophy; she

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did not want these questions to seem like a “square circle,” to borrow from Heidegger’s critique of Christian philosophy. Stein’s analyses did not merely stop at the relation between faith and reason as she was also interested in the different modalities of experiencing God. There are different approaches, and one does not necessarily exclude the other. All ways that lead to God are considered valid and worthy. Stein examines three ways: reason, faith and mysticism. All of these represent diverse ways human beings experience God. Finite and Eternal Being focuses on the rational path. Here, the I reasons with itself, asking about its origin and destination; it finds itself face to face with the nothingness of its being. This discovery not only brings anguish but also consents one a certain awareness, an inner, strong and undeniable certainty that “I am, that from moment to moment I am sustained in my being, and that in my fleeting being I share in enduring being. In the knowledge that being holds me, I rest securely. This security, however, is not the self-assurance of one who under his or her own power stands on firm ground, but rather the sweet and blissful security of a child that is lifted up and carried by a strong arm. And, objectively speaking, this kind of security is not less rational.”34 For Stein God is not a crutch upon which one can lean, whom one can burden with one’s own responsibilities; God is not an Other upon which one can throw the unbearable weight of one’s own choices. Choosing God does not mean “not choosing.” It does not mean not being responsible and not being a free subject and maker of one’s own existence. For Stein, God represents that lighthause that allows one to make choices that are always responsible and individual, choices that even God cannot enter into. Everyone must be able to realise oneself, according to one’s modalities and possibilities, possibilities that are not abstract and empty, but which are already inscribed in one’s core. I cannot become a painter if I do not have the capacities, if I do not possess them as my very own possibilities. This does not mean, however, that my own life is already determined by birth insofar as everyone has multiple possibilities. Certainly, for Stein, the person must realise him- or herself through that which s/he is. One reaches one’s own authenticity with the same fidelity to oneself, in realising one’s proper potentialities. Possibilities exist with regard to my own being. My freedom to be that which I desire is certainly conditioned by that which I carry inside. On my view, it is Stein’s position that is less abstract or speculative, that continually reasons with reality, with the existence of singular human beings. The human being is always localised within history, the social world, family, individuals; one can never completely separate oneself from these. The human being must be able to realise oneself by making choices and in making such choices s/he renders him- or herself free. The acceptance of oneself as one’s own most proper being is more complex

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and difficult than projecting oneself according to always new possibilities that are rooted in nothingness. But, how is it possible for something that is potential for a human being to actualise itself? What permits this? For Stein, the community that gathers its proper members must allow them to personally realise themselves through personal formation and development. Furthermore, communities are foundational for the life of human beings. Stein admits that one cannot speak of an individual human being without thinking of that being as being raised and formed within a community. One is born first as a communal being and then one recognises oneself as an individual. The first community is the family, and as the years go by one belongs to diverse communities. One can choose to isolate oneself or to exit such community, but one can never eliminate this moment insofar as it is that which renders the human being a human being. It is the community that permits us to become ourselves. It is only in the interior of communities that other persons can invite us to become men and women in the true sense of the word. Without the other we would not have the possibility to recognise one another, to grow, understand one another, to become that which we are. Moreover, the community has the responsibility to gather its subjects in order to form them. It is the repository of an historical, cultural tradition; it has its own memory that must be continuously transmitted insofar as subjects are born and raised within it. It even has the difficult task of transmitting values through various institutions, the family, school, and through all those organisations that are presupposed for formation. In fact, it has the responsibility to take care of its own members, which means that it must take on the full realisation of all the potentialities of a member. This is the case because a community that succeeds in realising the potentialities of its members is a healthy community, strong, fully developed, and conscious of itself. If it does not favour the full actualisation of its singular members, the community itself will be deficient because all of its potentialities localised within its members cannot be put into the service of the community, which would result in a certain lack or deficiency in many areas. A community, therefore, must be able to sustain its members,35 from all perspectives insofar as they all belong to that social organism. The community occupies a very delicate and important role, for example, when it comes to hard existential realities like death and pain, etc. This cannot be seen except from within a community. It is the place that opens, stimulates, and raises questions concerning the great problems of existence. Again, on this score, Stein cannot accept the vision of her colleague Heidegger, who believed that one cannot be authentic within a community. Heidegger’s they, which one has to flee, if one wishes to heed the call of conscience, is interpreted by Stein as the expression of a community. This is the case because

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letting oneself be guided, that is, following one that gives us directions for a possible formation of ourselves as men and women, does not mean being inauthentic, but simply feeling oneself and living as members of a community. The human being, according to Stein, is inauthentic when s/he flees her or his responsibility as a singular individual, when one submits to the judgements of incompetent persons, or when one allows oneself to be influenced by and lead into situations that would otherwise require autonomous and responsible behaviour. Living communally is, therefore, foundational for the growth of a human being because it is there that one becomes aware of the ultimate questions of our existence; it allows us to confront situations where we have to decide, and this is why the community allows us to become free men and women. The community is a locus of freedom because it is comprised only of free persons. “. . . [I]f it does not include at least one that constructs the community with his or her own personal life, it is no longer able to aim for a certain goal.”36 Without freedom there is no responsibility. Stein writes, “. . . [I]n a community where no one is responsible one cannot speak of a responsibility of the community. Here there exists no free agency, free self-organisation; there only exists an instinctual doing that cannot be considered a bearer of whatever type of responsibility.”37 On the contrary, a community that is truly a community, must be responsible and free, but these two aspects cannot but be rooted in singular individuals that must be capable of living them, guaranteeing and transmitting them through education. Even here the difference with Sartre is quite clear. Others are not hell, as Sartre proclaims at the end of No Exit. In the relations of others for themselves, toward which the I directs itself in order to fill the part that is lacking in itself, the subject continues to discover a nothingness. The other objectifies me, reducing me to a mere thing and negating my transcendence. The gaze of the other, from which there is no escape, is the most atrocious punishment that one can experience. One always feels surprised when one looks in the keyhole. “I am possessed by the Other; the Other’s look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it. The Other holds a secret – the secret of what I am. He makes me be and thereby he possesses me, and this possession is nothing other than the consciousness of possessing me. I in the recognition of my object state have proof that he has this consciousness.”38 The other, even if s/he is not present, is always there, always ready to make me an object and feel shame under his/her gaze. I find that which is fundamental to me outside of myself, because I feel myself under the gaze of the other, as that which the other knows, seeing me as other than I am; I am negated. Trapped in this play of mirrors that leads from seeing to being seen, from wanting to vindicate one’s own for-itself to being objectivated in oneself, consciousness does not succeed in grasping the other

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as a free objectivity. The I-others relation is always violent because it always resolves itself in a reciprocal negation. I cannot escape the continuous and eternal gaze of others! For Sartre, the other can exist for us only under two aspects: “. . . if I experience him with evidence, I fail to know him; if I know him, if I act upon him, I only reach his being-as-object and his probable existence in the midst of the world. No synthesis of these two forms is possible.”39 As previously noted, this vision will be modified when Sartre feels responsibility as an intellectual, when he becomes aware that each and every word and gesture have a precise meaning. The intellectual, then, must conduct a critical investigation of current ideologies in order to bring about a transformation of society and human beings. It is at this point that individual existentialism transforms itself to an intersubjective one with clear political implications. The other is liberated from the chains of his or her servitude; s/he has to wholly realise oneself. In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre does not undervalue solidarity, especially at the moment of making choices: to marry, to become a member of the union, etc. There is a faith in others because personal choices involve others. According to Sartre, existentialism does not sacrifice intersubjectivity, insisting rather on the concrete link between human beings that are directed toward the same thing while fighting for the same cause. That which he rejects, however, is the faith and collaboration that go beyond historical situations limited by time and space. One can rely on one’s companions in combat with whom one is engaged in a concrete and communal battle, but one cannot trust human beings that do not know one another, grounding oneself simply in the idea of human goodness or the common interest of human beings in the good of society. The aspects that we have drawn upon form only part of a possible comparison, a comparison that departs from a different philosophical anthropology that then reflects itself in philosophy, giving life to those who historically are defined by the philosophy of essence and the philosophy of existence. As we have remarked, a philosophy of essence like Stein’s does not preclude responsibility and the freedom to be that which one is. In this trajectory of formation and self-formation one is always accompanied by others who help us discover who we are, inviting us to be who we are. It is for this reason that we are not only responsible for ourselves but also with regard to others. For Stein, as for Sartre, one can and must speak of an ethics of responsibility; a responsibility that is always personal neither must nor can preclude responsibility for others. One does not find in Stein the notion of the Übermensch; the human being cannot become that which s/he wants. S/he must become that which s/he is. Edith Stein accepts the role of the creatureliness of Dasein, but this creatureliness does not preclude freedom and the responsibility of self-realisation and self-actualisation. The human being is free, and if the I does not wish, if it does

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not say yes to God, God cannot enter into that temple that is the human person. There is in Stein an approach that is less prejudicial concerning the questions that need to be faced, and a phenomenological excavation of questions follows from the showing of things themselves. It deals with questions von unten (from below) and not von oben (from above), as is the case with Sartre. “Zu den Sachen selbst (To the things themselves!)” means for Stein: follow with the gaze that which is manifested, describe it without prejudice; dig, plumb the depths, and do not fear or shy away from that which emerges. And, what one discovers is that the human being achieves true freedom and authenticity not in a continual self-transcendence, but in a constant immer wieder (always again), a beginning that must be again re-started right from the beginning in order to find, discover and re-appropriate oneself. All of this cannot be done alone because one needs others and the love of God. Pontifical Lateran University, Rome NOTES 1

Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as Rigorous Science, and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man. Trans. Q. Lauer (San Francisco: Harper Torchbooks, 1965). 2 Edith Stein, Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person. Vorlesung zur philosophischen Antropologie. Ed. B. Beckmann, in Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe, vol. 14 (Freiburg: Herder, 2004), pp. 28–29. 3 Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being. Trans. K. Reinhardt (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002), pp. 363–364. 4 For Stein, knowledge of the spirit and past epochs happens through the body. She writes: “. . . there is a multiplicity of forms that we encounter, but it is always linked to the physical body: the written word, the word that is stamped or carved into stone, the spatial form becomes stone or metal.” Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy. Trans. W. Stein (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1988), p. 117. 5 See Stein’s letter from 27.4.1917 to Roman Ingarden in Briefe an Roman Ingarden. Ed. M. A. Neyer OCD, in Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe vol. 4 (Freiburg: Herder, 2001), pp. 56–57. 6 Trans. M. C. Baseheart and M. Sawicki (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002). 7 See Edith Stein, Potenz und Akt. Ed. H. R. Sepp in Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe vol. 10 (Freiburg: Herder, 2005), p. 265. 8 Potenz und Akt, p. 139. 9 Ibid., p. 129. 10 Ibid., p. 135. 11 Ibid., p. 267. 12 Ibid. 13 J. P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, op. cit., p. 24. 14 Ibid., p. 138. 15 Ibid., pp. 565–569. 16 Ibid., p. 623.

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Ibid., p. 640. Ibid., p. 78. 19 Ibid., p. 83. 20 Ibid., p. 89. 21 Ibid., p. 707. 22 Edith Stein, Martin Heideggers Existentialphilosophie, in Welt undPerson. Beitrag zum christlichen Wahrheitstreben, Edith Stein Werke, vol. 6 (Herder: Louvain-Freiburg, 1962), p. 91. 23 Ibid., p. 99. 24 See, G. Invitto, Sartre. Dio: una passione inutile (Padova: Edizioni Messaggero, 2001). 25 Alcune domande a J. P. Sartre e a S. de Beauvoir in Il Policlinico, n. 31-32, luglio-agosto 1946, pp. 33–35. 26 Being and Nothingness, p. 356. 27 Ibid., p. 385. 28 Invitto, Sartre. Dio: una passione inutile, op. cit., p. 41. 29 Jean-Paul Sartre, Cahiers pour une morale. Ed. Elkaïm Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). 30 Edith Stein, Die ontische Struktur der Person, op. cit., p. 32. 31 Ibid., p. 25. 32 Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Darmstadt: Reiches, 1928) in Gesammelte Werke, vol. IX, p. 1. 33 Edith Stein, Briefe an R. Ingarden, op. cit., p. 85. 34 Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, op. cit., p. 58. 35 In Life in a Jewish Family 1891–1916, Edith Stein concretely demonstrates how a community must sustain its proper members. There are many episodes of moral and financial support that are evidenced by Stein’s mother, Auguste Stein, which are described by her daughter without smugness or satisfaction; they are simply described in order to testify how they came about within a community. Stein, during World War I, served as a nurse for the Red Cross, much to the dismay of family members and those who knew her, always showing herself as extremely open with regard to others and their sufferings. From her letters, for example, there emerges a great generosity on the part of the philosopher in helping colleagues and friends in economic difficulty, as was the case with Roman Ingarden (see, Briefe an Roman Ingarden, pp. 235ff.) 36 Edith Stein, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, op. cit., p. 292. 37 Ibid. 38 J. P. Sartre, Being und Nothingness, op. cit., p. 475. 39 Ibid., p. 400. 18

S E C T I O N III

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THE DIMENSION OF EXISTENCE DISCLOSED B Y U N R AV E L I N G T H E I N T E N T I O N A L S T RU C T U R E O F I M AG I N I N G

Existence Mediated by Phenomenological Elucidation of Live Phenomena in the Unfolding Significations of Which Empirical Imagination and Empirical Subject’s (so-called “Intentional Consciousness”) of Objects and Objective Events Are Pictured ABSTRACT

Phenomenology as Philosophy of Existence is concerned with the elucidation of the Manifest of Life presupposed in showing (differentiating/picturing conceptually by pointing, by ostensive demonstration as such) anything with its identity and difference. Our habitual ways of operating with representations on the other hand betray that we lack a necessary level of awareness of that manifesting Existence presupposed in terms of unfolding significations in the weave of which our memory and imagination are operationally structured by operating with pictures/representations of language and culture. Such a lack of awareness manifests itself in a peculiar way; i.e., in terms of essentialist or anti essentialist suppositions prompted by the structures of operational thinking which falls short of self-understanding as to how reality, thinking and imagination are intertwined and structured to behave and operate with pictures of language. Such behaviour and structure of thinking then manifests itself in the traditional epistemological suppositions of reality of subjectivity in contrast to objectivity, which results from the modality of a thinking in terms of pictures, circling by analysing and constructing pictures without however understanding the structure of these pictures in connection with the actor’s operational habits that shape the actor’s modalities of thinking, belief and imagination structures about reality. My paper is an attempt to contribute to the awareness in connection with Wittgenstein’s phenomenological reminders about the unfolding of signifying surroundings (of an ostensive definition) for a sign to point, name, picture anything in space, or an event in temporal space. Hence the awareness in question is about the structuring of empirical consciousness of space and temporality 181 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 181–206. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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and is concerned with the possibilities of such awareness for human beings; i.e., for unravelling the ties that intertwine thinking, intelligence as such, to react operationally with pictures of language, analysing and constructing pictures on one another; hence building the structures of a labyrinth of one’s own construction. Philosophy is the articulation of such a Language which is capable of raising our awareness about our expressions of beliefs/attitudes about truth, reality, existence of things and events. Without such awareness the modality of our thinking remains captured by the operational habit structures of imagination. That attitude although it is a structured intentionality resulting from our learning to operate with signs and pictures of language, expresses itself in the form of beliefs which are not held as propositions of belief, but held as propositions of truth and rational perception about reality, perception of reality, existence of things and events. In other words, the forms of our expressions about reality betray about our deep beliefs that condition our stance not only in relation to the surrounding world, but in relation to the understanding of ourselves. They express the beliefs of imagination in the form of assertions or propositions of self evidence, perception of reality, truth and so on. Hence they are expressed as unquestioned presuppositions of theories of knowledge and theories of propositions of language about the existence of facts, things, events, “simple and complex objects”, “particulars and universals” etc. Although they are not scientific theories conceived to be verified by experimental sciences, they are introduced in like manner, introducing new entities, as Sense-impressions, Ideas, Universals, Particulars, Atomic Facts, Complexes, Simples, and Substances etc., as objects of analysis and Rational Perception. They express a certain attitude addressed to our operational habits of imagination expecting our agreement to the truth of their premises on the basis of self-evidence, the truth of which is expected to be ascertained, verified by our performing and experimenting an operation in the same way, as i.e., in the manner of Moore’s demonstration of his hand, which is a demonstration reminding and calling us to experiment the same self evident truth and certainty of our belief in the existence of the external world. The so called “ostensive definition” i.e., is offered precisely on that belief, which is an operating belief, one which, therefore is maintained without one’s awareness that one is operating with the belief and intentional structure of imagination, but with the belief experienced as if a self evident truth is being demonstrated and experienced that one is operating logically in meaning, ascertaining, delineating, differentiating to name and picture an essential feature perceived as such; as if such is the way in which the differences and identities of objects from one another can be differentiated, presented, named, pictured, objectified in language. The ostensive definition as such (in deep

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oblivion of the signifying phenomena in the weave of which one’s imagination: the “intentional structure of consciousness of objects” to speak in terms of phenomenology) is structured to operate by particularizations, i.e., by pointing and focusing to one’s particularized images of sensations and things. It is an intentional structure which can operate as a function of operational habits of imagination under the impact of the images of pictures that resemble and associate what the image of the picture resembles. Hence, one is naturally inclined to demonstrate such beliefs of imagination about reality, truth and so on to oneself and to others as if they are self evidential common sense truths. Hence we come across such expressions as Moore’s: “Here is a hand” (as Moore’s demonstrative proof of the external world) or by pointing and attending to a thing and expressing what one believes in such sentences as: “This a chair”, “This is its colour”, “This is its material”, “This is its place”, “This is its shape” etc. As if the “chair”, “its place”, “its colour”, “its shape”, “its material” and so on are differentiated and shown by such gesture of ostensive pointing; as if we are demonstrating and reminding in fact (de facto) how we mean, perceive and share the conceptual differentiations that we ascribe to the surrounding world. Here the whole confusion about perception, reality, truth, belief etc. is knotted at this juncture of signifying phenomena where “meaning” and “differentiating something” conceptually, instead of being elucidated, is obscured and confused by the intentional habit structures of imagination that habitually operates and takes the various forms of ostensive definition pointing to the images of pictures of language. As these images of pictures are intertwined with the operational uses and consequences of the pictures of language, they are easily confused with the images of pictures on the basis of similarity of associated images. Hence the importance of clarifying The Use of the picture from the images the picture is associated on the basis of resemblances of images as Wittgenstein does. What needs to be elucidated is the operational use of the picture with other signs in internal connections with signifying phenomena which operationally inter-connect them. That would then clarify the difference of the significant use of the picture from the imagination picture which is isolated by the gesture of ostensive definition (a gesture which is in fact a form of expression of the logo-centric habit structure of imagination) from its significant use in internal connections with the use of other signs the significations of each of which presuppose the use of other signs that operate and signify within the signifying weave of phenomena unfolding. Thus, the phrase “language-game” is actually a short term for the series of reminders that are addressed to awaken our awareness as to the filtered aspects of manifesting and unfolding nexus of significations in the weave of which our logo-centric habits of thinking and imagining with pictures of language are operationally structured – structured as such to react operationally, by means of forms of

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expressions of an ostensive definition, i.e. to the images of pictures, in isolation and in deep oblivion of the signifying surroundings in the weave of which we have come to operate and use this picture. The lack of awareness in question results in numerous confusions deriving and encircling one another about the reality of concepts, on what we think about “reality”, on the “perception and differentiation of what is ‘real’ from the ‘imaginary” ’ and so on. The confusion is due to the identification of concepts with the images that represent conceptual identities and differences as “ready to hand” for the intentional habit structures of thinking and imagining to operate with them – without however an understanding of how thinking and imagining with signs operate, act and react, hence form intentional habit structures with the unfolding significations of phenomena. That is to say, in isolation from the signifying (internal) connections by virtue of which an image is pointed at, shown (pictured as such with its conceptual identity and difference), take on the conceptual meaning as “a sensation of a red” or “a colour image”, “chair” or “the look of a chair”, or “the hand” the existence of which is meant to be shown by Moore’s demonstration. Yet, Moore’s demonstration simply remains as an expression of a structured empirical imagination (the expression of an intentionality as such) in deep oblivion of the surrounding signifying phenomena in the weave of which we are trained to operate with the conceptual tools (pictures) of language the uses of which are internally connected with the use of other significations. “Hand” is a such concept we have learnt to use it while using our hands with the use of other signs and concepts, the Uses of all of which are internally connected by the significations. Analytical logic is often forgetful of this background of logical thinking which operates by defining and constructing/representing external connections between signs in deep forgetfulness of the signifying internal connections by virtue of which a sign signifies its sense which is represented by signs subject to definitions of logic. In other words defining and describing of external connections by means of constructing logical pictures and models, hypotheses as such, presuppose internal signifying connections of phenomena in the weave of which the reaction and habit behaviour of our thinking and imaging is structured. This means that having and raising our awareness and the lack of it behave and manifest different consequences and development in language and culture. The lack of it deprives one from the sense of unity that is expressed as the unity of good and beautiful which is the guiding sense of responsible action and the justification of which does not reside in a norm of convention but in the action guided by its own holistic awareness, by the “logos of life” – as the deeper layers of which have been the life-long subject of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s philosophical quest. The lack of it necessarily deprives one’s life from the real spiritual richness that motivates one’s personal life with its logos intrinsic to

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the sense of unity of life and is necessarily the source of Crisis emphasised by Husserl. It seems nevertheless to be an ongoing crisis as the roots of which require uprooting the reaction formations of memory and imagination along with the operational use of signs and representations of language which result in subject/object modalities of thinking and imagining. The lack of awareness is also expressed by the theories of the logician to explain everything by means of constructing pictures and models and conversely analysing everything into its atomic constituents of a logical picture as in Russell’s Logical Atomism which was once proposed as a theory about the logical structure of language. Western philosophy is a history of such theories conceived in like manner from the standpoint of the intentional structure of the analytical logic in oblivion of how analytical thinking operates on the basis of internal connections with the signifying internal connections of phenomena in the weave of which the behaviour and habit reactions of thinking are determined, conditioned. Conversely raising the level of awareness in question is the way of unconditioning the conditioned state of thinking woven by the operational habit structures of thinking. Ironically (remembering the philosophical wisdom of Socrates expressed as against the essentialist assertions of knowledge) we are presented, owing to the lack of awareness of analytical thinking habits, with the various pictures of Reality described and introduced in terms of theories as ontological entities with essentialist qualifications such as the primary qualities of a physical substance as opposed to the secondary qualities projected to it and so on. Hence, the essentialist ontological qualifications of an imagination projected about subject and object – projected from the imagination of the language operator who imagines one’s self as the rational ontological ground and centre of such essentialist distinctions and qualifications. This is how images are imagined and introduced as “objects of internal and external perception” each of which on the other hand owes their conceptual difference and identity to the signifying uses that operate in internal connections with the signifying uses of other signs. In other words, ostensive definition which is expressed in the form of demonstrative activities of meaning and perceiving or apperceiving something, doesn’t in fact demonstrate any signifying fact as to meaning and perceiving it – in the sense of conceptually differentiating it with its identity and difference – as something, but operates as an empty ceremony of concentrating on images filtered and isolated from their unfolding signifying connections. That is in fact the character of the surroundings from the internal signifying connections of which nothing can be isolated as the centre of grounds, i.e., subjectivity as a centre of willing, meaning, naming, differentiating objects.

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The elucidation of the context of language-game therefore, goes as deep as to the level of signifying unfolding phenomena where our awareness delves so deep into a level to trace back as well as unravel by gathering how our imagination and memory reactions are intertwined and knotted to operate with significations that are woven to operate with consequences interlacing and weaving in the light of signifying phenomena reminded and assembled as “language-games”. That is what Wittgenstein’s elucidations contributes to the phenomenological understanding as philosophy of Existence by his reminders assembled as language-games which are always meant to bring to our awareness despite inertia of psychological conditionings and in contrast to the habits of empirical thinking intertwined to operate with our imagination which both operate in the service of practical action by focusing and fore-grounding on what is significant from the standpoint of practical action. That is an action which operates on the one hand weaving a net of its own whose logical texture serves to order and catch the useful, the instrumental from the standpoint of practical action, and which on the other hand is misleading one, more and more into the depth of labyrinthine ways of imagination which reverberate and fluctuate with the pictures, representations of language, cut out for the purposes of practical action. That intentional structure, as long as the knots of which remain unravelled by the light of intelligence, (awareness as such) destines one to the fate of the language operator whose thinking is captured, conditioned, by operational habits of thinking and imagination – however those habits may be structured not only by the narratives and belief systems of culture but also by scientific methodologies and techniques based on scientific paradigms and theories. As these theories remain deprived from a deep and clarified understanding of the background signifying phenomena, which requires digging deep (by interrogating oneself on one’s thinking in relation to one’s concepts and pictures of language) into the roots of signifying phenomena and unravelling the knots there – where the operational use of pictures and imagination are intertwined and structured to build up an empirical horizon of objects for an empirical imagination – they, as theories, remain destined to be confined to the subject object modality of imagination – to perpetuate by describing and constructing external connections in the manner of scientific theories. That is by analysing propositions into the analytical perceptions of analyser subject in external relation to its own objects of analysis, hence introducing ontological entities by their own descriptions such as “particulars” and “universals” etc. which are purported as if they are ostensive to the analyser perceiver; as if they are essential identities and differences of a reality perceived and analysed as “particulars” and “universals” by the higher rationality of the logician who propose them in the form of epistemological theories.

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That sort of thinking deprived of such deep philosophical concerns and of the need for insightful clarity can therefore be compared to the thinking of those who are chained to think and imagine with the shadows on the walls of the cave so to speak in remembrance with Plato’s metaphor, without awareness of the structures “that chain and destine one’s thinking to a fate” which echoes Heraclitus’ remark: O N E ’ S C H A R A C T E R I S O N E ’ S F AT E

It is an operating belief structure which hides many misunderstandings and conceptions as to the relation of the facts of thinking, operating with signs of language to the signifying phenomena of language. One which is central to this kind of philosophizing by such theorizing is that the connection between language and thinking – therefore the connection between language and world of facts – is taken as an external connection as if the connection is set up by the analysis of a thinking subject which is supposed as the perceiver of objects of analysis – as if the naming relation between the signs of a proposition and objects is set up by the analyser perceiver subject meaning them. What is supposed by such an analytical perceiving and meaning is betrayed by the different guises of ostensive definition, which is in fact a demonstration of the analytical belief structure of imagination; one which is offered to our operational habits as a way of verifying the truth of perceiving and meaning something, as if something is conceptually differentiated by such manner of focusing attention on anything. What happens ordinarily at most, the image of something operationally recognized and conceptually differentiated is recalled or associated in imagination by imagining the thing, the sensation images which may be present or not. When the thing is present such imagination of the sensation images of the thing is open to confusion with the perception of the thing, which is a confusion (so called “conceptual confusion”) expressed in the manner of an ostensive definition – as if the “colour”, “shape”, and “colour sensation” concepts are differentiated and represented conceptually by such gesture of so called “ostensive definition” which is in fact an expression of the habit structure of imagination par excellence! As if, i.e., “the material” of the chair, “the place” of the chair, “the design or shape” of the chair, “the colour” of the chair, “the sensation or impression”, etc., of the chair are all differentiated from one another by one’s ostensive definition intentionally focused to its imagined “objects” expressing the intentional habit structure of imagination each time by such propositions as: “This is ‘the shape of the chair’; ‘This is the place of the chair’; ‘This is the material of the chair’, ‘This is its colour’, ‘This is its colour sensation or impression’ etc.”1 What is expressed as such is the habitual intentional structure of imagination picking out the images which are associated

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and confused as if they are representing the conceptual differences pictured by the operational uses of pictures. They are all conceptual differentiations which are not in fact differentiated by ostensive pointing and focusing of one’s attention, but which requires elucidating the surrounding signifying nexus of internal connexions2 for an image to picture a conceptual differentiation. That is the nexus of operational activities within the criss-crossing significations of which such conceptual distinctions are expressed and learnt with their differing consequences. That ostensive definition was an operating idea in the idea of an “atomic proposition” of Bertrand Russell’s theory of proposition, in which the simple signs were supposed to be connected to the atomic objects of analysis by the analytical perception of the “particulars” and “universals” of analyser subject. The existence of “particulars” and “universals” are introduced as ontological entities perceived by the analytical subject. Wittgenstein, in objection to such a conception of a proposition, was saying that the names of the atomic proposition are internally connected to the objects named by the form of the expression of the proposition and that supposition of analyser/perceiver, the ontological subject, analysing and naming the constituents of an atomic proposition was a redundant misconceived idea. That was the theoretical formulation of his Tractatus concerning how the signs of an atomic proposition name, picture atomic facts by internal connections of the form of the expression of the proposition. That idea of “internal connection” between signs and names, the idea of nexus of a proposition in which a name names, means, differentiates and picks out its object significantly is later elucidated by comparing and contrasting the connection with the connection between the parts of a mechanical system in which every item or part represents its conceptual identity and difference by the different uses and consequences which precede or follow and simultaneously with the workings, the differing uses and consequences, of other items of the system. That is a brake lever and an accelerator differ from each other and owe their conceptual identities to the differing uses and operational consequences working with the system. Apart from the system they may be anything or nothing. “I set the brake up by connecting up rod and lever” – Yes, given the whole of the rest of the mechanism. Only in conjunction with that is it a brake lever, and separated from its support it is not even a lever; it may be anything, or nothing. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Inv., P. 6)

The external connection is not an essential connection to the identity or difference of a part which can be replaced if it is broke. What he points out by such a comparison and contrast is that it is the use of a picture and not what the

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picture resembles is what represents the identity and difference represented by names or objects named. And that use is internally connected to the system of signifying use of other signs that weave operational systems, contexts for further uses, language-games within language-games within which one’s thinking and imagination are also intertwined operationally to fluctuate with the images and associations of pictures of the language-games. Lack of awareness of the kind of significant use that internally connect the use of signs operationally, hence forming and weaving systems and contexts for constructing logical connections based on internal connections, misleads one to search the meaning of concepts, names and pictures not in the use which functions in the system of uses (that are weaving further circuits of uses, the significations of which internally connect them to weave more and more systems, new continuations, weaving language-games on language-games – new contexts for further uses and introduction of new concepts, pictures and so on) but in what the image of the picture resembles as an imagination picture. Which is an image mistaken as if it is an ideal image instantiating a concept (rather than the signifying use of the picture that operationally connects up with the signifying use of other signs) the learning and operational uses of which operate and unfold in the nexus of signifying phenomena. That is the nexus of phenomena in the weave of which our empirical imagination is structured against the images of pictures of language to react and operate with them in subject object duality. It is an empirical imagination reacting to the similarity and vividness of images, as if the concept of “red” is recognized from the associated image of the colour image resembling the “colour sensation of red” forgetting that “colour sensation”, “colour image”, “visual image”, “image” etc. are all concepts differentiated and learnt in connexion with their differing significations and uses in language. It is, as if the connection between name and the “object named” is set up externally by association of images. They are confused images of pictures of language and they are expressed as empirical belief/imagination structure in the form of ostensive pointing to the images of pictures of language which are connected with one’s complete unawareness of one’s operationally structured empirical imagination which is structured along with the use of the picture which is internally connected to the signifying use of other signs! The signifying uses of signs are internally connected ultimately with the signifying phenomena in the internal connections of which our thinking, memory and imagination habits are operationally structured with our operations with signs. This is critical for understanding facts of language as proto-phenomenon in the signifying unfolding and weaving of which we come to learn to operate with names and pictures of language. They are pictures which then bewitch

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our thinking with their train of images of pictures which resemble and associate and fluctuate each other in such a way that one comes to confuse them in the manner in which is betrayed by our demonstration of ostensive definitions of objective appearances which are expressions of operational habit structures of imagining “objects”, the intentional structures of which are structured by the signifying uses which picture “objects” with their conceptual differences and identities. In other words, unless we strive for the flashes of the light of awareness about the unfolding and weaving of signifying phenomena in the nexus of which one’s intentional structure of one’s memory and imagination reactions are intertwined and layered with operational learning of the signs and pictures of language, one’s thinking remains at the mercy of imagination. That leaves one as a conditioned consciousness to theorize intellectually, logically and analytically, to hypothesize arguments based on the premises on the grounds of demonstrations, verified on the basis of structures of imagination which is not aware of its conditioned state, determined externally by habit structures of language as opposed to the distance of freedom gained by awareness. This part of phenomenological elucidations is clearly connected to the question of the meaning of freedom, of acting and thinking with a freedom of distance to the conventional codes of acting and thinking as an operator/actor of a language-game. In others words, this is where the unity of ethics and aesthetics, which means the unity of good and the beautiful are elucidated in their internal connections as opposed to the suppositions dividing and defining them as disciplines of philosophy, as ethical, epistemological, metaphysical etc., which are all internally connected for a philosopher who is pursuing philosophical researches with a deep concern for thinking freely and intelligently, with an ever enduring concern for the light out of the cave,3 which is the intuition of the unity of the true, the good and the beautiful. That is a concern whose deep motivation instead of leaving one contented with theorizing and arguing intellectually about shadows on the walls of the cave, keeps one enduring on the way of light glimmering. The other mode of thinking on the level of analysing and theorizing is in fact an intellectualistic mode of remaining chained in contentment to a form chaining which is developed as an analytical method of philosophising. It is the mode of thinking peculiar to someone who is not willing to question deeply enough the meaning of thinking and applying signs of language logically, the meaning of following and applying rules of logic. They conceal or reveal the questions depending on the mode of thinking of the questioner. They are those questions uncovered and made intelligible for people who are not yet lost that deep need for Self Understanding. They are therefore questions which are not to be answered in the mode of theorizing, analysing and constructing pictures but by developing an insight and awareness into the

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structure of thinking with pictures of language; into the frame in which the questions and propositions of these theories are conceived, hence penetrating into the nexus of phenomena in the signifying weave of which historical modes of thinking and imagining are structured and formed as historical imagination or consciousness. That in turn requires elucidation of the signifying phenomena in the internal connections of which one learns to operate and think with the techniques and pictures of language. That is the background presupposed in the weave of which conventions, codes, rules, methods are developed forming their own histories with their own historical imaginations and consciousnesses along with the habit structures of operating with these rules. Philosophy without Self Understanding is caught by history and historical imagination and serves to weave on only new knots to the historical imagination rather than unravelling them for finding out the way out of the cave so to speak shed by the glimmering of a ray in response to one’s deep self-interrogation as to the structuring of subject object consciousness or imagination, “the structure of intentionality” as such – to speak in terms of phenomenology. The Anglo Saxon analytic philosophy took Wittgenstein’s elucidations not in the direction of his phenomenological insights and philosophical aspirations after lucidity, after the perspicuity of the internal connections of signifying phenomena the awareness of which, so he hoped, would enable us to unravel the knots that tie and intertwine our thinking to operate with the intentional habit and imagination structures. More and more so that the fly would find the way out of the fly bottle so to speak; to uncover, on the way, the meaning of such calls as Nietzsche’s (echoing out: “Who is talking?”) in response to the theorist philosopher who constructs logical arguments based on one’s own empirical beliefs maintained as self evident to the empirical self and asserted in the form of demonstrative proofs (as expressed by Moore’s demonstrative gesture etc.) in philosophical arguments; the propositions of which however, before being proposed on self evident logical grounds are in want of awareness of the thinker’s unquestioned assumptions and presuppositions that shape one’s questions as well as one’s propositions. That requires awareness of the deeper layers of one’s thinking that shape one’s attitude to one’s propositions of logic and logical thinking that find their forms of expressions in the questions and answers of philosophical theories. That in turn requires one to understand logical thinking and rules of logic not from the standpoint of the one who is ready to operate with the techniques of applying them and the one who is habitually so much used to operate with them; but from the standpoint of the one who is “open-hearted” to make oneself more and more aware in what thinking and the rules of logic consist in relation to the phenomena pictured and formed by means of the propositions constructed by the application of the rules of logic. The latter standpoint, is not on the same level with the former, but is in accord

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with the call of Nietzsche that calls the theorist to think on one’s own mind, on the empirical belief and habit structures that are operating as the unquestioned belief structures which are maintained and expressed as self evident truths, or as truths of Rationality behind one’s propositions and theories. In short, Nietzsche was calling the theorist philosopher for an intuitive awareness of phenomena in the unfolding of which language, culture, history and human thinking and imagination was unfolding. By the rising of such awareness to a certain level of momentum he hoped that a new philosophical thinking could unravel the knots of imagination that are ravelled by the history of languagegames and that a new sensibility, not wounded and crippled by the historical sickness would arise. Nietzsche as a philologist spoke with the awareness of the impact of language and history of language on the intellect and imagination of the intellectualist philosopher and is more concerned with the healing and unravelling the conditioning of one’s imagination and thinking from what he diagnosed as “historical sickness”, than for arguing and offering alternative theories and analyses of propositions for the truth of thoughts in the name of philosophy. Despite Wittgenstein’s most valuable elucidations in response to such a deep call for an awareness capable of untying the knots of historical imagination, Anglo-Saxon interpretations of Wittgenstein’s elucidations seem to have gone in a direction which is least expected from them, namely going in the direction of theorizing, generalizing ideas or general pictures of an idea of “language-games”, i.e., about how the rules of logic are based on the rules of the language-game, how the actions and reactions of a child are trained to operate to share the rules by practice, and agreement of judgements by means of the consequences of applications shared in practice which are conventions adopted and developed in accordance with the manifold purposes of the language-game of culture etc. “Ordinary language” is such a generalization of understanding rules of logic on a conventional basis which in turn is traced back to agreement by practice starting from child’s primitive actions and reactions etc. This is then the conventional interpretation of Wittgenstein’s elucidations whose phenomenological depth is completely overlooked by the pragmatic generalizations drawn from his phenomenological reminders assembled as “language-games”. They are reminders on the other hand deepening and calling our awareness to gain a momentum which may change our whole pragmatic instrumental stance in relation to the world we live, from being a confinement by one’s own hand, namely by operational and instrumental habits of imagination and thinking to an imagined chamber of its own creation (confined to the modality of an empirical imagination structured with operational instrumental habits to operate, to act and react, with its own intentional

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objects). That is the kind of confinement which may however be conventionally shared as a form of life, which is still a mode of remaining captured by the shadows in the cave, as if remaining “imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.”4 The imprisonment is connected and results from the intentional structure of memory and imagination of which the subject’s thinking is not aware of the intentional structures that direct and mould one’s theories into the belief structures of imagination, the expressions of which are virtually experienced as if they are self evident to the empirical subject. One example of which is Moore’s demonstrating his hand, without consideration and awareness of the signifying phenomena with which our learning and using words (concepts) and the word “hand” is internally connected. This is important, as such a demonstration not only expresses a misunderstanding that is prompted by operational reactions of imagination to images of pictures of language in isolation from the signifying connexions with phenomena, but expresses also a deep going misunderstanding that infects and misleads one on all grounds of investigation as to the naming and differentiating of things with their conceptual differences; such as from one’s “hand” to “tables” and “atoms”; from a “colour of a physical surface” to “visual sensation of a colour”; from “subjectivity” to “objectivity” etc. It is a misunderstanding that misconceives the internal connection of uses and operations that differentiate and distribute things and events spatially and temporally with conceptual differences and identities ordering our spatial surroundings as things and events, our world-picture relative to the horizon or standpoint of a supposed subject whose reactions are structured to operate reactively with pictures of language to fluctuate and reverberate with them. That misunderstanding is connected i.e. with the belief or habit structure of empirical beliefs whose operational automatism repeating the same or similar train of operational consequences creates the belief as if the connection between the items are external, causal connections that are constructed as if they are subject to the will of the operator as the items and their connexions in the operating system can be set (in the manner expressed: “I set the brake up by connecting up rod and lever” quoted on p. 9) replaced, repaired, managed and directed in the manner of constructing and managing technological processes by technologies etc. But those external connections presuppose the internal signifying connections of unfolding phenomena from the weave of which in operation neither subject nor object can be isolated. And the phenomena of internal signifying connections are not subject to be represented objectively, i.e., in terms of space, as objects represented in terms of their differences and identities, or events as temporal space, in terms of events in the mechanized space. What is vitally important left for a real philosophical awareness is to

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elucidate phenomena in the proper sense of phenomenology, clarifying the intentional structuring process of thinking and imagining in the weave and streaming of unfolding signifying phenomena. Hence to elucidate phenomena not in the manner of trying to objectify and picture it for imagination habits; but in spite of and contrary to the stream of operational habits of thinking and imagining with pictures of language – to clarify more and more by an intuitive awareness of the significations of phenomena from moment to moment tracing their internal connections with memory and imagination reactions and to follow how they intertwine operationally in the weave of signifying phenomena as one learns to operate with signs and pictures of language. Hence to develop and strengthen an insightful awareness at any moment which is not divided by reactions and fluctuations of imagination, divided in the modality of an empirical subject as against the surroundings objectified as one’s ordinary surrounding world horizon. The significance of such elucidation is manifested when we become more and more aware of the spark of the insight about the conditioning and structuring of our thinking and imagination habits; when we really start to take notice how our thinking and seeing the reality of the world are determined at any moment of our acting and reacting. We may thus realize more and more the sense of freedom; the sense of gaining a distance of freedom from being a determined being whose thinking is woven and determined by imagination and habit structures layered upon layer by the history of language-games, by the backlog of history and history of human imagination. Here Phenomenology as philosophy of Existence expresses a genuine insight and philosophical intuitive awareness which differs from historical philosophies that belong to the history of philosophical theories which are meant to be a general picture, an essential transcendental picture as such that is meant to finalize, to ground its own grounds, and hence to close the account – rather than disclose – with the mystery of existence by means of the analyses and pictures of ontological theories. Phenomenology in this sense differs from Kant’s theoretical stance who formulated an approach to the mystery of Existence by his distinction between Noumenon and knowledge of phenomena in space and time without a deep understanding of phenomena; that is to say, without the phenomenological concern about the structuring of intentional structure of imagination and thinking in terms of space – which is not to be understood simply by the relative positions and localities of things and events in external relations and connections to one another, but by the differences and identities these localities and positions are represented in internal operational connections with the signifying unfolding of phenomena. Kant’s distinction in fact is not a real distinction that recognizes the mystery and sense of Existence with a freedom of awareness from historical imagination. His is an expression of historical imagination

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under the impact of physical science of Galilean and Newtonian physics. One of the rationalist unquestioned presuppositions of this science was concerned with the causal connection and its underlying belief in the causal nexus, the natural manifestations of which purported to be discovered and represented by physical science. That belief was severely shaken by Hume’s criticism. Kant’s theory, despite his claim to be awakened by Hume’s criticism from his dogmatic sleep, instead of taking the cue from Hume’s point and developing to clarify how in fact human beings develop the habit structure of believing the connection between cause and effect, the necessity of which needs to be clarified by clarifying the internal connexions which connect the items of a mechanical system; i.e., by showing no item as cause or effect can be conceived in isolation as if observing them in succession; as if the causal connection can be set up like an external connection by simple psychological expectation of two events in isolation from their surrounding internal signifying antecedents and consequences as misleadingly purported by Hume’s theory – As if the connection of cause and effect can be externally set up by the expectation and psychological habit of the empirical subject. Thus, Hume’s theory misleadingly analyses and represents cause and effect and the psychological observer subject in external relations with each other, without clarifying the signifying internal connections by virtue of which we operate and speak as an agent/actor of the operating system of connections – rather than as a psychological passive observer of two events whose psychological expectation is purported to connect them. The events cause and effect and the psychological subject are misconceived and misrepresented in Hume’s theory, as the phenomena of thinking, observing, forming expectations and hypotheses need to be elucidated in their internal signifying connections which operates as the structuring background of our operating with objects and events – which are operationally ordered and conceptually differentiated in relations of space and temporality. That requires intuitive awareness5 of signifying nexus of phenomena6 which forms a system of internal connections with our operational habitual activities from the weave of which neither subject nor object can be described in isolation. Kant instead, constructs his own theory of synthetic a priori without however clarifying the notion of a priori rules based on elucidation of a posteriori phenomena in the unfolding of which our operational activities and our habits of imagination are intertwined with their signifying internal connexions. Kant contends with the idea of our applying these concepts to make syntheses, generalizations, to construct logical hypotheses about events to draw conclusions for operational purposes, and hence to operate with causes to obtain the consequent effects. In short he presents us with his ideas in the form of a theory, which gives us a general picture which presupposes the a priori concepts in the construction of synthetic a priori according to which a

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priori concepts are inborn and applied to sensed phenomena; applied as if in the manner of moulds of understanding which results in empirical propositions corresponding empirical facts supposed to be shared objectively – that is to say, logically and scientifically by human rational understanding. Such an account does not in fact catch phenomena of experiencing and operating with concepts, as it remains on the level of an empirical imagination rather than resolving its structuring by means of the intuitive awareness of signifying phenomena. Here we are not presented an elucidation of signifying phenomena in the weave of which the synthetic a priori is supposed to be clarified on the basis of the internal connections of signifying phenomena; in the weave of which thinking needs to be elucidated as manifested in operation with significations of signs; in internal connections with operational uses and significations of signs with live phenomena which manifests itself in the unfolding of significations.7 Instead, we are presented by a theory that is idealizing thinking and rationality as a different spiritual transcendent activity of a subject whose thinking is conceived in external relation to empirical phenomena by the scientific logical analytical application of a priori inborn concepts, rather than elucidating human thinking and imagination in internal connections with concepts. The question of the synthetic a priori is therefore dealt with more accurately and adequately by Wittgenstein who elucidates the internal connections that are essential for a sign to signify; and by Husserl who, starting with the search for “essences” came to elucidate the same signifying field – the nexus of phenomena as a field from which thinking neither can be isolated as subjectivity, nor can be represented in external connection to the naming and describing of the phenomena of the field. Though both philosophers much contributed to the elucidation of the same nexus of phenomena in manifest, it is dismaying to observe that their elucidations instead of evoking the same need for elucidation and penetration in resolving the duality of subject object modality of imagination, remain subject to the mode of thinking in terms of theorizing and analysing still by means of constructing and thinking in terms of pictures, which continue to circle the modality of subject object dualism. In which case the transcendence in question is condemned to remain to be misconceived from the standpoint of subject object dualism the resolving of which requires not pictures of language, but intimacy of an intuitive awareness with the unfolding of signifying phenomena; the intimacy which would then enable our awareness to crack and unravel the knots woven by operational habits of language and thinking. Kant thus theorizes rather dogmatically about the puzzle and ambiguity which Hume’s criticism brings us to deal it with the problem of the necessary connection of cause and effect; which Hume’s criticism presents us with his confusion of internal and external connections, bringing on the one hand

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the a posteriori character of causal connection and giving an account of the necessary logical character of the connection as if it is an external connection set up between two events by simply observing two events in succession or in proximity in space.8 Kant’s thinking despite his seeing the solution of the problem in the question of how a priori logical connection is set up and works on the basis of a posteriori phenomena, remains more conditioned by its own unquestioned presuppositions due to historical culture. Therefore, his account of synthetic a priori is far from expressing the awareness that is brought about by the digging out and elucidating the roots of thinking in the unfolding of the signifying phenomena – in the weave of the internal connections of which our operations with signs and rules of language operate and develop logical and mathematical concepts and techniques, and hence such conceptual distinctions as a priori and a posteriori. One can imagine anything one already operationally recognizes. That recognition, by its operational consequences, is expressed and judged to be correct or incorrect if its consequences are shared or unshared. This is how, i.e., colour blindness is detected in the language-game. Such reminders simply serve to observe from moment to moment the unfolding and weaving of signifying phenomena in the weave of which our operational activities with signs take the form of operating with conceptual identities and differences which are represented not only by words but also by things and events. Such observation of the signifying unfolding of phenomena indicate an internal relation between thinking, operating with signs and the surrounding world, rather than the external relation imagined owing to imagining objects already operationally recognized, differentiated with their identities and differences as such. Moreover such intuitive awareness of moments elucidate the unfolding and conceptual spacing of space by means of clarifying how the use (verbs as such) of a name (naming and representing the identity of a “thing” or an event) by means of their internal connections with other uses (again verbs!) of signs represent what we mistakenly suppose as constant, eternal, as the logical identity of a thing or an event and which we mistakenly contrast with the transitory and temporary character of movement as opposed to the logical ideality of a concept.9 By contrast to the suppositions and presuppositions of such theories, the constancy of ideality of the space which is understood as opposed to change and movement is elucidated by means of the use of a name with its signifying internal connections with the operational use of the thing which internally connect up with the operational use of other signs within a field of significations – from the signifying interplaying texture of which no name or a thing can be isolated as a centre, i.e., as subject implying an object and vice versa. Hence the sense of such a field and the use which inter connect with the use of other signs is

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independent of the kind of use, action or operation which we seem to be carrying out as the subject of willing them to carry out. The reminders assembled as “Language-games” help cracking the shell of our imagination habits which make us think that we are as if willing and acting subjects of our actions and operations in this game, while in fact we are acting and operating with the belief and habit structures of the game, however we may be masterfully operating actors of the game, having learnt and trained with all the intricate rules and techniques of the game. This is not to say, we are puppets of the history of language-games, without freewill and freedom of acting. But on the contrary, it is part of understanding ourselves and life, not by drawing generalizations and general picture of state of affairs from such elucidations, but by moment to moment awareness of ourselves in Life’s unfolding and by removing the prejudices and conditionings about the question of freedom, freewill, God, etc. It is rather the question of closing an account with the backlog of the conditionings of the history of language-games. Our analysis differentiating and naming signs as “names” and “objects named” (subject predicate logic as such) and understanding language based on such analysis is therefore misleading with all its ramifications developed in the theories of knowledge, logic, perception, reality, subject, object and so on. It is therefore of critical importance to understand clearly the relation of thinking to language and reality in its internal connections with one another. That requires phenomenological elucidation of signifying phenomena in the weave of which not only we trace back our thinking and imagining to the root phenomena, to the weaving of the ties that bind our thinking to fluctuate with our imagination reactions and habits, but also we are enabled by an awakening awareness that grows to a momentum of insight to untie and unravel those knots, the chains so to speak, that chain and condition our intelligence by the habit and belief structures of empirical imagination. It is indeed we have a sense of personal identity determined by these belief structures which may be hindering us from the intelligent awareness that transcends such a personal identity, as the sages of eastern philosophies have always pointed out. It is perhaps, due to the same chains which chained and directed the development of western philosophy that philosophical thinking instead of developing in the way of sharing a universal wisdom, took a turn to misjudge eastern philosophies by its own unquestioned presuppositions. Phenomenology in the history of western philosophy is original and a new turn in so far as it expressed a real and deep concern to elucidate the intentional structure of objects as a way of resolving the paradigm of subject object ontology the unquestioned suppositions and presuppositions of which require the elucidation of the unfolding of signifying phenomena in the weave of which our operational habit structures of empirical imagination and thinking are structured.

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Our commonsense world horizon represents the standpoint of language operator who seem to be uninterested about one’s standpoint, while remaining much more preoccupied with operating with pictures of language and what these pictures are associated in the shared imagination of the operators (actors) of the language-game. Such failure on the part of the language operator’s awareness about thinking, imagining, perceiving, naming, describing, finds its own expressions in the theories of knowledge which are traditionally based on the presuppositions of subject/object ontology. One symptomatic of such a standpoint expresses itself in the particular form of ostensive definition, indication, demonstration of subject’s act of meaning, differentiating or perceiving something as if prior to naming or designating something by a sign. Existence of things and events appear to such a standpoint of imagination then as if they are there as something with an essential feature, which is supposed to be analysed and named as an object of perception. Two different senses of philosophy connect up with the language of philosophical thinking. One is expressed in the form of theories misled by the habit structures of imagination. The logical arguments of these theories are based on operational habit structures of imagination operating with pictures, representations of language. The other is the kind of philosophical thinking the movements of which serve to elucidate and unravel the ties that intertwine thinking to operate with imagination pictures with such typical symptoms of reacting to demonstrate to oneself and others by giving an ostensive definition of facts, a demonstration as if how we perceive, differentiate, delineate the reality of something. The whole of Wittgenstein’s clarifications are carried out by this strategy: Namely by reminding the signifying unfolding phenomena of surroundings as against ostensive definition expressed in the form of gestures of concentrating, focusing one’s attention on the images imagined as internal or external. Ostensive definition betrays the operator’s imagination and discloses for one’s awareness that something is being imagined without the awareness of its signifying surroundings – as if something (ontologically/essentially) private in the case of a sensation (like sensation of pain or the colour sensation of a physical colour sample etc.) or something physical in space like a table, or one’s hand as expressed by Moore’s gesture, is being perceived or disclosed by such a demonstration. But those reminders if we are attentive and modest enough10 as not to hide our ignorance about ourselves by the belief systems operationally developed and sustained by the rules of the language-games (the rules which may be mythological or scientific) opens for us a new dimension of awareness which is concealed, filtered and masked by a pseudo world horizon of imagination in which we imagine ourselves a subject experiencing and analysing objective

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facts, which connects up with the standpoint of theories of Realist and Idealist imagination. Every time we start such a thought experiment of isolating a sensation, or an impression, or an image of a sensation by concentrating and meaning it, we come across with the question of “how do we know what it is on that we are concentrating, directing our attention? How do we know that it is to be described as “pain sensation”, or “as pain in the arm”, or as a “visual sensation of a colour”, and that it is to be described as “subjective/private to the describer” as opposed to the colour of a physical thing. How does “the colour of a physical thing” (which is taken as if it is opposed in essentialist sense to a colour sensation which is imagined in the manner of ostensive definition imagined as if it is essentially private to one’s visual experience) differ from the colour sensation which is described as the “colour sensation” or “visual impression of a colour”? These are all conceptual distinctions the significations of which are expressed in the language-game, the contexts in which we have learnt to apply these distinctions significantly. The clarity about how and by what significations and differing consequences these conceptual differences are expressed and learnt, elucidate also the meaning of the concept of the “physical” of physics, as well the meaning of “privacy of sensations”, “subjectivity”, “content of consciousness” and so on. That also elucidates the phenomenological context of signifying phenomena in which our images about these conceptual distinctions are intertwined to operate together associating each other in such an automatic way that we easily go to imagine them in isolation of the signifying situations in which we have learnt to differentiate them. Our habit and belief structures of imagination interfere and determine our thinking to such an extent that forgetfulness of the real signifying phenomena in the weave of which we operate with signs, infects and determine our theories of knowledge, perception, and reality. All the subject object ontological suppositions stem from this conditioned state of thinking by habit and belief structures of imagination, which is also the intentional structure of objects. To express more correctly, the intentional structure needs to be elucidated along with the conceptual differences that picture our surroundings. The conceptual differences of objects are not given with the intentional structure which is due to habit structures of memory and imagination. The intentional structure is structured there in the weave of signifying nexus of phenomena in which one learns to operate with conceptual differentiations. Therefore the structuring of intentional objects is elucidated and indeed cleared off their possible misleading presuppositions along with the elucidation of signifying phenomena in which we learn to operate and differentiate surrounding world. Indeed, intentional objects and intentionality have no privileged meaning above the elucidation of signifying phenomena in which our memory and imagination

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reactions are woven and structured, hence become intentional as opposed to unintentional (which is again a conceptual distinction and not a an essential one) operationally in the service of practical action of organism. That is an action which connects up with more and more sophisticated ways of acting and operating with techniques and methodologies developed, but which nevertheless remains limited and determined as practical action in the service of practical ends. The practical ends change their meaning from serving for survival of the organism into conformism, utility, greed to have more and more rather than living in search for the higher sense of meaning in life, facing and enduring the question of living with a sense of life expressed by Socrates “philosophy and philosophical life as a rehearsal to death”. This is the critical point where Wittgenstein’s elucidations much contribute to the horizon of phenomenological investigations, to the opening and deepening the dimension of “Life-world” which is not a finite concept delineating and picturing a form in the world of forms, but a phrase like “language-game” which opens its sense and meaning along the trajectory of elucidating. Hence the Difference between Sense of Existence and the Sense of Reality connected with the belief structures of imagination structured with the operational use of pictures of language. Misunderstanding how pictures of language picture, represent facts, results in misunderstandings about the phenomena pictured – the ramifications of which connect up with misunderstanding the phenomena of imagination, thinking, perceiving, naming and describing facts, reality as such, which all stem out from the belief structures of empirical imagination and thinking intertwined to operate in the service of practical action, in the stream of practical operational activities that make up the rules of the language-game. Human history as such is on the one hand an expression of an enrichment human consciousness and imagination and also an impoverishment proportional to the extent of the entanglement of consciousness, or intelligence, by its own history, by the backlog of the imagination of history and culture. That is to say, an impoverishment proportional to the extent of bewitchment of intelligence by thinking and imagination habits of language; by doxa as such the conflicts and illusions of which are portrayed by Plato’s well known cave metaphor narrating a situation of conflict over the interpretation of shadows on the walls of the cave. The crucial point not to forget is that doxa is a state of imagination, false belief; untruth lived and experienced as the truth. That experience is on the other hand always expresses itself in one form or another as reality, as the reality of lived experience. This means that reality of truth and the reality of imagination overlap and indeed interplay in the stream of significations of lived experience which take many different forms of expression in live situations, in the unfolding signifying moments of phenomena in the weave of which the actors’, the language operators’, empirical selves are

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structured along with empirical beliefs in pictures/representations of language. They are such beliefs held fast as long as they operate as rules of the game, which plays the role of the standard of what is real and reality, the rule against which empirical logic measures, judges and so on as to the certainty of the truth of its conclusions. Therefore the problem of entanglement of intelligence with imagination and the question of what is reality and truth needs to be elucidated together as they are interdependent and internally connected with the unfolding of signifying phenomena11 in the weave of which imagination and signifying images interplay and intertwine. That is to say, truth or the perception of truth cannot be isolated from the signifying situations in which these concepts and human operational habits interplay and modify each other culturally and historically. In other words, the difference and differentiation of perception of reality from perception of imagined reality is not an easy matter; as our concepts representing such a conceptual difference formally, on the verbal level, representations in space and time conceal rather than disclose the signifying phenomena in the unfolding significations of which such conceptual differentiations are structured along with the operational structural habits of thinking and imagination reactions. That signifying phenomena in operation is completely filtered from human operational horizon that operates only in the service of the action of the organism for survival and practical action. Thus what is filtered by practical operational habits of thinking and theorizing in the name of philosophical knowledge, is recovered by the intuitive awareness tracing back and forth the unfolding moments of signifying phenomena of Life, in the nexus of which our imagination and memory reactions are intertwined operationally with learning and operating with signs and pictures of language, which means culture and with all the backlog of the history of language-games. This means that the real deep philosophical question here pertains to the questioner’s life stance, one’s existential concern and the deep disquietude as well as the deep existential astonishment in the midst of Life occurring as our lives – the unfolding of which takes the form of expression of an astonishment which was rightly pointed out as what started philosophical interrogation. Whether philosophy and all the people who expressed thoughts in the name of philosophy share this astonishment, the deep disquietude in need and in search of deep quietude12 and motivation for insight and clarity is a question connected with what one understands about philosophy, love and wisdom. Understanding philosophy on conventional grounds changes the original meaning of philosophy from the pursuit of Light, and deviates philosophical search from being a search for Self knowledge – from being a movement of thinking opening its own way of progress by the glimmers of its own insights of intuitive awareness to resolve the imaginings of empirical thinking. That deviates philosophy from realizing

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the potentials of human thinking, as well as from meeting with the universal light of ancient wisdom the discovery of which always gives an expression of an insight13 to the otherwise formal concept “transcendent” defined by Kant in formal contrast between phenomenon and noumenon. That is the same insight which finds a new and an original way to express itself by means of Wittgenstein’s reminders assembled as the surrounding signifying phenomena of an ostensive definition. Philosophy in its western forms of development seems to have lost the track of Light out of the cave to speak in remembrance of Plato’s metaphor and undergone an intellectualist formation of consciousness epitomized in Cartesian presuppositions about thinking, perception of reality and truth which are all theorized from the standpoint of the structured thinking habits of an actor without awareness of the signifying background in which such thinking and memory habits are structured. These are intellectual developments, instead of probing and cracking into one’s structured horizon, they serve to strengthen it and bar the ways for the rays of light from glimmering in to our cave; hence instead of resolving the structuring of operational thinking habits, they move on their grooves in terms of constructing, analysing, comparing logical pictures, with a view of obtaining a general picture of a state of affairs, without however an awareness of the misleading impact of these pictures on one’s thinking and imagining as the grooves of which serve for such thinking to move in them, circling into the labyrinths of intellectualism rather than moving to the flashing rays of light so to speak. The merits of philosophical thinking originating as if from a child’s unprejudiced and innocent ignorance mixed with the excitement of joy, disquiet and deep astonishment, lived as the sense of the mystery of life unfolding, and the merits of western philosophical development differ in so far as the latter’s theories with their own pictures serve to mask the unfolding mystery of life while leading and misleading one to read phenomena and surrounding world operationally with the techniques and finite forms of conceptual representations of the language-game, with all the backlog of its history and culture. The former is a brute response of the same nature expressive of poetry, uncontaminated with the conditionings of language-game; the conditionings resulting from narratives, belief and imagination structures operationally acquired from the belief systems of language and culture. The brute response is a scratch from which philosophy should always start and never lose contact of its uncontaminated trace. Only then it can take the form of an interrogation that can find its way to its own source of Light by an intensifying awareness of moments flashed out by one’s intuitive awareness; that which derives it motivation from the insight that enables one to keep an intelligent distance to representations, to the pictures of language – as they otherwise easily shape and fill one’s imagination to

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operate and read one’s surroundings with representations, to identify one’s self and surroundings with names and descriptions in essentialist, finalist terms and so on. The scratch from philosophy should start is connected with the awareness that captures in the scratch a trace of a vibration grooving and inscribing contours intertwined with memory and imagination reactions that are retracing reorganizing them by new structures, by interfacing, opposing and forming new contours; by presenting and representing them as conceptual pictures while interplaying them against one another. Only such awareness can follow the interplay of the trace of signifying phenomena in the weave of which human imagination and memory and thinking habits operationally interplay and structure/condition one another. That amounts to the “immensity of landscape” the details of which are reminded and assembled as “languagegames” and about which Wittgenstein points out: “I am showing my pupils the details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.”14 The scratch and the trace are internally connected by means of weaving signifying connexions that one comes to be touched by a trace that is constantly and internally connecting and interconnecting with the conceptual contours that seem to differentiate our surroundings into mountains, skies, stars, clouds, seas, earth, space etc. relative to the subject who supposes oneself in the stance of an external observer – as if self evidentially perceiving or observing them, i.e., in the manner in which this is purported by the demonstrative gesture of ostensive definition to one’s self and to others’ by pointing, by turning and directing one’s attention. Which are all different forms of expressions of the empirical habit structure of imagination – a habit structure which is experienced and shared as if it’s a self evident truth demonstrable anytime to one’s self and to others’. It is in fact a stance that one is confined in that one doesn’t know any other way of seeing and reading (The structuring of the phenomena of “seeing as” in the signifying weave of images) the world, the facts, life and death and so on. Not only that, but in that imprisonment one believes in (imagines and experiences) a self about one’s and others’ the communal reality of which is learnt operationally and lived on the basis of shared imagination, as historical consciousness conveyed and sustained through generations by the rules of the language-games. Whenever sensibility or awareness cracks this shell of imprisonment the manifest of life inspires astonishment, the sense of deep still silence of that is sometimes conveyed by the language of arts, which we also name generally as poetry, without necessarily confining it simply to its recited or written forms in verses. It is rather a sense of Life the traces and vibrations of which have been all along the subject of the philosophical investigations of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, her philosophy of Ontopoiesis. It is the sense of Life which needs effort and unravelling attention against the constant

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rush of memory and imagination reactions conditioning/determining intelligence to operate in the service of practical conventional ends and interests which create an empirical self-sense determined by representational images. They are images which operate to mislead many, including philosophers, into the depths of a labyrinth of one’s own constructions with pictures of language the images of which are operating and misleading in similar ways like the shadows of the cave, which are mistaken as reality, as in Plato’s metaphor. ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ Istanbul Kültür Üniversitesi (IKÜ) & Istanbul Teknik Üniversitesi (ITÜ), ˙Istanbul, Turkey NOTES 1

“The different ways names are used correspond exactly to the different uses of the demonstrative pronoun. (I cannot in the same sense point at a place, a colour etc.)” Wittgenstein, Philosphical. Remarks (Blackwell, 1975.) Par. 92. 2 Wittgenstein, Tractatus: 3.3. “Only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have meaning.” The concept of “nexus of a proposition” is later elucidated in the light of internal connections of signifying phenomena, language-game as “proto-phenomenon” (Philosophical Investigations, p. 654). 3 The endurance in question is characterized by Socrates and Plato “Philosophy as a rehearsal to death”, as a form of contemplative interrogation and thinking focused to find one’s way out of the cave by its own elucidating light – which is a form of life taking its stand not from the images reacted by words of “death” and “life”, “light” and “dark” which divide the life of imagination, but from the light of insight to the interplay of signifying phenomena without the awareness of which one’s imagination remains entangled to react to the images of words which otherwise constantly continue to divide imagination rather than elucidating the unity of life and death beyond images. It is against the constancy of the flow of imagination habits in life that one can only endure and proceed by means of philosophical interrogation, by unravelling and elucidating the knots that otherwise mislead one into the labyrinthine ways of identifying pictures of language with the images associated by them on the basis of resemblance, thus one misses the cue offered in connection with the signifying use of pictures. One is then misled by one’s operational habits of thinking into the depths of the cave so to speak by its own confusions about the shadows. 4 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value. Trans. Peter Winch (Blackwell, 1980) p. 43e. 5 See Wittgenstein: “Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness” (Philosophia, vol. 6, nos. 3–4, pp. 391–408, Sept., Dec., 1976. Selected and edited by Rush Rhees). 6 “Language-game as proto-phenomenon” Philosphical Investigations (Blackwell, 1968, p. 656). 7 Therefore the terms “‘Lebenswelt’, ‘Erlebnis’ or its Spanish equivalent ‘Vivencia’ though expresses a higher awareness as against the philosophical theories confined to representational subject object consciousness of the world, need to be used on the way of clarifying phenomena in the signifying weave of which our thinking and imagination, historical empirical consciousness as such, is structured, rather than used as a general picture of a state of affairs”. The latter usage as a picture reverberates imagination rather than bringing the awareness that stills imagination. 8 Compare Hume’s psychological habit explanation based on induction with Wittgenstein’s “reaction to a cause” explanation based on intuitive awareness of signifying connections (Note 5):

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i.e., to one’s reaction to the rope one holds when the other end is pulled and stretched unexpectedly. Or, one’s immediate reaction i.e., by pointing at a banana skin as the cause of one’s going suddenly off balance by stepping on it. These examples instantiate an intuitive awareness of signifying phenomena and also instantiate how they are expressive of the internal connections of which we operate with concepts of cause and effect. 9 The ideality in question is mistakenly identified as the essential features of objects by our common sense beliefs and by sophisticated theories of knowledge and perception is supposed and explained away as the identity of objects with their names by the participation and instantiation of them in the world Ideality. Our rational thinking is also supposed to be part of the Ideality in so far as it proves to be capable of analysing and perceiving them with their essential connections participating in such Ideality – which is Platonism with all its Rationalist and Empiricist qualifications, including the attempts of Kant and of Bertrand Russell to integrate them. 10 “Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.” Wittgenstein, Culture and Value. Trans. Peter Winch (Blackwell, 1980) p. 76e. 11 Here the state of affairs referred by the German term “Erlebnis” needs to be elucidated by intuitive awareness of signifying phenomena clarifying structuring of conceptual differentiations represented by pictures of language and not from the standpoint of empirical imagination structured to operate with pictures of language describing and representing phenomena in terms of space. As Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka rightly points out: “To grasp life’s patterning, all should be presented at once in one cross-section of an image.” In Logos & Life p. 5. Book 4. Reminders assembled as “language-games” present just these cross sections as the unfolding of significations as the background presupposed for meaning, pointing, showing, naming, picturing something, with its conceptual identity and difference from others. 12 As expressed beautifully by Edmund Husserl and quoted by Merlau-Ponty: “It is the experience . . . still mute which we are concerned with leading to the pure expression of its meaning.” 13 That is as expressed by Hui-neng: “From the first not a thing is”, in The Zen Doctrine of No Mind, by D.T. Suzuki, Weiser Books, 1972. 14 Ibid., p. 56e.

ANTONIO DOMÍNGUEZ REY

P H E N O M E N O L O G I C A L A N D P O E T I C A L G RO U N D S OF LINGUISTICS

ABSTRACT

A linguistic theory based solely on the semantic circle of closed sayings admits, as Chomsky affirms, “any syntactic theory”, but not a process significancy of the saying itself. One thing is to analyze forms and texts placing oneself opposite language, as if it was something foreign, and a very different one to enter the form, become oneself text. Since Language goes inside oneself, as Thought, on analyzing it we objectifie it and the critical distance like that created still continues to be a language. There begins the linguistic and poetic function. Any other criterion has this one as primary target. It is a priori of language, categorical, correlative. We stick to this from a phenomenological approach that needs a critical review of the principal contributions that have been given of Language. In this brief sketch of phenomenological linguistics we demonstrate how the basic reflections of Chomsky and his contemporaries or precedents are tributaries to XIXth century approaches, from Humboldt and his school to Husserl and Amor Ruibal, philosophers whose rational foundation is linguistic, morfosintactic and semasiological. We thus reappraise the speculative and poetic approach of Grammar and Language, against the disrespect that official linguistics shows to the speculative foundation of language, from where it originates. This disrespect, sanctioned by Humboldt’s exclusion by Chomsky for his apparent Cartesian inheritance, was taken as a principle by associationism and pragmatism, both liberal and behaviorist, as well as by the logical neo-positivism (Frege, Quine), functional structuralism and generativism, schools who present as new ideas simple corollaries of fundamental principles of the linguistic thought. ANTONIO DOMÍNGUEZ REY

F U N DA M E N TO S F E N O M E N O L Ó G I C O S Y P O É T I C O S D E LA LINGÜÍSTICA Una semántica conclusa, de dichos clausurados, admite “cualquier teoría sintáctica”, afirma Noam Chomsky, pero una significancia procesiva, añadimos 207 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 207–231. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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nosotros, no. Una cosa es analizar formas y textos situándolos enfrente, como ajenos a uno, y otra entrar en la forma, hacerse texto. Como el lenguaje va dentro de uno mismo, desde que nos conciben, o uno dentro de él, igual que después el pensamiento, al analizarlo lo objetivamos y la distancia crítica así creada sigue siendo lenguaje. Ahí comienza la función lingüística. Cualquier otro criterio tiene a éste por primario. Es el a priori categorial, correlativo, del lenguaje. A él nos atenemos. Tal entrada en función lingüística confiere a su estudio un carácter peculiar y presupone condiciones diferentes a las consideradas por norma como criterio y método lingüístico. La entrada en la forma nos remite a W. von Humboldt, G. Gerber, M. Bréal, Charles S. Peirce, Ángel Amor Ruibal, Hermann Paul y Husserl antes de llegar al Cours de Linguistique Générale, de Ferdinand de Saussure, a L. Hjelmslev, A. Martinet y Chomsky, por ejemplo, cuyos métodos y sistemas han de ser revisados bajo tal aspecto. Ha habido, no obstante, otros lingüistas que avalan este enfoque y a ellos nos referimos también implícitamente, entre otros, K. Bühler, L. Tesnière, G. Guillaume, Algirdas J. Greimas, etcétera. El método fenomenológico da entrada asimismo a pensadores cuya obra depende de la formación interna del lenguaje, como Eduard von Hartmann, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Lévinas, Derrida y Gadamer, pero el elenco de fondo remite a los orígenes con los gramáticos hindúes, Panini; griegos, Platón, Aristóteles, estoicos; latinos, Quintiliano, san Agustín, Llull, Nicolás de Cusa, Santo Tomás, Ockham, hasta llegar y, a la vez, repartir de Herder y Hamann, con los ecos precedentes.1 Nace así una lingüística diferenciada. En 1965 se publica, en edición póstuma, la obra The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy, del científico Friedrich Waismann, de la Universidad de Oxford.2 El título resulta sugerente. No se trata de una filosofía del lenguaje tal como suele entenderse de ordinario, sino de una filosofía lingüística, es decir, del pensamiento cuya estructura concierne al lenguaje. Analiza el orden combinatorio que explica la comprensión de las frases. Y tal orden coincide con el de la lógica en su aspecto formal, pero no se detiene en ella. Puede entenderse, por tanto, la formalización de conceptos y de conexiones entre palabras como un orden supremo de forma lógica. Es lo que hizo Chomsky desde la aparición de Sintatic Structures, y aún antes, que Waismann cita como uno de los varios ejemplos a tal efecto en la década de los años cincuenta. Y Waismann parte asimismo de Wittgenstein. Era la referencia obligada de entonces. El planteamiento choca, sin embargo, con la realidad del signo lingüístico, que Waismann reduce, como L. Bloomfield, y con él también el concepto de lenguaje, a los efectos que éste produce. Es la definición típica del behaviorismo y el resultado de la sospecha de equivocidad e indeterminación precisa

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que el lenguaje arrastra consigo para un lógico, matemático o científico de la naturaleza. Sucede, no obstante, que tal definición encierra una petición de principio, pues el signo ya es uno de los efectos producidos por el lenguaje, tal vez el más esencial, pero efecto al fin y al cabo. La lingüística fundada en la relación y reacción de estímulo a efecto o respuesta apenas puede definir el signo de otro modo, pero ya plantea en su premisa la consecuencia. Bajo tal aspecto, sólo Peirce atiende al fundamento transductivo del signo en la filosofía y lingüística de ámbito angloamericano. Y lo hace porque sus fuentes son más bien europeas: Aristóteles con el concepto de orden proposicional y categorial; Duns Scotto con el formalismo procesivo de conceptos y estructuras lógicas; y Kant, con el fenomenismo intuitivo, que Peirce interpreta como faneroscopia, en paralelo un tanto anticipado con la fenomenología de Husserl. Y ambos consideran el asociacionismo de J. Stuart Mill, que Saussure redujo también, a través de otros autores, a formalización estructural. Hay, pues, una continuidad emergente en el fondo conceptual de los grandes fundadores de la lingüística y del pensamiento que la gramática enhebra al fundamentar su forma inherente. El mismo Husserl parte de las reflexiones lógicas de Port-Royal en torno a las categorías gramaticales y las conexiones específicas de concordancia, dependencia, determinación, subsunción, conyunción, disyunción y síntesis tanto predicativa como ontológica. Cuando pasamos de la relación que la palabra instaura con el objeto o la realidad a las relaciones entre palabras y sus estructuras en la frase y proposición, entramos en el dominio de la generación de formas, es decir, el Orden supralógico al que refiere Waismann las conexiones lingüísticas y propiamente lógicas. Husserl cita a Hermann Paul y se fundamenta en su explicación de los demostrativos y pronombres para exponer el carácter de la intención significativa, la cual procede a veces en vacío, sin correlato de percepción real, y cuya objetividad depende precisamente de la conexión establecida con otras partes ya independientes de la frase o proposición. Por eso su entidad semántica depende de la ocasión o situación en que nacen o se estructuran los demostrativos y pronombres. La conexión de formas intencionales en vacío nos sitúa ya en la forma lógica X cuyas variables -este, esto, aquí, ahí, ahora, yo, tú, él, incluso la forma es, etc.- la saturan o complementan según la ocasión del texto y la situación comunicativa. X es locus formal complementable, y esto indica que toda frase o proposición, cualquier enunciado lingüístico, se reducen o son reducibles a X o a uno de sus formantes posibles, como el Nombre y el Predicado en la forma general, lógico-lingüística, S est P. Así se entiende también el concepto chomskiano de proyección expansiva o Teoría X . Todo elemento nuclear está inserto en una estructura sintagmática implícita que, de hecho, le sirve de horizonte posible. Decir X es mentar un punto de

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proyección en el eje —X—, cuyos segmentos indican en el orden propositivo y sintagmático dirección hacia el punto de origen expresivo (la izquierda), y entonces X adquiere valor de categoría léxica (Sustantivo, Verbo, Adjetivo, Partícula) y se marca con una barra (/) o un apóstrofo (X ), bien mira hacia la derecha o campo de complementación. En este caso, la X inicial alcanza su grado máximo de expansión y se nota con dos barras o apóstrofos (X ), signo de clausura e inclusión sintagmática. La posición nuclear tiene valor neutro o grado cero (Xo ), cuando en realidad es el punto de tensión implícita entre dos direcciones cuyo valor no es discreto, sino binario. La expansión inmediata o intermedia de X indica una especificación nominal, adjetiva, verbal o prepositiva, es decir, una posición fenoménica. Y tal punto de posición ya introduce tema. Tiene carácter tético, de tesis, por lo que decir Nombre [N] implica no Verbo [–V], y viceversa, o núcleo nominal y verbal, respectivamente. Los valores [±N] y [±V] con sus expansiones respectivas hacia la izquierda, de Especificador, y hacia la derecha, de Complemento, más la inherencia que esta proyección introduce en el elemento inicial Xo como categoría (X ), superpone y recubre funciones que se convierten en objetos formales propios como los de Husserl, pues van implícitos operadores de asociación, junción, dependencia, negación, tercero implícito, transformación, etcétera. El paso de Xo → X → X o en esta otra representación inversa en la que desaparece el presupuesto carácter neutro de Xo

Espec

X

Compl

presupone en las relaciones SX → Espec) X un movimiento retroverso que convierte al Especificador en Complemento. A su vez, la relación implícita en la expansión precedente, X → X (Compl), o mirada hacia la derecha, recude también retroversa introduciendo un factor especificativo en el Complemento respecto de su núcleo. En una frase simple como El árbol del jardín, con estructura SX → (Espec) X y X → X (Compl), el artículo El especifica a árbol y el sintagma prepositivo [de + el jardín: (Espec X ] lo complementa, pero árbol entra, de hecho, en relación con jardín mediante los operadores árbol ∈/C jardín. Entre los componentes semánticos y objetivos de jardín veo, percibo uno como árbol,

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especifico los dos como determinados y singulares y, al hacerlo, ya complemento una relación espontánea de pertenencia o inclusión entre dos objetos y la objetividad subyacente constitutiva. Queremos decir con esto que Especificador y Complemento son instantes procesivos y simultáneos de la posisicón X anclada entre su intención significante y su intuición completiva, cuyo proceso instaura un antes y después que son realmente los valores prepositivos y positivos en unidad de concepción sintagmática. Se percibe un proceoso unitario . La relación árbol ↔ jardín ya es objetiva, un objeto complejo, no discreto, cuyas implicaciones expone el lenguaje de modo discreto. Cada constituyente suyo lo es en tanto uno y otro acotan una unidad perceptiva y a la par su conjunto igualmente en relación con el sujeto que percibe y expresa. La relación Espec X → X Compl es en realidad la de indeterminado / determinado

X

donde árbol está siendo el árbol en tanto El árbol del jardín. La extensión sintagmática depende de su intensión perceptiva. Existe una tensión correlativa entre los polos de la relación árbol (R) jardín, que está entrevista mediante operadores de pertenencia e inclusión, de tal modo que el árbol del jardín es el árbol que pertenece al jardín o el jardín del árbol (el jardín que tiene el árbol). La preposición de encierra pertenencia, inclusión. Es un verbo tácito por su valor interpositivo. Supone correlacionalmente las dos operaciones implicadas. Y este recubrimiento confiere un tacto especial al lenguaje, pues confirma su función explicativa. Crea una adhesión o Einfühlung de lenguaje. Cada término de la relación descubre en sí la síntesis antepredicativa, al menos alguno de los atributos que lo relacionan con un ámbito conceptual que lo inscribe en tanto remite a otro término y esta remisión constituye su significado o tensión significativa. Significar comporta integrarse en el contexto de predicaciones o ámbito verbal que subtiende o relaciona a un elemento con otro. Es el instante de reconocimiento de un entorno de integración posible. Y esta posibilidad revela su potencia integradora, el a priori de relación o prevalencia sintáctica del nombre. El lenguaje vive entonces como gramática el fundamento que lo constituye, su principio genético. Por eso decimos con Amor Ruibal que todo nombre implica un a priori correlativo que lo subtiende, trátese de un nombre sustantivo, adjetivo, verbo,

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preposición, la oración entera, propositiva, o incluso operadores relacionales como los flexivos, que se convierten según Chomsky en núcleos y transforman al Sintagma Nominal y Verbal, respectivamente, en Especificador y Complemento suyo, como sucede en Barriers (1986). Posteriormente, estas relaciones pasan a posibilidades referenciales según el carácter dependiente o independiente de cada término siguiendo la oposición “ligado / libre” respecto de un “dominio local” en la configuración sintagmática, como sucede en Principles and Parameters in Comparative Grammar (1991) y en la denominada Teoría del Ligamiento (Government and Binding), de los años ochenta. Y esto ya recuerda más estrechamente los objetos independientes y no independientes de Husserl en Investigaciones Lógicas. Cada una de las categorías o expansiones encierra una operación nominal, simple o compleja: su valor de nombre. En la expansión existe lo que Husserl denomina síntesis de recubrimiento, implícita o derivada de la extensión o entorno del eidos (“Umfang des Eidos”),3 o conjunto de sus posibles ejemplificaciones singulares, es decir, el ámbito de su expansión. He aquí, en sustancia, el fondo principal de la teoría lingüística de Chomsky, rastreable casi punto por punto en las Investigaciones Lógicas de Husserl y sus precedentes, comparación ya esbozada inicialmente por Forment Giralt.4 Así, por ejemplo, del concepto de Gramática Universal, muy citado en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, y aplicado por Husserl a las formas significativas, es decir, a la “morfología de las significaciones”, se obtiene “el sistema a priori de las estructuras formales, esto es, de las estructuras que prescinden de toda particularidad material de las significaciones” (IL, II, 122). Husserl reconoce que es éste “el gran problema, igualmente fundamental para la lógica y la gramática, de establecer esta constitución , que envuelve el reino de la significaciones”.5 Tal es asimismo el trasfondo de la forma lógica de la lingüística heredada por Chomsky entre otros predecesores suyos como Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, citados por él mismo junto a los fundadores del descriptivismo y distribucionalismo americano, antropológico, sociológico y matemático. Por eso encontramos además en Husserl, tales cuales, y a la zaga de A. Marty, antecedente de la Estructura Profunda y Superficial del sistema de Chomsky, las transformaciones o modificaciones enunciativas de la estructura básica de la materia sintáctica, categoremas y sincategoremas, y de su forma asimismo sintáctica, los paradigmas y sintagmas famosos de Saussure, quien recurre también a las investigaciones semióticas y lógicas en curso, a los enlaces materiales y formales, y con él grandes lingüistas, como Bühler y Hjelmslev. Todos los fundadores europeos de la lingüística guardan alguna deuda con Husserl. En 1935 un grupo de filósofos y lingüistas lo invitan a Praga y el les expone su teoría de la significación.6

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Efectivamente, Husserl establece el principio lingüístico de sustitución y oposición tanto paradigmática como sintagmática y proposicional basados en la “unidad de sentido”, la coherencia y cohesión semántica de los enunciados coincidente o no con la enunciativa, es decir, la concordancia gramatical. Y con ello ya establece los criterios sintácticos y semánticos de la proyección lingüística, que son, con los nucleares, la base de Hjelmslev y Chomsky, y éstos también presentes en el filósofo alemán. Husserl ya diferencia entre enunciado, enunciación y sus leyes tanto formales como verificativas, los criterios de interpretación y verificación semántica y pragmática. En su reflexión asoma asimismo el fundamento de la pragmática, pero porque lo recibe de otros grandes fundadores del pensamiento lingüístico, como Locke y Von Hartmann. La teoría del contexto y de la retroalimentación de la forma respecto de la situación y de la base léxica, en pragmática y lingüística, así como el descriptivismo lógico, y por supuesto en poética o también en teoría literaria, pasa por la actuación de la forma y contenido poético de Von Hartmann. En tal sentido, J. L. Austin, J. R. Searle, O. Ducrot, la teoría de actos del lenguaje, ya expuesta antes además por el poeta Paul Valéry, es deudora de Von Hartmann, Gerber, Husserl y Heidegger. A los autores citados habría que añadir otros nombres y conceptos, como el de relevancia extendido por D. Sperber y D. Wilson, quienes pasan por alto el principio de “relevancia abstractiva” de Bühler, heredero, a su vez, de los conceptos de recubrimiento y síntesis nodulares de Husserl. Únase a ello, en la denominada escuela hermenéutica de la recepción, el principio husserliano de elucidación, próximo a la fundamentación científica del pensamiento, y extensible al “circuito de la palabra” de Saussure, con otros aportes intersubjetivos, tales la figura del receptor ideal, común a Husserl, Hjelmslev, Chomsky, U. Eco y la pragmática. Recordemos que Saussure sitúa el circuito precitado bajo el epígrafe de “Place de la langue dans les faits de langage”, donde se establece nada menos que el carácter objetivo de la lengua (langue), localizado, dice el autor francés, “en la porción determinada del circuito donde una imagen auditiva se asocia con un concepto”. Y es, además, “la parte social del lenguaje”.7 Y nadie de los múltiples lectores que cruzaron sus ojos con esta frase se preguntó quién asocia, determina y qué es ese espacio implícito de la operación realizada. Todo esto figura en los conceptos de elucidación, co-humanidad e intersubjetividad lingüística de Husserl. Me he referido a ello en varias observaciones de la Llamada Exótica, en el capítulo cuarto, dedicado al concepto de lenguaje y de la gramática mínima del pensamiento de Lévinas,8 que es un resumen del pensamiento lingüístico de la tradición hebraica, en concreto talmúdica, sin la cual sería ininteligible el fenómeno de la crítica gnoseológica actual, filosófica y lingüística, que afecta, con los conceptos de trace (huella), decir

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y dicho (Dire, Dit), a la grammatología de J. Derrida, e incluso podemos extenderlo al modelo minimalista de Chomsky (el denominado movimiento α, por ejemplo), y al criticism americano. Puede sorprendernos esta última relación, pero recordemos que los primeros libros de Chomsky versan sobre la base fonémica del hebreo y la estructura lógica del lenguaje, Morphonemics of Modern Hebrew, disertación universitaria de 1949, y Logical Structures of Linguistic Theory (1955/1956), título éste homólogo al contenido de la obra precitada de Waismann, escrita por esos mismos años, aunque editada póstuma. Esta preocupación científica similar obedece al fondo especial de la metafonía y composición silábica, derivativa, de la forma lógica gramatical y estructura sintáctica del hebreo, por una parte, y de la lógico-matemática de Wittgenstein y el concepto de objetividad en Villard O. Quine, por otra. Tal es, en resumen, el fondo de lingüística filosófica que recabamos, pues se trata, según vamos viendo, del fundamento de la lingüística como ciencia. Corroboran este fondo otros detalles conceptuales y principios de Husserl. Aludíamos hace poco a la determinación categorial -categoremas y sincategoremas, con la misma denominación de Aristóteles- de Husserl desde la combinación de paradigma y sintagma en orden a una “significación unitaria”,9 de donde deriva el “principio analítico” de la forma gramatical: las formas no pueden funcionar como materias ni las materias como formas”, lo cual se aplica “a la esfera de las significaciones”.10 Podemos decir Este árbol es verde, pero nos choca la expresión este liviano es verde o intensivo es redondo; más aún una frase como: si cuando víspera o verdea, un árbol es y como. Nos encontramos entonces, implícitos, los criterios de gramaticalidad y el principio de selección categorial, los grados procesivos de aceptabilidad o inaceptabilidad de un orden lógico, semántico y pragmático en la Gramática Universal de Chomsky. Ya están preformados en Husserl. Pero también descubrimos aquí el eje de proyección sintagmática de la forma y el selectivo, restrictivo, del Lexicón, así como los gérmenes de la semántica semiótica y categorial de Greimas, B. Pottier, E. Coseriu, etc. Y además, las bases del transformacionalismo y generativismo sintáctico con las formas primitivas, universales y a priori, de enlace y de transformación significativa y sintáctica, a la par: la nominalización, adjetivación, objetivación y proposicionalidad, que figuran las operaciones básicas y liminares de la expansión discursiva. Son los tipos estructurales de reducción y articulación categorial, prescritos a priori “en la idea general de significación”,11 en los que se fundan las leyes “de las operaciones de complexión y modificación” o leyes analíticas, que Husserl divide en formales -los principios de contradicción, doble negación y el modus ponens (en p → q, afirmado p se sigue q)- y ontológico-analíticas, categorías de objeto, propiedad y pluralidad. Las leyes formales se basan a

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su vez “en las puras categorías de significación” y sus primitivos, el Nombre, Adjetivo, la Proposición y los tipos básicos de enlace, conjuntivo, disyuntivo, hipotético, así como las funciones correspondientes a aquéllos, la de sujeto y objeto para el Nombre; de predicado y atributo para el Adjetivo; de oración libre o compleja según el tipo de enlace señalado y para la proposición. De aquí, y mediante sustituciones graduales de los primitivos por enlaces de formas antedichas surgen “nuevas formas de validez deductiva” en progresión infinita,12 como sucede asimismo con los conceptos de proyección y transformación en Chomsky. Esta subsunción categorial aplicada a la recursividad del enlace en la formación del sintagma nos sirve a nosotros para esbozar una “función gramatical narrativa”.i Nos fundamos además en los índices funcionales de la proposición según Peirce, cualitativa del verbo, existencial del nombre -sujeto y objetoy proposicional compleja, donde entran los enlaces primitivos de Husserl y sus deducciones: conjuntiva, disyuntiva, implicativa, hipotética, etc. Se une a ello, por otra parte, el concepto interno y externo de relación entendida como proceso dinámico del nombre, su potencia retroproyectiva, que caracterizamos como verbo del nombre siguiendo la forma interna de las raíces, la etimología y su proyección sintáctica, aspectos derivados de Humboldt y formalizados lingüísticamente por Amor Ruibal desde la escuela humboldtiana -Gerber, Steinthal, H. Paul, Van der Gabelentz- y Bréal.13 La estructura significativa de los primitivos categoriales, nombre, adjetivo y proposición, admite, conforme a la esencia categorial, las leyes de complicación y modificación, pues se fundan en ella, y esto posibilita “que oraciones completas puedan entrar como miembros en otras oraciones”,14 lo cual equivale para nosotros a que los constituyentes primitivos de las oraciones completas admitan en la estructura de sus articulaciones el horizonte que las engloba. La consideración de que todo término o nombre traslapa una relación atributiva o predicativa nos remonta a la escuela de Port-Royal y los siglos XVII y XVIII, a cuyo legado gramatical remite Husserl como base y fundamento de una gramática universal (IL, II: 137).15 Es la misma remisión de Chomsky en Cartesian Linguistics (1966). Ambos autores se unen homólogamente por la referencia común a Descartes y Humboldt. Husserl reconoce al final de la cuarta investigación lógica su deuda con el lingüista contemporáneo de Hegel. Y Chomsky cree que Humboldt cierra el capítulo “de la lingüística cartesiana” y que no abre “el comienzo de una nueva era en el pensamiento lingüístico”, si bien reconoce que reaparece i

Masaje del mensaje. Lingüística semiótica, pp. 97s. El drama del lenguaje, pp. 287s. “Entorno y horizonte de la oración subordinada”, Philologica Canariensia, no 10–11 (2004–2005), pp. 97–130; “Retracción expansiva del sintagma”, Philologica Canariensia, no 12–13 (2006–2007), pp. 237–258.

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“en los estudios contemporáneos sobre el lenguaje y el conocimiento”.16 Cabe decir que el reconocimiento humboldtiano de Husserl destapa las deudas de Chomsky respecto del lingüista alemán. Afectan éstas incluso a la determinación categorial de las formas nucleares y formas sintácticas, las cuales, dice Husserl, “presuponen ya contenidos nucleares en y con algunas formas nucleares como materia sintáctica” (IL, II: 126).17 Son los símbolos operativos de las cadenas sintácticas y los contenidos de sus matrices léxicas, semántico-sintácticas. El “momento esencial común”, el “ idéntido” de una significación primitiva y su nominalización, como en verde y el verde, ya evidencian la estructura profunda de la transformación realizada, el paso de la adjetivación abstracta -“verdosidad”a su determinación nominal, el verde, y con ello, a la postre, todo fenómeno de transducción o, como lo denomina Chomsky, de movimiento α o incluso, añadimos nosotros, ω, entre cuyos límites, expansiones o restricciones, se mueve el lenguaje. La significación consta en Husserl de materia y forma sintáctica y le corresponde una figura o forma proposicional a la que subtiende, a su vez, una ley a priori.18 El concepto de movimiento atañe a la acción lingüística en tanto constituye sintagma o proposición mediante replicaciones y recursividad, pero ya lo comporta el nombre por sí mismo. Indica el fenómeno de relación inclusiva o intrínseca del lenguaje, que tiende a replicar en proceso unidades primitivas de su constitución ontológica, como son el sustantivo y el verbo en cuanto nombres. El nombre se replica al expansionar la energía que lo traslapa. De ahí que el movimiento α chomskiano refiera la facultad de traslado de una categoría dentro del sintagma u oración que la contiene: “muévase cualquier categoría a cualquier parte”.19 Tal fenómeno deriva para nosotros del carácter transicional del nombre, del verbum que lo implicita, por tanto, de su horizonte de expansión proyectiva, que se traduce en Chomsky por la Flexión, tanto morfológica como sintáctica. La Flexión es el factor operativo de la relación implícita en la energeia y acción del nombre. En éste existe un espacio virtual de posición categoremática. Chomsky concibe una operación de Atracción / Movimiento que explique la formación de cadenas sintáctico-semánticas en el lenguaje, no determinadas por operaciones selectivas del léxico,20 según sucedía en Principles and Parameters Theory (PPT). Y confía en que la descripción de su funcionamiento la explique, es decir, la fundamente, entendiendo por tal una adecuación entre estas instancias, las funciones descriptiva y explicativa.21 El movimiento viene a explicar, sustituyéndolas, las reglas transformativas del proceso estándar de gramática generativa, a saber, la inserción, sustitución, modificación y supresión, con sus variantes e implicaciones.

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En realidad, los modelos chomskianos, desde la teoría estándar al programa minimalista, pasando por las de ligación (Government and Binding), principios y parámetros (PPT), responden a una estructura temática básica y a modos de derivación o, como dice Husserl, de modificación de la doxa concerniente a la actitud natural, bien mediante transformaciones (negación, complemento qu, pronominalización, relativo, interrogación, afijación, etc.,) bien por efecto de movimiento (α, R-rasgos), que incluye operaciones de sustitución y adjunción, borrado e inserción, entre otras, con sus reflejos específicos de huella dejada por el elemento desplazado como copia suya, por ejemplo al sustituir un nombre por un pronombre. En la frase Juan le dijo a Luis, el pronombre le “copia” a Luis. El movimiento y la copia implican, respectivamente, que la estructura ya prevé la posición posible del elemento desplazado y que la posición originaria sigue manteniéndose con eficiencia, pues admite la huella pronominal del fenómeno producido. Serían efecto, para Husserl, de la génesis de sentido (“eine Sinnesgenesis”) y de implicaciones intencionales aún ocultas (“die verborgenen intentionalen Implikationen”), del sentido escondido (“ihre verborgenen Sinnesmomente”), o de su lazo secreto (“eine geheime... Bindung”).22 Todo esto remite a los primitivos de Husserl (en Chomsky el Nombre, Verbo, Adjetivo y Partícula), los objetos y las operaciones formales semánticosintácticas, derivadas como la nominalización del núcleo sintagmático; la relativización, del adjetivo; la objetivación, del verbo y su complemento; y la proposicionalidad. Tanto en Husserl como en Chomsky el lenguaje se estructura en orden a un eje representacional inducido por un núcleo sintáctico respecto de sus posibles actuaciones sintagmáticas por anáfora y catáfora, entendiendo por ello el sentido de vuelta a posición de origen o antecedente y expansión nominal del núcleo, es decir, su carácter pronominal. El léxico viene a ser en Chomsky la materia o término de Husserl en orden a la forma sintáctica, funcional flexiva en Chomsky, si prescindimos para el caso de Husserl del componente fonológico chomskiano. Y en realidad el proceso depende del principio de proyección direccional (“directional mapping”) en Chomsky23 y el “principio analítico”, el a priori categorial tanto de Husserl como de Amor Ruibal, y la proyección propositiva de Husserl,24 de la que proviene el hecho de que todo término o concepto dice relación implícita a su esencia o al marco de su región, lo cual descubre su rango de copertenencia y la síntesis que lo recubre, así como que el nombre contenga predicados adquiridos en la actividad judicativa,25 pues lo determina la ontología formal: objeto, proposición, relación, pluralidad, en razón de una unidad ontológico-formal o forma de unidad colectiva.26 Percibe cada uno de los objetos y su conjunto, como sucede

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con los objetos sintácticos y la formación por ensamble del nuevo objeto K a partir de objetos previos (α, β) o rasgos suyos en Chomsky.27 Tan pronto se mueve un rasgo en la cadena sintagmática “por consideraciones morfológicas”,28 la base léxica muestra un componente funcional, sintáctico, de su desarrollo potencial. Y esto genera recubrimientos en Chomsky (“move F”) y encubrimientos en Husserl. Son operaciones que constituyen en uno y otro autor los “objetos sintácticos”, etiquetados como tales por Chomsky29 y los objetos fundados de Husserl. De este modo, las unidades básicas se ensamblan y recubren generando tipos lógicos y sintácticos mediante los movimientos en un caso y las síntesis de recubrimiento30 en otro, traslapando, a su vez, las categorías argumentales (Teoría θ de Chomsky) y sus objetivos. Tales objetos sintácticos “consisten en ordenaciones de las propiedades de los elementos léxicos de los que, en última instancia, se constituyen”.31 Queremos recabar con esta exposición el precedente fenomenológico de la lingüística, cuya fundación nos hemos propuesto revisar atendiendo a lo que transcendió de él en gramática y lingüística, pero también a todo lo que el sistema reductivo de la epojé ha dejado fuera de la fundamentación científica del lenguaje. Husserl lo matizó en Lógica formal y transcendental, en Experiencia y juicio y en Ideas II. Esta otra parte es la que motivó nuestro ensayo breve El decir de lo dicho, cuyo título responde a conceptos de Lévinas y que afectan al fondo fenomenológico de la semántica y de la concepción del lenguaje desde consideraciones fonémicas del significante, en el sentido de una vinculación o Verbindlichkeit del lenguaje (H. Lipps), la prelación de la onda sonora sobre la fotónica en el feto a través del cuerpo materno, la columna vertebral como antena de conexión táctil con el mundo; la articulación espacio-temporal del sonido, que prefigura el arco fonoacústico de la Sinnesartikulation, cuyo eco afecta a la estructura gramatical constitutiva o “primordialidad en protogrado”, como la llama Husserl, del vínculo natural que nos une al cosmos. El niño ya formaliza sus cosas kinésicamente en el seno materno.32 Habría una precomprensión táxica de la diferencia fónica, un carácter Leib, cárnico, por tanto, de la onda acústica percibida -babi, biba pronunciado a través de altavoces sobre el vientre gestante-.33 De éstas y otras inducciones y deducciones derivamos el carácter antepredicativo del nombre, el cual se despliega de nuevo -diástasis- al nombrarlo como campo u horizonte de nuevas atribuciones. Es la prelación nominal del predicado, que remonta a Herder, Hamann, Humboldt, Fritz Mauthner, Amor Ruibal y Ortega y Gasset, quien distribuyó entre sus obras los gérmenes de una gramática lingüística.34 No concluiríamos a gusto esta justificación fenomenológica de la lingüística y del concepto homólogo de gramática si no constatáramos que también el concepto de metalingüística ya lo prevé Husserl antes que Hjelmslev, Jakobson, el

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estructuralismo funcionalista -Greimas, Martinet-, el gnoseológico -Coseriuy el antimentalista y generativista, con Bloomfield y Chomsky. En realidad lo anticipa formalmente Ockham con el concepto de suppositio materialis del nombre, por ejemplo al decir que Juan es nombre propio. Toda expresión, categoremática o sincategoremática, puede, dice Husserl, “presentarse como nombre de sí misma, esto es, se nombra a sí misma como fenómeno gramatical”.35 Considera estas expresiones como modificadas respecto de la significación primitiva y pueden funcionar representándola, designándose a sí mismas como representación de la representación que se da en origen. En tal caso, matiza el filósofo, “la expresión verbal funciona en la significación modificada como > de su significación primitiva”.36 Esto afecta al cambio de todas las formas sintácticas respecto de la materia sintáctica, a las estructuras interpretativas de la estructura profunda y los encastramientos de la subordinación. Tales modos “arraigan en la esencia. . . de las significaciones”.37 Son homologías de la suppositio materialis que ilustran el fondo metalingüístico de las cadenas semántico-sintácticas tan pronto sobrepasamos el umbral de las categorías primitivas, pero que, en realidad afectan a la constitución originaria del lenguaje y tal vez fundamentan la proyección sintáctica o conformación propositiva a partir de las unidades básicas, el fonema, la sílaba y la palabra, como propone Amor Ruibal y puede deducirse de reflexiones de san Agustín sobre el lenguaje. El nombre se nombra de continuo, voltea sobre sí en un espacio interno de libertad conceptiva. Lévinas dice que el lenguaje se asiste antepredicándose. Es el fondo nuclear significativo de Husserl con otra modificación formal. Coseriu cree que se trata de un truismo en el caso de san Agustín, pues el nombre no puede nombrarse para significar, ya que convertiría su referencialidad transitiva en intransitiva.38 San Agustín acierta al concebir un ámbito de conciencia lingüística en el que las palabras voltean, reverberan. Es el verberare del verbum mentis, la acción interna que crea un nombre al constituirse en función significativa, como si inaugurara un flujo o continuo ya incesante: la diátasis originaria.39 Tal, pues, el fundamento de la lingüística que preconizamos. Recaba el signo como acción constitutiva del lenguaje. Es lingüística, además, del signo semiótico, cuya triangulación ya aparece en Husserl y Amor Ruibal. Son sus vértices el significante, el concepto y la referencia, todo ello en un proceso de concepción dinámica. Representa la plusvalía del sentido sobre los significados componentes, cuya suma no lo iguala ni lo justifica. El sentido es función continua no diferenciable como tal en cada una de las unidades a las que asiste y potencia, incluidos sus intervalos, de modo análogo a la función homóloga de Bolzano en matemáticas. El principio de composicionalidad de G. Frege y el referencialismo contextual, de R. Carnap, por ejemplo, presuponen fuera del signo el elemento que lo funda internamente con carácter simbólico: la

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correlación a priori de la forma o el sentido subyacente como a priori categorial en la constitución del Nombre. El signo es el código de un horizonte simbólico, el núcleo radiado de referencias, la idea central expandida en conceptos, cuya radiación forma la “constelación” simbólica, por ejemplo, del lenguaje en Calderón de la Barca, según W. Benjamin. Calderón desarrolla en su teatro tal horizonte simbólico de la idea constelada en conceptos. Un lenguaje que requiere la función semiótica, pues su entendimiento depende de la correlación del fono, icono y concepto, cuyo centro de irradiación es la idea. Estos tres vértices constituyen la vertebración semiótica que permite analizar y comprender la función crítica del lenguaje en textos complejos como el dramático y en general el comunicativo. Calderón lleva a escena la fonosofía de Atanasio Kircher, las relaciones verberantes de la reflexión óptica aplicadas al sonido en el escenario, los instrumentos musicales y la metáfora fónica, por ejemplo en el simbolismo de la letra y fonema O al interpretar la función de la Virgen de igual nombre en Origen, pérdida y restauración de la Virgen del Sagrario, obra cuyo símbolo se refleja en la concepción calderoniana del lenguaje.40 Los grandes autores clásicos, como Fernando de Rojas en La Celestina, o Baltasar Gracián con El Criticón, implican su concepción lingüística en algunas de sus obras. La correlación de los demostrativos esto y este que parte en unidad conceptiva de sujeto y objeto de la realidad activa, dinámica, del presente progresivo, siendo, del ente, expone la implicación determinativa de las significaciones en el contexto: un plano genérico o indeterminado y otro concreto, determinante. Así procede hoy la relación type / token de la lógica neopositiva, pero sin esta implicación interna de la que sólo es figura de superficie. Gracián trasciende el signo hacia el plano simbólico con esta relación ya Ley en la semiótica de Peirce, pero es, a su vez, el fondo de la significación dialéctica y constitutiva del signo en consideración moderna con Hegel al estudiarlo desde esta correlación: Dieses / Dieser, un esto / este que remite a la mostración determinativa de la ausencia y, con ello, a una interpretación o Auslegung indefinida, el cálculo de Gran Descifrador, según propone el personaje Critilo en la obra citada de Gracián.41 La figura del interpretante atañe también a la constitución del signo. La relación signitiva, que es la del significado, convierte a una palabra en intérprete de otra. Es ley ya advertida por M. Bréal y presente en filólogos y lingüistas españoles como E. Benot y Amor Ruibal. Chomsky le da rango de componente funcional de la competence interlocutiva. Es el valor hermenéutico e intertextual del signo, el cual nos lleva a su función replicativa y recursiva, pero también a la insuficiencia del lenguaje al clausurarse en sus funciones y remitir siempre a una sobresignificación que

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excede el código lingüístico desde sus propios límites. Si el signo surge contextualizado -la raíz inserta en la situación de habla con razón mesológica o logos del medio, según Amor Ruibal-, su tensión significativa lo descontextualiza para alcanzar la intuición correlativa de una intención que no se cumple pragmáticamente. Es la apertura del signo en función poética. La retracción fenomenológica se afecta poéticamente de un resto implícito, pues la esencia intencional de la palabra recude a un transfondo antepredicativo, precategorial, como si el signo revertiera a su origen a medida que avanza la potencia expresiva. Homboldt ya advirtió tal fenómeno. Tocamos entonces los límites del lenguaje y el germen de una gramática poética fundada en la asimetría que el centro del signo establece respecto del alcance significativo del lenguaje codificado. La poesía requiere el centro fontanal del signo, in nuce, como dice Hamann y repite Ortega y Gasset con el concepto de “nombre poético” aplicado a la emergencia del lenguaje. Una cosa es repetir la palabra “león” desde que se creó y otra diferente el momento nuclear de esa creación, differencia ya percibida por Husserl. Pero al repetir la palabra asimilada según aprendizaje, se activa en el hablante el fondo constitutivo de significancia, la nominación de sentido o Sinngebung. No vivimos el origen de la palabra, pero sí su fundamento, y el lenguaje poético busca su sustancia, es decir, los restos que las formas funcionales desatienden, y ello aún desde y en su energía. Humboldt observa que el lenguaje pierde intensidad una vez expandido y que la activa cuando el hablante creador conecta con su energía latente. Y lo hace evolucionando, cambiando, según nos muestran la historia comparada de las lenguas y sus tipologías. Los límites y aporías de la constitución lingüística hallan su fundamento explicativo al recuperar el fondo metonímico del lenguaje. Y esto atañe a una gramática poética orientada al verbo del nombre, a su fondo dicente y al alza de mira, como propone Lévinas desde la desnuclearización del aquí y ahora fenomenológicos del habla. El lenguaje poético descubre el límite del código y aquello que lo posibilita aún como centro energético de más lenguaje. Por eso decía F. Schlegel que la poesía crea su propio ser (“sie schafft sich die ihrigen selbst”). Y por ello resulta imposible traducir la verdadera poesía. Su traducción descubre el límite del lenguaje. El fenómeno de intertextualidad y de correlación type / token en el proceso de significancia, entre el modelo y su tipo, el género y su figura, o viceversa, es un hecho que afecta también al espaciotiempo implícito en el intervalo de unidades, entre signo y signo, palabra y palabra. Y este afecto proviene del deseo implícito de entrada en la forma constitutiva, emergente. Como en la relación radical de las formas poieo, poíesis y poiema, la materia léxica desentraña el factor lect del intelecto y de la lectura: la acción se categoriza

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como género que determina su forma concreta, el poema. Las formas devienen hipónimos textuales en función de una hiperonimia constante que es el poema mismo. Esta relación continua del universal concreto, de la invariante siempre mutable y de la variación asimismo convergente es, a nuestro entender, la esencia nuclear del lenguaje y el verdadero fundamento existencial de la lingüística fenomenológica. Bajo tal aspecto, la propuesta actual del cognitivismo viene a ser una figura de este fenómeno mucho más complejo.42 La cognición remite a un fondo gnoseológico en el que la raíz griega γ ν nos lleva a la de γ ι´γ νoμαι y γ ιγ ν ωσ ´ κω, que es la misma del nombre, recuerda san Agustín. La lingüística fenomenológica y poética analiza la forma entrando en ella, en su formación, convirtiéndose en parte del proceso, pues la palabra impregna, es pregnante, reconoce Merleau-Ponty. Al analizar el lenguaje, no salimos de él como si fuera algo externo a nosotros. Y aunque las palabras adquiridas y sus reglas de conexión pudieran parecernos extrañas y ajenas, la potencia que nos permite apropiarlas ya tiene fondo lingüístico. El lenguaje nos trasciende en otros de quienes recibimos sus esquemas, los cuales activan en cada uno la facultad libre e intransferible que voltea las palabras en función lingüística. Tal es la ética del lenguaje: tactar y reconocer su fundamento como respuesta a otro con responsabilidad de existencia. El ente reconoce el peso de existencia común que abisma su dependencia singular e intransferible. No basta, pues, un análisis componencial que nos dé sólo la coherencia y cohesión morfo-semántico-sintáctica. Cuando Chomsky deslíe el núcleo de la oración o la lingüística funcional lo centra en cláusula, partimos ya de una preconcepción de clausura, de horizonte cerrado. La flecha que reescribe la oración en dos sintagmas mínimos, nominal y verbal (O → SN, SV), o su condición de hipótesis lógica (si O, entonces SN, SV), ya son signo de ámbito concluso, reversible, pura réplica. Representan un estado de cláusula, de marco sobre lo enmarcado, como fremes y templates. Prejuzgamos el límite analizándolo. Al entrar en la forma -elucidación, por ejemplo, de Husserl-, sentimos, por el contrario, la reverberación de la palabra, su carnalidad. Nos adentramos por el agujero de Alicia en el mundo cuántico del lenguaje, en una topología de elementos mínimos y, a la par, hipercategorizados, intercambiantes. Vivimos cada nombre en su potencia animada, creadora. El output excede al input. El principio de composicionalidad semántica de Frege revierte especulativamente sobre las unidades de la oración y el signo de reescritura descubre en la base léxica de la raíz de cada elemento una relación antepredicativa y preanalógica, un predicado que antecede a los términos como espaciotiempo suyo asimétrico.43 La igualdad aparente del habla es un fondo il (él) y una

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dimensión dialógica de los pronombres verbales en la que yo es no-tú y no-tú es él, etc., como exponen Guillaume y Humboldt, respectivamente, explicando la razón dialéctica del lenguaje.44 Al reescribir la oración verbal como aposición de sintagmas, el hablante o lector ideal de la lingüística releen una dimensión común alterativa. En realidad, el proceso se invierte. Analizando la oración descubrimos la potencia que aún traslapa al núcleo nominal de ambos sintagmas. Observamos que el verbo despliega sus morfemas desde una base léxica nuclearmente común, pero nominalmente retráctil en los pronombres, la potencia del Nombre. El principio composicional de la oración nos remite a esta potencia nominal. Por tanto, al situar el signo de reescritura, o al establecer la hipótesis contenida en O → SN, SV, en la S de los sintagmas ha de entenderse primero un núcleo nombre antepredicativo cuya diátasis despliega relaciones modales de sustancia en tensión Pro-nombre, ahora diastática, y distribuyendo sus morfemas en consonancia con el proceso así desplegado: la diátaxis, la sintaxis distributiva.45 Entonces, la cópula est repite la transición del término A hacia B sabiendo que A=A hacia B=B y que A::B forman una nueva unidad en la transición preposicional que la constituye. El intersticio de igualdad y aposición sintagmática figura un factor mental de cuya función procede el espaciotiempo del lenguaje. Los términos coinciden en una base común retractiva sin que lo retraído sea ya igual en uno y otro. En A ya existe una esfera con la función Yo-Tú / Él sobre la vertical Aquí / Ahora o Espacio-Tiempo de la palabra. Ortogénesis molecular del nombre y la frase. García Bacca interpreta del siguiente modo esta observación: .2 Il s’agit ici d’une relation, d’un renvoi entre deux plans, du rapport et des réciprocités >.3 On peut résumer avec les mots de Ricoeur: .4 Pour ce qui concerne le second aspect de la relation d’essence, il faut dire qu’il y a une pluralité de règles qu’on peut aussi appeler consciences-de.

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Il y a donc une pluralité de règles et cette pluralité constitue l’articulation du domaine des essences, c’est-à-dire des objets dont l’intuition est rendue possible par une règle chaque fois différente. On peut dire que c’est .5 L’essence, pourtant, ne peut être saisie qu’à partir de la conscience. .6 Ce que Husserl se propose, c’est précisémente l’exploitation de ce champ de travail,7 qui est le champ de la conscience, un grand organisme, dont on doit relever les nerfs, les cellules, les organes etc. Pourtant, parmi les modalités différentes d’être conscience-de, il y en a une qui a chez Husserl la fonction de modèle, et le privilège d’être la structure de référence de toute relation. Husserl l’affirme à claires lettres: .8 Dès ce moment, Husserl procède d’una part à l’analyse des caractères propres de la perception, d’autre part il s’engage à décrire les autres modalités de la conscience-de en tant que modifications de la conscience fondamentale. Cette priorité de la conscience perceptive ne se borne pas à lui donner le caractère de modèle; elle exprime le lien fondamental de la coscience et du sens. Husserl en fait, dans un certain sens, le soubassement logique et ontologique de toute “vie”. .9 Bref: nous ne pouvons ne pas percevoir. Ce lien primordial qui s’appelle conscience-de, ou bien intentionnalité, ne cesse d’exprimer une ontologie en mouvement. La règle qui définit l’essence de la perception consiste dans l’enchaînement temporel de ces moments que Husserl appelle “esquisses” (Abschattungen). C’est ici qu’il nous fait comprendre la relation entre chose, espace, vécu. .10 L’essence de la perception, qui a comme corrélatif l’être spatial, est donc exprimée par la règle qui préside à la donation par “esquisses” – ce qui fait la différence d’avec le vécu.11 La chose spatiale se montre à travers et dans la concordance des esquisses. Elle >.12 À partir de la détermination du concept fondamental de l’essence, nous rencontrons pour la première fois l’imagination, dans la fonction d’exemple, qui donne une intuition fictive de la chose intentionnée. .13 Comme le souligne P. Ricoeur: .14 Il y a, selon Husserl, une fonction de l’imagination d’extraordinaire importance pour les sciences éidétiques, où , et c’est surtout dans le champ de la géométrie que le phénoménologue expérimente la valeur de la fonction imageante. .15 Le géomètre, en effet, ne dispose pas de modèles convenant au nombre infini des espèces de corps: de même le pénoménologue élargit son champ d’opération sur les essences lorsqu’il opère sur le plan de l’imagination. C’est pourquoi le géomètre-philosophe Husserl peut conclure: .16 Le thème de l’imagination s’étend tout le long de l’activité philosophique de Husserl et accompagne toutes les phases du développement phénoménologique – dès la période de Halle jusqu’au temps de Fribourg.17

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Il s’agit de la distinction fondamentale entre “gemeint” (entendu) et “erscheint” (vu, montré) – c’est-à-dire de la différence entre concept et image. Le projet husserlien d’une “Critique de la raison” renouvelée dans la forme d’une “Phénoménologie de la raison” devrait se développer à travers l’élaboration descriptive des différentes “regions”: perception, phantasie, temps, chose.18 Dans un texte de l’automne 1909, Husserl annonce un changement de sa pensée à l’égard des idées présentées dans les Recherches Logiques sur le thème de l’imagination. .24 On ne se trompe certes pas en soulignant la priorité de la percetion sur l’imagination chez Husserl. C’est la racine aristotelicienne qui revit dans l’attitude husserlienne. La perception avec son contenu empirique reste la source donatrice originaire. Pourtant, il y a un double fond de cette expérience – si basilaire qu’elle est appelée donatrice originaire. En tant qu’elle

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est fondamentalement vision d’essence elle dépasse l’horizon de la sensibilité naturelle, elle est en vue de l’universel-singulier. Mais il y a encore une phénoménologie qui accorde à l’imagination un rôle bien différent. Il s’agit de la recherche de Gaston Bachelard, et de son principe de l’imagination créatrice. Il ne s’agit pas, bien sur, d’abandonner la relation avec la chose, mais d’interpréter le soubassement originel du rapport. Chez Bachelard, l’imagination n’est pas redevable de la perception pour l’accès à un contenu; elle n’est pas la “modification” neutralisante du perçu. Elle est, au contraire, une activité qui précède toute impression sensible, elle travaille en deçà de la “chose”. Elle gîte dans une zone où il n’y a encore monde et chose, et régit l’univers préalable d’un pré-monde où l’émotion travaille une matière propre. 25 dit Bachelard, qui s’apprête >. Puisque >.26 On s’éloigne ici de la tradition aristotélicienne, selon laquelle l’objet-chose précède et dirige ou guide l’acte de perception, qu’il remplit avec ses qualités. Ce qui dirige le rêve – c’est-à-dire l’activité subjective qui précede la perception – est l’élément. Ce terme nous reconduit à une tradition très ancienne, à la pensée des présocrates. Chez eux, l’élément n’est pas matériel dans le sens que le terme “matière” a reçu avec Platon et Aristote – c’est-à-dire l’autre de la pensée, de la signification, de l’idée. L’eau, l’air, le feu, la terre: tout ça n’est pas le contraire de la signification: cet “élément” est quelque chose .27 Donc, l’image chez Bachelard n’est pas la “modification” de ce qui a été donné par la perception. .28 Et encore: .29 La vie de l’image, lorsqu’il ne s’agit pas de la “modification” d’un objectivité “réelle”, donnée dans la perception, demande l’éclairage de la couche d’expérience où elle naît et s’épanouit. Pour Bachelard, le lieu de naissance de l’imagination créatrice se présente comme un territoire qui se distingue soit du rêve – qui est l’objet de la psychanalyse – soit de la coscience éveillée, qui détermine au moyen des concepts. .30 La rêverie assume, chez Bachelard, une signification anthropologique précise. À propos du feu et de la rêverie devant le feu, il s’attache à montrer l’inanité de la conception utilitariste de l’esprit – laquelle souligne >.31 La rêverie recouvre un territoire de grande envergure. Entre l’inconscient freudien et la perception réaliste elle occupe un territoire unitaire – c’est-à-dire l’ambiance qui ne connaît pas encore la distinction des couches de l’esprit. La rêverie est le mot qui ouvre un terrein d’expérience qui forge l’esprit et ses puissances à travers son rapport inouî avec l’élément. Le retour des mots des présocrates est ici essentiel: puisque dans l’histoire de la langue grecque désigne une substance dont la texture n’a encore subit les distinctions platoniciennes, ni la catégorisation aristotélicienne. La texture de l’élément est en deçà de l’empirique et de l’intellectuel. De même, la rêverie ne suit pas les lois de l’expérience, telle qu’elle est donnée par l’union d’une matière inerte et une catégorie intellectuelle. Pour accéder à cette (pré)-expérience, il y a deux voies: le mythe et les poèmes. Ce sont eux, en effet, qui permettent d’atteindre l’expérience originaire, cet > qui ne détache pas le mot de la chose>>.32 La pensée conceptuelle sépare la chair de la chose de sa signification – puisque c’est l’universel qu’elle a en vue. C’est porquoi la phénoménologie de Bachelard en appelle à un cogito poétique. Tandis que chez Kant la signification se doit entièrement aux formes vides de la raison pure, chez Husserl l’intentionnalité est ouverture et rencontre du sens. Chez Bachelard, l’expérience mythique et poétique ouvre un milieu d’intimité et cohérence, une vie de complicité entre le rêveur de rêverie et son monde. Bachelard apporte un exemple très convainçant. Grâce au progrès de la psycho-pharmacologie les cliniciens disposent aujourd’hui d’une grande variété de drogues psychotropes permettant de faire varier en des sens différents l’attitude psychique des malades. De même, .33 Cela signifie que le terme “objet” – tel que la science et la philosophie moderne l’ont défini – ne remplit pas le cercle de notre expérience. Et le terme même d’expérience’, soumis au discours de la science expérimentale, laisse hors de soi la richesse de l’expérience donatrice originaire – qui est la rêverie. C’est ainsi que nous la montre Bachelard: >.34 Ainsi Bachelard énonce cette naissance et richesse de l’objet poétique, soulignant sa plénitude chez Rilke. L’orange, la rose des Sonnets à Orphée – cet inépuisable objet (der unerschöpfliche Gegenstand)35 : ce sont .36 L’image dépasse toujours l’objet, tout rêvé s’épanouit, se dilate en monde. .37 Le philosophe développe maintenant une réflexion sur l’imagination – dans le sens de rêverie – qui donne un nouveau sens à la phénoménologie, ou trace un nouveau parcours phénoménologique. >.38 Il s’agit, en effet, d’une – ou de l’expérience-limite, qui modifie le rapport de la conscience avec elle-même: .39 Ce dernier développement semble donner à l’imagination en tant que rêverie une amplitude extraordinaire: si l’image se fait Monde, la conscience imageante revient à elle-même à travers l’Immense et confirme son lien non objectivant, congénital au Monde. Cela fait encore une différence d’avec la conception de Husserl. Pour le père de la phénoménologie, le Monde apparaît au niveau de la perception. Celle-ci déploye son essence propre en tant que structure d’horizon. Le Monde est l’horizon des horizons, et la modalité de sa présence est tout à fait singulière: il est toujours perçu-avec, et en même temps soit comme limite que comme ouverture. Il est le lointain des lointains, qui pourtant assure la solidité et l’épaisseur de chaque perception. Chez Bachelard, la priorité de la rêverie sur la perception fait d’un morceau de monde – l’orange, la rose – un monde entier. Le petit se fait immense, l’immense habite le petit. En effet, le Monde en tant que tel ne peut être perçu, mais seulement rêvé. Le monde est un vécu poétique – ce qui confirme la priorité de la rêverie sur la perception. Bachelard explique: >.40 La rêverie, que Bachelard définit “fonction de l’irréel”,41 est l’ouverture qui permet à la “réalité” de garder sa profondeur, son épaisseur, et donne à l’expérience la multiplicité de ses dimensions. Si nous voulons comprendre jusqu’au fond la valeur décisive de la question de l’imagination pour la phénoménologie, nous ne pouvons nous passer d’examiner la réflexion sartrienne sur cet argument. Sartre s’est passionné pour cet argument, qu’il a conçu comme décisif pour la théorie de la conscience. Dans son livre de 1936 L’imagination42 Sartre a donné une esquisse historique du problème qui débouche dans le refus de la conception associationiste et psychologiste de l’image – pour conclure avec la théorie husserlienne de l’intentionnalité de la conscience. Cette idée est censée ouvrir une nouvelle voie à la question de l’image et de l’imagination.43 Sartre souligne le lien étroit entre la méthode phénoménologique et la question de l’imagination. En tant qu’elle cherche à saisir les essences, la phénoménologie . Or, cet universel n’est pas entrevu en tant que concept abstrait, mais bien dans la singularité expérientielle des exemples. >.44 Ce que Sartre nous dit, c’est qu’il s’agit ici d’un rapport étroit, intrinsèque, entre expérience et essence: >.45 Sartre souligne que la notion d’intentionnalité a finalement balayé de la conscience la confusion entre “contenu” et “objet” – et établi la trascendance de l’objet avec son idéalité.46 Dès lors la conscience perd ce caractère ambigu de contenant d’éléments matériels qui prétendent à la valeur d’objet et elle acquiert le caractère de trascendence. Pour la compréhension de la nature de l’image, selon Sartre ce changement est décisif: .47 Bref, l’imagination est une des modalité de la conscience d’accéder au monde, ou de ce que Sartre appelle trascendence. La trascendence définit la conscience en tant qu’elle est toujours près de l’objet; elle n’est pas fermé sur elle-même.

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Après avoir ouvert à la conscience le nouveau champ de la phénoménologie, Sartre développe dans son livre sur l’Imaginaire48 ce qu’il conçoit comme un monde: le monde imaginaire. Il faut commencer par l’essence phénoménologique de l’image. .49 Sartre va donc dessiner un système de lois, qui exprime les différentes modalités selon lesquelles la conscience se donne un objet. Ce qui est décisif pour ce programme, c’est la différence entre la perception et l’imagination. Il faudra décrire les deux expériences, et en remarquer la différence – c’est-à-dire, en termes éminemment phénoménologiques, en relever les lois, autrement dit les modes de donation. Tout ce joue à partir de ce que Sartre appelle l’acte positionnel. Il faut noter que Sartre suit, pour ce qui concerne la perception, l’analyse husserlienne, tandis que, pour ce qui concerne l’expérience imaginative Husserl n’a donné que des reinsegnements très restreints – bien que décisifs.50 Surtout, le caractère intentionnel de la conscience d’image, le fait .51 Dès lors, il s’agit de décrire la façon selon laquelle l’objet-image se donne à la conscience. Elle est comprise par Sartre d’une manière négative par rapport à la perception. .52 C’est-à-dire que l’objet me montre des silhouettes dans le temps, que j’apprends ses côtés successivement. Il montre des différents profils selon l’heure et la lumière, etc. .53 Celà signifie que l’objet de la perception a une richesse en principe infinie. L’image, au contraire, chez Sartre est définie par une limite dans sa chair même. Ce qu’elle donne, est donné une fois pour toutes, d’un seul coup. On ne pourrait observer une image – en elle un savoir est donné tout entier dans son surgissement: .54 Mais il y a plus. Chez Sartre, l’image ne montre pas une relation vivante entre un certain nombre de déterminations. .55 En même temps, il renferme en lui tout le savoir que la perception donne peu à peu et par “profils” (Abschattungen). Mais encore: il est compris en négatif à partir de la perception: .56

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Ce qui nous frappe, enfin, dans l’essai de Sartre, c’est que la “négativité” de l’image ne se limite pas à son aspect existentiel. Elle se prolonge dans une perspective morale. .57 Or la dimension magique est la dimension de l’émotion et .58 Le monde qui se déploye dans la dimension de la réalité est un monde qui requiert constamment notre action: Ainsi nous vivons dans ce que Sartre appelle espace “hodologique”- c’est-àdire la disposition des moyens au but: .59 Au contraire, la conduite magique vise à changer la situation d’un coup. Avec l’évanouissement, par exemple, je me délivre d’une situation que je sent ne pouvoir dominer.60 Or l’imagination est une conduite d’émotion .61 Jusqu’ici, la description que l’attitude phénoménologique requiert. Mais Sartre va bien au delà. Il se fait juge de la conduite magique-imaginaire, il passe sur le plan de l’éthique: .62 Il s’ agit du refus de la difficulté du réel. L’idée d’entendre la phénoménologie comme lecture des conduites conduit Sartre à oublier la richesse des puissances de l’esprit et à reduire la pluralité et la créativité des attitudes de vie à une seule et même dimension, celle de la “réalité” et de l’action réaliste. Husserl et Bachelard, au contraire, ont découvert la valeur autonome de l’imagination comme une puissance créatrice de l’esprit humain. University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy NOTES 1 E. Husserl, Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie, I, tr. par P. Ricoeur, Gallimard, Paris 1950, p. 21. (Dorénavant: Idées). 2 Ivi, p. 23. 3 Ibidem.

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P. Ricoeur, Introduction du traducteur, en Idées, cit., pp. XI–XXXIX, cit. p. XXXIII. E. Husserl, Idées, cit., p. 27. 6 Ibid., p. 110. 7 Pour ce concept cf. E. Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes, tr. fr. pr Gabrielle Peiffer et E. Levinas, Paris, Vrin 1953, p. 26. 8 E. Husserl, Idées, cit., p. 126. 9 Ibid., p. 127. 10 Ibid., p. 134. 11 Cfr. ibid., p. 137: . 12 Ibid., p. 138. 13 Ibid., p. 24. 14 P. Ricoeur, op. cit., note 2 p. 24. 15 E. Husserl, op. cit., p. 225. 16 Ibid., p. 227. 17 Cfr. E. Marbach, Einleitung des Herausgebers, dans E. Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, Martinius Nijhoff, The Hague-Boston-London 1980, pp. XXV–LXXXII, cit. p. XXV. 18 Cfr. E. Husserl, Personliche Aufzeichnungen, éd. par W. Biemel, , 16 (1956), pp. 294–300, cit. p. 297. 19 E. Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, cit., p. 276. 20 Ibid., p. 280. 21 Ibid., pp. 280–281. 22 Ibid., p. 281. 23 Cfr. ibid., pp. 281–282. 24 Ibid., p. 282. 25 G. Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves. Essai sur l’imagination de la matière, José Corti, Paris 1942, p. 6. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., p. 7. 28 Ibid., p. 23. 29 Ibid., p. 24. 30 Ibid., p. 32. 31 Ibid., p. 33. 32 Ibid., p. 83. 33 G. Bachelard, La poétique de la rêverie, PUF, Paris 1968, p. 130. Sur le rapport entre l’épistemologie et les poétiques chez Bachelard: Agata Piromallo Gambardella, G. Bachelard e la fenomenologia. Le tre poetiche, dans Bianca Maria d’Ippolito, E. Mazzarella, Agata Piromallo Gambardella, (ed.) Sogno e Mondo ai confini della ragione. Studi fenomenologici, ESI, Naples 1995, pp. 169–203, p. 169. 34 Ibid., p. 132. 35 R. M. Rilke, Sonnets à Orphée, I, n◦ XV et II, VI, tr. par Angelloz, Aubier, Paris 1943. 36 G. Bachelard, o. c., p. 135. 37 G. Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace, cit., p. 168. 38 Ibid., pp. 168–169. 39 Ibid., p. 169. 40 G. Bachelard, La poétique de la rêverie, PUF, Paris 1968, Introduction, p. 12. 41 Ibid. 42 J. P. Sartre, L’imagination, PUF, Paris 1963 (1ère éd. 1936). 43 Ibid., Chap. IV, pp. 139–159. 5

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Ibid., pp. 140–141. Ibid., p. 141. 46 Cfr. ibid., p. 145. 47 Ibid., p. 147. 48 J.-P. Sartre, L’Imaginaire. Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination, Gallimard, Paris 1948 (1◦ éd. 1940). 49 Ibid., p. 16. 50 Il faut noter que Sartre ne connaîit pas les maniscripts husserliens. 51 J.- P. Sartre, op. cit., p. 17. 52 Ibid., p. 18. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., p. 21. 55 Ibid., p. 28. De pauvreté essentielle Sartre parle aussi à p. 171. 56 Ibid., p. 163. 57 Ibid., p. 161. 58 J.-Sartre, Esquisse d’une rthéorie des émotions, Hermann, Paris 1960, p. 39. 59 Ibid., p. 42. 60 Cf. ibid., p. 45. 61 J.-P. Sartre, L’Imaginaire. Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination, cit., p. 161. 62 Ibid., p. 162. 45

S E C T I O N IV

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M E R L E AU - P O N T Y A N D T H E E T E R N A L R E T U R N TO THE LIFE-WORLD: BEYOND EXISTENTIALISM AND PHENOMENOLOGY

ABSTRACT

There is something strange in the life and work of Heidegger. He was sad when he saw that Sein und Zeit is interpreted as a philosophical anthropology. He did’nt want at all to be respected as an existentialist. About Sartre, he also said that if the question mark of the author of L’Etre et le Néant is man, in his philosophy it’s essentially the question of Being. Nevertheless, and however he insists to fix the meaning of his work, he left a trace who is eminently existentialist. Henri Gouhier, who was at that time the oldest French philosopher, said with enthusiasm and irony that the most interesting perspective in Heidegger is precisely the anthropological one. Finally it is the analytic of Dasein that had the most influence. It is the being-in-theworld of man, described by Heidegger, that aroused great interest. We can say then that the description of human existence is who had give us the most researches, including on psychology and psychiatry like the works of Medar Boss and Ludwig Binswanger. Heidegger let us with a paradoxal heritage, but promising. And we are now precisely living in that paradox. In reality, it is only at the coming of the work of Merleau-Ponty that we have surmount this major difficulty. With a radical return, beyond Heidegger, to phenomenology, and an eternal return to the life-world, he give us a possible solution and a real project, to get out from the metaphysics of subjectivity, and to be not going again between mind and body, subject an object, man and world. “We burst out laughing, said Nietzsche, when we see man and world separated by the sublime pretentiousness of a little word and ”. Merleau-Ponty was inspired by returning to the body and the life of things . . . There is maybe here an inspiring of future and the future of inspiring. He new how to talk about Cezanne and painting, Proust and literature, and, strangely, also about cinema. We have to learn again how to see the world, how to feel the world, and how to return to the life-world, after a long exile, there we have lost how to speak in the ded-world. We have to return to a world before knowledge, who’s older and younger than any knowledge, that we are not able to talk about, what we are, in the same time, always talking about. We are discounted of life, of our lives, 257 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 257–271. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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of what makes us being here. Returning to this world it means put us in the test of the world, and go through that crossing that let us have something like a reeducation of what we become now. We can call it existentialism, we can call it phenomenology, but here is the destiny of the philosophical heritage of the twentieth century. En 1943, parait L’Etre et Néant: c’est l’acte de naissance de la premiere grande rencontre entre l’existentialisme et la phénoménologie.1 L’auteur, Jean-Paul Sartre, qui choisit comme sous-titre “Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique”, ne sait pas encore qu’il allait constituer un croisement aussi important entre deux courants philosophiques; il ne sait pas d’ailleurs” non plus qu’il sera l’initiateur de l’existantialisme. Il parlait beaucoup, en effet, d’“existence”, mais il y n’avait pas encore le “isme” de de l’existentialisme. C’est bien plutot les parisiens, de saint-germain, du quartier latin, qui vont nommer et parler de cet existentialisme, qui allait marquer le XX siècle. Jusqu’à sa mort en 1980, son oeuvre et sa personnalité vont éclipser les plus grands philosophes: Husserl, Bergson, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty. . .Sa disparition suscite une grande émotion et montre qu’il est l’un des hommes les plus connus au monde. L’énènement est à peine croyable2 est laisse comme un vide, tant sa présence fut grande. Cependant, à ce moment-là, il y a aussi des bruits qui “courent”, comme des rumeurs philosophiques.3 Il y a, dit-on, l’existentialime athée: Sartre et Heidegger; puis l’existentialisme chrétien: Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers; et entre les deux le personnalisme d’Emmanuel Mounier. Quant aux origines de ce courant il proviendrait du “philosophe de l’existence”- tout le contraire de Hegel, “philosophe de l’Histoire”- du “mystique” danois Soren Kierkegaard.4 On peut donc dire aussi que l’auteur de L’Etre et le Néant a été source de grands malentendus. En effet, tous les grands philosophes que nous avons cités se sont retrouvés marqués par le sceau: “existentialisme”. Ce qui n’a pas été une bonne chose pour la compréhensions du sens de leurs oeuvres. Nous avons pu observer, par exemple, que Sein und Zeit n’a été officiellement et intégrallement traduit en France qu’en 1986, soit six ans après la mort de Sartre, dix ans après la mort de Heidegger, et près de soixante ans après sa première parution, en 1927, dans le Jahrbuch fur Phanomenologie und phanomenologische Forschung 5 . Et cela n’est pas du au hasard. C’était un peu comme s’il y avait Jean-Paul Sartre, mais l’“avant” et l’“après” n’étaient pasà l’ordre du jour, tant que Sarte était encore là Malgré une certaine présence de Husserl, le fondateur de la phénoménologie, et l’interet grandissant pour Heidegger, l’existentialisme avait brouillé toutes les pistes. Qui était Karl Jaspers? la réponse était: un philosophe chrétien . . .En revanche il a fallu attendre longtemps pour qu’on lise véritablement son oeuvre monumentale Psychopatologie générale.

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Malgré tout cela, le plus grand probleme auquel Sartre était confronté venait, en réalité, de lui-meme et de son grand livre L’Etre et le Néant. Aprés avoir montré tout l’interet de la phénoménologie et de l’analyse exsitentielle, il laisse une petite phrase à la fin d’un immense ouvrage qui allait susciter un immense désarroi:“ l’homme est une passion inutile”: Toute réalité humaine est une passion, en ce qu”elle projette de se perdre pour fonder l’etre (. . .) Ainsi la passion de l’homme est-elle à l’inverse de celle du Christ, car l’homme se perd pour que Dieu naisse. Mais l’idée de Dieu est contraditoire et nous nous perdons en vain; l’homme est une passion inutile.6 Cette passion dont parle Sartre, c’est d’abord, il faut bien le dire, sa passion à lui. Et elle ne le quittera jamais. Et que l’idée de Dieu soit contradictoire, et bien tant pis pour elle. Cela ne changera rien, comme nous allons le voir. Sartre allait de toute façon réagir, parce que de là partira le plus grand malentendu qu’il ne pouvait plus laisser courir. Est-ce un lapsus révelateur ou bien une erreur, une erreur d’interprétation? Comment peut-on parler ainsi de l’homme? Sartre n’aime-t-il pas l’homme? L’auteur de L’Etre et du Néant est accusé d’avoir quelque chose contre l’homme: il est maitenant accusé d’ anti-humanisme. Alors il faudra bien répondre. Ce sera la tache qu’il se donnera dans L’Existentialisme est un humanisme.7 Pour répondre à tout cela il écrit comme un manifeste, pour répondre philosophiquement à cette accusation. Mais comme le dit Arllet Elkaim-Sartre, Sartre ne devint pas moins “dans l’esprit de bien de gens, l’antihumanisme par excellence: il démoralisait les fraçais au moment ou la France, en ruines, avaient le plus besoin d’espoir”. Aussi l’existentialisme a-t-il-été appelé “une maladie de l’esprit”.8 Dans L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, Sartre ne manque pas néanmois d’arguments pour dénoncer cette falsification du sens de son oeuvre. Ainsi pour commencer, il adopte volontiers et assume le “isme” de l’“existentialisme” qu’on lui a un peu imposé, ainsi que l’“humanisme”. Beaucoup pourrons s’étonner de ce qu’on parle ici d’humanisme(. . .). Nous entendons par existentialisme une doctrine qui rend la vie humaine possible (. . .) L’existentialisme n’est pas autre chose q’un effort pour tirer toutes les conséquences d’une position athée cohérente. Il ne cherche pas du tout à plonger l’homme dans le désépoir. Mais si l’on appelle, comme les chrétiens, toute attitude d’incroyance, il part du désépoir originel. L’existentialisme n’est pas tellement un athéisme au sens ou il s”épuiserait à démontrer que Dieu n’existe pas. Il déclare plutot: meme si Dieu existait, ça ne changerait rien; voilà notre point de vue. Non pas que nous croyions que Dieu existe, mais nous pensons que le probleme n’est pas celui de son existence; il faut que l’homme se retrouve lui-meme et se persuade que rien ne peut le sauver lui-meme, fut-ce une preuve valable de l’existence de Dieu. En ce sens l’existentialisme est un optimisme, une doctrine de l’action.9

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Le plus important pour Sartre était d’insister, pour dire que l’homme est essentiellement ce pourquoi il pense et écrit, que la libération de l’homme est son principal souci. Et meme plus que çà: sa pensée s’inscrit non seulement dans l’écriture, mais aussi dans l’action et l’engagement. Ce qu’il compte faire c’est de tenter de responsabiliser l’homme et lui montrer les chemins de la liberté. Pour Sartre, l’homme est responsable de lui-meme et des autres; et c’est à lui de tracer librement son destin. De là viendra cette “inutilité” incroyable, à la véracité encore plus incroyable, de l’existence de Dieu ou de son inexistence. C’est comme si Sartre nous disait: Vous croyez en Dieu, tant mieux pour vous; mais mon probleme à moi n’est pas pour autant résolu, il est ailleurs. Que Dieu existe ou n’existe pas cela ne changera rien. Mon problème à moi transcende meme Dieu, en personne. La question de Dieu est devenue subalterne. Mon problème à moi est le sens de l’existence. . . Ce fut, croyons-nous, l’un des plus grands moments philosophiques du XX siècle: la véracité poussée à l’extreme, et l’exigence philosophique à son paroxysme. Il aura au moins laissé un message de vérité, chose rare, venant, encore plus rare, d’un homme de vérité. Mais lui, Sartre, se retrouvera étrangement piègé comme par sa propre destinée. En toute ravageuse fidélité à l’appel qu’il lance à l’homme, il passe progressivement de la pensée exigeante au devoir de l’action, de l’action immédiate. La tentation deviendra tentative concrète de faire quelque chose pour défendre l’humanité de l’homme partout ou il la trouvera offensée, méprisée. Devoir faire quelque chose revient alors à devoir prendre position face à toutes le questions sociales, et donc politiques de son temps. Et il sera emporté, à vrai dire, par les tempetes de son temps, qui vont le pousser, hélas, à adopter des tons extremes, fait d’indignations et de consternation excessives dont la plus fameuse, la plus incroyable a été: “Tous les anticommunistes sont des chiens”. Son refus catégorique du Prix Nobel qui lui a été décerné marquera une grande étape symbolique de son engagement politique “existentialiste” et “humaniste”. Et il ne s’agit pas seulement de refuser, mais d’etre vraiment la mauvaise conscience de son temps. Il se sent, s’éprouve comme solidaire de toutes les souffrances de la Terre sans rien pouvoir faire . . . Comment etre alors humaniste? C’est peut-etre, justement, en évoquant le question de l’humanisme qu’on pourrait aborder le mieux le message de Heidegger. Dans une lettre qu’il adresse à son ami Jean Beaufret10 , qui lui demandait “comment redonner un sens au mot humanisme”, Heidegger nous offre une synthèse d’un grand intéret, et qui pourrait etre une des meilleurs approches de son oeuvre. Heidegger a sans doute été beaucoup plus discret que Sartre. Mais son influence a été plus grande. C’est bien avant Sartre11 que Heidegger suit un chemin de pensée plus ample, et qui durera plus d’un demi-siècle. Lorsque Sein und Zeit

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est publié, en 1927, il surprend beaucoup de monde, y compris son maitre, Husserl, avec un grand texte d’une densité rare. Il se retrouve assez vite au devant de la scène intellectuelle européenne. Les lecteurs allemands et les germanistes intéressés, sont marqués par quelque chose qui leur semble etre un événement philosophique. Cet ouvrage parfois obscur et étrange devient très intrigant pour beaucoup d’esprits. Mais d’une façon un peu surprenante et meme un peu “technique”, Heidegger commence son ouvrage par une sorte de rappel, qui peut etre percu un peu comme un rappel à l’ordre. Heidegger demande au lecteur de reposer la question de l’etre, qui tenait en haleine Platon et Aristote, mais qui aujourd’hui n’est plus posée. Le lecteur “ordinaire” aussi “philosophe” soit-il peut ne pas comprendre ni le “pourquoi” ni le “comment” de la démarche de l’auteur. Rappelons néanmlons les points les plus importants. Il s’agit en tout cas, tout d’abord, du sens du mot Sein “Etre” d’un coté, et de l’autre du Dasein, de l’etre-là ou l’etre-le-là, “da” signifiant “là”, le tout Dasein pour souligner le lien originel entre l’homme et l’Etre. Il s’agit donc d’abord de la relation entre l’Etre et l’etre de l’homme. Il s’agit en vérit de préparer le Dasein pour etre en mesure de “répondre” à la question et à l’appel du Sein, ou bien, pour commencer, préparer le Dasein pour qu’il puisse entendre et comprendre la question du Sein. C’est comme si c’était un travail “pédagogique” préparatoire pour poser ensuite la question de l’Etre. Le Dasein devra etre repensé à partir de son lien au Sein. Le traité de Heidegger est là comme une oeuvre sur le Dasein. Mais pour son auteur il s’agit beaucoup plus du Sein que du Dasein. Ce qui est un peu paradoxal. Le traité a été lu néanmoins comme une remarquable anthropollogie philosophique. Heidegger était bien sur très déçu: finalement, les lecteurs n’ont prété attention qu’au moyen et non à la fin. On cultive l’intéret pour le Dasein, et on oublie le Sein. La célébrité de Sartre et de son existentialisme n’allait pas arranger les choses. Heidegger se retouve, en plus, comme nous l’avons déjà dit,dans le cadre existentialiste. De là l’importance de sa fameuse Ueber den Humanismus, Lettre sur l’humanisme12 . C’est donc à l’occasion de questions essentielles que Heidegger va se prononcer, répondre mintieusement pour dissiper toutes les confusions, et dire surtout ce qu’il pense de l’humanisme. Heidegger prendra ses distances avec tout ce qui est anthropologie, psychologie, existentialisme, humanisme. Vous demandez: Comment redonner un sens au mot “humanisme”? Cette question dénote l’intention de maintenir le mot lui-meme. Je me demande si c’est nécessaire.13 Cette réaction première de Heidegger montre la mesure de la tache qu’il se donne, et savolonté de renverser les choses de fond en comble. S’il est vraiment préférable de changer le nom de la chose, alors tout est à revoir sans ambages. L’auteur de la Lettre continuera avec le meme ton, la meme tonalité,

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pour faire savoir à son ami, la gravité qui entoure ce simple mot, cette appellation qui lui donne vraiment envie de la changer. Eloignons-nous un peu de l’humanisme, et voyons ce qui y a derrière ou avant. Car d’ou provient ce nom? Il es assez ancien. On appelle çà depuis longtemps la Renaissance européenne. Elle a été une certaine forme de retour à l’homme, à sa dignité, parfois, trop lomtemps bafouée, au profit de “dieux” de tout genres. On est revevu, après une longue nuit, à ce dont l’homme a besoin pou lui-meme. Il s’agissait de revenir à l’homme, à son existence, à sa vie, pour la rendre plus digne d’etre vécue. Et dire que, malgres les horreurs des grandes guerres modernes, il s’agissait à l’origine de le rendre plus heureux. La Renaissance européenne a été appelée pour cela “humanisme”, et elle ne cesse de nous interpeler nous modernes, qui sommes aujourdhui si bizzares, ni vraiment modernes ni renaissants, mais comme agonisants sans fin de notre propre destin. Mais qu’est-ce que diable pourrail-il y avoir de si inquiétant dans cet “humanisme” d’ou provient en quelque sorte toute notre modernité? Faut-il retourner à des temps anciens, ceux du Moyen-àge peut-etre, ou aux hommes de l’antiquité, ou alors aux plus anciens hommes de la préhistoire? Voilà qui est bien éitrange, et Heidegger devrait nous expliquer pourquoicette gene si manifeste à propos de ce que l’homme a fait de mieux pour l’homme, et qui à partir de là voulait rendre grace à l’humanité meme. Heidegger pour autant ne manquera pas d’arguments, et sa réponse, ses réponses seront là avec une grande vigeur. Heidegger, nous le savons, nous le devinons, n’est pas contre l’homme. On pourrait d’abord remarquer qu’il faudrait peut-etre se dire de quel type d’homme nous voulons. Car l’homme a été barbare depuis la nuit des temps, et n’a pas cessé de l’etre encore aujourd’hui. Et il faut bien le dire son histoire n’est pas très fière, et on ne peut se faire d’illusions à propos de sa “nature”. Les grands hommes ont certes existé, et il y en à encore aujourd’hui, mais à titre de hasard heureux, pas vraiment parce que voulu. A vrai dire, le problème de Heidegger, touve ici son lieu de privililège. Car, et il faut bien l’avouer, on ne peut pas dire vraiment que l’humanisme a été le propre de l’homme. Ainsi il faudrait bien préciser de quel homme il s’agit. L’humanisme ne suffit pas pour nous eclairer sur la la “nature” de l’homme. Mais il y a comme une idee qui nous vient à l’esprit, une petite phrase du XIX siècle qui a préparé en quelque sorte le xx siècle et qui nous a été transmise sous le nom de Nietzsche: Et nous le demandons encore une fois: aujourd’hui - la grandeur est-elle encore possible?14 Mais aussi: L’homme-mixture qui est l’Européen d’aujourd’hui, est un assez vilain plébéien somme toute.15

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Et Nietzsche ne cessera de parler de cette “époque populacière”, du “troupeau”, de la “la parfaite bete de troupeau ”16 de la petitesse de l’homme d’aujourd’hui. . . Y aurait-il là quelque chose qui est dit et qui trouve son écho dans la voix de Heidegger? Nous le croyons Finalement, quel humanisme voulons-nous ? Quel type d’homme voulons-nous pour nous-meme, pour nos enfants, pour notre humanité ? Est-il si clair maintenant quel genre d’homme nous voulons ? Hélas, c’est bien plutot le contraire. Avec le seul mot “humanisme”, finalement, on ne peux pas faire grand chose. . . S’occuper de l’homme. . . prendre soin de lui. . . mais pour faire quoi? Comment éduquer l’enfant de l’homme ? Quel type homme voulons-nous batir et édifier. . . pour qu’il soit grand? On peut déjà voir et revoir que tout cela n’est pas clair et ne va pas de soi. Et pourtant ce n’est pas grace à l’analytique du Dasein que nous avons appris cela. Ce fut une sorte de dialogue avec des questions, quelques débauches de réponses qui restent comme en attente. Heidegger, en tout cas, a vraiment des questions et meme de franches réponses: Reste à savoir si cette pensée peut encore se caractériser comme humanisme à supposer que de telles étiquettes puissent avoir un tel contenu. Assurement pas dans la mesure ou l’humanisme pense d’un point de vue métaphysique. Assurement pas si cet humanisme est un existentialisme et fait sien cette proposition de Sartre: Précisément nous sommes sur un plan ou il y a seulement les hommes. Si l’on pense à partir de Sein und Zeit, il faudrait plutot dire: Precisément nous sommes sur un plan ou il y à principalement l’Etre.17 Heidegger n’hésitra pas à conlure en disant: E n ce sens la pensée qui s’exprime dans Sein un Zeit est contre l’humanisme.18 La Lettre sur l’humanisme cré une synthése en soulignant pricipallement deux points L’analyse existentiale développée dans Sein und Zeit n’a de sens que si on la référe à l’ontologie dont l’unique objet est la question de l’Etre; d’un autre coté cette “ontologie” ne saurait s’édifier que sur la base d’une telle description de l’etre de l’homme, seul étant (ou etre) auquel ait été confié la garde de l’Etre. Ces deux points sont d’une extreme importance parce qu’ils constituent ensemble l’articulation principale de l’oeuvre, là ou se trouve, comme nous allons le voir, sa force et sa faiblaisse . Heidegger évite en effet de parler d’“existence”. En premier lieu, pour bien marquer sa différence, au delà de Sartre et de l’existenctialisme, avec Descartes et Kant, les deux plus hautes figures de la philosophie de la conscience, du sujet, ou, comme il le dira finalement, de la métaphysique de la subjecivité. L’existence dont est question dans son oeuvre n’a rien avoir la réalité de l’ego cogito de Descartes ou de la notion de réalité au sens de l’objectivité de l’expérience chez Kant. C’est justement pour cela que Heidegger écrit Eksitenz ou (en séparant) Ek-sistenz

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en allemande, et ce pour bien marquer le caractére ex-tatique de cette stucture fondamentale de l’etre de l’homme. Il s’agit donc de montrer que l’ek-sistence signifie bien autre chose que le simple fait d’exister; elle désigne, dans un pespective heideggerienne, la présence ek-statique de l’Etre au Dasein, lequel est en quelque sorte appelé pour “soutenir” l’Etre. Nous pouvons remarquer dès à present, que le rapport entre le Sein et le Dasein est pour le moins étrange. En effet, la description de l’etre de l’homme, l’analytique du Dasein, n’avait pas sa fin en elle-meme mais ordonnée tout entière à la question de l’Etre. C’est pourquoi l’analytique développée est bien appellée existentiale et non pas existentielle . Seulement, Sein und Zeit est bien plus consacré au Dasein qu’au Sein, et il bien clair que Heidegger a beaucoup plus parlé de l’etre de l’homme que de la question de l’Etre. Et de surcroit, on ne cesse de d’entendre Heidegger parler du besoin et de l’appel de l’Etre au Dasein, à l’etre de l’homme. L’avenir de l’Etre en personne dépend-il à ce point du “pauvre” etre de l’homme? Ce serait bien dommage d’autant plus. . .qu’on ne peut vraiment pas compter sur l’homme. La prevue: son histoire. L’Etre ferait mieux de ne pas attendre, parce qu’avec l’homme il attendra toujours. On pourrait peut-etre se permettre de dire apres avoir observré tout cela qu’il y a chez Heidegger comme un paradoxe, qu’on pourrait appeler “le paradoxe ontologique”. Le malentendu anthropologique provient en réalite de l’oeuvre elle-meme et ce du début jusqu’à la fin, et, pour etre encore plus précis, jusquà nos jours. Ou est donc passé la question de l’Etre? Voilà la question. Si Heidegger s’est toujours élevé contre les interpétations psychologisantes et anthropologists, il n’en demeure pas moins que l’oeuvre elle-meme about it à une confusion entre l’Etre et l’etre de l’homme. Leur role, leur statut ne sont plus trés clair à partir du moment ou l’on parle de leur relation. Mais en vérité Heidegge est parti sans laisser de reponse. La réponse devait etre dans le second volume de Sein und Zeit qui devait précisément avoir pour titre Zeit und Sein. Et ce n’est pas tout. Si l’on essaye de faire quelque chose commet un “billan” de l’oeuvre, on ce rend compte que si l’oeuvre a été d’abord consacré au Dasein pour le préparer à poser la question de l’Etre, cette tentative ne s’arretra jamais tout au long de l’oeuvre et ce jusqu’à la fin. Lorsque Heidegger parle de l’homme comme berger de l’etre, comme étant le seul à qui a été confié la garde de l’etre. . .ou encore de l’homme qui doit proteger l’Etre, on est en droit de se poser de graves questions sur le sens de l’oeuvre de Heidegger et son héritage. La tache que se donnait Sein und Zeit était à la fois l’analytique du Dasein et sa préparation authentique pour poser, comme il se doit, la question de l’Etre. Seulement aprés toutes ses méditations et analyses, tout une oeuvre se déploit devant nous, et abouti à une inversion inattendue des roles du Dasein et du Sein. Désormais le Dasein doit s’occuper du Sein, alors que le Sein était l’“inspirateur” du Dasein, et le sens meme de toute l’analytique du Dasein.

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C’est ce paradoxe là, nous semble-t-il, qui explique beaucoup de malentendus. De là, croyons-nous, que vient la mystérieuse phrase de Heidegger: “ Seul un dieu peut encore nous sauver”.19 En effet, si le Dasein a autant besoin du Sein et vice versa, alors il faut bien avouer qu’il nous faut l’intervention d’un troisiéme “dieu”, par delà Sein et Dasein. Mais comme il nous est impossible d’“intervenir” auprés du Sein directement, cela va de soi, nous nous consacrerons au Dasein qui est l’authentique soi-meme pour réflechir, se connaitre soi-meme, et agir autentiquement . Seulement on n’en finira jamais avec le Dasein, il y aura toujours à faire et refaire pour sa “compréhension” et son “éduction”. Ironie de l’histoire, à force de s’occuper du Dasein nous avons mis de coté la question de l’Etre. Nous sommes comme tombés dans un piége: la question du Dasein va perpetuellement repousser, ajourner, reporter la question de l’Etre. On va finir Presque par oublier la question de l’Etre. Au demeurant, il nous semble aussi, par ailleurs, que le Dasein lui-meme porte en lui comme une erreur, une erreur philosophique. Le rapport du Dasein au monde et à la vie et finalemen au “monde de la vie” nous semble un peu curieux. S’il n’y a de rapport qu’entre le Sein et le Dasein alors ou se trouve la vie, oui la vie? La notion de vie nous semble avoir son importance. Et nous ne pouvons pas en faire l’économie. Car s’il y a l’exixtentiel ou l’exitentale, la vie doit bien avoir sa place et son statut. L’homme ne vient pas d’une création ex nihilo, mais bien d’une évolution de la nature, de la vie sur terre, vie vegetale, animale et puis homo sapiens sapiens autrement dit anthropos. Le Dasein a ce defaut de ne pas etre articulé avec aucune forme de vie, cette “vie” qui est tout de meme à l’origine de l’homme. Et si l’homme est précisément une forme de vie supérieure, c’est parce qu’il est d’abord une forme de vie. Il y a là sans doute une lacune et une insuffisance qui ne peuvent etre éludées L’homme fait bien partie intégrante du monde, de la nature, avec tous ses paysages vivants. La matière première, l’organique, l’inorganique, la vie végetale, animale, et puis la vie de l’homme. C’est bien la vie avec ses different degrés qui a rendu possible l’homme dans toute sa singularité. Il y a comme une tradition cartésienne qui, depuis plusieurs siècles, considère les animaux comme des manchines. On voit comment Heidegger fait partie de cette tradition et n’y échappe pas. Dans cette fameuse Lettre sur l’humanisme on voit bien comment la part animal, l’animalitas, ne fait pas partie du tout de son “humanisme” à lui.20 Il est hors de question que le Dasein soit anthropos, et donc de c fait toutes les autres “parties” de l’homme n’ont rien à voir avec l’etre de l’homme. On se rene compte alors combien ce point est important pour lui. Car s’il autorise ne serait-ce qu’une petite part d’animalité, le Dasein serait autre chose qu’un pure Dasein en rapport avec le Seir La vie, toute la vie, les arbres, les fleurs, tous les animaux, ne sont pour lui que des choses qui se trouvent dans le monde, avec le monde entier des choses. Elles sont toutes du

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reqistr de l’ontique, et non pas de l’ontologique. Cet “ontique” est le domaine réservé de Heidegger. Tout ce qui n’est pas de l’ordre de l’Etre ou de l’etre de l’homme est tout simplement ontique, une chose ou bien alors un “étant”. L’analytique du Dasein pourrait etre alors dangereuse pour la phénoménologie elle-meme. Malgré tout l’intéret de Heidegger, il faudrait peut-etre repartir phénomen´ ologiquement sur de nouvelles bases. Comment peut-il y avoir une rupture aussi brutale entre l’homme et toute la vie sur Terre? N’est-ce pas la vie qui permet à l’homme de vivre? Il y a en réalité chez Heidegger quelque chose de hégélien. Comme chez Hegel, Heidegger considère aussi que l’esprit est au dessus de la nature. Mais, il faut bien l’avouer, l’auteur de Sein und Zeit, fait souvent abstraction de la part charnelle de l’existence humaine. Lorsqu’ on parle de vie, il s’agit bien pour l’homme d’une bonne part de lui. Comment peut-on admertre alors que la vie ne fait pas partie de l’etre de l’homme? Il s’avère finalement qu’Il y a là une erreur de méthode. Heidegger à force de vouloir etre toujours dans l’existential est tombé lui-meme dans un oubli, l’oubli de la vie. Il se retouve dans la tradition ancestrale de l’intellectualisme qui finit par oublier ses racines sur Terre. Au demerant, nous pouvons trouver une solution. Le Lebenswelt “le monde de la vie” en phénoménologie, a cette qualité rare d’etre une possibilité de vie, d’etre une tentative de profiter de la vie, de la meilleur façon. Elle n’a pas besoin de beaucoup de philosophie, et veut, par ailleurs, retourner à un monde antérieur à la science et à la philosophie. Mais, avant d’aller à la recherche du “monde de la vie” il nous faudrait d’abord revenir une ultime et dernière fois à ce cher Dasein, pour l’“examiner” et s’“occuper” de lui. Comme il faut s’occuper du Dasein pour lui permettre d’entendre et de comprendre la question de l’etre, il faudrait le préparer, le mettre en bon état, qu’il soit bien disposé pour le rendre capable de bien “reprendre en main” la question de l’Etre Mais cela revient en dernière analyse, à en prendre le plus grand soin; et comme il est malade depuis si lontemps, alors la tache première est de le prendre en charge globalement, en tenant compte du physique et du psychique. Il faudrait aller chercher les causes et les conséquences de ce qui le rend si mal en point dans son corps et son esprit. En sommre, il faudrait en prendre soin, c’est-à-dire er un mot, le soigner; d’ou l’actualité de ce que nous serions tenté d’appeler “le tournant clinique” de la pensée contemporaine. C’est un ravissement, une extase, tout le monde est heureux de s’occuper enfin de l’homme et surtout de ses maladies. Alors c’est le frolilège de tous les arbres, les branches, les feuilles, les bourgeons et les fleurs: anthropologie philososophique, anthropologie clinique, phénoménologie clinique, anhtropologie médicale, anthropologie, physiologique, sociologie clinique, mais aussi et surtout anthropologie phénomenologique. On pourrait bien sur

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en ajouter plus mais nous préférons évoquer simplement la phénoménologie clinique et de rendre hommage á Médar Boss, à Ludwig Binswanger et à leur Dasienanalyse qui n’a pas manqué de susciter le respect et l’intéret de Heidegger lui-meme. Cependant, et ironie du sort, malgré tout l’effort vénérable de Sein und Zeit, et son analytique du Dasein, ils se retrouvent comme piégés par leur propre histoire. Ils relancent malgré eux la fameuse problématique de l’union de l’ame et du corps, héritée de Descartes, ce que Heidegger a justement appelé la métaphysique de la subjectivité. Le Dasein a-t-il résolu le problème de l’union de l’ame et du corps, le fameux: Mind-Body problem? Nous sommes porté à croire qu’il n’en est rien. Reste maintenat à savoir comment s’en sortir, car la porte se referme et nous voilà bien embarassé, à cause des conséquences de nos propres paroles, tout beaux tout heideggeriens. Il s’agit peut-etre de retourner á “l’avant”, pour aller à “l’apres”, par délà Heidegger. Ce fut le cheminement, la tache patiente et radicale de l’oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty. Il n’a cessez de poser et de reposer toutes ces questions, qui occupent une bonne part de son oeuvre, mais pas entiérement. Chez Merleau-Ponty, il y a bien plus que chez Heidegger. (Nous allons nous permettre une petite doxa: chez Merleau-Ponty il y a ce qu’il y a chez Nietzsche, ce que, chez Nietzsche, Heidegger n’a pas compris) Rappellons peut-etre pour commencer que Merleau-Ponty s’est en effet occupé, sans hésiter, du probléme de l’union de l’ame et du corps. Il avait toujours l’audace d’aller voir le mal à la racine, mais sans pourtant l’éradiquer. Il fallait lui laisser sa chance pour qu’il puisse évoluer Ce qui doit se faire pour lui, c’est faire en sorte que la nature, la vie puisse lui “parler” lui “raconter” ou bien alors sutout lui faire voir et le “regarder”. Il a bien connu l’angoisse et il l’a toujours cherchée. Mais il n’a pas eu besoin de “désobstruction” ou de “déconstruction”. Il a eu plutot des méditations, encore plus denses et profondes que celles de Heidegger. Il a suivi seul son propre chemin qui a cet aspect étrange, qui mene quelque part sans connaitre la moindre limte. Il ne s’agit point pour nous d’opposer les “chemins qui ne ménent nul part” au cheminement de Merleau-Ponty, mais de dire simplement que Merleau-ponty, bien qu’il soit trop tot parti, son silence a laissé une trace qui nous parle autant que l’oeuvre de Heidegger, sinon plus. Son texte à lui emporte presque le lecteur lui-meme qui se sent porté avec le bon choix des arrets, pendant lesquelles il y a le savoir le plus important. Sa façon de repenser l’etre et le sens de l’etre porte en elle Heidegger, mais s’en va aussi plus loin. En aval et en amont, elle reste fidele à sa vocation de faire voir et faire parler les choses les plus simples, les plus oubliées, là ou il n’y a plus rien à voir. Sa phénoménologie à lui est encore plus radicale que celles des autres phénoménologues. Il conçoit les choses plus clairement et fait en sorte

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qu’elles apparaissent dans le plus clair de leur lumiere, qu’elles soient des oeuvres d’art ou oeuvres de rien. La vie avec lui retrouve son gout, et prend avec elle, avec son élan, sans plus jamais se demander si elle est absurde ou insensée. Les couleurs redeviennent ce qu’elles étaient, et le paysage le plus simple devient là ou régne, toujours, le temps sans ennui. C’est le temps lui-meme qui se dissout pour le bonheur du temps présent, qui n’a plus rien à voir avec un passé déplaisant, qui nous hante sans doute encore aujourd’hui, mais qui est dissout grace à l’oeuvre d’un ami, l’oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty. L’avenir, lui, est sans doute encore un problème; il est bien fragile à n’en plus finir quand il passe aussi “vulgairement” que la “vie” que nous menons. Mais comment faire dirait Merleau-ponty comment fait notre vie à nous, à chacun d’entre nous, pour qu’elle soit autre chose que “nous? Faut-il alors s’occuper de soi ou de s’occuper de ces choses-là, cette mascarade barolée de tous les styles? Cette vie là restera-t-elle là? L’engagement de Merleau-Ponty contrairement à ceux de Sartre et de Heidegger ne sera pas soumi mais bel et bien toujours choisi. Il ne cessera de penser tout, tout ce qu’i y a là, tout ce qu’il n’y a pas là, pour rendre possible tout ce qui devrait etre là, mais sans se tromper de vie restant toujours à l’ecart un peu, beaucoup s’il le faut, et interviendra là ou le possible serait bien là. Merleau-Ponty ne donnera de leçons à personne, mais restait toujours là, ou il faut faire appel, là il n’y en a pas. Sa phénoménologie à lui était l’héritiére de toute la philolosophie, celle qui traversa les ages sans vieillir, toujours jeune et meme enfantine, l’enfant “naif” bien sur pas le sentimental, celui qui revoit les choses éternellement. . . pour la premiere fois. Et il ne s’agit ni de différence ni de répétition, mais d’une vision toujours nouvelle, sans attendre la dernière ou la première fois. Proposer simplement aux gens de s’arreter un peu, une fois, et voir qu’il vont voir comme il n’ont jamais vu. Voilà le programme de sa phénoménologie, voil le programme de sa philosophie. Interrompre parfois le temps pour voir justement, comment les choses se “font”. Nous faisons ça parfois mais bien trop rarement. C’est que cela est, commele disait Husserl, notre attitude “naturelle”, si on se laisse aller dans le cours naturel des choses, le cours de la vie la plus bete qui ne sait que faire de sa “tete”. Nous la faisons parfois cette rupture du quotidien mais pas vraiment comme démarche voulue et choisie. C’est toujours le hasard qui regne le hasard le plus “bete”. Vouloir, vouloir vraiment la phénomenologie, la philosophie c’est un peu une passion; c’est un engagement pour se rendre compte, que là meme ou il y a le plus habituel, là aussi il y a le plus l’etrange, l’ignorance, l’inconnu, un savoir oublié, et toutes ces choses-là vont paraitre sous un nouvea jour. C’est de cette attitude là que provient la phénomenologie, et meme finalement toute la philosophie. Merleau-Ponty reprendra sutout ce que Husserl avait dejà appelée “le retour aux choses memes”. Il définira tres clairement à ce sujet-là ce qu’est la philosophie. Avec lui la philosophie

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constituera cette tentative, cette tache qui consiste à apprendre et à réapprendre à voir le monde, à le ressentir, à l’éprouver, à se retrouver soi meme dans cette épreuve, et le retrouver dans son etre brut et sauvage.21 C’est pourquoi revenir aux choses memes c’est revenir à ce monde avant la connaissance, dont la connaissance parle toujours, et à l’égard duquel toute détermination scientifique est abstraite, signitive et dépendante, comme la géographie à l’égard du paysage ou nous avons d’abord appris ce que c’est qu’une foret, une prairie ou une rivière”.22 Ce monde plus vieux, plus jeune que la connaissance, que toute connaissance, toute scienc et tout savoir, et dont nous ne savons plus parler, alors que nous en parlons tout le temps, qreste là, nouveau, toujours, toujours présent, toujours là . . . éternellement. Et c’est peut-etre grace à lui qu’on pourrait voir ce qu’ont vu Nietzsche ou Merleau-Ponty. Mais ont-ils vu quelque chose ou bien ont-il vu autremenent? Voilà maintenant la question. Par une étrange coincidence, mais qui est la raison meme de toute la philosophie, ce dont il s’agit c’es de réapprandre à voir, d’apprendre et de réapprendre sans cesse, comme une rééducation de soi, d’apprendre à nouveau à voir, dans un mouvement perpetuel, comme un éternel retour aux choses memes, à la vie, au monde de la vie, à tout ce qui vit, à tout ce qui ne v pas, aux choses de la vie, à toute chose qui est là. C’est cette surprise là, dans le surgisement nouveau des choses, que réside la tache patiente de l’auteur de L’Oeil et l’esprit et de Le Visible et l’invisible.23 Au total la philosophie interroge la foi perceptive -mais n’attend ni ne reçoit une réponse au sens ordinaire (. . .) La philosophie, c’est la foi perceptive s’interogeant sur elle-meme. Ce n’est pas seulement la philosophie, c’est d’abord le regard qui interroge les choses. Nous avons non pas une conscience(. .)nous avons notre corps, nos sens, notre regard, notre pouvoir de comprendre la parole et de parler. Si nous sommes nous-meme en question dans le déroulement meme de notre vie, c’est parce que nous-meme sommes une seule question continuée, une entreprise perpetuelle de relèvement de nous-meme sur les constellatons du monde. C’est cette question continuée ou cette entreprise perpetuelle que Platon avait nommée pous la premiere fois Philosophia. Cet étonnement imprévisivible, soudain, qui surgit, surgit puis repart, s’en va au loin et nous échappe, et qui revient soudain, pour faire vivre et revivre la philosophia . C’est dans le “ vivre” de cette expérience, la plus surprenante de toute que git vivante, inépuisable la source de toute pensée et meme, si nous le voulons bien, de tout monde. Pour Merleau-Ponty c’est la perception elle-meme du monde “qui est la forme instable de la présence et du temps, elle est ce don singulier du voyant ou le visible se fait vision, ou le monde se donne à lui-meme un point de vue, nous-meme”.24 Ce monde que nous sommes, que nous ne sommes pas, qui est

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en nous, qui vit en nous, qui voit en nous, qui nous absorbe toujours, tout en laissant vivre, meme bien vivre parfois, en lui ou hors de lui. C’est notre raison d’etre, notre destin, la nécessité qui pleure et rit en soi, et sourit meme parfois, sans le moindre regret de n’etre pas toujours là, alors que nous sommes là, devant soi, devant le monde, devant les autres, devant le diable ou le bon Dieu. Alors imaginons un instant, un instant seulement, vouloir revenir éternellement, avec tout ses soucis et ses habits, revenant éternellement nu, sans ses habits et ses soucis, oubiant le temps, se voyant dans le monde et voyant le monde en soi. ll y a là peut-etre l’explication perdue de ce que je fus, de ce que j’aurai à etre de façon ininterrompue. Alors nous saurions etre en ces instants, hors du temps, qui nous tombe du ciel comme de la lune et ou nous ne savons plus, combien nous sommes déjà vieux, et combien nous sommes encore jeunes.25

NOTES 1 C’est en réalité Raymond Aron qui le premier avait parlé à Sartre de phénoménologie, de retour en France après un séjour en Allemagne, en 1932. 2 Le journal Le Monde, qui avait un certain prestige, consacre toute la largeur de la première page, à quelque chose d’incroyable: “Jean-Paul Sartre est mort”. 3 Sartre le dit et s’exprime de la meme façon dans L’existentialisme est un humanisme, Comme nous le verrons plus loin, c”est comme des échos entre lui et ses lecteurs. 4 L’UNESCO organise en 1963 une “Année Kierkegaard” à l’occasion du cent cinquantième anniversaire de la naissance du penseur danois. Et elle organise un colloque en 1964 intitulé “Kierkegaard vivant” en faisant appel “aux principaux représentants des courants de la philosophie de l’existence”. Il seront tous là . . . Jean-Paul Sartre et Gàbriel Marcel, Martin Heidegger et Karl Jaspers . . . Ce document important, un peu oublié, montre bien que “l’exitentialisme”, du moins “la philosophie de l’exitence” n’était pas seulement une rumeur ou un malentendu, mais bien encrée dans la réalité historique. Cf. Kierkegaard vivant. nrf Gallimard 1966. 5 Revue annuelle de phénoménologie et de recherches phénoménologiques (revue fondée et dirrigé par Husserl). Le première fois le texte est dédié à Husserl. 6 Jean-Paul Sartre L’Etre et le Néant Gallimard 1967 p.678. 7 Jean-Paul Sartre L’Existentialisme est un humanisme. Ce fut à l’origine le texte d’ une conférence que Sartre avait donnée en octobre 1945. Il a été publié l’année suivante en 1946 aux Editions Nagel. Notre référence: Editions Gallimard 1996. 8 Jean-Paul Sartre L’existentialisme est un humanisme. présentation et notes par Arlette ElkaimSartre Gallimard 1996 p. 11. 9 Jean-Paul Sartre Ibid. p. 23 et p.77, 78. 10 Heidegger envoie une lettre à son ami Jean Beaufret, en 1946, qui lui avait demadé: Comment redonner un sens au mot “humanisme”. C’est cette lettre-là qui allait avoir cette fortune. Publiée en forme restreinte la premiere fois en 1947 avec pour titre: Ueber den “Humanismus”. Brief an Jean Beaufret . . . 11 Sartre a lu bien sur Sein und Zeit et il parle du Dasein par exemple p.123 Rappelons que c’est Raymond Aron qui le premier avait parlé de phenoménologie à Sartre en 1932, en lui indicant

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comment il est possible de faire de la philosophie à partir des choses les plus simples de la vie quotidienne. Il lui parle aussi de Husserl et de Heidegger. 12 Martin Heidegger Ueber den Humanismus Vittorio Klosterman 1951 Martin Heidegger Lettre sur l’ humanisme. trad. Roger Munier Aubier-Montaigne 1967. 13 Heidegger Lettre . . . p. 23. 14 Nietzsche Jenseits von Gut und Bose KSA = Kritische Sudienausgabe. Herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari Wallter de Gruyter 1967 par 212. 15 Nietzsche lbid par 223. 16 Nietzsche lbid par 62 et par 58. 17 Heidegger Lettre . . . p. 71. 18 Heidegger Lettre . . . p. 75. 19 “Spiegel-Gesprack”, in Der Spiegel N 23 / 1976. p. 209. L’entretien eut lieu en réalité en 1966, mais il ne fut publié, selon la volonté de Heidegger, qu’après sa mort en 1976. 20 Heidegger Lettre . . . p.55–59. 21 Merleau-Ponty Phénoménologie de la perception. Gallimard 1957 Avant-propos p.III. Le livre de Claude Levy-Srauss La Pensée sauvage sera dédié A la Mémoire de Maurice Merleau-Ponty mort brutalement le 3 Mai 1961 (Levy-Srauss aimait à préciser qu’ il ne s’agit pas de la pensée des sauvages, mais bien de la “pensée sauvage” . . .comme le disait Merleau-Ponty. 22 Meleau-Ponty Phénoménologie lbid. 23 Merleau-Ponty Le Visible et l”invisible Gallimard 1964 p. 139–140. 24 Merleau-Ponty Le Primat de la perception. Verdier 1996 p. 47. 25 Nietzsche Jenseits von Gut und Bose Ibid par 271.

ILARIA RICCIONI AND ANDRZEJ ZUCZKOWSKI

DIS-IDENTITY AS LIVING IDENTITY

ABSTRACT

We present the concept of “dis-identity” as an intra-personal and inter-personal phenomenon of a person’s inner life and interpersonal relations. Disidentity manifests itself both in people’s inner monologues and in their dialogues with other people. Although the principal meaning of inner monologues is “discourses with one voice”, they do, in fact, reveal intrinsic polyphony and alterity, i.e. dialogicity between different voices, which come both from different parts of the same person and from other (imagined, internalized) persons. This dialogicity leads to the concept of disidentity and to its main forms: from a spatial perspective, we distinguish “inside” – disidentity from “inside vs. outside” – disidentity; from a temporal perspective, we distinguish diachronic from synchronic disidentity. Literature offers vivid examples of inner monologues in which disidentity emerges, one of these being Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Fräulein Else (1924). In order to explain the concept of disidentity we analyze some passages taken from this work. 1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF OUR RESEARCH Our research aims at studying the structure and organization of inner monologues or, more precisely, of their linguistic expressions and features. People’s stream of consciousness or stream of thought (W. James 1890, 1892), their life experience (Erlebnis), their inner world, is by its very nature private and inaccessible to an external observer and can only become the topic of inter-subjective study when in the form of a monologue, in other words in a written or spoken text. Thus by the term “interior monologue”, we intend to refer to either the spoken or written linguistic manifestations of stream of consciousness, what a person “says in his or her head”. 1 . 2 R E A S O N F O R O U R R E S E A R C H A N D S T U DY M AT E R I A L As psychologists, the interest and motivation for this research stem from the use of interior monologues as one of the techniques used in psychotherapeutic 273 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 273–297. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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sessions and their supervision as well as in the training of adults in communication (A. Zuczkowski 2004). This interest, which has arisen out of the clinical and educational field, has been extended to the analysis of monologues taken from literature. In effect, these offer “some possible-real” cases (M. Mizzau 1979, 1998), that is to say, cases which although non-real are probable as they are taken from the real. From an epistemological point of view, the justification for the use of the literary case implies both the recognition of common sense (F. Heider 1958) as a source of knowledge and the assignation to it of a greater value. Literature, however, provides examples of common sense in its most sophisticated forms. In the course of our research, which began in 2004, we have analysed various literary texts by different authors, among which are A. Schnitzler, L. Pirandello and J. Joyce. In this paper, from the several texts analysed, we have chosen to make particular reference to the novella Fräulein Else by A. Schnitzler (1862–1931), in which the author uses the technique of interior monologue. 1.3 RESULTS One of the main results of our research in the clinical, educational and literary fields, is the identification of the fundamental dialogicity which typifies interior monologues. Although their principal meaning is “discourses with one voice”, interior monologues are actually characterized by intrinsic alterity and polyphony, in other words by the interweaving of voices that represent the various inner parts of the same person. This dialogicity and the way in which it is expressed at a linguistic level lead to the concept of personal disidentity (G. Lai 1988). 1.4 DISIDENTITY Moreover most of the theories of the person that developed from psychotherapy such as Freudian psychoanalysis (S. Freud 1938), F. Perls’ Gestalttherapy (1951) and E. Berne’s Transactional Analysis (1961), in different ways maintain that “personal identity” is more about multiplicity, diversity and conflict than unity and identity. The adjective “disidentical” means “not identical to oneself”. Thus, when using the term “disidentity”, coined by the psychoanalyst G. Lai (1988), we refer to a personality structure in which different “parts” co-exist, parts which, at times, are conflictual. Some of these parts may interact, that is enter into dialogue with each other, sometimes consciously but sometimes unconsciously. Other parts may not interact at all, appearing simply as juxtapositions. The passages that we have chosen from the novella demonstrate both these possibilities.

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1.5 RESEARCH METHOD The method used in this research consists, mainly, in a qualitative, structural linguistic analysis (morpho-syntactic, semantic and pragmatic). Interest is focussed both on the specific content of the interior monologues and above all on the linguistic and communicative modalities which transmit this content, on how a person speaks to himself/herself and on how the interior monologue develops.

1.6 LINGUISTIC INDICES OF DIALOGICITY AND DISIDENTITY Analysis of the texts has led to the identification of some linguistic indices of dialogicity and thus of disidentity. These are signs, in the broad sense, which allow the reader to recognise the different “parts” of the character that enter into dialogue among themselves (or, in some cases, that manifest themselves almost simultaneously), at times in an apparently syntonic, at others, conflictual way. These linguistic indices of disidentity can be briefly classified as follows: a) morpho-syntactic: characterized, for example, by the shift in personal pronouns (e.g. I/you/she/we), by the presence of particular “adjacency pairs” (e.g. question-answer; affirmation- negation etc.; E. Schegloff, H. Sacks 1973); b) semantic: identifiable, for example, in the juxtaposition of concepts, meanings and different or antithetical thoughts; c) pragmatic: characterized, for example, by the presence of some discourse markers which express agreement and disagreement (e.g. yes, but, of course not, no etc.) and different types of speech acts (e.g. questions, orders, prohibitions etc.).

1.7 TYPES OF DISIDENTITY Our analysis has shown that in interior monologues disidentity seems to manifest itself in different ways. If we consider the spatial dimension, we can distinguish between the disidentity which manifests itself solely within a person, in other words in his/her head (disidentity “inside”) and the disidentity which becomes explicit in the discrepancy between what the person simultaneously “says to him/herself” and “says to others” with whom he/she is speaking, that is between interior monologue and both verbal and non verbal outward behaviour (disidentity “inside-outside”).

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Whereas, if we consider the temporal dimension, disidentity manifests itself, on the one hand, as the emerging of different and successive statements made at a relative distance from each other (diachronic disidentity); on the other, as an immediate, almost simultaneous, juxtaposition of different or conflicting options (thoughts, opinions, decisions etc.) (synchronic disidentity).

“Inside”

Disidentity

spatial dimension

“Inside-Outside”

Diachronic

Disidentity

temporal dimension

Synchronic (simultaneous or almost-simultaneous)

2 . F R Ä U L E I N E L S E ( 1 9 2 4 ) B Y A RT H U R S C H N I T Z L E R

The Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler was born in Vienna in 1862. His work is set against the backdrop of the crisis that had beset the liberal bourgeoisie and the resulting waning of values that typified the Habsburg fin de siècle. It was a time of great cultural experimentation in which artists and intellectuals were searching for ways to confront the crisis facing contemporary humanity: the psychoanalysis of Freud, the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the figurative art

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of Klimt and Schiele, the new architecture of Otto Wagner and Adolft Loos as well as the attempt by Mahler and Schonberg to break new ground in music and last but not least the exceptional writers and poets such as Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan Zweig. Although Schnitzler was aware of the social contradictions and the uncontrollable dissolution of civil values and moral categories, he is not a writer who deals with social issues but rather a searcher of souls. In order to involve the reader deeply in his characters’ emotions, Schnitzler chose a new form in which to narrate; the narrative flow is carried by interior monologue in which the deep sensations of the mind are recorded even if they do not surface and are not noticeable to others. The total absence of the narrator means that the reader is in direct contact with the character in the story. 2.1 ARTHUR SCHNITZLER AND INTERIOR MONOLOGUE As early as 1900 Schnitzler had used this technique in his short story Leutnant Gustl. In Fräulein Else, written in 1924, he perfects and enriches it with new nuances. In order to highlight visually the inner separation of the main character from the surrounding world, the dialogues of all the people around Else are printed in italics which, particularly towards the end of the story, has a dramatic significance. Schnitzler took the idea of this narrative technique from the first story to use it extensively, the novel by Eduard Dujardin, Les lauriers sont coupés, written in 1888. Interior monologue, exceptional examples of which can be found in the works of James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf etc. – sets out to reproduce, in a direct and accurate way, the thoughts and feelings of a character seen from an inner perspective, following the meanderings of the stream of consciousness with its many leaps and its play on the association of ideas. 2.2 FRÄULEIN ELSE: A BRIEF SUMMARY O F T H E P L OT Schnitzler’s story takes place on a single day, 3rd September 1896. Else, who is 19 years old and the beautiful daughter of a well-known Viennese lawyer of Jewish extraction, is staying for her holidays in a hotel at San Martino di Castrozza in the Dolomites as the guest of her rich aunt. Else receives an express letter from her mother. The letter contains a precise request which will determine the tragic outcome of events. For several years Else’s family has been in severe financial difficulty on account of her father’s gambling and some unlucky, rather shady business dealings. Else has a soft spot for her father but he is in trouble again and there

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is a risk that he will be sent to prison. Hence dishonour and ruin threaten the family. The only way to save her father and the situation, according to her mother, is to obtain thirty thousand florins as soon as possible. Her mother presses Else to beg Mr Dorsday, a rich old art dealer and friend of the family staying in the same hotel, to give her a loan; if she does not, all will be lost. Else, trying to overcome her shame and fear, unwillingly decides to agree to the request but her decision and its consequences lead to her suicide. Dorsday, in effect, says he will agree to the loan but only on one condition: to be able to look at Else nude for fifteen minutes. Now blackmailed on two fronts (her parents and Dorsday), tortured and torn between obedience and the wish to maintain her dignity, between filial love and the repulsion for Dorsday and the situation, she finally decides to make an extreme gesture. She undresses in front of the art dealer . . . and all the hotel guests gathered together in the music room. The burden of shame and loss of “social identity” force her into suicide by poison. 3. DIALOGICITY IN THE MONOLOGUES

3 . 1 S T RU C T U R E O F T H E N OV E L L A A N D T H E F O R M A L COMPOSITION OF THE TEXT The novella is made up almost entirely of the main character’s monologue and the texts of some letters. The monologue is interspersed by some “real” dialogues between Else and other characters and the dialogues of these characters among themselves. However, even these “non monological” parts are presented from the perspective of the main character who takes part in the dialogues or listens to them and who writes and reads the letters. The only meta-textual indications that signal to the reader the passage from Else’s inner world to the world outside are the inverted commas and italics used for the “real” dialogues. In an extensive part of the monologue we can distinguish between non dialogical monologues and dialogical monologues. The former are made up of passages in which a single voice prevails and which reflect, in a coherent uncontradictory way, the thoughts, feelings, memories etc. of the main character. The latter are made up of passages in which she converses, at times, with herself and, at times, with imaginary interlocutors who are not actually present in “reality”. Several voices take the stage and converse amongst themselves. It is possible to sub-divide these imaginary dialogues into two categories which we have called imaginary dialogues and imaginary logues respectively. In the former, the interlocutor imagined by Else interacts with her in a brief dialogue made up of a series of fantasized exchanges while in the latter, Else

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directly addresses an imaginary interlocutor using the second person. However, this interlocutor is not given the chance to reply thus leading to an appeal with no reply. That’s why we coined the word “logue”. Monologues (inner world)

Non monologues (outer world)

- 8 “real” dialogues between Else and other characters - some “real” dialogues between other characters (in the final part of the short story, while Else pretends to have fainted) Non dialogic

Dialogic

- her mother’s letter - her mother’s telegram - Else’s letter to Dorsday

between parts

with interlocutors

of herself

other than herself

imaginary dialogues (the interlocutor replies)

imaginary logues (the interlocutor does not reply)

We will now present and comment on some examples, taken from the novella, of: – non dialogic monologues (§ 3.2); – dialogic monologues between parts of herself (“I – I”, “I – You”) (§3.3.1); – dialogic monologues with interlocutors other than herself (imaginary dialogues and logues) (§ 3.3.2). 3.2 NON DIALOGIC MONOLOGUES (1) I don’t think of anybody. I’m not in love. Not with anybody. I never have been in love. I wasn’t in love even with Albert, though I imagined I was for a week. I don’t think I’m capable of falling in love. That’s really curious, for I’m certainly sensual. But high-spirited and ungracious too, thank Heaven! (p. 11)

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The impression is that this is a single voice speaking. The nine “I” refer to the same part of Else; her thoughts and reasoning are coherent and not contradictory. As regards the question of love, she presents a self that has a single identity, a coherent and univocal image which is outlined mainly in the negative: I’m not in love (at the present); I never have been in love (in the past); I don’t think I’m capable of falling in love (in the future). She attributes the reasons for her condition to her proud, ill-mannered attitude which she sees as positive. 3.3 DIALOGIC MONOLOGUES In the following examples we will use both normal type and bold type to indicate the parts of Else which we believe express her disidentity. 3.3.1 Between Parts of Herself 1) I–I (2) Here I am with the letter in my hand. The letter’s crazy. I speak to Dorsday? I’d die of shame . . . Why should I be ashamed? It’s not my fault . . . (p.23)

Two parts of Else seem to converse together expressing radically opposing opinions. When she imagines the possible meeting with Dorsday, a part of her appears crushed by a feeling of shame (I’d die of shame); whereas the other part of her rejects this sentiment in the same way as it refuses to feel guilty for the irresponsible decisions of her father (Why should I be ashamed? It’s not my fault . . .). In this case both morpho-syntactic (questions) and semantic features (the juxtaposition of divergent opinions of the same event) operate as linguistic indices of dialogicity and disidentity. 2) I–You (3) If only I didn’t dislike him so much – and the way he looks at me. No, Herr Dorsday, I’m not taken in by your smartness and your monocle and your title. You might just as well deal in old clothes as in old pictures . . . But, Else, Else, what are you thinking of? Oh, I can permit myself a remark like that. Nobody notices it in me. (p. 24)

Whereas in this example we see a splitting of the subject, both from the point of view of the content expressed and that of the grammar. Here Else talks to herself using the second person. Besides the referential index of the second person, we can also consider the vocatives and the adjacency pair formed by the reproof and the questioning of the reproof itself as indicators of dialogicity and disidentity. Else dislikes Dorsday, so she degrades him (You might just as well deal in old clothes). One part of Else seems to reproach the part which has just insulted Dorsday (But, Else, Else, what are

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you thinking of?), while the other part replies in a firm, almost irritated tone (Oh I can permit myself a remark like that. Nobody notices it in me). 3) I–You (Ich-Sie) The following passage, in which Else talks to herself using the second person and adding the appellative Fräulein to the vocative, is similar to the previous example (3). (4a) Who shall I have to undress for next time? Or shall we stick to Herr von Dorsday for simplicity’s sake? His present mistress is nothing very grand “between ourselves”. He’d certainly prefer me. I don’t know, I’m not at all sure that I’m much better. Don’t put on airs, Fräulein Else, I could tell tales about you . . . a certain dream, for instance, that you’ve had three times now . . . and that you haven’t told even to your friend Bertha. And she can stand a good deal. And what happened this year at Gmunden, at six in the morning, on the balcony, my proud Fräulein Else? Perhaps you didn’t notice the two young men in a boat who were staring at you. Certainly they couldn’t make my face out clearly from the lake, but they must have seen that I was in my chemise. And I liked it. Oh, more than liked it. I was intoxicated. I drew my hands across my hips and behaved as if I didn’t know anyone was looking at me. And the boat didn’t move from the spot. Yes, that’s what I am. A hussy. They all see. (pp. 53–54)

In this passage, as in others, the original German version “marks” more distinctly the “distance” between the two parts in the dialogue by using the third person Sie (for the sake of brevity we will cite only the fragment in bold type). Tun Sie nicht vornehm, Fräulein Else, ich könnte Geschichten von Ihnen erzählen . . . einen gewissen Traum zum Beispiel, den Sie schon dreimal gehabt haben – von dem haben Sie nicht einmal Ihrer Freundin Bertha erzählt. Und die verträgt doch was. Und wie war denn das heuer in Gmunden in der Früh um sechs auf dem Balkon, mein vornehmes Fräulein Else? Haben Sie die zwei jungen Leute im Kahn vielleicht gar nicht bemerkt, die Sie angestarrt haben? (p. 38)

The part that uses Sie sarcastically scolds the other for dreams and lascivious behaviour about which no one, not even her friend Bertha, knows. In this example, unlike the previous one, this part of Else seems to win the assent of the other part which does not defend itself or deny the accusations but falls in with them, sharing the same opinion and then giving more information. The example that follows (4b) is similar to the previous one in that it concerns the differences between the English translation and original German version which uses Sie. (4b) The moon hasn’t risen yet. It’ll rise just in time for the performance, the great performance in the meadow, when Herr von Dorsday makes his female slave dance naked. What’s Herr von Dorsday to me? Now, Mademoiselle Else, what are you making such a fuss about? You were ready to go off and be the mistress of strange men, one after the other. And you boggle at the trifle which Herr von Dorsday asks of you? You’re ready to sell yourself for a pearl necklace, for beautiful clothes, for a villa by the sea? And your father’s life isn’t worth as much as that? It would be just the right start. It would justify all the rest at once. (p. 65)

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Nun, Mademoiselle Else, was machen Sie denn für Geschichten? Sie waren doch schon bereit auf und davon zu gehen, die Geliebte von fremden Männern zu werden, von einem nach dem andern. Und auf die Kleinigkeit, die Herr von Dorsday von Ihnen verlangt, kommt es Ihnen an? Für einen Perlenschmuck, für schöne Kleider, für eine Villa am Meer sind Sie bereit sich zu verkaufen? Und das Leben Ihres Vaters ist Ihnen nicht so viel wert? Es wäre gerade der richtige Anfang. Es wäre dann gleich die Rechtfertigung für alles andere. (p. 47)

The cynical, unscrupulous Else re-appears criticising, with almost contemptuous derision, “the phoney good girl”, who, a little earlier in the novella, she had imagined courted by a host of lovers. This part of Else is evident in the sarcastic apostrophe, Now, Madmoiselle Else, what are you making such a fuss about? After all, what Dorsday is asking is but a small thing when compared with the lascivious fantasies of a moment earlier. And then, it implicitly reproaches her, for the life of her father is worth much more than the trifling material goods that he dreams of owning. Moreover, as if playing the part of the “voice of the guilty conscience”, this disenchanted and uninhibited Else continues her task of persuasion with further egotistical arguments. To undress for Dorsday would be just the right start. It would justify all the rest at once. Once she had lost her good reputation and for a good cause, in this case dictated by filial love, Else would be able to start the life that until now she had only fantasized about. 3.3.2 With Interlocutors Other Than Herself: Imaginary Dialogues The imaginary dialogues and logues lead us clearly into the world of Else’s fantasies. Fantasies which are usually projected into the future and in which, in the case of the imaginary dialogues, the character imagines a possible “script”, a series of exchanges in which, inevitably, she interprets alternately her own role and then that of the other interlocutors. (5) “I’ve just had a letter, Herr von Dorsday” . . . “Oh, Fräulein Else, it’s not worth mentioning, I sold a Rembrandt only yesterday, you put me to shame, Fräulein Else” . . . (p. 28)

In this particular example, Else tries out the opening of the conversation that she will shortly have with Dorsday. She also gives the man’s side of the conversation and in a reassuring fantasy imagines a scene in which the meeting-dialogue takes place as she would like it to. Thus the fictional dialogue seems to be a handy expedient for exorcising her fears and anxiety. Else obtains what she wants in a very quick and easy way, with a minimal expenditure of energy and words and with a very obliging Dorsday immediately writing out the cheque without asking anything “in return”. Everything is resolved speedily and for the best. This positive fantasy seems to function as a reinforcement of the decision already taken to talk to Dorsday and works as a kind of implicit encouragement.

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3.3.3 With Interlocutors Other Than Herself: Imaginary Logues In the imaginary logues, Else, using the second person, directly addresses an imaginary interlocutor whom in her imagination is not given permission to reply. (5) Couldn’t I go down now, at once, and speak to Dorsday before dinner? Oh, how horrible! . . . Paul, if you get me thirty thousand you can have anything you ask of me. That’s out of a novel. The noble daughter sells herself for her beloved father’s sake, and really rather enjoys it. B-r-r! No, Paul, you can’t get me even for thirty thousand. Nobody can. (p. 25)

At the beginning of this passage we find another example of the disidentity between the parts existing within Else; we see one putting forward the proposal to talk to Dorsday before dinner and the other subsequently rejecting the idea. This is immediately followed by Else addressing her cousin Paul in her imagination, trying to come to some sort of unilateral virtual pact with him (Paul, if you get me thirty thousand you can have anything you ask of me); but she immediately hastens to negate what she has just said, first by deriding herself, then by amplifying and generalizing this position (No, Paul, you can’t get me even for thirty thousand. Nobody can).

4. DISIDENTITY IN THE MONOLOGUES

In this second part, we will present and comment on examples taken from the novella regarding both the spatial dimension of disidentity (“inside” disidentity and “inside versus outside” disidentity) and the temporal dimension (diachronic and synchronic disidentity).

4 . 1 D I A C H RO N I C I N N E R D I S I D E N T I T Y ( “ I N S I D E ” ) In the course of the long monologue of which the novella is composed, Else shows different parts of herself which succeed and alternate with each other in time. Besides the examples of dialogic monologues already cited, we will present others which clearly illustrate the manifestation of her inner identity in the diachronic temporal dimension. This disidentity becomes particularly evident if we consider not only the different “images of herself” put forward by Else to herself and the reader but also her opinions, feelings and decisions which alternate in her mind. 4.1.1 Disidentity Between the Different Images of Herself In the following two examples Else imagines possible but contradictory future identities:

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(10a) I could make a man very happy – if the right man only came along. But children I won’t have. I’m not motherly. (p. 30) (10b) The Cimone looks uncanny, gigantic, as if it were ready to fall on me. Not a star in the sky as yet. The air is like champagne. And the perfume from the meadows! I’ll live in the country. I’ll marry a landowner and have children. (pp. 30–31)

In (10a) Else states that she does not want children as she is not maternal. On many other occasions in the novella she seems to love the idea of imagining herself outside the conventions of society and the historical period in which she lived when the roles contemplated for a “respectable” woman were those of faithful wife and loving mother. Whereas in (10b), she seems to return to the “fold” with fantasies which are diametrically opposed to those expressed earlier: she’ll have children. 4.1.2 Disidentity Between Her Opinions, Thoughts, Feelings and Decisions The following fragments, which are linked by a single leitmotif (the possible suicide of her father), show the continual oscillation of Else’s feelings for her father, swinging from resentment to affection, from indignation at the blackmail to the fear of his suicide. (11a) And I’m sitting quietly on the window-sill, and Father is to be locked up. No! Never, never! It mustn’t be! I’ll save him! Yes, Father, I’ll save you! (p. 24) (11b) Impudent rascal! [= Dorsday] Never, never! There’s nothing for it, Father, you’ll have to kill yourself . . . (p. 52)

The first fragment (11a) presents Else’s immediate reaction after reading the letter containing the irksome request from her parents. She cannot accept the fate that awaits her father and decides to do all she can to save him. The sudden change from the third (I’ll save him!) to the second person (I’ll save you!) should be noted since the father becomes the direct interlocutor (imaginary logues). The second fragment (11b), on the other hand, immediately follows the dialogue with Dorsday in which he makes Else his “indecent proposal”. Else’s first reaction to the man is to refuse point blank and not to care whether her father will have to commit suicide. The words Else uses to address her father in her imagination express her rage at the situation in which he has landed her. (12a) A human life is at stake. Father’s life. But no, he won’t kill himself, he’d rather go to prison. Three years’ penal servitude, or five. (p. 53) (12b) And now Dorsday is his hope, his last hope. And if the money doesn’t come he’ll kill himself. Of course he’ll kill himself. He won’t let them send him to prison. Arrest, trial, assizes, prison, convict’s clothes! No, no! When the warrant comes, he’ll shoot himself or hang himself. He’ll hang himself from the window bar. They’ll send word to us from the house opposite. The lock-smith will have to open the door, and it will have been my fault. (p. 57)

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In the first fragment, Else imagines that her father would prefer to serve a year or two in prison rather than commit suicide. While in the second, she imagines her father would prefer suicide to shame and dishonour. But the responsibility will all rest with Else who has shirked the duty of fulfilling her father’s request. Thus at this point in the novella, in rapid succession we are given two contradictory visions of the same situation deriving from the two disidentical parts of Else. The first, in which her father is imagined as devious and unscrupulous, as a wicked exploiter of his daughter and her sentiments. These fantasies lead to Else’s refusal of Dorsday’s proposal and thus, indirectly, of her father’s plan. The second, is of a more generous Else who is obliging and willing to excuse her father, moved by filial love and the fear of his suicide or ruin. Another interesting example of inner disidentity from a diachronic perspective is the scene of Else’s suicide which closes the novella. Else, after undressing in front of the hotel guests gathered in the music room, falls to the ground and pretends to have fainted. She is then taken to her room amid the confusion and general bewilderment. When no one is looking, Else drinks the fatal dose of veronal from a glass which she had prepared and left on her bedside table before going down to the hall. The fragments that follow regard the moment Else decides on and carries out her suicide by drinking the veronal (13a) and then the moment immediately after, in which she passes from the feeling of satisfaction about her imminent death to fear and regret for what she has done (13b). Else cries to herself for help but no one can hear her now, nor can they come to her assistance. (13a) There my glass stands. Quick, before they come into the room again. Are there enough powders? I must never wake up again. I’ve done what I have to do in the world. Father is saved. I could never go among people again . . . [. . .] Well, have I got it at last? Quick, quick! I must. I mustn’t spill a drop. There. Quick. It tastes nice. More, more. It isn’t poison at all. Nothing ever tasted so nice. If you only new how nice death tastes! Goodnight, my glass. [. . .] I’ve taken veronal. Good. I’m going to die. Thank God (pp. 106–107). (13b) Dorsday! Dorsday! Why, that’s the – Fifty thousand! Will he send it? Good God, if he doesn’t send it! I must tell them! They must make him do it. God, if all this has been for nothing! But I can still be saved. Paul! Cissy! Why don’t you hear me? Don’t you know that I’m dying? [. . .] Paul! Paul! I want you to hear me. I’ve taken veronal, Paul, ten powders, a hundred. I didn’t want to do it. I was mad. I don’t want to die. You must save me, Paul! You’re a doctor. Save me! [. . .] Save me, Paul! I implore you! Don’t let me die! There’s still time. But then I shall go to sleep and you won’t know it. I don’t want to die. Please save me. It was only for Father’s sake. Dorsday insisted on my doing it. Paul! Paul! [. . .] Cissy, Cissy, what did I ever do to you that you should be so cruel to me? Keep your Paul – but don’t let me die. I’m so young. It will grieve Mother. I want to climb a lot more mountains. I want to dance. And I want to marry one day. I want to travel. Tomorrow we’ll do the trip up the Cimone. Tomorrow will be a lovely day. (pp. 107–109)

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In these fragments also, two different people, two wills, seem to be in conflict. Else at first (13a) seems happy and firm in her decision to be able to put an end to her life (Nothing ever tasted so nice. If you only new how nice death tastes! [. . .] Good. I’m going to die. Thank God); then the thought that after her death Dorsday might not respect their secret pact, causes her to reconsider the act she has just carried out (13b). Now she no longer wants to die and accuses herself (I didn’t want to do it. I was mad. I don’t want to die). She would like to ask her cousin Paul for help but at this point it is too late. 4 . 2 S Y N C H RO N I C I N N E R D I S I D E N T I T Y ( “ I N S I D E ” ) Some passages of Else’s monologue show examples of sudden contradictions between opinions, thoughts, feelings etc. We are dealing, then, with a quasisynchrony, lightning shifts between saying and contradicting, as can be seen in the examples that follow: (14) It’s nearly dark now. Night. The dead of night. I wish I was dead . . . It simply isn’t true. (p. 25)

Else seems to transpose her state of mind onto the perception of the natural space in which she is immersed. Night envelops her, but it is she who invests it with her anxiety. The space outside of her becomes a metaphor for her inner space. At this point Else acts out a dialogue between two disidentical parts of herself which takes the form of quick repartee in which one part negates what the other states or proposes. (15) If Fred were here, could he give me advice? I don’t need any advice. There’s no advice to give. I’ll talk to Herr von Dorsday d’Eperjes and I’ll borrow from him – I, the high-spirited one, the aristocrat, the Marchesa, the beggar girl, the swindler’s daughter! (p. 26)

This fragment seems to reproduce an inner dialogue in which two Elses clash, the “weak” Else who is confused, frightened and distressed and the other “tough” Else who is autonomous, pragmatic, pro-active and cynical. (16) In Heaven’s name, what can be in it? I won’t open it till I’m upstairs, or perhaps I’ll faint. Probably Father has – if Father’s dead, then everything’s all right, then I needn’t go to the meadow with Herr von Dorsday . . . Oh, what a miserable creature I am! Dear God, please let Father be alive. Arrested, if you like, but not dead. If there’s no bad news in it, I’ll offer a sacrifice. I’ll become a nurse. I’ll go into an office. Don’t be dead, father. I’ll do everything you want . . . (p. 74)

After Else’s conversation with Dorsday she spends a while in the park thinking it over and then goes back to the hotel where the concierge calls her attention in order to give her a telegram which had arrived a quarter of an hour earlier. She decides to go up to her room to open it so as not to fall to the ground in a faint. This waiting period is crowded with fantasies which are first catastrophic

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then reassuring. Else’s first thought is that the telegram contains news of her father’s suicide. Faced with this possibility, again we see two different and clashing Elses: one who is more egotistical and pragmatic while the second is more loving and devoted to her father. In effect, at first, Else seems to evaluate the advantage to her of her father’s death: if Father’s dead, then everything’s all right, then I needn’t go to the meadow with Herr von Dorsday . . . The fantasy seems to meet her wish to eliminate the problem of undressing in front of Dorsday. Thus the death of her father would free her. But there immediately emerges a sense of guilt for having thought of the death of her father in these terms and perhaps for even having desired it. The wish that appears to be stronger however, is that her father is alive. Elsa reproaches herself (what a miserable creature I am!) and then, overcome by fear, prays to God promising she will make a vow if the telegram does not contain news of a death. Finally, she makes an imaginary address to her father, saying that she is ready to do anything for him.

4 . 3 S Y N C H RO N I C “ I N S I D E ” A N D “ I N S I D E V E R S U S OUTSIDE” DISIDENTITY The “real” dialogues in the novella between Else and other characters offer some interesting examples regarding the disidentity of the main character. We will give two in which Else is not only “other than herself” as we have already seen but also shows herself to be “other” or “two-faced” when interacting with other people. Our first example is taken from the conversation with Dorsday while the second is from a dialogue with Paul. In the text of the novella, Else’s monologue interweaves and runs parallel to the dialogues. Very often the part which is conversing on the outside is not syntonic with the voice which is speaking on the inside, so that, as we shall see, even the latter often seems to split. 4.3.1 The Dialogue with Dorsday The first example is taken from the long, dramatic dialogue between Else and Dorsday. Here Else appears to be literally “two-faced” if we consider the face that she shows Dorsday and her inner one which only she and the reader can see. But in addition to this, we can observe the dialogue, and at times, the clash inside herself between two complementary parts, a one-up (someone like a parent) and the other one-down (someone like a child adapted to that parent) to whom we like to refer as “Director” and “Actress” respectively. Else finds herself caught in a situation of double blackmail which has an effect on the love she feels for her father. On the one hand, are her parents who do not seem to have any scruples in exposing her to the possible perils of a “man of the world” like the mature Dorsday in order to get the money they

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need. On the other, is Dorsday himself who does not hesitate to take advantage of the distressing situation by trying to buy or rather extort by blackmail something which he could never have obtained spontaneously. In the interpersonal power games, Else is a victim who does not know how to rebel. She is disgusted by the lust of the man, but at the same time paralysed by fear and perhaps also by something which both repulses and attracts her. The conversation with Dorsday is interwoven with Else’s multi-faceted interior monologue. On occasions it may seem to the reader that there are three or four interlocutors for while Else is speaking to Dorsday, in her interior monologue she is having an imaginary conversation at times with him, but at times with herself, criticising him with bitter sarcasm, expressing her state of mind and asking herself questions. We have decided to give some fragments of this multivoiced conversation using a grid which separates the actual dialogue (outside, between D=Dorsday and E1=Else) from Else’s simultaneous interior monologue (inside, E2=Else) in order to highlight the different and disidentical parts of the main character which alternate on the scene. First part: the pleasantries (pp. 37–41) The dialogue takes place on two levels, outside and inside. The former is accessible to both interlocutors, while in the second, only Else and the reader can take part. The opening is ritualistic with the two characters exchanging polite pleasantries. They talk about the countryside, the weather and of walks in the mountains. Nevertheless Else, to herself, does not spare the sarcasm she feels for Dorsday. What she feels about him is clear; he is boring and is not aware of it, idiotic and stupid like all men who do not know how to resist a girl’s flirtatious eyes (1.E2). In this first part of the dialogue, Else seems to be dominant from the point of view of interpersonal power, at least from what emerges from the comments in her interior monologue. She is a girl from a good family and he is a parvenu; she has a lively intelligence and he is boring and stupid. Her sarcastic comments are the expression of this perceived superiority. Second part: Else’s request, Dorsday’s first reactions (pp. 41–46) It is in this part of the dialogue that Else makes Dorsday the request for money. We will first analyse the outer level, the “real” dialogue between the two and then go on to her parallel interior monologue. In the phase preliminary to the request, Else accompanies information about her family with a series of captatio benevolentiae strategies. She stresses the friendship and affection which bind Dorsday to her father and the whole family (2.E1, 6.E1, 10.E1). These close ties are underlined by her assertions which presuppose that Dorsday knows of the difficulties that the family has been in for some time.

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Outside

289

Inside

1.D:

“Are you staying some time at San Martino, Fräulein Else?”

1.E2:

Idiotic. Why do I look at him so coquettishly? He’s smiling already, in the usual way. Oh, how stupid men are!

2.E1:

“That depends partly on my Aunt’s plans.”

2.E2:

That’s quite untrue. As if I couldn’t go to Vienna alone. (38)

As for Dorsday, he is not only in agreement with the remarks about reciprocal friendship (9.D), but is very solicitous of Else, picking up on the girl’s emotional tension and showing himself interested even in the details of the situation. In this first part, Else dominates the scene. She speaks much more than Dorsday, if we consider both the number and length of her contributions to the dialogue. We see that she tries to gauge her remarks and guess the effect of her words on her interlocutor (2.E2). [. . .] [. . .] The interior monologue shows an Else who is disidentical to the one who is speaking to Dorsday if we consider the divergence between the way in which she speaks to him in reality (sweet, humble, respectful) and what she says about him to herself (at times ridiculing him, at times underlining his effrontery). Further proof of disidentity can be seen in the remarks which she addresses to that part of herself which is taking part in the dialogue, just as if it were another person whom she has to control, guide, encourage or scold. Probably in order to pluck up courage, Else repeats to herself that Dorsday is an old and dear friend of her father’s (1.E2), but she does not seem able to overcome her aversion to him as seen in the expressions of derision (2.E2). An aversion which has increased in response to the seductive attitude assumed by Dorsday. Gradually the idea that this man could make advances to her begins to creep into her mind (7.E2). Else’s interior monologue keeps us informed of the ambiguous messages that Dorsday is sending her through proxemics and the progressive invasion of her personal space. The man, who is aware of his growing power, begins to “close the distance”; he touches her arm, looks at

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Outside

Inside

1. E1: “Oh, I have some belief in premonitions and feelings. Think, Herr von Dorsday, I got a letter from home only today.”

1.E2: That wasn’t very clever. He looks rather puzzled. But go on, don’t stumble. He’s a good old friend of Father’s. Go on. Go on. Now, or never!

2. E1: “Herr von Dorsday, you spoke so kindly about Father just now that it would be simply horrid of me not to be quite straight-forward with you.”

2.E2: What calf’s eyes he is making at me! Oh dear, he notices something. Go on, go on.

3. E1: “You were mentioned in that letter, Herr von Dorsday. It was a letter from Mother.” 4. D:

“Really?”

5. E1: “It was a very sad letter. You know how things are in our family, Herr von Dorsday. . .”

3. E2:

Good Heavens, my voice is breaking. Forward, forward, there’s no retreat now – thank God! (39)

her in a way that Else defines as not decent and presses his knees against hers. The subtle infringement by Dorsday of the formal pattern of social relations is only the start of what will occur soon after. Faced with this behaviour, Else pretends not to understand. She is aware of her psychological subjection and almost recognizes the man’s right “to take the liberty”. Else’s interior monologue reveals the constant awareness of her disidentity, in that she has a clear perception of the lack of syntony between her “inside” and “outside”. As already mentioned, Else at times seems to simultaneously take on the roles of “Director” and “Actress”. The frequent use of the second person singular and the imperative is indicative of this split (1.E2, 2.E2, go on repeated several times). But in most cases, even when Else speaks in the first person, the separation of the roles seems clear-cut (3.E2, 4.E2, 7.E2).

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Outside

291

Inside

6.E1:

“Well, Herr von Dorsday, you’re an old friend of our family.”

4.E2: I said that very well.

7.E1:

“And you probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that Father is in a terrible mess again.”

5.E2: How strange my voice sounds! Is it me speaking? Am I dreaming? I’m sure I must look quite different, too, from what I usually do.

8.D:

“It certainly does not surprise me very much. You’re right there, Fräulein Else . . . although at the same time I regret it deeply.”

6.E2: Why do I look up to him so beseechingly? Smile, smile! It’s going all right.

9.D:

“I have a sincere feeling of friendship for your father – for all of you.”

7.E2: He oughtn’ t to look at me like that, it’s not decent. I’ll speak differently and not smile. I must behave with more dignity.

10.E1:

“Well, Herr von Dorsday, now you will have an opportunity of proving your friendship for my father.”

8.E2: Thank Heaven, I have got my old voice back. (40–41)

Outside

Inside

11.E1:

“You mean, Else, that otherwise an arrest would be inevitable?”

9.E2:

Why does he say it so disagreeably? I won’t answer, I’ll just nod . . .

12.E1:

“Yes.”

10.E2:

Now I’ve said yes after all. (42)

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Despite the noticeable distinction between roles, on more than one occasion, we are nevertheless aware of instances of insubordination by Else’s “outer” part, which at times seems to escape the control of the inner (5.E2: How strange my voice sounds! Is it me speaking? Am I dreaming?; 6.E2: Why do I look up to him so beseechingly? Smile, Smile! It’s going all right; 8.E2: Thank Heaven, I have got my old voice back). Examples which typify this lack of subordination can be seen in 9.E2 (I won’t answer, I’ll just nod . . .) and 10.E2 (Now I’ve said yes after all). Thus Else seems to perceive the split which takes on the characteristics of “dream” and “alienation” when she is not able to control the actions of her own body as she would like. Third part: the “indecent proposal” (pp. 46–51) The coup de théâtre which radically changes the reciprocal roles of the interlocutors is reserved until the final part of the dialogue. Else does not know what to say or what arguments to use to convince the recalcitrant Dorsday. Exhausted by the elusive attitude of the man, she is about to leave, tired and disgusted by the humiliation she has been forced to undergo. She fantasizes about extreme gestures as punishment for all the people around her. Dorsday, however, detains her as he has not yet given her his answer. Since the loan previously given to her father has never been repaid, as Dorsday is careful to point out, he declares that he is willing to grant the requested sum, above all because he has been persuaded by the intercession of such an enchanting young girl. The definitive reply is as follows: at midday, the day after tomorrow, her father’s creditor will be paid off . . . but on one condition. From this moment on, Dorsday is no longer the respectful family friend but an unscrupulous seducer ready to take advantage of the situation. He knows that Else is vulnerable and willing to sacrifice herself for the love of her father. Perhaps to some extent he believes in the charm he can exercise over the young woman. After all he is a rich man and though not still young, capable of courtship and seduction. Dorsday strips off his “elderly respectable gentleman” mask to put on that of the unprincipled old libertine who is both amoral and corrupt but also capable of corrupting. Aspects of the rake are evident in his ability to flatter using mellifluous and refined words but also in his cynicism and aura of “man of the world” who knows the way things are. He is a business man used to dealing with valuable objects and this is exactly what Else is for him, a valuable object which circumstances are unexpectedly offering him at a good price. Even in the dialogue Else seems to reify herself. Dumbfounded and bewildered by Dorsday’s proposal, she feels she is a coward, broken, humiliated and though astonished and confused reactions crowd her mind, few words issue from her mouth.

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Now it is Dorsday who is the undisputed protagonist of the scene. His is almost a monologue. Dorsday’s verbal dominance is a reflection of the interpersonal power that he is acquiring and which is expressed in the increasingly risqué audacity with which he addresses Else in the course of the sequence. He reduces the social distance both with proxemics (he approaches her, takes her hand, gazes at her ardently) and with words (he leaves off the appellative “Fräulein” and addresses her simply as Else. He also uses explicit words to express the attraction he feels for her etc.) The proposal-condition is preceded by a series of arguments whereby the man, on the one hand, seems to justify himself for what he is about to ask and on the other, reaches the conclusion that it is Else’s beauty and the present circumstances that are responsible for his actions. Noticing the astonishment and bewilderment of the girl who has now fallen silent, he embarks on arguments which, on the one hand, justify his request and on the other, may persuade Else to consent to it. Then he moves on to practical details. He is so generous as to leave it up to Else to choose the meeting place, either in his room or in a clearing in the wood. Dorsday even leaves her time to reflect calmly, asking her, however, to let him know her decision after dinner. Else is a passive presence in this part of the dialogue. Her only participation in it is first, to make excuses so as to get away, then undertake to be the guarantor for her father concerning the repayment of the money, then again to make excuses to break off the discussion and leave, and finally a sharp reply to Dorsday which is also an invitation not to continue the conversation. These are the last words the girl speaks to him. In the fragment chosen, we can observe how the condition imposed by Dorsday leaves Else in a state of bewilderment. At first she does not understand the request (Is he mad? He does see me. Oh, that’s what he means!). Then she understands what the man is driving at and her reaction, which is entirely inside her, is quite violent. Several times in her mind she calls him a scoundrel and would like to hit him, leave him in the lurch, but she is not able to . . . or perhaps does not want to. The girl is aware of the ambivalence of her feelings and of her disidentity. One part of her would like to react loudly, defend her integrity by hitting the impudent rascal whose physical proximity disgusts her so much; another part seems to put up resistance, perhaps not only for reasons of duty, propriety or good manners. In her repeated questioning (Why don’t I hit him in the face, the swine? [. . .] Why don’t I smack his face? [. . .] Why don’t I simply go?) Else leaves room for a doubt to creep in (I’d like to call him a brute, but I can’t. Or won’t?). It seems that there is something in the situation which, despite everything, allures her and does not allow her to move, caught as she is in the conflict between the desire-duty to leave and the desire-duty to stay. It is something obscure and undefined of which Else is not aware but which perhaps

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Outside 1.D:

“If you really should need a million some day, Else–I’m not a rich man, but we’ll see. But this time I will be moderate, like you. And this time I want nothing more, Else, than – to see you.”

Inside 1.E2:

Is he mad? He does see me. Oh, that’s what he means! Why don’t I hit him in the face, the swine? Have I turned red or white? You want to see me with nothing on? Many people would like that! I’m pretty with nothing on. Why don’t I smack his face? His face is enormous. Why so close, you brute? I don’t want your breath on my cheeks. Why don’t I simply go? Are his eyes holding me fast? We glare at each other like deadly enemies. I’d like to call him a brute, but I can’t. Or won’t? (49)

has something to do with showing herself in the nude, a theme which emerges very often in the course of the monologue. The gratification of an unconscious incestuous fantasy could also explain her confused feeling; this mixture of repugnance and attraction of which Else feels herself to be the victim. 4.3.2 The Dialogue with Paul (pp. 73–74) The second important example of “inside-outside” disidentity can be seen in the brief dialogue between Else and Paul. Here what emerges above all is the disidentity between the exterior image and Else’s inner world, a disidentity which she seems to be both fully conscious of and responsible for. After Else goes back into the hotel following her conversation with Dorsday and has spent some time thinking things over on her own, she hears someone call her name. It is Paul who is worried as he has not seen her at dinner. He scolds her gently for not having informed him, or Aunt Emma, his mother, so that they had all been thrown into a state of anxiety. Else comes up with the excuse that she had been overcome by a violent headache and Paul, after enquiring kindly into his cousin’s health, goes to reassure his mother.

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The dialogue with Paul, and Else’s monologue which interweaves with it, appear to us to be an interesting example of the expression of “inside outside” disidentity, of the discrepancy between the face Else shows to others and what is passing through her head at the same moment (thoughts, perceptions of herself and others etc.). We propose, yet again, to highlight the way in which the two Elses (“public” and “private”) emerge from the passage of dialogue by using a grid which underlines the split between the outer and inner dimensions. Else lies to Paul and observes herself lying. She gives herself instructions (1.E2), scolds herself for not expressing herself convincingly (2.E2), and evaluates the way she strikes a pose with her cousin (3.E2).

5 . T O WA R D S A D I A L O G I C A L T H E O R Y O F T H E I N N E R W O R L D

As we have tried to demonstrate with the examples taken from Schnizler’s novella, the inner theatre, the theatre of the consciousness, seems populated by several actors who play different roles. At one point the main character, alone on the “stage”, recites a monologue; at another point two or more characters converse together, sometimes in a way which is friendly, syntonic, productive and protective . . ., while at others in a way that is harshly conflictual, asymmetrical and destructive . . . Different parts of a person can enter into dialogue, that is they can enter into a conscious relationship. Or they can speak one after the other without conversing, so that they are contiguous but do not communicate. Or they can remain in silence. In the imagination, a person can converse with other people (imaginary logues and dialogues), giving and taking away their right to speech. The fundamental dialogicity of the inner world seems to mirror that of the outside world. Communication in the inner world occurs between parts of the same person, just as communication in the outside world occurs between interlocutors who are actually different. Therefore one can put forward the theory that this interior dialogicity is modelled on that of the outside world, that it is an internalization of the communicative structures present in the outside world and, more specifically, an internalization of the ways in which people relate to others who are important to them. The hypothesis of this work tends towards a dialogical theory of the inner world of the person considered as disidentical. This inner world is made up not solely of a single Subject but of several psychological Subjects. There is

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Outside 1.P:

“Else!”

2.E1:

“Oh, Paul. Why, what’s the matter, Paul?”

3.P:

“Where have you been hiding, Else?”

4.E1.

“Where do you suppose I’ve been hiding? I’ve been for a walk.”

5.P:

“Now – during dinner?”

6.E1:

“Well, why not? After all, it’s the best time for it.”

7.P:

“Mother has been imagining all sorts of things. I went to your door and knocked.”

8.E1:

“I didn’t hear you.”

9.P:

“But seriously, Else, how can you make us so uneasy? At least you could have let Mother know that you weren’t coming down to dinner.”

10.E1:

“You’re right, Paul, but if you’d had any idea what a headache I’ve had.”

Inside

1.E2:

I’ll put on an innocent air.

2.E2:

I’m talking nonsense.

3.E2:

I talk in a melting voice. Oh, what a hussy I am! (73)

only one grammatical and linguistic “I” for the person, but from time to time it refers to different parts of that person. Centre of Research in Psychology of Communication, University of Macerata, Macerata, Italy

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REFERENCES E. Berne, Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy (New York: Grove Press, 1961). E. Dujardin, Les lauriers sont coupés (Paris: Libraire de la « Revue Indépendante », 1888). S. Freud, Abriss der Psychoanalyse: Einführende Darstellungen, 1938 (Frankfurt am Mein: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995). F. Heiser, the psychology of interpersonal relations (New York: Wiley, 1958) W. James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890). W. James, Psychology : a Briefer Course (New York: Holt 1892). G. Lai, Disidentità (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1988). M. Mizzau, Eco e Narciso. Parole e silenzi nel conflitto uomo-donna (Torino: Boringhieri, 1979). M. Mizzau, Storie come vere. Strategie comunicative in testi narrativi (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1998). F.S. Perls, R.F. Hefferline, P. Goodman, Gestalt Therapy (New York: The Julian Press, 1951). E. Schegloff, H. Sacks, “Opening up closing”, Semiotica, 8 (4) (1973), pp. 361–327. A. Schnitzler, Fräulein Else, 1924, In: Die erzählenden Schriften, vol. II, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1961, pp. 324–381. A. Schnitzler, Fräulein Else , Eng. Translation (London: Puskin Press, 1998, 2001). A. Zuczkowski, Dialoghi quotidiani: il counselling amicale (Bologna: Clueb, 2004).

MING-QIAN MA

D E - S I T UAT E D N E S S : T H E S U B J E C T A N D I T S E X H AU S T I O N O F S PAC E I N G I L L E S D E L E U Z E

But just what is this situating? —–Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method The (deeply rooted) grammatical illusion of a subject is what generates all the errors . . . —–G. E. M. Anscombe, “The First Person” ABSTRACT

Deleuze’s philosophy of life in terms of pure immanence is inseparable from his radical rethinking of the subject. Having identified the situatedness as the subject’s form and syntactical link with the world that prevents it from engaging in the universal communication of events, he envisions a de-situated subject who is exhausted, and who exhausts itself by depotentializing space as already situated, defined by an a priori scheme. Deleuze’s reading of literature from this perspective thus gestures towards a social epiphenomenology, whereby to attain to the affirmation of disjunctive syntheses beyond logical contradictions as well as a-logical incompatibilities. I

“Calculated to displace dialectics,”1 Gilles Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism”2 envisions, as it entails, what Leonard Lawlor calls, in his reading of Deleuze reading Foucault, “a new notion of life,” a radically different concept of “the living” through which, and through which alone, he argues, “one can overcome metaphysics.”3 Conceived of as “pure immanence,” such “A life,” as Deleuze himself specifies it emphatically, “is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence,” in that “It is not immanence to life, but the immanence that is in nothing is itself a life” (PI, p. 27). Central to Deleuze’s ontology of life is, among many other issues of course, “an enterprise of desubjectification,”4 or, to put it in Daniel W. Smith’s summary words, of “The Dissolution of the Subject”5 as is hitherto conceptualized. Its objective, more specifically, is to de-ground and to displace the subject, both conceptually and methodologically, as the organizing agent positioned as such in an asymmetrical subject-object dialectics constitutive of life in terms 299 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 299–313. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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of metaphysics. “We will speak of a transcendental empiricism in contrast to everything that makes up the world of the subject and the object,” Deleuze thus begins his essay on life (PI, p. 25). Being “everywhere” as “a pure plane of immanence,” life, in this sense, “is not in something, to something,” Deleuze explains further; “it does not depend on an object or belong to a subject” (PI, pp. 29, 26). It follows then that life, manifesting itself as “the transcendental field,” “cannot be defined by the consciousness that is coextensive with it, but removed from any revelation,” and this is because, so argues Deleuze, “Consciousness becomes a fact only when a subject is produced at the same time as its object, both being outside the field and appearing as ‘transcendents’ ” (PI, p. 26).6 By “[eluding] all transcendence of the subject and of the object,” life then unfolds itself “as a pure stream of a-subjective consciousness, a prereflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without a self” (PI, pp. 26, 25). It presents, as Deleuze makes it clear in his reading of Johann Fichte and “his last philosophy,” “an absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers to a being but is ceaselessly posed in a life,” a life constituted, that is, by “The singularities and the events” (PI, pp. 27, 29). Deleuze’s desubjectification as such, which deactivates the “Subject as an act that brings about a synthesis of things” (PI, p. 27), certainly does not limit itself to the task of mere deconstructive critique. It presents itself, rather, as a dual project, with a parallel objective of experiment. Juxtaposed simultaneously with his desubjectification is, therefore, his theorizing of “a new conception of subjectivity,”7 of an entirely different subject capable of being “with the world.”8 It is well known that, throughout Deleuze’s writing, this new concept of the subject has been extensively explored and variously articulated in terms, for instance, of “becoming” (TP, pp. 232–309), of “schizophrenia [as] the process,”9 of “event-type individuations where there’s no subject,”10 of “a subject without any identity” (N , p. 115), of “dynamic individuations without subjects,”11 of “the index of a multiplicity” (PI, p. 30), and of a subjectivity structured by “the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis,”12 to name only some of the most recognized reconstructive formations. Presented as such, Deleuze’s empirical notion of the subject seems to have remained, regardless, “only a conceptual one,” as he himself has similarly pointed out in his critique of “the relation of the transcendental field to consciousness” (PI, p. 26) in metaphysics. It still appears, in its diversely descriptive configurations, to stand in need of an experiential practicality, a non-metaphorical tangibility, a socio-quotidian palpability, or, simply put, a literal grounding of some sort. Deleuze himself also acknowledges, quite candidly, certain degree of abstract oddity associated with his new concept of the subject, the paradoxical quality of which he attributes to the philosophy of

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Nietzsche, describing it ironically, not without a tinge of wry humor, as “a perverse taste,” and distinguishing it as “certainly something neither Marx nor Freud ever gave anyone” (N , p. 6). Deleuze thus writes: It’s a strange business, speaking for yourself, in your own name, because it doesn’t at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject. Individuals find a real name for themselves, rather, only through the harshest exercise in depersonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities everywhere within them, to the intensities running through them. (N , p. 6)13

To concretize such a depersonalized subject out of the misty shroud of strangeness and abstraction, and to enable it to live a life “in [its] own way, in affects, intensities, experiences, experiments” (N , p. 6), Deleuze then assumes the position of Hume, in whom he sees the “merit . . . in the singling out of this empirical problem in its pure state and its separation from the transcendental and the psychological” (ES, p. 87). Arguing that the subject is not given, but is constituted in the given, he emphasizes that the subject, to the extent that it is absolutely inseparable from “the singular content which is strictly essential to it,” and from “the circumstances” in which, and in which alone, it finds itself, is itself “essentially practical” (ES, p. 104). Following what John Rajchman calls “another logic,” a logic, that is, of “an empiricist,” (PI, pp. 8, 7) – or, more accurately phrased, an empirical phenomenologist – Deleuze then goes on to epitomize thusly his position: The fact that there is no theoretical subjectivity, and that there cannot be one, becomes the fundamental claim of empiricism. And, if we examine it closely, it is merely another way of saying that subject is constituted within the given. If the subject is constituted within the given, then, in fact, there is only a practical subject. (ES, p. 104)

That said, “The question Deleuze poses with regard to the subject” throughout his writing, as Smith has rightly observed (ECC, p. xxix), is “how the individual would be able to transcend his form and his syntactical link with a world, in order to attain to the universal communication of events, that is, to the affirmation of a disjunctive synthesis beyond logical contradictions, and even beyond a-logical incompatibilities.”14 Or, differently put, if there is only a practical subject constituted within the given, what, then, is its practical manifestation? II

Deleuze’s own answer to this question can be read as consisting of two parts. The first part of his answer deals with a preliminary inquiry: What, to begin with, is the form and syntactical link which the subject should transcend? To this question, the reply is suggested in his contrasting analysis of what constitutes the difference between two types of critique: the transcendental and the

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empirical. In the title essay collected in Empiricism and Subjectivity, he thus outlines the two opposing trajectories: We embark upon a transcendental critique when, having situated ourselves on a methodologically reduced plane that provides an essential certainty – a certainty of essence – we ask: how can there be a given, how can something be given to a subject, and how can the subject give something to itself? Here, the critical requirement is that of a constructive logic which finds its model in mathematics. The critique is empirical when, having situated ourselves in a purely immanent point of view, which makes possible a description whose rule is found in determinable hypotheses and whose model is found in physics, we ask: how is the subject constituted in the given? The construction of the given makes room for the constitution of the subject. The given is no longer given to a subject; rather, the subject constitutes itself in the given. (ES, p. 87)15

Succinct, lucid, but emphatic, the rhetoric of this passage makes a crucial statement. It brings to the forefront one pivotal issue. What constitutes each critique, thereby signifying the fundamental demarcation between the transcendental and the empirical, is, as Deleuze has taken pains to indicate, how the subject (“we”) situates itself (“having situated ourselves . . .”) or how the subject is situated, which, as the originating and grounding move of positioning, functions to determine and to establish, each in its own way, the precondition for the operation of the critique. By way of an illustrative contrast stylistically enhanced through a syntactical parallel and phrasal reiteration (“when, having situated ourselves . . . when, having situated ourselves”), he thus calls attention to a fact fundamental to the hitherto formation of subjectivity. Insofar as the subject is concerned generally, Deleuze contends, it is its situatedness that is determining; it dictates, more specifically, the subject’s structure of consciousness, its conception of subjectivity, its status as being, its perspectival orientation, its position vis-à-vis the life-world, its type and nature of the critique, its methodological grounding, and its corresponding questions. Thus articulated, Deleuze’s understanding of the nature and function of situatedness on the part of the subject resonates, in one sense, with that of Jean-Paul Sartre who, in his critique of Marxism, captures the essence of situatedness as the formal, syntactical, and operational scheme similarly theorized and practiced by “The contemporary Marxist.”16 An existentialist is “not simply” a Marxist, Sartre thus insists on the fundamental difference, principally because the latter is always already situated, and dogmatically to boot. As is the case with “the statements of Engels and Garaudy,” a contemporary Marxist is so situated, thus explains Sartre, as to consider these statements, precisely due to the dictation of such situatedness, as “concrete truths” rather than “guiding principles . . . indications of jobs to be done . . . problems,” as already “clear, precise, and unequivocal” rather than “insufficiently defined and, as such, capable of numerous interpretations” (SM, p. 35). In response to the vexed question

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“But just what is this situating?” in this particular context (SM, p. 36), Sartre then offers a concrete answer. He writes, If I turn to the works of contemporary Marxists, I see that they mean [by situating] to determine for the object considered its real place in the total process; they will establish the material conditions of its existence, the class which has produced it, the interests of that class (or of a segment of that class), its movement, the forms of its struggle against the other classes, the relation of forces to each other, the stakes, etc. (SM, p. 36)

Viewed from this perspective, situatedness is a decisive positioning that establishes and constructs, from the position of the subject, a transcendental vantage point of total perception and its concomitant total orchestration. It constitutes, in its totality, the form and syntactical link in which and through which the subject finds itself in a determined and determining relation with the world. Having thus identified situatedness as the subject’s form and syntactical link with the world, Deleduze’s and Sartre’s critical understandings and explanations of it in such terms then beg the question of a primitive yet necessary definition: What does it means, specifically, by situatedness? To situate, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it in its various forms,17 is “to give a site to,” “to place, locate,” “to establish or indicate the place of,” “to put in a context,” “to bring into defined relations,” and so forth. Its adjectival and past participle form of “situated” has the denotative meaning of “placed” and “located” when referring to places or things, and “placed in relation to” or “in respect of” certain “circumstances” when involving persons. Understood in this light, the verbal phrase “to situate,” or “to be situated,” takes on a tripartite signification, with a subject assumed as given. First, and most explicitly, it is spatial, predicated on space as the medium of its embodiment, perceptually, conceptually as well as physically. Site-specific in its action, to situate is always to situate, therefore, somewhere. Secondly, equally explicit but more important is that to situate is to institute a placement always “in reference to” someone or something, as Sartre has observed, whatever that might be (SM, p. 36); and that the nature of such an “in-reference-to,” which defines a placement, is always structural and relational. For the placement, upon engaging any given space by being inserted into it, invests in the latter by transforming it from a “smooth” or “nomad” space into a “striated” or “sedentary” one (TP, p. 474), from an otherwise vastly horizontal expanse of “geographical” distributions into a vertically internal stratification of “geological” semantics.18 It either effects, in Rajchman’s terms, “a space defined by an a priori ‘scheme’ ” (PI, p. 15), or conforms to an already organized space. To situate, in this sense, is to tap into the possibilities and the potentialities of the space by configuring or reconfiguring it, fabricating it into a meaningful context, mapping it into a network of defined relations, and ordering it into explainable circumstances,

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in each of which all elements involved are coordinated in relational terms with each other and rationalized into a hierarchal structure. And thirdly, as both Deleuze and Sartre have amply indicated, to situate is to be functional – i.e., teleological. On this issue, David Simpson, in his study of situatedness, offers a useful overview of some of the teleological functions of situating as is rationalized and practiced in hitherto everyday life.19 Foregrounding situational contexts or contextual situations, Simpson defines situatedness as “the dwelling in situations,” situations the nature of which is always characterized, as is commonly experienced, by “a measure of the unstable and indecisive” (S, p. 20). That being the case, situatedness is, for one thing, psychological in function, in that it magnifies the presence of “agency” and its “gesture of freedom” in the midst of uncertainty and uncontrollability, thereby producing for the subject “a measure of comfort” by ensuring a degree of “manageability” of whatever situations dealt with (S, p. 20). For another, situatedness is fundamentally epistemological, and its emphasis is placed “on solving, or seemingly to solve, residual problems in the epistemology of subject-object relations by the invocation of an in-place and in-time practical attitude to living in the world” (S, p. 24). A case in point is Donna Haraway, Simpson points out, whose notion of “Situated Knowledge” reinstates “agents” who are believed to be “progressives,” and “allows [them] as much access to objectivity as is needed for changing the world and keeps [them] at a distance from the temptation to subscribe to outright relativism” (S, pp. 24, 25).20 For yet another, situatedness functions as methodology and through methodology, and to situate is to be methodologically armed and prepared against all possible odds, whatever the kind. It is to “become methodologically affirmative” vis-à-vis the situation one faces, which, again, is “a way of preserving or reinventing a function for agency, for human effort, in the face of all the familiar forces – that state, ideology, the sex-gender system, the economy – that have seemed to threaten such agency with extinction” (S, p. 25).21 In this light, to situate is to enact the invocation of methodology for the purpose to “ultimately . . . authenticate” the subject “under various pressures” (S, p. 27). For still yet another, situatedness has a communicative function, which is to achieve strategic orientations and to establish familiar points of references against conflicts, ambiguities, confusions, and misunderstandings in social exchanges and communal interactions. It provides one, expediently but usefully, with the “explanatory principle” and the “rhetoric of knowledge” (S, p. 204) in face of doubts, suspicions, questions, and challenges, and by so doing, helps to find, locate, and secure one’s legitimate place in a given situation. Spatial, relational, and teleological, situatedness thus presents the ultimate expression of self-assertion, self-validation, and self-representation.22 It aims

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at realizing, maximally, the possibilities and “the potentialities of an anyspace-whatever,” as Deleuze himself puts it (ECC, p. 160). Being the subject’s form and syntactical link with the world, it operates by a self-serving paradox. For whereas to situate is to imply, if not to acknowledge, the limits or boundaries that necessitate the act of situating in the first place, as Simpson has observed (S, pp. 28, 163), it is precisely from these limits and boundaries that universal claims are made.23 Otherwise stated, situatedness, understood as the subject’s embodiment as well as enactment of “a reason, a ratio, a connection, a relation” in its approach to the life-world, circumscribes what Michel Serres terms, in his formal and structural study of the strategies of positioning in epistemologies since the “Classical Age,” as a “game-space,” one in which these limits and boundaries, precisely by virtue of their status as “minorants,” are “majorized” psychologically into self-justifiable pretenses on the one hand and, on the other, “maximized” methodologically into judicial verdicts, metaphysical absolutes, founding propositions, and a priori conditions in its engagement with the world.24 Once strategized into “the maximum maximorum” (H , p. 27), these limits and boundaries stage a paradox: They constitute the preconditions for transcendence and the conditions for laws of universality. Indeed, in these limits and boundaries that give rise to situatedness as the subject’s form and syntactical link with the world, “there exists,” as Serres has pointed out, “a guaranteed winning strategy” (H , p. 27). III

Against the situatedness as such, the second part of Deleuze’s answer to his own question presents an empirical alternative. The way in which a subject is able to transcend its situatedness as its form and syntactical link with the world, Deleuze seems to say, is to de-situate itself, and the practical manifestation of such a de-situated, practical subject assumes the form of what Deleuzes describes, rather poetically, as an “exhausted” subject (ECC, p. 152).25 Unable to “possibilize” any longer, an exhausted subject is a “sufficiently disinterested and sufficiently scrupulous” one, and it is exhausted in that it “exhausts [itself] in exhausting the possible,” Deleuze thus explains, in “[exhausting] that which, in the possible, is not realized” (ECC, pp. 152, 154). In other words, an exhausted subject is one who has exhausted itself by exhausting “the whole of the possible,” “the sum total of all possibility” (ECC, p. 152), as the a priori condition for any potential realization of the possible. Fundamental to Deleuze’s thinking herein is his concept of exhaustion, which he differentiates from that of realization. By his own account, to realize anything is always a situated act that pivots upon the specificities of the subject’s particular situatedness. For “The realization of the possible,” he points

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out, “always proceeds through exclusion, because it presupposes preferences and goals” (ECC, p. 153). “When one realizes some of the possible,” Deleuze thus goes on to explain further, “one does so according to certain goals, plans, and preferences”; so much so that “in fact, one even creates the possible to the extent that one realizes it” (ECC, p. 152). Understood from this perspective, the possible ceases to be innocent or neutral; it becomes, rather, the chosen possible, the predetermined possible, the authorized possible, and the manipulated possible; and it is realizable precisely because it is controllable. In other words, the very possibility of the possible lies in the very situatedness of the subject, and the very realize-ability26 of the possible is measured in direct proportion to the varying degrees of the specifically situated ambitions, intentions, needs, and purposes on the part of the subject. In stark contrast, “Exhaustion is something entirely different,” Deleuze contends, because it is a de-situated act. Also referred to as “The combinatorial,” exhaustion is “the art or science” of desituatedness in that it “combines the set of variables of a situation, on the condition that one renounces any order of preference, any organization in relation to a goal, any signification” (ECC, pp. 154, 153). Thus de-situated, it exhausts the possible “through inclusive disjunctions” (ECC, p. 154), through, that is, an indiscriminate acceptance of the different and the diverse, an unconditional embracing of the undifferentiated multiple. Deleuze brings his view into focus as follows: The combinatorial is the art or science of exhausting the possible through inclusive disjunctions. But only an exhausted person can exhaust the possible, because he has renounced all need, preference, goal, or signification. Only the exhausted person is sufficiently disinterested, sufficiently scrupulous. Indeed, he is obliged to replace his plans with tables and programs that are devoid of all meaning. For him, what matters is the order in which he does what he has to do, and in what combinations he does two things at the same time – when it is still necessary to do so, for nothing . . .. The combinatorial exhausts its object, but only because its subject is himself exhausted. The exhaustive and the exhausted. (ECC, p. 154)

More importantly, the de-situated, exhausted subject exhausts the whole of the possible by “exhausting space,” as Deleuze makes it emphatically clear, by “exhausting the potentialities of an any-space-whatever,” by “extenuating the potentialities of space” (ECC, pp. 152, 163, 160, 161).27 For space is prior, and hence constitutive, both structurally and functionally, of any systems of signification. “Space has potentialities inasmuch as it makes the realization of events possible,” Deleuze writes, “it therefore precedes realization, and potentiality itself belongs to the possible” (ECC, p. 160). Differently put, space presents itself as the phenomenological condition, as the physical sphere in which, and in which alone, realization of anything is rendered possible through reduction because it is an already charged space, invested space, striated space, conditioned as well as conditional space. It is, in other words, situated space, already

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defined by an a priori scheme. As such, the potentialities of space, which lie in making the realization of events possible, are in fact identical with the possible events to be realized. Furthermore, “Entirely determined geometrically,” such a situated space offers its potentiality in the form of a logical directive, of an itinerary map, for the realizations of the possible, and it “appears,” as Deleuze puts it in a mixed metaphor, “as a motor ritornello – postures, positions, gaits – to the one who travels through it” (ECC, p. 160). Space-dependent, “Potentiality is a double possible,” Deleuze specifies it further; “It is the possibility that an event, in itself possible, might be realized in the space under consideration: the possibility that something is realizing itself, and the possibility that some place is realizing it” (ECC, p. 163). Whichever the case, it is imperative that an exhausted subject exhausts the whole of the possible by exhausting space – i.e., by depotentializing space (ECC, p. 163). IV

Deleuze finds in literature the model of such a de-situated, exhausted subject engaged in exhausting space. In Pure Immanence, he illustrates his concept of “A life” in terms of “immanence” with a brief episode from Charles Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend,28 the title of which clearly suggests, among other issues, inclusiveness (“mutual”). Focusing on the changing feelings, behaviors, and relations between a rogue and the people around him, he captures an intense moment of a different life, of which he offers the following reading: A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degree that he comes back to life, his saviors turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death. (PI, p. 28)

There are, as Deleuze outlines explicitly in the above description, two scenes juxtaposed with one another, both centering on the rogue, the people around him, and their mutual relations with and corresponding reactions to one another. The first part of the passage presents, in the main, the characters’ interactions when the rogue lies dying, whereas the second part gives a brief narration of what happens when the same rogue comes back to life. It is clear that the second scene, in which the rogue comes back to life, delineates a familiar and recognizable social space. It is a space that is “already situated in its generality,” to put it in Sartre’s more straightforward words (SM, p. 50), with its social standards, class hierarchies, moral codes, behavioral norms, and evaluative criteria already established and programmed into

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the social psyche at large, and with all its subjects situated in it accordingly. Such a social space finds its own mirror image, then, in the “theatrical space,” as Deleuze thus compares it in performative terms, at once metaphorically and literally, and in “the manner in which [the theatrical space] is filled and determined by the signs and masks through which the actor plays a role.”29 The rogue is a case in point. As is both denoted and connoted by his identity label, the rogue is a specifically situated subject in his relation to society in general, and to those immediately around him in particular; and his situatedness as a rogue is defined by his social standing, economic status, moral character, and behavioral patterns, among other factors. Having been situated in the social space as such, he truthfully performs his role by presenting himself the way he is expected: being “mean and crude” to others, and making himself “disreputable” and “[contemptible]” in the eyes of society. In a similar fashion, people around the rogue react to him negatively, also as they are expected (“turn colder,” holding him in “contempt,” considering him as “disreputable”), precisely due to their different situatedness, a situatedness that articulates their own sense of superiority over the rogue, a socio-economic-moral superiority advocated and privileged by society. Thus situated respectively in the social space, whose potentialities lie in making the realizations of events possible within the confines of that social space, both the rogue and those around him succeed in executing their situated acts of realizing the already determined possible: the rogue’s meanness and crudeness, and people’s coldness toward and contempt for him. In this sense, the second scene stages the daily banality of realizing the possible, and what is realized by all the subjects therein are, in fact, the socially sanctioned and socially demanded stereotypical performances of exclusions, which are none other than the potentialities – i.e., social perceptions, social needs, and social preferences – of that very same social space. By contrast, the first scene, in which the rogue lies dying, dramatizes an intense moment of a different life. Characterized as “neutral,” it is a life “beyond good and evil” (PI, p.29),30 beyond categorical distinctions and systematic exclusions. “Freed from the accidents of internal and external life” (PI, p. 28) as socio-psychologically determined potentialities and possibilities, it is a life, not of role-playing, but of combinatorial living in which the subjects, who used to be situated concretely in the social space, have de-situated themselves by discarding all socially constructed significations represented by that space. This moment of de-situated openness in turn “releases a pure event” of living (PI, p. 28), in the immediate intensity of which the rogue’s hard core of meanness and crudeness is thoroughly penetrated by “something soft and sweet” from “those taking care of him,” and people’s coldness toward and contempt for the rogue give way to “an eagerness, respect, even love, for his

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slightest sign of life.” In the intensity of this de-situated living there appears, then, a new type of subjects, who, in their moment of exhausting the potentialities of the social space as situated determinations for the realizations of its own situated possibilities, have exhausted themselves into “singularities rather than particularities,” as Rajchman summarizes it (PI, p. 8). De-situated and exhausted, the characters herein succeed, then, in crossing over social, economic, and moral demarcation lines that have constructed the paradigms of exclusion, and in breaking open the categories and systems of separation and segmentation. In this sense, the first scene, by staging the dynamics of inclusive disjunctions, offers a glimpse of a life beyond logical contradictions, beyond, indeed, even a-logical incompatibilities. It sketches the contours of the pure plane of immanence of a living “made up of virtualities, events, singularities,” as Deleuze has described, a living the “indefinite article” of which presents, paradoxically, “the mark not of an empirical indetermination but of a determination by immanence or a transcendental determinability” (PI, p. 30). V

Deleuze’s ontology of a life as immanent, and his conception of a de-situated, exhausted subject exhausting the potentialities of space through the combinatorial of living, argues for a radical rethinking of existential phenomenology. Though envisioned and articulated in terms of transcendental empiricism, his philosophy of life is, as Deleuze himself has stated in his reading of pataphysics and of Alfred Jarry as a precursor to Heidegger, “inseparable from a phenomenology, that is, from a new sense and a new comprehension of phenomena” (ECC, p. 91). Moreover, Deleuze’s extensive as well as intensive engagement with literature as the material of his philosophical rethinking, and “as the site of a philosophical problem to be inquired into and conceptualized,”31 gestures, in the spirit of daring explorations and experiments, to what might be referred to as a social epiphenomenology. For the phenomenon of the de-situated and exhausted subject, in whom a life “is itself actualized” (PI, p. 31) in the moment of depotentializing space by the subject, “does not refer to a consciousness, but to a Being,” thus argues Deleuze, “the Being of the phenomenon that consists precisely in its self-showing [semontrer]” (ECC, p. 92). More concretely, “The Being of the phenomenon is the ‘epiphenomenon’,” which is none other than “the self-showing of the phenomenon” (ECC, p. 92). In this sense, Deleuze’s conception of a de-situated and exhausted subject presents itself, perhaps, as the first exploratory step toward “a new conception of society,” as Rajchman has put it, “in which what we have in common is our singularities and not our individualities” (PI, p. 14). It points to a social epiphenomenology, with self-showing of phenomena being

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the precondition for the attainment of the universal communication of events, of the affirmation of disjunctive syntheses beyond logical contradictions and a-logical incompatibilities. In his rethinking toward a future life-world of immanence, Deleuze’s “fantastic decomposition of the self” (ECC, p. 154) thus leads to the radical concept of a de-situated and exhausted subject capable of transcending the form and syntactical link with the world by depotentializing space. It is, indeed, a new subject; and it “remains forever new” (DR, p. 136) in that its “only identity,” as Deleuze makes it clear, is “experimentation on [itself]” (D, p. 11). The State University of New York, Buffalo, New York NOTES 1

Boundas (1991, p. 8). Henceforth cited in the text as ES. Deleuze (2005, p. 25). Henceforth cited in the text as PI. 3 Lawlor (2006, p. 9). Lawlor’s study is a continuing rethinking of the issue of immanence of life, and it is contextualized historically in what he refers to as “an epoch of bio-power” (p. 1), against which he makes his argument. Though unmistakably Deleuzean in its overall perspective, as is alluded to in the title of the book, Lawlor’s theorizing of this new notion of life, or “the notion of the living (le vivant)” (p. 9), for which he has coined the term “life-ism” (p. 122), is primarily based on his reading of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Foucault in connection with Husserl and Heidegger. For the summary of his concept of life-ism, see especially Chapter 10 of the book. 4 Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 270). Henceforth cited in the text as TP. 5 Smith (1997, p. xxviii). Henceforth cited in the text as ECC. Original italics. Unless otherwise noted, all forms of emphases are to the original. 6 The term “transcendents” is put in quotation marks in Deleuze’s text because he attributes it and its usage to Jean-Paul Sartre. In an endnote, he thus writes, “Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, who posits a transcendental field without a subject that refers to a consciousness that is impersonal, absolute, immanent: with respect to it, the subject and the object are ‘tarnscendents’ ” (La transcendance de l’Ego [Paris:Vrin, 1966], pp. 74–87). To read the endnote in its entirety, see PI, p. 32. 7 John Rajchman, “Introduction” in PI, p. 9. In more specific terms, he argues that, on the issue of subjectivity, Deleuze “sees Hume as connecting empiricism and subjectivity in a new way, departing from Locke on the question of personal identity,” and that, though Deleuze’s new conception of subjectivity “acquires its full force from Hume,” it “goes beyond his ‘associationism’ ” (PI, pp. 12, 9). For more details, see his “Introduction,” pp. 7–23. See also Deleuze’s chapter on “Hume” in PI. For more in-depth discussion of this topic, see Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity. 8 Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 169). 9 Deleuze and Guattari (1983, p. 24). 10 Deleuse (1995, p. 115). Henceforth cited in the text as N . 11 Deleuze and Parnet (1987, p. 93). Henceforth cited in the text as D. 12 Deleuze (1988, p. 106). Henceforth cited in the text as F. 13 My emphasis. 14 Deleuze (1990, p. 178). My emphasis. 15 My emphasis. 2

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Sartre (1963, p. 35). Henceforth cited in the text as SM. For a brief description of the history of the word “to situate” as it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, see David Simpson, Situatedness: Or, Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 21–22. Henceforth cited in the text as S. 18 The two words “geographical” and “geological” are thus used by Jean-Jacques Lecercle in his discussions of the concepts of metamorphosis and transfer in Deleuze’s notion and treatment of language. With these two terms, Lecercle contrasts Deleuze’s “syntagmatic” approach with Jakobson’s “paradigmatic” one. For more details, see his book-length study of Deleuze titled Deleuze and Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), especially pp. 22, 27, 232. 19 Though David Simpson’s book-length study presents, in principle, an interdisciplinary engagement with the issue of situatedness, it approaches it and addresses its polemics primarily from the umbrella perspective of modern and contemporary popular culture and social sciences, as is clearly suggested in its subtitle Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From. It focuses on an analysis and understanding of how situatedness works in everyday life as one knows it. The result is an intricate study still grounded, however, in the principles and concepts of traditional humanism but articulated through an all-to-familiar postmodern rhetoric. To the final question “Can We Stop Situating Ourselves,” for instance, his answer is, understandably, a dialectically idealized one when he thus concludes his study, “A long way to go, that is, in coming to terms with situatedness as imprecise albeit essential information for the adjudication and prediction of human needs and human futures” (S, pp. 192, 247). When quoting from Simpson’s book, this paper will use only his relevant observations and pertinent expressions but not his arguments. 20 For complete details of Donna J. Haraway’s argument, see “Chapter 9: Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” in her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp.183–201. 21 As the examples of “familiar forces” therein make it equally clear (“the state, ideology, the sexgender system, the economy”), Simpson attributes such methodological function of situatedness to “typically the intellectuals on the left” (S, p. 25). But his understanding of the methodological function of situatedness in these terms goes certainly beyond the limited circle of the left, applicable in fact to almost every sector of society. 22 For a detailed philosophical study of the situatedness of the subject in the large context of representationalism, see The Situated Self by Ismael (2007). For a textual and cultural study of situatedness in terms of interpretations and representations, see Harry Berger, Jr., Situated Utterance: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations, with an introduction by Judith H. Anderson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 23 Though Simpson does not explicitly emphasize the paradoxical nature and function of situating, he does seem to perceive the function of situating along this line of thinking. When discussing “one’s situatedness [as] an admission of one’s limits rather than a claim to authority,” for instance, he points out that “the subject secures itself precisely in confessing its insecurity” (S, p. 28). 24 Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, edited by Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell, Postface by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 15, 16, 19, 20, 27. My emphases. Henceforth cited in the text as H . Serres’s formal and structural study of the strategies of knowledge acquisition in science across disciplines provides an illuminating insight into Deleuze’s thinking on the issue of situatedness. For more details of his in-depth analysis, see especially “Chapter 2: Knowledge in the Classical Age: La Fontaine and Descartes,” pp. 15–28. 25 Deleuze is very emphatic about the difference between “exhaustion” and “tiredness,” and he begins his essay by drawing a distinction between a “tired person” and an “exhausted person.” He writes: “Being exhausted is much more than being tired. The tired person no longer has any (subjective) possibility at his disposal; he therefore cannot realize the slightest (objective) possibility. 17

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But the latter remains, because one can never realize the whole of the possible; in fact, one even creates the possible to the extent that one realizes it. The tired person has merely exhausted the realization, whereas the exhausted person exhausts the whole of the possible. The tired person can no longer realize, but the exhausted person can no longer possibilize” (ECC, p. 152). 26 My coinage, for the lack of a better word. 27 According to Deleuze, exhausting space is just one of the “four ways of exhausting the possible,” and the complete list runs as follows: – forming exhaustive series of things, – drying up the flow of voices, – extenuating the potentialities of space, – dissipating the power of the image. (ECC, p. 161) 28 Dickens (1989). The scene Deleuze excerpts and comments on is on page 443 of the novel. 29 Deleuze (1994, p. 10). Henceforth cited in the text as DR. 30 Much has been said and written positively on ethics in Deleuze’s thinking. When trying to relate it to Deleuze’s conception of the subject, however, the issue of ethics is not without theoretical problems, which will be the topic of another study. 31 Ma (2005, p. 97).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Berger, Harry, Jr. Situated Utterance: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations. Judith H. Anderson (intro.). New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Boundas, Constantin V. “Introduction: Deleuze, Empiricism, and the Struggle for Subjectivity,” in Gilles Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. Constantin V. Boundas (trans.). New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 1–19. Deleuze, Gilles. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. Constantin V. Boundas (trans., with an introduction). New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on Life. John Rajchman (intro.), Anne Boyman (trans.). New York: Zone Books, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Brian Massumi (trans., with a foreword). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Hugh Tomlinson, Graham Burchell (trans.). New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane (trans.), Michel Foucault (preface). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Deleuze, Gilles Negotiations. Martin Joughin (trans.). New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam (trans.). New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Sean Hand (trans., ed.), Paul Bové (foreword). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Martin Lester, Charles Stivale (trans.), Constantin V. Boundas (ed.). New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Paul Patton (trans.) New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Daniel W. Smith, Michael A. Greco (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

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Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Ismael, J. T. The Situated Self. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Lawlor, Leonard. The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life. New York: Fordham UP, 2006. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Deleuze and Langauge. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Ma, Ming-Qian. “Becoming Phenomenology: Style, Poetic Texture, and the Pragmatic Turn in Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres,” in Analecta Husserliana LXXXIV. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.). Netherlands: Springer, 2005. 97–116. Rajchman, John. “Introduction,” in Gilles Deleuze’s Pure Immanence: Essays on Life. Anne Boyman (trans.). New York: Zone Books, 2005. 7–23. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Search for a Method. Hazel E. Barnes (trans., with an introduction). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. Serres, Michel. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Josué V. Harari, David F. Bell (ed.), Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers (postface). Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Simpson, David. Situatedness: Or, Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2002. Smith, Daniel W. “Introduction: ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’: Deleuze’s ‘Critique et Clinique’ Project,” in Gilles Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical. Daniel W. Smith, Michael A. Greco (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. xi–liii.

BRIAN CHRISTOPHER KANOUSE

T H E P O S T- S T RU C T U R A L E F F E C T O N T H E LIFE-WORLD: RE-THINKING CRITICAL S U B J E C T I V I T Y A N D E T H I C S T H RO U G H EXISTENTIAL PERFORMANCE AND THE C O N S T I T U T I V E P O W E R O F P E R F O R M AT I V I T Y

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I analyze and discuss how Judith Butler’s concept of performativity works as a critique of critical existential conceptions of subjectivity as well as a corrective in regards to understanding and delimiting how ethical questions of individual responsibility and agency can be understood. In line with the fundamental insights of Emmanuel Levinas’s post-humanist philosophy of the Other, Butler seeks to approach the conditions under which subjectivity unfolds, relying primarily on a critically oriented conception of discourse and the need to break ties with the narcissism of an ontologically grounded subject. Particularly I analyze the concept of existential performance, as understood through a critical appropriation of intentionality and facticity as found in traditional existential phenomenology. In so doing, I display how the poststructural concept of performativity deconstructs the ontological assumptions of critical existential performance, displaying fundamental problems imbedded in existential philosophy. By illuminating an uncritical assumption imbedded in existential thinking about the simple “thereness” of the subject, and by analyzing the conditions under which the subject is produced, it will be seen that the task of existential phenomenology needs to be radically re-evaluated. In the vein of Levinas’s shifting of the grounds of phenomenology, this essay will make clear that the concept of performativity does not eradicate the agency of the subject, but rather works to explain how, due to the nature of history and discourse, the agential subject of humanism has been normatively assumed in our day to day lives. By critiquing and contrasting critical existential performance with the constitutive power of performativity, this essay works to establish the need for a post-humanist attitude of humility, one that can guide 315 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 315–332. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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us in thinking through the possibilities of ethical subjectivity without installing an uncritical awareness of the very tools of our inquiries. If critical thinking has something to say about or to the present situation, it may well be in the domain of representation where humanization and dehumanization occur ceaselessly.Judith Butler1

In his book The Intervention of the Other, David Fryer aptly describes the contemporary philosophical landscape as being focused on post-humanist inquiries surrounding ethics, particularly in terms of subjectivity.2 Taking seriously critiques of essence, autonomy and self-transparency, post-humanist studies have been defined by inquiries into historical situatedness, contingency and otherness, and the discursive production of the subject. In the analysis of what “Otherness” means, and how it comes to interrupt the development of subjectivity, new questions as to who one is and how we are related to other human beings come to the fore. In Otherwise than Being, Emmanuel Levinas formulates the situation as such: Subjectivity is the other in the same, in a way that also differs from that of the presence of interlocutors to one another in a dialogue, in which they are at peace and in agreement with one another. The other in the same determinative of subjectivity is the restlessness of the same disturbed by the other.3

At the core of this restlessness, we find Levinas depicting the Other and discourse as challenging “the celebrated ‘right to existence’ that Spinoza called the conatus essendi and defined as the basic principle of all intelligibility.”4 This poses quite a quandary for existential philosophy, in that at the very core of its trajectory is the fight for the establishment of this right to existence, not as something given over by a particular political disposition or party, but as a very fact of being. The ontological fact of one’s existence itself is seen as containing the freedom of the individual, which is won by developing a powerfully critical and self-reflexive relationship with oneself and the world. To call its status into question, and the manner in which it is established through phenomenological and existential methodologies, is to also raise questions about where the site of subjectivity unfolds. For if it is not upon the very body and through the expression of a singular human being, where and what is it? This is precisely what I would like to analyze in this essay, and I would like to do so by looking at how the mediation of the Other and of discourse, as described by Levinas and Judith Butler, work to show the fundamental problems in philosophies of existence. It is through establishing the primacy of discourse and the concomitant sense of the precariousness of subjectivity, of the dispersed and irretrievable ground of one’s being, that philosophies of existence will be seen as problematically constructed and held within a form of narcissism.

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It is with this in mind that I wish to discuss Judith Butler’s work, and in particular, her concept of performativity. I align this inquiry with her own interest in taking up Levinas’ concerns with the Other. For she believes that “through a cultural transposition of his philosophy, it is possible to see how dominant forms of representation can and must be disrupted for something about the precariousness of life to be approached.”5 Performativity is a concept that attempts to do just that. Powerfully discussed in Gender Trouble and tediously clarified since, performativity is an intriguing and useful concept that attempts to incorporate the critiques of metaphysics and onto-theology that came out of 20th century phenomenology, placing its basis in historical and discursive production.6 What will be important to establish in this essay is a clear sense of how the concept of performativity resituates the processes (and therefore the site) of subjectivity in light of a post-humanist critique. For it does not eradicate the subject, but rather works to explain how, due to the nature of history and discourse, the subject of humanism comes to be assumed in our day to day lives and how such an assumption, as found in philosophies of existence, must be critically analyzed. Thus, I wish to seriously problematize the existential subject and the site that it wishes to project for subjectivity. Through this analysis, I will illuminate the necessity of recognizing the consequences of post-humanist inquiries, particularly if we wish to understand what critical philosophy can mean. E X I S T E N T I A L I S M A N D I T S C R I T I C A L A P P R O P R I AT I O N

We find in Jean-Paul Sartre’s development of the subject some distinctive elements of existential philosophy, and in addition, concepts that have been challenged and changed in order to hold onto its fundamental insights as to the nature of subjectivity. I wish to highlight how a critical appropriation of existentialism becomes necessary in light of post-humanist critiques of individualism and essentialism, particularly in relation to how the concept of history initially remained unproblematic for existential philosophy. To do so, I will turn to Sartre’s initial attempts to protect the freedom and autonomy of the subject by distancing it from the relevant influential forces of one’s historicity. First, one must recall that for Sartre, above all else, the pour-soi must remain free. His eccentric ontology and his radicalization of the cogito are constructed in order to maintain the status of the for-itself as free, and as such, each subjective act must be seen as dictated by the for-itself. Freedom here refers to the ability to make choices about one’s being-in-the-world, one’s ability to “choose oneself”. This does not occur somehow “outside” of being-in-itself, or merely “inside” the for-itself. Rather, in order for the for-itself to take up a

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self-relation, it must be mediated by the in-itself. This mediation is explained by Sartre as one’s facticity, which is “the For-Itself’s necessary connection with the In-itself, hence with the world and its own past. It is what allows us to say that the For-itself is or exists. The facticity of freedom is the fact that freedom is not able not to be free.”7 Though the in-itself is a necessary condition for the existence of the for-itself, it does not have the capacity to change the nature of the for-itself’s freedom – in fact, it ensures it. (1) No factual state whatever it may be (the political and economic structure of society, the psychological “state”, etc.) is capable by itself of motivating any act whatsoever. For an act is a projection of the for-itself toward what is not, and what is can in no way determine by itself what is not. (2) No factual state can determine consciousness to apprehend it as a negatite or as a lack. Better yet no factual state can determine consciousness to define it and to circumscribe it . . .8

It is this very formulation of facticity that brings to the fore the post-humanist critique of the isolated subject, who remains both disaffected by its historical situation as well as its embodiment, in that no “factual state” has the ability to affect the manner in which the freedom to “choose oneself”, and thus to posit one’s existence, unfolds. In discussing this particular problem in existential humanism, Jacques Derrida states Although the theme of history is quite present in the discourse of the period, there is little practice of the history of concepts. For example, the history of the concept of man is never examined. Everything occurs as if the sign “man” had no origin, no historical, cultural, or linguistic limit.9

This will remain problematic even for a critical existentialism. Below I will draw out how a critical appropriation of existentialism responds to these claims, and discuss how such an appropriation builds a unique and powerful case for the ethics of existential performance. I will do so particularly through an analysis of dissent, linguistic and social mediation, and the nature of embodiment from a critical existential perspective. What is important to recognize is that Derrida’s critique is integrated in this new form of existentialism. The problem of facticity, and thus one’s historical situatedness, undergoes a critical appropriation in order to salvage the key concepts developed in existentialism. Clearly there arose a necessity to find and utilize historical and concrete methods in order to even conceive of what freedom and agency could mean. In Search for a Method, we find Sartre beginning to explicitly recognize the problem of a philosophy of freedom that does not consider the sociality of the human being. Criticizing his own principle of radical freedom, he states As soon as there will exist for everyone a margin of real freedom beyond the production of life, Marxism will have lived out its span; a philosophy of freedom will take its place. But we have no means, no intellectual instrument, no concrete experience which allows us to conceive of this freedom or of this philosophy.10

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Hence the need to take up the social political concerns of the marginalized, which requires one to recognize that the conditions of subjectivity involve the rights and the status of others.11 If there are no isolated individuals in this world, then one’s own anxiety, social oppression, political status, etc., is always already a social issue. The consequences of formulating a philosophy of existence in terms of a critical philosophy are vast, and it has worked to save existentialism from attacks that it is solipsistic, bourgeois, and out of touch with historical problems. CRITICAL EXISTENTIAL PERFORMANCE

With this being the case, a critical existentialism is necessarily connected to a concept of existential performance, in that it is only in action that the subject can be understood. This was one of Sartre’s initial interests in formulating a theory about the subject. It is strange that philosophers have been able to argue endlessly about determinism and free will . . . without ever attempting first to make explicit the structures contained in the very idea of action.12

From the critical perspective, the subject is taken to be inseparable from sociopolitical action, or what might more properly be referred to as social praxis. Far from merely being “theatrical”, particularly in terms of a connoted aesthetic quality, critical existential performance works to question the manner in which both moral (Moralität) and ethical claims (Sittlichkeit) upon one’s being do not subsume the category of the individual, nor do they do the work of becoming an individual.13 One of the key elements of existential thought revolves around the ethic of developing a self that is properly related to itself, which requires recognizing one’s social, linguistic and contingent nature. Without taking up this project, individuals fall victim to inauthentic embodiment and uncritical existence, which thus mechanizes in his/her behavior a repetition of hegemonic and oppressive practices. Thus, the Marxist concerns about the power of ideological constraints upon one’s social being can now be seen within the category of the existential: one must wrest from their own self-relation the ability to gain a critical distance from the overwhelming powers of hegemonic control. DISSENTING INDIVIDUA LS

Here we locate a necessary condition for an act to be considered existentially performative: it must be characterized by dissent. Whereas, prior its critical appropriation the existentially aware individual found his/her freedom through a fundamental mood (nausea, anxiety, boredom, etc.), in critical existentialism

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one must adopt particular reactions to what comprises their subjectivity: “Dissent defines how individuals may adopt critical self-relations to themselves, thus, always to a whole in which they already descriptively begin.”14 Dissent is anything but arbitrary here, in that one does not merely “take up a cause” in order to be considered authentically existentially embodied. The task of radical subjectivity and socially performative action requires the enactment of critical techniques upon oneself and within one’s own social expressions, and these are not merely handed down to someone in a book or doctrine and cannot be forced upon someone through a regulatory discipline. “I do not choose this or that tradition, this or that value-sphere, but myself as capable of responsible, honest, hermeneutically reflexive choosing within what or where I am socialized.”15 It is something one must choose, and as a finite being, something that must become, continually, a defining project of one’s being. It is this becoming itself that is to be considered a dissident act.

THE HISTORICAL AND LINGUISTIC LIMIT

As mentioned above, a central post-humanist concern is how discourse is understood in relation to the subject. For if we hold an uncritical awareness of language and its effect on the constitution of meaning, value and ultimately the parameters of the Lebenswelt, or life-world, it appears as though the subject falls into the traps of a voluntaristic position. As a method, phenomenology can be read as avoiding such a pitfall. Butler states: Though phenomenology sometimes appears to assume the existence of a choosing and constituting agent prior to language (who poses as the sole source of its constituting acts), there is also a more radical use of the doctrine of constitution that takes the social agent as an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts.16

From this formulation, language is not something that is taken up by a prediscursive subject to be utilized at will, but rather, it requires that we approach the subject as coming to understand itself and its life-world through the use and appropriation of language. Thus, phenomenological inquiries need not be regulated to the perspective of a constituted doer prior to the deed, but are more formally placed in the category of a social constructionism.17 The lifeworld carries with it the quality of mediation, in that language, as socially and historically developed, mediates the “I”, allowing such a signification to take on its meaning in particular contexts. This marks a major similarity between existential performance and post-structural performativity, and it expresses the existentialist’s counter claim to Derrida’s critique that it harbors an ahistorical perspective.

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Language in the existentialist perspective is the mediating element of the “I”, it helps to make up the life-world and brings meaning and concretion to the techniques utilized in positive self-determination. In taking up the Wittgensteinian argument against private language, a critical existentialist approach defies “individualism” by defining the expression of one’s unique existence, and individual “acts” of critical defiance as being constructed within and through one’s sociality. The existential individual (always already individualized via socialization) marks the most concrete yet the most ideal vanishing point of conceivable dissenting difference (non-identity). The horizon of possible dissent cannot but assume that each individual may embody a sui generis species being. Therein – not in the formally liberal, libertarian or assimilative communitarian categories – lies the vanishing point of radically existential, multicultural, and egalitarian sociality, which I image in this study as well as seek in life. A dissenting act interlocks each individual with the human race, together as singular universals. Thus, existential dissent, speaking in terms of critical social ontology, is a relational performative.18

Self, as Mitsein, as being-with and being-in-the-world, is not the isolated poursoi, disembodied and ahistorical, but rather is a unique expression of a social possibility. The task of existential performance is the constitution of the self as action, best understood as a substantive activity, which works over and against the force of conformity. By situating itself against the moral force of Kant’s deontology and the communitarian force of Hegel’s ethics, critical self-constitution must be accounted for in its own right.19 It is precisely this “unique” element that is the focus. “Radical self-choice is not directly sayable through universalizing aims of language . . . It constitutes a modal condition of the possibility that one can hermeneutically and critically reflect on (and dissent from) the normative ideals of the good and right at all.”20 It circumvents liberal individualism, hegemonic communitarianism, and the linguistic monism of determinist post-modern theories by modally requiring the existential category of individual existence to be recognized in its own right, as something expressed and performed, but not fully categorizable in language. This brings to the fore the necessity of recognizing existential performance in its fully embodied sense and of its own accord. INTENTIONALITY AND EMBODIMENT

It is important to raise a concern here, in order to clearly establish how this form of subjectivity is being constituted. In admitting the constraints of social construction, critical existentialism again must not be confused as arguing for individualism, or maintaining a disembodied perspective, as critiques of this

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philosophy have maintained. Here I think the insights of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka are particularly helpful, in that she describes the modal category of existence as the ground of subjectivity. “I submit that the living being recognizes itself as ‘himself’ or ‘herself,’ not by a cognitive act but by ‘being alive’ – by experiencing oneself within one’s milieu of beingness . . .”21 What this requires is that phenomenological inquiry take into account the singular fact of existence as primary to subjectivity. For Tymieniecka, and for any theory of existential performance, the concept of Sentience is central, in that existence expresses itself passionately, and not merely conceptually. Sentience here can be understood, subjectively, as a unifying element of social existence. And it is this singular fact, and its social political implications, that give it its critical weight. When establishing how it is that a radical existential subjectivity can be social, one must not invoke a deontic duty or a communitarian pressure to abide by normative codes of action. Embedded in one’s singular sentient existence is the whole. “Dissent defines how individuals may adopt critical self-relations to themselves, thus, always to a whole in which they already descriptively begin.”22 By assuming that an isolated subject, or some form of disembodied intentionality lies at the heart of phenomenological existentialism, one fails to recognize its founding principles. This type of conflation is commonly found from opponents of existential thinking, who either do not understand its complexity or do not wish to engage its consequences. In a telling article critiquing Butler’s post-structural approach to performativity, Geoff Boucher not only misappropriate’s Butler’s work, but displays an unfortunately common and naïve reductionistic depiction of phenomenological existentialism, seeing existential self-choice originating from a “free-floating intentionality [which] stands aside from the subject-positions available to the individual, and selects the social identity that, under the circumstances, conforms to the values or interests of the agent.”23 Among other things, this treatment of the term “intentionality” stands out as highly problematic, and implicates existentialist self-choice as disaffected by its own embodiment, capable of a “free-floating” analysis outside of itself. The all too common conflation of the term “intentionality” with the voluntaristic understanding of an individual’s “intentions” produces a false depiction of what Husserl meant by the term, much less the critical appropriations of it that have since followed.24 Thus, critical existentialism posits a subject that is at once embodied, socially and linguistically mediated, and historically aware, being defined by the process of becoming that unfolds as an ethical project within the context of a normatively constructed life-world.

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Before leveling a critique upon critical existential performance, I want to establish my goal in utilizing post-structural analyses. I wish to dictate their use and the techniques I describe as being existentially engaged, politically responsible and ethically oriented. The entire purpose of this essay is to situate the question of the “right to existence” in a framework that properly understands the constitutive grounds under which a subject comes into “existence”, as well as how that constitution can be understood as inherently an ethical one. Thus, the task of defending post-structuralism from the overtly diminutive attacks of political nihilism, amorality and the like, is one that I have decided to take up here, and I do so not to protect its constitutive grounds, but to display how it can be used as an explanatory philosophy with a ruthlessly critical edge. I will establish in what follows a depiction of the “subject” that will take up the critical existential insights, imploring them to go further in order to articulate the politically resistant possibilities implicated within a post-humanist form of subjectivity. As discussed above, one of the defining similarities between a critical existentialism and a post-structural critical philosophy revolves around the processes of mediation and thus, the way in which the social construction of the subject is understood. In the critical existentialist approach, we see that the subject is mediated by the constitutive elements of the life world (language, culture, practices, etc.), finding itself capable of self-interpretation, critical self-awareness and active embodied agency only by developing techniques of critical self-analysis. This formulation goes far in protecting phenomenology and existentialism from the critiques of an isolated individualism; however, imbedded in this form of social construction are very serious faults that land critical existentialism into a fundamental narcissism, which also calls into question the very critical element of its nature. S O C I A L C O N S T R U C T I O N V S . D I S C U R S I V E M AT E R I A L I Z AT I O N

I believe, as Vicki Kirby asserts, that Butler’s approach to language is “arguably the key to her entire oeuvre”, and thus it is important to focus on how discourse for her radically places in question the critical existentialist approach to social construction.25 Butler assumes much here from Michel Foucault and his explanations of how discursive practices, through their historical development, work to establish particular mechanisms within societies that are both productive and constraining. Butler understands the social field through which human beings come to find recognition to be thoroughly imbued with normative mechanisms of power. This does not stray far from the critical perspective as given above, but it holds significant differences that I

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want to highlight. Through her rearticulation of Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation, Butler emphasizes the nomological (law enforcement) and nominalogical (naming) processes at work within the production of the lifeworld, or what she calls the social field of intelligibility. Whereas Foucault and Althusser can be seen as focusing primarily on the punitive/juridical mechanisms at work within institutional settings of society (e.g., being hailed by a police officer, being sentenced in court or less subjectively, being regulated by disciplinary practices in a prison), Butler extends her analysis of power to include the very ways in which we come to assume our embodiment, particularly through our gendered and sexed identities. This reorients the concerns of social construction into an interrogation of the underlying assumptions about how embodiment itself is constituted. I will first look into the Butler’s approach to the materialization of the body through discourse. By utilizing a reiterative/citational model of discourse, Butler can be seen as challenging the materiality of the existential body as well as the temporality of phenomenological discourse. C I TAT I O N A L I T Y The process of sedimentation or what we might call materialization will be a kind of citationality, the acquisition of being through the citing of power, a citing that establishes an originary complicity with power in the formation of the “I.”26

The “I” can only be established through a very particular citation, one whose context must be comprised of the basic conditions for the signification to make sense, or hold sway. “Where there is an ‘I’ who utters or speaks and thereby produces an effect in discourse, there is first a discourse which precedes and enables that ‘I’ and forms in language the constraining trajectory of its will.”27 The “I” here does not simply designate a problem for the abstract, linguistic formulation of signification, and it would be a critical error to assume such a limitation. Butler takes Monique Wittig’s insight into the materiality of discourse as a central insight to its formative capacity. “Wittig refuses the distinction between an ‘abstract’ concept and a ‘material’ reality, arguing that concepts are formed and circulated within the materiality of language, and that language works in a material way to construct the social world.”28 Thus, even the human body, the coveted site through which dissident existence can be conveyed, is itself a product of the materialization of discourse, and thus the materialization of the body as constituted through social normative mechanisms. The consequence here is that one’s body is not, primarily or initially, one’s own. One of the key theses in Butler’s book Bodies that Matter is that the normatively assumed sexed identity of the body, in the binary of male/female,

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works as the ground for the correspondent social expectations of gender as man/woman, masculine/feminine, and that it does so in a very covert manner. The relation between culture and nature presupposed by some models of gender “construction” implies a culture or an agency of the social which acts upon a nature, which is itself presupposed as a passive surface, outside the social and yet its necessary counterpart.29

And it is these binaries of active/passive, nature/culture that help to develop a “naturalization” of sexual difference, and the concomitant differential valuations attached to that designation.30 In terms of the sexed body, one can see how a discursive constitution is covered over. When the sex/gender distinction is joined with the notion of radical linguistic constructivism, the problem becomes even worse, for the “sex” which is referred to as prior to gender will itself be a postulation, a construction, offered within language, as that which is prior to language, prior to construction. But this sex posited as prior to construction will by virtue of being posited, become the effect of that very positing, the construction of a construction.31

This has a rather devastating consequence, in that it positions the politics of the sexed body out of reach in terms of its discursive production, which we find concretely expressed in the horrific traumas and political struggle of the intersexed, the transexed and transgendered, and the more traditional concerns of the oppression of “female” and “feminine” bodies. This is far from a mere point about the linguistic effects of construction, it is about the very viability and social recognition of particular bodies over and against others, of imbedded “naturalized” valuations and normative expectations working as the mechanisms which produce bodies as such. Clearly this situation is of central importance for feminist and queer philosophies, but its insight cannot be relegated to their trajectories alone. What this highlights for this essay is the uncritical nature of social construction and mediation as it has been formulated in critical existential philosophy: the very conditions under which one’s “right to existence”, one’s ability for existential performance and embodiment, is assumed to be established outside of discourse, or done so around discourse in an indirect manner, and consequently, maintains a problematic, ontological ground. For the existentialist, the mis-signification of the “I”, its inability to adequately identify the individual, expresses the problem of the universal vs. the singular. Discourse, in being thoroughly universal at base, cannot locate the particularity and unique embodiments that are the hallmark of an existential analysis. Thus, the mere existence of an individual, his or her “thereness” or somatic singularity, can only be accounted for indirectly. However, in order to hold this perspective the critical existentialist is principally forced, among other things, to assume a pre-discursive or non-discursive substance of

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self/body, even if such a substance/body is qualified as an activity that an individual is capable of crafting a unique performance on or through. At base in the assumption of “thereness” is an ontological and temporal problematic that jeopardizes the critical element of existentialism. For we must posit that there is something there, that one’s very being can be established or expressed in the world. However, the conditions under which such a “thereness” can come into being are left completely unproblematized. The focus is rather on the techniques of self that one can apply to produce a unique performance, grounded in the body, and not the actual conditions under which such activity could be recognized, at any time, as legitimate and meaningful. Herein lies the accusation of narcissism: “critical” existential subjectivity is incapable of accounting for the discursive conditions under which it can assert, performatively “win”, or wrest from the mechanisms of normativity its performative embodiment. It is methodologically incapable of recognizing that the conditions under which some forms of subjectivity are given recognition, whether as normative instantiations or as dissident warriors, work to exclude and oppress others. As Butler asserts: Sometimes the very terms that confer “humanness” on some individuals are those that deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that status, producing a differential between the human and the less-than-human. These norms have far-reaching consequences for how we understand the model of the human entitled to rights or included in the participatory sphere of political deliberation.32

With this being the case, a number of covert binaries, such as body/discourse, essentialism (though qualified)/constructivism, nature/culture, can be seen at work in the ontological assumption of “thereness”. The operative thesis of this critique is that the materialization of the body itself has to be analyzed, in that by leaving existence, and its relative “thereness” unproblematic, the processes of power embedded in the discursive production of subjectivity are overlooked, and concomitantly, the normative and hegemonic mechanisms which are at work in that production go untouched. For there is an “outside” to what is constructed by discourse, but this is not an absolute “outside,” an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive “outside,” it is that which can only be thought- when it can- in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders.33

P E R F O R M AT I V I T Y, D E C O N S T R U C T I O N A N D T H E S U B V E R S I O N OF IDENTITY

This analysis begs the question then of what subjectivity must look like if it is to be properly critical in nature, and what performativity must be if it is

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to hold within it the dissident quality of a critical philosophy. Just as I have challenged the site of subjectivity in the above analysis, I would like to show in what follows that a change in the very terms of subjectivity is necessary if post-humanist inquiries are to remain critical. This entails that post-structural techniques be capable of accounting for the normative mechanisms of production at work in the processes of subjectivity, as well account for how subjects come into being. By doing so, I will have accomplished the stated goal of this essay, which was to display the effects of a post-structural analysis of subjectivity as it has been critically reformulated within the confines of existential philosophy, as well as relocate the “site” of subjectivity in relation to the constitutive power of performativity. The consequence of the reiterative/citational position on discourse requires that we take into account the prior conditions that allow for a signification to provisionally work within a given context. To do so, we must not assume that a given identity succeeds either in the political deliberation between rational interlocutors in a given social context, à la Jürgen Habermas, or through the willful and defiant pursuit for existential recognition. In fact, the entire assumption of a separable “subject”, of somatic singularity itself, must be turned on its head. By analyzing the contexts in which identifications do provisionally succeed, we come to recognize the historically determinative processes at work that produce the conditions under which such an identification can occur. Butler turns to Derrida in pointing out this particular effect of citationality. Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a “coded” or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in some way as a “citation”? . . . in such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance.34

And even further, this position holds that the “category of intention”, and the possibilities of a subjective position in any given context are constituted by discourse. Thus, there is no agent at work per se, either as the one calling for recognition, or the one who may assume the position of authority to grant it. Importantly, however, there is no power, construed as a subject, that acts, but only, to repeat an earlier phrase, a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability. This is less an “act,” singular and deliberate, than a nexus of power and discourse that repeats or mimes the discursive gestures of power.35

Consequently, there is no “I” who stands behind discourse and executes its volition or will through discourse. On the contrary, the “I” only comes into being through being called, named, interpellated, to use the

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Althusserian term, and this discursive constitution takes place prior to the “I”; it is the transitive invocation of the “I.”36

As such, the “subject” is clearly not something that can be considered “prior” to discourse, or even as something that stands along side it, merely influenced by it, as it is in the social contructionism of critical existential philosophy. It is here we see the temporality of the subject as held within any phenomenological existentialism to be shaken to its core. The temporality of the subject is found to be caught up in discourse itself, and thus to even invoke the term “subject” is to tacitly affirm it as a “subject-effect”. To understand identity as a practice, and as a signifying practice is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effect of a rule-bound discourse that inserts itself in the pervasive and mundane signifying acts of linguistic life.37

Subjectivity in this context is actually not the attainment of a particular form of identity, the consequence of a critical process of self-reflection, nor the uncovering of a natural self. It is an effect of the historical development of discourse and it is bound up in the rules of discourse as such. This may, at first glance, appear to posit a linguistic determinism. However, the reiterative/citational model of discourse that Butler uses challenges this determinism by positing that in the very demarcation of particular forms of subjectivity, of what it means to be recognized as human, lies the very terms through which subversive rearcticulations can be formulated. This is at the heart of what she terms performativity. Hence, it is not enough to claim that human subjects are constructed, for the construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more and the less “human,” the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bound the “human” as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of there disruption and rearticulation.38

Performativity is thus not a form of existential expression, as was initially assumed in the critical existential formulation.39 Though Butler is commonly misread as articulating a post-modern form of existentialism, she has made clear that this is not her aim. This is not a return to an existential theory of the self as constituted through its acts, for the existential theory maintains a prediscursive structure for both the self and its acts. It is precisely the discursively variable construction of each and through the other that has interested me here.

Thus, performativity is actually the principle of the expressive limits and inherent subversive possibilities that lie at the heart of historical discourse. It is an expression of both the deconstructive movement within language, and the historically contingent conditions of emergence at work in the production of the social field, or life-world.

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Following Derrida’s lead, Butler insists on the spatial and temporal differentiation being posited in any act of signification, and in line with Foucault and Wittig, this necessitates a concrete, material interpretation. As each signifier bespeaks of an endless chain of signifiers and the innumerable contexts in which they can be articulated and rearticulated, even the restrictive power of normativity cannot fully determine the creation of new subject positions. Although this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power.40

Accordingly, even amidst the normative social mechanisms that attempt to rigidify, or naturalize very particular formulations of identity, there lies the inherent possibility of subversion. Understanding the concrete acts of subversion requires a thorough analysis of the nature of the performative, but the key point for this essay, set as a critique of critical existential self-determination, is that performativity structurally reorients critical philosophy as such, helping us rethink the production of the subject, the possibilities of agency and the ethics of dissent. THE OTHER AS DISCOURSE

One of the major consequences of this formulation of performativity is that the conditions of the emergence of any given form of subjectivity can only be analyzed through a philosophy of Otherness. In this formulation, the productive power of discourse comes to take over what the “Other” means, in that it shoots through the subject, positing other bodies, other subject positions, and discursively covert historical conditions. I see this perspective, along with Butler, as aligned with that of Levinas due to his fundamental insight into the “Other”, and the necessity of seeing subjectivity, if it wishes to move past narcissism and the violence of appropriation of the other, within the “restlessness of the same disturbed by the other.”41 For it seems to me, and as my analysis has just shown, that if a philosophy wishes to be critical, it must be capable of going outside of itself, and in particular, outside of the questions of a concrete expression of individual existentiality. This “outside” need not throw us into metaphysical analyses, or abstract and overly formal systematics. But it humbles us to the task of approaching the Other in a trajectory that does not wish to assume and consume its position, or actively deny the conditions under which one’s own constitution unfolds. Butler sees in Levinas “a conception of ethics that rests upon an apprehension of the precariousness of life, one that begins with the precarious life of the Other,” and it is this precariousness that she attempts to analyze within

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the inner-workings of discourse.42 Accordingly, a critical ethics requires that we can account for or at least position ourselves philosophically to understand the constitutive elements that lie below our feet. If we do not take into account the processes of discursive production, covert binaries remain covered up, allowing for a false sense of accountability in critical existential philosophy. Secondly, if we assume that the primary move of an existentially sound political theory is that of critical self-relation and action, it appears that we also overlook an imbedded narcissism at the heart of the subject. Butler’s conception of performativity certainly re-orients subjectivity, but does so in order to usher in a philosophy of otherness and one of difference, which attempts in its critical gesture to provide a humility missing in the existential claims to critical agency. Department of Philosophy and Communication, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA NOTES 1

Judith Butler, Precarious Life, (New York: Verso, 2003), p.14. David Fryer, The Intervention of the Other (New York: Other Press, 2004). 3 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Being Beyond Essence, trans. Alfonso Lingis (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), p.25. 4 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p.87. 5 Butler, PL, p.xviii. 6 Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (New York: Routledge, 1999). (Original publication 1990). 7 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Pocket books, 1984), p.802. 8 Ibid., p.562. 9 Jacques Derrida, Ends of Man, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p.116. 10 Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p.34. 11 See Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964) and Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 12 Sartre, BN, p.559. 13 Again, “individual” here cannot be understood as a substantive, isolated or pre-linguistic. “If the nominalistic or possessive-individualist ontology of existential revolt is unsupportable . . ., one must commence with a rich self whose singularly universal and radically egalitarian freedom is relational, historically situated, multi-culturally polyvalent, and linguistic. If every I-individual is always already embedded in a cultural we-universal, then existential dissent from a social whole itself is holistic, never atomistic.” Martin J. Beck Matustik, Specters of Liberation: Great Refusals in the New World Order, (New York: SUNY Press, 1998), p.26. 14 Ibid., p.28. 15 Ibid., p.29. 2

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16

Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”, in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 518. 17 Social Constructionism here should not be considered within the framework of a determinism or doctrine of freedom. Rather I wish to depict the process of existential performance as unfolding within the constraints of historical and discursive practices which the subject comes to appropriate and uniquely express in a relational manner. 18 Matustik, SL, p.30. my italics. 19 I utilize this with the guidance of Martin Matustik’s argument that claims in relation to one’s existence are not to be considered ethical or moral per se. Rather, they are in need of being accounted for in and of themselves. See Matustik, “Existence and the Communitively Competent Self”, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 25: 3 (1999), pp.93–120. 20 Ibid., p.30–31. 21 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, “The Great Metamorphosis of the Logos of Life in Ontopoietic Timing”, in Timing and Temporality in Islamic Philosophy and Phenomenology of Life, ed. AnnaTeresa Tymieniecka (New York: Springer-verlag, 2007), p.16. 22 Matustik, SL, p.28. 23 Geoff Boucher, “Judith Butler’s Postmodern Existentialism: A Critical Analysis”, Philosophy Today, 48:4, (Winter 2004), p.356. 24 Husserl’s conception of the body, as “Bodily-Psychic” recognizes [Consciousness] is there in space-time where his living body is; and from there he lives into and acts upon the world . . . he constantly has a privileged experiential consciousness of “his” living body . . . of always “living” and “being able to do” things through it as the affected ego and the ego holding sway. In this passage, it seems that Husserl favors the mind’s capacity to live through the body, but this is not merely one of many other choices in the world. It is clear though that Husserl believed that the intentional structures of consciousness are bound to the body. For every human being, [groups of sensations] belong, in a way that is immediately intuitable, to the Body as to his particular Body, i.e., as a subjective objectivity distinguished from the Body as a mere material thing by means of this whole stratum of localized sensations. The intentional functions, however, are bound to this stratum . . . a human being’s total consciousness is in a certain sense, but means of its hyletic substrate, bound to the body. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Shuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), p.160, 289. 25 26

Vicky Kirby, Judith Butler: Live Theory (London: Continuum, 2006), p.45. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 15.

Here, the term sedimentation refers to the “naturalizing” effects of the normatively constructed social field. The critical existentialist will not object to the construal of the social field as “normative”, nor to the idea that power/knowledge works to construct the mechanisms of normativity. 27 Ibid., p.225. 28 Butler, GT, p.119. 29 Butler, BM, p.4.

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In his essay “Between Emergence and Possibility,” Jeffrey Nealon makes clear the relationship Butler has with Foucault on this point: “For Butler, ‘gender’ cannot be reduced to or ruled by a prediscursive notion of ‘sex’ in the same way that for Foucault statements cannot be reduced to or explained by the conditions of possibility that are said to govern them: those conditions are themselves statements, discursive formations that are the product of reinscripitve power relations rather than the origin of such relations.” Jeffrey Nealon, “Between Emergence and Possibility,” Philosophy Today, 40:3, (Fall 1996), p.433. 31 Butler, BM, p.5. 32 Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), p.2. 33 Butler, BM, p.8. 34 Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, ed. Gerald Graff, tr. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p.18. 35 Butler, BM, p.225. 36 Ibid. 37 Butler, GT, p.145. 38 Butler, BM, p.8. 39 Butler, GT, p.181. For an example of an existentialist misreading of the performativity of language, see Alan D. Schrift, “Judith Butler: Une Nouvelle Existentialiste”, Philosophy Today, 45:1, (Spring 2001), pp.12–23. 40 Ibid. p.15. 41 Levinas, OB, p.25. 42 Butler, PL, p.xvii.

SECTION V

ANGELE KREMER-MARIETTI

J E A N WA H L T H E P R E C U R S O R

Jean Wahl (1888–1974) was a French philosopher, a professor in Sorbonne from 1936 till 1967. During the Second World war, having been interned as Jew to the concentration camp of Drancy, where from he escaped, he took refuge in the United States from 1941 till 1945, where he taught. Starting in 1950, he headed the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale. For many interpreters and especially for Robert Denoon Cumming (1916–2004),1 Jean Wahl was the most influential French interpreter of contemporary philosophy. I organized in March 1989 a colloquium at the Sorbonne to celebrate Wahl’s philosophy, there were some of the former students of Jean Wahl: Yves Bonnefoy, professor at the Collège de France, Clémence Ramnoux, of the University of Paris X, Emmanuel Levinas, of the University of Paris IV, under the Presidence of the Professor Henri Gouhier, of the Sorbonne. Jean Wahl had numerous students in France and in the world, Jean Hyppolite (1907–1968) was one of them. Jean Hyppolite, professor at the Sorbonne in 1949 and elected in 1963 to the Collège de France, considered possible to reveal as a nucleus the existentialism in the Bergsonism. From bergsonism to existentialism, there was for him a route of the French thought with a very important meaning. The passage of bergsonism to existentialism made him better become aware of the historic situation. The two philosophies were certainly states of mind letting understand the French spirit of two different periods. Jean Wahl’s philosophy is a witness of the relation evoked by Hyppolite. Jean Wahl said himself “Bergsonian” in the 1920s. Indeed, Jean Wahl began his career as a follower of Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and the American pluralist philosophers William James (1842–1910) and George Santayana (1863–1952). He published in 1920 his thesis on the pluralistic philosophies2 of England and America, in which he analyzes in detail William James’s pluralism, in a reflection going on with a reflection on the idea of unity in his study of Platon’s Parménides. The pluralistic thinkers have the concern of action and their philosophy (Les philosophies pluralistes d’Angleterre et d’Amérique (1920); new ed. with a preface of Thibaud Trochu, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2005.) is always attentive to the consequences of thought, which, too, is action. Wahl’s philosophy was an essential source for the thought of Gilles Deleuze (1825–1995); Jean Wahl was the big French interpreter of audacious thoughts about the concrete experience, the experience that “troubles or excites”. 335 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 335–339. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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Jean Wahl tried new ideas on Hegel (1770–1831) and is also known as one of those introducing a new Hegelian thought in France in the 1930s, after Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964), who gave in 1926–1927 a lesson on “Hegel and the unfortunate consciousness” at the School Pratique of the High Studies, and before Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968). Indeed, Jean Wahl contributed to promove the French perception of the Hegelian work towards the Phenomenology, while the accent had been put on the Logic, notably in Georges Noël’s works on 1897 and of Meyerson (1859–1933) on 1921. Wahl’s famous book on Hegel is titled The misfortune of the consciousness in the philosophy of Hegel (Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, 1929). Wahl read also the theological papers of the young person Hegel. The peculiarity of Wahl’s book with regard to Koyré and Kojève is to have based this new reading on the constant merger of Hegel and Hölderlin (1770–1843), a “crazy poet”, with whom he was often associated in the German Hegelian studies of this period, but to which seemed then hardly promised to be recognized in France a philosophic status. But for Wahl, Hölderlin’s great poems of Hyperion, Empedocle and the texts on Empedocle’s Foundations were philosophic tools to enter the secrets of Hegels’s Phenomenbology. Wahl began his book on Hegel by these words that gave his tendencies by writing on Hegel’s philosophy: “The dialectic, before being a method, is an experience by which Hegel goes from an idea to the other one. Negativeness is the movement of a mind by which it always goes beyond what it is. And it is partially the reflection on the Christian thought, on the idea of a made God man, who led Hegel to the conception of a universal concrete. Behind the philosopher, we discover the theologian, and behind the rationalist, and also the romantic.”

In the 1930s, his reflection turned Towards the concrete (Vers le concret, 1932) title of another book. And he was a champion in French thought of the Danish proto-existentialist Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and of the German philosopher Nietzsche he rehabilitated by analysing and deepening his thought. Wahl was one of the first French readers of the thesis of Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) on Kierkegaard, from the year of its publication, in 1933. On Kierkegaard’s philosophy he published Kierkegaardian Studies (Études kierkegaardiennes, 1938), a book in which he made of Kierkegaard the emblem of a refusal of the systems and the tension towards metaphysics, often described as the competences of his own thought. On Nietzsche’s philosophy, Wahl wrote an article titled “Nietzsche and the Death of God”, he published in the second issue (the 21st january 1937) of the review: Acéphale (1936–1939),3 founded by Georges Bataille (1897–1962). Jean Wahl was a lucid and a hesitant believer, also a poet4 ; his originality is very great and diverse: he published poems in English and French in the collection Mesures,5 and a selection of poems entitled Knowing without

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knowing (Connaître sans connaître) by one of the editors of the Surrealists, GLM (1938). The work of poetry published by Jean Wahl focused mainly on the period of war, during which he published two collections. Jean Wahl is the founder of the French Existentialists movement, which grew under Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). In Draft for a history of existentialism (Petite histoire de l’existentialisme, 1947),6 he attempted to redraw briefly the genesis and the evolutions of the « existentialism » : concerning the name « existentialism » it must be said that it came into a wide circulation in intellectual and artistic circles, some years already before Jean Wahl undertook to delineate the contours of the nascent movement. Let us note that Martin Heidegger (1889– 1976) explicitly rejected it on account of its ties with the metaphysical tradition : Heidegger had written to Jean Wahl that « his philosophy was not Existenzphilosophie ».7 After rejecting this name, Sartre became nevertheless one of a very few philosophers of existence, along with Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), who began to characterize himself as an existentialist. As to Wahl, he tried to fix the big features of this “new mode of philosophizing”, that is to say a movement without doctrine; and the author collides with the difficulty to precising what it is really. Classic philosophy considered the essence as the supreme, unchanging and constant value, and let it precede the existence, Kierkegaard was one of the first to oppose to the philosophies which denied the individuality, the subjectivity and the value of the human experience. For Jean Wahl, Kierkegaard was the first “subjective thinker”, without whom we could not conceive any prefigurations of philosophy of the existence, which starts up the Christian existentialism : even if God is not any more in the center of the reflection, he always holds a place of choice. Jaspers was one of the first ones for secularizing the Kierkegaardian thought, eliminating God without rejecting however the notion of transcendence (not any more called Jesus), but is “an absolute”, “something hidden who shows himself in escaped fleeting fragments”. So, by becoming aware of his limits and failures, humanity succeeds in coming true and in asserting his existence. Evocating also Martin Heidegger, Jean Wahl draws the big moments of Heidegger’s reflection : the finitude of the possible in the consciousness of the death, but also the run-up of transcendence pushing the humanity, always in project, towards the world, the others and the future, and death (not “the impossibility of possibility”, as said Wahl, but the “possibility of impossibility”8 ). Thinking that this philosophy is « a negation of Kierkegaardian individualism », Jean Wahl does not stop questioning the paradoxes and the ambiguities of Heidegger’s philosophy and mentioned the Heidegger’s support of the Nazi theses, from 1933. . . The historic work is coupled here with a real philosophic initiative, for instance the great number of questioning which punctuates the speech, as well as the propositions to deepen the existentialist question in

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order to distinguish more and more carefully the various elements which were enumerated, and among them: « the instigation on the being in the world. » Concerning Heidegger, Wahl employed more than ten years to render known Heidegger to the students of the faculty of philosophy, by commenting step by step on texts which he translated for them, and even Heidegger’s lessons that had been passed on to him. Before making of Heidegger one of the main subjects of his teaching, Jean Wahl had been the first French professor of university publishing an article on the German philosoph in the second issue of the review Recherches philosophiques (1934). An anti-systematic philosopher, Wahl was always in favour of philosophical innovation.9 In analysis with Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), Jean Wahl translated the second hypothesis of the Parmenides (1930) of Plato (428–348 BC). Lacan adopted his translation as a central point in psychoanalysis. For Lacan, “Il y a de l’Un” (“there is something like the one”) was the positive existential sentence of psychoanalytic discourse; the negative one being: “there is no such a thing as a sexual relationship”.10 Generally said as a thinker without doctrine, Jean Wahl did not stop in all his works asserting his distrust towards systems. That made him all the more able to describe and analyze the multiplicity of the concrete, the complexity of the lived. In a recently collection, Kierkegaard. L’Un devant l’Autre11 (Kierkegaard, the One before the Other) there are now published all the articles and conferences which Jean Wahl dedicated to Kierkegaard, spread out from 1930s to 1960s. Some were unpublished: others were at the source of the Kierkegaardian Studies, published by Jean Wahl in 1938; others else, drafted or published after the war, testify of Wahl’s continuous attachment to Kierkegaard, and his idea of seeing in him the father of existentialism. Restored in their originality and in their completeness, these texts propose a unitarian and multiple reading of Kierkegaard, where are approached his categories such as: fear, moment, choice, paradox . . . In this exceptional encounter between two men and two thoughts, we can find the discreet thread which connects them with Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) and Gilles Deleuze. In order to appreciate Wahl’s original reflection, we must remember among the favoured terms, used and/or often created by Jean Wahl, the following terms from the Treatise of Metaphysics, for instance: transdescendence and transascendence, abundantly quoted by many contemporary writers and philosophs like Levinas, Sartre,12 Eero Tarasti,13 Hent de Vries,14 Regina Schwartz.15

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NOTES 1

Robert Denoon Cumming, Phenomenology and Deconstruction, Volume Four: Solitude (Phenomenology and Deconstruction, Vol 4, University Of Chicago Press, July 1, 2001. 2 Les philosophies pluralistes d’Angleterre et d’Amérique (1920); new ed. with a preface of Thibaud Trochu, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2005. See William James, A Pluralistic Universe, Longmans, Green & Co., 1909. 3 Acéphale, réédition des numéros publiés et du numéro final non publié, éd. Jean-Michel Place, Paris, 1995. 4 See Isabelle Kalinowski, « La littérature dans le champ philosophique français de la première moitié du XXe siècle », Methodos, 1 (2001). 5 Jean Wahl « Poèmes anglais », Mesures 3, 15 juillet 1935. 6 Petite histoire de l’existentialisme, aux éditions Limoges pour le Club Maintenant, 1947. 7 Miles Groth, Translating Heidegger, Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Humanity Books, January 2004. 8 See S. J. Michael Barnes Theology and the Dialogue of Religions, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine, Paperback – April 1, 2002. » 9 See J. Migasinski, « Jean Wahl: une métaphysique inexprimable », in Archiwum Historii Filozofii i My´sli Społecznej, 1990, no35, pp. 149–163. 10 « Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel ». 11 Jean Wahl, Kierkegaard. L’Un devant l’Autre, Paris, Hachette, 1998. 12 Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, Les essais 24, NRF, 1948, in 12 , Note de Michel Leiris; L’être et le néant. Essai d’Ontologie phénoménologique (Being and Nothingness. Essay on Phenomenological Ontology), Gallimard, 1943. 13 Eero Tarasti, Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics (Approaches to Applied Semiotics, 3, Walter de Gruyter Inc, August 2003, p. 126. 14 Hent de Vries, Philosophy and th turn of Religion, The Johns Hopkins University Press, June 17, 1999, p. 320. 15 Regina Schwartz, Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond, Routledge; 1st edition, April 28, 2004.

IGNACY S. FIUT

A L B E RT C A M U S : P H E N O M E N O L O G Y AND POSTMODERN THOUGHT

ABSTRACT

The paper contains an analysis of the philosophical dialogue that Albert Camus had with Edmund Husserl, Martin Hediegger, Max Scheler, and which eventually led to the shaping of his philosophical concept of man. It is our belief, that this concept anticipated his future model of man and the corresponding philosophy. Nowadays, this philosophy is described, in most general terms, as a postmodern way of thinking, which was presented in France by Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, among others. The intensification of these processes of philosophical transformation, which was first observed by the French philosopher, is at present realized mainly through the development of postmodern civilization. This intellectual formation, due most of all to the processes of globalization and creation of a “risk society” as well as to the impact of old and new media, is characterized by a fragmentation of social life, an individualized interpretation of emotional states, cognition, understanding of the truth and axiological phenomena, which is expressed in the multicultural character of contemporary societies. These latter phenomena also heighten the problem of the individual’s identity in the postmodern world, which actualizes the concept of man proposed by Camus in the mid-twentieth century to an even greater extent. I N T RO D U C T O RY R E M A R K S

The philosophy of Albert Camus (1913–1960) focuses on man in his specific existential situation. The French philosopher believes, that man, through his direct experience intuitively discovers that his existence is absurd. Because of this fundamental experience of absurdity man is condemned to ask about the sense of his own individual existence. Because, should there not be a positive answer to this question, he can be justified in committing suicide. Another solution to a lack of a positive answer could also be man’s escape into various inauthentic ways of thinking and acting, which lead to his or her alienation, which in consequence causes the existence to become truly inauthentic, and through this practically unhappy. The expression of this unhappiness is the 341 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 341–354. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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existential anxiety and lack of clear goals in one’s existence. An escape into the inauthentic “they” is but a temporary solution to the problem of the justification of one’s existence. It generates an escalation of anxiety and leads to extreme stances in life. Such stances are leaps into a search for a full rationality of one’s existence or into a full irrationality in justifying the goals of one’s actions in life. Two basic questions attracted the interest of the French thinker: how to make the individual happy? But also, due to the consciousness of the absurdity of man’s existence, which spread in the 20th century in connection with the wars and revolutions – this run of force, crime and violence – he formulated another question: is it possible to justify the act of suicide? His critical dialogue with the philosophical thought contemporary to him, especially phenomenological and existentialist, was an attempt to phenomenologically solve these questions, which he presented in his philosophy of rebellion and the absurd. Due to the fact that Camus observed how his contemporary world and the man living in it are filled with a philosophical reflection which is going in two coantradictory directions, he proposed a third solution, which he saw precisely in what he called the philosophy of rebellion and the absurd. To do so, he undertook a critical assessment of the philosophical trends dominant in the mid 20th century, which dealt with the place of man in the world and society, such as phenomenology, various forms of existentialism, personalism and Marxism. He was most interested in phenomenology and so called religious existentialism. The latter one, at the time, often took the form of total irrationalism and an abandonment of reason. In these two orientations, Camus accepted the method of describing man’s situation in the contemporary world, but he did not agree with the solutions of these philosophies and their proposals regarding the setting of goals for the individual, which were to bring sense to his or her life, and thus make it happy. CAMUS AND EDMUND HUSSERL

As far as Camus’s attitude towards Husserl’s phenomenology and existentialist thinkers with a religious inclination is concerned, it is as follows: „On quite a different plane, that of method, Husserl and Phenomenologists, by their very extravagances, reinstate the world in its diversity and deny the transcendent power of reason. The spiritual universe becomes incalculably enriched through them. The rose petal, the milestone, or the human hand are as important as love, desire, or the lows of gravity. Thinking ceases to be unifying or making a semblance familiar in the guise of a major principle. Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of Proust, into a privileged moment. What justifies

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thought is its extreme consciousness. Though more positive than Kierkegaard’s or Chestov’s, Husserl’s manner of proceeding, in the beginning, nevertheless negates the classic method of the reason, disappoints hope, opens to intuition and the heart a whole proliferation of phenomena, the wealth of which has about it something inhuman. These paths lead to all sciences or to none. This amounts to saying that in this case the means are more important than the end. All that is involved is “an attitude for understanding” and not a consolation. Let me repeat: in the beginning, at very least”.1 In “Philosophical Suicide” Camus analyses more closely the elements of Husserl’s method and phenomenological thinking. He examines in turn the „topic of intentionality” and the “extra-temporal essences” or the concept of the eide in the realm of pure consciousness and the “transcendental ego”. Regarding intentionality, he states the following: „I shall examine merely the theme of „the Intention” made fashionable by Husserl and the phenomenologists. (. . .) Originally Husserl’s method negates the classic procedure of the reason. Let me repeat. Thinking is not unifying or making the appearance familiar under the guise of a great principle. Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one’s consciousness, making of every image a privileged place. In other words, phenomenology declines to explain the world, it wants to be merely a description of actual experience. It confirms absurd thought in its initial assertion that there is no truth, but merely truths. From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth. Consciousness illuminates it by paying attention to it. Consciousness does not form the object of its understanding, it merely focuses, it is the act of attention, and, to borrow a Bergsonian image, it resembles the projector that suddenly focuses on an image. The difference is that there is no scenario, but a successive incoherent illustration. In that magic lantern all the pictures are privileged. Consciousness suspends in experience the objects of its attention. Through its miracle it isolates them. Henceforth they are beyond all judgments”. This is the “intention” that characterizes consciousness. But the word does not imply any idea of finality; it is taken in its sense of “direction”: its value is topographical”.2 Camus writes that this intention testifies to the “interest” that reality can offer and it is a way of awakening a sleeping world and of making it vivid to the mind. The rational basis to the notion of truth, if one claims to discover in this way the “essence” of each object of knowledge, needs the deepper experience. “For an absurd mind – writes Camus – that is incomprehensible. Now, it is this wavering between modesty and assurance that is noticeable in the intentional attitudes, and this shimmering of phenomenological thought will illustrate the absurd reasoning better then anything else”.3

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Camus presents Husserl’s thought as an Platonic idealism. For Husserl – he explains – speaks of “extra-temporal essences” brought to light by the intention, and he sounds like Plato. All things are not explained by one thing but by all things. I see no difference. To be sure, those ideas or those essences that consciousness “effectuates” at the end of every description are not yet to be considered perfect models. But it is asserted that they are directly present in each datum of perception. There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up. Platonic realism becomes intuitive, but it is still realism. Kierkegaard was swallowed up in his God; Parmenides plunged thought into the One. But here thought hurls itself into an abstract polytheism. But this is not all: hallucinations and fictions likewise belong to “extra-temporal essences”. In the new world of ideas, the species of centaurs collaborates with the more modest species of metropolitan man. French philosophy criticizes the rigorous logic of Husserl, because in his philosophy reason triumphs and trumpets forth with that voice. For Camus it is Husserl’s leap into eternal Reason by thought preformed in the abstract, which gives forgetting the means which any man dose not forget. “I see then – writes he – that of a psychological truth Husserl aims to make rational rule: after having denied the integrating power of human reason, he leaps by this expedient to eternal Reason”.4 Husserl’s theme of the “concrete univers” is to Camus the example of a form of the detranscendalisation of the absolute reasoning. He tells us, that not all essences are formal but some are material. Thus the former are the objects of logic and the latter of science and this situation is merely the question of definition. These changes in Husserl’s method for Camus are nothing, because he finds there an intellectualism sufficiently unbridled to generalize the concrete itself. After this critical analyses, Camus explains his relations to the philosophy of Husserl and of Kierkegaard and places his own philosophy of man, built on absurd reasoning, between these two concepts. These thinkers lead philosophic thought to its own negation using the opposing paths of humiliated reason and triumphant reason. Camus writes that from the abstract god of Husserl to the dazzling god of Kierkegaard the distance in not so great, because both philosophers leapt into absolute reasoning, which is far from human reality. “The abstract philosopher and religious philosopher – writes Camus – start out from the same disorder and support each other in the same anxiety. But essential is to explain. Nostalgia is stronger here than knowledge. It is significant that the thought of the epoch is at once one of the most deeply imbued with a philosophy of the nonsignificant of the world and one of the most divided

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in its conclusions. It is constantly oscillating between extreme rationalization of reality which tends to break up that thought into standard reasons and its extreme irrationalization which tends to deify it. But this divorce is only apparent. It is matter of reconciliation, and, in both cases, the leap suffices. It is always wrongly thought that the notion of reason is a one-way notion. To tell the truth, however rigorous it may be in its ambition, this concept is nonetheless just as unstable as others. Reason bears a quite human aspect, but it also is able to turn toward the divine. Since Plotinus, who was the first to reconcile it with the eternal climate, it has learned to turn away from the most cherished of its principles, which is contradiction, in order to integrate into it the strangest, the quite magic one, of participation. It is an instrument of thought and not thought itself. Above all, a man’s thought is his nostalgia”.5 In Camus’s opinion for the absurd mind the world is neither that rational nor that irrational, it is unreasonable. According to Husserl the reason has no limits, but the absurd, on the contrary, establishes its limits since it is powerless to calm its anguish. The absurd is lucid reason, with noting limiting it. C A M U S A N D M A RT I N H E I D E G G E R

In many ways Camus accepted the existential description of man’s situation in the world, provided at the time by Martin Heidegger. Although he does not share his existential pessimism, he is of the opinion that the phenomenological existential analysis of the man in the world proposed by the German philosopher coincides with his own observations and remains connected to his existential concept of man. It provided him with arguments for a constructive reshaping of his original absurd reasoning. The vision of Husserl’s student pointed to a necessity of constructing a system of thought, which would give a chance to overcome this collapse of the human condition in the world: “Heidegger considers – writes Camus – the human condition coldly and announces that condition which is humiliated. The only reality is ‘anxiety’ in the whole chain of beings. To the man lost in the world and its diversion this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man ‘in whom existence is concentrated’. This professor of philosophy writes without trembling an in the most abstract language in the world that ‘the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial then man himself.’ His interest in Kant extends only to recognizing the restricted character of his ‘pure Reason’. This is to conclude at the end of his analyses that ‘the world can no longer be of any thing to the man filled with anguish.’ This anxiety seems to him so much more important than all categories in the world that he thinks and talks only of it. He enumerates its aspects: boredom when they quash it in him and benumb

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it; terror when the mind contemplates death. He too, does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is a call of anxiety and ‘existence then delivers itself its own summons thorough the intermediary of consciousness.’ It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence ‘to return from its loss in the anonymous They’. From him, too, one must not sleep, but must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this absurd world and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way amid these ruins”.6 Camus excepted such a description of the human condition in the world, as presented by Heidegger. Furthermore he believed, that this vision obliges the engaged thinkers to search for a way of thinking about man, which would differ from the traditional one, and would be an optimistic way out of this uncomfortable and pessimistic existential situation in the future. Such an absurd state of consciousness means being kept in both intellectual and physical poverty, by producing a constant existential anxiety, which makes a happy life impossible. The escape from such a situation of everyday life can be found precisely in the leap into the irrationality of existence, together with others, amounting to becoming alienating from oneself and falling into the inauthentic life. A solution in this situation – believes Camus – can be the development in the individual consciousness of people of the full consciousness of the absurdity of one’s existence, which will allow for a limitation of these thoughtless and absurd choices and the forms of action resulting from them. Because it is through their means that the absurdity and inauthenticity themselves of thought are strengthened.

CAMUS AND MAX SCHELER

Camus also undertook a direct polemic with Max Scheler regarding the meaning of rebellion, as a force which causes man’s development and constantly ads a meaning and positive values to his existence. Scheler understood rebellion in the spirit of Jean. J. Rousseau, as a symptom of egoism, which is derived from man’s resentment towards people and the world. An act of rebellion, according to this German phenomenologist was therefore directed against man’s dignity when his inner strength took on the form of personal hatred towards specific people. Camus disagreed with such a proposition by Scheler on the essence of rebellion. He rejected such an understanding and proposed his own. He agreed, that egoism is at the root of rebellion, being an “inexhaustible source of activity and energy”, but in the development of the act of rebellion, towards its end, it transforms into altruism. The French philosopher sought the reason for rebellion in a objection of the rebel directed against an incorrect situation of one’s own existence, which is then directed towards the protection of others who are

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similar to the rebel in existential terms. Rebellion also encompasses an objection against the actualized and absolutized state of understanding the world, but with irrational interpretation. Rebellion appears and is led always in the name of higher all-human values, which constitute “the comic idea of man”. Camus wrote: “Scheler is right when he says, that grudge is strongly infused with envy. But envy is directed towards that which we don’t have, while the rebel is defending what he is. He isn’t demanding goods which he doesn’t have or has been deprived of, he wants an acknowledgment of what is within him, and what he himself in almost every case has decided to be more important than what he might desire. Rebellion is caused by a pre-rational feeling of love and carries with it a solidarity with the Other and the world because of the goal, in the name of which it is undertaken”.7 Despite a difference in the assessment of the genesis and nature of rebellion, there is a certain philosophical similarity between Scheler and Camus, in terms of the direction of the constructive situating of man in the world and the universe, which is expressed in the concept, proposed by the French philosopher, of the idea which organizes for people a life happy and full of sense, or the “cosmic idea of man” which in many aspects is reminiscent of Scheler’s notion of God as a “common person”. Rebellion in its name, in the name of the values for which it stands, juxtaposed with the actual destitution of the human condition, should bring about the creation of a new man, the „axiological rebel”, who would renew systematically the sense of human condition in the world. This could be that “first man”, whose picture Camus tried to construct based on his own biography and personal existential experiences from his early years, in his novel, published posthumously and titled „Le premier homme”. THE MAN ACCORDING TO CAMUS

In “The Absurd Man” Camus writes: “What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his moral consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime. That is his field, that is his action, which he shields from any judgment but his own. A greater life cannot mean for him another life. That would be unfair. I am not even speaking here of that paltry eternity that is called posterity”.8 The French philosopher sees this model of human existence as a personalized entity, living and transcendental in its essence, with a specific morality and equipped with a primordial sense of

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innocence. Man is also condemned to living in a permanent state of choosing. But after some time he or she becomes indifferent and ceases to undertake action. He also no longer formulates rules regarding the choice of the forms of activities and no longer abides by these rules in his life. The concepts of God, morality and guilt become blurred to him and because of this he develops into a being which is dangerous for the existence of other people like him, that is for the rest of society.9 The only rule governing his activity then becomes “mechanical skepticism” which means that as someone not yet fully aware of the absurdity of his or her surroundings he feels that „The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all action. ‘Everything is permitted’ dose not mean that nothing forbidden”. “The absurd merely” – explains Camus – “confers an equivalence on the consequences of actions. It dose not recommend crime, for this would be childish, but it restores to remorse its futility. Likewise, if all experiences are indifferent, that of duty is as legitimate as any other. One can be virtuous through a whim”.10 As a result of this situation a sense of the paradoxical character of life is born in man, which becomes expressed in the conclusion that the statement that life is a constant choice is false but that in turn the statement becomes true that life without the possibility of choosing is truly impossible. In practice this means that for some time he or she looses the sense of responsibility for his or her choices and remains in a state of cognitive dissonance at the time he or she must make a choice. Therefore man has the option of agreeing with the absurd and remaining in conflict with himself. More rarely we come across a situation when the individual fights against the absurd in all its forms, which in turn leads to a permanent conflict with society. This type of people Camus calls the „rioters of absurdity”. Both the former and the later type come across „absurd walls”, which in turn leads to their intellectual or physical suicides, characterized by the fact that these desperate acts negate the value of life. The cause for these people to reach for the extreme solutions is hope – incessantly inspiring them to act: that mythical gift from Pandora’s box. Camus also notes, amidst this existential analysis, that thought related to hope must be false, because if it does not lie, it is completely futile. Referring to a contemporary author, Camus explains this matter as follows: „It is essential to be absurd”, writes a modern author, „it is not essential to be a dupe”. The attitudes of which I shall treat can assume their whole meaning only though consideration of their contraries”.11 So man is condemned to the absurd, but to be in accordance with the nature of his existence, he should have that border – consciousness of the absurd. Otherwise, man’s life is „a dupe”, because it is based on lying to oneself, and as a further consequence on the loss of the sense of one’s won existence. „In the absurd world – Camus says– the value of a notion or of a life is measured by it sterility”12 .

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In the second phase of the development of his theory of man, Camus built a constructive model for rebellion based on experience and the realization of the constructive value of a full consciousness of rebellion. It is based on man’s complete awareness of the absurdity of his existence in the world, which shows the actual boundaries of his life, reason and emotions. This awareness limits him, doesn’t allow him to reach the absurd walls, both in thought, emotions and in actions. It functions in his human existence as a “practical cogito”. This cogito gives the absurd man a chance to become creatively involved in the world and the fate of other people in a similar existential situation. This involvement then becomes a responsible and free act, because it fits within the boundaries beyond which the absurd walls appear. He knows, with full consciousness that he cannot overstep the limitations defined by his awareness of the absurd. Man is then able to say with full responsibility in specific situations “yes” or “no” to the direction of his actions. This model of a man, who is fully aware of the absurd was described by the French philosopher as the rebel man. To the question: „What is the rebel?” Camus answers in the following way: “A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes as soon as he begins to think for himself”13 . Maurice Cranston, writing about the correct understanding of the translation of „l’hommo révolté” into the English „the rebel”, proposes to understand its meaning as describing “the ideology of violent change”.14 „The rebel” can be understood as „the permanent man” and this phrase seems to be a more adequate explanation of Camus’s „l’hommo révolté”. But what is most important is the content of this phrase. It is in the nature of this man to constantly oppose obedience „(. . .) to others in the name of the legitimacy of everyone”. Such a constant but at the same time constructive opposition is not of negative character in him, but stands in defense of the sanctified (universal) values, and therefore is a negation not of the nihilist type, but a differentiating one, which is also pushing towards discovering new values or their new meanings and facets. It is capable of thinking in adherence with the rule of contradiction, that is, of thinking in difference. Permanent acts of opposition – the very rebellion – allow the rebel to cleanse himself of submissiveness and bad faith in the name of good faith and the noble values which evoke it. He must however, without any help (from god, the supernatural, the absolute) create moral values, guard them and through this say the “yes”. These values should be of a real nature and should be genetically embedded in the reality of human life – in man’s everyday existence. The realization of such a moral system must be consequently expressed in adequate behavior, and the rebel must be active, fully engaged in the issues in the name of which he is rebelling.15

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According to the author of “The Plague” the main value for which rebellion is undertaken is the “cosmic idea of man” and therefore a universal notion, which encompasses all the matter which describes humanity. In Camus’s thought this constitutes the highest value – timeless and extra-historical – for human existence. It has been extrapolated from the image of the real and actual course of man’s life, that is from that which has made every individual human and continues to do so now. Thanks to this idea, in the model of life of “the rebel” people can return to each other after straying to the wrong paths of transcendence in their individual life and reclaim their authentic and original existence. Every act of rebellion therefore, is undertaken in the name of these values, which the idea encompasses and in its initial phase is always determined positively in axiological terms. Rebellion is born – writes Camus – from the perception “that there is something in man, with which he can identify”. It also leads towards the birth of the idea of the unity of mankind, resulting precisely from the realization in a universal dimension of the absurdity of man’s existence. The awareness of this, while fully absurd, always is transformed into a constructive rebellion creative in action. This movement chooses values and lifts them to the top of their hierarchy and as a consequence it also lifts up and defends the dignity of each and every man, turning towards the higher axiological spheres. The material content from which rebellion begins, are the values present in existence of man and of other people with ties to his existence. They constitute in their matter a concretization of general values embedded in “the cosmic idea of man”, in the defense of which the rebel is even ready to die.16 The logic of the absurd which turns the absurd man into the rebel is – according to Camus – as follows: “The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to”.17 That is to say it does has meaning when, and this is in its nature, when it becomes a source of disagreement with oneself: it must constantly be negatively assessed and breed opposition. “The absurd is itself, contradiction (. . .), it’s actual character – writes Camus – lies in the fact that it is an experience to be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence, of Descartes’s methodical doubt”.18 This contradictory nature of the absurd means that “(. . .) it is contradictory in its content because, in wanting to uphold life, it excludes all value judgments, when to live is, in itself, a value judgment”.19 By removing this absurd situation, that is a degeneration of the human condition, rebellion defends life, which is its most profound value, but initially is also its cause. Speaking in general terms, Camus’s concept of rebellion depicts it as a tool of protest against a world which reifies man, holds him captive with the various social determinisms and forces him into a inauthentic life, which in individual terms means unhappy human beings. The rebel therefore, or the “obsessed with the absurd”, will on his or her part constantly trace and fight the reemerging

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absurd. He will be a “balancing man” (l’homme balancer), who responsibly says „yes” or „no”, combating all the occurrences in the world which are inhumane, and in their place he will realize with his engaged actions an authentic and real humanism, full of heroism and mythical prometeism.20 This means, that it will also oppose and combat an absolutist and idealistic humanism, seen as a manifestations of escaping into rational, emotional and religious absurdities such as fundamentalisms and extremisms. they are, from this philosophical perspective, manifestations of real thoughtlessness and the result of the “crashing” of such peoples minds against the “absurd walls”. The rebel in contrast will firstly act in favor of a permanently constituted and constantly realized humanism in the order of individual human beings. This will be made possible by a certain ability, based on thinking in categories of contradiction, which also presumes an ability to think through the category of difference. Such a construct of thinking can successfully oppose all totaliarization and homogenization of people through absolutization – rational, irrational, religious or axiological – of the goals and meaning of human existence. Such differentiating also makes it possible to be a person sensible to otherness and overcoming negative stereotypes which describe people who are different, allowing to make a distinction and respect it in the name of universal human values – the highest value for which the rebellion is constantly undertaken when people say “no” and act to change the present existential situations. Such a model of man, based on his uniqueness, singularity and individuality as well as subjectivity gives a chance of recognizing differences and treating them with respect, so that action based on rebellion can be successful and is a source of new humanism and lay heroism. It results from the wisdom contained in the „Myth of Sisyphus”, which Camus brought back and tried to use as a metaphor to explain the universal meaning of humanity. He believed that the heroic and epic Sisyphus can be seen as a man who is happy even though he is constantly in an absurd situation, but never giving up on opposing it, because he is fully aware of his own absurdity. For the avatar of the „rebel-Sisiphus” to be realized it must envisage the construction of the common space in which people can interact in rebellion and create new axiological communities which allow them to rebel in an effective and creative way. Its aim is to defend the universal human values which constitute a man’s real being, give specific and individual goals to his life and thus make it happy. But other people as well, the ones in whose name the rebellion is undertaken can build in this way their path to a happy life. This is the way – in Camus’s opinion – in which we should act and oppose the depreciation of man with engaged acts of revolt, and as a consequence the areas of man’s happiness will expand and the social areas of inauthentic life – created as a consequence of mass escapes into existing within the so called anonymous They – will decrease.

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And so, if we consider the question of physical suicide in the light of the presented reconstructions of Camus’s existential philosophy, then such suicide cannot be in any way justified. Life, and what’s more a dignified life is the most important real value for a man aware of the absurdity of his existence, and the rebellion in defense of life is a consequent and fully responsible attitude. Other suicides, of a philosophical, mental and axiological nature are actually forms of escaping into an inauthentic existence together with others. They are also an agreement to the spreading and real coercion, violence and terror directed against people all over the world. Furthermore, they deprive man of the ability to realize that the sense of absurdity can be a rationale for a responsible opposition against the wrongfulness in the world aimed at each man’s dignity and value. Because in an alienated life both love and solidarity with others, which constitute the positive matter of rebellion are understood and practiced falsely. Instead of building axiological communities which defend man’s humanity, they turn into actions which depreciate his dignity and ruin his collective existence.

C O N C L U S I O N S : T H E „ A X I O L O G I C A L R E B E L” AND THE POSTMODERN THOUGHT

Already in the late 1990s the so called “new French philosophers”: A. Glucksaman, B.-M. Levy, K. Lambert and G. Larderau pointed out, that the pioneer of postmodern thought was none else than Camus. His constant émigré’s experience and the experiencing of otherness which he felt towards the country in which he was born and spent his youth, and which he described in his novels and short stories, is a strong argument for the theory, that this was insightfully reflected in his philosophy of man, in which he distanced himself from the main trends in European philosophy of the previous century. And undoubtedly, the world created in his novels is proof that he was searching for a new formula of humanity for people in world which had at that time begun to undergo processes of globalization connected with the expansion of the capitalist model of economy across the entire globe. This led to the mixing not only of people and their societies, but of their cultures and their axiological, religious and intellectual systems, and therefore had to generate an intensification of contradictions, conflicts and existential anxieties. This caused problems with the individual and common Identity. It also aggravated fears, disillusionment and the processes of alienation related to social and cultural uprooting, which in turn enhanced problems with people’s Identity in the future. Therefore, the proverbial “risk society” emerged, in which the existing models of thinking and assessing of values broke down and where everything became less and

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less certain. To live in such a world, one had to learn to think in the “categories of difference”, which gave a chance to adapt to it. This situation led Western thinkers as well to doubt the dominance of their culture and the need for its expansion to the whole contemporary world. All of these transformations had to lead to an attempt to revise the place occupied thus far by reasoning and valuing in the world’s intellectual order. The postmodern thought and culture which emerged and is currently developing is undoubtedly an expression of this process, which had begun already in the mid-twentieth century. And Camus’s intellectual achievements certainly can be seen as pioneer analyses, which later paved the road for viewing new existential topics important in today’s philosophical thought about man, society and culture on a global scale. Camus’s idea of rejecting the absolute systems of rationality and valuing, undoubtedly found its continuation in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida: in his method of thinking about the meanings dominant in contemporary culture in the categories of: „différence” and „disséminattion”, which aim to deconstruct the leading intellectual discourses. Derrida, similarly to Camus, believed that difference comes before meaning -being primordial- and that meaning in a sense feeds on it in its developments in life. And the vitality of meaning understood in such terms inspires new directions of its actual understanding by people.21 Another example of inspirations with Camus and his method of describing and interpreting man’s condition in the world in French postmodern thought can probably be found in the systemic thinking about people’s life in the postmodern world of Jean-François Lyotard. This he put it forward in his two main philosophical works: „Le Différende” (1983) and „La Condition postmodern” (1979). He points out that thinking in categories of difference has brought about the collapse of the dominant forms of meta-narration, which were legitimate and which legitimized the forces within the ruling systems of meaning and rational thought. Thus, a kind of detranscendentalization of the predominant forms of rational reasoning took place, which was the cost for a development of a multitude and variety of more subjective ways of thinking, which aspire on the one hand to uphold the difference separating them from other ones, and on the other hand attempt to reach a common understanding within more general frames of rationality. He calls the first process dissens and the second consens. As a certain dynamic whole they create an image of the common consciousness of societies in a globalizing world, which have in fact, a mosaic character, and whose socio-political rule within the democratic state is the rule of political correctness which calls for respect and dignity for individuals and social groups who differ from the majority and constitute cultural, religious, mental and moral minorities.

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Also the concept of subjectivity and transversal reason purported by Wolfgang Welsch has much in common with the movement of rebellion in man as regards the way in which man is presently situated in the world.22 In many ways this is similar to the logic of the absurd and rebellion as used by Camus’s “balancing man” or the real rebel, who, while fighting for dignity and the acknowledgment of his otherness was at the same time fighting for the dignity of others similar to him in existential terms and in this way expressed his solidarity with them. He must however, be able to enter and pass through the world of reason and values of these other people, to understand and feel them correctly and to enter into creative social interaction with them and at the same time not to loose his own identity and cultural distinctiveness. That is why it seems fully justified to return to Camus’s thought today. AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow NOTES 1

Albert Camus, An Absurd Reasoning, (in:) A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays, Vintage Books. A Division of Random Hause, New York 1955, p. 20. 2 Albert Camus, Philosophical Suicide, (in:) A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus . . ., op. cit., p. 32. 3 Ibid., p. 33. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., p. 25–26. 6 Albert Camus, An Absurd Reasoning, op. cit., p. 18. 7 Albert Camus, Człowiek zbuntowany, (in:) A. Camus, Eseje. Pa´nstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa 1974, p. 277. 8 Albert Camus, The Absurd Man, (in:) A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, op. cit, s. 49. 9 Ibid., p. 50. 10 Ibid., p. 50. 11 Ibid., p. 51. 12 Ibid. 13 Com. Albert Camus, The Rebel. Trans. Anthony Bower. London: Penguin Books, 1951. 14 M. Cranston, “Man and Ideas. Albert Camus”, Enconnter 1967 (XXVIII)/2(Feb.), p. 49. 15 Com. Albert Camus, The Rebel, op. cit., 1951. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Pieer. H. Simon, Presence de Camus, Bruxelles 1981, p. 147–148. 21 Bernhard Wandenfels, Phänomenologie in Frankreich, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 1983, p. 539– 540. 22 Wolfgang Welsch, Nasza postmodernistyczna moderna, Oficyna Naukowa N, Warszawa 1993, p. 436–440.

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JA N K OT T A N D T H E A E S T H E T I C S O F R E C E P T I O N : A S P E C T S O F A N E X I S T E N T I A L T H E AT R E

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Jan Kott’s contribution to drama criticism through his indebtedness to existentialism. The first part of the paper is concerned with how Kott’s reading of Shakespeare enabled him to better understand his own situation as a dissident in Communist Poland. The second part of the paper maintains that Kott’s reading of Greek tragedy casts light on the period of the Polish Occupation and the situation in Europe after the Second World War. The concluding section argues that Kott’s drama criticism is best read as an application of reception theory to the existential approach to literature. Jan Kott was one of the most important writers to have emerged in post-War Europe at a time when the social function of literature strongly concerned critics, writers and philosophers. However, particularly as a drama critic, Jan Kott assumes a special place among those who sought to move beyond the rigid tenets of Social Realism in order to interpret human experience in existential terms. The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, Jan Kott’s unique approach to Shakespeare’s tragedies will be examined as a radical application of “reception theory” to a dramatic situation that includes both the Elizabethan stage and present-day theatre. Second, Jan Kott’s interpretation of classical drama will be revisited as an effort to identify some of the most disturbing features of both modern and ancient experience. The concluding part of our discussion will be concerned with how the philosophical dimension of Jan Kott’s approach to drama combines existential attitudes with hermeneutical concerns that can be understood largely in terms of traditional phenomenology. I

In a late interview that was conducted shortly before his death in 2001, Jan Kott discussed why Shakespeare could become a figure of supreme importance for avant-garde dramatists in Eastern Europe during the 1960s. While certainly not an overtly political playwright, Shakespeare offers us a view of the world that 355 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 355–366. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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is at least implicitly concerned with the question of higher authority. From Jan Kott’s standpoint, Shakespeare does not simply produce a series of brilliant plays that are performed in a sphere that is peculiar to drama. Moreover, these same plays do not merely express the nature of human existence in a way that confirms a rather familiar view of our own world. Jan Kott’s originality as a drama critic in his path-breaking work, Shakespeare our Contemporary, only becomes evident when we recognize how he observes a certain pattern that recurs in the tragedies as a whole. This pattern involves an interpretation of human events that applies to Shakespeare’s view of history as a “grand mechanism” that engulfs both great and small in a way that is not unrelated to the concerns of our own period. For Jan Kott, we would seriously misread Shakespeare if we assumed that the feudal monarch was simply a privileged personage who rose above the occasions that prompted his actions. On the contrary, the political system that the dramatist sought to represent in his art is not one that any individual can either escape or survey from the outside. The role of morality in Shakespeare’s drama is less important than the conditions that provide the starting-point for action in the first place. Unlike classical drama, Shakespearean tragedy does not abide by a sense of fate that controls the hero’s destiny in advance of its unfolding. For this reason, we might speak of Shakespeare’s realism as a style that goes along with his view of the world: “The greatness of Shakespeare’s realism consists in the awareness of the extent to which people are involved in history.”1 However, if this is true, how does history reveal the order of human affairs in a way that casts light on its indelible features? In attempting to answer this question, Jan Kott does not employ phenomenology as a method but approaches his subject-matter in a manner that might be described as existential and phenomenological at once. On the one hand, without invoking the name of Husserl, he approaches Shakespeare’s plays in pursuit of their eidetic constituency as a reader who is deeply interested in what they have in common. It is from this standpoint that Jan Kott can identify “the order of history” with the Grand Mechanism that shapes the lives of monarchs and common persons alike and that explains how the King who is dethroned can be followed by an equally unworthy successor. On the other hand, this formidable mechanism is one “according to whose laws the road to power is at the same time the way to death.”2 Thus, when considered from an existential standpoint, this strange mechanism could be interpreted in the light of Jan Kott’s own disillusionment with Communism in post-War Poland. The existential reading is not necessarily separate from the eidetic account but might be adopted as another perspective on the same phenomenon.

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The political aspects of Jan Kott’s reading of Shakespeare is therefore an interpretation of the past in view of the present. A basic assumption that underlies this reading is that human nature remains constant in time. Human actions lead to similar results during all periods because men cannot escape the mechanism that exerts a unified influence on them whenever they become obsessed with power. But Jan Kott views this tendency as a humanist who strongly believes that art has the capacity to illuminate the ruses of power and thus to function as a potential warning among those who are able to heed its message. The world that Shakespeare illuminates through his drama is an age of violence, conflict and painful repetition. However, Jan Kott is clearly unable to accept the dimensions of this world as coextensive with that of humanity as a whole. Art in his understanding demonstrates the limits of this background and, in this way, holds up a mirror to aspects of the human condition that might be modified in time. Thus, Shakespeare becomes our contemporary to the precise degree that the world that he reveals is some respects corresponds to our own, just as it suggests, in an ironic fashion, why this world is inadequate. What this means on an aesthetic level is that Jan Kott interprets Shakespeare as an artist who shows us the dark side of the human condition while providing us with knowledge of the world that might contribute to a vital change in consciousness. Jan Kott’s indebtedness to Russian Formalism is perhaps most evident in his emphasis on the role of aesthetic distance in drawing the dramatic observer away from customary habits of thought and perception, For Jan Kott, the dramatic observer normally assumes that Shakespeare’s world is completely unlike the world of the present. However, Jan Kott also understands that unlikeness is the precondition for a dramatic reversal according to which the present world can be reinvented as “alienated” from an ideal vantage-point that we can only imagine but cannot adopt as our own. Hence, the Formalist insistence on the difference between the work of art and the empirical reality in which it is situated only applies to a single phase of aesthetic reception. The importance of history to Jan Kott’s reading of Shakespeare is what leads him to existentialism. The fact that our world remains surprisingly similar to that of Shakespeare introduces a sudden shift in how we view the present world. This sudden shift can be shocking, but it also works toward restoring our capacity to envision the world in different terms. While Shakespeare’s plays may present the world as alienating and monotonous, we do not have to accept this view of things as anything other than provisional. Once we recover from the surprise that is induced upon recognizing our own age in the art of this remote period, we can begin to look ahead to a world in which the normal corruptions of power are no longer inevitable. We can easily see how Jan Kott’s theoretical approach to Shakespeare fits into the project of an artistic avantgarde, which invariably emphasizes the disruptive side of human experience,

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perhaps at the risk of neglecting what encourages creativity and growth. However, this same approach would be inadequately conceived if it could not be related to the possibility of radical transformation. From the standpoint of this higher possibility, Jan Kott allows us to interpret Shakespeare’s world as both historical and as a prefiguration that addresses our ultimate human prospects. Jan Kott’s reading of Shakespeare’s history plays clearly demonstrates how attention to the precise conditions that produce tragedy can be combined with an awareness that transcends the limitations of any given political epoch. Consider first the fate of Richard II, the deposed king who, in the end, confronts his personal flaws with regard to the institution of kingship. which offers a pretext for contemplating the vanity of worldly power. Jan Kott observes that the “meaning” of this monarch’s demise is inseparable from the glimmer of hope that survives the brutal machinations of political intrigue. However, Jan Kott also discusses the case of Richard III, who appears to be invincible but opens up a more ambiguous overview as he enters the final crisis in his career. Jan Kott summarizes the importance of this particular monarch on the basis of a decisive contrast: “Here the king is, in the first half of the tragedy, the mastermind of the Grand Mechanism, a demiurge of history, the Machiavellian Prince. But Shakespeare is wiser than the author of The Prince.”3 The conclusion is inevitable. Richard III rises to the level of history, but Shakespeare’s drama belongs to a moral universe that the protagonist cannot hope to occupy. It would be inaccurate, therefore, to interpret Jan Kott as offering a purely descriptive impression of two plays when his comparative analysis supports an evaluative approach that points beyond the moral inadequacies of the feudal worldview. Jan Kott’s interpretation of Shakespeare is not only original in its unique combination of historical reflection and moral evaluation, but it also allows us to raise anew the old question of what is truly “Shakespearean” about this author’s greatest plays. Jan Kott mentions that King Lear was interpreted psychologically during the Romantic era and according to historical criteria during the age of realism. During the early twentieth century, the notion of an “authentic” Shakespeare produced a Lear who “can arouse only compassion, never pity and terror.”4 In time, however, various attempts to present the play as either a legend or a fairy tale diverged too strongly from the reality that the author himself sought to communicate as a dramatist. Jan Kott would not want to deny that Shakespeare’s work is in some respects dissimilar to our own: “Yet the cruelty of Lear was to the Elizabethans a contemporary reality, and has remained real since.”5 No doubt Jan Kott’s own experience as a twentieth-century Pole was instrumental in turning this painful cruelty into a present-day reality. We might wonder, nonetheless, how Jan Kott envisions the transformation of Shakespeare into a dramatist who can be appreciated in the company of other

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contemporary writers, particularly those of avant-garde standing. Jan Kott’s reading of King Lear once again provides a basis for interpreting Shakespeare as not only a great tragedian but also as a precursor to the drama of our own time. First, he contends that many of the more recent productions of the plays reveal something essential that previous generations were not able to fully grasp. The role of cruelty in King Lear offers us the key to a literary text that has been overlooked in earlier criticism: “In this new theatre there are no characters, and the tragic element has been suspended by grotesque. Grotesque is more cruel than tragedy.”6 On the basis of this fundamental trait, Kan Kott can use the adjective “Shakespearean” with reference to recent dramatists as different as Brecht, Dürrenmatt and Beckett. Of course, each of these dramatists has a special style that captures the element of the grotesque according to a unique view of existence. Jan Kott’s reading of King Lear also indicates how a major work of literature can gain much of its effectiveness through allusions to religious traditions that seem to be out of place in grotesque situations. Antigone is offered a choice between human and divine laws; her fate is sealed when she affirms the laws of the gods without equivocation. The biblical Job waits for some sign of God that would confirm his belief in the absolute. In this uncanny world, we are no longer in dialogue with some higher authority: “The absolute is absurd. Maybe that is why the grotesque often makes use of the concept of a mechanism which has been put in motion and cannot be stopped.”7 The world of Lear is therefore somewhere between that of Macbeth and that of Job, between a time of frenzy and a place of patient suffering. The threat of madness consumes Lear and those who survive him. As if to anticipate the plays of Beckett, the stage on which Lear rages becomes increasingly empty, devoid of any “world” that might contain it: “The force above and beyond man is strongly reminiscent of the Old Testament God. This is also a Book of Job, but without a optimistic ending.”8 If the world exists at all, we might compare it to what emerges in medieval literature as subject to fall and decay, which becomes the tale of clowns rather than the setting of princes. For Jan Kott, Shakespeare does not merely embody the myths of the past in new ways but creates myths that somehow reflect both personal and public realities. A careful reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets demonstrates how this is done. Jan Kott interprets these famous poems dramatically as a three-way discussion about love and the ravages of time. He also contrasts them to the sonnets of Petrarch, a much colder and more artificial writer who never questions the conflict between the body and the mind: “In Shakespeare’s Sonnets, this rigid division into physical and spiritual is blurred. Good intermingles with evil, beauty with ugliness, desire with revulsion, passion with shame.”9 This

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intermingling of traits is conducive to eroticism, which supports an imaginative view of things. Jan Kott discusses convergences between Shakespeare and Leonardo, who were both influenced by the Platonic spirit that swept through Renaissance Europe and came to be expressed in different ways. By reading Shakespeare’s lyric poetry as a prologue to the later plays, Jan Kott suggests how a mythic framework has been invented to accommodate the most diverse aspects of human experience: “Shakespeare is like the Bible; he creates his own myths.”10 But if this is in fact the case, we want to learn more about the value of myths to the literary mind. This brings us to the next phase in Jan Kott’s work as a drama critic. II

After writing on Shakespeare, Jan Kott turned to classical Greek drama at least partially to deepen his thesis concerning the contemporary nature of great literature. The result of this return to origins was Jan Kott’s next major publication, The Eating of the Gods, a study of the interface between myth and literature in ancient Greek civilization. This study can be read as a sequel to the book on Shakespeare, since it takes up the issue of how myth can serve a non-traditional function in providing the spectator with insights into his or her own situation in time. One would think that any possible return to classical literature would have to be undertaken on different grounds to the degree that a received mythology was integral to Greek drama in the ancient world. What Jan Kott suggests, however, is not only that the classical Greek dramatists used myths on their own terms but that they often employed drama in response to the poltical realities of their own period. Largely for this reason, Jan Kott can be compared neither to those poetic souls who have argued that the Greek world was radically unlike our own nor to the traditional humanists who emphasized that this same world was endowed with values that anticipate the modern age. The existential dimension of Jan Kott’s reading of classical tragedy is inseparable from his critical assessment of what the Greek dramatists endured and chose to express in writing. For instance, Jan Kott’s interpretation of Prometheus does not only mention how Aeschylus raised a time-honored myth to the level of sublime poetry. On the contrary, Jan Kott emphasizes that this particular drama provides evidence that the author “knew tyranny from his own experience, having spent fifteen years in Syracuse at the court of the Sicilian tyrant.”11 We should not be surprised to learn, therefore, that “the categories and terms of fifth-century political thought” can be found in crucial passages throughout this drama.12 Jan Kott also reminds us that, while the Prometheus of the nineteenth century was the hero of Goethe and Shelley, the Prometheus of our own age has been differently envisioned by Camus, Kafka and Beckett.

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The existential side of Jan Kott’s approach to the literary canon becomes even more prominent in his remarks on Ajax, one of Sophocles’s most pessimistic plays. Noting that classical philologists have tended to deny that Sophocles was capable of expressing such a bitter view of life, Jan Kott argues that academic classicism never limited the greatest critics. Corneille was one of the first among the moderns to understand what it means to live at the end of a heroic era, which in our own time has offered “corpses thrown into a rubbish heap, hasty exhumations and invariably belated rehabilitations, connected with the cult of new leaders.”13 This gruesome scene refers to the attitude that the Greek commanders adopted toward Ajax, a traitor who finally committed suicide. The background for this scene is the Trojan War, which, in the play itself, has entered its tenth year. Jan Kott notes that the second half of the tragedy would be unheroic, not only to a present-day audience, but to all audiences: “It is contemporary to a nonheroic world.”14 The character of Odysseus in this play unites many opposing traits that often exist separately in other literary depictions, just as it provides a perspective on life that was probably shared by Sophocles himself. The burial of Ajax commemorates the death of a hero in an absurd world in which even heroism has become absurd. Jan Kott’s reading of Sophocles acquires an existential edge when it brings together the pathos of the great tragedies with the historical situation that would soon overwhelm the Athenian people. His interpretation of major works is not self-contained: “Sophocles’s tragedies are not historical parallels, but their contemporaneity, although hidden, does not cease to be significant.”15 Sophocles’s Philoctetes was written four year after the destruction of the Athenian fleet and during the nineteenth year of the Peloponnesian war. Jan Kott compares this catastrophic event to the historical situation that Tolstoy evokes in War and Peace, the most popular book in occupied Central Europe during the Second World War.16 In both cases, factors that exceed human control seem to contribute to the outcome of conflicts that qualify the heroism of their participants. In responding to this new situation, Sophocles creates the figure of Philoctetes as the victim of an incurable wound that may be interpreted as an emblem for tragic consciousness itself. Philoctetes clings to his own suffering as an antidote to the cruel workings of fate and, in this way, opposes the conventional poetry of both Neoptolemus and Odysseus. Surely the stance of Philoctetes comes closer to Camus’s Sisyphus than to that of the biblical Job. The rescue of Philoctetes from his desert island that occurs at the end of the play performs a symbolic role, suggesting that no one can escape the pressures of history.17 Our final example of how Jan Kott read Greek tragedy is proided by Euripides’s deeply disturbing play, The Bacchae. Jan Kott does not read this play as a simple glorification of excess or as a moral allegory that depicts the effects of

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repression on rational beings. Instead, he emphasizes the play’s tragic features when he calls attention to the role of madness among the bacchantes, whose wild frenzy results in the death of King Pentheus. The function of Pentheus in the play, therefore, replicates what can be found in most tragedies; the protagonist is the scapegoat whose sacrifice resembles that of other classical heroes. However, Jan Kott also discusses how the cult of Dionysos inscribes a ritual of death and resurrection that has been compared anthropologically to fertility rites that exist in many primitive societies. The drama not only has a religious cast but might remind us of various non-Western theatrical performances that rely on symbolic expression to communicate their deepest messages.18 This symbolic component in the drama, nonetheless, cannot obscure the difference between the mythic dismemberment of Dionysos and the ritual murder of Pentheus, a victim of religious frenzy. “The death and resurrection of the god are in The Bacchae a sign, but the agony and death of the man are real.”19 For Jan Kott, the murder of Pentheus, which is cruel and violent, brings about the defeat of life rather than any hope of genuine rebirth. The play can be read in relation to the historical events that overtook the Greek world during its most critical phase: “The Bacchae was written in the third decade of the Peloponnesian War; less than two years after its first performance, Athens fell.”20 Jan Kott’s reading of the Greek classics, like his reading of Shakespeare, implicitly argues that art is both irreducible to history and deeply engaged in a situation upon which it offers a very special sort of commentary. III

Jan Kott’s work in drama criticism provides an important bridge between avant-garde art theory and the academic interpretation of canonical texts. His work in this field is perhaps unique in offering us an alternative to both the hermeneutics of distance and the more “classical” hermeneutics that seems to rediscover the past in the present. We might identify these two very different hermeneutical approaches with Friedrich Nietzsche and Hans-Georg Gadamer respectively. On the one hand, Nietzsche’s inaugural text, The Birth of Tragedy, might be read today as an example of the hermeneutics of temporal distance insofar as it refers to an ancient world that is all but inaccessible to modern consciousness. At least in this early work, Nietzsche’s attitude toward Greek drama is profoundly nostalgic, particularly when it depicts a world in decline that we can never hope to recover.21 On the other hand, Hans-Georg Gadamer provides a definition of “the classic” in Truth and Method that extends the method of phenomenology into the realm of cultural interpretation.22 For Gadamer, the classic work is one that is capable of communicating the meanings of the past in the mode of the present. The concept of “contemporaneity”

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applies to the classic work, not in the restricted manner of describing a purely contempoarary sort of appeal, but in the more inclusive manner of suggesting how the work of art can cross the threshold of time in eliciting a clear response among different spectators. Jan Kott, as a literary critic, is closer to Gadamer than he is to Nietzsche, but we still need to distinguish his approach to art from that of Gadamerian hermeneutics in general. A distinguishing feature of Jan Kott’s interpretive strategies is certainly an emphasis on the historical nature of experience. However, this emphasis should not be considered in isolation. When Jan Kott defines monarchical institutions as cruelly mechanical, or when he identifies the role of wars in forming human attitudes in classical civilization, he does not merely refer to the values of past societies. The world of Shakespeare, like that of the ancient Greeks, becomes contemporary when historical experience is lived on an existential level. Jan Kott was able to read Shakespeare as a precursor to his own situation during the Communist period because political power possesses certain characteristics that were dramatized for all time in the Elizabethan theatre. By the same token, Jan Kott was able to appreciate Greek tragedy as an expressive medium that could be rediscovered in the crisis of occupied Poland and in the terrors of war that remain an indelible part of contemporary life. In calling attention to parallels between the past and present, Jan Kott suggests how definite historical recurrences provide the occasion for an elaboration of existential terms. Underlying his reading of Shakespeare was pessimism concerning the future of Communism as it developed in his native Poland. Certainly his experience as a partisan during the Occupation, which demonstrated the brutality of war as well as the possibility of heroism, rekindled his love of the Greek classics at a later time. Jan Kott’s existentialism is evident in his reflections on historical recurrences that cannot be understood if personal experience is not taken into account. In recognizing himself and his own generation in the dreams of the past, Jan Kott acknowledges the existential kinship of human beings who live in diverse times and places. Finally, Jan Kott’s existentialism can be framed in critical terms as integral to his unique approach to drama. For Jan Kott, the plays of Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks do not simply reproduce the existential dilemmas that are peculiar to historical experience. Jan Kott goes beyond a basically retrospective view of literature when he argues that great drama has the capacity to produce a coherent audience response that testifies to shared engagements with the world at large. Great drama is no more reducible to historical circumstances than it possesses a “structure” that excludes the experience of living individuals. On the contrary, the plays of Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks are remembered because their authors had the capacity to raise human experience to the level of sublime art that elicits the response of diverse audiences. History does not

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produce great drama, but it may be a condition for the possibility of a theatre that is capable of being transmitted from one period to another. In conclusion, Kan Kott’s existential theatre presupposes a system of reception that is brought into being as soon as the playwright develops the means to communicate with the audience of his own time. Jan Kott, like Gadamer, is interested in the mode of presence through which a given dramatic production achieves consistency in time. However, rather than attribute constancy primarily to the structure of the work, Jan Kott implicitly demonstrates that the audience provides the space of reception within which a given play becomes a performance that can be repeated. Wolfgang Iser has discussed the “aesthetic” significance of this space of reception in his phenomenological approach to literature, which unites the active and passive sides of interpretation in a unified theory of reading.23 In arguing that the same dramatic work can be appreciated during different periods, Jan Kott implies that similar historical conditions provide the occasion for a creative response that enables a community of spectators to visit and revisit a dramatic spectacle. History itself may be absurd and repetitious. Nonetheless, the playwright is not condemned to present historical events uncritically anymore than the spectator is limited to a single perspective. By showing us how the historical element in human experience enters the space of reception whenever a dramatic work is consciously appreciated, Jan Kott unites the claims of both existentialism and phenomenology in an approach to drama that addresses the enduring problems of our common world. Skidmore College NOTES 1

Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1974), p. 20. 2 Kott, p. 38. 3 Kott, p. 51. 4 Kott, p. 130. 5 Kott, p. 130. 6 Kott. p. 130. 7 Kott, p. 133. 8 Kott, pp. 148–149. 9 Kott, p. 244. 10 Kott, p. 292. 11 Jan Kott, The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 23. 12 Kott, p. 23. 13 Kott, p. 13. 14 Kott, p. 72.

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Kott, p. 183. Kott, p. 183. 17 Kott, p. 185. 18 Kott, pp. 205–206. 19 Kott, p. 219. 20 Kott, p. 229. 21 While identifying Aeschylus and Sophocles with highpoints in Greek drama during its most exuberant period, Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy clearly adopts a nostalgic view of classical theatre when it attributes its decline to the rise of Socratic rationalism. He viewed the Age of Alexander in less than positive terms, just as he saw the theatre of Euripides as the precursor to a culturally retrograde modern realism. Nietzsche’s nostalgic attitude toward the early phase of Greek culture looks back to the Romantic sentiments of Friedrich Hölderlin and, in some respects, anticipates the more philosophical position of Martin Heidegger. 22 Gadamer’s attempt to develop a modern form of hermeneutics in Truth and Method can be read as a major contribution to contemporary thought that depends on the achievements of early twentieth-century phenomenology. The work of both Husserl and Heidegger are crucial to this project, which confronts the problem of historical consciousness through various strategies, including a renovation of “the classic” as a timeless work that comes to us from the past but speaks to us in the mode of the present. While acknowledging that the notion of the classic in Western cultural studies points back to Greco-Roman antiquity, Gadamer also employs this concept to support a view of the understanding that foregrounds the role of language as a universal medium of expression and communication. 23 Wolfgang Iser’s “aesthetics of reception” is thoroughly discussed in The Act of Reading, a theoretical work that employs the work of Husserl to discuss the nature of the reading process and to reinvigorate the role of the audience in the constitution of literary meaning. The reading of Jan Kott that has been proposed in this essay has allowed me to relate Iser’s critical contributions to the historical and interpretive dynamics of existential theatre. 16

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G S Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Easterling, P.E. (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Esslin, Martin. The Theater of the Absurd. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Gadamer. New York and London Continuum Books, 2004. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Kuharski, Allen J. “Raised and Written in Contradiction: The Final Interview; Jan Kott in Converdsation with Allen J. Kuharski.” New Theatre Quarterly 18 (2002), pp. 103–120. Kott, Jan. The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Kott, Jan. The Meaning of the Body: Essays on Theatre and Death. Trans. Jadwiga Kosicka, Lillian Tallee and others. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992. Kott, Jan. Shakespeare our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. New York: and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1974.

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Kott, Jan. Still Alive: An Autobiographical Essay. Trans. Jadwiga Kosicka. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Kott, Jan. Theatre of Essence, and Other Essays. Ed. Martin Esslin. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1984. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blackmore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

ANNA MAŁECKA

THE EXISTENTIAL AND AESTHETIC ASPECTS O F T H E H I S T O RY M U S E U M AT T H E T U R N O F T H E C E N T U RY

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses the new history museum formula, interpreted in terms of existentialist philosophy and against the background of the tragic experience of the twentieth century. Firstly, the concept of museum in the context of Roman Ingarden’s theory of the work of art is presented, in the view of which the museum space can be considered as initiating the aesthetic experience where – through the act of aesthetic values actualization – metaphysical qualities can be revealed. Secondly, the modern discoursive formula of history museums is analysed, as exemplified by Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Museum of Warsaw Uprising in the capital of Poland. Such museums introduce a truly existential approach towards the represented past. Martin Heidegger’s philosophy is quoted in this context, to show how within the aesthetically built museum space, the visitors are supposed to experience a symbolically reconstructed history, seen from the present existential perspective. Modern exhibitions tend to accomplish this purpose by offering shocking and strong emotions. Such symbolic though traumatic experience is believed to contribute to the transformation of Dasein towards the authentic existence. In the second half of the 20th century, and especially in its final decades, an essential change in the museum formula can be observed, which refers primarily to its ideological and philosophical message, and also to the methods of exhibition arrangement and musealia development. This transformation concerns, in particular, history museums, including martyrology ones, which are rooted in the tragic experience of the twentieth century. Contemporary existentialist philosophy, especially Martin Heidegger’s thought, seems to play an essential role in creating the museum space in which the visitors are supposed to experience a symbolically reconstructed history, seen from the present existential perspective. Besides, history museums provide a good illustration of the temporality of human existence as such, in its supra-individual dimension. As Hans-Georg Gadamer taught us, the past can provide the structures, concepts and meanings through which we can better understand ourselves.1 Museums, 367 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 367–378. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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whose main function has been traditionally considered as preservation and displaying of objects possessing meaning and value for past generations, play an important role in that endeavour.2 Recent museology students emphasize especially the present significance of reconstructed past signs. The eminent museology scholar Nelson Goodman expresses the view that a common objective of museums consists in the improvement of our understanding, and also of creating, the worlds in which we live.3 The main problem with the old and schematic formula of traditional museums can be seen in the fact that it seemed rather remote and alien to the perception of modern subjects. As existentialism focuses upon the existing human individual, so also new history museums attempt to render it possible for concrete visitors to enter into a specific dialogue, based on their own existential experience, with the past reconstructed within the exhibition space. Such reconstructed and subjective experience of the past (especially the tragic past) can help the visiting subject to make their existence more authentic, to understand better not only their own being, but also the nature of Being as such. The museum can thus acquire a quasi-metaphysical significance. Let us remind in this context that Heidegger’s idea of authentic existence is based on the experience of anxiety (Angst) in which Being as such reveals itself enigmatically, in the horizon of the world in its entirety that is going to be lost. With the evading Being we encounter nothingness, which is not – and cannot be – the object of our experience, as it is precisely “no-thing” (it does not exist), but which refers exactly to elapsing Being, as its opposite. It is the very awareness of the inevitability of losing our own existence, and also Being as such, that enables us to grasp both: Being and Nothingness. Such experience is traumatic, as all the familiar and customary ways of relating to the world become questioned. However, we are given an opportunity of liberation from the inauthentic routine existence, and from the enslavement of the herd instinct. The traumatic feeling of Angst is thus necessary for fulfilment of the truly human task of understanding (and expressing in speech) of Being.4 Referring to the main theme of the present paper, we can ask the question in what way the new history museums can contribute to our existential awareness, as it is understood by Heidegger. Museums belong to the sphere of culture, that is this dimension of human activity the objective of which consists in constituting values and imposing meanings upon the rough material of experience. Not only art museums, but also history, nature, science, and technology ones can be considered as specific cultural and aesthetic phenomena, aiming at providing their visitors with an opportunity of specific experience, in which artistic values possess clue significance – they are employed to awake the observer’s awareness of certain phenomena that are considered essential and worth representing by the museum curators.

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As a cultural process, the museum experience may be analysed within the context of specific aesthetic situation. Accordingly, Roman Ingarden’s theory of the work of art, which explains both the essence of art itself and the entire aesthetic situation in terms of ontology and aesthetics, can be quoted in this context.5 Confronted with the museum, we find ourselves within the specific aesthetic situation, in which the displayed artefacts and the whole arrangement of the exhibition space appeal to us in the way akin to that exercised by the works of art. Aesthetically understood “museum experience” evokes feelings and reflections rendering it possible for us to actualise the potential elements of the “work of exhibition art”. Following Ingarden’s theory, we can say that the museum formula is schematic, and contains areas of indeterminacy, which are to be completed (concretised) in the individual experience of the exhibition observer. The mode of completion which occurs in the visitor’s thinking or fantasy is not unambiguously determined by what is contained in the exhibition itself. The museum – especially the modern one – is thus an open creation, welcoming constitution of its various “versions” on the part of the receiver. Consequently, there may be numerous different concretions of the same museum space, though they are not fully subjected to the visitor’s will. Thus we can say that the “museum work of art”, like all kinds of works of art, sets certain limitations to its admissible completions and interpretations that are observed by the appropriately qualified subject. In fact, the adequate (though still individual and unique) concretions can be authored only by sensitive and conscious observers. This has led Nelson Goodman to claim that the museum often has to face the problem of inappropriate experience and incompetence of its visitors.6 The initial task imposed on the museum visitors lies in recognition and actualisation of potential aesthetic values, inherent to all authentic works of art and rooted in artistic values. All museums, regardless of the type they represent, convey their messages – including the cognitive, educational and existential ones – within this aesthetic environment, in which the experience of aesthetic values plays the role of directing the subject’s commitment and attention to the deepest meaning of the exhibits. Considering the work of museum art as an intentional object, and following Ingarden’s categories related to other works of art, we can distinguish several strata in it. The first consists of visual (and in modern museums – also audio) appearances and spatial shapes. The next one includes objects and events presented by the former stratum. The following one carries historical and symbolic meaning – the artistically reconstructed past, while the ultimate layer conveys metaphysical qualities. According to Roman Ingarden, this final layer constitutes the essential stratum of all works of art. It symbolically reveals (by means

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of other strata) the inexpressible ultimate meaning of being as such. Thus, from the philosophical point of view, when deprived of metaphysical reference which would remain in accordance with artistic qualities, the work of museum art cannot be considered as fully valuable. Traditional museums, however, do not always create the space that supports this kind of metaphysical experience, performed within the context of aesthetic situation. In his famous paper entitled Valery Proust Museum, Theodor W. Adorno compared museums to mausoleums, to family tombs of art, in which tradition is only quoted and does not contain any embracing or substantial power.7 It seems that recent museums – especially the newest ones – aspire at changing this rhetoric of distance and alienation, arranging aesthetic situations in which the past – in its natural, historic, civilisational, artistic, technological, or other aspects, becomes close to the experience of contemporary viewers. That which is historic becomes reconstructed in the appealing way, actively engaging the visitor within the aesthetically constituted experience. The implementation of this idea is in accordance with the Polish museologist ˙ Zdzisław Zygulski’s concept of the ways in which the past should be reconstructed by museums: “Any message – concerning art, science and history – is futile, unless it carries a significance that can be directly related to the present”.8 The principles of modern exposition are based on the concepts of participatory creation on the part of the observer, so extensively promoted by postmodern culture, and especially by Net Art. This purpose is achieved, first of all, by various multimedia techniques, introduced both to new and traditional museums, deconstructionist architecture of museum buildings, artistically original or even shocking methods of displaying the artefacts. The focus on the observer’s unique reception and their active role in the process of musealia perception contributes mostly to the constitution of highly individualised space, in which the aesthetically rooted existential experience becomes possible. This concept of subject’s active role in creating their aesthetic object is in compliance with Ingarden’s aesthetic theory. In museology, the idea of active pursuit and discovery of the exhibits’ meaning and message was introduced by Nelson Goodman, and has been accompanying the international museum boom witnessed since the early 1980-ies.9 The tragic history of the previous century found its dramatic expression in the new generation history museums, opened at the turn of the century. Especially museums-monuments devoted to the tragic fate of Jews during the second world war, as well as that of other nations invaded by the Nazi, have been expressively designed to transmit the notions of anxiety, death, absence, nothingness. In such museums the constitution of aesthetic situation

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that engages the visitor and makes it possible for them to be symbolically confronted with the tragedies of the past, prevail over the strictly informative and cognitive aspects, traditionally understood as the major function of this type of museums. Accordingly, history museums are transformed into truly existential museums, in which the observer is supposed to empathize with the past generations who experienced “border situations”, and through this empathy – to pursue the meaning of the universal human condition as such. Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, opened in 2001, constitutes an extremely expressive example of such creations. The most striking aesthetic fact about the museum is its architecture, which overshadows all possible exhibits. Architecture – by its very nature – is an art of spatial arrangement. Hence its role in creating metaphorical spaces of modern museums. The deconstructionist architect Libeskind evokes the exceptional museum dimension by means of introducing versatile elements of philosophy, literature and music to his masterpieces. The architectural space itself becomes a carrier of the existential message which seems too tragic to be represented and “explained” by any literal and strictly documentary exhibits. Theodor Adorno’s well-known phrase claiming that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”10 appears very pertinent in this context. Art in general, so also the museum as a specific work of art, falls short of representing the depth of historic and existential tragedy. The only possible aesthetical solution is to evoke silence of empty spaces that symbolise total uncertainty, decline of all hope, death and absence (Figure 1). The figurative language of Libeskind’s design is to be read in terms of allusions related to the Holocaust. The very plan of the building – the zigzag shape, presents the broken Star of David, which symbolises the fact that tradition of Jewish culture and religion was scarred by the second world war – though not destroyed. The author called his project “Between the Lines”, as it is supposed to represent the entangled lines of German and Jewish history, both disjointed and catastrophic. The star itself “was generated by plotting the addresses of prominent Jewish and German citizens on a map of pre-war Berlin, and joining these points into an ‘irrational and invisible matrix’ ”.11 The spatial structure of the building lacks the axial composition or symmetry, there is no balance of the masses, and the storeys are blurred. The facade is covered with magnificent titanium and zinc sheets, from which distorted shapes of windows shoot out like thunders.12 They resemble scratches, and provide allegories of wounds. The distorted and torn lines on the building facade, visible from without, are to make the visitor feel uncertain and disorientated as to the building’s structure. They constitute a pertinent introduction to the whole maze of uncertainty and threat that awaits the perceiving subject on their further steps into the museum. Furthermore, the building cannot be entered directly from the outside, but only

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Figure 1. The Jewish Museum in Berlin – fragment of the facade

through the Baroque Kollegienhaus. The way leads downwards, throughout the poorly lit staircase, and is an emblem of descending to the world of the dead. The essential part of the building consists of empty spaces, called – after Derrida – “voids”, inaccessible directly to the visitors, and overlooked by several bridges. As Naomi Stead states, the void spaces present absolute absence.13 They symbolise the Jewish life removed from the city, the painful lack permeating to our present. Empty spaces may be also interpreted, more universally, as symbols of nothingness which – though itself unrepresentable – is allegorically alluded to by the lack of any objects and bare walls. Through the aesthetically evoked experience of absence and privation of past life, the visitor is confronted with the more general issue of human condition, pervaded with anxiety which points to the loss of being in its totality. The museum route offers numerous spatially and emotionally disturbing effects, bringing about the feeling of overwhelming uncertainty, ambiguity, and lack of hope. On the lowest level, the visitor encounters a corridor leading

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to the right, which is seemingly dead-ended. It becomes unexpectedly narrow and cramped, which is the effect of the rising floor and lowering ceiling. The observer, however, is not aware of the fact; he experiences lack of air, and feels trapped. Thus he is supposed to follow – allegorically – the way of the Jewish nation’s suffering. At the end of the corridor, a small metal door leading to the so called Holocaust Tower can be noticed. The walls of that place are set up at different angles, it is dark inside, and specific acoustic effects occur, which evoke the atmosphere of incomprehensible whispering of a terrified crowd. A ladder suspended high up is out of reach – which indicates the inaccessibility of signalised hope. Another corridor leads from the lower level to a metaphorical garden which consists of reinforced concrete posts, on the top of which olive trees have been planted. The garden that could have symbolised life, is unattainable, similarly to other signs of hope. The posts deviate from the perpendicular by 10–12 degrees, similarly as the floor from the ground level. Walking on the uneven surface reinforces the feeling of uncertainty and embarrassment. Heideggerian experience of Angst constitutes the precondition of a personal liberation from everyday routine, of making one’s existence conscious and authentic. In this context, we can ask the question whether the museum experience, which evokes such extravagant emotions, can contribute to the actual existential and metaphysical awareness of the perceiving subject, carrying the message that would be both positive and lasting. The whole experiment bears a character of aesthetic situation, and, accordingly, it is to be interpreted figuratively. Yet, the overall museum message, if considered in terms of the catharsis category, provides the true existential answer that is non-nihilistic and hopeful. At the end of the third corridor, which leads up to light, the visitor is confronted with the allegory of ultimate metaphysical meaning. Through the maze of void and dark spaces indicating nothingness, the visiting subject arrives at light: the symbol of Being revealed within the painful experience of total loss. Eventually, an uneasy hope is summoned. “This museum is a new emblem of hope – says Libeskind, explaining the essential message of his creation. – It underscores the necessity to create a different – and by different, I mean ethical – architecture for the 21st century, which is based on a fundamentally transformed political, cultural, and spiritual experience of the 21st century”.14 According to Ken Gorbey, the New Zealand archaeologist and historian, the museum “is a built paradox: it speaks of destruction and the triumph over destruction; it points up absence and is overwhelmingly present”.15 Libeskind’s architectural deconstructivism is rooted in “dismantling” of forms, which, however, serves the task of rebuilding the architectural “cosmos” based on new and shocking arrangement of elements. The process of components “dismantling” and introduction of the destruction poetics into the museum artefact can

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also be allegorically interpreted in the context of Walter Benjamin’s view of ruins emblematically representing history. Yet, they imply also a more positive meaning.16 As Naomi Stead pertinently remarks, the metaphor of the ruin “delves beyond the aesthetic of ruin as an object, and reads it as a process, a means of demythifying and stripping away a falsely affirmative vision of reality, and of history”.17 Through the shock of destruction the participant of this peculiar museum experiment is to wake up from the familiar life of Dasein towards the authentic existence. The “historiographic” architecture and museum itself offer a new perspectives for reflections over history interpreted as the past lost forever. For the Ingardenian aesthetic subject, it can also reveal more universal, i.e. metaphysical qualities related to the ultimate source of existence. Treated as a pure history museum, the sophisticated symbolism of the Jewish Museum assumes as a prerequisite certain factual knowledge on the part of the visitor. However, if we give priority to the aesthetic and existential dimension of the museum, the sensitivity and openness to a new experience turn to be sufficient conditions, rendering possible the aesthetically rooted reception of the metaphysical meaning of the masterpiece. The visitor is given freedom to plan their own “sightseeing” route throughout the exhibition experimental space, and – consequently – to construct their own aesthetic object based on the “museum work of art”. The perceiving subject is expected to arrive at the vital meaning of history and human existence on the basis of figuratively reconstructed fragments and traces. The opinions of people who have visited the museum are full of admiration: “It is amazing, that such simplicity can induce the feelings within the receiver that are so profound; it cannot be denied that this museum is breathtaking”.18 Another modern history museum which assumes an active involvement on the part of the visitor is the Museum of Warsaw Uprising situated in the capital of Poland. Opened in 2004 to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the uprising, the museum evokes strong emotions. The diversified exhibition space symbolically introduces the contemporary visitor to the very centre of the tragic past events that for every Pole constitute an emblem of heroic and lonely struggle against the overwhelming forces of the Nazi occupant, while the Soviet army were standing passively on the other bank of the Vistula river, waiting for the extermination of the Polish insurgents by Germans. The museum is located in the modernized building of the former transformer station for the trams, whose civil staff was murdered by Germans on 6th August 1944. It is recognized to be the only Polish institution fully deserving the name of the 21st century museum.19 The user is offered a wide range of their own options selection, and activation of the potentialities provided by the exhibits.

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Figure 2.

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The Museum of Warsaw Uprising

The museum does not present a strictly scholarly or rationally ordered character; the visitor is expected to create spontaneously their own route within the exhibition space filled with original documents, recordings made on various carriers, and replicas (Figure 2). By means of differentiated forms of presentation and multimedia devices the authors of the exhibition tried to reconstruct multifarious aspects of everyday life in Warsaw at the time of the uprising. Among the exhibits, the following are most impressive: a reconstructed canal (through which the insurrectionists were escaping from the threatened districts of the city), a barricade, ruins, a collection of weapons and uniforms, radio station, printing machines which still work and edit the historic announcements, the mail and hospital, the “Palladium” cinema showing the news of the time, RAF’s airdrop containers, replica of the Liberator – the American aircraft shot down near Warsaw, and

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others. In the museum center, a monument pervading all the levels of the edifice has been erected, which transmits the multifarious sounds of the fighting city, and symbolises “the beating heart of the capital”. Martyrology museums speak most expressively through the emblems of death. In the Warsaw museum, which is to commemorate the national heroism and tragedy, numerous mourning symbols are displayed, for example the authentic cross taken from the young insurgent’s grave and included among the museum exhibits. A shocking illustration of the mass murder performed by the SS brigade on over 40 thousand civil inhabitants of the Warsaw Wola district on 5th August 1944 has been shown in a big tent, with tables in center, on which the authentic reports of the victims’ exhumation – preserved in resin – are displayed. The inside of the tent is dark and austere; the exhumation reports contain detailed and dry data concerning the victims’ wounds and clothes. The recorded voice of a woman who miraculously survived the massacre and makes a shocking account of the events she witnessed can be heard from the loudspeaker. The curators aimed at creating a suggestive atmosphere of the tragic days of Polish history. Within the museum figurative space, the Uprising is still raging. We can hear the bullets whistle, as well as the hopeful freedom fighters’ songs and prayers. As the museum co-creator and chief curator Jan Ołdakowski states, the essential objective of the museum project is to maintain a constant communication with the visitors, to ensure their interest and involvement in what is metaphorically “happening” within the museum. That objective is accomplished through a specific game, in which the participants are supposed to decipher the historic and existential meanings of artifacts for themselves.20 The museum message is actualized within the observers’ aesthetic experience, that is artistically induced with the assistance of audio, visual, and multimedia means. Though the primary task of the museum seems to lie in the revival of the spirit of patriotism and respect for national traditions, the exhibition refers to universal symbols that are comprehensible to all members of the Western culture, even those who do not know much of the Polish recent history. The contemporary visitor is given an opportunity to participate figuratively in the most tragic and heroic chapter of Warsaw recent history. Through the museum experiment, understood as a specific aesthetic experience, the adequately qualified subject is also capable of deciphering the metaphysical qualities pertaining to human condition as such, which is permeated with death and directed towards it. Owing to the aesthetic values of the exhibition arrangement, that which seems distant becomes close to the existential experience of contemporary participants, and reveals its present meaning within the

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individualized aesthetic situation. The nostalgic history of the annihilated prewar Warsaw and its inhabitants, metaphorically reconstructed in the visitors’ museum experience, can also contribute to their understanding of the universal tragic dimension of la condition humaine. Modern history museums, though thematically focusing on the past, are addressed to the present and future generations, and are expected to be creatively experienced by visitors, regardless of the time they live in. In accordance with the ontopesis concept formulated by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, we can conclude that the museum aesthetic experiment shows – similarly to human existence as such – the procesual character, in which ever new meanings are constructed within the creative-existential processes.21 Faculty of Humanities, Department of Culture Studies and Philosophy, University of Science and Technology AGH, Cracow, Poland

NOTES 1

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, transl. G. Barden and J. Cumming (2nd ed., London: Sheed and Ward, 1989), p. 230. 2 Ignacy S. Fiut, “Rozwa˙zania o utworze muzealnym”, in Filozofia. Media. Ekologia (Kraków: Stowarzyszenie Twórcze Krakowski Klub Artystyczno-Literacki, 1998), p. 50. 3 Nelson Goodman, “The End of Museum?”, in Nelson Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984). 4 Cf. Martin Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics?’, trans. David Farrell Krell, in Basic Writings, London: Routledge, 1993). 5 Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. George G. Grabowicz, (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Selected Papers in Aesthetics, ed. Peter J. McCormick, München: Philosophia Verlag,1985. 6 Goodman, op.cit. 7 Theodor W. Adorno, “Valery Proust Museum”, in Prisms (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 175–176. 8 ˙ Zdzisław Zygulski jun., Muzea na s´wiecie. Wst˛ep do muzealnictwa (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo PWN, 1980), p. 172 (translation mine, A.M.). 9 Goodman, op.cit., p. 148; Bohdan Dziemidok, Główne kontrowersje estetyki współczesnej (Warszawa: PWN, 2002), p. 92; Museum Studies. An Anthology of Contexts, ed. Bettina Mesias Carbonell (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). 10 Cf. Naomi Stead, “The Ruins of History: Allegories of Destruction in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum”, Open Museum Journal Vol. 2 (August 2000: Unsavory Histories). 11 Ibidem. Cf. also Daniel Libeskind, “Between the Lines: The Jewish Museum, Berlin”, Research in Phenomenology Vol. 22 (1992), p. 83. 12 Cf. Krzysztof Lenartowicz, “Architektura trwogi”, Konteksty LVII (2003), pp. 321–330. 13 Cf. Stead, op.cit. 14 http://www.architectureweek.com/2001/1107/design_1-2html (translation mine, A.M.). 15 Ibidem.

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Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, (New York and London: Verso 1977), p. 177. 17 Cf. Stead, op.cit. 18 http://www.sztuka-architektury.pl (translation mine, A.M). 19 Paweł Ukielski, “Historia pewnego muzeum . . . ”, Mówia˛ Wieki 1 (2006), pp.68-71. 20 “Muzeum musi by´c jak dobry film. Z Janem Ołdakowskim, dyrektorem Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego, rozmawiaja˛ Jarosław Krawczyk i Bogusław Kubisz”, Mówia˛ Wieki 1 (2006), pp. 64–67. 21 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, “The Creative Experience and the New Critique of Reason”, Japanese Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana, Vol. 8 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1974), pp. 205–229.

S E C T I O N VI

LIINA UNT

P L AY I N G W I T H P L AC E S : T H E A E S T E T H E T I C E X P E R I E N C E O F P L AC E I N A P L AY S I T UAT I O N

ABSTRACT

One of the crucial qualities in playing is engagement in the activity that enables experience (including aesthetic experience) of the world of play. Playing includes engagement with fictional as well as real environments (objects, events), which has made it a productive metaphor for describing aesthetic experience. The paper takes closer look at the very idea of playing. Concentrating on environment it argues that playing fosters a specific type of aesthetic experience that can be described through the concept of aesthetic engagement used in phenomenological environmental aesthetics. It shows that playing can radically change the perception of places – rather than locations they are experienced as events.

INTRODUCTION

Playing is one of the key terms that Hans Georg Gadamer uses in the discussion of aesthetic experience (Gadamer 1989, 1998). In certain sense playing, like art, has the capability to temporarily redefine the relations one has with the world. Fictionality and moreover, involvement with the environment required in the act of playing, open up a new dimension of engagement with the environment. Environment, however, is a broad concept. Place is the personal and meaningful centre of human environment; the concept is widely used in several disciplines ranging from environmental aesthetics to cultural anthropology, from literary studies to human geography. Playing,1 based on the relationship between phenomenal body and place, is discussed here as an embodied and immediately placed experience that fosters aesthetic engagement with places. The tendency to treat place as a stabile and fixed unit is gradually giving way to the concept of places-as-processes (Creswell 2004), the long span of geographical and social expressions in environment makes the aesthetic aspect of the processes hard to be immediately experienced. Playing makes aesthetic engagement in places as processes possible. 381 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 381–391. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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The first two chapters will open the background for the discussion of place and aesthetic engagement. The third chapter concentrates on the specificity of playing as a form of aesthetic engagement. The relationship between the activity of playing and its environment is discussed in the fourth and fifth chapters. Final chapter focuses on the changes in the experience of place that playing creates. B O DY A N D P L AC E

Place has become one of the central concepts in various disciplines, including phenomenological environmental aesthetics. Place is understood as the subjective meaningful centre of human space. Space is an abstract concept; place its narrow and subjective centre. The idea is integrally related to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of body as the cardinal point of space. Phenomenal, animated, sensing and self aware body defines the spatial relationship one has with the environment (Merleau-Ponty 1993: 50, 54). It literally places one in the world as a part of it and establishes a direct contact with the surrounding environment (from local to global) that originates from the unique viewpoint that phenomenal body grants. Body constitutes the stably present, yet mobile “here”. Thus it functions as the primary place and the first mediator between perceiver and environment. The experience of place is related to the immediate meeting of the perceiver and the environment. The importance and value of places are different and so are their meanings. The experience of place is related to perceiver’s memory, knowledge, emotions and experiences. Therefore places are not neutral locations, objective sectors of the physical world, but places of involvement, the boundaries of which are defined by the relationship the perceiver has with the place. Human geographer and aesthetician Pauli Tapani Karjalainen writes, “Place is internally connected with time and self, so that place, time and self make up a triangle of drama of which plot is written by intimate sensing, the individual’s direct and deep personal meeting with the world” (Karjalainen 1999: 1). This distinguishes place from site, lived environment from cartographic co-ordinates. Place experience is embodied. As philosopher Edward S. Casey suggests, human existence is not only embodied, but also immediately placed or implaced. It is a dual process, where in addition to the lived body’s capability to receive outside impulses, “take in” the world, place takes in the body. It creates a place for us and envelopes the body. (Casey 1987: 191–192) Thus places create familiarity at the most basic level. It also suggests that the experience of place, although it may be culturally conditioned, is deeply personal. Place experience in this view is only available through engagement with the place.

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AESTHETIC ENGAGEMENT

Proceeding from the phenomenal relationship between body and place phenomenological environmental aesthetics has attempted to redefine aesthetic experience. Implaced and embodied aesthetic experience starts from placing the perceiver in the scene as an active participant. In its extremity it denies the possibility of aesthetic experience as a distant observer. This approach has been criticized for blurring the subject–object boundary. However, also MerleauPonty and Casey argue that it is impossible to separate living and sensing body from the environment, eventually they form a continuity (Merleau-Ponty 1993, Casey 1996). Aesthetician Arnold Berleant emphasises the processual character of aesthetic experience and suggests an alternative term, aesthetic engagement. Aesthetic engagement is the multisensory phenomenal involvement with the environment, place or object, which is immediate and available only through engagement (Berleant 1992: 28). It can differ in quality and intensity, but the aesthetic dimension is present in all experience. “Aesthetic engagement includes many of the traditional features associated with that (aesthetic – LU) experience, such as emotion, imagination, and pleasure centring on an object, but it surpasses that tradition in recognizing the embedded and embodied character of experience, the plurality of factors implicated, and their centre immediate perception” (Berleant 2001). The process of engagement takes priority over the object. Experience is different on every occasion even if the object is the same and it depends highly on the situation. The idea that aesthetic experience is not an appreciative response evoked by an object and understood by the perceiver, but a dialogue, is also put forth by authors like Hans Georg Gadamer, John Dewey and others. However, Berleant’s emphasis on synaestethic processes suggests a more direct and multisensory involvement that engages many senses and levels of consciousness. Although Berleant focuses on environment, the idea of aesthetic engagement stresses the function of place. First, by emphasizing the active subject as a part of the scene, the relationship between perceiver and its place becomes the pre-requisite of aesthetic experience. Second, the aesthetic object is also situated in a particular place, which is integral to the experience. Along similar lines, Nick Kaye argues that the prime function of site-specific art is not to articulate the intimate relationship between the object and its place, but to draw attention to the relationship between the spatial reality of the perceiver and that of the object (Kaye 2001: 1–3). It employs perceiver’s imagination and creativity (that shape the experience) and direct involvement that activates the experience. The experience is doubly implaced – regarding the perceiver and the perceived object (or place, landscape, environment).

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The idea of aesthetic experience that is possible only through direct engagement with the aesthetic object is also present in hermeneutical aesthetics. The identity and meaning of the aesthetic object are constituted in communication between the perceiver and the object. Similarly to Berleant’s foci it draws attention to the process of experiencing. Gadamer famously compares art experience to playing, because the perceiver accepts the work of art as fiction and experiences it by its rules (Gadamer 1998: 26–27). Although his discussion focuses directly on art, It encompasses aesthetic experience as such. In Gadamer’s interpretation even the act of seeing, recognizing and accepting the object, place or event as fiction is becoming a part of the game. The ability to discern “rules of the game” helps to appreciate the aesthetic object’s (event’s, environment’s) material and mental qualities, genre, culture as well as other factors that are different in eg theatre, painting or installation art. Understanding the rules of the game also influence the particular way the perceiver engages with the object, mentally and/or physically. Aesthetic experience depends on relating the object to the fictional as well as everyday (factual) contexts.2 Gadamer describes the process as an invitation to play which has to be accepted by the viewer. The viewer in turn fills up the open space (Spielraum, literally play-space) that is left in or around the object. Semiotician Juri Lotman also pays attention to the mutually contributing connection between fictional and factual realities. In his understanding playing is the relationship between practical behaviour (where objects are used for necessity) and semantic behaviour (objects are used to represent something, e.g. status). Playing is the interaction of the two realized in constant communication between the practical and fictional levels (Lotman 2006: 158–159). This contributes substantially to the understanding and creation of art. In a certain sense the fictional level acts as a metastructure that gives meaning to the elements of the game: objects, places, people, relations (Hakkarainen 1991: 45). Their meanings and functions in a game depend on the players: that is the acceptance of the particular relationship between the fictional and factual levels at a specific moment. Besides emphasizing the continuity between the subject and the object in aesthetic experience, the comparison with playing also implies a strong degree of involvement. Playing is an inclusive activity, it unites player(s), objects, places into a totality – a set of reality – that is understood only by participating in it. Perceivers, who remain outside the game, fail to understand the course of events as well as the role of the elements of the game. Thus the question of involvement is essential. Even in cases like theatre, where at first sight playing seems to be limited to actors on stage, spectators

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are players. The question is not limited to understanding the fictional nature of events and accepting according behaviour. In order to understand and experience play, spectators need to be involved in the agreements that are proposed in the process of performing. The events, objects and emotions shown onstage become meaningful only if understood by the spectator. Also the emotions and experiences that spectator goes through are highly related to involvement in the game. Gadamer describes it as an act of being succumbed to playing, “the primacy of play over the consciousness of the player” (Gadamer 1989: 103). The elements of game become available and understandable only through involvement. It also holds for place experience in playing. Successful communication of the agreements (the metastructure) and involvement in the process are key factors in play experience. As shown above, they are also integral to aesthetic engagement. Further points of contact can be found in relationship with place.

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Playing is used here as a general concept that can be described through similar qualities (free activity, the outcome and process are not pre-defined, subject to rules, temporal and spatial limits, parallel existence of fictional and everyday realities that do not exclude one another, goal in itself). Regardless if it is treated as metaphor for describing aesthetic experience or as an actual activity that creates aesthetic experience, is a spatial practice. The playing of a game rests on the interplay between the physical location of playing and the fictional environment.3 Fictional level assigns meanings to the real, while real places (objects, events) can be incorporated into the game at any moment and affect the course of events. Even in cases of solitary play, where one is drawn into subjective imagination, it is impossible to completely distance oneself from the physical reality of being somewhere. Casey calls human body the place of all places (Casey 1987: 195). In imagining something in one’s mind, the ultimate playing place is the player’s body that as such makes experience possible. Gadamer states that aesthetic object contains an open space (Spielraum) that has to be filled in by the perceiver. It suggests an active relationship between the spatial context of the object and of the perceiver. As shown above, it is available through immediate engagement. Proceeding from Merleau-Ponty and Casey, play experience is essentially embodied and implaced. Thus the relationship between the immediate place of the object, the place of the perceiver and perceiver’s related place experiences becomes integral to the aesthetic experience. Like Kaye suggested in the case of site-specific art, this triangle forms the basis for aesthetic experience on a situational grounds.

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At the basic level playing rests upon the experience of phenomenal body in place. The implaced, animated, sensing, self-aware and mobile body makes the world available, including the fictional world constituted in arts and made available in playing. The fictional environments of play are only partly realized in the real environment. However, two remarks should be made on the specific relationship between the real and fictional environments in play. First, in a game literally any object, place or person can stand for another one. Nevertheless, it does not cancel its existence in the everyday reality during or after the game. Second, as the inclusion of elements into the game and their subsequent functioning depend on the mutual acceptance of the players, it also follows that the agreement are temporal and valid only for the time of playing. And only for the participants. Places that are established in a play situation can be viewed as temporal agreements that are available only through engagement in the course of playing. Of course, some meanings that are created in the game may alter the perception of the place outside the context of playing. Vivid memories of a performance, familiar childhood venue of hide-and-seek, the outrageous transformation of a tree into an imaginary bear can all contribute to the future experience of the place. It also follows that any place be incorporated into the game at any given moment. Thus the entire environment can be viewed as network of potential places. NETWORK OF PLACES

In a play situation fictional and real environments cannot be treated as extreme opposites. Not only is the player mutually aware of the both levels, but the relationship between the two is dynamic. Theatre director and researcher Annette Arlander defines real environment as the physical and immediate place of action, but even as such it contains connotations, memories, meanings that can be considered fictional. Real environment inevitably becomes partly fictional in the act of being experienced. (Arlander 1998: 58–60) In such a view fictional and real environments are in constant communication and affect one another. In playing fictional environment may become partly realized in the real environment – for instance through the introduction of real objects, oral or gestural references. On the opposite, some games may use the given real environment for the fictional one. In the application of Gadamer’s theory to children’s games aesthetician Pauline von Bonsdorff observes that playing tends to be context-based. This context can either be the immediate physical surroundings or a remembered situation, where the events are integrally connected to the place they happened

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in. (Bonsdorff 2005: 267–8) Environment, whether real or fictional, is hence always a context-building factor. Let us consider a very simple example that illustrates the complexity of experiencing a play environment and its role as an essential contributor. Imagine a situation, where children are in a garden and play travelling to Grandma’s. They enter an imaginary bus (perhaps marked with a toy bus, bench or a stone), find their places and drive through a variety of locations while physically situated in the bus. They exit and go to Grandma’s. It is very hard to differentiate whether the described actions create the environment or it is the establishment and mutual recognition of the fictional environment that fosters action. Action and environment are intrinsically bound together. A situationbased game like going to Grandma’s automatically evokes a spatial context that demands according behaviour, which can be irrelevant of the physical location of the players in the garden. This is not to say that the real environment as such is irrelevant to playing. It offers affordances that can be integrated into the process of playing at any time and thus affect the course of events. Real places and objects can induce imaginings that can be incorporated into the game and influence it. Philosopher Kendall L. Walton calls this process prompting. Prompters can be natural as well as artificial ranging from strangeshaped clouds, tree stumps and stones to lifelike dolls. (Walton 1990: 21–24) Toys are specific case of prompters, since they are designed to induce imaginings. On the one hand they guide the imaginative mind in a certain way (e.g. dolls tend to provoke a game with people in it), on the other hand they provide a possibility to share imaginings or even share and reproduce the personal experience of prompting. The imaginary bus drive to Grandma’s proposes many questions regarding to the perception and experience of places. The players are physically located in the garden and fictionally in a bus, in a particular location in the bus and drive it through a variety of others. Even while disregarding the relationship between fictional and real environment (e.g. bench that is used for the bus), there still remains the presence of multiple locations at the same time (the bus and its varying outside), and the exchangeability of inside and outside. Quite similarly to taking a bus in everyday life, attention is alternatively paid to the passing scenery and the interior of the bus. Some aspects are pushed to the background, some emerge to the foreground. The relationship is dynamic and changing. Consequently it creates a multisensory montage of various places that are experienced to different degrees. Michel de Certeau compares it to asyndeton, the linguistic practice of leaving out conjunctions, adverbs in or between sentences (de Certeau 2005: 162). It has a compressing or even dislocating impact on the environment.

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The process can also be described in terms of framing. Frame separates the outside from the inside and thereby guarantees the integrity of the inside by providing a single focus. Multiplicity of locations indicates shifting focuses, which suggests the possibility of being part of multiple frames. On the fictional level the road that the bus travels on acts as a unifying frame (environment) that can, but does not necessarily contain other frames (places). The same holds for the real environment, where the garden can act as a unifying frame (environment) that contains smaller places (path, stone, patch of grass). Therefore it is possible to speak of different spatial levels that range from general to specific. The first holds the general rules of action since different behaviour calls for different spatial needs (and vice versa), other one is integrally woven into action. The bus drive example shows that not all aspects of environment are realized in a game in the same way. Some places that are actualized become central, while others remain in the background. Their relationship, however, is dynamic and potentially subject to constant change. According to Lotman, such a relationship is always open. Centre may shift to the background, while the previous marginal areas may rise to focus. Such interchangability is characteristic to culture, especially the arts. (Lotman 1999) Furthemore, the potentiality of the marginal areas is higher, since they are centres for creating new meanings. The dynamic character of playing and its subsequent effect of the aesthetic experience of place can also viewed on another level, namely the direct experience of fictional places. As shown above, places are foci that the player is actively involved with, whether emotionally and/or physically. The rest of the environment is a context-builder and a network of potential places. Walton suggested that objects that are included in play act as prompters. Those objects of imagining give physical (re)presentation to the imaginings, whether prompted by the same object or conceived elsewhere. They eventually lend their bodies to imagination. As such they can be seen, touched, perhaps even smelled and heard. In addition they mark the initial spot of occurrence. For instance in imagining a stump to be a bear, the bear appears as occupying space. (Walton 1990: 25–26) The object literally takes place, both as an imagined event and a process of transformation in which the stump becomes a bear and appears as a physical presence in particular location. It constitutes and defines a place. This imagined bear is “bodily”, spatial and may be experienced in a multisensory way. Playing enables the immediate and multisensory experience of fictional places. Places too lend their bodies to imaginings so they could become physically manifest. A patch of grass can become a bed. Grandma’s garden enemy territory on the Moon. A stage can magically transform into a forest and forest into a stage. Characteristically these places acquire substance, they take place. It is a twofold process. On the one hand it is embodiment – taking on body. On the

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other – taking on space. The result is a physical unit that can be attended to and a process at the same time. Since the metamorphosis is not permanent and the places (objects, events) are viewed as temporal agreements, they can be seen to appear in a constant process of becoming. It could be maintained that in a play situation, places are constituted as events rather than incorporated as locations. Places can be – and indeed are – regarded as processes. Whether viewed on the level personal meanings or shared cultural constructs, places have their histories. Several authors point at risks involved in focusing on the spatial qualities of place. Social scientist Doreen Massey criticizes the separation of temporal and spatial dimensions of place, because it inhibits the perception of place as dynamic and heterogeneous (Massey 2005: 49–54). Excessive emphasis the spatial aspects can lead to situation, where place is primarily described or recognised according to its visible and measurable attributes. As such it is in danger of becoming a fixed entity, since visual changes in the environment may be slower than the changes in social and cultural meanings related to a place. But also if place is understood only as experienced, it becomes fixed – a “frozen scene for human activity” (Pred 1984: 279). Instead, geographer and social thinker Allan Pred proposes that places should be treated as processes that are in the state of constant becoming. Place depends on the perceiver, its experience is a process of constant negotiation between present and past experiences, social and cultural relationships and contexts. For Pred, places are not merely processes, but namely interactive processes in specific spatiotemporal locations (ibid.). In such a view places can be discussed as spatialized events rather than fixed unit of space. However, from the point of view of aesthetics, the processual aspect of places is hard to consider. Changes in physical environment generally tend to be slower than on the level of meanings and values. Playing operates on a shorter time span and does not necessarily call for a fixated change in the physical environment. It offers an alternative and complementary aesthetic experience of places as dynamic processes. Playing expands the limits of aesthetic experience of place.

CONCLUDING NOTES

Places are foci of human environment that are internally connected to perceiver’s experience, imagination, knowledge, emotions. As Berleant suggests, the experience of place holds an element of aesthetic experience. In turn, aesthetic experience is always implaced as it is connected to perceiver’s phenomenal body. It is a form of aesthetic engagement – multisensory engagement

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with the environment. Instead of an appreciative response created by an aesthetic object, the prime stress lies on the process of experiencing. Gadamer discusses it as a process of playing. First, playing emphasizes implacement. Playing essentially requires involvement, including engagement with the environment and thus for the player to “be in place”. Within the framework of phenomenological environmental aesthetics, play environment can be described through the concept of place as the meaningful centre of human space. Playing is a form of active engagement with real and fictional environment. The larger play-environment, whether fictional or real, works as a general setting that is put in action through places. Therefore it can be described as layered structure, where some meanings remain on the background and some or actualized. The relationship is dynamic. Secondly, playing in places raises the question of embodiment. As realized in playing fictional places take on body and space and become embodied in real, tangible places. Their emergence and presence have the character of action. In a play situation places are constituted as events in an ongoing process of taking place. Not only can aesthetic experience justifiably be compared to playing, but playing as such integrally holds aesthetic engagement. Playing as such fulfills important functions designated to the arts. First, it broadens experience. Due to its embodied and implaced character playing makes it possible to experience fictional places in an immediate and multisensory engagement. Secondly, it offers an alternative way of experiencing places as processes. Thirdly, it places the player into immediate contact with the world and fosters the process of aesthetic engagement. Playing unites imagining, communicating and experiencing. University of Arts and Design Helsinki NOTES 1 “Play” and “game” are used in this paper as general concepts that can be described through common characteristics (incl. free activity, the outcome and process are not pre-defined, subject to rules, temporal and spatial limits, parallel existence of fictional and everyday realities that do not exclude one another, goal in itself. See e.g. Johan Huizinga “Homo Ludens” 1938, Aino Saar “Laps ja mäng” 1997). Theatre, fine arts, children’s games and others can therefore be viewed as a part of a similar practice. The current study looks at the general concept from the point of view of involvement with the environment and excludes playing activities that do not use the players’ immediate surroundings, e.g. video and computer games. 2 Juri Lotman does not rely on the usul opposition fictional-real, but uses categories ‘fictional’ and ‘everyday’ (Lotman 1999). His choice of words subtly emphasizes the particular relationship that fiction- which is constituted in playing- has in everyday expereince. It exists in parallel and never excludes everyday reality.

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3 In theatre research, where the dichotomy of fictionality-factuality is an essential part of discussion, these are called ‘real space’ and ‘fictional space’. Following the tradition of environmental aesthetics I use terms ‘real environment’ and ‘fictional environment’ since they recognize person as the defining element.

REFERENCES Arlander, Annette 1998. Esitys tilana. – Acta Scenica 2. Helsinki: Teatterikorkeakoulu Berleant, Arnold 1992. The Aesthetics of Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press Berleant, Arnold 2001. Experience as Aesthetic. http://www.autograff.com/berleant/pages/ recentart7.html (29.10.2007) Bonsdorff, Pauline von 2005. Play as Art and Communication: Gadamer and Beyond. – Aesthetic Culture. Essays in Honour of Yrjö Sepänmaa on His Sixtieth Birthday. Eds. Knuuttila, Seppo, Sevänen, Erkki, Turunen, Risto. Helsinki: Maahenki Casey, Edward S. 1996. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkley: University of California Casey, Edward S 1987. Remembering. A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Certeau, Michel de 2005. Igapäevased praktikad. I Tegemiskunstid. Transl. Lepikult, Mirjam. Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli kirjastus Creswell, Tim 2004. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Gadamer, Hans-Georg 1998. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Transl. Walker, Nicholas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Gadamer, Hans-Georg 1989. Truth and Method. Transl. Weinsheimer, Joel, Marshall, Donald G. London: Sheer & Ward Hakkarainen, Pentti 1991. Leikki toimintana. – Leikki ja todellisuus. Puheenvuoroja suomalaisesta leikintutkimuksesta. Eds. H. Soini, T. Hyvärinen. Kajaani: Oulun yliopisto, Kajaanin täydennyskoulutusyksikkö, pp. 25–80 Karjalainen, Pauli Tapani 1999. Place and Intimate Sensing. The Thingmount Working Paper Series on the Philosophy of Conservation. Lancaster: Lancaster University Kaye, Nick 2001. Site-Specific Art. Performance, Place and Documentation. London: Routledge Lotman, Juri 2006. Kultuurisemiootika. Tekst-kirjandus-kultuur. Transl. Lias, Pärt, Soms, Inta, Veidemann, Rein. Tallinn: Olion Lotman, Juri 1999. Semiosfäärist. Transl. Pruul, Kajar. Tallinn: Vagabund Massey, Doreen 2005. For Space. London: Sage Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1993. Silmä ja mieli. Transl. Pasanen, Kimmo. Jyväskylä: Gummerus Pred, Allan 1984. “Place as Historically Contingent Process, Structuration and the TimeGeography of Becoming Place.” - Annals of the Association of American Geographers, pp. 279–297 Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe. On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

KAIA LEHARI

MYTHOPOETICS OF STONE

ABSTRACT

The mythopoetics of stone, rocks and mountains is archaic, universal and ambivalent. The mythopoetical meaning of stones depends on a person’s way of life and on his/her relations with the environment. Stones are enemies to the tiller, and soil provides him with food. Stone is lifeless and also dangerous to life – stone is both a weapon and means of punishment. A stray person is stoned to death; he is turned into a stone statue or locked up in a stone cell. At the same time stone has assumed preserving role of life – a fortress on a rock is a safe shelter, hearthstones keep warm, millstones grind grains. Stones, rocks and mountains mark the sanctification of place, they are the core of it and at the same time a boundary between profane and sacred, everyday and eternal world. As such, they are setting up the cosmic order, as well the phenomenal order in our lifeworld. Among the natural materials stone is lasting, strong and durable, but also rigid, static and constant as well. As such, it is a means of bringing the time flow to a standstill, halting a moment and spacing the time. Stone is the bearer of cultural memory, the supporter of both body and place memory, the means of recollection, reminiscence and memorialization. Mortal body finds immortalization in stone, and will lead its eternal life as a peace of sculpture; stone buildings are the reflections of history; gravestones, monuments and stone mounds prevent life from sinking into oblivion. A recurrent subject in arts and myth is that of bringing a stone figure back to life. Stones support the belief in incarnation and re-incarnation. In art and religion has stone made it possible to turn imperceptible into perceptible, invisible into visible. Stone immortalizes mental values, be it from mythical, religious, political, social, artistic or other forms of cultural consciousness. Stones are things, and as such natural occupants in a landscape. Horizons and pathways delineate movements in environment, stones bring about fixation and focus there. 393 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 393–402. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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“The role of things in places is curiously comparable to that of the lived body. The body and things both lend a distinctive density to their surroundings; and as body is central for the experiencing and remembering subject who pivots around (and with) it, so the things are pivotal points in a given place, constellating it by their presence.” (Casey: 205) Stones put the past into place; they are the primary source of its concrete implacement in memory. Stones help to make place memories a part of our memorial lives. Human perception of the environment is an active process, it “is the looking, listening, touching and sniffing that goes on when the perceptual system is at work.” (Ingold: 166) Perception is a mode of action, depending of the kind of activity in which we are engaged with our lived-in environment. To perceive a thing or event is to perceive what it affords. The context of perception is thus our practical activity in environment. Meanings are not attached by the mind to objects in the world, rather these objects takes on their significance – in James Gibson terms, they afford what they do (Gibson: 127–143). Our perception of the environment is embedded in practices of engagement, with the more conventional alternative that such perception results from the reconstruction of naturally given realities in terms of metaphors drawn from the ideal realm of culture (Ingold: 10, 166) In his “The Origin of Art” Martin Heidegger gives the example of stone as mere thing in the interpretation of thingness of the thing. “This block of granite, for example, is a mere thing. It is hard, heavy, extended, bulky, shapeless, rough, colored, partly dull, partly shiny. Thus we acknowledge its characteristics. But still, the traits signify something proper to the stone itself. They are its properties. The thing has them. The thing? What are we thinking of when we now have a thing in mind? Obviously the thing is not merely an aggregate of traits, nor an accumulation of properties by which that aggregate arises. A thing, as everyone think he knows, is that around which the properties have assembled. We speak in this connection of the core of things. The Greeks are supposed to have called it to hypokeimenon. For them, this core of the thing was something lying at the ground of the thing, something always already there. The characteristics, however, are called to symbekõta, that which has always turned up already along with the given core and occures along with it.” (Heidegger: 149–9) For Heidegger the self-contained block of granite is something material in a definite if unshapely form. Natural stone can acquire the status both of commodity and cult item depending of the milieu and the meaning of the context, which it has assumed in a certain culture. As such, it acts analogically to a work of art, bringing forward the truth of Being. Only the thing not perceived is a

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mere thing, this status is determined by man’s relation to it. The stone opens up in its own way the Being of beings. The principle of vertical cognition suggested by Merleau-Ponty can help us to observe and realize the stratification of ambivalent meaningful layers of stone, their metamorphosis and enrichment in the history of culture (MerleauPonty: 186, 212–213). Archaic and universal meanings shimmer through the later, younger strata – resulting in multiple meanings, which is one of the essential presumption of aesthetic cognition of the environment.

MYTHOPOETICS OF STONE

Mythopoetical meanings of stone have survived in our cultural memory and language up to now. Even if to confine oneself to widespread ordinary natural stone, leaving aside gems and pearls, stone is an exceptional one among the natural materials – it is lasting, strong and durable, but also static, rigid and heavy. These qualities of the material are of primary importance both in practical use of stones and in the formation of their metaphorical meaning in culture, as they constitute the deepest meaningful stratum of stones as embodied metaphors. Already with the first approach to the stone, its ambivalent estimation becomes evident resulting from man’s way of life and his relations to the environment. Stones seem to be enemies to a farmer and earth is his breadwinner. Earth is one of the fundamental elements and in its pristine opposition to Water, Fire and Air it is represented both in nature and in human experience. They exist together both in cosmogonies and eshatologies. Mythopoetical dialectics appears in the mutual co-operation. Earth has complicated relations with other pristine elements and this results also in ambivalence of Earth itself. Earth exists as fertile soil but as well as fruitless sands and stones, it is both field and desert. Contrasting fruitless and inanimate stone to soil is not absolute. Even to the farmer, in case of certain type of soil, stones can be the means of improvement of the soil structure, preservers of air and moisture, and as field borders and stone fences they protect crop from animals and humans, as well as from fire, water and storms. In mythopoetics are physical opposites in complementary relations, and in ancient religions and in folk traditions are they related to holiness. Sacred is one of the fundamental notion in ancient culture (Anttonen: 2529). “Among countless stones, one stone becomes sacred – and hence instantly becomes saturated with being – because it constitutes a hierophany, or prossesses of mana, or again because it commemorates a mythical act, and

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so on. The object appears as the receptacle of an exterior force that differentites it from its milieu and gives it meaning and value. The force may reside in the substance of the object or in its form; a rock reveals it to be sacred because its very existence is a hierophany: incompressible, invulnerable, it is that what man is not. It resists time; its reality is coupled with perenniality. Take the commonest of stones; it will be raised to the rank of ‘precious’, that is, impregnated with a magical or religious power by virtue of it symbolic shape or its origin: thunderstone, held to have fallen from the sky; pearl, because it comes from the depth of the sea. Other stone will be sacred because they are the dwelling place of the souls of ancestors (India, Indonesia), or because they are once the scene of teophany (as the bethel that served Jakob for a bed), or because a sacrifice or an oath has concecrated them.” (Eliade 1989: 4) Boundaries are related to sacredness. These boundaries, in which people live, are created and protected by ritual ceremonies. Stones are domesticated as borders of the field, thus they are sanctified into borders of time and space, on the other side of which is wild intangible chaos. STONES AND COSMIC ORDER

“One of the vital features of the culture is the division of the universe into internal (cultural, ‘own’) and (non-cultural, ‘alien’) spheres.” (Lotman: 266) From time immemorial has the closed “cultural” space been identified with regularity and cosmic, religious, social and political order, external space on the other hand, is associated with disorder and chaos, with the power of hostile cult and political forces. As a matter of fact, just the inner rooms created by man – cave, dwelling, town square or townspace as whole, surrounded by mould, became special creative cultural objects. One of the most worshipped Roman deities was Terminus – holder of motherland boardes (Lotman: 267). In the beliefs of many peoples has threshold as a bordeline of home magical protective meaning. In mediaeval towns we find underneath rooms closed by stone walls, which house ecclesiastical and state authorities; behind multiple walls are closed emperior and royal palaces, temples, monasteries, etc. Stone has the role of protecting and preserving life in the form of town wall as well as home walls. Fortress on a rock is a secure refuge, hearth stones keep warmth, millstones grind grane, roof covers the house protectively. Earth in the form of a stone is just the thing, which is able to resist the other three primodial elements – fire, water and air. In this way it provides the continuity of inner space of culture in time, preserves the created order, and the sanctification of it. Stone is, at the same time the material, of which not only tools but the first weapons were made as well. Stone is dangerous to life as a weapon or means of

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punishment – the one having broken the divine laws or regulations of community life is stoned to death, or changed of salt (Loti’s wife who acted contrary to prohibition and looked back to see the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah) or into stone (by means of Gorgo’s glance), or is imprisoned in a stone cell or tower, etc. Stone can simultaneously be as a means of protection and destruction. Thus, the sacred meaning is ambivalent – both negative and positive at the same time. Stones are also defenders of borders as weapons, holders of inner space of culture from chaos. Stones have assumed sacred meaning almost in all cosmogonic myths. Next to the border, the stones are also marking the core of the Cosmos. According to Mircea Eliade the ritual meaning of the sanctification of the place is creating a sacred center, whereas each sanctified place becomes the core of the World (Eliade 1989: 20). The Hub of the Universe is a mythopoetical image, which supports other images of the core – Egg, Cosmic Pillar, Cosmic Tree, Heavenly Mountain, where Noah’s Ark and boats landed after the Flood, etc. One of the most archaic cosmogonical images is the creation of the world from the pirmordial man, frequently from androgynous giant being, from whose parts of the body, depending on the principles of conformity between microcosmos and macrocosmos, arise different nature forms. Androgynity is the sign of a primary whole, while the creation is the division of the primary whole (Eliade 1962: 123–205). Thus, the eyes become the sun and the moon, hair – vegetation, bones change into stones, rocks and mountains, etc. The navel of the primary man is the core of the world, the Hub of the Universe, Old-Greek omphalos, ancient Indian nabhi. The exclusive sacredness of the navel is connected with the birth, it is the trace of the birth of a man and also of the creation of the world. The Hub of the World has metaphysical meaning – in mystical observation techniques of Buddhism and Byzantine this is an ideal mental focus in the course of meditative trance. Surveying one’s own navel is a way to comprehend the world as a whole. A marble ball with two eagles on both sides was set up in Delphi, in the Temple of Zeus to mark the centre of Cosmos. In the South of India we can come across hemispherical boundary stones, which were called naval stones. In Latin the word “umbo” (boundary stone) has the stem similar to that of the naval – “umbilicus”. The naval has sacred meaning both in American Indians and in Asian tradition. In Hinduism is the stone altar the place for sacrifice – the naval of re-creation of the world. It is the place, where the God Agni is staying after returning to the earth. The image of naval is widespread and universal. In mythical imagination acts the central core as putting in order and ritually purifying the space, it is the center of cosmic harmony, in the bordeland of

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which, behind the bondary, starts chaos. Golden mean or center was a value in ancient ideology, and has until now been preserved in moral philosophy and aesthetics – yet, harmony, symmetry and geometrical order are highly estimated in art. Cosmic Tree is the most widespread among the mythopoetical images representing the core of the world. Often it is accopanied by hearth (fireplace), spring (well), altar, sacrificial pillar or throne, Delphi omphalos among them. Axis mundi – axis connecting the earth with the heaven runs often through such stone objects. Interesting enough, in mythological model of the world each intermediate cosmos (country, town, house) has its own special core, which is the hypostasis of cosmical core. In a house (tepee, wigwam, tent, etc.) it can be the stone hearth, home altar, or a column supporting the roof; the core of the town or village is a church, temple, cathedral, where in the central place is altar; it can also be a stronghold, fortress or a castle, where the centre is a throne, etc. As an example can serve here the cult of Hestia, who was the goddess of both hearth, home, town and the whole Greece, whose sacrificial altar was located in Delphi. According to the Pythogoreans Hestia was a magical cosmic hearth, around which were circling the spheres of the planets. Juri Lotman admits that the order of inner space of culture is irregular, there are always existing certain formations (core) and perphery. The strictness of order is reduced toward perphery and meaningness/unambiguity is also divded accordingly. The regular change of places of the core and the periphery is one of the mechanisms of structural dynamics (Lotman: 228–229). “Since the relations between ‘core and periphery’ acquire in each cultural system complementary value judgement ‘up – down’ then the dynamical state of semiotic type system is accompanied usually by change of places between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’, valuable and worthless, existing and as if non-existing, described and not relevant to being described.” (Lotman: 229) The thresold of ancient Estonians, mostly of stone, was both a boundary mark simultaneously connecting and separating sacred and profane world, and one of the hypostasis of home altar. The meaning of the core in case of field is the productivity of the plants, boundary stones are perpheral both in their spatial position, function and meaning. At the same time, can just borders be the places of fertility sacrifice and, thus the cores of ritual procedures. In a sacred grove are trees and stones alternately both the parts of a centrum and perphery; the cult object can, depending on the ritual, be either sacrificial stone or a sacred tree. In a sacred grove a sacred tree and sacrificial stone represent the connection of the centrum with the vertical dimension (as Cosmic Pillar or Cosmic Tree) thus, both spatially and timely. As such, they are both a

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border and central point between the worlds of dead ancestors or deities, and lifeworld of the living persons. By Taoist tradition, the sacred mountains of China were understood in the same way as Cosmic Tree. “ The high sacred mountains . . . were places from wich to survey not the panorama of the earth, but the mysterious immaterial essence of its spirit. Four were located at each corner of the universe, with the fifth at its center, and together they were axial pillars connecting the celestial with the terrestrial and infernal realms.” (Schama: 407) The centrum and boundaries of a sacred place can be displaced over and over again, but the relation between them providing phenomenal order, are stable, despite their dynamics. Circle and its center bearing ancient magical meaning, embody both cyclical natural time and space, therefore is the total effect of these two mythopoetical images particulary strong. Sitting or dancing around in a circle, or any similar ritual activity is the sanctification of cosmic space and time. In phenomenal space it does not always mean geometrical regularity, but as the model of cosmic order, it is widespread in cultures of archaic primitive races of past and today, in historical sacred cultures as well as in contemporary secular lifeworld. We are sitting up to now in a circle round the bonfire similarily to American Indians and African aborigines, we are still dancing folk round dances around Midsommer Eve bonfire. Stove has always been the heart of the house for the Japanese in mountain villages, as well as for Estonian farm household, who gathered around the hearth in winter evenings to sing, tell stories and make handicrafts. The metaphorical meaning of the circle has unconsciously lasted until today. We speak about circle of friends, family circle, hobby circles, theatrical circles, etc. They are all combined by centralizing function holding together boundary and center, which creats the whole and organizes it as well. This pair of archetypal metaphores is the bottom, the core of primary meaning of our multilayered area of meanings in our lifeworld, which up to now, uncosciously influences our cultural acting in environment, being a part of our collective common language.

S T O N E A N D M E M O RY

Stone has historically been a preferable material and a means of fighting against mortality, merciless flow of time and sinking into oblivion. It is a means of bringing the time flow to a standstill, halting a moment and spacing the time. Stone is a bearer of cultural memory, the supporter of both body and

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place memory, the means of recollection, reminiscence and commmemoration. Stone has the ability to record, to give eternal life to the mortal man. Memorial stones, statues, walls, etc. make up a part of commemoration rituals. Commemoration seeks to preserve and stabilize the memory of honoree, and to do so in time-binding, invariant manner. Thanks to memorial stones is the memorializing ritual an especially efficatious remedy against time’s dispersive power. In the lastingness achieved by such ritual the past to which tribute is being paid is allowed to perdure – to last as coming toward us – through the present of the commemorative act and onward into the future as well (Casey: 226–229). Cultural traditions are characterized by continuity and duration. Culture does not delete old meanings, new and old meanings live side by side, incompatible logically, but accepted at the same time. As the basis of everything is the image of a kind of eternal and unchanged order, it has been attempted to preserve the time-spatial entirety when turning sacral meanings into the secular ones. “In view of such a concern with lastingness, it is not surprising to discover that many memorials are constructed of stone, the most durable natural substance available in large quantities. The very hardness and hardiness of granite or marmor concretize the wish to contnue honoring into the quite indefinite future – and thus, by warding off the ravages of time, to make commemoration possible at any (at least foreseeable) time. At the same time, a memorial in stone – a tombstone, a memorial plaque, a sculpted figure, etc. – is a public presence and hence accessible to many potential viewers. The distention in time is matched by a comparable extendedness in space.” (Casey: 226–227) The objects belonging to the sacral space, be it sacred stones, plaques, columns and stone idols up to the ancient and Oriental images of God represent continual tradition, which could neither be broken by philosophy nor theology. They are admired as works of art, and at the same time they are prayed to with head covered by a prayer kerchief or a veil, following the traditional prohibition to have a look upon them. Mystical relation between the statue and God, which appears in mystical or physical presence in archetypal images, the interpretation of this as incarnation of god is a tradition of thousand years in ancient culture, it is represented in Chinese and Japanese culture, in a certain period also in Islam and in modern European Christian culture until the 21st century (Bernstein: 327–349). Divine forces have, since animism, in most religions manifested themselves in natural “bodies” – in stones, trees, animals, but particularly as a human beings. Incarnation is a widespread phenomenon. Stone, percieved as everlasting substance, records the Gods and immortalizes heroes (both

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sacral and profane). The images of them become the aids of remembering and commemoration. Stone as such has a function of a bearer of cultural memory. Graveyards, memorials and other sacred commemorative places, where the past is “hewn into stone” are in paradoxical way just the places of vertical axis of time of livening up historical memory, be it either collective or individual. S U M M A RY

The mythopoetical meaning of stone is multi-layered. The basic layer is the metaphorical meaning of the substance, based upon the direct authentic and recurrent experience. The second layer of metaphorical meaning is the function of the stone, various possibilities of application, offered by stone, constructive and functional meanings associated with it. Symbolical ritual meanings of mythical consciousness and religion, which as transferred from sacral sphere to secular one, have preserved in one way or another, make up the third layer of meaning. Works of art are also of importance, they often playfully connect all previous, interpreting them and creating new bunches of metaphors. Mythopoetical multiple meaning of stones is the assumption of rich aesthetic experience. Stones mark the sanctification of place, they are the core of it and at the same time a boundary between profane and sacred, everyday and eternal world. Stone is remembering and narrating – thus alive. Stone immortalizes mental values, be it from mythical, religious, political, social, artistic or other forms of cultural consciousness. Animated stone is a heart and skin of a place, be it cemetery, village, town, castle or sacred grove, mountain, field or garden. Estonian Academy of Arts, Institute of Art History REFERENCES Anttonen, Veikko 1992. “Püha mõiste rahvausundis” (Concept of Sacred in Folk Religion), in Akadeemia 12, Tartu, Estonia: EKL, 2514–2535 Bernstein, Boris 2002. Mimesis ja inkarnatsioon II (Mimesis and Incarnation), in Studies on Art and Architecture 11, Tallinn: Teaduste Akadeemia Kirjastus, 327–351 Casey, S. Edward 2000. Remembering. A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press Eliade, Mircea 1962. Mephistopheles et l’androgyne. Paris: Callimard Eliade, Mircea 1989. The Myth of Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History. Transl. Willard R. Trask. London, New York: Arkana Gibson, James J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin

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Heidegger, Martin 1996. The Origin of the Work of Art. Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge Ingold, Tim 2000. The Perception of the Environment. London and New York: Routledge Lotman, Juri 2006. Kultuurisemiootika (Semiotics of Culture). Tallinn: Olion Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press Schama, Simon 1995. Landscape and Memory. London: HarperCollins Publisher

A L E S S I A R I TA V I TA L E

T O WA R D S A P H E N O M E N O L O G Y O F T H E I N S T R U M E N T- V O I X

ABSTRACT

The singer incarnates a paradox: (S)he is the only interpreter of a musical instrument (s)he didn’t have to buy. For all that (s)he is still obliged to address an “other than self” if (s)he wants to get to know, and to work with, an instrument s(h)e not only already possesses but which (s)he has been using ever since (s)he was born. The voice as internal (intimate, private, linked to the space and time of the unconscious) “object” and as external “object” (social, public, linked to shared space-time) is situated at the constitutive threshold of Being. In a multi-disciplinary context, and taking account of the polyvalent and multi-functional characteristics of the voice, I have carried out a detailed study of the singing lesson and of those spatio-temporal phenomena which make it up. In the light of the polyvalent and multi-functional characteristics of the voice, I regard the singing lesson as both a physical and a psychic space (Vitale 2007c; Winnicott 1971), a space where the double constraint of the body of the transmission and the transmission of the body (Vitale 2007b) makes itself known. This original study required, above all, direct observation “in the field” of the teaching of singing, that is to say, of that didactic space devoted officially to the latter. A phenomenological approach – in conjunction with a clinical method – was adopted. It links up with other kinds of enquiry, in particular those based on interviews and questionnaires, for its aim is to reconstitute the mosaic of the psycho-dynamic processes that underlie the learning of singing. If, in the institutions officially devoted to the teaching-transmission of musical instruments, the instrument-voix is considered as an instrument exactly on an par with any other, on the contrary, the observed and analysed data brings to light the phenomenologically plural specifics that contribute to making this instrument unique. Amongst other things, my research has given rise to a paradigm, both methodological and epistemological, one that has been presented and employed at the base of this research by resituating the voice and its dynamics, as the primary element, at the crossroads of the pre-verbal and the verbal, 403 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 403–421. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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the body and the unconscious, whose privileged instrument it thereby becomes (Vitale 2007c, 2008a). PRELUDE

My research – that has not yet been attempted from a transversal standpoint – is situated at the interface of the fields of the perception and mastery of the epistemological processes developed on the basis of, and across, the human voice. Here, I will concentrate especially on those processes linked to phenomena of embodied vocal inter-corporality in the dynamics of the study of the human voice in its singing capacity. What I am proposing here is a systematic phenomenology bearing upon what constitutes the uniformity of the instrument-voix. INTRODUCTION

In those institutions officially devoted to voice training, the human voice is taken to be a musical instrument in exactly the same sense as other instruments. So my proposal here is, on the one hand, to know and to understanding what is specific to the instrument-voix that is, to the voice when it is studied and employed with the value of a musical instrument (Vitale 2007b) in all its polyvalence and multi-functionality. On the other hand, I propose to investigate the cognitive dynamics specific to this “instrument”, that is, the dynamics underlying the study of singing. How is the learning of the only instrument incorporated into the body of its interpreter structured, on the one hand, and organized, on the other? I have created the neologism “body-case” to characterize a synthesis between, on the one hand, the idea of the enveloping envelope and, on the other, the game with the chiasmatic figure of the “voice of the body and the body of the voice” (Vitale 2009). The instrument-voix presents a double negation: it can neither be touched nor seen. So how is tactile and visual memory, so important in the learning of other instruments, replaced in the learning of that “non-visible”, transparent instrument incorporated into the body of its interpreter? The voice is the lightest instrument there is. We don’t even have to buy one since it is already built into our very being. Most of us sing regularly (more or less) in the course of our lives. But why can a Johnny Hallyday song be sung by everyone whereas, if one wants to sing a Jean-Sebastian Bach Cantata, one has to appeal to someone “other than oneself”? Moreover, if (as we are told by speech therapists) different voices can be linked to the same vocal chords, then on what do singing teachers base their pedagogical work?

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Why is one defined as a “beginner” in singing, even though no human being (with the exception of the victims of certain pathologies) is in fact unfamiliar with the practise of singing? Throughout an entire life-time, each individual develops its vocal competences (a know-how) and this just as well in speaking as in singing. In fact the practise of singing is built into everyday life. Why does the intervention of someone “other than myself” become necessary at a certain point? And how does this other develop my capacities? How does this other than I intervene to do this for me? Why do beginners in singing find it difficult to work at their own voice, even though any other beginner in connection with any other musical instruments is obliged to spend hours discovering his or her instrument (bringing out its sound, discovering its various sonorities, making contact with the “body” of the instrument, touching it, appraising it, caressing it . . . this in a gradual process of discovering both the body of the instrument and its connection with our body together with the quality of the sounds produced by our gestural interaction with the instrument: weight of the touch, pressure of the air . . . , how to sustain notes . . . as a function of the specificity of each instrument)? Why do even the best “orators” (as also actors), those who use their spoken voice professionally, prove to be quite incompetent – at least at the beginning – when they begin to study singing? After all, they are specialists of the voice. The voice is their profession, their profession being based on the voice or, at least, relying largely upon it. Is it just a matter of the way in which the study of the voice is organized? I don’t think so. It would be simpler to repeat what happened in the course . . . Why are beginners unable to do this? Moreover, the teachers themselves do not even want their beginning students to practise at home initially, for fear that they will harm their voice. What is the role of repetition in the dynamics of learning to sing? What relation to time does the study of singing engender? What role do memories, including corporeal memories play; and what specific relation to space is implied by the fact that the instrument is completely integrated into the human body? These terms are used here in the plural because I am formulating the hypothesis according to which there would be at least two types of corporeal memory, more particularly, several capillary corporeal memories and a synthetic corporeal memory which links the different capillary memories (Vitale 2007b, 2008a). Modern philosophy committed itself to tackling the problem of time, often at the expense of that of space, even though the dimensions of our existence are just as much spatial as they are temporal. This is why I would like to establish a spatio-temporal link in the study of the dynamics that affect my research, inasmuch as they deal with phenomena at the crossroads of the human sciences and, in particular, of Psychology, Phenomenology, Pedagogy and Semiotic.

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How does the dependence of the pupil on his or her voice teacher originate? This process is already noticeable with students beginning their study of the instrument-voix but also with professionals and even with professors of another musical instrument (Vitale 2007c). In sum, is the learning of the instrument-voix comparable to the appropriation of other musical instruments? And in what does it differ? The paradox appears right away if one follows up what is specific to the voice in relation to other musical instruments, and if one tries to trace back the processes that distinguish each of these learning processes, as also their eventual convergence. “It turns out to be necessary to appeal to an other than oneself if one wants to use an instrument one not only already possesses but that one constantly employs from birth. This instrument accompanies us into the world with the first cry and it accompanies us out of it with the last sigh”. (Vitale 2007c).

My research – conducted personally in the field, that is, in the environments officially dedicated to the learning of singing – shows that a professional musician who has mastered a musical instrument other than the voice experiences exactly the same difficulties as a beginning singer, both in singing itself and in its musical notation (Vitale 2007c). For all that, no one is a novice when it comes to employing his own singing voice, since everyone uses their voice everyday – just as they do their hands. So how can we account for the fact that the vocal gestures belonging to singing create such difficulties, thereby engendering a real dependence upon the voice teacher? Does the study of the voice – in its singing dimension – give rise to many other dynamics? If so, a student of singing must learn to master simultaneously (in relation to time) a good many different types of situation (in relation to sensori-motor cognitive tasks): corporeal, linguistic, musical . . . given that a student of singing stands in relation to a polymorphous, multi-functional and polyvalent instrument – a plural instrument. I spent many years analyzing:“The singing lesson”. This experience of “in the field” research led me to formulate the hypothesis according to which the singing lesson occupies a space that is both physical and psychic (Vitale 2007c). The singing lesson was first examined in its spatial, then in its temporal dimensions, which immediately exposed me to the problem of the relation between physical and psychic space. The rituals linked to this physical and psychic space seemed to me very interesting from the first, and I assumed that they played a role in the organization of our knowledge, both a know-how and a know-how-to-do, neither of which had, up to now, been taken seriously

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in the research devoted to the learning processes. This bibliographical limitation aroused my curiosity and prompted me to develop, from the start, the vocabulary needed to confer precision upon the principles I wanted to define for theoretical purposes: like the vocabulary specifying the vocal gestures, the “body-case”, the sequential model as well as the development of my hypothesis concerning the dynamics of repair (in the psychoanalytical sens) in singing, an original hypothesis confirmed by Winnicott’s theories. My work could not benefit from an extended reading list and so I had to rely upon a phenomenological observation of the facts making up the mosaic of the psycho-dynamic processes underlying and so upholding the learning of singing. This is the reason why I chose to study the phenomenology of its organization. One might talk about the deep structure underlying the organization of the different phases of the teaching of singing if this term “structure” had not become “outdated” and so consigned to references anchored in a history too far removed from contemporary research. What I wanted to do was to go beyond the specifics linked to different musical genre-styles. And so I took note of a very broad sample of students. I took account of students of all ages (the age spectrum under observation varies from ten to seventy), a comprehensive variety of musical genres (baroque, lyrical and classical singing, Lieder . . .), students of both sexes and at all levels, from the true beginner at his or her first lesson to the concert performer. And this with a view to unearthing, beneath the differences, what kept constantly emerging as the same. So I paid especial attention to the features in common, which I interpreted as furnishing the basic problematics of the teaching-apprenticeship of the singing voice. METHOD

This analytical investigation relies heavily upon observations conducted “in the field” over many years in France and, more specifically, in different institutions (municipal and national musical academies, the Paris Conservatoire), on the basis of a longitudinal-transversal methodology that consists in being present regularly (weekly) in several classes and following each student individually over a long period. This clinical method also relies upon videos later analyzed by me, employing a phenomenological approach interspersed with a number of recordings (interviews, anonymous questionnaires also addressed to singers from other countries, with a view to verifying the points in common and the differences linked to socio-cultural factors). I wanted to mark out the “points in common” underlying the dynamics belonging to all sorts of singing lessons, beyond the differences linked to the variables of musical style, of age,

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of sex, of level, even while retaining these variables for later analyses and further reflection. In the course of this research I was able to observe a wide range of students: from the true beginner right up to the professional, and ranging across all the intermediary levels. Different genres and musical styles were observed: from rock, to songs, to operettas, to lyrical songs, to rap. I must emphasize that this variety of styles proved to be invaluable in my research, making it possible to come to terms with larger perspectives than those arising from the analysis of a single musical style.

OBJECTIVE

My intention was to bring to light both the independent and the dependent variables directly or indirectly linked to the voice when, in all its polyvalence and its multi-functionality, it is investigated as a musical instrument despite its polyvalence and its multi-functionality. The a posteriori objective of this research is to reconstruct the phenomenological mosaic of the dynamics unfolded in a Space/Time conceived as a psychic envelope.

T H E I N S T R U M E N T- V O I X

The notion of an “instrument-voix” (Vitale 2007b) makes it possible to distinguish the processes involved in the singing voice from those involved in the learning of other musical instruments. The decision to do “field work” was motivated by the fact that vocal training is considered here as a whole and in all its complexity and so without neglecting the variety and the richness of the processes constitutive of the “master-pupil constellation” (Vitale 2006). Voice training is also looked at from the standpoint of its various “rituals”. This research is therefore based on a plurality of recordings: videos, notes, anonymous questionnaires, interviews with singing teachers and their pupils, to which should be added my own previous experience as a singer. This multiplicity of approaches was necessary in order not to lose the polyvalence and the richness of the voice as a properly human experience. In many institutions devoted to the teaching of music, the instrument-voix is taken to be exactly similar to other musical instruments. On the other hand, our observations tend to bring out the irreducibility of the specifics of the voice in relation to other musical instruments. In fact, the voice is the only instrument that is not visible, that can not be touched or manipulated. Moreover, it is hidden in a living body which is itself also exposed to the action of Chronos, to the germinative impact of a time which tends to transform it. It is not interchangeable and it

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can not be lent or borrowed. It is therefore the only musical instrument completely integrated into the human body, and this is what makes the study of the instrument-voix so complex. PA R A D I G M

The voice is also situated at the crossroads between the body (bone, tendons, etc), its linguistic (the verbal) and its pre-linguistic capacities (the pre-verbal: babbling, verbalization devoid of meaning, vocalizations, affective language), and its roots are planted in the soil of the unconscious (to the point of being the privileged instrument of psychoanalytic therapy) (Vitale 2007b). In a certain sense, the voice is plural.

Figure 1.

Paradigm (Vitale 2007c, 2008a)

This paradigm, both epistemological and methodological, is one I have formulated and which has been presented and employed in my research (Figure 1). The voice tears the subject away from its isolation and enables it to surpass itself, break out of the cocoon of solipsism and, in the words of Anzieu, both break down and reduplicate le Moi-peau by enclosing the psychic envelope within a genuinely “acoustic envelope”. The voice is therefore both a “prolongation of the self” and a “point of rupture”: it exists at the juncture of the interior and the exterior world of the one who is its bearer, the one it inhabits in the most profound sense of that term. Do we not often think we have used our own voice when it is rather the latter that has used us? This complexity, this richness, this “multivocity of the voice” therefore emerges very clearly from my observations. If, for a long time, the vocal chords were the unique object upon which all analysis and observation converged, today, and in the light of the discoveries made by voice therapy, we know that the vocal chords of a professional singer – with no pathology – do not differ from those of a person who simply

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sings under the shower. In addition, we know that many different voices can be produced by the same vocal chords. What is involved, whether physically or non-physically, in voice training? And how is it so involved: directly or indirectly, earlier or later, consciously or unconsciously? Can this training be reduced to a simple corporeal gymnastics? The absence of any specific bibliography in this field of voice training prompted me to construct hypotheses on the basis of interconnected methodologies, both to identify the points in common with other types of learning of musical instruments and to set out their differences. P S Y C H I C S PA C E

The concept of psychic space – or psychic place – was introduced by Winnicott. By that is meant this first “appropriation” of an object between the “within” and the “without”, an appropriation which in turn makes possible the localization of the self. What is at issue is a space making it possible for experience to be lived as self-generated, as discovered, created. “All these sounds, these objects which do not belong to the body of the child and which he nevertheless still does not think of as belonging to external reality. Both thinking and fantasizing can be attached to these experiences.”1

Pedagogically speaking, in my view, it could be said that psychic space is the place where learning continues in the person, even after it has come to an end, adding a veneer of retrospective reflections, with a view to uncovering other semantic strata, by prolonging “the presence” of the teacher in the self. It’s a space of “reverberation” and of a prolonged encounter where “the other than I” continues to live in me in a “belonging to me” which accompanies us everywhere. (Vitale 2007c). Psychic space appears then to enjoy a primordial significance in the process of co-construction by opening up a passage-way between past experiences and this potential space that prepares future experiences. Psychic space is the place where the individual co-constructs its experience of the world. As a “passage-way”, it is the place that makes possible transitional processes as well as the space where transitional objects are situated. A space that embraces both the “self” and the “other than self”. So psychic space implies an entirely personal relation to time, and through which experience can be “stretched” as well as “unified”. So we are talking of a Space-Time created by the person, a sort of psychic envelope in which the representations of the world, as well as their intrinsic relations, are co-constructed (Vitale 2007c). Borrowing from Porret, one might say that in his analysis Winnicott has shown us in his own way how “intra-locution is anchored in inter-locution”. For in fact, “the cure is not the

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conjunction of two balloons but this incomparable experience where someone is listening to himself in a simultaneous relation to himself and to someone else who is listening to him.” In the same way, in the production of the singing voice, and within the frame of the singing lesson, there is the presence of a recognizable other than I’ who, across his attentive and individualized listening obliges me to redefine my listening to myself, in the end, by partially displacing myself (since, in part, I obviously have to remain anchored in my own body as the producer of the sounds). In other words, the presence of an expert becomes a living presence across a varied listening process which is polychrome/varied and new for me in a new perspective that brings me to modify my “point of view” on myself, that invites me to displace the perspective of my “grasp of sound”. Across this new perspective, I manage to observe myself from outside myself. ‘Looking’ at, ‘listening’ to my self, just as Ricoeur tells us to, as one’s own other self. One is there in the attention paid to the creative act. “It’s a strange kind of solitude, a creative solitude, which does not offer autonomy in the etymological sense of the word implying being a law unto oneself. It is not a citadel or an interior stronghold.”2

Both in the therapeutic session as well as in the singing lesson, it’s a matter of establishing a relation with the quality of time, interior time. Making oneself vulnerable – a condition without which no true learning can take place – with a view to letting oneself become permeable. Any developmental act carried out within a protective space (envelope of the self) puts to the test the degree of confidence one can extend to the other. The quality of “letting go”, basic to the disclosure of one’s own nature, has to avoid any form of complacency whose “wanting to please” would set at a distance the living material and the sincere presence of the self, both to itself and to the other. No in-depth work would be possible without this self-disclosure offered to the other. “Analytic space is not that of the analyst’s study. The latter is just the indispensable place for something to happen – or not to happen. Analytic space, on the other hand, is a psychic locus of encounters, of thoughts, of words, of memories of silences, of fantasies, of impressions and sensations.”3

This space is a psychic location whose importance in the learning of singing can not be overestimated because it makes it possible to take one’s singing professor “back home with one”, to listen to the echoes of his voice without the support of a tape-recorder, to attend to his suggestions, his nuances, those of his vocal characteristics that make him “unique” and that define the musical imprints of his personality. It’s the space of a silent acoustic dialogue allowing the dyad, or better still the constellation, to remain alive, engaged in an active dialectic.

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Rien n’aura lieu que le lieu . . . excepté peut-être une constellation. ‘Nothing will have taken place except the place . . . unless it’s a constellation.’ Mallarmé

Psychic space is the “place” that brings two people together at a distance. It’s a place filled and nourished by these two beings, thanks to a thread that links past, remembrance, present and future perspectives. “This space is not given in advance. It has to be progressively developed after unavoidable crises of confidence. The analytic space is this curious didactic place which is not the sum of many private spaces: its content is taken from the representational acts of the one being analysed, which is itself solicited by the words or the silences of the analyst. It is therefore a space of sublimation which, by definition, belongs neither to the one nor to the other, and so separates them even while bringing them together.”4

In the singing lesson, beyond the first spatio-structural phase devoted to establishing the relaxation-permeabilization setting, the intervention of the teacher’s spoken voice evidently plays a different role from that occupied by the psychoanalytic session. It tends to become the acoustic mirror of the vocal gesture, primarily with a view to correcting the latter across its exemplary function. In this sense, the voice, understood as the “interactive vocally acoustic material”, is intimately linked with the habitus of the singing teacher, and with the whole non verbal language, notably the gestures, so reduced by the substitutive role of the voice when eventually it comes to “overtake”, “stifle”, “extinguish”, “deaden” the voice of the pupil (Vitale 2008a). All of which is confirmed by the fact that, when the teacher falls back upon his or her own voice to talk about the vocal accomplishments of the pupil, it is thereby implied that the teacher knows best how to correct the pupil at that very moment. And that gestures, or other kinds of suggestions, would probably not have achieved the same level of didactic correction. THE “OTHER THAN S ELF” “Thus, alongside the mature pleasure of the responsibility – without however appealing to the burdensome concept of sublimation – there coexists either a functional pleasure that coincides, one might say, with the perception of its own physical reality, of its own body (and, as we have seen, of the psychic apparatus as a prolongation of the body), or a series of non-climactic pleasures, as defined by Winnicott. Pleasures typical of playing games, of engaging in an intellectual or artistic activity. With the Freudian schema in mind, they should be classified as variants of the “preliminary pleasure.”5

The unavoidable presence of an “other than self” makes up the main difference between the practise of the study of singing and that of writing, for example. And to such a degree that this need for the “other” turns into a dependence upon the other, even though it might be limited to a particular stage in the learning of singing. Dependence upon an “other than self” who holds the reins

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of our voice and who works out a didactic plan whose details are not disclosed, in certain cases, to the parties concerned. Nevertheless, the pupil continues to carry out in silence a weekly or even a daily work not simply on its vocal chords but across the whole resonance of its Being in and through which the past has the power to reverberate/reflect the present across its Echoes, across the known idioms, as well as those idioms that have not yet been incorporated and which are only known through an imitative process. The degree of dependence upon the chosen person is such that we have to think that, even when the collaboration is the result of an accident, the very fact of staying to work with that person – over and beyond any pedagogical obligations of a contractual order – can only be the result of an autonomous and voluntary a posteriori choice. One can not continue working with a voice teacher who makes one feel uncomfortable, for this hindrance will be incorporated somatically, and so will have consequences for one’s psycho-physical equilibrium, and therefore for one’s voice. The relation with one’s singing teacher “has” to be positive, on account of the transferential and transitional characteristics needed to work at an internal instrument, an instrument incorporated in, and hidden and protected from, the “musical body-case” (Vitale 2007c, 2009), an instrument that can neither be handled nor exchanged. A very high level of intimacy is implied by this didactic dyad, by virtue of the multiplicity of the implications that the voice bears naturally within itself – the relation with the unconscious whose instrument the voice is –, and the intimate relation with the body. So quite obviously there has to be a living intimacy, even in the absence of any physical contact. In the study of singing we find a transitionality that also pertains to the flesh. The study of the singing voice – which activates a system of reinforcement of the synaesthetic modalities – appeals at every instant to the world of the senses, aided and abetted by the continual solicitations of the imaginary. The synaesthetic imagination can, on the one hand, create difficulties with respect to cognitive control and, on the other, induce a kind of drunkenness. What would appear to be specific to the study of one’s own voice would be the emergence from a state of isolation. For singing can not really be learnt as a solitary exercise. The encounter with the “other” is therefore fundamental to the study of one’s own singing voice. So this practise is entirely different from that which characterizes writing, even though it has to be admitted that it is on account of someone other than one’s self that one learns to write. For all that, writers are engaged in a solitary practise while singers, even professionals, regularly ask other singers to listen to them, singers they have themselves carefully selected. The writer can admittedly have his writings read by someone whose opinion he respects, but he can also dispense with this reflective reading, something that seems virtually impossible for singers (Vitale 2007c). It is our belief that an other than self remains an indispensable acoustic mirror, in the sense

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of a “receiver of sounds”, given that, as we have already pointed out, progress made in the development of the technical means of recording have not made it possible to replace the “presence” of singing teachers. In the course of singing lessons, the voices of a good many students can be recorded – this practise is employed by students of all levels –, even those situated at a very advanced level. For all that, they all continue to need their teacher. For the same reason, concert singers who have reached the summit of their careers continue to take lessons with a colleague in order to “take stock of the situation”, as they like to say. Some kind of “revision” is periodically necessary. There again, parallels can be drawn with the practise of psychoanalysis. “Every analyst should periodically, let us say every five years, go through analysis again without experiencing any shame regarding this recapitulation. This means that not only is the therapeutic analysis of the patient transformed from a finite into an infinite task, but his own analysis as well.”6

L I S T E N I N G T O O N E S E L F, D I S TA N C E

Listening has to be reviewed in order to find once again (thanks to an acoustic mirror) a confirmation of the listening quality (neither too interior nor too exterior), as if listening to one’s own voice proved to be periodically altered by the types of acoustic space in which one is called upon to sing, and with regard to certain types of repertory, which require certain types of voice production and volume, depending upon the musical mass of the accompaniment (a full orchestra, or just a harpsichord . . .) If one gets too absorbed in one’s work after having completed it, one is still entirely prejudiced: if too much time goes by, one can’t get into it. Just like pictures viewed from too far and too near. And there is only one indivisible point which is the true point of view, the others being too near, too far, too high or too low. Pascal

Regarding my listening and my proprioceptions, the assistance of a colleague in whom one has confidence can, through his listening, help to “put the clock right.” The difficulty in singing – using the instrument-voix – consists in “finding” the right listening quality for one’s own voice, a balanced listening. The singer is in fact the only instrumentalist to listen to his “interior voice”, in one way and his exterior voice, in another, and to oscillate between the two. It is very difficult to listen to oneself objectively, no matter what the instrument. And especially difficult for the voice, given that the organs of reception, the ears, are themselves both external and internal, and that, in the occurrence, they are

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in the head, in close proximity to the oral cavity. The head is also a valuable resonator of the sounds produced by the singing voice, especially the sharp notes (Vitale 2007c). As a result, the listening can be “saturated”, to the extent that one sings with the strong voice production required by theatre and by the customary repertories. I don’t hear myself as I hear others, the sonorous existence of my voice for me is so to speak folded back on itself; it features more as an echo of its articulated existence, it vibrates through my head rather than out of it.7 Merleau-Ponty

On the other hand, a kaleidoscopic mirror proves to be necessary to modify my perspective. For the reasons previously mentioned, it is extremely rare, but not impossible, to find amongst professional singers persons who practise an exclusively solitary study of the voice. As if the “mere presence” of an “other than self” could give rise to a much finer proprioceptive listening, linked to a more precise and meticulous faculty of concentration and discernment in the course of the training session. This can also be observed in the singing lesson – more particularly in the vocalizing phase – where the concentration is at a high level and accompanied by a higher proprioceptive listening quality. In the singing lesson, this phase of great concentration is also made possible thanks to the phase of relaxation by which it is preceded (control of the attention span) (Vitale 2007c). During the vocalizing phase the student and the teacher often keep their eyes closed, as if to avoid being distracted by visual data, thereby being able to concentrate better on the listening (Vitale 2007c). The person who vocalizes can plunge into the “depths of herself” without “drowning”, for she has a vigilant “guard” alongside of her. Following the inspiration of Winnicott, one might say: ‘The person who vocalizes becomes the vocalization.’ Vitale (2007c).

Even while requiring a personal (private) relation to self, the art of singing also needs an external relation . . . since singing puts the self in a position to hear one’s own voice. In this sense one might be led to think that singing exists for/in an intrinsic function of addressing (Vitale 2007c) and that, in and of itself, it is not designed for a solitary or exclusively solitary practise, even though the latter turns out to be quite widespread. “A certain kind of ‘private’ writing is more or less ‘secret’ (especially those involving intimate journals or autobiographical notes) and which, sometimes, in its pre-literary generality, is typical of crucial moments in human sexuality (adolescence, falling in love, illness, senility, etc), that is, when, in a Freudian manner the feeling of ‘lack’ (dissatisfaction, desire . . .) is more lively and the auto-erotic character of masturbation predominates.”8 Stefano Ferrari

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Moreover it seems that solitude and silence is needed in those periods that precede a production, as well as in periods of great cognitive absorption, and especially periods of reflective abstraction (Piaget). It seems necessary to lead an entirely withdrawn/solitary life to prepare oneself for singing. This is the kind of life-style adopted by a great number of soloists, of lyrical artists, in advance of opera production (this way of proceeding was also that adopted by Maria Callas, who claimed to be upset at the very idea that Onassis might be in Paris at the same time that she was preparing an opera). “When one talks of the « presence » of an actor, we are talking about his being concretely present in what he does when he does it. The rest is of no importance. When I am engaged in the preparation of a production I have difficulty concentrating on anything else, going to the theatre, the cinema, visiting the town. I am afraid that another fiction might disturb the fiction in which I find myself.”9 Mireille Delunsch

This degree of “elevated” presence seems essential to arriving at a performance of high quality, not only in singing, but most especially in the latter, given that the interpreter coincides with the instrument he is playing, a factor that implies the plurality – and the difficulty linked to it – of the many functions that have to be controlled at the same time if one is to be prepared for such important moments. It is obvious that a cognitive activity of this kind requires at the same time both an in-depth study of the subject and a study of high quality, all this associated with a state of sufficient “freshness” and a reserve of physical energy more readily recuperated in a state of rest and contemplation. In this phase, a state of silent solitude – at least in what concerns lyrical opera – helps towards the delivery of a better performance on the stage. To the qualities of a sophisticated singer those of an actor have to be added. A meticulous work of coordination has to be carried out to enable the interpreter to sing better, as if he remained constantly in a stable pose, even though he is called upon to sing in movement, as also in all sorts of possible positions, even the least comfortable, while at the same time guaranteeing a constant vocal quality, balancing the internal against the external reception of his voice, listening to the orchestra, adjusting to the acoustics of each representation (which can change in one and the same theatre depending upon the number of spectators). A meticulous study of external vocal gestures (Vitale 2007b) has to consistently accompany the vocal expression, to the extent that a personage is characterized largely by its gesture.

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B O DY O F T H E T R A N S M I S S I O N – T R A N S M I S S I O N O F T H E B O DY

The singing teacher transmits, “passes on” to his student so to speak, his own gestures, those that are specific to his own body, which accompany him, so to speak, and which were at least in part transmitted to him by his teachers, which therefore only later became a part of his very being once they had been appropriated. Each student then develops and further personalizes these gestures by adding his or her own contribution to the chain of that oral and corporeal memory which remains the most important mode of transmission, even though writings on the subject of the voice are always increasing in number. The human body instrument remains the privileged vector: Each technique, each traditionally acquired and transmitted behaviour, is founded in certain nervous and muscular synergies that constitute veritable systems, built into an entire sociological context.10

Here we encounter situations familiar to the apprenticeship of all musical instruments. But the incorporation of the voice considerably amplifies this primacy. The study of the instrument-voix, the incorporated instrument, calls for an extreme generosity on the part of the teacher who lends his body to the student right up to allowing him or her to look into his own mouth to demonstrate the movements of the uvula, disclosing the depth of his mouth, this limiting point, where the interior of his own body first becomes visible to the other (Vitale 2007b). Just as a violinist lends his violin to his students, so the singing teacher lends his body and his intimate being (Vitale 2007b). This aptitude, particularly necessary with beginners, contributes to explaining the strong link of dependence upon the teacher that gets instated with all students of singing. The quality of the presence of an expert is moreover fundamental for improving the quality of the presence of the self to itself through the presence of the other, a veritable mirror for the self. This relation to a body featuring as an other envelope engenders a memory of specific experiences. The singing teacher, on the one hand, invents exercises to meet their difficulties – he proposes stimuli of different kinds: proprioceptive (vocalizing them), cognitive . . . – and, on the other hand, he brings solutions, he resolves difficulties of another order, technical difficulties or difficulties the student may encounter with regard to identity or to listening (Vitale 2007b). S TA G E S I N T H E L E A R N I N G O F T H E I N S T R U M E N T - V O I X

With regard to the voice, the learning process is set up in stages. Even if all the most basic notions were communicated in the first class – something

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teachers often do deliberately – the (beginning) student would not succeed in singing a Bach cantata. It seems necessary to adopt the detour of exercises, of empirical trials. The internal vocal gestures have to be induced, the memories coordinated, opposed gestures balanced . . . making mistakes . . . understanding the mistakes one has made . . . finding alternatives to physical and psychic proposals . . . – all of these have to be attempted. The last proves to be very important, notably for the instrument-voix, so rooted in mental images, which get transformed into acoustic synaesthesia. Moreover, the image in singing can not be reduced to the world of ideas, so important for the suggestion of acoustic landscapes. In singing, where the instrument coincides with the physical and psychic body of its interpreter, the image is, above all, an image unconscious of itself (Vitale 2007c). Singing also requires that one puts oneself at the disposal of the discipline to which one has committed oneself. One has to be prepared for another dimension, that of the voice in its singing dimension. So singing asks of us that we constantly pass from the spoken-voice dimension (that of everyday existence) to the dimension of that suspension in which the relation to time can be metamorphosed (Vitale 2007c). The two dimensions are of course both linked and disconnected. That it is not enough to be an orator in order to be able to sing well, already attests to this. Inversely, a good singer is not always a great orator. In my view, we also have to take account of reasons of a cerebral order that are much more complex than the simple example given above. We will present these reasons in an exhaustive manner in a later study. Singing is an act of faith ! One does not have to know everything about what is going on in order to be able to sing well. On the other hand, the mystery of singing has to be appreciated and this mystery has to be communicated to other by considering music as a sensation, an indescribable emotion.

The declaration of a singing teacher to a student during a course. T H E T I M E O F T H E B R A I N A N D T H E T I M E O F T H E B O DY

Even if the teacher is quite clear in his explanation with regard to what the student has to carry out and to experience during the activity of singing to obtain the final vocal gesture making it possible for the final aesthetic gesture to find its appropriate musical equivalent, and even if the student understands the explanation perfectly well, it still takes years of apprenticeship for the teacher’s proposal to be executed correctly. The transition from speaking to understanding can be brief, but the time it takes to carry out these instructions is often directly proportional to the level attained by the student in his study of singing (Vitale 2007c). Furthermore,

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one notes that the supposedly intellectual understanding, the one that arises on the plane of thinking reasoning is acquired faster than that linked to the body, which latter requires an experiential practise to “import”, “integrate” the new knowledge. This knowledge becomes a knowing how to do with the body once the latter has memorized it, not in an almost passive fashion as though mastering an order dictated by the intellect, but rather by re-organizing this knowledge, this know-how, by integrating it into a personal frame of reference in which corporeal memories and the synthetic network play a primordial role (Vitale 2007b, 2008a). It seems that in the processes through which singing is learnt, the time of the brain is not the same as the time of the body (Vitale 2007c). Even if a body is well trained in the disciplines of singing (with well-developed practical foundation in singing), the gap between the two types of temporality is less than with a beginner. This implies that working with the singing voice brings about very important connections between the body and the brain all through the course of its development (Vitale 2007c). This also makes it clear that as that instrument used every day in its spoken and sung dimension – even if the latter is limited to individual practices of an escapist nature (singing under the shower . . .) – the study of accompanied singing with a master bears upon issues which have not yet been dealt with up until now. University of Paris Sorbonne – Paris IV, France NOTES 1

Pétraud – Périn Annick (2000). “Winnicott” in Grand Dictionnaire de la Psychologie, (ed.) H. Bloch et alü, Paris, Larousse. 2 Porret Philippe, «L’espace et le temps d’une expérience: talking cures . . .», Les colloques (de l’Association FRISPI), «Naître à la vie», Winnicott aujourd’hui perso.orange.fr/frispi/porret.htm. 3 Ibidem. 4 Ibidem. 5 Ferrari Stefano, Scrittura come riparazione, Rome, 1994, Laterza, p. 11. 6 Freud Sigmund, Analisi terminabile e interminabile, in Opere, Ch.7, vol. 11, Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 1979, p. 632. Original title: Die endliche und die unendliche analyse (1937). (Analysis terminable and interminable, Standard Edition, Hogart Press, London, vol. XXIII, 1964). 7 Merleau-Ponty Maurice (1964b, p. 194). (The visible and the invisible, SPEP, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1969). 8 Ferrari Stefano, Scrittura come riparazione, op.cit. p. 12–13. 9 Entretien, octobre 2004, Forum Opéra (Internet). <www.forumopera.com/v1/actu/delunsch.htm> 10 Levi-Strauss Claude, “Introduction”. In Mauss, Marcel, Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris, PUF [1950], 2004, p. 13.

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Anzieu Didier (1987). Le Moi-peau, Paris, Dunod. Anzieu Didier (2000). Les enveloppes psychiques, Paris, Dunod. Bloch Henriette et alii (sous la direction de), Grand Dictionnaire de la Psychologie, Paris, Larousse, 2000. Bringuier Jean-Claude (1977). Conversations libres avec Jean Piaget, Paris, Robert Laffont. Claparède Édouard (1946a). Psychologie de l’enfant et pédagogie expérimentale, vol. I, Le développement mental, Neuchâtel-Paris, Delachaux & Niestlé. Claparède Édouard (1946b). Psychologie de l’enfant et pédagogie expérimentale, vol. II, Les méthodes, Neuchâtel-Paris, Delachaux & Niestlé. Ferrari Stefano (1994). Scrittura come riparazione, Rome, Laterza (Coll. Biblioteca di cultura moderna, n◦ 1054). Imberty Michel (2005). La musique creuse le temps, Paris, L’Harmattan. Levi-Strauss Claude (1950a/2004). “Introduction”, in Mauss, Marcel, Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris, PUF, p. 13. Merleau-Ponty Maurice (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty Maurice (1964a). L’œil et l’esprit, Paris, Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty Maurice (1964b). Le visible et l’invisible, texte établi par Claude Lefort, Paris, Gallimard. Pascal Blaise (1670/1997). Pensées [fragment 19] (édition de Michel Le Guern), Paris, Gallimard. Piaget Jean (1974b/1992). Réussir et comprendre, Paris, Presses Universitaires Françaises. Piaget Jean (1998). De la pédagogie, Paris, O.Jacob. Porret Philippe, «L’espace et le temps d’une expérience: talking cures . . .», Les colloques (de l’Association FRISPI), «Naître à la vie», Winnicott aujourd’hui. perso.orange.fr /frispi/porret.htm. Ricœur Paul (1984). Temps et récit, Paris, Seuil. Ricœur Paul (1990). Soi-même comme un autre, Paris, Seuil. Vitale Alessia (1997). En corps chanté. Prospettive sulla voce. Tesi di laurea in Semiologia della Musica, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna. Director: Professor Gino Stefani. Vitale Alessia (2003a). La leçon de chant. Master Thesis. University of Paris IV-Sorbonne. Vitale Alessia (2003b). Dal silenzio al suono. Voce Corpo Sensi Memorie, Rome, Borla. Vitale Alessia (2004). “La voix et ses gestes”. In Abstract du Huitième congrès international sur la signification musicale/Eight International Congress on Musical Signification (ICMS 8), sous la direction de Costin Miereanu, Paris, October 3–8, 2004. Vitale Alessia (2006). “The singing lesson. Learning and non verbal languages”. In Proceedings of the 6th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM) & the 9th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC). M. Baroni, A. Addessi, R. Caterina, M. Costa (eds.), Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, August 22–26, 2006. Vitale Alessia (2007a). “The language of gestures in the singing lesson”. In Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on cognition and musical arts (SIMCAM), D. Santiago (ed.) University of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, May 21–25, 2007. Vitale Alessia (2007b). “Gestes et mémoires dans l’apprentissage du chant”. In Temps, geste et musicalité, Michel Imberty (éd.), Paris, L’Harmattan, (p. 101–125). Vitale Alessia (2007c). La leçon de chant. Temps, espace, transitionnalité. Doctoral Thesis in Psychology and Pedagogy of Music, University of Paris IV-Sorbonne. Thesis director: Michel Imberty.

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Vitale Alessia (2008a). “The singing lesson. Phenomenology of the non verbal dynamics appearing in studying l’instrument-voix.” In Musicae Scientiae, special issue: Narrative in music and interaction (p. 111–128). Vitale Alessia (2009a). “Learning processes in the study of the singing voice”, in Proceedings of the 4th European Network of Music Educators and Researchers of Young Children (MERYC), Bononia University Press. University of Bologna, Itay, 22–25 July 2009, p. 443–452. Vitale Alessia (2009b). “From the vocal gesture to the writing of music”, in Proceedings of the 7 th Triennial conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM), University of Jyväskylä, Finland, 12–16 August 2009, p. 567–572. Vitale Alessia (2009/In press). “The impact of the vocal gestures within the dynamics of the learning process in singing lesson and in the transitional process from oral musical culture to the writing of music”. In Philosophy of performance, Eero tarasti (ed), Helsinki, Acta Semiotica Fennica. Vitale Alessia (2009/In press). “Temps et espace dans les processus d’ apprentissage du chant”. In La coscienza di Gino: esperienza musicale e arte di vivere. Saggi in onore di Gino Stefani. Dario Martinelli, Francesco Spampinato (eds), Umweb, Helsinki. Vitale Alessia (2009/In press). “Transmission du corps – corps de la transmission. Parallèles eutre l’étude de la daux et l’étude du chant”, in Journal of Cognition & Musical Arts, Federal University of Paranà, Curitiba, Brazil. Winnicott Donald Woods (1971). Jeu et réalité, Paris, Gallimard (Coll. Folio Essais, n◦ 398), 1975. Original title: Playing and reality. London: Tavistock publications. Winnicott Donald Woods (1996). L’enfant, la psyché et le corps, Paris, Payot, 1999. Original title: Thinking about children. London: Karnac Books. Winnicott Donald Woods (1987). Le bébé et sa mère, Paris, Payot, 1992. Original title: Babies and their mothers. Wokingam: Addison-Wesley.

M AT T I I T K O N E N

HORS D’OEUVRE REVISITED: AN EXISTENTIAL EXCHANGE

ABSTRACT

The human “here” position places one’s companion inescapably into a “there” position. The same applies vice versa: no subject can enter the existential “here” position of a fellow human being. These positions are simply uninterchangeable. Let the following attempt for an exchange between possible worlds bring more light to the matter. Existential dialogues create a polyphonic verbal reality in which the inner universe of the work is placed in cross lighting: two beams flooding from opposite directions create an exposure game of contrasting lights and shadows. Echoes of different time sounds stratify the present moment, and the perspective expands into the remotest pasts and most distant futures. There is a faint scent of the eternal meal in the air. The experience is about to arrive. A little more patience – it will soon be now.

FOREWORD: A SKETCH FOR A DIALOGUE

The purpose of this foreword is to offer the reader a bird’s eye view, to place in front of the reader’s eyes a camera observing the landscape from up high, and to sketch a panorama, or several panoramas, in anticipation of future events. One can spend a while in the blue sky which is a part of cosmic time and reflects the universe on its all-perceiving, shimmering foil. Existential dialogues create a polyphonic verbal reality in which the inner universe of the work is placed in cross lighting: two beams flooding from opposite directions create an exposure game of contrasting lights and shadows. Echoes of different time sounds stratify the present moment, and the perspective expands into the remotest pasts and most distant futures. There is a faint scent of the eternal meal in the air. The experience is about to arrive. A little more patience – it will soon be now. 423 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 423–439. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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Before I can get to the bottom of myself I must outline a strategy, a methodology. As long as one is aware from the outset of the all-distorting danger of psychologism there is a chance of coming up with something philosophically interesting. So I shall begin the quest for my experiential present – this sketch for a philosophical probe – with an outline of a phenomenologically pure psychology of food. Plan a: My aim is to describe originalities, idiosyncrasies; I want to establish the nature of a universal intentional-spiritual process which would contain the all-embracing rule of synthesis: every connection of consciousness with another consciousness gives birth to a new consciousness. Application a: “If I look to the right I see the old beloved dining room of the Kämp hotel. On my left there is the old beloved Esplanade-street. I am sitting by the window at the Kämp, you see, and feel very deeply that I am a Helsinki native, an authentic one. I have Aleksi and Espis – Alexander street and the Esplanade – running through my veins. There is no other city that speaks to me as this one does.” (TET, p. 28.) “Three handsome restaurants have now turned up in the legendary Kämp in Helsinki. Yume is a harmoniously modern Japanese restaurant, with Hirokazu Kamijukkokun as the chef de cuisine. [...] At the Kämp Café there is both a restaurant and a café that serve breakfast, lunch and à la carte dishes in the style of the Grand Café. The Kämp Club is a cosmopolitan night club. To visit these three restaurants you can for example take the Gastrosafari. Start the journey with an aperitif at the Kämp Café bar, followed by sushi for hors d’oeuvre at Yume, enjoy the main course (for example coq au vin) in the Kämp Café dining room and to top it all, make toasts with truffle martinis at the Kämp Club.” (Maku magazine, p. 17.) What distinct originalities do the foregoing verbal images comprise? There is a time gap of 78 years between the two passages. Over the years, the Kämp hotel has flourished, disappeared and been born again. Still it is quite easy to grasp the all-embracing food psychological rule of synthesis in this instance: when my consciousness encounters the consciousnesses of author Kersti Bergroth and the ever-so-self-confident food journalist a new consciousness comes into being. Or, alternatively, the only consciousness present in the situation is my own interpretive consciousness. The two other dimensions are represented only through the printed word. Yet an encounter between two consciousnesses is possible even with a short story or a magazine article, albeit that meaning is generated in one direction only: from text to reader. Bergroth and the Maku magazine may affect me but I cannot effect any changes in them.

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Nevertheless, a vibrant consciousness of life – something that could perhaps be named an aesthetic food identity – inspires one’s being. At the renovated Kämp Hotel, that centre of Finnish cultural history, there is a Japanese restaurant. None of the three restaurants at the Kämp carry a Finnish name. On the Gastrosafari there is raw fish for hors d’oeuvre! Why couldn’t one just as well go to the fish counter in Stockmann’s department store and start the gastronomic experience there? Raw fish from the display counter straight to the plate! That, if anything, would be trendy. The coq au vin strikes one as a reasonable choice in comparison, even though it rather desperately brushes off Finnishness and bows in the direction of France – as does the truffles aberration mentioned in the text. In spite of all this, the intentional-spiritual process goes on and the vibrant consciousness retains its force: I sit with Bergroth at the window table in the Kämp. The summer of Helsinki fills me to the brim. I am seized in rapture in the stylish interior of the Kämp Café. I can hear history humming around me. This newborn connection of one consciousness with another induces me to feel more deeply. I will hold on to my experiential self. May the Kämp live within me. This feels fine. Plan b: I must set out to explore the discrete forms of the intentionalpsychological process which must and can manifest themselves in the mind. In the same context I shall investigate syntheses that consist of such discrete forms. My fixed purpose is indeed to reveal the existential pattern of these manifestations. The resulting typology would embrace all forms: the discrete, the concomitant and the finite, and those which reach out to infinity. Application b: “The instinct of women to dress beautifully and decorate the body derives at least partly from a conscious or unconscious desire to please the opposite sex. Men noticed this long ago and have therefore considered it best to design women’s fashion themselves in order to make their wishes known to all. It is currently men who dictatorially decide what forms, what colours, models or sizes women should wear at any given time. Their stronghold for achieving all this is Paris, the promised city of fashion artists.” (NTT, pp. 14–15.) “The cover of the new book on grilling is not particularly enticing. The bombastically titled All about grilling is, however, a worthy volume which delivers what its title promises. The various techniques, ingredients and sauces are given a thorough treatment. There are helpful pictures for the beginner but there is also much to experiment with for the more advanced cook. For example the grilled pizza, the salsa caprese and the pork fillet stuffed with tapenade sound exciting. The book makes a fine present to the male who loves grilling.” (Avotakka magazine, p. 54.) When observing the wide variety of forms that the intentional-spiritual processes can assume in the mind one is immediately confronted by a gendered

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reality. It often seems that a number of writers and speakers are intent on forcing the world into strict masculine and feminine categories. The discrete forms of these categories are then brought to the realms of dress, food, fashion as well as to the more general observation of everyday life. The result is a masculine and a feminine mode of observing the mutuality of existence. What kind of typologies are we actually dealing with here? It seems appropriate here to use the term “worldly masculine and feminine syntheses” and to present gendered, specific typologies as the basis for describing these syntheses. The birthing process might go through for the following stages. One has observed several men in the act of grilling outdoors during the same week. Each of them has been seen in the garden of a house on a warm summer evening. The culinary performance has always been witnessed by a relatively large audience. One has thus gathered sufficient evidence for the purpose of drawing definitive conclusions. One discrete form of masculine synthesis is summer grilling. Such a discrete phenomenon can, however, also be a part of a typology of “summer men” reaching out to infinity, or more specifically, represent the phenomenon in its Finnish incarnation. All about grilling is a paean to barbecue man and an outstanding work of pure food psychology, presenting in one volume a scientific, general presentation on the gastronomic phenomenon of masculine outdoors grilling. It is time to celebrate: we are invited to taste a culinary masterpiece in the form of grilled pizza, spiced with tapenade that carries in its essence nuances of capers and anchovy. Bon appétit! The eating audience consists of women only. They are all dolled up in order to please the male chef and are about to be entranced by his masculine grilling feats. All the guests know that their host admires things Parisian, and is particularly enthusiastic about haute couture. The fashion magazines have reported that vintage clothing is the absolute must of the season in the fashion world. The creations of leading fashion houses in Paris have even been dubbed classics: unique collectors’ items. Meanwhile, recycling, flea markets or used clothes do not merit a single mention. Trendiness comes first. One discrete form in the typology of feminine syntheses is a conscious opinion of what is aesthetic. A strict beauty care regimen gives one basic selfconfidence. A key term in all this is décolleté. The meaning of decolléter in French is to lower the neckline, to uncover the neck. Décolletage refers to a low-cut neckline, and thus decolleté means “low-cut”. The most fashionoriented guests have studied the article in the Kauneus & Terveys (“Beauty & Health”) magazine which gives the following advice to the ignorant: “Is your face receiving all the attention and care, while your neck and the decolleté are neglected? The area below the chin will mercilessly reveal a woman’s real age and the quality of her skin care. That is why the neck and the decolléte deserve

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special attention. [...] Caring for the neck and the decolléte should belong to your skin care routine every morning and evening.” (Smolander.) Eureka! The situation calls for an intellectual touché: if something troublesome should land on the neckline of your light summer dress, it is advisable to master the correct cleaning methods. One must care for the garment appropriately and take it to the dry-cleaners. This is the way to achieve a spotlessly clean result. The woman journalist Tarja Smolander has confused a decolléte dress with skin: the only way to pamper one’s decolléte is to find a high quality laundry. However, it is perhaps passé to pose as an intellectual and set out to correct the error made in the magazine. Surely it is best to just smile and direct an enchanted stare at the male at the grill. And in so doing represent one basic type of feminine synthesis constructed by the media. At the same time, a possible anomaly among the discrete forms of the group will conveniently merge with the rest of the members of the typology. And all are happy, nothing but smiles. Plan c: My objective is to show the total structure of the mental life as such and at the same time to offer an eidetic presentation – a Wesendeskription – of that structure. My analysis is thus designed to illustrate the essential nature [...] the Wesensart – of the universal stream of consciousness. Application c: “3 June [1928] Sunday. Veikko read in the newspaper that an automobile running on rocket power has been built at the Opel factories in Germany. It accelerates from 0 to 100 km/hour in 8 seconds. The Germans are apparently very advanced in designing a space ship. A dismal idea: man flying into space. How does one get back from there? Veikko has two more weeks of work in Turku. I am fascinated by different salads now, they make nice summer meals and are good for the figure.” (Linnilä & Pukkila, p. 70.) “Our latest product, Siluetti metwurst, is a true find for all weight watchers. The product has only 2.7% fat and tastes just like salami ought to taste. The product is made from the leanest cuts.” (Kodin Kuvalehti magazine, p. 115.) If one aims to reveal the total structure of the inner life or the inner stream of consciousness, the criteria set for the inquiry are quite demanding. Or are they? It may still be entirely possible to grasp the essence, the eidos. The above-mentioned element of universality makes the matter all the more intriguing. One must find a factor connecting all human, experiential agent-subjects regardless of time or space. Food is situated at the very core of such universal applicability. This observation provides an excellent starting point for analysis. At the end of the 1920s the human race, and the generation of young artists in Finland with it, became enchanted by speed, machines and technology. Jazztyttö keittää (“The Jazz Girl Cooks”) is a beautiful, downright seductive book that describes, as its subtitle indicates, the gastronomic year 1928 of Miss Aino Helminen. However, the reader ends up feeling bewildered as it

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is difficult to distinguish what is original material in the book and what has been inserted by the editors. There is no bibliography. The reader has good reason to feel betrayed. But the remarks about the aesthetics of mechanics and about the lightness of food are evocative and bridge the time gap of 78 years without difficulty. Both of these dimensions belong to the active stream of human consciousness in the 21st century as well. The book successfully conveys something genuinely timeless: an eidetic presentation of human universality. Leafing through the pages, the reader senses a powerful presence and is entertained for long periods of time. The extract from the Kodin Kuvalehti magazine only confirms the genuine character of the impression. Moreover, the delicious taste of the Siluetti metwurst does nothing to alter the matter. On the contrary, it transports the experiencer to the inimitable eidos of food psychology – the ideal core of gastronomic skill. The apt description and the delectable taste of the product raise to the eater’s lips an authentic smile that transcends gender categories. Plan d: The word “I” now entails a new direction of inquiry in the context of ordinary modes of being. “I” refers here to the subject of permanent conceptions or modes of thought – such as convictions regarding existence and values, and deliberate decisions; the subject, then, of habit, practiced skills and qualities of being. (On the foregoing, see for detail e.g. Husserl, p. 26; Itkonen, 2004.) Application d: “At a neat, attractively set table, in a well-ventilated room, even simple food is bound to taste delicious. [...] The middle of the table is reserved for decorations. Flowers in vases, pots, or simply laid on the table, branches and leaves, candles and fruit can all be used for decorating the table. Simple decoration is usually the most beautiful and successful. Christmas, Easter, midsummer, etc., require different decoration styles. Decorations on dining tables should not be too high.” (Oksanen & Harmio, p. 346.) “Designed for combinations. You simply cannot fail with “Teema” (“Theme”), Kaj Franck’s design classic. The renewed “Teema” dinner set is designed to complement the familiar collection and to meet the demands of modern dining. [...] You will find larger sizes in the “Teema” range, and new colours – brown and olive green. In addition, there will be changing seasonal colours in the series, starting with turquoise. Compose your own Theme with these timeless artefacts and allow yourself to consume less and live more. The new Theme: against disposable culture.” (deko., p. 103.) There is beauty in simple and plain design. This statement may also contain the secret of style in all its unaffectedness. Looming in the background there is also a certain image or concept of the human being; one that involves an esteem for individuality and uniqueness. A well-set table liberates the room, creating a space where opposites can come together.

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Since “I” refers to a subject of permanence, it also entails an idea of respect for skill and know-how. It becomes possible to speak about steering clear of disposable culture and serial production. The idea does not by any means involve an underestimation of aesthetics or beauty ideals. It is permissible to dissociate the everyday from the festive – traditions are valuable. In this sense, Maija keittää (“Maija Cooks”, 1948/1956) remains a topical book even today. The table setting constructs a space in the room for calm. The act of eating is graced by a touch of the sacred and the sublime. All participants are permitted to be themselves; no one needs to pretend to be anything else than what they are; all social roles and masks can be dropped. The host and the hostess are respected, as are all the others sitting at the table. The gastronomic work of art is crowned by the existentially appropriate dinner set. Finnishness suits the harmonious composition perfectly – “Teema” is the theme of the day. Deep gratitude is due to Kaj Franck!

IN WHOSE EYES?

The human “here” position places one’s companion inescapably into a “there” position. The same applies vice versa: no subject can enter the existential “here” position of a fellow human being. These positions are simply uninterchangeable. Let the following attempt for a dialogue between possible worlds bring more light to the matter. Proposition a: Only moments or periods in the agent-subject’s life project constitute his or her actions proper. Hence the notion of a project also involves the horizon of the subject’s protracted life plans, inasfar as the verifiable, concrete future circumstances of the outlined activity have a defined status, at least to some extent, in these life plans. Response a: “Who could be bothered to watch dull TV programmes, when there is something infinitely more exciting right at the heart of one’s home? It is now worth your while to take a look at your refrigerator. On its door there is a wireless broadband connection for mailing and chatting even as you cook. You can store recipes in the fridge library and check your electronic shopping list in the middle of a busy work day. Of course, the fridge door transmits all the TV and radio programmes too. [...] The second-generation Screenfridge by Electrolux fills the needs of those modern, technologically-minded consumers who want to keep in touch with their friends and family while busy in the kitchen. A penny saved is a penny earned – also when it comes to time. Measured in money, the new fridge costs approximately 7000 euros.” (Gourmet magazine, p. 73.) “The Opa company celebrates its 80th anniversary by launching a new model of the smart frying pan. There is a point in the handle that changes

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colour according to the pan’s temperature. In the Opastava cooking ware set there are also two types of sauté pans.” (Koti ja Keittiö magazine, p. 95.) Are the thoughts of the modern human being constantly occupied by a techno-utopia? Is it impossible for the modern subject to live a single moment without longing for a state of mechanized being? Who can penetrate every moment of the life project of their fellow human being? Or can one observe only short periods of their companion’s stream of consciousness at a time? What lies hidden behind each visible, external act? These interesting questions are worth seeking answers to. If each person is the only expert on their own life project it becomes all the more necessary to interpret the foregoing passages. If only the periods of time that are meaningful to the subject are worth examining, one can indeed ask if magazines are needed at all. Who has written the lines cited above and with whose permission? Why should a reader have any intention to buy a computerized refrigerator – or even an intelligent frying pan that instructs its user? On the contrary, it is quite likely that people hope or positively yearn to have more peaceful moments of repose in their lives. If this is true, one’s life designs may include a plan of detaching from ordinary business and routine. To remove oneself from the technologized flow of everyday life becomes the new objective. The future-oriented gaze begins to see a horizon of everyday life full of freedom and spontaneity. Instead of tight schedules and a virtuality that in fact binds people to one place, one needs to discover states of unfettered existence. This is a very concrete, and almost the only, requirement for future states of affairs. So the magazines have perhaps unwittingly succeeded in their work, at least in the sense of helping the readers find out what they definitely want to avoid. Technology is a good servant but a bad master. What would it be like as a maid or a mistress, I wonder? Proposition b: The entire structure of life plans – even though at any given moment fixed and consistent – is inevitably altered as the agent-subject passes from one moment of internality to another. It is precisely this structure of life designs that has a decisive influence on the full meaning of the subject’s acts. Hence that meaning itself must change with the constant modification of the overall structure. Response b: “A simple, attractively served snack brightens up the working day. In these days of hardship the housewife may need to be slightly more innovative than earlier when it was customary to have coffee and pastries at midday. So we have made several suggestions for snacks. We are all familiar with the difficulty of knowing what might please others and what can be offered at any given time. [...] You can also leave it to the children to prepare and serve the snack for a change. For little girls, it can be an honour and

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fun too.” (Helaakoski-Tuominen, p. 21.) “With the beginning of student life, your social life changes too, usually in a more active direction. It is important to know how to separate the everyday from the festive. The foods served at parties are usually rich in energy and salt. When daily food choices are balanced, light and affordable, you can, if you want, have some party treats that are more fatty: candy, pastries, pizza, hamburgers, sausage, savoury pies or creamy foods. However, you cannot celebrate every day, for constant partying is harmful both to your health and wallet even if it does not show on your waist.” (Parikka & Johansson, p. 18.) Different times, different realities, different life plans. A statement that may sound a little harsh posits also an undeniable truth: internality changes together with the external time of the world. Each one of us is a prisoner of our own experiential humdrum. It is difficult to transcend the boundaries of time and attempt to move into other presents. Nevertheless, each person maintains a consistent relationship with their own lived everyday because decisions and values always originate in the agent-subject, not in some external force. Therefore a perfect understanding of the book Pula-ajan keittokirja (“Cooking in Hard Times”, 1941) is perhaps impossible for modern readers who may not fully comprehend the demands and deprivations of wartime. The motives for writing the book influenced its contents and controlled the whole act of creation: the readers had to be guided towards those elements of existence that were perceived as meaningful and necessary. It is perhaps in this light that one should view the gendered reality in which little girls were expected to be particularly interested in serving the midday snack. To aim at versatility, though, appears sensible in the present perspective too: it is indeed impossible to fully know what kind of food would please others and when. Personal tastes may vary somewhat from one situation to another. Having said that, it seems that rye bread is an eternal part of the Finnish soulscape. Could it even be that the perennial core of the Finnish food truth lies in rye bread? The book Tonnikalan tuolla puolen (“Beyond Canned Tuna”, 2005) involves an entirely different set of life designs. It gives advice to young people beginning their student lives. The modification of the experiential everyday according to situation is a good starting point: there is good reason for separating the festive from the mundane. The meanings of the concrete food acts will take shape accordingly. But why does one need heavy, fatty delicacies at all? Who needs creamy foods and why? One would do well to forget fatty sausages altogether, and the same applies to candy and pastry. Who has said, and with what right, that one should like puff pastries? The full meaning of the act of eating in life plans should be viewed from the standpoint of what is light and low-fat. Even if such choices do not necessarily make the wallet thicker, at least they would have the advantage of making the waist smaller. A low-calorie diet

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is worth the investment; it supports body aesthetics. Let us study the existential guidebook: “Live long and exercise!” All else is sheer self-deception. Proposition c: The agent-subject can know the structure of life projects in its precise, explicit form only partially; the structure can be captured, comprehended, only approximately by the focused beam of real attention. In the same way, the life plan construct can be revealed only in part. In each given moment there is a brightly illumined core surrounded by the ever-expanding horizon of darkness. The core and the horizon constitute together the explicable and yet inexplicable background against which the planned, concrete act can be clearly discerned. It is thus that a moment or period in the life design can bring about a unity. Response c: “‘What an exceptionally successful and extraordinary taste!’ said Joseph in a slightly lecturing tone. ‘There is a hint of the exotic in the tartness, and yet not a trace of heaviness. It fulfills its function perfectly as it is: a fine, piquant stimulant for the appetite. It is nowhere else than in cooking bouillon that the greatest gastronomic crimes are committed – I do not hesitate to follow Brillat-Savarin here and use the word art. Bouillon, in the same way as sauces for fish, are the pierre de touche for the kitchen artist. Mrs Lauraeus, this bouillon makes me venture into saying that you have the heart of a poet!”’ (Waltari, pp. 105–106.) “If you love pasta as the Italians and I do, you will also love Barílla. By using the original Barílla pasta and the Barílla pasta sauces you will create a genuine smell and taste of the Italian kitchen at home. Barílla pasta and sauces: ‘You will succeed!’ Hans Välimäki, founder and chef de cuisine of the only Finnish restaurant with two Michelin stars.” (Kotivinkki magazine, p. 111.) In Finnish author Mika Waltari’s novel Ihmeellinen Joosef (1938/1993), the playful subtitle and guideline for the reader is “a serious pastime novel”. The book nevertheless also contains a thoughtful analysis of food culture and its significance. The modern reader meets a familiar circumstance in the foregoing passage: all dinner guests are addressed as a single, faceless group, and Finnishness is held in contempt. In all likelihood the author has been familiar with only parts of the life plans of himself and his contemporaries. Along with the small explicable traces, there are large parts of the multilayered realm of future plans that remain uninterpreted. The observations made of reality and one’s fellow human beings cannot embrace the essence of being-in-the-world in its entirety. The French chef Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin has probably never represented a demigod of the culinary arts to the mother of a working class family. Neither has a clear consommé figured, in the beam of her inner stream of consciousness, as the toughest challenge of the kitchen artist. The brightly illuminated core of her experiential moments has probably been occupied by

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entirely different matters. Her future horizon has probably been darkened by uncertainty about the future. Perhaps these countless mothers have been the real poets of everyday life: intuitively they have succeeded in combining the explicable with the inexplicable of the lived everyday. At the same time their concrete food acts have been works of genuine gastronomic art. This should by no means be underestimated. For many of us, the word Michelin may evoke associations of car tyres and white, wrinkly and overweight “Michelin men”. These figures functioned as moving advertisements, front men clearing the way for the product name. Next, one had to suddenly take in the colossal rise in status of the restaurant guide that was originally designed for professional drivers. Likewise one was expected to understand the phenomenon of professional cooks and chefs turning into semi-divine art and media personalities. The media visibility and glorification they have received in recent years approaches the incomprehensible. What should one actually think about Hans Välimäki with his Michelin restaurant and raptures on Italian food? All the same, one must recognize his success, which deserves genuine respect. Yet there is much that remains outside the reader’s brightly illuminated core of attention. There are many “culinary artists” who do not include sublime Barílla pasta in their concrete mealtime acts. Does this mean that they never succeed? In other words, do their future horizons consist of only negative food experiences? That would, of course, be one way of achieving a corresponding unique synthesis. But is that worth striving for? And why not want the fragrance and taste of the Finnish kitchen to linger in our homes instead of the mock-Italian? This would conjure up in our reality something inimitable and genuine. Let me propose a toast to Finnishness and to our beautiful language! Let us be shamelessly proud of both – let us live our food experiences in Finnish! Without forgetting humour and self-irony, of course. Proposition d. Everything described in the foregoing, however, is open only to the consciousness of the agent-subject and remains inaccessible to the control and the approach of the observer, whose access to the actions of the subject are confined to realized acts. The observer notes only parts of the agent-subject’s activities. In order to produce a true, ingenuous description of what passes in the mind of the subject of some act, no matter how trifling or insignificant, the observer would need to step into the whole process of the agent-subject’s stream of thought. The observer would need to be able to enter the whole history of the agent-subject’s personality, the originating phases of his or her subjective life projects, every skill, experience and expectation concerning future circumstances. To do all this the observer would need to have gone through every setting in the agent-subject’s inner life – to have experienced the shared succession, tempo and fullness of each scene of events. The observer would have to become one with the object of observation, as French

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philosopher Henri Bergson has stressed. (On all the above propositions see esp. Schutz, pp. 39–40; Itkonen, 2006a; 2006b.) Response d: “The T-bone steak is worth tasting. In a top loin beef steak there is a bone in the shape of the letter ‘T’, separating the tenderloin from the sirloin. The delicious and tender delicacy can be either grilled or fried in the pan. The taste comes from the fat that marbles the meat from the inside and surrounds it from the outside.” (Kotiliesi magazine, p. 41.) “Stand-by flights to the Mediterranean starting from 3%! Try the new Apetina feta cheese cubes and make a tasty trip: fill a sandwich or a baguette with fresh salad, tomato, and zucchini slices. Spice with olive oil and vinegar, oregano and ground black pepper. Give your tasty treat a finishing touch with Arla Apetina 3% feta cheese cubes and voilà – you’re far away from home! Basil & Oregano, Garlic & Parsley, au Naturel.” (Gloria magazine, p. 97.) On account of the foregoing dialogue the only justifiable policy is to stay with describing one’s own world of experience. May this text serve as a personal food psychological confession or testament of sorts. I shall also use this opportunity to characterize all that which lies out of reach for even the most attentive of observers. What we have here is a gastronomic-contemplative introspection. “Flinch from fat, reach for the fatless.” This is my food cultural guideline for the near and dear. Taste and delicacy never require fat, not even in a Tbone steak. For the outside observer, my modes of thought materialize in my concrete food choices. This is why I favour Arla’s ultra-light feta cheese. It is tastier than the corresponding product by the Valio company. The Basil & Oregano alternative is particularly delectable. The strainer that comes with the Arla package and is used for lifting the cheese cubes from the liquid is exceedingly useful as well. The observer will notice also the following trait in my food behaviour: I combine low-fat feta cheese cubes with salads and grind black pepper from the pepper mill directly on top of it all. In order to step further into my inner stream of consciousness, the observer would have to make a leap into being a part of me, into the churning midst of my thoughtstream. In order to do this the observer would need to know my entire lived history with all its griefs and joys, as well as my dreams and expectations for the future. We would need to peer into the shared world with the same eyes, without the existential gap separating our “I”s. Two would have to become one – and this combination of selves should abhor oil-and-vinegar. This would be a true challenge, in anybody’s book. So far I have never once encountered a double of myself. Thus it would seem that I am a unique individual. No one can take my place; neither am I able to become someone else. This is why I can say in complete honesty that a T-bone steak must be fried – without oil, of course – until done. All other versions, from rare to different degrees of medium, are sheer madness.

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Likewise, all attempts at accompanying sauces will invariably ruin a steak. Hence I would seriously discourage my observers from trying to become me. Vive la différence between the observer and the observed. And until such time as the reek of garlic is illegalized, people will keep at a sufficient distance from each other. I wonder if this is another fact recognized by the famed French philosopher Bergson. Perhaps – he did after all receive the Nobel Prize for literature already in 1927. We can surely rely upon his words.

A F T E RW O R D

The hors d’oeuvres have been served and the taste of cultural philosophical gastronomic art has been brought to one’s lips. One can expect a delicious main course to arrive next. It almost seems possible to become incorporated in the nostalgic painting Automat by Edward Hopper (1927). The milieu is an urban café or perhaps a railway station restaurant in which an elegant young woman is waiting for the departure of the next train. The ready-made meals have been serially produced, and the peaceful coffee-time is tinted with seclusion, detachment from others, and the loneliness of the table. There is an abundant, brightly coloured fruit bowl glowing in the background. Limits between worlds are transcended. The present moment flows away, and time trickles into the past as well as into the future. The gaze carries far, beyond the horizon. The universal glance surveys future events: the inner stream of consciousness unites with the external time of the world.

EPILOGUE IN HONOUR OF PROFESSOR ANNA-TERESA T Y M I E N I E C K A : A F I N N I S H R E Q U I E M I N A H A RVA R D M AY

M OT T O The home district, that place on earth to which our being is fixed with eternal roots, the environment of our childhood and youth, the eternal homestead of our hearts, the most beautiful and precious on earth, beautiful even if bare and more beautiful because of it, the object of our longing, if we have left it, – it is our natural sphere of life, outside of which we will somehow forever feel like mere wanderers. (Hollo, p. 57.)

I Spring is everywhere: in the colours of the flowers in the green glow of the grass and in the opening sea of leaves.

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II I cross the campus. I listen to the murmuring of the old buildings. III In this milieu there is sophistication learning centuries thick. IV I feel a pressing need even to think in whispers. V One must have respect: to quieten down when the time comes. VI Coming from afar, a human product of another environment, I go with the flow. I do not stand out. VII The place is imbued with dignity. The spirit of the place is born of small things, of gusts, the wind of cultivation. VIII I yield, my criticism lapses, it melts into the architecture, into the flowing, harmonious form language.

HORS D’OEUVRE REVISITED

IX The river Charles gives life to everything. It also took lives, when bright-eyed youths journeyed into the purgatory of Vietnam. In the middle of the love decade. X There it ended, an existence hardly begun. They became eternal boys: in lead coffins, under the stars and stripes. Three shots fired for each of them. XI Charles, Charles, rising youth still inhabits your banks. Or was it left, after all, in Iraq or Afghanistan? XII A song to Harvard, to the one and only, to the alma mater. Only the best is good enough for you: in both life and death. It has been chiselled into the marble slabs, in the brilliant names, in glistening golden letters. XIII The short years and tearful eyes; to the university, to the land of their fathers they gave their sacrifice. Far away from home, the ballot as their judge. Charles will not forget his children

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nor Harvard its offspring. Memories shall never perish.

University of Jyväskylä Translated by Carla-Rose Häkkinen English translation checked by Ian Gurney and Glyn Hughes

BIBLIOGRAPHY Avotakka. (2006). “Uroskokin järeä opus.” Avotakka 6 (39), p. 55. deko. (2006). “Teema. Kaj Franck 1952.” deko. 3 (3), p. 103. Gloria. (2005). “Arla, mielihyvää meijeristä.” Gloria 221 (19), p. 97. Gourmet. (2006). “Uutta asiaa jääkaapille. Kieli poskessa.” Teksti R. Seppänen. Suomen Kuvalehti, Gourmet 2 (3), p. 73. Helaakoski-Tuominen, M. (1941). Pula-ajan keittokirja. Porvoo: WSOY. Hollo, J. (1931). Itsekasvatus ja elämisen taito. Porvoo: WSOY. Husserl, E. (1927/1981). “Phenomenology.” Revised Translation by R. E. Palmer. Shorter Works. Edited by P. McCormick & F. A. Elliston. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 21–35. Itkonen, M. (2004). “Does What Has Been Survive After All? The Touch of Yesterday.” Translated by R. MacGilleon. Analecta Husserliana. Volume 82. Mystery in its Passions: Literary Explorations. Edited by A.-T. Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 359–369. Itkonen, M. (2006a). “From the Station to the Lyceum. In the Footsteps of a Wanderer in Time.” Translated by I. Gurney. Analecta Husserliana. Volume 90. Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book Three: Logos of History – Logos of Life. Historicity, Time, Nature, Communication, Consciousness, Alterity, Culture. Edited by A.-T. Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 501–520. Itkonen, M. (2006b). “Kerro, kerro kuvastin. Aikamatkaajan kulttuurihistoriallinen Torni-uni.” Torni. Toimittanut K. Salo. Helsinki: Otava, pp. 181–204. Kodin Kuvalehti. (2006). “Meetwursti.” Kodin Kuvalehti 13 (39), p. 115. Koti ja Keittiö. (2006). “Opastava paistinpannu.” Muistilista: kaupat/näyttelyt/messut/kirjat/ uutuudet. Teksti N. Hallman. Koti ja Keittiö 5 (11), p. 95. Kotiliesi. (2006). “Pihvien pihvi.” Liedellä. Teksti M. Malinen. Kotiliesi 12 (84), p. 41. Kotivinkki. (2006). “Kunhan se on Baríllaa, se on parasta Italiaa.” Kotivinkki 10 (25), p. 111. Linnilä, K. & Pukkila, H. (2005). Jazztyttö keittää. Aino Helmisen ruokavuosi 1928. Helsinki: Helmi. Maku. (2006). “Kämpin kolme uutuutta.” Uutta ravintolailmettä. Makupaletti: ruokamaailman asioita, ihmisiä, ilmiöitä ja tapahtumia. Koonnut H. Saine-Laitinen. Maku 5 (4), p. 17. NTT. (1960). Naisten tieto- ja taitokirja. Toimittanut K. Heporauta. Helsinki: Kustannustalo. Oksanen, A. & Harmio, L. (1948/1956). Maija keittää. Perusteellisin työ- ja valmistusohjein varustettu keittokirja. Yhdeksäs painos. Jyväskylä: Gummerus. Parikka, M. & Johansson, S. (2005). Tonnikalan tuolla puolen. Tampere: Amk-Kustannus.

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Schutz, A. (1978). “Parson’s Theory of Social Action: A Critical Review.” The Theory of Social Action. The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons. Edited by R. Grathoff. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 8–124. Smolander, T. (2006). “Kurkistus leuan alle.” Kauneus ja Terveys. Verkko-osoitteessa http://www.kauneusjaterveys.fi/luejutut/kauneus/article120421-1.html. (Luettu 25.5.2008). TET. (1928). Bergroth, K. Suurin hulluus auringon alla. Helsinki: Kirja. Waltari, M. (1938/1993). Ihmeellinen Joosef eli Elämä on seikkailua. Vakava ajanvieteromaani. Neljäs painos. Helsinki: WSOY.

S E C T I O N VII

F R A N C E S C O T O TA R O

T H E H U M A N T E L O S B E Y O N D T H E I N S T RU M E N TA L CLOSURE: THE CONTRIBUTION OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM

1. AN EMPIRICAL DESCRIPTION

I would like to start my inquiry with an attempt of empirical description. Nowadays, at the level of factual considerations, it is possible to highlight the difficulties regarding any discourse about ends. In our contemporary historical situation, the tension towards a telos of thinking and acting is either reduced to a minimum or completely absent. The reason is to be found in several factors, both cultural and structural. At the cultural level, many ideals that had previously been considered as goals of the fundamental human commitment to transform reality have fall into disgrace. Even the key-value of democracy is hardly perceived as a universal model for political organisation. Because of the ways in which it has been proposed or concretely realized, democracy is surrounded by suspects and runs the risk of being perceived as an empty formula. The situation is even worse with regard to the possibility of endorsing ideals of equity or fair distribution of resources. On the one side, it is well known that inequalities among countries and within each country have grown in the last years, despite wealth increase in absolute terms. On the other side many fights for equality have failed. Why then should we aim at fulfilling ends that we cannot pursue? Looking at the hardness of empirical facts, would it not be better to abandon any utopia and learn the art of disenchantment? In these brief considerations I would like not to be ungenerous. Surely the statements about the lack of democracy, the violation of human rights, and the inequity of resources distribution at the global level are unceasing. But such statements mostly do not go beyond the threshold of moral pressure, which conflicts with the guilty inactivity of political institutions lead by strong interests. The authentically universal character of ends that can be shared and thus become clear criteria for acting through the use of consistent means does not emerge. The 20th Century has been called (with a negative emphasis) “the century of ideologies”. However ideologies have hade the paradoxical effect of defining clear areas of comparison, and fostering competition among countries that were open or forced to a “team work” relying on declared (and shared) goals. 443 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana CIV, 443–449. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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After the end of the bipolar world order, the century we are groping our way in is apparently more homogeneous, especially because of economic globalisation. But the homogeneous character of economy (at least with regard to its functioning procedures) does not inspire a common vision. On the contrary, on the ground of economic standardisation, a mixture of positions linked to fragmentary and often geopolitical interests has grown. The competition among these interests is the result of partial visions, which are mostly dictated by utility calculus in the short term, and have given up any claim of systematic hegemony. Nonetheless competition can also benefit from contrasts linked to the feelings of national or territorial identity, or from the clash of different religious faiths. The “fuel” of national identity and different religious belongings, as well as the mixture of them both are the concurrent causes of explosive events and anyway arouse serious problems with regard to the harmony of our living together. However the conflicts born because of a bad declination of the identity-difference relations do not hold the power to disestablish the devices of global economy, for the latter does still have a control over identities and differences themselves. Here we face the structural reasons that prevent the proposal of universal ends and make the idea of a common telos dull.

2. THE ENDS BECOME MEANS

As a compensation of the hiding of ends, the dominion of means is growing more and more. As a consequence, the end of human life as a whole is nowadays the unlimited increase of means. The end is not suppressed, but is contracted within means: in other words, this is a collapse of ends over means. This is, I would argue, the core of the proclaimed submission of our planetary society to the essence of technique. However the extension of the dominion of ends can be grasped only if it is linked with the economic dimension. Economy – as it is since Adam Smith’s time and as it will always be if it does not take into account the anthropological “correction” that is also suggested by the critics of its utilitarian background – is absorbed by an instrumental logic. This is the stamp which is proper to its prevailing model of rationality. Let us examine this issue more in detail. The economic sphere is not only aimed at the development of means; but, because of its goals – being them the increase of material wealth – it does not accept any discussion about ends. The reason does not lie in a sort of irrationalism of economic dimension, but is rather to be found in the fact that mainstream economics is based on a narrow view of rationality. According to such a narrow view, looking at ends that transcend the aims of material growth would introduce an element of irrational perturbation. Despite appearances, economic logic does entail a strong

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immanent finalism, which consequently excludes any consideration on “transcendent” ends. All this leads to the closure into instrumental rationality or, more simply, to an instrumental closure. At this stage it is necessary to highlight a deeper consequence. When economic rationality becomes the general way of acting and submits people’s existential habits to its imperatives, then it invades the life world: as a further consequence the latter turns out to be a tank from which economy gets without measure the energies to carry on its operations. Economy then becomes the subject of the active synthesis of actions carried on in the life world, and the latter turns out to be the domain of passive synthesis with a capillary diffusion. The significance at the basis of individual existence and the relationships among subjects are moulded by the self-representation of individuals as producers and consumers. 3. THE CRITICAL INCIDENCE OF PHENOMENOLOGY

In a situation as the one I have tried to describe above, how can the interpretative and creative core of the reflection inspired by phenomenology and existentialism be fruitful? How can these currents of thought contrast the closure into instrumental rationality? In its core, phenomenology is the opening towards the horizon of the whole of meaning, that cannot be constrained at all in any factual dimension. Without such a reference to the whole, which does not only have a noetic, but also e noematic relevance, it is impossible to understand the suspension of the attribution of validity to the world of “natural” experience. If our intentionality is correlated to the whole of meaning, then the “natural” scene of existence, together with the ingenuous faith in its value of being, undergoes a decrease of validity, as Husserl has highlighted in the first of his Cartesian Meditations, when he proposes the shift to the ego cogito and the transcendental subjectivity, and defines the field of the “apodictically certain and ultimate” judgement. With regard to Husserl’s thought however, I would like to point out something that seems to remain implicit: the phenomenological epoche, thanks to which the whole and concrete life world is «for me only a phenomenon of being rather than a being», has its condition of possibility also in the noncoincidence between the being which is grasped in the natural experience, and the being which is understood (intentioned) as the totality of meaning. Suspending the validity of the “value of being” of experience and of the natural world entails the negation of their claim to fill the whole of being. The shift according to which the life world is «for me only a phenomenon of being rather than a being» can be realized by the transcendental conscience only because the latter is linked to a transcendental idea of being.

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Looking at things in the background of the whole of meaning, which is also the whole of being as different from factual existence, allows to think at things themselves as objects of a cogitatio and to open them to the processes of constitution that transcend the factual reality. Thinking of something as a phenomenon destroys the natural content’s ingenuous claim to possess an unconditional validity of being. In the reduction to a phenomenon, the content of experience does not lose any positivity, but gets a relative positivity. This is why the being “given” of the phenomenon, reduced or brought back to the act of thinking, looses its rigidity and can be considered according to fluid and dynamic ways of being. In this way, within the factual being, space is made for the mobile scene of the possible being. If this were not the case, conscience could only limit its task to a mere ratification of existence. In the reality of being that the transcendental subjectivity aims at building, the given existence is assumed as possible. The existing being given, is thus available for an “ideal” history: the latter is other than the already crossed one, but nonetheless able to fulfil the highest potentialities of real history. In fact the eidetische Typik, i.e. the typical eidethics that is realised by the transcendental subjectivity does not coincide either with empirical events or with the historical typology that can classify them. The order of eidos is richer than the order of factuality: the former is adherent to factual immanence but projects the latter into a transcendent telos and into an eidethical articulation which, in order to fulfil itself in the temporal path, can benefit from the efforts of a creative imagination able to realise the anticipation of the eidos. After this general sketch of the main traits of phenomenological approach, I would like to investigate, more in detail, how such an approach can arouse an effective critique of knowledge and specifically a critique of the knowledge proper of social sciences. In fact social sciences are engaged in giving reasons for the ways of relationships among individuals that seek pragmatic interests and goals, where the logic of an instrumental closure of behaviours always lies in ambush. How then can the “disinterested” and universal opening of transcendental subjectivity modify the interested and particular self-referentiality of empirical subjectivities, which are conditioned by an instrumental overload? A virtuous mediation could be carried on in the framework of an anthropological re-interpretation of economy. In such a re-interpretation a very important role can be plaid by phenomenological inquiry, thanks to its orientation towards the fulfilment of a free and autonomous humanity, which can take part at a common but not uniform life world; furthermore the very important theoretical revisions within the field of economics need to be brought out, that

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assign to economics the goal of the universal realisation of each person’s capabilities to do and to be. This is a discourse that has been be further considered and deepened in our congress.

4. THE CONTRIBUTION OF EXISTENTIALISM

On a different but convergent level, existentialism too could have an incidence on actual culture. In its most representative scholars, existentialism provides us with a tragic consideration of the relationship between the forms of singularity and the forms of the social or collective, which has been elaborated in a historical period when the former were suffering from the prevalence of the latter. On this line, existentialism has contested the abstract character of the universal and has expressed a refusal of the ethical codes dictated by conformism or authoritarianism. As a result, in its more constructive part, existentialism has expressed a moral based on the responsibility of the concrete person, in opposition to the capture into the massification and the “serialisation”. It has also addressed the hard issue of inter- subjective relation – which is always suspended between alienation and authentic realisation – without falling into a sweetened representation of otherness. It has also promoted an engagement for the transformation of unjust social relationships and for a historical arrangement emancipated from any logic of dominion. In the actual situation, the “tragic” contrast between individual and society seems to fail. Especially in western contexts, the individualistic spirit has got the upper hand over the importance of social organisation. Power institutions do not need any more to ask for obedience and subordination, but rather offer protection and promotion of individual life worlds. Biopolitics has become the most effective form of government, especially thanks to its realisation of spectacular paternalistic strategies through which the political leader acts as the protector of people. As “excellent” individual, he helps standard individuals with compassion. The individualism that is thus encouraged pervades common habits. Immediate emotions are lead by fear and insecurity and give rise to a condition of permanent Angst, i.e. Anguish, that takes the “social pact” back to its primitive Hobbesian characters. The dialectic between particular and universal is weakened and the life code of a wild existentialism imposes itself. This regression needs to be contrasted by a culture of existence that does not give exclusive space to the individualistic drift, but at the same time can highlight the positive qualities of the individual. On the basis of the full assumption of himself and the awareness of his character of being finite and thrown into the world, the individual needs to face the fundamental alternative between blind

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individualism and authentic individuality. The former attitude leads to the closure of the individual in himself and to the exercise of a diabolic instrumental will in the relationships with others, that he lives with hostility; the latter attitude turns finiteness into a reason for an opening towards others and makes common ends and solidarity possible, through reciprocal recognition. 5. THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONVERGENCE

In the fulfilment of the latter option, the importance of singularity, highlighted by existentialism through the figure of the always situated conscience, can be reconnected with the instance of transcendental subjectivity, that has been proposed by phenomenology. In fact deciding for the individual authenticity means to raise the singularity to a sort of moral epoché that introduces into singularity itself the point of view of universality. Thanks to such a shift, empirical conscience can reach the level of transcendental conscience; in this way the singular subject, together with his immediate interests and his direct claims, can be reduced to an “impartial observer” of humanity. It is plausible to think that such a shift, which has some important affinities with the ethical-political theories of justice, does not only concern the mere goal of a reconstruction of the “European” humanity, according to the narrow Husserlian expression, but is also able to offer the basic premises for the telos of the construction of a world humanity. The last but not the least, I would like to bring gain the transcendental dimension of the conscience to the more concrete field of anthropology. In brief, a fundamental question is at stake: which vision of the human being do we need, in the era of globalisation, in order to avoid that our vital acts are captured by the instrumental logic? And, more specifically, how can phenomenology contribute to the delineation of a human being which is not assimilated to a machine aimed at producing and consuming? Phenomenological reflection as such is a thought that goes beyond any interest to impose already given or presupposed instrumental functions. The world filtered through phenomenological reduction is given us by transcending the operations which are linked to usability (a conceptual gain that will be lost with Heidegger’s existential analytics). This transcending does not nullifies the world of our operations, but is to be understood as the indirect capacity of the glance, thanks to which the already constituted operations stop to oblige us through their value of being. In the broadening of meaning realised by phenomenological reflection, the same operations can become available for other goals and for others values of being. The semantic breaking of phenomenological reflection is the condition of possibility for the activation of an imaginative capacity, that can aim at recreating the existing world through new constitutive operations.

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This faculty of transgression, which raises the human to a condition of freedom in comparison with existing reality, does not remove the concreteness of temporality and historicity, but coincides with the exercise of the broadest activity as possible, namely contemplative activity. Retaking possession of such a faculty is a decisive anthropological task. Of course this task cannot remain generic and must be accompanied by the exploration of the regional contexts of human expression, in whose immanence this task needs to be able to point goals that transcend any tendency to self-referential closures. On this way, the contemplative faculty can inspire the capacity for a reformative and transformative action over life contexts, through which the concrete humanity does not give up the operations of producing and consuming, but at the same time does not exhaust itself in these operations and in the consequent alienation. If phenomenological reflection suggests contemplative activity as a fundamental element of a view of the human being that is connected with the capacity to product-work and act, then such a reflection can extend its connections and link itself to the western tradition of metaphysics and classical ontology. In such a tradition, especially in Aristotle, the human has been understood according to his capacity to work, to act, and to contemplate. Nowadays, unlike Aristotle, we do not need to establish a hierarchical ranking among these dimensions, but to embed them into one another, so that they can express their peculiar function and can reciprocally fecund themselves, in order to realise an overall human flourishing, i.e. the fulfilment of the human concrete ontopoiesis.

NA M E I N D E X

Adorno, T. W., 336, 370, 371, 377n7 Althusser, L., 324, 328 Anttonen, V., 395 Arendt, H., 168 Arlander, A., 386 Bachelard, G., 252n25, 252n33 Barbaras, R., 88n6 Barnes, H. E., 330n7 Bataille, G., 336 Bello, A. A., 55–76, 127n1 Benjamin, W., 220, 374, 378n16 Berger, H., Jr., 311n22 Bergson, H., 42, 44, 157, 258, 335, 343, 435, 436 Berleant, A., 383, 384, 389 Berne, E., 274 Bernet, R., 90n45 Bernstein, B., 400 Bielawka, M., 147–160 Biemel, W., 252n18 Binswanger, L., 75n52, 257, 267 Blondel, M., 51 Boss, M., 257, 267 Boundas, C. V., 310n1 Brozina, R., 29 Burgos, J. M., 107–129 Butler, J., 315, 316, 317, 320, 322, 323, 324, 327, 328, 329, 330n1, 331n16, 331n23, 331n26, 332n30, 332n39 Buttiglione, R., 127n2, 141 Buzina, R., 32n28 Cacciari, C., 240n8 Callas, M., 416

Camus, A., 147–160, 341–354, 360, 361 Casey, E. S., 382, 383, 385 Casey, S. E., 394, 400 Chen, M., 355–366 Churchill, J. S., 75n40 Claude, L. -S., 74n1, 88n1, 419n10 Comte, A., 50 Conrad-Martius, H., 73, 76n60 Cranston, M., 349, 354n14 Creswell, T., 381 Cumming, R. D., 335, 339n1, 377n1 de Certeau, M., 387 Deleuze, G., 88n14, 299–312, 335, 338 Derrida, J., 52, 214, 310n3, 318, 330n9, 341, 353 Descartes, R., 37, 52n2, 52n9 de Vries, H., 338, 339n14 Dewey, J., 383 Dickens, C., 307, 312n28 D’ippolito, B. M., 241–253, 252n33 Dreyfus, H. L., 90n61 Dufrenne, M., 84, 90n47 Dujardin, E., 277 Dupré, L. K., 50, 51, 53n39 Eliade, M., 396, 397 Faulkner, W., 277 Feuling, D., 30 Fink, E., 17, 29n2, 29n7, 30n10 Fiut, I. S., 341–354, 377n2

451

452

NAME INDEX

Freud, S., 51, 274, 301, 419n6 Fryer, D., 316, 330n2 Gadamer, H. -G., 208, 362, 367, 377n1, 381, 383, 384, 385 Galileo, 7, 234 Gallagher, S., 103 Galli, G., 240n2, 240n7, 240n9 Gibson, J. J., 394 Glucksaman, A.352 Gonzalez, C. B., 131–146 Goodman, N., 368, 369, 370, 377n3 Gorbey, K., 373 Gouhier, H., 257, 335 Groth, M., 339n7 Guattari, F., 310n4 Guerra López, R., 135, 136, 145n7, 145n10, 146n32 Haar, M., 79, 89n17 Hakkarainen, P., 384 Haraway, D. J., 304, 311n20 Harmio, L., 428 Hegel, G. W. F., 39 Heidegger, M., 39, 52n9, 90n51, 90n54, 148, 337, 367, 394 Heider, F., 274 Helaakoski-Tuominen, M., 431 Henriette, B., 419n1 Hölderlin, F., 336, 365n21 Hollo, J., 435 Hopper, E., 435 Husserl, E., 29n1, 29n6, 30n13, 52n2, 74n13, 74n18, 75n26, 75n35, 75n36, 75n39, 75n40, 75n41, 94, 95, 98, 102, 145n14, 150, 154, 156, 159n40, 162, 176n1, 206n12, 229n5, 229n9, 229m14, 229n17, 230n22, 230n30, 251n1, 252n5, 252n18, 331n24, 341, 342 Hyppolite, J., 335 Ingold, T., 394 Iser, W., 364 Ismael, J. T., 311n22 Itkonen, M., 423–438 James, W., 273, 335, 339n2 Jarry, A., 309

Jaspers, K., 51, 147, 150, 151, 162, 258, 270n4, 337 Johansson, S., 431 Johnson, M., 228, 231n53, 240n11 Joyce, J., 274, 277 Kanizsa, G., 96 Kanouse, B. C., 315–332 Kant, I., 43 Karjalainen, P. T., 382 Kaushik, R., 77–90 Kaye, N., 383, 385 Kierkegaard, H., 47 Kierkegaard, S., 40 Kirby, V., 323, 331n25 Knopf, A. A., 158 Köhler, W., 234, 240n4 Kojève, A., 336 Kott, J., 355–364 Koyré, A., 336 Kremer-Marietti, A., 335–364 Lacan, J., 90n45 Lagrange, G., 108 Lai, G., 274 Lakoff, G., 233, 238, 239 Lambert, K.352 Larderau, G., 352 Lawlor, L., 88n6, 88n14, 299, 310n3 Lecercle, J. -J., 311n18 Lehari, K., 393–401 Leibniz, G. W., 43–44 Levinas, E., 53n33, 316, 330n3, 335, 338 Levy, B.-M., 352 Lewin, K., 240n2 Loos, A., 277 López, R. G., 135, 136, 145n7, 145n22, 146n32 Lotman, J., 384m, 388, 390n2, 396, 398 Lyotard, J. -F., 341, 353 Mahler, 277 Małecka, A., 367–378 Ma, M. -Q., 299–312 Marcel, G., 162, 258n4, 337 Massey, D., 389 McCleary, R. C., 88n8 Melaney, W. D., 37–54

NAME INDEX

Merleau-Ponty, M., 3–36, 40, 52n6, 55–76, 77–90, 93, 95–103, 257–271, 310, 382, 383, 385 Merton, T., 149, 153, 158n6, 159n34 Metzger, W., 234, 240n1 Meyerson, 336 Mizzau, M., 274 Nietzsche, F., 192, 257, 262, 263, 267, 269, 271n14, 271n15, 271n16, 271n25 Norton, W. W., 364n1 Oksanen, A., 428 Ołdakowski, J., 376 Parikka, M., 431 Paris, S., 157n1, 229n7, 251n1, 419n10 Perls, F., 274 Petöfi, J. S., 233, 237, 240n9, 240n12 Pezzella, A. M., 161–176 Philippe, P., 419n2 Pirandello, L., 274 Plato, 149, 150, 205, 338, 344 Plotinus, 150, 345 Pred, A., 389 Prigogine, I., 311n24 Pukkila, H., 427

453

Scheler, M., 109, 117, 127n9, 128n16, 140, 142, 143, 146n27, 150, 159n45, 171, 177n32, 341, 346, 347 Schnitzler, A., 274, 276, 277 Schonberg, 277 Schutz, A., 434 Schwartz, R., 338, 339n15 Serres, M., 305, 311n24 Shakespeare, W., 355–364 Shestov, L., 147, 150, 151 Simpson, D., 304, 305, 311n23 Smith, D. W., 90n49, 301, 310 Smolander, T., 427 St. Augustine, 147, 150, 154, 156, 159n43 Stead, N., 372, 374 Stefano, F., 415, 419n5, 415n8 Stein, E., 162–177 Styczen, T., 142, 144, 145n4, 146n36, 146n41 Susan, H., 95 Suzuki, D. T., 206n13 Tarasti, E., 338, 339n13 Tischner, J., 147–160 Tymieniecka, A. -T., 32n22, 36n40, 127n6, 127n8, 158n14, 160n53, 204, 206n11, 322, 331n21, 377, 378n21 Ukielski, P., 378n19

Rajchman, J., 301, 309, 310n7 Rey, A. D., 207–231 Reynaert, P., 93–103 Riccioni, I., 273–296 Ricoeur, P., 51, 242, 244, 251n1, 251n4, 252n14, 411 Rilke, R. M., 248, 252n35 Rokstad, K., 3–36 Russell, B., 185, 188, 206, 212 Sacks, H., 275 Sallis, J., 90n47 Santayana, G., 335 Sartre, J. -P., 37–54, 147, 151, 152, 161–170, 174–177, 241, 249–253, 257–270, 299, 302–304, 310–313, 317, 318, 330, 337–339 Schama, S., 399 Schegloff, E., 275

Vitale, A. R., 403–419 von Bonsdorff, P., 386 von Dorsday, H., 281, 282, 286, 287, 290, 291 von Hofmannsthal, H., 277 Wagner, O., 277 Wahl, J., 335–339 Waldenfels, B., 90n46 Waltari, M., 432 Walton, K. L., 387, 388 Wierzbicki, A., 133, 145n2 William, J., 89n23, 277, 335, 339n2 Wojtyła, K., 107–129, 131–146, 153, 155 Woolf, V., 277 Zahavi, D., 103 Zuczkowski, A., 240n6, 240n10, 274 Zweig, S., 277