Phenomenology of Life. Meeting the Challenges of the Present-Day World (Analecta Husserliana)

PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE. MEETING THE CHALLENGES OF THE PRESENT-DAY WORLD ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA TH E Y EAR BO OK O F P HEN...

Author: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (editor)

9 downloads 1369 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE. MEETING THE CHALLENGES OF THE PRESENT-DAY WORLD

ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA TH E Y EAR BO OK O F P HEN OM ENO LO GIC AL RES EA RCH VO LU ME L XX XIV

Founder and Editor-in-Chief: A NNA -T ERESA T YMIENIECKA T he World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and L earning Hanover, New Hampshire

For sequel volumes see the end of this volume.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE. MEETING THE CHALLENGES OF THE PRESENT-DAY WORLD

Edited by ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA T he World Phenomenology Institute

Published under the auspices of T he World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and L earning A.-T. Tymieniecka, President

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 1-4020-2463-0 HB ISBN 1-4020-3065-7 e-book ISSN 0167-7276

Published by Springer, PO Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Sold and distributed in North, Central and South America by Springer, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Springer, PO Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 2005 Springer No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. Printed in the Netherlands.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TOPICAL STUDY ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA / The Pragmatic Test of the

Ontopoiesis of Life

xiii

SECTION I PHENOMENOLOGISTS’ VOCATION IN THE WORLD OF LIFE CARMEN COZMA / ‘‘Phenomenology of Life’’ as Chance for

Philosophy’s Transformation into a New Humanism

3

¨ NBERG / The Meaning of Life vis-a`-vis the DAVID GRU

Challenges of the Present-day World

13

R. KURENKOVA, Y. PLEKHANOV and E. ROGACHEVA / The

Transcendental–Phenomenological Meaning of the Notion of ‘‘Experience’’ in E. Husserl and J. Dewey’s Philosophy

33

SECTION II THE ROLE OF THE PHILOSOPHER CONTINUED JOZEF SIVAK / Husserl’s Mission of Sovereignty of Thought:

In the L ight of his ‘‘Briefwechsel’’

45

NICOLETTA GHIGI / The Task of Philosophy and the

Signiﬁcance of the Vocation of the Philosopher for Human Life in Husserl’s Phenomenological Analysis

69

JEFFREY WATTLES / Towards a Phenomenology of

Courageous Willing

81

MING-QIAN MA / Becoming Phenomenology: Style, Poetic

Texture, and the Pragmatic Turn in Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres v

97

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SECTION III SHARING-IN-LIFE ELLA BUCENIECE / How Can We be Together:

Intersubjectivity and Communication

119

CHIEDOZIE OKORO / A Critique of the Polarity in Edmund

Husserl’s Intersubjectivity Theory

129

MATTI ITKONEN / Lived Words: The Phenomenology of

Poetry Experienced

145

VELGA VEVERE / Existence and Communication: Challenge of

the Times

165

HALI˙ L TURAN / The Existence of Other Egos and the

Philosophy of Moral Sentiments

177

SECTION IV ECOLOGICAL CONCERN AND THEIR GROUNDWORK IN THE UNITY-OF-EVERYTHING-THERE-IS-ALIVE ZAIGA IKERE / The Beingness of Living Beings in

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Philosophy

195

AYHAN SOL / On the Idea of Environment

201

NIKOLAY MILKOV / The Meaning of Life: A Topological

Approach

217

ALEX ANTONITES / Epistemological Relativism as a

Challenge to Life Sciences – Do We Still Need Universals? HANNAH SCOLNICOV / Meeting One’s Death in Arcadia

235 249

SECTION V CIPHERING LIFE: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE MARI´ A LUCRECIA ROVALETTI / The Objectivization of Time

in the Obsessive World

265

WILFRIED VER EECKE and RICHARD COBB-STEVENS /

Phenomenology, Linguistic Intentionality, Aﬀectivity and Villemoes’ New Therapy for Schizophrenics

275

TABLE OF CONTENTS

vii

SECTION VI FURTHER EXCAVATING OF THE ‘‘CONCEPTION’’ OF THE ‘‘LIFE-WORLD’’ ANGELA ALES BELLO / Phenomenological Hyletics and the

Life-world

293

KONRAD ROKSTAD / Phenomenology, the Life-world and the

Human Condition

303

ELI˙ F C ¸ IRAKMAN / Transcendence and the Human Condition:

Reﬂections on Kant, Heidegger and Levinas

315

ALAIN BEAULIEU / L’Enchantement du Corps chez Nietzsche

et Husserl

339

WENDY C. HAMBLET / To Being or Not to Being? That is the

Question for Ethics

357

SECTION VII SEARCH FOR A DEEPER SOCIAL EQUILIBRIUM JESSE T. AIRAUDI / Imre Kertesz in the 21st Century:

Phenomenological Approaches to Philosophical Distortions and Social Violence

367

MICHAEL STAUDIGL / Pha¨nomenologie der Gewalt.

Eine Problemskizze

385

PIERO TRUPIA / Twentieth-century Italian Painting against

the Nihilist Drift of European Thought

407

SEMIHA AKINCI / On Guises, Concepts and Related Topics

425

KIYMET SELVI / Curriculum of Primary School Science

439

ELDON C. WAIT / The Orator does not Think Before, Nor

Even While Speaking: His Speech is his Thought

451

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU / Education Amidst a Cultural

Crisis: A Theoretical Comparison of Emerging Contemplative Pedagogy with an Ending of Cognitive Priorities in Current Education INDEX OF NAMES

465 553

A group of participants. Left to right, ﬁrst row: Cameron Cozma, Maija Kule, Ella Buceniece, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Angelo Ales Bello, Rimma Kurenkova. Second row: Bianca Maria D’Ippolito, Velga Vevere, Zaiga Ikere, Daniela Verducci. Third row: Mamuka Dolidze, Nickolay Milkov

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The present collection gathers the studies presented at our 53rd International Phenomenology Congress, ‘‘Phenomenology of Life. Meeting the Challenges of the Present-Day World’’, which was held in the framework of the 21st World Congress of Philosophy held by the F.I.S.P. (International Federation of Philosophical Societies), ‘‘Philosophy Facing World Problems’’, August 10–17, 2004. We owe our sincere thanks to all our participants who came from around the world to share with us their work. I also want to thank those who helped to prepare the event, especially our secretary, Jeﬀrey Hurlburt. Thanks also go to Ryan Walther, who copyedited and proofread this volume. A-T.T.

ix

TOPICAL STUDY

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

THE PRAGMATIC TEST OF THE ONTOPOEISIS OF LIFE Alfred T arski in memoriam

RECLAIMING THE PERENNIAL ROLE OF PHILOSOPHY

The topic I will treat in the present study lies at the heart of discussions concerning philosophy and its role in our culture, extending from modernity and its peak at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century to so-called postmodernity and the present. Our topic is the issue of theory and practice, one that strikes at the knot of all the great philosophical questions we have inherited from two and a half millennia of tradition. In contemporary times, especially in the twentieth century, it came to such a sharp formulation that it undermines the great tenets of what Karl Jaspers called ‘‘philosophical faith’’. When in the mid-ﬁfties I tried to convince Alfred Tarski, the great mathematician (and a convinced neopositivist), of the universal validity of Husserlian phenomenology, his reaction was: ‘‘Can phenomenology pass the pragmatic test?’’ Taking up his challenge, I wrote the book: Phenomenology and Science in Contemporary European T hought*. In the decades which have followed, the inspirational role phenomenology has played in the human sciences, which I expound upon in this study, has progressed into the empirical and hard sciences, there assuming several new and directly congent functions. Does this rapprochment in eﬀect diminish the role of philosophy in guiding and bringing together the discrete scientiﬁc inquiries. By and large, philosophy – and phenomenology – has lost this traditional authority. As the contrast between theory and practice diminishes, that has led unexpectedly to the loss of philosophy’s credibility in oﬀering a higher order of principles and reasons than those met with in the concrete research of the sciences. The great question opens: ‘‘Is philosophy in its new familiarity with concrete knowledge losing its status of universal reference – of ‘ﬁrst philosophy’ ’’? This is the question which I want to answer on the basis *New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Noonday Press, 1961.

xiii A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV xiii–xxxvii. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

xiv

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

of a presentation of some sectors of my phenomenology of life in which I meet the ‘‘pragmatic test’’ in a new way, upon concrete ground, that of scientiﬁc research. I submit that the more the sciences and philosophy ﬁnd in the advance of their respective researches, the more a common ground for a dialogue on the crucial function of philosophy will come to a new light. We will now discuss the situation in somewhat more detail. What is at stake in present-day philosophical questioning is the status of philosophy within the orbit of human knowledge and praxis. Where may human knowledge and practice, so diversiﬁed now by scientiﬁc inquiry, ﬁnd orientation and direction, a ‘‘compass upon a stormy sea,’’ to use Kant’s expression. By and large there prevails now a consensus that philosophy may be valuable in clarifying concepts, arguments, and in satisfying in its exercise curiosity of mind, but that the universal principles that it generates do not bring any resolution to the great questions of the past and present because these very questions are now considered obsolete. Confronted with the palpating pulp of life, we no longer seek the ‘‘ultimate reasons’’ of things. This dismissal of philosophy to an auxiliary position when it comes to our primary concern with the propitious handling of actual life problems is not new. The present situation reminds us of the pre-Socratic reign of the Sophists against whom Plato and his disciple Aristotle inveighed. It was from the Platonic-Aristotelian protest against the Sophistic giving of priority to the practically advantageous attitude toward life that Occidental philosophy took its inspiration. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle emphasizes that philosophy does not aim at realizing anything. It proceeds not from a desire to solve any life diﬃculties or arguments but from marveling about the simplest of things, whose reasons escape us at ﬁrst (Metaphysics A,2,982). And insofar as human beings have philosophized to liberate themselves from ignorance – their basic needs having been met – it is obvious, Aristotle says, that they have sought to know for the sake of knowing and not to obtain some practical utility. Aristotle continues that in practicing philosophy we do not seek any advantage that would lie to the side of it and would be foreign to it. Among the other sciences philosophy is the only one that is free, therefore, because only philosophy is an end in itself. It consists in the contemplation of truth for truth’s sake. He concedes that all the other sciences are more necessary in a practical way than philosophy, but declares none of them to be superior to it. With these views Aristotle set up an ideal of philosophy that has inspired thinkers for centuries and which has led to its separation

THE PRAGMATIC TEST OF THE ONTOPOEISIS OF LIFE

xv

from scientiﬁc inquiry, which sets out to achieve practical aims (e.g., geometry as applied in building construction). However, its impracticality has not precluded philosophy’s assuming an essential role in the last account. Philosophy and the other sciences have followed distinct but parallel paths, partly nourishing each other, partly prompting each other’s progress. For both Plato, following Socrates, and Aristotle, philosophy provides orientation and guidance for scientiﬁc inquiry and the conduct of life. A striking example is that of how ethics orients the societal order and statesmanship (see Plato’s Republic). And then Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics have given ultimate biological principles for the life sciences, principles that have been maintained into the most recent embryology, genetics, etc. And yet this faith in the validity of seeking the ‘ﬁnal principles’ of things and of order has been dismissed in contemporary thinking. With the unfolding of Modernity, philosophical thinking that delves into the concrete began already with Francis Bacon, David Hume, etc, and so there ensued the tendency to so-called ‘empiricism,’ which abandoned the quest for ﬁrst principles and reasons, holding them to be dispensable in the understanding of reality and nature. This, along with the rejection of speculation that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century and which branded twentieth-century thinking, meant that the great metaphysical systems dealing with the great issues of ultimate reasons, the Aristotelian ideal of philosophy as concerned with metaphysical foundations and so standing as the queen of the sciences, has altogether been abandoned. In our times, philosophy, in particular phenomenology with its conceptions of the human being and of the lifeworld, ﬁrst nourished the human sciences and then widened its sphere of inﬂuence to the ‘‘hard sciences’’ of biology, neurology, physics, etc. Although Husserl began his founding of the entire phenomenological undertaking with the building of a philosophia prima to be related to the sciences as the set of the ﬁnal principles of reality, nevertheless in the pursuit of his project he himself felt he had lost the foothold of certainty and necessity that characterize philosophia prima and that should yield the ﬁrst principles of reality. As a matter of fact, in digging deeper and deeper into the concrete basis of reality, he left the quest for ﬁrst principles behind, and phenomenology remains in this respect half completed. The phenomenologists of today rely on intuited evidence and employ the main phenomenological devices and so maintain reference to the Husserlian ideal, but they proceed without any direct relation to Husserl’s project. And so phenomenology’s intuitive ﬁndings and procedures are being employed in scientiﬁc inquiry without

xvi

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

fulﬁlling the role of philosophy as envisioned by Aristotle and the philosophers of all the centuries after him, namely, that of oﬀering ﬁnal reasons and directives. Leaving aside the point in question, that today’s science is claiming to provide the answers to the ultimate questions, it has to be emphasized that the role assigned to philosophy is that of clarifying concepts for science as well as that of providing penetrating concrete intuitions and concepts for the practical handling of the world’s issues. At least that is so judging by the current output of the majority of philosophizing scholars. Is our knowledge about the world, life, society, and the human being so advanced as to approach complete understanding of them and to explain their order and give us guidance for conduct? Such an assumed self-suﬃciency makes any search for the application of the last and ﬁrst principles of reality obsolete. Yet in contemporary thinking the great issues still come up: May we arrive at an adequate understanding of reality without recourse to its ultimate reasons? Can these reasons be obtained from particular operations and inferences? Can human aﬀairs be adequately handled without the primary assumption of an underlying order and a directional vector? And lastly, and most crucially, should we reject principles wholesale on account of their seeming distance from concrete life and praxis, that is, on account of their seemingly ‘‘speculative’’ provenance, divorced from the reality of existence? Would this rejection necessarily apply to each and every type of philosophy seeking universal principles and order? Does it mean denial of philosophy’s aptitude/ capacity to deal with concrete existence, of its pertinence to real life? This is the crucial and ramiﬁed issue ar stake in our times, and I am going to address it immediately. First, however, let me more fully explain my general position. No matter how precious it is for the progress of knowledge and of our culture, scientiﬁc inquiry continues to be groping for understanding of reality. It is blindfolded so long as it may not have recourse for guidance to universal principles looming at the far oﬀ horizon. It is questionable whether scientiﬁc inquiry, diversiﬁed as it is into numerous sectors and working with varied approaches and targets to uncover some parcels of the great unknown, could ever yield such ﬁnal principles of the All upon which its fragmentary discoveries hang. Only philosophy for its taking all into account but identifying with no part of it may provide links among its fragmentary ﬁndings. As I have voiced numerous times, we may grasp the signiﬁcance of a fragment only through reference to the guiding ideas of philosophy and in particular of philosophy as it is

THE PRAGMATIC TEST OF THE ONTOPOEISIS OF LIFE

xvii

represented by Phenomenology in any of its branches. But for the sake of the advantages that come from the practical results of the application of philosophical insights, theoretical guidelines and reliance on them are being foresaken. This stress on practical eﬃciency, on results, the gearing of philosophical reﬂection to the needs of science and the society of our times overshadows entirely the classical signiﬁcance of philosophy as the disinterested pursuit of truth exclusively for the sake of marveling and contemplation. Furthermore, it is often maintained that science itself is now pursuing the ultimate questions of the universal order of the cosmos, of the origins of life, and of the laws structuring/articulating the unfolding of reality. These claims, however, concern only hypothetical proposals that are disputed by others and then are replaced by new proposals. Still philosophies/phenomenologies that cooperate with the new sciences are for the present bound to them at the level of methodology only and so also foresake universal reference. In simple terms, philosophy is yielding to the pragmatic orientation of science, seeking to enhance the quality of human life as well as human power over the natural and cosmic forces to be harnessed to that end. The pragmatic victories of scientiﬁc progress, as astounding as they may seem, are only fragmentary. The research projects are fragmentary to begin with, and the results obtained can only be the same. As I have declared before forcefully, to understand one fragment of reality, one ‘‘thing,’’ it is necessary to situate it within its entire network, its existential context, and within the pattern of universal forces deployed in the all. The more that scientiﬁc advances obtain in the direction of securing life’s individual perdurance and well-being, the greater the existential hazards that are created for the perdurance of life as such. Contemporary philosophy is caught up in the waves of enthusiasm for scientiﬁc advances and so gives radical preeminence to practice over theory, marveling, contemplation, which is to impoverish the deployment and enjoyment of human faculties. What is more the plethora of multiple rationalities that now emerge in an endless ﬂow and the concomitant expansion of the human mind in its attempt to understand and process them all in life call for their integration in an expanding conception of reality. This calls for a new investigation of and approach to rationality: the rationality of life, theory and practice. The reason that Modernity identiﬁes as and restricts to the intellective mode of thought is being blamed for the strict separation of scientiﬁc procedures from the ‘‘marveling,’’ ‘‘meditating,’’ functions of the mind, which are then considered ‘‘pseudo-scientiﬁc’’ philosophies, Husserl’s ini-

xviii

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

tial project included. So, precisely the state of science and the state of philosophy today call, as I have often declared, for a new critique of reason, one more complete than those of Descartes, Kant, and Husserl, on the one hand, and those of the positivist/analytic-linguistic empirical schools, on the other. Just such a new critique, which we see being accomplished in the phenomenology/ontopoiesis of life, is bringing into equilibrium these multiple faculties of reason and establishing a platform upon which theory and praxis assume their right proportions. This proportionality is achieved ﬁrst of all owing to philosophy’s retrieval of its guiding function with reference to the ultimate ontopoietic principles that it establishes. And yet, as I have said numerous times, there is under way a great change in the scientiﬁc approach as well. The ‘‘new science’’ so eloquently described by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers is shedding the hard calciﬁed skin that science acquired in modernity.1 Science is becoming more ﬂexible in its assumptions and dogmas, making room for a rapprochement with philosophical thinking to develop. As I brought out in my essay on the new philosophical paradigm, with the actual transformations going on in scientiﬁc research, method, discourse, there is possible and has even begun a most illuminating dialogue between philosophy and science. I mean here the dialogue that phenomenology/ philosophy of life has begun with the sciences of life.2 In this dialogue, neither is philosophy abstractly seeking speculative principles nor is scientiﬁc inquiry ﬁtting its ﬁndings into dogmatic prejudices. The two projects can meet because the creative act of the human being oﬀers royal access to the common enigmas of both. The changing scientiﬁc approach culminates in recognition of the unique locus in which scientiﬁc inquiry/discovery strikes the same chord that philosophy strikes, the locus of the creative/discovering act. The discoverer is no longer considered a neutral spectator of ‘‘objective’’ realities; the discoverer is recognized as a ‘‘subject’’ who participates in the act of discovery/creativity with his or her entire endowment as a living being. Concurrently, the chord of the creative act of the living human being resounds throughout the philosophy of life and the human creative condition. Scientiﬁc inquiry and philosophy coincide in the subject, who is precisely the living human being who brings the entire endowment of his or her creative condition to the performance of that act. To put it succinctly, scientiﬁc inquiry and philosophy both share in the ontopoiesis of life. We have been conducting a dialogue between the ontopoietic principles of reality as such and the contemporary life sciences for quite a while, pointing out the common ontopoietic context in which their queries take

THE PRAGMATIC TEST OF THE ONTOPOEISIS OF LIFE

xix

place. In this dialogue we have been gaining a much needed interconnectedness between practically signiﬁcant aims and the ﬁnal principles that reference to ontopoiesis provides. I will give here a short survey of the concrete issues that the natural and social sciences have heretofore had to address in the dark and for which ontopoietic principles, the highest principles governing the becoming of reality, oﬀer direct guidance. I. IMPETUS AND EQUIPOISE: REALITY IN TRANSFORMATION AND THE LAWS OF RELATIVE PERDURANCE

The ﬂuid – even protean – nature of the reality in which we living beings delineate the course of existence lies at the base of our philosophical marveling even as it is the axis of our individual concern to plan practically for natural cataclysms, social upheavals, and individual accidents. In the short span of our recorded history, nations, social groups, and individual destinies have witnessed sweeping changes to which accomodations have had to be made for the sake of survival. Scientiﬁc research in all branches has always been seeking out the reasons for changes as well as norms of stability guaranteeing perdurance. Amid today’s technological drives (if not imperatives), demographic challenges, and sociopolitical upheavals, individuals are more than ever consciously aware of, nay, alert to the changeable nature of everything around and within them. The literate part of humanity anxiously follows new scientiﬁc ﬁndings and hypotheses on the origin of the cosmos and life on earth hoping to ﬁnd there some clues to current phenomena and hints by which to prognosticate on the unknown future. For humanity at large, however, science and philosophy are separate or largely separate projects. But even such sweeping synthesizing views as those presented by Ludwig von Bertalannfy (who limns a uniﬁed selfdeveloping system of the cosmos inclusive of the orbit of life with its own intrinsic order of self-ordering progress that harnesses the ﬂux for its own progress), while they extend the principle for self-ordering from the cosmic to microscopic realms, do not go beyond positing the ‘‘autopoiesis’’ of nature. These systems do not disclose the nature of this order itself, the innermost nature of the self-ordering in the diﬀerentiation of types and individuals, the meaning of the ordering itself. It is only by isolating from the self-ordering of beingness, cosmic and living, the nature of beingness as such – its ontopoietic-ontic status – that is, by rooting ontopoietic ordering within its originary condition, thus entering into the linea entis,

xx

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

that we may bring out the central conduit of existential becoming, the conduit of the logos of life that proceeds from the unfathomable past and leads toward an open-ended future and which situates and explains the essential status of concrete existence in the space of the present. This conduit of becoming I appropriately call the ontopoiesis of life. As I have developed this line of thought in numerous writings and on many occasions, the ontopoiesis of life fulﬁlls a double role. First, it oﬀers crucial insight into the source of the universal order of the Logos, the Logos of Life. Starting with the concrete self-individualization evident in life’s systems or sequences, the Logos of Life reveals its very sense in that its relevancies extend from the sphere of life into its originary prelife conditions and beyond those to the wild half-tamed forces that govern the cosmos. Second, the Logos of Life allows us then to conjecture the primeval nature of the Logos itself, in particular, its universal law of impetus and equipoise.3 As this law operates in ~he promotion of life, innumerable devices are revealed in their deployment. In following the deployment of all of these devices we see the impetus of universal logoic forces being brought into the constructive shaping of beingness and so ﬁnding a measure of equipoise. And so in the shaping of concrete beingness, in the sequence of the self-individualization of life, of living beingness, is revealed a basic standard of being. The thus revealed self-individualizing sequence of life that I denominate its ontopoiesis accords certainly with the main tenets of the scientiﬁcally founded concept of the ‘‘autopoiesis’’ of life (which it preceded by more than a decade). Our investigations have taken into account the same scientiﬁc data as that interpreted by Prigogine, Stengers, Varela, and their followers, but it is only when the data are acknowledged to ﬁt integrally into the philosophically apprehended, ontologically informed ontopoietic constructive design that is unfolding within the horizon of the logos of being and becoming that we arrive at a universal paradigm for our time. Thus I brought out my study, ‘‘The Ontopoiesis of Life as a New Philosophical Paradigm.’’4 Against the background of natural beingness-in-becoming within the universal play of forces and dynamisms and the crucial prompting along of the originary ﬂux by the intrinsic law of the logos of life, that is, against a background of impetus and equipoise, the issue that emerges, and conspicuously so in our times when we are particularly alert to the everintensifying change transforming our world (so much so that long venerated criteria, faith in principles, prospects of security, of any stability, give way to chaos and anguish) , is the issue of measure, that of how measure

THE PRAGMATIC TEST OF THE ONTOPOEISIS OF LIFE

xxi

may be discovered and then applied to the great and small problems of philosophy of life today and over time. What emerges is this, that the measure is not the human being but life. II. THE CALL FOR MEASURE

Already the earliest Presocratic thinkers were aware of the ﬂeeting, changeable nature of all things and were seeking the ﬁrst principles that could simultaneously account for their transitory conditions and their relative perdurance. And so Anaximander posited forces that maintain the earth in an equilibrium and had recourse to a superior supporting agency. There is a proportionality not only in the forces and principles maintaining the cosmos and earth in their place, but also in the relations between and among the forms and matter of things measured against each other and the whole. In the human realm proportionality is indispensable for the equilibrium found in architecture, sculpture, scientiﬁc pursuits, human exchange, etc. With Protagoras, the leading Sophist, we reach the clear notion of ‘‘measure.’’ Although understood by him to concern basically human aﬀairs, it may be extrapolated to a measure of all things. Now Protagoras rejected any standard measure in human aﬀairs. He was concerned with establishing an equilibrium among various opinions, reactions, attitudes that people may have about anything. He rejected any criterion that we could apply to assay things as they are, that is, any objective standard by which to diﬀerentiate beingness from nonbeingness, truth and falsity, that is, any universal value by which to discriminate and ‘‘measure’’ things. Protagoras proposes for us as a universal point of reference, the human being: ‘‘Man is the measure.’’ Let it be noted that this criterion does not refer to a human nature but merely to each singular individual. As what is warm for one individual feels cold to another, as what is sweet to one is bitter to another, things as such are neither warm nor cold, neither sweet nor bitter. Plato in reporting Protagoras’ doctrine in his T heatatus speciﬁes that the same wind may be felt by one person to be cold and by another to be warm. In this approach the wind as such is neither cold nor warm, but is as it is felt by each singular individual (T heaetetus 151e–152b, Diels-Kranz) . Sextus Empiricus styles this axiom the ‘‘principle of relativity’’ (Pyrroneioi hypotyposeis I.216, Diels-Kranz, 80A 19). In this fashion Protagoras’ principle of ‘‘man is the measure’’ is the precursor of the rampant relativism of our times, in which criteria of value, truth, certainty,

xxii

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

have been abandoned and criterion of utility for human existence adopted instead. Indeed the now dominant pragmatism and utilitarianism echoes directly Protagoras’ criterion as he applied it in teaching ‘‘how to win an argument,’’ speciﬁcally his counsel to advance double reasons in each case. There is no question here of seeking the truth of facts. Rather in each conﬂict of thinking or policy in either social or personal life, varied hypothetical reasons always stand in opposition to each other and the point is not to seek factual truth but to discuss the controversy for the sake of ﬁnding a point that will have the force needed to win the debate. Although the theory of double reasons concerns directly judgement about things, nevertheless that the human is seen to be the measure of things may be interpreted in a radical sense that sees man as the measure for deciding on the beingness or nonbeingness of all. Leaving aside the gnoseological aspect of this thesis and taking it in a universal sense, may we not consider the human being to be the central point of our orientation within the universe? Do we not consider length of space and time as it is proportionate to human action? Does not all scientiﬁc research into the matters of nature and the universe turn on human interest, whether that interest be pragmatic or solely inquisitive? Is not the orbit of this reasearch deﬁned by the horizon of human concern and capacity to investigate? Yes, it would seem that, indeed, the human being is the center of all things and that his nature corresponds to his universal nature as well as individual disposition. If we add to that an epistemic slant, we seem to have arrived at Kant’s ‘‘transcendentalism’’ (with no direct experience had of ‘‘things in themselves’’). And yet, when we look at the situation going beyond direct, human bias, such an anthropocentric perspective on all things does not seem to be justiﬁed. As much as animalia and vegetation exhibit autonomous natures comparable to that of humans, they do not evidence any intrinsic dependence on humans to exist. In their speciﬁc universal natures they appear to stand in relationship above all to climate, just as humans ultimately do. They in fact share with man the basic conditions of life within the unity-of all-beingness. And so I revise the Protagorean maxim and declare ‘‘Life is the measure of all things.’’ It is life that maintains the unity of all beingness. In the present human climate, the maxim ‘‘Man is the measure of all things’’ has brought about a rejection of objective truth or standards and a shallow pragmatism has even caused philosophy to renounce its lofty quest for the ﬁnal reason of all things. In radical contrast, the phenomenol-

THE PRAGMATIC TEST OF THE ONTOPOEISIS OF LIFE

xxiii

ogy/ontopoiesis of life pursues that quest steadfastly. It makes manifest that ﬁnal principles are not only reconcilable with the ﬂeeting becoming of the concrete world but are also indispensable to steering a proper course within it. Without going backwards to revive old principles, it reveals new ones on the grounds of scientiﬁc and human progress itself, that very progress that has so lightly dismissed the claims of ﬁnal principles. The thus established principles of the ontopoietic unfolding of life reach the very heart of beingness-in-becoming, and from this ultimate vantage point they may enlighten many issues concerning the human sector of life. Indeed, we may infer an ontopoietic dictum that only reference to the whole provides us understanding of its vital fragments! Taking up the Kantian aspiration to a deﬁnitive critique of reason – albeit with a Husserlian twist – as we descend the phenomenological constitutive ladder of objectivities to the very end, but without postulating ‘‘things in themselves,’’ the ontopoiesis of life reaches the incipient point of intentionality and unveils the prepredicative level of the becoming of life. It uncovers the principles of the constitutive ordering of objects as such. W hen not the epistemic but the creative/poietic perspective is taken as the starting point, the ordering of living beingness is unveiled at its core, qua the primogenital exfoliation of the logos of life. The phenomenology/ontopoiesis of life is situated at the level of generation, where the becoming of living beingness encounters the constitutive/ epistemic-presentational manifestation. In the arteries of becoming the selfsame beingnesses in their generative as well as unfolding and deteriorating phases, and in existential interchange with the vital conundra of other beings, reveal themselves to reside in the primogenital function of life: the self-individualization of beingness. The self-individualization of living beings is sustained by the forces and dynamisms available as they are received, distributed, and/or rejected by the operative nucleus of the ‘‘ontopoietic sequence’’ that surges to the fore with each life commencing. With reference to that nucleus’ varied intrinsic virtualities and forces, living individuals in their circumambient conditions diverge as singular beingnesses, but that instrinsic, virtual nucleus of forces, dynamisms, and shaping directions endures in the living being’s generative relations with ﬁrst the prelife sphere and second the universal scheme of life on earth, the conditions for the mutation of present types, perduring-in-transformation. As such this nucleus also conducts the progressive diﬀerentiation of types. As each type emerges in its speciﬁcs, it evolves with the currents of the exchange between its circumambient milieu and its own intrinsic molding in the process of the transformation of the ontopoietic sequence

xxiv

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

and so in its speciﬁcs represents its own kind. Thus we may identify the steps of the progress of life on earth that science is attempting to excavate with reference to the ontopoietic sequence. And each type may be identiﬁed in the ontopoietic blueprint of its individualizing sequence.5 The sequence of the self-individualizing process of life is indeed its ultimate measure. It entails/gives access to all the arteries and functions of life as well as to the proper proportions of their deployment in each individual. Let us now see a few illustrations of how the ontopoietic constructive model of becoming/beingness of life contributes to the concrete issues of our times in its bringing together the two sides of the coin, as it were – the highest metaphysical ‘‘reason of reasons’’ and its most concrete ‘‘selfindividualization of beingness.’’ This conception of the ultimate rational ground from which the rational articulations of life emerge and unfold the ontopoietic sequence or design proves itself to be indispensable. III. FACING THE PRAGMATIC TEST

A. Medicine is the most appropriate focus we could select to enter into the heart of our short and selective survey of current – as much as perennial – issues of vital signiﬁcance confronting humanity. The most ancient of the sciences, it deals with the crucial knot of the concerns of the human mind, namely, with how to remedy obstacles to and discover the most appropriate ways of preserving life, whether animal or human. Here theory and praxis – diagnosis and therapy – are most intimately conjoined if not reﬂections of each other. Moreover medicine’s great queries spread tentacles through the entire span of life with all its dependencies and relevancies. We will attempt to succinctly encompass that span in our present discussion. The current debate in medicine may be epitomized exemplarily in the controversy between an organismic and a holistic approach to healing as represented by two distinguished scholars, Christopher Boorse and Lennart Nordenfelt. In the organismic approach advocated by Boorse, the point of reference proposed for theory and praxis, the measuring stick for diagnosis and therapy, is the biologico-physiological ‘‘design’’ of human beings, their composition and functioning. The radical emphasis here falls on the organismic nature of life as the essentially fundamental point of all vital concern.6 In contrast the holistic approach advocated by Nordenfelt focuses on the human individual as a ‘‘whole,’’ that is, as

THE PRAGMATIC TEST OF THE ONTOPOEISIS OF LIFE

xxv

a person immersed in communal and societal networks of existence.7 The emphasis here falls on the communal/societal interactive situation of the individual life. How might these two diverging ways of focusing on the living being converge in an approach that considers the human being integrally and gives both perspectives their due, distributing attention adequately, in appropriate proportions? Here is where ontopoietic design comes in as a measuring stick, for represented in ‘‘species design’’ as a medical point of reference is the biologico-organismic ideal schema for coordinating and articulating the constructive, universal functioning of the living individual. Thus, in one of its most signiﬁcant features it coincides with my ontopoietic design of life. Both ways of conceptualizing focus on the basic articulations of human living organismic functioning. They share the same platform, namely, that of the functional system of the generating, unfolding, and growing life. They meet also in entailing the orientation of life’s progress. They even complement each other: while the species design emphasizes the concreteness and empirical singularity of a life form’s basic organization in an ‘‘idealized’’ model, the ontopoietic approach is itself a concrete positing of a set of fundamental virtualities entailing transforming the nature of the vital moves. These virtualities carry references to varying conditions, operations, and processes that conduct life; they function simultaneously as the primogenital laws and rules for articulations of the logos in life’s becoming. Not an eidos of organic functioning but a blueprint of virtualities makes life emerge and unfold. The ontopoietic design referring to the universal laws of life and of becoming oﬀers the ultimate system of reference for a species’ design. The designs complement each other. There is also another most signiﬁcant poit at which these two designs diverge from and complete each other. The species’ design concerns merely the human being as such, and it does not give humanhood any special status among other types, specie, of living beings. In this overarching way it helps to establish a ladder of complexities among living beings that culminates in the phase of the Human Condition. Attention to biological design does indeed fall short of particular consideration of the psychological, intellectual, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of the human, which cannot be ignored in medical theory and practice.8 These are valorized by the alternative theory: the ‘‘holistic’’ approach to medical diagnosis and therapy, which brings to the fore the thesis that the conditions of birth, growth, decay, aging are embedded in

xxvi

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

the individual’s social situation. Societal institutions, their regulations, resources, the availability of services and support are here essential. What comes to the fore with the holistic approach as a matter of crucial signiﬁcance is that the distance between life and death even in a very organismic approach depends on societal networks – regulations and political considerations that are at play in the application of the organismic prescriptions. As recently proposed by Lennart Nordenfelt, it is the nature of humanhood that is in question.9 He proposes a goal-oriented ‘‘theory of action,’’ to be a schema of reference in the agent’s ‘‘plan to reach certain goals.’’10 It is with reference to individuals’ ability to obtain expected results in pursuing their goals – as the cultural and social environment deﬁnes them – that the condition of their health is to be determined. In other words, the performance of the individual is the ﬁnal point of reference for estimating his or her choices. The pursuit of goals is the ﬁnal criterion for estimating the patient’s condition. There is certainly a substantial coincidence between the holistic and ontopoietic conceptions of human life. Nevertheless the holistic conception falls short of explaining in virtue of what human life is goal-oriented. Furthermore, if we are not restricting our aims to procreation and survival, what is the further social sense of human goals? As individuals set for themselves diﬀerent goals, what determines their pertinence? And lastly, but not least, the great question of the continuity or discontinuity of the human action giving sense to the human endeavor goes unanswered. Thus a goal-oriented theory falls short of answering the essential questions that it raises. With the expansion of medical concern to the speciﬁcally human sphere, a most important contribution of contemporary medicine is acknowledged. Medicine, is in fact, involved in vitally important debates concerning the social availability of the newest inventions in pharmacology, physical therapy, etc. as well as, in medical ethics, concerning the role of individual physician. However, goal-oriented or performance-ﬁxated theory does not seem to to reach the crux of the matter, namely, the motivational ground as well as the volitional resources of the human individual in maintaining his or her purpose. This calls not only for deeper anthropological study but also and ﬁrst of all for a proper situating of the human individual within the entire context of life, which is implicated deeply in our organismic/vital resources. Otherwise the organismic network within which the activity of the human being is grounded is somewhat left in the air. But having opened up the other side, the humanistic side, of the human life-situation, we may now attempt to bring

THE PRAGMATIC TEST OF THE ONTOPOEISIS OF LIFE

xxvii

the goal-oriented approach to the patient and the ontopoietic vision into a harmonious integration able to do justice to the understanding of the patient’s well-being or the impediments to it, Here phenomenology/ontopoiesis of life steps in. In its conception of the signiﬁcance of human life’s emergence in human ‘‘self-interpretationin-existence,’’ it supplies precisely the element of continuity that endows sense upon goal-oriented human action.11 It is clear that both sides of this spectrum call for an integrative approach capable of grasping their interdependencies, an overarching approach acknowledging their meaningful contributions without reducing them to each other and without neglecting the role of any element within the entire living functioning of the human being along with its relevancies in external conditions. The conception of the ontopoiesis/phenomenology of life means to ﬁll exactly this role. Since the debates just covered encompass the entire horizon of our life involvements, touching its central point, it is here that we will enter into the tenets of the phenomenology/ ontopoiesis of life with some precision, which will be useful for the extension of our presentation. Bringing to the fore the speciﬁcally human phase among living types in the evolutive progress of life, the phase of the Creative Human Condition, reveals life’s transformatory interchange of forces. What I have called the ‘‘creative forge’’ of the Human Condition gathers all the organismic biological forces into itself in order to process them through the devices of the creative virtualities that emerge in the human condition.12 Thus the speciﬁcally human sense of life emerges. While the organismic biological system maintains survival and nourishes the unfolding of the speciﬁcally human sense of life, this latter prompts the setting up of speciﬁcally human goals and the pursuit through them of further endeavors yet. Hence, while human performance may not oﬀer an ultimate foundation for human life, the ontopoietic sequence of the individual human being oﬀers not only a network of grounding principles fed by organismic forces, but also beyond that the path of the creative logos of the speciﬁcally human being. Thus we may see in the ontopoietic sequence of the human being an appropriate measuring stick for medical theory and praxis. It extends through the entire spread of their concern in weighing, estimating, proportioning, and equilibrating our vital forces with our societal and cultural conditions. It reaches universal as well as most concrete life situations. This ontopoietic arc of life in its design/sequence of self-individualization – taking into account the interactive as well as intergenerative

xxviii

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

dynamisms and gathering all the strings of logoic forces at work within the human creative condition – projects a system of reference to being in becoming. Its constructive discrete continuity takes in vital/organismic forces as well as societal sharing-in-life and does not leave out the personal and cultural, all ﬁnding in that arc their measure and equilibrium. The overreaching arch of sense, the very conductor of the logos of life, proceeds from the primogenital moves of life’s operations and culminates in the inventive/creative logos of speciﬁcally human action. B. The empirical sciences that carry out the inquiries of medicine are themselves in search of direction. In the enormous progress being made by scientiﬁc and technological inquiries, disciplines previously all but isolated now ﬁnd themselves so entangled and intermeshed that a common point of reference is indispensable. (a) What could be a more appropriate point of reference than life? And life, I propose, it is. Basic scientiﬁc investigation, like that of embryology, advances step by step inquiring into segments of life’s formation. This is done in the dark, step by step but with no foresight. It is the ontopoietic sequence of originating life at its primogenital phase, that is, the phase of the ‘‘womb of life,’’ that indicates by inference forwards and backwards the otherwise unconnected expressions of the logos of life. (b) The selfindividualizing process in its multiple discrete but necessary phases articulates in its sequence the rationale of the progress seen and serves as a measure and horizon of all. All the sciences ﬁnd in the primogenital level of life’s self-individualization and its ramiﬁcaticn of sense through the ontopoietic sequence simultaneously a foothold and a horizon by which to measure the otherwise seemingly disconnected phases of the unfolding they witness.13 C. At the other extreme of the spectrum, we ﬁnd the problems of sharingin-life, of our societal life. As I have voiced previously, Husserl’s diagnosis of the ‘‘crisis’’ of European science and humanity has been transformed in multiple ways. What we are now facing is not any speciﬁc crisis of one or another society or culture – they are erupting continually in some or other part of the world and all the rest of the world is aﬀected by each – but a social/cultural disarray pervading Occidental civilization, which disarray has repercussions in the other cultures of the globe. In fact, we live in a period in which the constant progress of the sciences and technology have shaken the preponderance of mankind’s inherited preconceptions about life and

THE PRAGMATIC TEST OF THE ONTOPOEISIS OF LIFE

xxix

the world. Theoretical reason is being denounced for its fallibility in explaining phenomena, and so in direct practice, all the norms for human conduct and intercourse with others have been undermined. Basic convictions have been thrown into question, and the codes of moral conduct are being in part abandoned and in part subjected to critical scrutiny. Hence we witness a complete disorientation of the person in his/her existence and a complete relativism in societal trends in morality. Ethical norms accepted at the surface cede to the ‘‘morality of negotiation’’ in the depths of practice.14 Even in our legal practice guilt or innocence are no longer a matter of fact, truth, or ethical principles, but in a Sophistical way, a matter of negotiation, namely, a matter of which of the alternative pleas or settlements is more propitious for the course of the procedure. The truth of facts being jeopardized, how can we talk about the essential principles of justice, fairness, punishment and reward? Not that there is a lack of ethical theories competing for acceptance in practice. When ethical or moral principles are deprived of the power to impact on the individual will, how can their import extend to human individual action? Not only do we urgently need a measure for human conduct, to oﬀer moral direction for the conduct of individual and societal aﬀairs, but such a measure also has to have in it the motivating force to ignite the individual and societal will to implement it in conduct. In short the measure indispensable to healing the woes of the times and redirecting societal drift toward a necessary equilibrium has, as I have argued before, to partake of the full nature of the human individual. Intellectual directives or ‘‘reasons’’ have to be galvanized by the emotive, sentient, and imaginative forces of the will. In order to trigger active response, directives must simultaneously crystalize an innermost commitment prompting the will to follow them. The weight of human sentiment today is behind the call for a novel assessment of the world’s and life’s contingency. Life’s innermost core, the ﬂux of reason/unreason, order/disorder, etc. calls for explication. The multiplication of rationalities in the conduct of personal and societal life as well as in the policies of nations calls for an articulating net, a common denominator that would at least enable us to approximately evaluate them. Again it is to the human creative condition that we have to turn. It is always necessary to recall that we are dealing here – as we always do within the ontopoietic perspective – with the question of the sense

xxx

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

that everything has to have in order to become meaningful; in the present case, we need simply to reach to the source of the primeval sense of human societal living. In situating the human being within the midst of life, the Human Creative Condition, as an encounter of vital and creative forces, dynamisms that mingle and then reciprocally nourish and condition each other in transformative ways, provides a central point of reference for sharing-in-life, that is, for the societal/cultural/political phase of life’s unfolding.15 In this logoic theater all the forces and dynamisms of human existence stew, and owing to the freely inventive nature of the speciﬁcally human creative logos, they seem in their enactment to become detached from any mooring. Going in this or that direction, social ‘‘reasons’’ intermingle freely, or go against each other, till their energies are spent in conﬂicts and struggle, and their justiﬁcations get lost from sight. The human inventive genius will then propose new aims, and those goals will capture fervent human attention. Society, as it were, starts anew, propounding a novel set of convictions, rules, norms of individual conduct, societal organization, etc. And so the growing fermentation of the content within the Human Creative Condition ﬁnds external expression. Indeed, the human condition brings three factors of sense bestowal to life’s progress – intellective, moral, and aesthetic sense. This sense bestowal charts the course of the speciﬁcally human. Between the intellective and aesthetic senses, which it introduces, the human condition implements a unique vehicle for human transaction, the moral sense. I refer the reader to my short treatise on how the factor of the moral sense enters and spreads through the entire psychic, emotional, intellective orbit of human life.16 Here it is enough to stress that the moral sense, streaming from the ownmost endowment of human beings, spurs them toward the enactment of its meaningful qualities, which ﬂow from the re-cognizing of other beings as other selves, as ourselves. In its workings the moral sense makes the individual a person and ﬁrst of all a human being. Furthermore, it brings in not only criteria for the valuation of events and actions but also tendencies to assess the validity of each for life’s aﬀairs and to then select particular ones to implement in action. The moral sense, as the crucial factor of humanness in life’s progress, is then a factor of evaluation and selection as much as an impetus to action. It is the origin of moral criteria as well as their implementation. There it is that we should seek moral direction, discrimination, and motive force in our choices. We ﬁnd in the moral sense the key to rethinking, reinvestigating, and reassessing our societal troubles with reference to the ontopoietic course of the

THE PRAGMATIC TEST OF THE ONTOPOEISIS OF LIFE

xxxi

unfolding and development of human existence with its vicissitudes and uncertainties. To regain our lost existential balance, let us revive in individuals, communities, societies the moral sense of life! D. Having brought out some crucial aspects of the phenomenology/ ontopoiesis of life in it oﬀering a system of reference for present-day – as well as perennial – concerns, we may naturally rejoin the Human Condition at its very heart by taking up the nowadays so very much debated issues covered by the name ‘‘ecology.’’ Although concern for the environment was already expressed during the nineteenth century, urgent concern with our ‘‘environment’’ is relatively new, owing to the grave threats that human use and abuse of technology is posing to living nature, living creatures, and our own vital life resources. The debates around these and many other connected issues are too well known to merit enumeration. It seems that all public and personal interests are involved: scientiﬁc, communal, economic, aesthetic. Earth science, environmental science, the various stripes of politics, etc., each have their say. A common meeting-point is sought in vain. And yet such a point is not out of sight. The very notion of the ‘‘environment’’ at stake oﬀers an essential point of departure for an adequate approach. The concept of the environment was introduced into the space of discourse of the general scholarly public late in the nineteenth century by von Uexku¨ll, who spoke of the ‘‘Umwelt.’’ It found its way into philosophy with the concept of the ‘‘lifeworld’’ introduced by Husserl and Heidegger later on. By Umwelt was originally meant the speciﬁc, uniquely own, vital sphere of living individuals that each circumscribes in the course of his or her vital and existential ways of living among other living beings. This vital sphere of each individual beingness emerges from the generation of each being’s innermost vital postulations. In response to a most intimate need to fulﬁll the existential ontopoietic design at work in each being, a cluster of interdependence emerges; there emerge the being’s individualizing virtualties, which stipulate its speciﬁc and, particular necessities and needs; it is to its innermost virtualities that the surrounding elements respond as they unfold, either positively or negatively, indicating adjustments or possible ways of deviation from the virtual pattern. In short, this existential cluster emerges in virtue of the central position of the innermost virtual blueprint that I call ‘‘ontopoietic design or sequence.’’ In our conception of this centrality of the self-individualizing beingness, this cluster of the circumambient forces is certainly included.

xxxii

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

Self-individualization in its incipient phase and throughout its progress depends on it essentially. The focus falls on the individual, who prescribes as well as performs the constitutive (vitally signiﬁcant) formation of its circumstantial network of forces. What remains from the orthodoxy of the initial Husserlian eideticism is merely the focusing on the ‘‘essential’’ that makes up each intrinsically singular beingness. However, with our conception of the living beingness, the Husserlian abstract and unchangeable eidos, which he himself in the development of his thought substantially transformed, remains merely as an irreducible dynamic nucleus of seminal forces. Nevertheless, as embedded within the logoic self-individualizing network, that nucleus is indispensable for the discrete but coherent articulations of life. Thus it carries an articulated albeit evolving unifying net of life. Certainly no ideal, abstract eidoi of permanent structures sustain the pristine genesis of life, but rather clusters of virtualities (that is, capacities lying-in-wait with their dynamic as well as shaping forces to be triggered into deployment), with the articulations of life then being accomplished through the forces and energies mobilized by the constructive course of individualizing becoming. Although each living being fashions through its way of life its very own, unique environment, yet three points have to be raised. 1. First, this seemingly ‘‘isolating’’ sphere of each living being’s very own by no means hangs in a vacuum. On the contrary, there is a speciﬁc way of coexistence of types and individuals within a life-network, for it is not restricted to casual encounter but varies in degrees of mutual involvement in innumerable primary nourishing, generative, and ‘‘symbiotic’’ processes. This amounts to what we could call in general a ‘‘symbiosis of life,’’ which entails a sensibility of a sphere of rootedness among all living creatures. 2. From viruses, bacteria, plants, and the smallest animals up, we are all, as I have pointed out before,17 creatures of the earth. We, all living beings, share the indispensable conditions for life, conditions that the planet earth is fulﬁlling to this eﬀect. Our environment, albeit in diﬀerent guises, is rooted in these primogenital earth conditions. It draws on mineral resources, water, climate, the organic substrate/soil, etc., and it participates in earth events like volcanic eruptions, river ﬂoods and ocean surges that submerge the earth’s usual surface for ﬂora and fauna, as well as the catastrophes created by numerous technical means either accidentally or through human indiﬀerence. We might live on the ‘‘surface’’ of earth, but we are utterly grounded in earth’s situation.

THE PRAGMATIC TEST OF THE ONTOPOEISIS OF LIFE

xxxiii

This symbiotic existence involving perpetual exchange, interaction, adjustment is the essential situation of individual life. Soil, light, temperature, supply of water are essentially the basic resources of the energies and dynamisms of life for all things given to unfold within a symbiotic, ‘‘communal’’ existence. And each individual circumscribing its own circumference establishes by its unfurling its very own equilibrium of forces, direction, telos. Despite the recent ‘‘deconstructive’’ tendencies to ‘‘decentralize’’ approaches to the human subject and to world constitution as such, as long as we living beings dwell within this world of life and exercise the same cognitive and acting systems, it remains from various perspectives an indisputable fact that the living individual unfolds from within its very own premises and projects its very own existential milieu, its own territory for drawing upon and adapting to the circumambient material/conditions in an interactive exchange with other beings that reside within the reach of its vital concerns in their expansion. We may call this with Ortega y Gasset each living being’s ‘‘circumstance,’’ but in his comprehensive view the emphasis falls on the ‘‘living being and its circumstance.’’ Indeed, the individual needs to unfold this varied vitally constructive network of interactive/transformative/exchange with the surrounding vital elements; hence it there emerges from within his own devices, his own forces before its accomplishment. 3. It is not nature’s organic vital conditions only that shape and sustain the environment of living beings. There is also the profound dimension of the speciﬁc sphere that the living human being encircles owing to the enactment and creative spread of the Human Condition as the ensuing human valuative, deliberative, calculating, planning, and deciding mind infused by the intellective, moral, and aesthetic sense-giving powers turns its attention to its world. The speciﬁcally human environment extends over the entire spectrum of ‘‘factors’’ that are the realm of the Human Creative Condition within the-unity-of-everything-there-is-alive. We are, with all living beings existentially symbiotic, which entails the basic life fact that we are in various, more or less developed degrees ‘‘attuned’’ to everything-there-is-alive. As I have often described it, the gardener, like the farmer, participates with his or her entire sentient being in the sentient circuits of plants. The farmer feels his/her beasts with a natural ‘‘symbiotic empathy’’ for their well being, their pain or sadness. But the intellectual advance of humanity in the last centuries might have weakened this attunement. That advance has to a great degree led to antagonisms among calculated interests in the debates concerning the

xxxiv

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

situation and future handling of the environment, but the congenital ground for this attunement will remain as long as life on earth exists. This symbiotic sympathy may have weakened and the human being in question become estranged from other living beings, but Saint-Exupery has shown us how in a desert even a snake is like a friend. Seeking a basis for an understanding among the various parties that enter into the ecology debates – which are actually debates about nothing less than the future of life on earth – with the participation of the earth sciences, forestry, agriculture, mining, and technological interests – and this from numerous perspectives such as the economic, political, private interests, aesthetic considerations, and even some theological concerns (e.g., with sacred places and their treatment) seeking a unifying groundwork in which the calculation of interests, economic, political, emotional, etc. could come to a uniﬁed equilibrium, we will turn to an unprejudiced arena, namely, philosophy. But what philosophy? Not a metaphysics of being, for ‘‘being’’ (Heidegger) is an abstract, undiﬀerentiated notion while we deal with material that can be inﬁnitely diﬀerentiated. Nor will we seek that ground in an extension of a rare uniquely human experience of moral sympathy (Levinas) found in encounters with a fellow man because that occurs at the highest level of the creative deployment of the Human Condition and we are seeking unity at the primary, generative level. Hence it is symbiotic empathy that oﬀers us the sought for ﬁlum Ariadne the all-pervading although diﬀerentiating thread running through the entire ladder of life’s deployment. What else could we consider to be the key to establishing unity among all the divers attitudes, interests, and perspectives if not life itself ? The ontopoietic stream beginning with the most elementary sequence of life and running to the highest sphere of complexity in the Human Creative Condition is the sole philosophy which allows one to found upon the ‘‘universal metalogy’’ I have been programming some time ago.18 Upon which studies of the environment and ecology with all their ramiﬁcations may ﬁnd the ground that provides a properly based measure. CODA

Could we, having given a brief selective survey of our later work, forget to go back to the main thrust of our inquiries by which the investigations of the Phenomenology of Life and of the Human Condition took their deliberate state? I have here in mind the all-underlying concern of the present times with the speciﬁcally human signiﬁcance of life? It is obvious

THE PRAGMATIC TEST OF THE ONTOPOEISIS OF LIFE

xxxv

that in the last half century great technological advances have liberated many burdens of heavy labor. The industrial application of machines that shorten the span of time devoted to production, the speed and eﬃciency of modern means of communication, and last but not least, the simpliﬁcation of everyday chores and the establishment of social intuitions helping with child care and education have not only freed people from much of the weight of work, but have allowed them to take vacations, more holidays, and shorter working hours if they wish. But this has raised the question of how to use our spare time to the best advantage of family and friends. Hence the preoccupation with all that goes under the name of ‘‘quality time’’, with a new and better balance between work and leisure. Enjoyment has become universally appreciated for the savor it gives life. Hence the frequency of family visits and celebrations, excursions, visits to museums, the theater, concerts, nature hiking, and treks in the wilderness, where supposed authentic nature is unspoiled by civilization, maybe confronted. All this has become an essential part of life and education. So far, so good. However, and here is the essential aspect of this new situation of human existence, the technological gifts to humanity carry with themselves the above-discussed drawbacks of the indigestibility of rapid transformations. Our new ways of apprehending reality and the new inventions have pulled us away from our natural points of orientation, cultivated over the centuries, so that our natural sensibilities are being replaced by a technically inspired apprehension of life that is haphazard and arbitrary and unchecked by time and the experience of humanity. The foundations of human culture in the aesthetic sensibilities, with their moral reverberations in beauty, generosity of spirit, and faith in the abiding values of humankind, have given depressing short-term satisfactions. It is to this situation of the bankruptcy of the human spirit that we have addressed our search for the essential Human Condition. It is by descending to the origin and genesis of the speciﬁcally human signiﬁcance of life in seeking to investigate just that at the divide between animalia and humans at the shift from vital striving for existence, for survival, to the evolutive unfolding. That shift brought into the commerce of life the uniquely new, unprecedented factors of sense that we have attempted to excavate in order to make manifest the authentic sense that our human life is endowed with, that being the speciﬁc factor of its unfolding. We have sought to grasp these genuinely human germinal factors of human sensibilities, emotions, feelings as they take form in the creative crucibles of each individualizing life at the limit of the elemental

xxxvi

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

stirrings where these factors enter into interplay with vital signiﬁcance of animal life. (See our Poetica Nova: At the Creative Crucibles, T he Philosophical Reﬂection of Man in L iterature, Analecta Husserliana, Volume XII [1982].) See also our statements on the importance of this investigation in Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, Part I, Analecta Husserliana, Volume XIX (1985); Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, Part II, Analecta Husserliana, Volume XXIII (1988); T he Elemental Passions of the Soul, Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, Part III, Analecta Husserliana, Volume XXVIII (1990). We have, in fact, devoted two decades of our work, and we continue at it, to redressing the hasty, superﬁcial, and misdirected tendencies of contemporary arts and literature and to uncovering the pristine sources of beauty, aesthetic valuation and inspiration, all for the renewal of our sensibilities, our appreciations of nature and of human relations. Uncovering the source of the human signiﬁcance of life from which it springs, in its pristine nature, should permeate our living. With our experiential horizon thus lifted, we may bring novel, fresh inspiration to our creative endeavors, enjoyments, ‘‘quality time’’. And so we may appreciate life’s gifts with new perspectives and deepened sensibilities. Anna-T eresa T ymieniecka

NOTES 1 See Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Ontopoiesis of Life as a New Philosophical Paradigm,’’ Phenomenological Inquiry 22 (1998), pp. 12–59. 2 Ibid. 3 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Impetus and Equipoise in the L ife-Strategies of Reason (L ogos and L ife, Book 4). Analecta Husserliana LXX (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000). 4 See Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Ontopoiesis of Life as a New Philosophical Paradigm,’’ op. cit. 5 See my study, ‘‘Diﬀerentiation and Unity: The Self-Individualizing Life Process,’’ in Marlies Kronneger and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (eds.), L ife: DiVerentiation and Harmony – Vegetal, Animal, Human. Analecta Husserliana LVII (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), pp. 3–36. 6 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Ontopoietic Design of Life and Medicine’s Search for the Norm,’’ in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and Zbigniew Zalewski (eds.), L ife – T he Human Being Between L ife and Death – A Dialogue Between Medicine and Philosophy. Recurrent Issues and New Approaches. Analecta Husserliana LXIV (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 1–13. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid.

THE PRAGMATIC TEST OF THE ONTOPOEISIS OF LIFE

xxxvii

9 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Human Condition as the System of Reference for the Medical Interpretation of Illness,’’ and ‘‘Topical Introduction: Illness, Life, and the Human Condition,’’ in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and Evandro Agazzi (eds.), L ife – Interpretation and the Sense of Illness with the Human Condition. Analecta Husserliana LXXII (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), pp. ix–x; xv–xxi. 10 Ibid. 11 On self-interpretation-in-existence I have written on several occasions; see ﬁrst of all my treatise L ogos and L ife, Book I. Analecta Husserliana Vol. XXV and ‘‘The Plurivocal Poiesis of the Airy Element’’, p. ix. Analecta Husserliana Vol. XXIII, 1988. 12 On the ‘‘creative forge’’ processing the speciﬁcally human signiﬁcance of life, see my treatise L ogos and L ife, Book 3: ‘‘The Passions of the Soul and the Elements in the OntoPoiesis of Culture: The Life-Signiﬁcance of Literature,’’ in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.), T he Elemental Passions of the Soul. Analecta Husserliana XXVIII (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), pp. 3–141. 13 See Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Ontopoiesis of Life as a New Philosophical Paradigm,’’ op. cit. 14 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘Measure and the Ontopoietic Self-Individualization of Life,’’ Phenomenological Inquiry 19 (1995), pp. 26–51; see esp. pp. 33–36. 15 On the Three Generative Matrixes of Life contributing to the central point of ‘‘sharingin-life,’’ see ‘‘The Life-Force or the Shaping of Life,’’ in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.), L ife – Energies, Forces, and the Shaping of L ife: V ital, Existential. Analecta Husserliana LXXIV (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), pp. xv–xxxiv. 16 See my treatise ‘‘The Moral Sense: A Discourse on the Phenomenological Foundation of the Social World and of Ethics,’’ in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and Calvin O. Schrag (eds.), Foundations of Morality, Human Rights, and the Human Sciences. Analecta Husserliana XV (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983); see also Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.), T he Moral Sense in the Communal Sense of L ife: Investigations in Phenomenological Praxeology, Psychiatric T herapeutics, Medical Ethics, and Social Praxis within the L ife- and Communal World. Analecta Husserliana XX (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986). 17 See my study ‘‘The Passions of the Earth,’’ in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.), Passions of the Earth in Human Existence, Creativity, and L iterature. Analecta Husserliana LXXI (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), pp. 1–12. 18 A.-T. Tymieniecka, ‘‘Phenomenology as the ‘Universal Proteology of Knowledge’ – Interdisciplinary Communication through a Philosophical Dialogue,’’ p. xvii. Analecta Husserliana Vol. XIV, 1983.

SECTION I PHENOMENOLOGISTS’ VOCATION IN THE WORLD OF LIFE

Interior of Santa Sophia

CARMEN COZMA

‘‘PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE’’ AS CHANCE FOR PHILOSOPHY’S TRANSFORMATION INTO A NEW HUMANISM

In the cultural scenery of the frontier between the 2nd and 3rd millennia, marked by the premature claim of the ‘end of philosophy’, a distinctive voice presents the ‘‘Phenomenology of Life’’. A prestigious work elaborated by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, this original contribution to phenomenology oﬀers new horizons to the entirety of philosophy, as a viable complex vision of extraordinary potential in terms of reﬂexivity and methodology. It makes the revival of philosophy in the beginning of the XXIst century into a ‘‘New Enlightenment’’ able to present an authentic view of the human condition, in reply to the spiritual crisis in which an alienated, bewildered humanity has found itself. Through a serious challenge to man to re-discover his very own spiritual power, the ‘‘Phenomenology of Life’’ brings forth some major philosophical categories, opening an important trajectory for the development of a New Humanism, by focusing on creativity as the deﬁning dimension of man in relation to the whole web of existence. Some components of the phenomenology of life include: the author’s concern about the human condition; a resort to the ethical reference; the interpretation of the creative dimension of man’s existence as a speciﬁc feature in his eﬀort to become the dynamic-integrator a perspective about the unity in diversity of life and the idea of conciliation between antagonisms within a common world, aiming towards the maintenance of the living equilibrium, to the assurance of prosperity, of the common good of every participant in life. Designing her phenomenology of life as the ‘‘starting point for philosophy’’, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka tackles even the teleological mission of philosophy: to direct man into his authentic mold, to guide him toward a full accomplishment. We really need to be awake to the elevated value of the human – thus the crucial issue of the transformation of man from ‘homo’ into ‘humanus’. It is a worthy lesson for us, all the more so as humanity traverses a profound unprecedented crisis. As a dynamic-holistic vision concerning the human signiﬁcance of life, the phenomenology of Tymieniecka delves into a New Humanism with the temptation of essence’s knowledge, of life’s explanation and under3 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 3–11. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

4

CARMEN COZMA

standing, of man’s status in the world. According to her, this phenomenological approach could be the ground for philosophy generally, or more precisely, for the philosophizing which unfolds much more in the proximity of life, sustaining the interrogative consciousness and nurturing man’s care to reach his speciﬁcally inward potential, to fulﬁll and reach the hypostasis of self-creator. A New Humanism projects through the union of internal and external man, as self-transcendence, activating creativity – man’s unique prerogative that allows him to have exceptional access to the entire ‘‘ontopoietic design of life’’. Man is conceived, at the same time, in the diversity of his beingness’ circumstances (organic, vital, psychic, societal), in his lifeindividualizing process which ‘‘is simultaneously crystallizing the ‘outward’ framework of his existence within the world and manifesting ‘inwardly’ the entire spread of his vital existential and creative virtualities as they may unfold’’.1 Outlining man’s potentiality to continuously upsurge into the order of beingness, the phenomenology of life brings to light the idea of existence’s perfectibility – a hope for revival counterpoised to the actual crisis facing humanity with the danger of a triple dimensioned self-destruction: material, biological, and spiritual.2 That is why we have to be aware of the necessity of a basic accordance, of negotiation and harmonization of diﬀerent interests and positions, the necessity of communication. These are part of an implicit Humanism unfurled by the phenomenology of life, assuming the coparticipation, the ‘authentically human relation’, the ‘opening for the other’, the admission of alterity as the highest modality of the hermeneutic experience with regard to the ‘other’s experience and understanding’ – according to Gadamer,3 to pervade the signiﬁcation’s’ fullness of all there-is-common. Man’s distinction is given by a responsible rationality sustaining coexistence, convention, the common-system-oflife’s construction. Phenomenology of life guides us not only to the unitary context of the ‘self-with-the-other’, of intersubjective experience, but also to man’s opening to life’s total expanse, to the maintenance of coherence with any type of living creature sharing-a-same-world. Man has a central position in the world to prove unconditional trust in reason, sensibility, sympathy and tolerance, and, ﬁnally, to prove wisdom in all his actions, relating not only to men, but also to the cosmicnatural system of life. Human becoming engages the burst and the growth of self-awareness in life – rooted in man’s ontopoietic aspect, ingrown

PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE

5

within the life context – which makes man the ‘‘Custodian’’ of existence’s equilibrium, the subject of responsibility toward ‘everything there is alive’. Shifting the investigation’s interest to the life’s sphere, Tymieniecka’s phenomenology has as a prevalent feature the human condition, which is tackled and analyzed as the highest creative moment of the ‘‘ontopoiesis of life’’. L ife is given the prime place of origination and existence, and it deserves a greater attention to catch more from its hidden meaning. In an attempt to ground a better understanding of life, of the creative life, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka opens for her philosophy the task of making man consciously aware of his essence through creativity. We appreciate the phenomenology of life as a stimulating vision for philosophy which transmits the conviction that the philosopher can ﬁnd the highest meaning of life’s understanding in his very own capacity to ‘reﬂect entirely’, that is ‘to live entirely’. T o live means to become selfindividualizing and at the same time to harmonize with the whole of life. Focusing on the fundamental theme of the phenomenological exploration of human becoming, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka oﬀers an important way to philosophize that articulates the speciﬁcity of the human spiritual telos of life. Eﬀectively, we encounter a major work able to inculcate a fundamental trust regarding the virtualities of progress through ideal production with practical reactivity in the light of the spirit – the lonely which ‘‘is eternal’’.4 We do recognize a work able to express a pattern of cultural behavior centered on commitment and responsibility, activating them in all man’s transactions ‘‘within the unity of everything there is alive’’. Enriching phenomenology’s conceptual apparatus, Tymieniecka elaborates this syntagma, one of maximal importance for her philosophy, opening toward a personal manner of putting in relief the call for a New Humanism. Querying about man in the context of life, our author analyses her speciﬁc determination in terms of a type of human’s ontology, scrutinizing the process of sameness-diﬀerentiation from Nature to the Human Condition. We are reminded of Heidegger’s intention to articulate a ‘‘humanism’’ of a peculiar type, by thinking beingness ‘‘more originary, more essentially’’, only in the proximity of Being, in the bright opening of Being.5 We could say that Tymieniecka’s work moves toward a ‘‘humanism’’ by conceiving man’s existence as belonging to the world, engaged in it, while at the same time diﬀerentiating from and surpassing it by his inventive virtualities; man’s existence is thought only in the intimate relation with

6

CARMEN COZMA

the ‘‘unity of everything there is alive’’. So, man appears as a sense-givingagent by his valuation functions, a subject equally having rights and duties toward the totality of life’s expanse: not only towards himself or others like him, but also towards any kind of living creature. Assuming intellectual clarity and poetical intuition, man can grasp life’s meaning through all the levels, as self-experience, intersubjective experience, socio-cultural and cosmic-natural experience. An important idea sustained by Tymieniecka’s phenomenological project concerns human becoming closely linked to Nature. The understanding of human nature, the discovery of human paths of development and fulﬁllment are not possible without taking into account the scheme of Nature. Man extracts his unique being ‘‘from an anonymous Nature’’,6 as an integral part of that, of its energies, dynamisms, forces. This doesn’t mean we should reduce him to the natural state, but that we need to recognize man’s rootedness in the universe, and thus to reﬂect more adequately on our own virtualities of transcending the biological framework of life and instilling a spiritual one. We identify a New Humanism as the re-signiﬁcation of the ‘‘intrinsic dignity of the nature’’,7 a vision about human living in accordance / in harmony with, and not against, nature, one of participation in the great cosmic order. This is a kind of ecophilosophy with elements of ethical thinking, interfering with ecological hedonism and utilitarianism on a deontological basis: play involves the enjoyment of the awareness of the importance of progress for all forms of life, tied by the duty for and the right to the quality of life’s balance. With a utilitarian purpose, man experiences a peculiar joy in exercising his duty to administer Nature’s resources with wisdom, with prudence, and with responsibility. Thus, man gives himself the chance of further beneﬁt for his own welfare through the continuity, protection, and security of the total system of life. Such manifestation means, lastly, the eﬀort of ‘‘creative orchestration’’ of all of life’s coordinates. As we’ve already mentioned, phenomenology of life carries an intrinsic humanism, enlightening a new understanding and a new wisdom of being. The author adheres to the classical position in the endeavor to revive and to enrich general-human values. Thus, she unfolds the power of wisdom – both theoretical and practical – through which man can give himself the ability to surpass his present spiritual crisis. Tymieniecka insists upon the need for a creative wisdom to rule man’s orientation and conduct within the world, to prove his own excellence: the value of the human. Manifesting wisdom, it is possible to hold together all of life’s

PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE

7

coordinates, to protect the sovereign order including the spheres of cosmos, bios, society, and culture. One of the pivotal factors circumscribing the context of the phenomenology of life represents the human condition. It ‘‘grounds the creative act as man’s foothold within the unchartable schema of life’’.8 Within the total web of life, man can reach his speciﬁc mode of being, and the human condition is revealed as ‘‘placed deep in the midst of the unity of everything there is alive’’.9 Emerging from the human organization’s plane, the creative potential is that which gives to man his peculiar state within the network of life involvement; it marks the transition from the natural to the cultural state, on the route of man’s becoming, growth and perfectibility. Man’s dignity is manifested on the personal, social, and cosmic levels of existence; the dignity of man gives man the ability to re-create himself permanently, in accordance with the complexity of the world, contributing to its humanization. Tymieniecka investigates man’s re-awakening to his dignity, as agent of transformatory participation in the entirety of life’s territory. The message is to look for the signiﬁcation of homo humanus in his inventive commitment and responsibility within the web of life, in its biotic and cultural workings alike. Somehow, phenomenology of life encounters the transdisciplinary perspective, even in the semantics of the transhumanism concept: ‘‘a new form of humanism that oﬀers to each human being the maximal capacity of cultural and spiritual development. It means to search everything does exist inside, among and beyond the human beings – namely, the Being of beings’’.10 The singularity of the human being is approached on the basis of creativity – the ‘‘Archimedean point for the phenomenology of life’’, as the author asserts.11 The scrutiny of man’s essence focuses on his becoming process, the creative experience within life’s progress. Under the auspices of an axiological and cosmological metaphysics, man’s priority appears as a ‘‘valuating being’’ who creates and shows the status of self-creator ‘‘in the context of life’’ – with its various circumstances organic, vital, psychic, social; his creative activity constitutes the framework of ‘‘endowment the existence with the speciﬁc human sense’’.12 Through the creative act, ‘‘we have a royal access to all the experiences and processes which carry on human existence, ﬁrst within nature, and then within our societal framework’’, bringing us ‘‘to man’s foundational basis within the universal life-process of nature, the human condition’’.13 At the pinnacle of the progression of

8

CARMEN COZMA

life, man’s creative condition opens the main way to grasp the entire ‘‘ontopoietic’’ course of life. From the hermeneutic point of view, the explanation and interpretation of human essence, in the context of the natural-cosmic and socio-cultural order, as self-individualization and participation in life, entails man’s creative function. It is drawing a kind of onto-creatology: man’s creative act founds the entire speciﬁcally human functioning; the subject is mainly manifested as creative self. Actually, the interpretation – activating the cipher-decipher binomial – is deﬁned by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka as ‘creative experience’, ‘creative analysis’; as she notes, man’s creative endeavor is ‘‘the interpretation par excellence’’.14 A ‘‘fabulating function’’15 for the self-individualization of the life of man, for the inventive prompting and reorganization of the lifeworld, for its continual transformation to a new form endowed with value, is given to the Imaginatio Creatrix. Its status is privileged within the creative soul. In the topos of phenomenology of life, the workings of the creative imagination have a greater role than any other of man’s faculties, crystallizing and sustaining human unicity. The ‘‘Promethean gifts’’ of creative imagination ‘‘inspire the elan of human being transcending the conﬁnements of concern with survival only and allows his weaving of his own universe’’.16 Bursting within the ‘‘twilight zone’’ of the soul, Imaginatio Creatrix is the place from which emerge three principal instrumental functions of life’s human signiﬁcance: the aesthetic/poetic, the intelligible, and the moral senses. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka confers the leading role to the creative imagination; it is that faculty from which the organic and vital forces of life are transformed into valuating, sense-bestowing factors. On creativity’s issue, Tymieniecka brings another inspired contribution through the uncovering of the ‘‘matrix of life’’. Thus, she distinguishes: a primogenital matrix of the ‘‘womb of life’’; a second matrix, of ‘‘sharingin-life’’; and a third one, named ‘‘the creative matrix’’ which ‘‘transcends in its telos the vitally signiﬁcant workings of life-nature and which with the virtualities of the Human Condition bursts forth with a profusion of novel dynamisms, energies, forces throwing life upon an entirely novel platform, the platform of intelligibility’’.17 The third originary matrix and phase of individualization in life is considered to be ‘‘the decisive factor of human life’’, prompted by Imaginatio Creatrix – the ‘‘source of unique dynamisms and forces of life, /.../ the key to the radical metamorphosis of the logos of life’’.18 Again, the author insists on the power of Imaginatio Creatrix, with its

PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE

9

‘‘Promethean gifts’’, to impose the living agent as distributor and receiver of the human signiﬁcance of life, instilling a peculiar existential universe: ‘‘an inward/outward universe, wide open, in ﬂux, and vibrant in experience and in reﬂection’’.19 The universe of human existence is a new phase of life’s existence initiated by man’s creative condition ‘‘in the progressive ascent of the logos of life. /.../ The speciﬁcity of this universe originates and progressively generates from the impetus, dynamisms, energies and forces of Imaginatio Creatrix’’.20 A constitutive dimension of the phenomenology of life is the ethical reference. It persists throughout the entire discourse about life’s philosophical re-signiﬁcation. On the strength of a theoretical attempt to claim and re-assess the major values, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka emphasizes the importance of ethical comportment within the full range of life’s manifestations. The call for ethics shines light on the positive and constructive sense of life. A great role is attributed to the moral sense, together with the intellectual and the aesthetic/poetic senses, to assure the evaluative order of life, including all the spheres: cosmos, nature, society, culture. The moral sense introduces into the living arena ‘‘the Sentiment of Benevolence toward other creatures, toward oneself, and toward life in general’’ which sustains the system of moral valuation, and with that, the possibility for ‘‘the human being to become human’’, and so, the conﬁguration of ‘‘the motivation for the common good of life’’.21 A New Humanism is celebrated by the phenomenology of life through the avowed urge for a completely rehauled ethics to ground human being. Our author requests the revival of moral values and principles, for deliberation, choice, discernment, and decision making in the game of sharing in life; brieﬂy, for morality ‘‘as the expression of a style in human relations’’,22 a style of negotiation and conciliation into the communion level of being; a style able to lead us to commitment and responsibility, to solidarity, coexistence, and convention. By developing the common sense/ sensus communis we get a humanist directory concept, a decisive one for life’s progress, owing to its function in forging community.23 The common sense needs to be ceaselessly developed for life’s maintenance and progress. A necessary rationality is outlined; in terms of an Ancient virtue’s hypostasis, it is phro´nesis, the practical wisdom contributing essentially to man’s dignity. In the same framework of a rehauled ethics, we should mention the attention given to the measure. The speciﬁc ‘‘situation in life’s dynamically uninterrupted stream’’,24 the human condition is closely related to and can

10

CARMEN COZMA

be revealed by the moral measure of life. The ‘right measure’/‘aureas mediocritas’, the old lesson contained in that ‘est modus in rebus’ must be re-discovered, deciphering it from Nature-life, from its harmonious unity in diversity. The measure is the valuating criterion, a key principle, and an indispensable factor of life. It is the basis for understanding man as ‘moral experience’; it makes the nucleus of the ethical strategy of enlightening the aretaic power of human being, and so, the ‘lex vitae’. Even ‘‘the entelechial ontopoietic design of life’’, the constructive progress of individualization of living beings in existence is viewed ‘‘as the axis of a universal measure’’.25 Proposed as a ‘‘New Philosophical Paradigm’’, the ‘‘Ontopoiesis of life’’ sends to the creative structuration of becoming, as liaison between potentialization-actualization, the axial nerve of the total life expanse. More or less explicitly, phenomenology of life is a crucial project for the transformation (and therefore revival) of philosophy into a New Humanism as foundation of the homo’s metamorphosis into humanus. The New Humanism is urgently needed in a confused world threatening to lose any spiritual reference. The philosopher, as master of speculative and practical wisdom, draws close to the ‘ideal: the human like excellence in the moral becoming order; proving that only by instilling a human meaning to existence can we ﬁnd the joy of a life worth living. This would fulﬁll Husserl’s point that the philosopher has to be a servant for humanity.26 The phenomenology of life is impressive as a foundation for philosophy, not only as a methodology but also as a vision of life, world, and man. It is a lesson of topical interest and extraordinary signiﬁcance by the very integrator-dynamical search of human as the supreme value enlightening man’s spirit and action, the real conﬁguration of the enhancement of life, of its nobleness. It is a lesson and counterbalance to the disharmonious situation in which man ﬁnds himself: a wise lesson that supposes tension, confrontation, and diﬀerentiation, but conducts them into conciliation, ﬁnding the common elements through which life matters and perpetuates. It is a lesson about man able to honor that status of ‘‘CUSTODIAN OF EVERYTHING THERE IS ALIVE’’,27 by showing his true merit, his humanity, and avoiding the excessive self-alienation and alienation from any other components of life, and, ﬁnally, by avoiding the disintegration of the human. In conclusion, we do believe that the phenomenology of life can help us to actualize our potential, achieving the authentically human condition. ‘‘Al. I. Cuza’’ University

PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE

11

NOTES 1 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘Truth – the Ontopoietic Vortex of Life,’’ in Analecta Husserliana LXXVI (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), p. ix. 2 Cf. Basarab Nicolescu, L a T ransdisciplinarite´. Manifeste (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1996). 3 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, Romanian translation: Adevaˇr s¸i Metodaˇ (Bucarest: Ed. Teora, 2001), p. 273. 4 Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis des europa¨ischen Menschentums und die Philosophie, Romanian translation, in volume Scrieri ﬁlosoﬁce alese (Bucarest: Ed. Academiei Romaˆne, 1993), p. 230. ¨ ber den Humanismus, Romanian translation, in volume Repere pe 5 Martin Heidegger, U drumul gıˆndirii (Bucarest: Ed. Politicaˇ, 1988), pp. 322, 325, 326. 6 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, T he T heme: T he Human Being in Action, Analecta Husserliana, VIII (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978), p. xiii. 7 Cf. Jeﬀrey Olen and Vincent Barry, Applying Ethics (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1992). 8 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Phenomenology of L ife and the New Critique of the Reason: from Husserl’s Philosophy to the Phenomenology of L ife and of the Human Condition. Analecta Husserliana XXIX (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), p. 5. 9 Ibid., p. 16. 10 Basarab Nicolescu, op. cit., p. 168. 11 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘Measure and the Ontopoietic Self-Individualization of Life,’’ Phenomenological Inquiry 19 (1995): 41. 12 Cf. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, T he T heme: T he Human Being in Action, loc. cit. 13 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Phenomenology of L ife and the New Critique of the Reason: from Husserl’s Philosophy to the Phenomenology of L ife and of the Human Condition, loc. cit., pp. 6–7. 14 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, T he Creative Self and the Other in Man’s Self-Interpretation. Analecta Husserliana VI (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1977), p. 168. 15 Gary Backhaus, ‘‘Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka: the Trajectory of her Thought from Eidetic Phenomenology to the Phenomenology of Life,’’ Phenomenological Inquiry 25 (2001): 36. 16 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Creative Forces and Formation, L ife’s Creative Matrix, Analecta Husserliana LXXVII (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), p. xxv 17 Ibid., p. xv. 18 Ibid., pp. xv, xvi. 19 Ibid., pp. xvii, xxiii. 20 Ibid., p. xxv. 21 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Measure and the Ontopoietic Self-Individualization of L ife, loc. cit., pp. 48–49. 22 Ibid., p. 33. 23 Hans-Georg Gadamer, op. cit., p. 27. 24 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Measure and the Ontopoietic Self-Individualization of L ife, loc. cit., p. 44. 25 Ibid., p. 38. 26 Cf. Husserliana, Bd. VI (Den Haag: M. Nijhoﬀ, 1953), pp. 15, 72. 27 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Phenomenology of L ife and the New Critique of the Reason: from Husserl’s Philosophy to the Phenomenology of L ife and of the Human Condition, loc. cit., p. 16.

¨ NBERG DAVID GRU

` -V IS THE CHALLENGES THE MEANING OF LIFE V IS-A OF THE PRESENT-DAY WORLD *

In this paper we shall try to answer the question of what is, or rather could be the meaning of human life in the face of the challenges of the present-day world. Indeed, despite the extraordinary progress in science and technology as well as in socio-political conditions, suﬀering (resulting from poverty, illness, natural catastrophes, etc.) is still the fate of a very large part of the human population of the present-day world. There are two main attitudes toward the problem of the meaning of worldly life: pessimism and optimism, the former being the view that life is not worth living whereas the latter that it is so. One way to resolve pessimism is by having recourse to a theist view according to which the true meaning of life is found in the other world. Another is frequently associated with a naturalist, if not an atheist, conception, according to which life has meaning in this world. We shall attempt to defend optimism in a way that is neutral between the naturalistic and theistic solutions of the problem, and, furthermore, shall try to show that, in principle, a relatively happy meaningful life is possible. We argue in favor of the view that human life has indeed a meaning in the sense that it is worth living. It seems that normal persons for the most part have the capacity of being happy, provided that social conditions are suitable. Our main result is that happiness is based on self-gratifying activity. By turning work into a play which is desired for its own sake, rather than as a means for an external end, the great part of human life becomes enjoyable. Unfortunately, during the whole of human history up to the present day, human work has been for the most part one of the main sources of human suﬀering. The main reason for this consists essentially in the maldistribution of education, health care, wealth, and income both within particular and among diﬀerent nations. However, scientiﬁc, technological, educational, and more generally cultural progress enhances the quality of work, and the higher this quality is the more enjoyable human life is expected to be. 1. THE PROBLEM OF THE MEANING OF LIFE

Let us analyze the concept of the meaning of life. Notice that living is not gratis, one should rather spend conscious and voluntary eﬀorts to 13 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 13–31. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

14

¨ NBERG DAVID GRU

keep alive. As written in the Old T estament, the Eternal God said to man: ‘‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread ...’’1 But a voluntary eﬀort must have a purpose, which motivates this eﬀort. It follows that life can be construed as a process directed to an overall purpose. The problem then is to ﬁnd out what this purpose consists of and how to attain it. We take the meaning of life, if any, to be precisely this purpose itself. Therefore, if life were meaningless, eﬀorts for living would have no purpose at all so that one could say that life is not worth living. Hence, we can say that this purpose is what makes life worth living. Consequently, the meaning of life consists in what makes life worthwhile to live. Life surely has meaning for a person at a given time in case she is engaged at that time in a (voluntary) teleological activity, since by deciding to engage in this activity she is committed to admit that her life is worth living, at least during the performance of the activity. Let us call what makes the person’s life at that time worth living, the temporary meaning of that life. But we must also take into consideration what might be called the enduring meaning of the life of a person. The latter can be deﬁned as what makes the totality of the life of a person worth living. The enduring meaning of life can be construed as that to which the series of consecutive temporary meanings converges, which is precisely the durable overall purpose of the life process. This enduring meaning consists of a system of interrelated purposes for one’s life, which Robert Nozick calls a ‘‘life plan’’.2 Analogously Paul Edwards construes the meaning of a particular person’s life as determined by her purposes. As a special case he considers that one’s devotion to a cause constitutes the meaning of that person’s life. More generally, he says that having attachments is suﬃcient for the meaningfulness of a person’s life.3 The life of a person endowed with a divergent series of temporary meanings cannot have an enduring meaning. But it is a fact that mentally normal persons, at least at some period of their life, are engaged in voluntary teleological activities so that their lives are indeed temporarily meaningful. It is important to remark that even a life having an endurable meaning in the sense deﬁned above is not necessarily a happy or an ethically valuable one. One can have a coherent life plan and realize it successfully, but the means of realization may be so painful that the life would be a quite unhappy one. Also one’s life plan, though coherent, may involve evil purposes so that the life though meaningful, would not be ethically valuable. It follows from the above considerations that among meaningful lives we can distinguish those which are valuable from those which are not. A

THE MEANING OF LIFE

15

meaningful life is valuable especially if it is so in an ethical sense or if it is a relatively happy one. Since human beings are mortal they cannot be absolutely happy. Therefore one can only be relatively happy in the sense that such happiness is a matter of degree. One’s life may be more (or less) happy than another’s. From now on we shall use ‘‘happy’’ only in the sense of relative happiness. Notice that pessimism involves the assumption that happiness is absolute rather than relative. Normal persons, especially those who do not suﬀer mental depression, do pursue ends, and often have a life plan so that they have a meaningful life. This is a fact about men. Let us say then that a life in this sense is de facto meaningful. On the other hand, it is surely desirable that one’s life be not merely de facto meaningful but also a valuable one. We call then a valuable meaningful life, de jure meaningful, i.e., a life which is as it ought to be. In a parallel way, we can say that a de facto meaningful life is de facto worthwhile and one which is de jure meaningful de jure worthwhile. Our aim is to ﬁnd out whether a de jure meaningful life, which is a happy and ethically valuable one, is possible at all, and if so to state the conditions under which such a life is realizable in the face of the challenges of the present-day world. From now on we shall restrict the sense of meaningful life to a happy and ethically valuable one. The analysis of what is ethically valuable is of course beyond the scope of this paper; we rather inquire into the notion of happiness. Before arguing in favor of optimism in the sense of the possibility of human happiness and of a highly meaningful life we shall elaborate on some important views emphasizing the wretchedness of the human condition, and thus conducive to pessimism. In fact, two of these views (Pascal’s and Tolstoy’s) avoid pessimism by recourse to religion. But the third one (Schopenhauer’s) is frankly pessimistic.

2. WRETCHEDNESS OF THE HUMAN CONDITION

For the overwhelming majority of human beings, at ﬁrst sight, there seems to be no reason for making life worth living. Indeed during the whole history of mankind, men who seem to be happy within a certain period of their life towards the end, ultimately turn into unhappy ones. Suﬀering is considered to be the destiny of men. An oriental story ends with the following succinct history of mankind: they were born, they suﬀered, and they died.

16

¨ NBERG DAVID GRU

Human suﬀering, and even wretchedness, is considered by Pascal to be the condition of men as long as they have no religious faith. He states in an exceedingly impressive way that we are like a cattle everyday waiting to be slaughtered. From this premise Pascal concludes that in order to be happy, men are striving not to think about their miserable condition. Diversion4 (divertissement) together with occupation involving responsibilities and duties are precisely the means for the happiness resulting from dispelling our fears of death and forgetting our miserable condition. This is stated by Pascal as follows: Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things. Despite these aﬄictions man wants to be happy, only wants to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be happy.5 But how shall he go about it? The best thing would be to make himself immortal, but as he cannot do that, he has decided to stop himself thinking about it.6 [Men] are given responsibilities and duties which harass them from the ﬁrst moment of each day. You will say that this is an odd way to make them happy: what better means could one devise to make them unhappy? What could one do? You would only have to take away all their cares, and then they would see themselves and think about what they are, where they come from, and where they are going. That is why men cannot be too much occupied and distracted, and that is why, when they have been given so many things to do, if they have some time oﬀ they are advised to spend it on diversion and sport [play], and always to keep themselves fully occupied. How hollow and foul is the heart of man!7 ... after closer thought, looking for the particular reasons for all our unhappiness now that I knew its general cause, I found one very cogent reason in the natural unhappiness of our feeble mortal condition, so wretched that nothing can console us when we really think about it.8

From these considerations Pascal derives the following conclusion: The only good thing for men therefore is to be diverted from thinking of what they are, either by some occupation which takes their mind oﬀ it, or by some novel and agreeable passion which keeps them busy, like gambling, hunting, some absorbing show, in short what is called diversion.9 A half-hearted entertainment without excitement will bore him. He must have excitement, he must delude himself into imagining that he would be happy to win what he would not want as a gift if it meant giving us gambling.10 That is all that men have been able to devise for attaining happiness; those who philosophize about it, holding that people are quite unreasonable to spend all day chasing a hare that they would not have wanted to buy, have little knowledge of our nature. The hare itself

THE MEANING OF LIFE

17

would not save us from thinking about death and their miseries distracting us, but hunting it does so.11

Pascal maintains that men aim to reach happiness through rest as a result of the success of their purposeful activities. However, the happiness expected in a state of rest is threatened not only by thinking about our miseries but also by the boredom produced by rest. This situation is expressed by Pascal in the following lines: We seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must get away from it and crave excitement. We think either of present or of threatened miseries, and even if we felt quite safe on every side, boredom on its own account would not fail to emerge from the depth of our hearts, where it is naturally rooted, and poison our whole mind.12

Despite the fact that diversion is the unique thing which consoles us with the thought of our miseries, Pascal considers it as being the greatest of our miseries. His main reason for this judgment is that diversion is the principal hindrance for reﬂecting on ourselves. Without diversion, we would be in a state of boredom, which would push us to look for a better means to get rid of it. Presumably, Pascal intends this means to consist of meditation about the human condition that will ultimately bring us to religious life. Pascal also criticizes diversion on the following ground: If man were happy, the less he were diverted the happier he would be like the saints and God. Yes: but is a man not happy who can ﬁnd delight in diversion? No: because it comes from somewhere else, from outside; so he is dependent, and always liable to be disturbed by a thousand and one accidents, which inevitably cause distress.13

Pascal’s remarks consist on the one hand of a statement of basic psychological facts concerning human life, and on the other hand of the personal evaluation of the facts in question. We consider Pascal’s statement to be a faithful description of the human condition without being committed to his evaluation, which seems to derive from his particular religious conviction, viz., Jansenism. Pascal himself despises worldly happiness altogether. Indeed as said above, he considers diversion to be the greatest misery, and recommends rest, and even rest accompanied with boredom, as a way leading to a religious life. Hence Pascal, despite his emphasis on the misery of the human condition, is not ultimately a pessimist, since he is convinced that men can be salvaged by religious faith.

18

¨ NBERG DAVID GRU

On the other hand, Schopenhauer is one of the most consistent proponents of pessimism. The essence of his argument is dramatically expressed by Moritz Schlick as follows: Men sets himself goals, while he is heading towards them he is buoyed by hope, indeed, but gnawed at the same time by the pain of unsatisﬁed desires. Once the goal is reached, however, after the ﬁrst ﬂush of triumph has passed away, there follows inevitably a mood of desolation. A void remains, which can seemingly ﬁnd an end only through the painful emergence of new longings, the setting of new goals. So the game begins anew, and existence seems doomed to be a restless swinging to and fro between pain and boredom, which ends at last in the nothingness of death.14

Indeed the overwhelming majority of men are engaged for the most part of their life in painful activities with the purpose of satisfying their desires, and often they fail to attain their goals. Furthermore, even if their purported desires are satisﬁed they are disappointed for the reason that the satisfaction does not secure as much pleasure and joy as expected, or at least does not procure the prolonged/permanent joy they had hoped for. Tolstoy, just as Pascal, emphasizes the vanity or futility of human life when it is devoid of religious faith. He considers himself a person who attained a state of complete contentment, but the fear of his death and that of his family members made him exceedingly unhappy. On the other hand, he observed that the great majority of ordinary people ﬁnd their life worth living despite painful work and frustration of desires, thanks to their religious life. He concludes that recourse to religion is the unique way to endow life with meaning.15 Our task in the following sections will be to investigate the possibility of a happy meaningful life despite the pervasiveness of wretchedness in human history. We shall start by analyzing the notions of pleasure, joy, and happiness as the main factors one may expect to counterbalance pain, sorrow, and suﬀering. 3. PLEASURE, JOY, AND HAPPINESS

Aristotle deﬁnes happiness as ‘‘something complete [without qualiﬁcation] and self-suﬃcient, and is the end of action.’’16 A thing which is complete without qualiﬁcation is ‘‘that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.’’17 A self-suYcient thing is ‘‘that which when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in nothing; and [which is] most desirable of all things ...’’18 Aristotle says then that ‘‘happiness is an activity of soul in accordance with complete excellence ...’’19 Our

THE MEANING OF LIFE

19

usage of ‘‘happy’’ seems to be in conformity with Aristotle’s statement that happiness is an activity rather than a state of feeling. Thus we say that one’s life is happy or one lives happily, and life or living consists primordially of activities rather than feelings. By contrast, we say that one is in a state of pleasure or feels pleasant. Aristotle himself says that ‘‘pleasure is a state of soul ...’’20 Pleasure diﬀers also from happiness in that the former is transient while the latter is enduring. Joy, or enjoyment, is intermediary between pleasure and happiness.21 It is less passive and transient than pleasure, but less active and enduring than happiness. We can say that a person has a relatively happy life to the degree that her desires are satisﬁed and her pleasures and joys prevail over her pains and sorrows. Notice that happiness, besides pleasure and joy, generally involves also pain and sorrow, since the realization of pleasure and joy as well as the satisfaction of desires frequently requires painful means. Paradoxically, persons who endure pain as a result of activities pursued for the sake of future pleasure may enjoy their painful activities. Pleasure due to the satisfaction of desires occupies an exceedingly short time of our life, since most of our life is devoted to goal-directed activities. But by enjoying these activities we enhance the possibility of realizing a happy life. An analogous situation holds for joy and sorrow in the sense that we may endure sorrow for the sake of happiness in the long term. In this case our sorrow is attenuated by our expectation of happiness, or even turned into what can be called a second-order joy. Of course this also promotes our chance of being happy. Happiness, therefore, consists ultimately in the harmony within the satisfaction of our desires as well as between our feelings of pleasure and joy, which prevail over endured feelings of pain and sorrow. The problem is whether and how such a harmony is realizable. This will be dealt with in the rest of the paper. The harmony constituting the happiness of a man’s life depends essentially on three conditions, viz., chance, innate disposition, and action, states Georg Henrik von Wright.22 Chance can be interpreted as the totality of external (natural and social) factors inﬂuencing the person’s life, innate disposition as the sum of the person’s abilities (especially excellences and virtues), and action as the person’s purposeful activities (especially those which are creative). In so far as an activity is purposeful (goal-seeking), it involves both means and end. Hence, the purpose may be considered to exist implicitly in the activity. Since the meaning of life consists of a life plan, i.e., of the major purposes of the concerned person, this meaning is manifested by the person’s (purposeful) activities.

20

¨ NBERG DAVID GRU

But as mentioned above the meaningfulness of life does not imply happiness. Happiness (of course only in its relative sense) can be secured by a propitious concurrence of all the three conditions. Among these activity is the only one which is directly under the persons control. Furthermore through her activity a person has the power to inﬂuence, more or less, the other two conditions. On the one hand, a person can to some extent change her natural and social environment, and thus eﬀect her chance. On the other hand, a person can enhance her skills to the level of excellences by training. We shall later argue that a particular kind of purposeful activity, viz., ones that are productive, self-gratifying, and creative, are essential for the realization of happiness as well as for the endurable meaningfulness of life. Happiness involves pleasure and joy; there can be no happiness totally devoid of pleasure and joy. But the converse does not hold. One can have a pleasant and joyful life without necessarily being happy. There is indeed a paradox of pleasures (especially of bodily ones). In the case of excess, any pleasure – even without the possibility of noticing this excess – turns very easily into its opposite, i.e., pain. We see that, although, as stated in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ‘‘most people say that happiness involves pleasure’’,23 bodily pleasures are by no means necessarily associated with happiness. Quite the contrary, exceedingly unhappy men often indulge in base pleasures such as drinking, using drugs, or simply greediness, without being able to get rid of their unhappiness. In the next section we shall attempt to show that the key to the possibility of happiness lies in human activity. For this purpose we shall rely heavily on Goethe’s Faust in which activity indeed induces happiness poetically expressed by the theological notion of salvation. 4. HAPPINESS THROUGH ACTIVITY: FAUST’S WAGER

We think that Faust’s salvation in Goethe’s masterpiece can be construed as a poetic expression of a way out of Schopenhauer’s above-mentioned pessimistic circle. Faust’s wager against Mephistopheles is expressed in the following verses: MEPHISTOPHELES. I shall perform as you instruct All these delights I can purvey. ... FAUST ... If any pleasure you can give

THE MEANING OF LIFE

21

Deludes me, let me cease to live! I oﬀer you this wager! MEPHISTOPHELES. Done! FAUST. And done again! If ever to the moment I shall say: Beautiful moment, do not pass away! Then you may forge your chains to bind me. Then I will put my life behind me, ... And time come to an end for me!24

We see that Faust is convinced that his desires – throughout his life – can never come to an end so that he can never reach a state of complete contentment.25 Faust towards the end of his life engages in large-scale activities, the last of which purports to give millions of men a new living-space. These activities seem to completely satisfy Faust’s desire, as a result of which he risks losing his wager against Mephistopheles by making the following declaration: FAUST. ... I long to see that multitude, and stand With a free people on free land! T hen to the moment I might say: Beautiful moment, do not pass away! Till many ages shall have passed This record of my earthly life shall last. And in anticipation of such bliss What moment could give me greater joy than this?26

We see that Faust – contrary to his initial conviction that he will never reach a state of complete contentment – approximates to such a state as a result of his recent activities. This expresses Goethe’s ‘‘conception of a wager half won and half lost.’’27 It is half won since Faust does not really reach a state of full contentment because of the qualiﬁed statement of the form ‘‘Then ... might ...’’ On the other hand, the wager is half lost since, as stated in the following verses, he comes very close to a state that he has asserted to be impossible for him: MEPHISTOPHELES. Poor fool! Unpleasured and unsatisﬁed, Still whoring after changeful fantasies, This last, poor, empty moment he would seize, Content with nothing else beside.

22

¨ NBERG DAVID GRU How he resisted me! But in the end Time wins; so here you lie, my senile friend. The clock has stopped –28 MEPHISTOPHELES ... Why bother to go on creating? Making, then endlessly annihilating!29

We can distinguish in this context three alternative kinds of situations: First, situations in which Faust would deﬁnitely win his wager. This is the case when desires are either frustrated or, if satisﬁed, replaced by other ones all the time. This is the common lot of the overwhelming majority of mankind. It agrees with Schopenhauer’s picture of human life leading to unhappiness. Second, situations in which Faust would deﬁnitely lose his wager. This is seemingly the case of complete contentment. But such a state will inevitably give rise to boredom and depression, especially fear of illness and death leading thus to even greater unhappiness. Third, Faust’s situation in which his wager is half won and half lost leading to the dissolution of Schopenhauer’s paradox. It is an optimal intermediary between the ﬁrst two extremes both of which lead to unhappiness. It represents an ideal men are advised to approximate in order to minimize unhappiness and maximize happiness. This last situation is illustrated by Faust’s salvation: ANGELS [hovering in the upper atmosphere, carrrying FAUST’s immortal part]. This noble spirit saved alive Has foiled the Devil’s will! He who strives on and lives to strive Can earn redemption still. And now that love itself looks down To favor him with grace, The blessed host with songs may crown His welcome to his place.30

Now as remarked by David Luke ‘‘striving’’ is a more poetic word for ‘‘activity’’,31 and Goethe explains the relation between salvation and activity as follows: the key to Faust’s salvation: in Faust himself an ever higher and purer activity continuing right to the end, and from on high the eternal Love coming to his aid. This is entirely in keeping with our religious conception, according to which we are not saved by our own strength alone but by supervenient divine grace. (Conversation with Eckermann, 6 June 1831)32

THE MEANING OF LIFE

23

Luke remarks that divine grace means ‘‘grace mediated by loving intercession’’,33 and furthermore that ‘‘[t]he concepts of divine grace, divine love, and earthly love are blended ...’’34 Goethe’s notion of salvation seems to be a poetic counterpart of the meaningfulness of human life. We propose then to naturalize the notions of activity, love, and divine grace involved in that of salvation. Accordingly we interpret grace as chance in the sense of the totality of external factors determining the life of a person.35 Furthermore, we interpret love as worldly love, and extend its application to passionate devotion to a – possibly social – cause, and in general, ardent attachment to a goal, which constitute, according to Edwards, an essential constituent of the meaning of life.36 In the next two sections we shall specify the characteristics of human activity which directly contribute to meaningfulness and happiness in life. In section 5 we shall introduce the characteristic of self-gratiﬁcation, and in section 6 a special kind of self-gratifying activity, viz., a kind involving creativity. 5. HAPPINESS THROUGH SELF-GRATIFYING ACTIVITY: SCHLICK’S CONCEPTION OF THE MEANING OF LIFE

A major ground for pessimism is that the purposeful activities in which we are engaged for most of our time give us pain and sorrow. Fortunately, there are also activities which are undertaken for their own sake, which we may call self-gratifying. Among these activities, we may distinguish between those undertaken only for their own sake and those undertaken also for the sake of something else, viz., the activities’ product. We call the former ones non-productive, and the latter ones productive. Both kinds of self-gratifying activities (independently of the product) are direct sources of pleasure or joy. We call activities undertaken only for the sake of something else, i.e., a product, hetero-gratifying. Hence hetero-gratifying activities are always productive, but more or less painful. Schlick calls self-gratifying activities play, and those that are hetero-gratifying work, both taken in the philosophical sense. He considers work in this sense as a main source of unhappiness. According to Schlick, children’s play is the paradigmatic example of self-gratifying activities. He considers a person to be youthful as long as she preserves her capacity of playing in the above-mentioned sense. Schlick, in order to elucidate his special notion of play, quotes the following lines of F. Schiller:

24

¨ NBERG DAVID GRU

For, to declare it once and for all, Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing. This proposition, which at the moment perhaps seems paradoxical, will assume great and deep signiﬁcance when we have once reached the point of applying it to the twofold seriousness of duty and of destiny; it will, I promise you, support the whole fabric of aesthetic art, and the still more diﬃcult art of living. But it is only in science that this statement is unexpected; it has long since been alive and operative in art, and in the feeling of the Greeks, its most distinguished exponents; only they transferred to Olympus what should have been realized on earth. Guided by its truth, they caused not only the seriousness and the toil which furrow the cheeks of mortals, but also the futile pleasure that smooths the empty face, to vanish from the brows of the blessed gods, and they released these perpetually happy beings from the fetters of every aim, every duty, every care, and made idleness and indiﬀerence the enviable portion of divinity; merely a more human name for the freest and sublimest state of being.37

Schlick interprets Schiller’s contention that the notion of play ‘‘will assume great and deep signiﬁcance when we have once reached the point of applying it to the twofold seriousness of duty and of destiny’’ as an attack on Kant’s conception of duty according to which ‘‘moral action means a struggle against one’s own inclination’’38 whereas ‘‘an action is moral only when it springs from reverence for the law of duty as its sole motive ...’’39 Play (in its philosophical sense) is deﬁned by Schlick as ‘‘any activity which takes place entirely for its own sake, independently of its eﬀects and consequences.’’40 Hence play is nothing but a self-gratifying activity. It follows that play can be productive as well as non-productive. Indeed Schlick emphasizes that ‘‘work ... in its philosophical generality [is] any activity undertaken solely in order to realize some [external] purpose.’’41 We see that work in this sense corresponds to what we have called heterogratifying activity. We may call this notion of work simply toil. On the other hand, work in the sense of productive activity corresponds to work in the economic sense. Schlick calls productive self-gratifying activity, i.e., play which is also work in the economic sense, creative play.42 Schlick considers an ideal life in which every activity is creative or noncreative play. But given that such a life is diﬃcult to realize, he takes, as second best, one in which toil is compensated by joy. However, he emphatically distinguishes between ‘‘joy, on which life’s value depends’’ and mere pleasure. He also connects pleasure with diversion, and joy with play. He takes diversion as ‘‘release from the working day’’ and remarks that ‘‘it is precisely the child that is capable of the purest joy.’’43 So for him diversion is not play. Notice that Schlick, just as Pascal, takes a decisively negative attitude towards diversion.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

25

In the next section we shall deal with creative activity as a special kind of creative play, and attempt to show that as such it can lead to a relatively happy meaningful life corresponding to Schlick’s second best ideal life. 6. CREATIVE SELF-GRATIFYING ACTIVITY CONDUCIVE TO A RELATIVELY HAPPY MEANINGFUL LIFE

We shall argue that human creative activities form a special kind of productive and self-gratifying activity, and that they constitute the main factor (or condition) of a relatively happy meaningful life. Let us start by clarifying the nature of such activities. Creative activities are activities creating a product so that they constitute a kind of productive activities; hence they can be either self-gratifying or not. In the ﬁrst case they would form a kind of creative play, and in the second one a kind of toil. We argue that the second case is impossible, i.e., all creative activities are self-gratifying. Indeed a person cannot create a product without engaging enthusiastically in her own creative activities so that she would be ready to undertake the activity independently of the beneﬁts she might expect from the product. But this means creative activities must be self-gratifying. However, the converse does not hold; i.e., all self-gratifying productive activities are not necessarily creative. In other words, a creative play in Schlick’s sense may not be properly creative. We mean by a ‘‘properly creative activity’’ one that is not creative in the sense of merely productive, but also innovative. A non-creative activity can be self-gratifying only ﬂeetingly; it constitutes rather mere routine work and gives rise to boredom when sustained. Hence it cannot be self-gratifying in any lasting sense. We see that self-gratifying productive activity, unless creative, is not conducive to happiness. Thus creativity is indeed a major factor of happiness, since only it can secure lasting self-gratiﬁcation. We contend that the products of creative activities of any kind are structurally analogous to the products of the ﬁne arts, i.e., to artworks. Now an author’s artwork is something meaningful. It consists, in essence, of a physical and a semantic component, viz., the text and the interpretation of that text. Diﬀerent receivers of an artwork, i.e., diﬀerent members of the relevant art community, including the author herself, may diversely interpret one and the same text. Each particular interpretation constitutes a world of interpretation within the intellect and/or imagination of the interpreter. Notice that to interpret an artwork is also to evaluate it. An interpretation is realized in accordance to the norms and rules prescribed

26

¨ NBERG DAVID GRU

by the art community to which the interpreter belongs. The creation of an artwork occurs in three so-called onto-poietic stages. At the ﬁrst stage the author designs the preliminary world constituting the meaning of the projected artwork, at the second she produces and communicates the text to the relevant art community, and at the third the members of the art community interpret (and evaluate) the text produced.44 Let us now attempt to generalize the above-mentioned notions to all kinds of creative activities. The analog of the author is the agent of the activity, and that of the artwork is obviously the product of the creative activity, i.e., a good or a service in economic terminology. The product as a physical object or event corresponds to the text of the artwork. On the other hand, the realization of the product of a creative activity gives rise to more or less important changes both in the agent’s own life and in the agent’s social and natural environment. The agent, at any given time, forms a more or less faithful image of her own life and of her natural and social environment at that time. Following Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, we may call this image ‘‘the world of life45 of the agent at the given time’’. The respective analogs of the three onto-poietic stages of artwork are as follows. At the ﬁrst stage the agent, taking into consideration the state of her natural and social environment, designs the world of life she expects to realize through her projected creative activity – call it ex ante (expected) world. The ex ante world constitutes the purpose or end of the activity in question. This design involves a choice among a number of alternatives which must be compatible with the agent’s natural and social environment in order to be realizable at all. At the second stage she undertakes the projected activity (and thus creates the product) in order to achieve the purpose adopted in the ﬁrst stage. At the third stage she confronts the world of life corresponding to the situation generated by the reaction of the natural and social environment directly aﬀected by the activity cum product – call it the ex post (realized) world corresponding to the ex ante world which was designed at the ﬁrst stage. Notice that the ex post world is an image of the agent’s own life as well as of her natural and social environment at that time. In so far as the ex post world is faithful to its corresponding ex ante world, the activity in question can be considered as a successful one. The agent’s lifetime can be divided into consecutive periods each devoted to some activity involving the three onto-poietic stages mentioned above. The ex post world reached at the end of a given period should be taken into account by the agent for choosing her ex ante world in the consecutive period. Now the ex ante world is the analog of the preliminary

THE MEANING OF LIFE

27

world involved at the ﬁrst onto-poietic stage of the creation of an artwork whereas the ex post world is the partial analog of the world of interpretation of a receiver of the artwork. It is only partially analogous for the reason that whereas worlds corresponding to an artwork may pertain to members of the art community diﬀerent than the author, the ex post world is exclusively the agent’s own world. Furthermore, while the receivers of an artwork are the members of the author’s social environment, the analog of the ‘receiver’ of an activity consists in the author’s total environment, the natural as well as the social. The above-stated deep analogy between art and creative activity in general may yield considerable insights into the nature of human creativity in the light of the following remarks by Tymieniecka: ... the human being is not merely (as Husserl proposed) a meaning-bestowing agent, the maker of his life-world; what comes ﬁrst is that his very life in itself is the eVect of his selfindividualization in existence through inventive self-interpretation of his most intimate moves of life.46 [Max Scheler] believes that self-constructivism through invention and creativity closes life’s possibilities. We intend to show, to the contrary, that it expands them into possible worlds of life.47

We may say that the agent’s ex post world corresponds to Husserl’s lifeworld and her (possible) ex ante worlds to Tymieniecka’s possible worlds of life. The agent at any moment of her life, taking into consideration her current ex post world, chooses as the purpose of her envisaged activity one among a number of possible ex ante worlds (of life). This choice closes indeed ‘life’s possibilities’ (as stated by Scheler) since the remaining alternatives are eliminated, but this holds only at the ﬁrst stage. Indeed, in so far as the activity is creative (innovative, inventive), the ex post world corresponding to the chosen ex ante world gives rise to a number of expanded new alternatives, i.e., possible worlds of life, from which the ex ante world of the agent’s activity in the next period will be chosen. The creativity of the previous activity secures the powerfulness of the next one. In general, human creativity endows men with the power of transforming and partially controlling their natural and social environment, and thus, ultimately, of enhancing man’s relative happiness and securing a more and more meaningful life, always assuming, of course, that the intended outcome is actually achieved (and it did indeed have a possible eﬀect on the agent’s environment).

28

¨ NBERG DAVID GRU 7. MEETING THE CHALLENGES OF THE PRESENT-DAY WORLD

In the preceding sections we have argued that creative self-gratifying (purposeful) activities contribute to a relatively happy and meaningful life. In this last section, we shall elaborate on the relativity and on the social-ethical dimension of happiness, and then we shall emphasize the possibility of realizing a highly meaningful and a relatively happy life through asymptotic approximation of a state of complete contentment. As already stated above, pessimism about the human condition (devoid of religion) presupposes a notion of absolute happiness, and since this is impossible for mortal beings, it is concluded that the human condition is miserable or wretched. But, as a matter of fact, men engaged in purposeful activities which are not mere toil, but rather more or less self-gratifying, are capable of enjoying their life despite incurred pain. This shows that men do not require the promise of absolute happiness in order to feel joy, while joy is an essential part of what makes life worth living. An allor-nothing response to the problem of the meaning of life should be replaced by a nuanced one. In order to live, we must submit stoically to the reality of pain, suﬀering, natural disasters, and ultimately death without ceasing to engage in purposeful (self-gratifying) activities and enjoy them. Remember the Muslim aphorism according to which men must always be ready for death, but act as if they were to live eternally. Relative happiness means precisely one of a realizable form, taking into account the sore realities of the human condition. What we could realistically strive to is the maximum of such a relative happiness. In all areas of human culture, theoretical and practical, absolute perfection is unattainable, and we must contend with a realizable optimum. Even the most certain kind of knowledge procured by formal deductive logic and mathematics is subject to limitative results such as Kurt Go¨del’s incompleteness,48 and Alonzo Church’s undecidability.49 Just as logicians and mathematicians do not despair of their disciplines, ordinary men should not lament over their practical life. Let us now emphasize the social-ethical dimension of happiness. In short, for the most part, one cannot be happy without sharing her happiness with others, and what makes one happy should not be harmful – at least in the long run – to her natural and social environment. Indeed the reaction to a harmful activity hurts the agent herself. Furthermore, many sane persons are devoid of malevolence; they are even delighted by others’ happiness. Now politics, in its original Aristotelian sense, is the science and art of training, educating, and governing the members of a

THE MEANING OF LIFE

29

human society, in such a way as to secure a state of harmony, within the life of each person as well as between the lives of diﬀerent persons. In other words, the end of politics is human happiness, both personal and social. As stated emphatically above, creative self-gratifying activity is the best means for securing a highly meaningful life.50 The work of a highly qualiﬁed person (such as an artist, a scientist, an engineer, and even an artisan) may be self-gratifying, but of course it is also a means for something else, viz., a salary or a proﬁt. Unfortunately, the labor of the great majority of men, especially of unqualiﬁed workers, is not self-gratifying; it can even be qualiﬁed as hard labor. However, the development of science and technology in the present-day world allows us to hope that in the long run all kinds of unqualiﬁed labor will be undertaken, for the most part, by automated machines. Furthermore, as Human Rights prevail more and more in international as well as national social and political institutions there is reason to expect that a more equitable distribution of wealth and income both within and among nations will also occur, and so the technological progress in question will beneﬁt the whole of humanity. Only then will it be possible to say the great part of men’s labor will ultimately be of a qualiﬁed kind. In this way we may be optimistic to hope that in the future human work will turn into selfgratifying and furthermore creative activity. Previously, we stated, following von Wright, three conditions of happiness: chance, inner disposition, and action. We can now say that chance can be turned in our favor by the advance of science and technology, and inner disposition can be enhanced into excellences by training and education and, in the future, even by ethically controlled genetic interventions. Ultimately all of these are based on the last condition, viz., action in the form of creative (self-gratifying) activity, including the political one. We can thus opt for an optimist philosophy of life. Middle East T echnical University NOTES * I would like to express my gratitude to David Davenport and Kenneth Rosen for helpful comments and suggestions. 1 Genesis, 3, 19–20. 2 See R. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 577. Nozick himself adopts this term from J. Rawls, A T heory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), section 63.

30

¨ NBERG DAVID GRU

3 See P. Edwards, ‘‘The Value and Meaning of Life’’, in T. L. Carson and P. K. Moser, eds., Morality and the Good L ife (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 457. 4 Diversion is explained as dissipation, oblivion of one’s self. See B. Pascal, Œvres Comple`tes (Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie, 1903), p. 264, n. 2. This is not a description of diversion, but rather a statement of the motivation thereof. 5 B. Pascal, Pense´es, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 66. 6 Ibid., p. 67. 7 Ibid., p. 72. 8 Ibid., p. 67. 9 Ibid., pp. 67–68. 10 Ibid., p. 70. 11 Ibid., p. 68. 12 Ibid, p. 69 13 Ibid, p. 66. 14 M. Schlick, ‘‘On the Meaning of Life’’, in his Philosophical Papers, Vol. II (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), pp. 112–113. 15 See L. Tolstoy, ‘‘My Confession’’, in Morality and the Good L ife, pp. 441–448. 16 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I, 7, 1097b20–21. 17 Ibid., 1097a35–36. 18 Ibid., 1097b15–17. 19 Ibid., I, 13, 1102a5–6. 20 Ibid., I, 8 1099a5. 21 Cf. G. H. von Wright, ‘‘The Good of Man’’, in Morality and the Good L ife, p. 153. 22 Ibid., pp. 152–153. 23 Aristotle, ibid., VII, 11, 1152b6–7. 24 J. W. von Goethe, Faust: Part One, trans. D. Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1688–1706 (pp. 51–52). 25 This obtains in the state of ataraxy, which results from the extinction of all desires. 26 Ibid., Part T wo, 11579–11586 (p. 223, italics ours); see also D. Luke’s Introduction, p. lxx. 27 Ibid., Introduction, p. lxx. 28 Ibid., 11587–11593 (pp. 223–224). 29 Ibid., 11588–11599 (p. 224). 30 Ibid., Part T wo, 11934–11941 (p. 234). 31 Ibid., Introduction, p. lxxi. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. lxxiii. 35 Considering von Wright’s three conditions of happiness, viz., chance, innate disposition, and action, we may say that the ﬁrst and the last of these correspond respectively to Goethe’s notions of grace and activity. 36 See Edwards, op. cit., p. 457, who holds the view that a particular person’s life is meaningful in case his life has purposes. 37 Schlick, op. cit., p. 115, quoted from F. Schiller’s L etters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. R. Snell (London, 1954), p. 80. 38 Ibid., p. 125. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., pp. 115–166.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

31

41 Ibid., p. 114 (our emphasis). 42 Ibid., p.116. 43 Ibid., p. 120. 44 Such a conception of artwork and the related notions are expounded in our paper, ‘‘The Endurance of Aesthetic Objects and the Relative Durability of Scientiﬁc Theories’’, sec. 3, Analecta Husserliana, forthcoming. 45 See A.-T. Tymieniecka, Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXIV (1988), p. 6. 46 Ibid., p. 5. 47 Ibid., pp. 5–6. 48 See K. Go¨del, On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems, trans. B. Meltzer (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1962). 49 See A. Church, ‘‘A Note on the Entscheidungsproblem’’, Journal of Symbolic L ogic I (1936): 345–363. 50 This thesis is clearly in conformity with Tymieniecka’s view expressed as: ‘‘In brief, I propose that the access to the Archimedean point from which, alone, the unity of all the possible perspectives on man’s experience can be explained, and the key to the Human Condition be obtained, lies in the creative act of the human being which makes him ‘human’ – the creative act of man where the diﬀerentiating factors of the macrocosm of life diﬀerentiate.’’ See Tymieniecka, op. cit., pp. 5–6.

R. KURENKOVA, Y. PLEKHANOV AND E. ROGACHEVA

THE TRANSCENDENTAL –PHENOMENOLOGICAL MEANING OF THE NOTION OF ‘‘EXPERIENCE’’ IN E. HUSSERL AND J. DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY

The theme ‘‘Husserl and Dewey’’ could hardly have been out of researchers’ interest in connection with the contribution of both outstanding thinkers of the XXth century to the development of all contemporary philosophy and culture. James W. Garrison and Emanuel I. Shargel1 are but two authors who stressed the internal similarity of Husserl and Dewey’s philosophy. The problems of the existential nature of the human experience and its horizontal structure were understood by both Dewey and Husserl within the context of the ‘‘life-world’’. While we highly appreciate the objective research attempt undertaken by our American collegues, we consider the interpretations of the notion of ‘‘experience’’ presented by the founder of transcendental phenomenology and the philosophy of pragmatism to be more complimentary and interactive in relation to each other than simple convergence suggests. The basis for a deeper relation can be found in the similarity of the central theme that was evident at the peak of Husserl and Dewey’s intellectual eﬀorts, namely the theme of the future. The main reasons for Husserl to turn to the problems of transcendental phenomenology characterized by the analytics of ‘‘historical teleology of the inﬁnite aim of the human intellect’’ were the crisis of Western Culture and anxiety about the future of European mankind. The essence of the crisis for scientiﬁc civilization at its height may be vividly seen in the loss of the life sense of the practical by a human being in conquering the world. The contradiction between ‘‘life self-excitement’’ on the part of a human being and a scientiﬁc way of his/her self-determination in the world reached, at the beginning of the XXth century, its highest degree of acuteness. Husserl thought the search for a new liveliness and spirit would provide a great and distant future of mankind a positive alternative to that decay of ‘‘European existence’’.2 As for Dewey, the theme of a future that is open and initially not guaranteed, requiring constant and persistent human eﬀorts, has also become the focus of attention. Dewey believed that with the origin of 33 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 33–41. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

34

R. KURENKOVA, Y. PLEKHANOV AND E. ROGACHEVA

democracy and its establishment there appeared a new way of social activity based not on a collective tradition and authority but always presupposing critical reﬂection and creative solution of problems. Thanks to democracy a person brings into his life-world a notion of freedom, but at the same time creates problems for his/her personal future. Dewey stressed the idea that we live in a developing world that is not static but of a dynamic character. So he considered the main task of a human being to focus not on the past but on the future. For Dewey the past (all our knowledge in comparison to thinking lies in the past) has its value only if it provides validity and eﬀectiveness to our future decisions.3 The evaluation of the situation of crisis for Dewey and Husserl appear quite diﬀerent. For the leader of pragmatism the development of democracy is a phenomenon of a permanent crisis. Democracy can function only as a process, as a constant permanent transcending of social experience and overcoming of its marked life-world borders. In this sense the fact of the crisis of democracy is less important than the openness of democracy to the horizon of inﬁnite goals, tasks, and needs. Husserl sees in the crisis of the European spirit not the stage of Faust’s darings but Wagner’s tiredness and disillusionment with a new-European philosophical and scientiﬁc way of cognition. In spite of the marked diﬀerence, both philosophers display similarity in giving importance to life-sense and rational-reﬂective components of human experience for the future of democracy and culture. They both stress the role that the category of ‘‘experience’’ can take. We may therefore consider the creative work of both thinkers as an attempt to give way to the ‘‘philosophy of experience’’. Dewey wrote: ‘‘... the philosophy in question is, to paraphrase the saying of Lincoln about democracy, one of, by, and for experience. No one of these words; if, by or for, names anything which is self-evident. Each of them is a challenge to discover and put into operation a principle of order and organization which follows from understanding what educative experience signiﬁes’’.4 We should stress that neither Husserl nor Dewey simply identiﬁed experience with the reality of individual mental life. For Husserl this statement needs no special conﬁrmation. As for a transcendental–phenomenological sense of the notion ‘‘experience’’ in the philosophy of pragmatism, it is not that evident. One should pay attention to the declaration of Dewey to create ‘‘a scientiﬁc philosophy of Experience’’. Dewey stressed ‘‘... the organic connection between education and personal experience; or that the new philosophy of education is committed

‘‘EXPERIENCE’’ IN E. HUSSERL AND J. DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY

35

to some kind of empirical and experimental philosophy. But experience and experiment are not self-explanatory ideas. Rather, their meaning is part of the problem to be explored. To know the meaning of empiricism we need to understand what experience is’’.5 Dewey’s intention was in tune with Husserl’s but each thinker realized this task in diﬀerent ways. In his theory of experience, Husserl started from the theory of intentionality; this made it possible for him to avoid the dubbing between the quality of an object and sensation, a thing and an image, physical and mental processes. Intentional objects are not the reﬂection of material phenomena and objects. They are constituted by mechanisms of functioning of consciousness and are given to us in the form of internal experience, the modes of which (presentation, perception, imagination, desire, evaluation and others) express a process-dynamic character of a mental reality. So, from the point of phenomenology it is more important to know how immanent objects are given to us than what is represented in our emotional experience. For Husserl every attempt to put physical objects under mental phenomena blocks the singling out of experience from natural things and processes. Phenomenological reduction is a necessary prerequisite that makes it possible for a reﬂective consciousness to face itself as an object for description and analysis. At the same time, reduction is something more than just a pure methodological procedure not concerning the ontological status of the external world and the being of consciousness. As contemporary researchers state ‘‘... what people call a real world, what physicists call transcendental substances – all of it, according to Husserl, is nothing more but correlates of consciousness, having partly a mythological character’’.6 If we look at the world of nature as a result of the natural orientation of our consciousness, then we will be led to the conclusion that the intentional content of experience needs no external reality. On the contrary, the world may be understood as reality only in our emotional experience. ‘‘Consciousness,’’ as Husserl states, ‘‘if it is understood in its pureness must be accepted as a closed interlink of being, and namely as an interlink of absolute being, where nothing can penetrate into and nothing can escape from. ... On the other side all space–temporary world, to which a human being, a human ‘self ’ as main subordinate realities belong – is in its sense only intentional being, the being that has only a relative, secondary sense of being for consciousness. ... The being of this type is an identity of uncontradictory motivated varieties of experience and it is open to contemplation and determination – above of all this

36

R. KURENKOVA, Y. PLEKHANOV AND E. ROGACHEVA

such a being is just nothing, or, to be more exact, it is the being, for which every above this is an antisensible thought’’.7 It is necessary to analyze the contribution of Husserl to the dynamically-processed understanding of the experience of consciousness. From the phenomenological concept of consciousness, experience is seen as a permanent process of changing emotional experiences. Only in the permanent constituting of ‘‘pure’’ experience does consciousness ﬁnd the reality of its being. The movement of intentional objects is to some extent an immanent way of life, an accomplishment of our consciousness. ‘‘The life of consciousness is a current, and every cogito is ﬂuctuating, it has no ﬁxed elements and relations’’.8 Husserl also warned, however, that the image of the current is very treacherous as it is easily associated with cincretic being-becoming, and thus opens up to the perspective relativism and subjectivity, which the founder of phenomenology opposed strongly. So in another line of his writings we ﬁnd a special explanation related to the fact that the dynamism of the life of consciousness is a product of incompleteness of a row of reductions. Thanks to the phenomenological epoche, experience is shown in a form of diﬀerent ‘‘blinks’’, psychological phenomena – feelings, emotions, thoughts, excitements, fantasies, etc. These uncertainties form an empirical level of experience. So phenomenological psychology is possible owing to eidetic reduction that reveals a deeper level of internal experience, a level of invariant structures of emotional experiences. ‘‘In a current, as Husserl stressed, there rules a very well expressed technique’’.9 A deep layer of experience, formed by stable conﬁgurations of intentional objects, cannot be seen as a unity and division of separate elements of consciousness. A concrete emotional experience is a sort of a chain in the continuous chain of other emotional experiences that form the permanent meaning ﬁeld of our experience. At the same time emotional experience is the unity of immanent running, where one can see diﬀerent phases and intervals. ‘‘In every partial perception running as a phase of integrated perception, the whole meaning of the object that is percepted is seen in every phase meaning, it is fed by phase meanings, becoming deeper and being determined more in detail, but it is by no means integrated from separate parts and united in a whole one with the help of gestalt sensitivity’’.10 The constitution of integrated processes of experience was intended by Husserl to criticize associationism which still rules in psychology and which explains the integrity of internal experience by chancy links not

‘‘EXPERIENCE’’ IN E. HUSSERL AND J. DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY

37

connected with the context. It is also a critique of reductionism in natural science which explains the content of psychic reality on the basis of activity of perceptive mechanisms of the sense organs. Integrity and continuity of internal experience is supplemented by its capacity to ‘‘soft’’ and ﬂexible self-determination. The current of consciousness includes immanent teleology, that is a constructive basis for collecting discrete, local in modality and the time of running as well as emotional experiences into an integrated unity, that has the characteristics of meaning conﬁgurations. The state of conﬁguration is explained by the presence of some deﬁnite internal form in a permanent ﬁeld of experience. This form gives integrated outlines (contours) to its intentional content. The capacity of consciousness to make distinct outlines of the objects of internal experience is accomplished in the noemic-poetic structure of intentionality. Noemicpoetic unity is of a projective character. It is explained by the fact that intentional objects, in opposition to physical objects, belong to the ﬁeld of human experience and are projected by the constitutive capacities of our consciousness. Besides, being deﬁnite they are not schematic, but variable. Owing to this there takes place what Husserl called ‘‘attentional shifts in noemic and noetic aspect’’ of emotional experience. The possibility of existence of every meaningful concrete integrity in diﬀerent modes (in forms perceptable, imaginative, desirable, thinking, etc.) is characterized as intentional projects, as various varients of one and the same meaning of the object. The notion of ‘‘intentional projects’’ presupposes not only a meaningful content of every concrete emotional experience, but also its principal peculiarity as horizonness. Husserl himself uses the term ‘‘horizon’’ in at least three diﬀerent senses. Firstly, by horizon Husserl means a potential level of experience in opposition to an actual, completed state. As every emotional experience includes a sort of intrinsic potentiality it cannot be seen as completely realized in any of its states. In this case horizon is an internal logic, that determines the perspectives of the perception unfolding and its striving to exhaustive accomplishment. The ex-statics of this kind, typical of human reality, is explained by Sartre as the need of consciousness to ﬁll a gap in its ontological insuﬃciency. So, the horizon of ‘‘being for oneself ’’ is dependent on projections of our desires, in the form of which the intuitive striving to fullness and completeness of our emotional experiences is given to us.11

38

R. KURENKOVA, Y. PLEKHANOV AND E. ROGACHEVA

In connection to this, actual acts of consciousness potentially contain both possible and previous experience of excitements, and they are accomplished in a permanent horizon of immanent time and so can be unfolded as prospective and retrospective projects. Prospective projects are protentions that are going to enter our perception and to be accomplished in intentions of what is expected, desired, anticipated, foreseen. ... Retrospective horizonness is not equal to earlier accomplished intentional acts, otherwise it would loose its projective character. The horizon of the past is displayed through the intentionality of recollections, each of which takes us to a permanent inﬁnity of other recollections. And retentional projects are not a reconstruction of previous perceptions but its new excitement, comprehension, explanation, evaluation as the past always appears to us in unprocessed and unexpected image.12 The unity of retentional and potentional projectivity may be seen as a two-faced Janus. It forms a diachronic horizon of constitutive experience of the activity of our consciousness. Secondly, the notion of horizon is connected by Husserl with the potential completeness of the content of actually given experience. Every initial perception (image, knowledge, meaning) is impoverished, schematized but at the same time it has a capacity to complete, to enrich a content, to ﬁnd out something hidden. In the process of intentional perceptive acts there occurs a change of various parameters that determine an object in experience (distance, background, a degree of lighting, etc.). Possible variations of perception of this object form what is called a synchronic horizon of a current of consciousness. In a ‘‘transverse’’ slit, intentional experience may be seen as a total combination of inter-linked projects or varients of intentional objects potentially contained in an actual content of emotional experiences. And, lastly, the horizon is also given by an environment of internal experience. Every concrete perception is born and grows within the frame of other perceptions that, owing to synthetic capacity of consciousness, ﬂow together into a permanent universal cognitive ﬁeld. So, a general emotional background, unconscious settings of consciousness, rational and axiologic dominants create a contextual horizon of emotional experience. If a surface noemic-noetic structure of an object is fairly determined and factual, then its deeper, meaningful structure is variable, as it gives a chance to diﬀerent interpretations. This very circumstance was meant by James when he analyzed a horizontal organization of sense perception.

‘‘EXPERIENCE’’ IN E. HUSSERL AND J. DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY

39

‘‘The meaning, the value of an image is mainly in its addition, its light shadow (penumbra) of the elements of thought surrounding and accompanying it. Better to say, this penumbra together with this image makes the whole ... , leaving the very image the same as it was before. It gives it a new function and a fresh colour’’.13 The mentioned properties of intentional life of experience are not exhaustive but suﬃcient to have a notion about Husserl’s understanding of experience. In comparison to Husserl, Dewey pays more attention to the elaboration and growing of experience on the part of a subject and focuses less on the constitution and organization of internal experience. Experience here may be seen as consisting of active and standard components. An active side of experience means that it presupposes an action with objects, thus presupposing intentionality in a sense of directness, of selectivity of inﬂuences on an object. The passive side has a reverse inﬂuence, of world objects on human beings. The sense of experience is in making connections between our inﬂuences and counteractions of things. As Dewey stressed, ‘‘the main thing in experience is the combination of activity and passivity, and not its cognitive aspect’’.14 At ﬁrst sight this interpretation of the nature of experience does not open a wide space for critique from the positions of ‘‘pure phenomenology’’. But looking deeper, we see this is not so. First of all we should stress that Dewey very deﬁnitely says that the relations between the objects cannot be understood outside the experience context. More so, the noemic content of things can be seen only within a structure of intentional relations. A thing may be had in experience as hard or soft, coloured or colourless, useful or not only if it is in relation with us. Secondly, Dewey gives priority to the active elements of experience and not to the cognitive, but that does not mean that he underestimates the importance of rational reﬂection in the process of consolidating experience. He sees the need for intentionality and projectivity. ‘‘Thinking’’, as he points out, ‘‘is an explicit expression of intellectual component of our experience. Owing to thinking, an aimed action becomes possible’’.15 In its turn, the action that has aim and is conscious is based not on a psychological but on a transcendental level of experience. As in Husserl, Dewey’s attitude towards the natural setting has undergone a great evolution, that may be explained by his dealing with the problem of intersubjectivity and ‘‘life-world’’. To be more exact, Husserl does not simply accept and rehabilitate a natural assumption, but analyzes it as the dominant state of human experience by means of phenomenology. The

40

R. KURENKOVA, Y. PLEKHANOV AND E. ROGACHEVA

product of this is the notion ‘‘life-world’’ as a ﬁeld of cultural and historical experience that is seen as the content for collective practice. In its horizon all possible meanings, concepts, norms and values of human life lie. So, Husserl removes some duality in Dewey’s understanding of the world of objects, trying to underline that every concrete person deals in his experience not with the things and phenomena transcendental to his consciousness, but with the fragments and regions of cultural and historic life-world. Dewey wrote that, ‘‘... we live from birth to death in a world of persons and things which in large measure is what it is because of what has been done and transmitted from previous human activities. When this fact is ignored, experience is treated as if it were something which goes on exclusively inside an individual’s body and mind. It ought not to be necessary to say that experience does not occur in a vacuum. There are some sources outside an individual which give rise to experience. It is constantly fed from its springs’’.16 It is here that we can sum up our research. The interpretation of experience by Husserl and Dewey is complimentary, at least, in two aspects. Dewey adds to Husserl’s discovered horizontal structure of experience a vertical structure, that is seen as a consistent process of growth. As for Husserl, by systematically clarifying a transcendentalintentional content of life-world he adds much to the theory of activity that Dewey had put forward. Husserl binds the gaining of individual experience with a cultural–historical context.17 NOTES 1 James W. Garrison and Emanuel I. Shargel, ‘‘Dewey and Husserl: A Surprising Convergence of Themes,’’ Educational T heory 38 (Spring 1988): 239–247. 2 E. Husserl, T he Crisis of European Mankind and Philosophy (Voprosi ﬁlosoﬁi, 1986, N3. s. 115). 3 J. Dewey, Democracy and Education (Moscow, 2000), p. 145. 4 J. Dewey, Experience and Education. T he Kappa Delta Pi L ecture Series (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1938), p. 29. 5 Ibid., p. 25. 6 T he Outlines of Phenomenological Philosophy (Saint Petersburg, 1997), s. 14. 7 E. Husserl, T he Ideas T owards Pure Phenomenology (Moscow, 1994), s. 9. 8 E. Husserl, Parisian Reports, L ogos (Moscow, 1991, vyp. 2), s. 17. 9 Ibid. 10 E. Husserl, Amsterdam Reports (Moscow, 1992, vyp. 3), s. 74. 11 J. P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness: T he Experience of Phenomenological Ontology (Moscow, 2000), ss. 118–123. 12 See for details, E. Husserl, Phenomenology of Internal Consciousness of T ime/Husserl Collective Works (Moscow, 1994, Vol. 1), ss.32–67.

‘‘EXPERIENCE’’ IN E. HUSSERL AND J. DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY

41

13 W. James, Psychology (Moscow, 1991), s. 71. 14 J. Dewey, Democracy and Education (M., 2000), s. 134. 15 Ibid., s. 139. 16 J. Dewey, Experience and Education. T he Kappa Delta Pi L ecture Series (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1938), pp. 39–40. 17 To tell the truth Dewey touched the question of environment as the source of experience. The elements of the environment presents everything that the individual interacts with. ‘‘The environment, in other words, is whatever conditions interact with personal needs, desires, purposes, and capacities to create the experience which is had’’ (J. Dewey, Experience and Education. T he Kappa Delta Pi L ecture Series. Macmillan Publishing Company, 1938, p. 44). And, nevertheless, this important notion was not suﬃciently taken as a theme by the American philosopher.

SECTION II THE ROLE OF THE PHILOSOPHER CONTINUED

JOZEF SIVAK

HUSSERL’S MISSION OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THOUGHT In the L ight of His ‘‘Briefwechsel’’

Wir haben zwar noch philosophische Kongresse – die Philosophen kommen zusammen, aber leider nicht die Philosophien. Cartesianische Meditationen

1. INTRODUCTION

E. Husserl is one of those philosophers whose life and work cannot be separated. Like Kant, for example, his biography is coextensive with his work. We know the ‘‘Husserl’’ of the published and unpublished works, but it remains to know him as a correspondent. This is rendered possible by his Briefwechsel, correspondence published by K. Schuhmann.1 In fact, this correspondence shows us another facet of Husserl. And when we ask, to conform to the theme of this Congress, if Husserl was engaged or not and if the answer is yes, this raises additional interesting issues. Correspondence illustrates his doubts, his discouragement, and his appeals, particularly since Husserl mostly behaved as a thinker living in an ivory tower. Evidently, there is no neutral philosophy or philosopher; since Plato the rational animal and political animal are not to be separated. In what sense was Husserl an ‘‘engaged’’ philosopher? At any rate, he was not an engaged intellectual in the sense in which the term is used in France, for example, where it was incarnated by Sartre or Foucault.2 Would he have been a public intellectual in the American style?3 This essay is an attempt to respond to these questions. 2. LIFE INTERTWINED WITH WORK

Husserl’s philosophizing was an almost existential aﬀair for him, one of life and of the diﬃculties of thought.4 According to him Wer nicht seine Antinomien, seinen Paradoxien hat, die ihm seine scho¨nste Wege verlegen und mit denen er bis zur Verzweiﬂung ringen musss, ist kein Philosoph, weiss gar nichts

45 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 45–67. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

46

JOZEF SIVAK

von philosophischer Existenz – d.i. eben Ringen um philosophisches Leben u. philosophischen Tod.5

For him philosophy is not a matter of career but one of fate, something as serious as life and death, and it results from doubting. Husserl himself passed through such extensive periods of doubt (for example during his work in Halle) because he did not adapt himself to ‘‘hollowed argumentations and systems’’ set into comfortable traditional patterns of thought; rather, he took seriously the phenomenological reduction. He must have proceeded as Robinson did: to make himself his own ‘‘instruments and results of thought’’ (‘Denkgera¨te, ‘Denkergebnisse’).6 This work ‘‘of passionate and doubting eﬀort’’7 kept him living and breathing. However, this coherence of life and work can serve diﬀerent sophisms, privileging one or the other of those aspects. This was the case, for example, in relation to discussions about M. Heidegger’s political engagement. Without wishing to return to this discussion,8 let us note what is considered essential. If it is true that there is only one alternative to suicide, namely work, then for Heidegger there would not remain even this last possibility. In our opinion, the connection between Heidegger’s temporary political orientation and his philosophical work is an absurd invention. Finally, it would signify that there is not just one work! A confounding of man and his actions with his work is at least precipitate.9 It is sure that life and work have the same subject, but a work diﬀers from life not only through an autonomous existence but also by creating a philosophical asceticism. For Husserl this was the famous ‘‘phenomenological reduction’’, and for Heidegger the reﬂection about Being. In general, the basis of intellect itself is not intellectual but moral.10 In the ﬁrst place, an intellectual is a man who thinks with his entire soul and his entire body and who has character. Science and philosophy grow in the same soil, in the faculty of being reasonable, as it is the case with moral good. If one is not loyal to his ideal, if one doesn’t like the truth and if character collapses, then intelligence itself is not suﬃcient, reason is not in control and one makes mistakes successively in spite of any increased eﬀort. Such an intellectual does not realize that it is not his intellectual qualities which are called into question but something diﬀerent, something which is not intellectual but moral or relative to health.11 Nevertheless work is a virtue, one which any intellectual must cultivate. Now the studiousness itself must not lead to neglect of other duties.

HUSSERL’S MISSION OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THOUGHT

47

Because, let us repeat, the true and the good are not essentially diﬀerent from each other. A working discipline is not separable from a submission to the truth: an intellectual is ever a slave to truth.

3. WHAT IS HUSSERL WRITING AS A CORRESPONDENT AND AS A PHILOSOPHICAL WRITER

The number of volumes of Husserl’s correspondence is comparable to those of Leibnitz or Voltaire. However he considered it to be a secondary exchange of ideas; he preferred personal exchange. In spite of this, his letters do not lack friendliness and cordiality. He was not exemplary in answering: he has not answered by return of mail. He said, ‘‘I don’t want to lose ideas’’. As to its content, Husserl’s correspondence appears as the constituent of his own work. The way he writes, his lifelong task, is a new philosophizing, the struggle for a new, true humanity. As he confessed, he had a ‘‘mission’’ from his divine (in the Socratic sense) Daimon(ion) which prompted him to carry his philosophical load. In other words, he has felt called by God and charged with the duty of being a ‘‘servant of the Absolute’’. His ‘‘philosophantum’’ absorbed him entirely.

a) Husserl and German Idealism He was Brentano’s pupil in so far as he accomplished (and in this he was successful) deliverance from German idealism by means of his own idealism consisting of a rigorous utilization of concepts. If we consider German idealism not as a conception of the world but as a method, this method is fruitful. Husserl’s attitude towards German idealism, with other qualiﬁcations, can be read in a letter to Natorp.12 According to Husserl, Kantianism culminates in Fichte and not in Schelling who, as a romantic, was not to be considered (together with Hegel) as a philosopher to be taken seriously. Husserl is an heir of German idealism, too; more exactly, he represents scientiﬁc form and he follows Lessing, Herder, Schiller and Goethe.13 ¨ hnlich wie in Hegels Idee des absoluten Geistes sind ... auch bei Huserl Kunst (Literatur), A christliche Religion und Philosophie die drei innigst verschvisterten Wesenskennzeichen des deutschen Geistes.’’14

48

JOZEF SIVAK

Husserl’s attitude toward German idealism is critical because of the presence of romanticism in it. So it is ‘‘hurled down at end of 19th century in lifeless techniques and literary platitude’’.15 A turn begins with phenomenology, meant to realize the worldwide mission of Germany, which would be to enlighten other nations. In 191216 Husserl writes: Das deutsche Volk ist ganz wesentlich das Volk der Dichter und Denker (die religio¨sen Reformen wie Luthers inbegriﬀen), und so ist es, die historische Mission der deutschen Volkes, ... allen anderen Vo¨lkern und der Philosophie veranzuleuchten.

Husserl wanted to identify himself with this mission and to build (through a self-consciousness of Germanhood), a German sovereignty of thought. He felt himself indebted to the German nation. Even after the defeat he cared what became of it. Our philosopher engaged with the German Academy (Akademie zur wissenschaftlichen Erforschung und zur Pﬂege des Deutschtum – Deutsche Akademie), and wanted phenomenology to be uniﬁed with the German spirit. Furthermore, he represents a ‘‘suﬀering patriot’’,17 like Fichte. His motto was: Niemand kann mich aber hindern, nach schwachen Kra¨ften um christlichen Geist und fu¨r Fichte und den deutschen Idealismus zu wirken.’’18

b) Determinants of L ife It is worthwhile, according to the editor’s Introduction, to stop and look at three determinant circumstances of Husserl’s life. The ﬁrst concerns the afore mentioned national mission of Germany, which is worldwide.19 Alles Grosse ... ist u¨bernational, aber notwendig in nationaler Auspra¨gung und diese ist nicht ein gleichgu¨ltiges and zuﬀa¨liges Gewand, sondern hat in sich grosse und ideal ho¨chst wichtige Funktionen fu¨r den Aufbau der Menschheit, und damit fu¨r den der konkret wahren geistigen Welt.’’20

Husserl and phenomenology are called to participate in this building of humanity. Obviously the philosopher is not free to choose the community in which he lives. A philosophizing ego does not cease to be a family member, father, or citizen. Every person lives in a community founded on a concrete certainty and on a ‘‘way of life,’’ and there is no other community for him. At most he can maintain some relations with members of another community. The concrete certainty of a community can

HUSSERL’S MISSION OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THOUGHT

49

assert itself face to face to the certainty of another community only by a conﬂict ﬁnished by the destruction of one of them. So it appears that there is a diﬀerence between the two ways of life. This diﬀerence can be aﬃrmed or denied but the violence reveals it. A philosophizing ego cannot escape this conﬂict and if necessary the philosopher becomes a combatant. So a philosophical attitude is never neutral. Husserl was persuaded of German victory in the 1st World War because teleologically Reason becomes itself. Es ist absolut sicher, dass wir siegen: Diesem Geist, dieser Willensgewalt, kann ... keine Macht der Welt widerstehen! ... Dieses Deutschland ist unbesiegbar.’’21

Husserl changed his opinion on this war after the death of his son in combat. Concerning the concept of ‘‘just war’’, he realized that the 1st World War, as a ‘‘popular war,’’ was qualitatively diﬀerent from preceding wars animated by a military spirit (Polemos?). In spite of its defeat, Germany had to bear up to its world mission for Husserl. Husserl had not written a war paper (as Scheler or Natorp did);22 his ‘‘daimonion’’ dissuaded him of it, but he liked to read such papers. He survived the war as a ‘‘scientiﬁc philosopher’’ acknowledging that he retired to a world of ideas. ... ich bin nicht zum Fu¨hrer der nach ‘seligem Leben’ ringenden Menschheit berufen – im leidensvollen Drange der Kriegsjahre habe ich das anerkenenn mu¨ssen, mein Daimonion hat mich gewarnt. Vollbewusst u. entschieden lebe ich rein als wissenschaﬂtliche Philosophe (ich habe daher keine Kriegsschrift geschrieben, ich ha¨tte das als ein pretentio¨ses Philosophengetue angesehen).23

After the war it was the moral, not ‘‘political’’, rescue of Germany which became the actual problem. From 1925 on, Husserl welcomed the German ‘‘high national idealism’’ again, but at the same time he stated with regrets that a ‘‘false nationalism’’ was being propagated in Germany. The division of the German people into Arian and not Arian had dispossessed him of Germanhood and the aﬀected roots of his being. This was a real ‘‘amputation of body of nation’’. This ‘‘logical absurdity’’ of national socialism signiﬁed for Husserl that its validity cannot be deﬁnitive and universal. He supported this regime as a philosopher when he said: Die Zukunft. wird erst das Urteil sprechen, was 1933 die echte deutsche Gegenwart war, und welches die echten Deutschen waren, ob die Deutschen der mehr oder minder materialistisch-mystischen Rassenvorurteiel oder die Deutschen der reinen Gesinnung, ererbt von den grosssen Deutschen, in verehrungsvollen Nachleben.24

50

JOZEF SIVAK

Who can decide whether somebody is German or not? Ob ich sub specie aeterni ‘Deutscher’, ob meine Philosophie ‘deutsche’ heissen kann und soll, das sehe ich als eine theologische Frage an, die oﬀen bleiben mag fu¨r wen immer; an sich ist sie entschieden.

The author of the Introduction adds: Theologisch deswegen, weil Gott als Entelechie im teleologischen Prozess des Weltgeschehens waltet und dessen unumsto¨sslicher Garant ist.’’25

A hope is set in the future: after the fall of the nazi Regime, his work will be discovered again. He is ‘‘absolutely sure of the future’’, as he writes in 1931. On the basis of a strong conviction, phenomenology encompasses ‘‘an inﬁnite depth and an inﬁnite multitude of problems and discoveries’’, as far as that ‘‘they will create a promised earth of future generations of philosophers’’. He himself is a beginner only and those who come after will be the true beginners and followers of the philosophy as rigorous science. Husserl reacted to this situation by multiplying his working load, the result of which will be the ‘‘Krisis’’.26 On the other hand, he was ready to recognize at least a little spark of Germanhood in national socialism. The second circumstance is Husserl’s Jewish origin. He confessed: Ich bin rein ju¨discher Abstammung, habe aber nie eine konfessionnelle oder ‘vo¨lkische’ Erziehung genossen. Ich habe mich nie anders als Deutsche gefu¨hlt und fu¨hlen ko¨nnen, ich bin von meinen Kinderjahren her mit einem unendlichen Liebe in die Geistigkeit des deutschen Volkes und in ihrem endlosen heerlichen Horizonte ... Mein ganzes Leben, eigentlich von meinem 18. Lebensjahr, spielte sich so ganz ausser Zusammenhang mit dem Judentum ab, dass ich eigentlich Jahrzentelang ... darum vergessen habe, dass ich eingentlich rassenma¨ssig Jude sei.’’27

From the religious point of view, he felt himself converted: more Lutherian than Jewish. He was not an anti-Semite (unlike, allegedly, his wife Malvine28). Given that he obtained permission to go to Vienna and Prague, he thought that the new (nazi) Regime accepted him. He didn’t protest in public against the persecution of intellectuals of Jewish origin. If this origin brought him into a ‘‘negative discrimination’’, there is no relationship between it and his philosophical doctrine.29 Third is the petty bourgeois spirit of Husserl, coming from his middleclass back-round and behaving in accordance with a certain family pattern.30 So a formalism (rituals, etiquette, decency) managed his relations with other people during evening parties, visits, working meetings

HUSSERL’S MISSION OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THOUGHT

51

and seminars at home, recreation stays, etc. On the other hand Husserl’s social origin and manners contradict the Marxist thesis about party and social class principles as determinants of scientiﬁc work. c) A ‘‘pope’’ of phenomenology As we said, Husserl felt that he was called to missionary work in philosophy. However, he will not simply repeat the history of philosophy, but recreate it from the point of view of a universal science. Phenomenology would be ... ein Versuch, die urspru¨ngliche Idee der Philosophie als universaler Wissenschaft (die alle mo¨glichen Sonderwissenschaften in sich fasst) zu erneuern und sie in Form denkbar strengster Wissenschaftlichkeit in systematischen Gang zu bringen.31

For this reason he did not commit himself more, since he would consider truth and science as the highest values: ‘‘the intellect ought to be servant of will also servant ... leader of humanity,’’32 as he writes to Metzger,’’ ... and theories ought to serve to the new world, otherwise they are nothing’’. Yet in 1935, facing his son’s orientation in the ﬁeld of theory of law he characterized his entire work as ‘unpolitisch’.33 So he resigned himself to eﬃciency, to action, and he explains onwards that from Fichte’s time the situation changed and it was no longer possible to be socially eﬀective. In the 20th century, technology makes impossible a direct inﬂuence on people and nation – Husserl scarcely perceived the existence of such inventions as radio. Therefore he aimed at philosophy as theory, which will likewise act practically (‘‘aussertheoretisch’’). His conviction was: ... viele Jahre dauern bis die Pha¨nomenologie bis zu der Ho¨he gebracht ist, dass sie praktisch und weltanschaulich allgemein wirken kann.34

Phenomenology is a ‘‘conception of the world’’ too, but this conception must have the form of a rigorous science as the condition of bringing closer diﬀerent philosophical positions.35 Husserl’s perception of technical domination is even more true at the beginning of this 21st century. This domination is accompanied by the loss of the life world. Only the return to this world would limit, or even overcome, the preponderance of technical rationality. Husserl wanted, ﬁnally, to oﬀer another quality of life, a ‘‘happy life’’, a non-theoretical domain – a ‘‘life of an action according to ideas of spirit’’. Such life was ‘‘for him a norm’’ too.36 The editor states:

52

JOZEF SIVAK

Nicht also das Leben in der Tatenwelt einfachhin, sondern dieses Leben, sofern es nach Ideen sich formt, ist Husserls Ziel.37

Husserl the Platonist is also convinced of an interaction of ideas in a milieu of violence. In reference to national socialist ‘‘ideo-logy’’ he said: Es gibt in der Geschichte wie eine Art echter, unu¨berwindliche Realita¨ten: sie heissen Idealita¨ten.38

Ideas shall ‘‘procreate’’ living people too. A political leader is a true leader, if he follows the idea of the Good, as well as the ideas which philosophers freely discover. Husserl holds quite simply, to the thesis of force if it is backed up by ideals. For him it was a question of the foundations of true practical action. Der scheinbar blosse Theoretiker ist der Praktiker des langen Atems.39

This ‘‘splendid isolation’’ can be understood, according to Schuhmann, also as what the sport terminology says: ‘‘to move backwards to jump better – the longer the start, better to spring’’. He also helps with the French saying: ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’.40 There is another aspect of the relationship between theory and practice: a theory grants a measure of validity for practical aims. Is the world in which cruelties are perpetuated a part of reality, Husserl inquires? He replies by escaping into the world of ideas ‘‘not to see that earthly life.’’41 Because phenomenology is conceived as ‘‘pure’’ he renounces the social eﬃcacy of his thought and of his behavior. In noting that philosophical ideas are not applicable directly, Husserl states Transzendentalphilosophie, eine sehr unnu¨tze Kunst, hilft nicht den Herren und Meistern dieser Welt, den Politikern, Ingenieuren, Industriellen.42

Let us remember what the question is for Husserl: to ﬁnd a foundation for all forms of praxis. Such a search is at the same time a search for certainty which is that of subjective experience, a key for the approach to all reality, including social and political reality. So his paradigmatic philosophical discipline is a philosophy of consciousness with an absolute position of subjectivity. According to M. Walde, Husserl thus prepared a ﬁeld for the further development of phenomenology, namely the passage to a philosophy of existence.43

HUSSERL’S MISSION OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THOUGHT

53

Can we nevertheless refer to him by using Nietzsche’s expression ‘‘Eunuch’’ of lifeless science, as the editor does elsewhere?44 Husserl was persuaded that phenomenology can ﬁll the entirety of historical time and in this sense push out all precedent philosophies – for example, Marxism. On the other hand, he had his doubts, accounting it as necessarily unilateral. This unilaterality results from the necessity of choosing one or the other way, which can be corrected in the course of further development. Afterall, doesn’t the thesis of overcoming all precedent philosophies mean a delirious ‘‘hubris’’, an exaggerated accentuation of ego? In spite of this, Husserl understood his mission as a necessary connection of ‘‘hubris’’ and of ‘‘tragedy’’ through philosophy, seen in his ‘‘philosophical existence’’ (Philosophendaseins).45 Above all he was persuaded that he would succeed in penetrating into the absolute, into the universal unity of being, into the deepest mysteries of subjectivity, which are identical with those of phenomenology. This is another parallel with Hegel.46 If the radicalism of the early Husserl was Cartesian, that of the later Husserl was worthy of Nietzsche, whose program – according to Schuhmann – he brought to life. ... endlich Ja sagen zu ko¨nnen ... vom Zentrum des im Allversta¨dnis sich selbst verstehendvollenden Ich. Ja sagen zu mu¨ssen zum gesamten All bzw. zum eigenen Dasein.’’47

He looked for friends who could help him to be autonomous, on one side, and also behave as models who would have aﬃnity with each other and create a coexistence. According to Husserl, he wasn’t educated enough to harmonize in himself the ‘‘intellectual inclination to autonomy’’ and the ‘‘aﬀective inclination to dependency’’. Such passion and such cooperation required a religious platform. His passage from mathematics to philosophy was inﬂuenced by his religious attitude as well, after his introduction to the New Testament. There is a divine action, on the level of the sense of the world, just as in human existence. Neither philosophy nor science is able to overcome fatality on a national or individual level. A faith full of feeling is needed, a faith in the sense of the world and life. This faith in a certain sense is not separable from religion. ¨ berwindung des Schicksals, das heisst in Sich selbst erproben im Unglu¨ck, durch innere U sich selbst die Go¨ttlichkeit des Daseins erweisen. ... Eben auf diese Innenwendung ist es im Absoluten abgestellt. Sie zu motiviern, und zur Entscheidung, die uns u¨ber uns selbst und unsere Endlichkeit erhebt, darin bekundet sich die Teleologie, die uns und unserer Welt Sinn gibt.48

54

JOZEF SIVAK

According to Husserl’s words, his philosophical life would lead to a philosophy of religion. Because phenomenology is in its infancy, and must ﬁrst resolve all of its scientiﬁc concerns, its way is unreligious, nay ‘‘atheistic’’, although the ﬁnal aim is God. But this phenomenological theology is not a simple continuation of tradition; it will be the ﬁeld of philosophy of inﬁnity. In this sense real philosophy does not diﬀer from theology. Pha¨nomenologische Philosophie als eine in Unendlichen liegende Idee ist natu¨rlich, Theologie. (Fu¨r mich sagt das: echte Philosophie ist eo ipso Theologie.) 49

These last and highest problems which have an inﬁnite horizon, and which overcome human forces, call for an unaccustomed working tension50 and give a philosophical school a speciﬁc dimension and mission for future generations of philosophers. As mentioned above, the sovereignty of thought culminates in a religious attitude and theology. Husserl tried hard to achieve this sovereignty, and to a great degree he also contributed to the sovereignty of German thought itself. All of these problems must be an object of rigorous science. The structure of such science ought to be built ‘‘von unten’’, from below, from the solution of problems of experiencing things, of intersubjectivity, of the foundation of the sciences, of time-consciousness before dealing with issues of God, which have to be provisionally left to the faith. So the engagement of a philosopher must be seen mainly in close connection with the sovereignty of thought; hereby we can explain the persecution of intellectuals, and particularly of philosophers. From a formal logical point of view, Husserl was disgraced because of his racial origin, but, from the dialectical point of view, it was because he became a symbol of the sovereignty of German thought.51 The vicissitudes surrounding the salvage of his ‘Nachlass’ in which the secret and diplomatic services of several countries were involved, conﬁrm it.52 He did not admit any competition (Meinong, Pfa¨nder). He fought for everyone, for each individual who had a comprehension of his philosophy. These included: Spranger, Metzger, H. Kuhn.53 He wanted these souls, educated by him, to create a ‘liebende Gemeinschaft’, a community of love. Such a community cannot be based on either politics or the economics of the capitalism of that time. Therefore in the same letter to Metzger, reacting to his paper comparing such a community with Marxism54 and enchaining it to the ‘radikale Gesinnung’ of ‘‘Ideas’’, Husserl writes ... fest entschlossen ist, das Leben nicht als Handelsgescha¨ft fu¨hren und ansehen zu wollen mit den 2 forlaufenden Rubriken Soll und Haben (in denen das Sollen nichts weiter

HUSSERL’S MISSION OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THOUGHT

55

ausdru¨ckt als Forderungen auf Haben) und die totfeind ist allem ‘Kapitalismus’, allen sinnlosen Aufha¨ufung von Haben und korrelativ allen egoistischen Personwertungen – darin beschlossen Ehren, Ruhm, Stolz – sogar auch Stolz auf reformatorische Einsichten, Ziele, Missionen.’’

Husserl’s feeling of solitude as a philosopher was reinforced more and more toward the end of his life when he characterized himself as a ‘‘leader without followers’’, or as a ‘‘hermit’’.55 It was his radical attitude which did not permit him to be inﬂuenced by his own pupils either. Wir ko¨nnen nur wirklich autonome Selbstdenker brauchen, die sich nichts aufsuggerieren lassen.56

Not a single one of his pupils has understood the constitutive phenomenology enough. So little by little, the missionary, the master and researcher transformed into a ‘‘chief ’’, a framer, even the ‘‘pope’’ of phenomenology.57 A condition of this autonomy, this sovereignty of thought is a liberty – a phenomenologist must assume ‘‘the destiny of liberty, of autonomy’’ – which is to be created by liberating ourselves from the prejudgments of tradition. According to the editor, Husserl’s leadership consisted of aiding others to become autonomous, self-thinkers, for phenomenology is Die oberste Function der auf absolute Selbstverantwortlichkeit, auf Selbstreinigung, eingestellten Menschen: des sich in freien, echt wissenschaftlichem Denken selbst befreien, sich als Menschen selbst stiftenden.58

That‘s the ‘‘archontic function’’ of phenomenology and the community of phenomenologists ought to be composed of self-founding men given that Die Menscheit kann sich nur selbst erlo¨sen, u. sie kann das nur, wenn wir, jeder von uns u. fu¨r sich, die Selbsterlo¨sung vollzieht; wenn wir Einzelne den Mut ﬁnden u. den grossen Willen, unser ganzes Absehen auf Selbsterkla¨rung, Selsbterkenntnis u. dann Selbstreinigung zu richten.59

The circle of phenomenologists is small – that’s true – but they ought to become autonomous thinkers, they ought to found, explain and know themselves. According to Schuhmann, Husserl meant himself ﬁrst of all: In seinem Philosophieren ... beta¨tigte er sich als reiner Selbstdenker und ‘‘Autodidakt’’.60

In fact Husserl does not lose hope and he does not fall into an excessive pessimism. He invests his hope in some students, for instance, Landgrebe,

56

JOZEF SIVAK

Schu¨tz, D. Cairns (‘‘who conquered for us the Americas’’), Fink, a circle which behaved as a sect. But, on the other hand, he does not want to be immune from criticism if it helps to provide a better comprehension of things. 4. A PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOL AS A PHENOMENON

It is impossible to separate the researcher from the teacher, scientiﬁc work from pedagogical work. Husserl evaluated himself pessimistically. In 1904, still in correspondence with his teacher Brentano (without whom he would not have written any line of philosophy), he expressed doubts about his intellectual aptitudes, writing about his: ‘‘stupidity, obscurity and ignorance.’’ Such evaluation is in contradiction with the awareness of his philosophical mission, as well as with his real talent and disposition. He had seen the solution in an ant-like work, in details. However, in 1937, he stated: ‘‘An entire philosophical system has grown’’.61 On the other hand he refused to characterize his phenomenology as a ‘‘system’’ (for example in his correspondence with P. Welch) since the realization of any system in philosophy is not possible. At any rate, Husserl always came up with new plans and projects for his phenomenological philosophy, but he did not realize them all.62 Instead, he launched formulations of new problems and ameliorated his work by suppressing lacunas and through literary elaboration. This literary elaboration produced additional diﬃculties. Already, in the second volume of L ogical Investigations, he admits: ... ich bin gefesselt und kann nicht zusammenschliessen und zum Vollendung bringen.63

And in 1937: Vielleicht lo¨st doch in Gott meine Zunge, dass ich noch sagen kann was in mir u. in so vielen Jahren gewachsen, gereift: ist aber es gilt um wirklich alles in letzten Reife und zum Ganzen zusammengeschlossen zu fertigen u. darzustellen.64

Husserl complained lifelong of an ‘‘absence of literary talent’’. For example, in connection with the Prague Lectures (‘Krisis’ work) he lectured orally but had diﬃculties with setting the material in literary form. He never managed to ﬁnish the work, and it was eventually published on the basis of written unﬁnished manuscripts of variable quality. Hence – for him – a systematic and closed work is impossible.65 This is a striking

HUSSERL’S MISSION OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THOUGHT

57

example of an intellectual as someone who evolves without cessation, but who also gropes, forgets, remembers, falls, raises and falls again. Nevertheless, as a philosophical writer Husserl can serve as a model from several points of view: by the exactitude of his expression, by his discipline, indefatigability, honesty and temperance. His writings are not easy to read; the cause of this is not so much his style, but the problems which he proposed to solve and to which he came back repeatedly.66 Those who don’t give way to despondency will ﬁnd out that these works testify to a penetrating spirit and contain a multitude of ﬁne analyses – after all Husserl was more an analyst than systematizer – as well as being written didactically.67 The dialogue between teacher and students continued in a epistolary way. Husserl’s correspondence with his pupils ﬁlls three volumes.68 He noted that his purported task of a ‘‘guide’’, a ‘‘leader’’ of young philosophers, presumes an education: ... ich bin Fu¨hrer einer von meinen Schriften entsprungenen philosophischen Bewegung, und die treibt in innerer Kraft weiter. Ich muss in meiner akademischen Lehrta¨tigkeit den vielen bedeutenden jungen Philosophen genug thun u. meine Ideen in immer ho¨heren Stufen aussbilden.69

The future depends upon them; they will be his heirs and followers, nay, ‘‘representatives of new spirit’’, ‘‘functionaries of eternity’’. Several schools of study exist already: those of Go¨ttingen, of Munich and of Freiburg. However, in the end these schools will not become followers of this ‘‘hunter of men’’ (K. Schuhmann). Regardless of Husserl’s opinion about his pupils, the history of the phenomenological movement appears as a history of (philosophical) heresies. (P. Ricoeur). Husserl did not analyze the motives and reasons for these divorces, nor did he elaborate a phenomenological pedagogics. On one side he called upon individual self-education and on the other side, he set up the elaboration of his theories to further the development of phenomenology.70 So let us give at least a short outline of Husserl’s teaching. The level and composition of phenomenological study are international: there are correspondents and pupils from all continents, perhaps with the exception of Africa. These schools are born not from ﬁxed ideas but on the basis of philosophizing, of dialogue – the works which arise in this way are to be seen as a cooperative opus. Also the relationship between teacher and pupils was founded on collaboration rather than on authority. However, Husserl set up a condition for participating in his lectures and seminars:

58

JOZEF SIVAK

if one will attempt to understand his teaching and not come with settled beliefs, they would be cordially welcomed. Concerning the practical side of teaching, Husserl laid stress upon seminars. During these seminars he did not endeavour to demonstrate or show something but to evoke an experience of thought and to give the pupils a chance to achieve it.71 According to his words, he wanted ‘‘to lead and not to instruct’’. Instruction was given through stages of development and the interior structure of phenomenology. Before becoming a philosophy of consciousness, phenomenology was a philosophy of common sense. From the phenomenological point of view, the ever present problematic is what is self-evident (‘selbstversta¨ndlich’). An adept of phenomenology has to examine what he sees, hears and touches in his environment: tables, chairs, melodies, cubes, etc.72 The ﬁnal aim of education was to learn a pertinent sight and to become a self-thinker. Meetings with Husserl were never something trivial but always serious work. He encouraged constructive scientiﬁc work, and if someone was working on a doctoral thesis he cared for its being ﬁnished. Moreover, he was interested in the private life of his pupils and friends, namely in their leisure activities, family condition, etc. – this the correspondence shows and conﬁrms. Husserl was an excellent organizer of scientiﬁc work. He was able to carefully choose his assistants and fellow-workers, assigning them to diﬀerent tasks: from creating indexes to editing of texts and stylistic arrangements. Moreover he trusted them completely. Some suggest he may have appropriated the fruits of their work.73 However, to charge Husserl with theft would be ridiculous, he was himself a very hardworking and original writer, who demanded from himself more than from others. Phenomenology appears again as an enterprise with many members. Husserl was the instigator, soul and mover of it. It was Husserl who believed in the force of ideas so much that its further development and propagation was ensured through his pupils. Last but not least we should also remember, that the more frequent use of activities to collaborators is connected with Husserl’s advanced age.74 In all cases, as a research director he diﬀers from today‘s university ‘‘mandarins’’. Schools connected with Husserl’s name not only contrast with the ways of teaching of philosophy and of human science today, but constitute an original phenomenon inside the German university in the ﬁrst thirty years

HUSSERL’S MISSION OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THOUGHT

59

of the 20th century. Let us have a look at the situation in the German university at that time. In Germany a professor of philosophy or theology was treated with respect.75 This social inﬂuence was not due to any politics but to the complete academic liberty, ‘libertas philosophandi ’ which governed German universities since the 18th century. Only a free university can educate free spirits. So the German university became an exclusive place or forum for scientiﬁc work. However, the state reserved to itself a certain right of supervision and limitation of interior university autonomy. As a counterpart to academic liberty and its protection, the state expected a non-political attitude from the teaching staﬀ.76 This division of work or this ‘modus vivendi ’ between the state and universities endured for 150 years, until it was disturbed and misused by national socialist cultural and school politics. It transformed the education into ‘politicum’, the professor into the ‘‘chief ’’ of students and so an ‘‘unoﬃcial’’ philosopher became an ‘‘oﬃcial’’ one. Not a few professors were taken by surprise, for they wished to remain in the non-political role to which they had been habituated. The worst thing is that there was no other alternative: the professor who did engage himself was surprised too, because he ceased to be a professor.77 Thus German society polarized itself. Some expressed hope in new regime, others resisted or became outsiders in virtue of the introduction of the ‘Rassenprinzip’ and ‘Fu¨hrersprinzip’ into education and research.78 In the ﬁrst group we ﬁnd Heidegger,79 in the second, Husserl, who had seen correctly that Nazi Germany is a denationalized Germany. Consequently, the beneﬁciary of this negative evolution in Germany could not be Germany.80 Husserl did not live to see the rise of his phenomenology worldwide, the rise he hoped would happen. Contemporary phenomenological literature, the division of which into primary81 and secondary sources is practically impossible because pupils became classics, represents a vast number of books and periodicals – in footsteps of the famous ‘Jahrbuch’. Add to this a multitude of phenomenological societies, institutes, centers, lectures at many universities and symposiums, including this Congress. One could easily discuss the social impact and actuality of phenomenology today.82 Are these societies and centers, all this editing activity which cannot be enumerated here, monuments erected to the dead? In any case, they would be very expensive monuments, and the Western as well as the Eastern societies aﬀected by mercantilism and proﬁteering would scarcely allow this to happen.

60

JOZEF SIVAK

So we can say that the post-war years were impregnated by phenomenology, which is readily present in the beginning of this 21st century as well. It would seem that Husserl’s expectations concerning the importance of phenomenology and of phenomenologists as ‘‘public servants of humanity’’ – a resuscitated Phoenix of the European spirit – are being fulﬁlled. In reality this is not the case: phenomenology remains only one among many contemporary philosophical movements. From the point of view of subsidy, philosophy and the human sciences occupy the last place after natural sciences, technological disciplines, social sciences and social techniques.83 In spite of this we have the impression that even this small amount of means, which are superior to those available to Husserl,84 are being squandered. In truth, there is no longer a philosophical school such as Husserl’s but simply the teaching of philosophy which is no longer performed according to the model ‘‘teacher–pupil,’’ as in the arts or sports, for example.85 So today people do not say: I go to learn, to work with a professor, but I go to study sojourn, stay, etc. Moreover, the teaching of philosophy through problems and traditions is increasingly rare, replaced by teaching which has to provide simultaneously a topic or to impose a philosopher ‘‘a` la mode’’: human rights, democracy, etc.86 And there are many networks on national and international level specialized in research stays and investing not a few ﬁnancial means.87 5. BY WAY OF A CONCLUSION: A PHILOSOPHER IS NOT A POLITICIAN

Let us ask now in what measure is Husserl’s position as an intellectual reconcilable with the tradition on one hand and what lesson would it provide for us on the other hand. The philosopher is an intellectual, i.e. somebody who learns and progresses ceaselessly. What changes in him is his intellect, which is his instrument. If an intellectual work is destined to humanize itself, its true too that an intellectual is frequently a target of criticism, rouses jealousy and passions, all of those things which he wanted to eliminate. It is a ransom which this kind of work demands. First, an intellectual is a target of destructive criticism on the part of other intellectuals. The history of ideas and of philosophy is at the same time a history of polemics between thinkers and between schools.88 In these polemics we have to distinguish between their verbal or psychological character and the political one, which can end in the elimination of the philosophical life, even in the

HUSSERL’S MISSION OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THOUGHT

61

death of a philosopher. In the last case, the question follows naturally: who is responsible for it? 89 Finally, a honest work will sooner or later be recognized in public, although all controversies cannot be removed from this world. Each intellectual, and particularly a philosopher, represents a portion of the sovereignty of thought of which consists his true engagement.90 In this sense Husserl can serve as an example and as a lesson: an example of the building of such sovereignty and a lesson how to conserve it. Husserl succeeded in reaching a large national and international public as far as he did because he became a symbol of the German sovereignty of thought. That’s a reason why he was disgraced toward the end of his life and why he was ﬁnally and literally stolen from Germany and studied and edited abroad.91 Husserl’s case conﬁrms the validity of another thesis: a philosopher is not a politician. Wisdom should teach philosophers not to enter into political action. If a professor enters into politics, he cannot ever take the program of his party literally, but he can believe in the good intentions of this program, considering a lie as a necessary evil, engendered by the political struggle. In any case, he will limit his liberty of expression: a scientist wishes to express the full truth, while a politician cannot tolerate this.92 With regard to politics, Husserl manifested during those critical years more lucidity than Heidegger, remaining devoted to philosophy and to his ideal. A philosopher is free to choose to enter or not to enter into a politics, with all attendant consequences. And it happens that a philosopher may be engaged in politics.93 However, he should try not to pry into politician’s business or advise politicians at any price. But by necessity – the history of nations testiﬁes to this – a philosopher or a theologian becomes a scientist, a technician, or a politician when there are no such vocations and professionals in a society. The needs of a country generally call forth men to meet them. On the other hand, politics is too serious an aﬀair to be conﬁded to politicians alone. More concretely, a philosopher (and other intellectuals) could and even ought to be interested in the speeches and writings of politicians and try to explain the doctrines and political intentions proposed to a society. A philosopher can speak about political issues as a surveyor and as a historian, about the ways of its solutions in the past and about ways to resolve diﬃculties now. In this sense, for example, a philosopher can speak about a democratic solution, showing the advantages and disadvantages of such a political regime, helping to demolish

62

JOZEF SIVAK

the legends which accompany certain men and certain regimes. By doing this he does not oppose this regime or government but steers attention to the fact that schemas, words, are taken for realities. It seems that the German intelligensia of the thirties – without naming anyone – failed in this respect: they did not perceive that the former division of labor between intellectuals and politicians was not actual any more.94 Now aren’t we, participants to this Congress, in a similar situation, before a ‘fait accompli ’, but in this time on a larger, global level? According to Schuhmann, Husserl’s lofty proposals about new community of men who live in ideas which unify us and create an intentional humanity do not satisfy. In such intentions the elaboration of required ‘‘strategies for humanity’’ (Strategien der Humanita¨t) are absent.95 Although such a reproach could be addressed to many thinkers, Husserl worried about his own autonomy and was aware of a lack of juridical and other mediations, which he reserved to others. Slovak Academy of Sciences NOTES 1 Cf. Husserliana Dokumente vol. III, parts 1–10. K. Schuhmann is also the author of two other publications which reveal the public side of Husserl’s personality and the applied character of his phenomenology: Husserl-Chronik. Denk und Lebensweg Edmund Husserl (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1977; Husserliana Dokumente I) and Husserls Staatsphilosophie (Munich: K. Alber, 1988). However ‘‘engagement’’ and ‘‘application’’ in philosophy are in close connection and often confused, though they are diﬀerent strictly: while an engagement is connected with an autonomy, nay, sovereignty of thought, an applied philosophy completes this thought by oﬀering it to other domains as theory, action, matter, nature. 2 An intellectual in this sense is a member of an elite, of an avant-garde, a non-conformist. He is somebody who, by means of massmedia, wants to inﬂuence public opinion and could be called an idealogue rather than a philosopher. He is often oposed to the philosopher, who leads a disinterested struggle without counterpart and who instead of defending himself at any price builds his habitation with stones throw at him. 3 Cf. R. Halawani, ‘‘Introduction to the philosopher as public intellectual’’, in Metaphilosophy 33, 5 (October 2002). The main points of this piece cover diﬀerent aspects of an intellectuals’s adresses to the public. Philosophical lectures, in magazines and journals, appearances on popular televison programs, speaking about his own issues or those that the public is interested in (politics, patriotism, homosexuality, etc.) make up the main avenues of public expression. 4 Lifelong he worked more than 14 hours a day, and at seventy years old still 8–9 hours daily, in trance, with ‘furor philosophicus’. 5 Husserl an Kuhn, 18.II. 1935, Husserliana Dokumente III, part 6, p. 239 sq. 6 Ibid., part 10, p. 40. 7 Husserl an Bell, 18.IX. 1921, ibid., part 3, p. 25.

HUSSERL’S MISSION OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THOUGHT

63

8 Namely J. Habermas, V. Farias and P. Bourdieu, who alledged that Heidegger‘s Nazi past did not diﬀer from his work. 9 According to V. Janke´le´vitch a philosopher is one who makes what he said. If such a deﬁniton of philosopher’s behavior is not an ideal, the realization of it would not be without sacriﬁces. 10 In another letter to Ingarden, Husserl wrote in 1933: ‘‘The philosopher is an ethical personality only, or he is nothing.’’ 11 Thanks to Husserl’s correspondence we learn about several depressive periods brought on by nervosity, overwork and nicotine. In a letter he confesses that with L ogical Investigations he took care of himself. 12 Ibid., part 10, p. 11. 13 Ibid., part 10, p. 13. The L ogical Investigations, with the idea of ‘mathesis universalis’ and the Cartesian Meditations with the project of ‘‘monadology’’ testify to Leibniz’s inﬂuence, whom Husserl knew by the intermediary of Herbart, an authorised philosopher in Austria, unlike Hegel. 14 Ibid., part 10, p. 13. 15 Ibid. 16 Husserl an Rickert, 21.XI. 1912; ibid., part 5, p. 172. 17 Husserl an Darkow, 25.II. 1923; ibid., part 9, p. 168. 18 Husserl an Mahnke, 23.IV. 1921; ibid., part 3, p. 430. 19 Nowadays the relationship between nationalism and universality is much discussed once again. 20 Husserl an Mahnke, 17.X. 1921; ibid., part 3, p. 432,; cf. too part 8, p. 15, and part 6, p. 155. 21 Husserl an C. und H. Husserl, 17.VII. 1914; ibid., part 9, p. 289. 22 Cf. Max Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges und der deutsche Krieg and Paul Natorp, Deutscher Weltberuf. 23 Husserl an Arnold Metzger, 4. IX. 1919; ibid., part 4, p. 409. 24 E. und M. Husserl an Mahnke, 4./5.V. 1933; ibid., part. 3, p. 494. 25 E. und M. Husserl an Baudin, 26.V./ 8.VI.1934; ibid., part 7, p. 14. 26 With works such as ‘Krisis’ Husserl extends and completes his formal eidetic systematics toward a philosophy of matter or noematics. 27 Husserl an Mahnke, 17.X. 1921, ibid., part 3, p. 432. In this context, one could be curious to know the origin of Husserl‘s name (cf. J. Ku¨ndel, ‘‘E. Husserls Heimat’’, in Archiv fu¨r Geschichte der Phil., 1969). Going back to the oldest predecessor’s, the family name Husserl would proceed from ‘hussen’, to move quickly, to compete. Hence ‘‘Huss-er-l’’, a little competitor. Otherwise it was his Jewish origin which led Husserl to emigrate to Germany, i.e. Austrian anti-Semitism. Paradoxically it will be soon topped by anti-Semitism in Germany. According to W. M. Johnston, author of T he Austrian Mind. an Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938 (The Regents of the University of California 1972) there is another reason: not only Jews leave Austria for Germany, but anti-Semites, their ‘Doppelga¨nger’ did too. 28 This characteristic, due to Levinas and to one visit is perhaps exaggerated. 29 That will not stop certain Jewish intellectuals from recovering Husserl as a Jewish philosopher and from reproaching him for his inﬁdelity. 30 This petty bourgeois attitude of Husserl’s came out also in the question of women‘s access to habilitation.

64

JOZEF SIVAK

31 Ibid., part 6, p. 181. That means Husserl is persuaded that the epoch of science was already opened by Plato, and not by Aristotle only. 32 Ibid., part 10, p. 16 33 Brief an Gerhart Husserl, 5.VII. 1935; ibid., part 9. 34 Husserl an Albrecht, 26. XI. 1934; ibid., part 9, p. 111. Thoughts are acting not only in theoretical philosophy but in religion too, as justiﬁed by the confession of faith: ‘‘I confess ... that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed ...’’ 35 According to an apropriated expression of Natorp, who specialized in Plato: ‘‘Nicht die Philosophen sollen Ko¨nige, aber Philosophie soll Ko¨nigin sein’’ (apud Schuhmann, Husserls Staatsphilosophie, p. 166). 36 Ibid., part 6, p. 94. 37 Ibid., part 10, p. 16 38 Husserl an Grimme, 4. II. 1933; ibid., part 3, p. 97. 39 Ibid., part 10, p. 25. 40 Ibid. 41 Husserl an Albrecht, 12. IV. 1919; ibid., part 9, p. 56. 42 Cf. Hua VII, p. 283; apud Schuhmann, op. cit., p. 161. 43 ‘‘Es ist gleilchwohl (unfreiwilige) Verdienst Husserls, dass er die Aporien der Subjetivita¨tsphilsophie so weit radikalisiert hat, dass Heidegger und Sartre die Pha¨nomenologie existentialanalytisch reformieren ko¨nnten.’’ (M. Walde, ‘‘Krise und Therapie. Zur Aktualita¨t von Edmund Husserls Pha¨nomenologie’’, in Merkur, 42 (1988/4): 342–347. 44 K. Shuhmann, Husserl’s Staatsphilosophie, p. 19. 45 E. und M. Husserl an Mahnke, 4./5.V. 1933; ibid., part 3 p. 492. 46 G.W.F. Hegel, Pha¨nomenologie des Geistes. (Hamburg 1952), p. 129, apud. Schuhmann, op. cit., part 10, p. 46. 47 Husserl an Panwitz, 28./29.XI.1934; ibid., part 7, p. 221; cf. also F. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, No 6.; apud Schuhmann, op. cit., part 10, p. 46 48 Husserl an Landgrebe, 12. XI. 1931; ibid., part 4, p. 275 sq. 49 Husserl an Feuling, 30.III.1933; ibid., part 7, p. 88. 50 ‘‘... was ich vorhabe, geht fast u¨ber menschliche Kraft und Zeit.’’ (Husserl an Albrecht, 3. VI. 1932; ibid., part 9, p. 82 sq.) 51 So the defeat of Germany didn’t begin with Stalingrad but with the coming of Nazism, and is motivated by taking away and acquisition of German intellectuals. 52 Posthumously, Husserl’s fatherland became, ﬁnally but not easily, Belgium. Also, for example Russians wanted the Husserlian manuscripts to remain in Prague. If that were the case, perhaps the philosophical life in former Czecho-Slovakia and the Soviet Union would be diﬀerent. It was not allowed: paradoxically the victorious country would remain in the straight jacket of an imported ideology, with the aid and participation of many Western intellectuals, who engaged themselves on the soil of Marxism and helped the Soviet Union‘s dominating ideology rather than overcoming it. 53 We can cite other names who testify to an opening of phenomenology towards the state, politics, law, sociology: A. Reinach and Husserl’s son Gerhardt as lawyers, E. Stein (phenomenology of religion), A. Vierkandt, H. Freyer and I. Altaray as sociologists. 54 A. Metzger, Die Pha¨nomenologie der Revolution. Eine politische Schrift u¨ber den Marxismus und die liebende Gemeinschaft; republished in Pha¨nomenologie der Revolution (Frankfurt a.M.: Fru¨he Schriften, 1979).

HUSSERL’S MISSION OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THOUGHT

65

55 ‘‘I have become a philosophical hermit’’. [Briefe an Roman Ingarden, ed. R. Ingarden. (The Hague: Nijhoﬀ, 1968), p. 79. 56 Apud Schuhmann, Einfu¨hrung in die Ausgabe, part 10, p. 29. 57 In this way he will be followed, though in a diﬀerent sense, by another ‘‘pope’’, that of existentialism, Sartre, who without being a university teacher, ruled the French university for several decades. 58 Ibid., p. 30. (also cf. part 4, p. 439). 59 Ibid., p. 30 (also cf. part. 3, p. 218 sq.). 60 Ibid., part 6, p. 460. 61 E. und M. Husserl an Albrecht, 22.12. 1931; ibid., part 9, p. 79. 62 He elaborates such plans from 1906 until 1935. 63 Husserl an Albrecht, 1. VII. 1908; ibid., part 9, p. 41. 64 Husserl an Panwitz, 14. IV.1937; ibid., part. 7, p. 227. 65 We can say so much about the entire work of Husserl and namely his ‘Nachlass’ of which he wished someone to take care of. First it would be Heidegger, then Fink and Prager. So the creator became the administrator of his own work. 66 One must read his works on three levels: principal text, supplements and critical notes. All critical editions have this three-stage structure. 67 His ‘Nachlass’ is a result of monologue styled meditations. The fact that Husserl meditated by writing may seem to certain commentators uninimaginable. Was not the spiritual view, i.e., intuition, the paradigm of phenomenology? Does not the written manifestation carry the risk of disturbing the wholeness and evidence of this view? In our opinion, these are not incompatible activities. Not only did Husserl consider an intuition as forming its own object, but the language was for him a constitutive essence, a means of the constitution of sense. On the other hand, the expressed sense can be a starting point of reﬂection. Does an improvising musician or orator make something diﬀerent? Isn’t it an improvisation that can get over this abyss between intuition and expression? An improvisation is neither a judgment nor intuition, but a creation which exceeds the diﬀerence between essence and existence. Husserl mastered such improvising as a writer and as a lecturer. 68 Cf. ibid. III/2: Die Mu¨nchener Pha¨nomenologen; III/3: Die Go¨ttinger Schule; III/4: Die Freiburger Schule. 69 Husserl an Darkow, 22, XII. 1920; ibid., part 9, p. 162. 70 Among phenomenologists it was, for example, S. Strasser, phenomenologist of the ﬁrst generation, who took interest in pedagogical phenomenology; cf. Erziehungswissenschaft – Erziehungsweisheit (Munich: Ko¨sel-Verlag, 1965). 71 M. Heidegger opened new perspectives of this experience of thought. We can also cite J. Patocˇka who practised what he learned in Freiburg. (Cf. Our essay ‘‘Un philosophe du monde naturel: Jan Patocˇka 1907–1977’’, Analecta Husserliana XXVII, p. 582). 72 For example, A. Reinach together with students devoted an entire semester to phenomenolgical descriptions of one object only: a letter box. 73 There is Ingarden‘s statement, which leads us to posit such a question. Ingarden, who was at ﬁrst Husserl‘s pupil before his passage to the Go¨ttingen school of phenomenology and who thanks his principal work Die Streit um die Existenz der Welt to Husserl ﬁrst of all, said at the occasion of a colloquy in Royaumont (in 1959) in France, that Husserl asked him to ‘‘edit’’ a manuscript (about time), but he refused it. 74 For example, when he entrusted E. Stein with elaborating his lectures and notes about time, it was in 1917, when he approached sixty years of age.

66

JOZEF SIVAK

75 Husserl himself proﬁted by this tradition: with his nomination as professor at the University in Freiburg in 1916, he obtained the title ‘‘secret court advisor’’ (Geheime Hofrat) from the Prussian king of that time, who awarded him also (in 1918) the Cross for merit during the 1st World War. Husserl lectured at that time within the framework of curriculums for participants in war. Concerning the title of advisor, Husserl did not advise any local politicians, at most he let himself be adressed so in several letters. 76 It happened that the faculty vouched for a professor who was engaged politically in any way but the last and decisive word belonged to the ministry. 77 Politicians and generals abdicated earlier. Especially high oﬃcers had seen – and several among them contributed to it – that the army was politicized but they refused any action against Hitler on the basis of the attitude of a German oﬃcer, who was traditionally unpolitical. So they missed the moment where they could refuse to give the army to Hitler. 78 In spite of this, the German scientiﬁc and technical potential is, until approximatily 1939, always superior to that of Great Britain and the USA, until it is weakened by the following things: a dispersion, central managing, departures in exiles and war conditions. Also philosophy remains as far as a society is not completely violent. 79 According to K. Jaspers, Heidegger entered into the service of politics because ‘‘he wanted to lead the Fu¨hrer’’. It shows much that hermeneut Heidegger was unable to read a political reality. His ‘Rektoraatsrede’ contains a true diagnostic of the German university in the course of its politicization, but the connecting of the declared need for the autonomy of the university with ‘Fu¨hrership’ was problematic. It was simply too late to establish the organic relation between a sovereignty of thought and state sovereignty. 80 Like twenty years ago Russia was deprived – it did not deprive itself – of its intelligentsia with the rise of imported ideology. 81 The critical edition of Husserl’s Collected Works has surpassed 30 thick volumes and ten additional volumes are still being planned. 82 A philosophical school is actual so long as its terminology, its language is able to reﬂect on recent developments of science. Such an aim is followed in the monograph series Research in Phenomenology, which deals with phenomenogical philosophy as scientiﬁc philosophy. For example, cf. B. Frydberg, ‘‘What Becomes of Science in ‘the Future of Phenomenology’?’’, in Reseach in Phenomenology, 32 (2002): 219–229. 83 The decline of philosophy goes hand in hand with a degradation of science into ‘‘technoscience’’. And the most recent philosophical streams of poststructuralism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and postmodernism are modiﬁcations of those precedents under the inﬂuence of politics, ideology, science, language and money. 84 For the purpose of characterizing the relationships between the work and reward at that time we are seduced by such adage in French: ‘‘penser plus en de´pensant moins’’. 85 There are worldwide several philosophical colleges with a long tradition (Oxford, Ecole normale supe´rieure of Paris, Louvain, ...) but out of it, excepting accidental encounters, adepts of philosophy are taken in by philosophical ignorance. As if it would not be allowed for anyone to eat of the tree of knowledge. 86 So the ideologisation of the teaching of philosophy did not cease with the fall of communist ideology. That is the general impression given by such ambitious publications as T eaching Philosophy on the Eve of the T wenty-ﬁrst Century, D. Evans and I. Kuc¸uradi (eds.) (Ankara: FISP, 1998). 87 Thus we cannot help an impression that ignorance is intentionally sponsored. 88 The conﬂict between Husserl and Pfa¨nder or Heidgger are nothing extraordinary in comparison with those between Aristotle and Plato, Pascal and Descartes, Kant and Leibnitz, followers of Hegel and those of Schelling, etc.

HUSSERL’S MISSION OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THOUGHT

67

89 Husserl had a presentiment that Nazi ideology was not German because in the contrary case it would signify that, for example, ﬁsh themselves would want to pour the water out of their lake. 90 Is there a solution of an organic relationship between state sovereignty and that of thought? According to Schuhmann, the state as power must become an object of phenomenological variation and description: ‘‘Die Pha¨nomenologie wandelt durch umwertendes Umdenken (..) die a¨ussere Macht des Staates um in die der Selbsterkenntnis aus Vernunft. Als Verwirklichung der alles unterspannenden Ideen macht muss sie darum ihrerseits die leitende Funktion im menscheitlichen Leben beanspruchen. Damit erhebt sich das pha¨nomenologische Denken aber nicht in imperialistischer Weise u¨ber die anderen ¨ usserlichkeit entgegen.’’ Bewusstseinssubjekte, denn es setzt sich ihnen nicht als eine neue A (Husserl’s Staatsphilosophie, p. 166). 91 So Husserl was preceded by another of Germany’s ‘‘gifts’’ to the world, a gift somewhat poisoned. 92 So Sartre, in spite of his militantism and his Marxism, refrained from joining the French Communist Party: as unpolitical he was more eﬃcacious and useful to this party than as a member. 93 Then he will have to reconcile in himself a man of action with a man of reﬂection, a very diﬃcult perhaps impossible ideal. Throughout history we can ﬁnd hardly someone who would be successful at it. Gandhi, perhaps? 94 Let us think of the destiny of such book as ‘Mein Kampf ’, printed in the millions so that its author was the best payed one in Germany! Who among these millions of German and mainly among philosophers read and analysed it thoroughly? 95 Cf. K. Schuhmann, Husserl’s Staatsphilosophie, p. 177.

NICOLETTA GHIGI

THE TASK OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE VOCATION OF THE PHILOSOPHER FOR HUMAN LIFE IN HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

1. ORIGIN OF THE TASK: FROM THE NATURAL TO THE THEORETICAL ATTITUDE

In an epoch like the one we are living in today, which fatally seems to repeat the situation after the ﬁrst World War which Husserl spoke of as ‘‘our tormented present’’,1 great urgency seems to attach to Husserl’s concept of the signiﬁcance and ethical value of humanity. ‘‘This war, humanity’s most universal and profound guilt in all its history’’, so Husserl wrote in those years, ‘‘has brought out the impotence and inauthenticity of all the ideas’’.2 In the direction of a ‘‘universal education of humanity’’,3 with a view towards conferring coherence and sense upon those ideas and, in general, upon culture as such, it is essential that the philosopher, who by his very nature has the task of helping man towards the realization of his humanity, should ﬁnd strength in the faith that every nation has to have, ‘‘in itself and in the beauty and goodness and good sense of its cultural life’’.4 To rediscover faith in one’s own traditions and, more generally, in all endeavours aimed at human realization, is thus the ﬁrst and fundamental purpose of philosophical activity and, therefore, also of philosophy as such. Nevertheless, as Husserl warned: ‘‘Every radical renewal of humanity in the direction of an autonomous humanity presupposes a radical philosophy’’, in other words, a philosophy that has the ‘‘liberation of mankind’’ as its goal and, at one and the same time, sets out to attain this objective in a radical, ‘‘scientiﬁc manner’’.5 The involvement of the philosopher in life and, even before that, the redeﬁnition of his objectives in this radical sense therefore delineate themselves as even more essential. Now, a possible analysis of the absolute uniqueness of the philosopher’s task and therefore of the professional character of this calling (such as to be also simple, to translate into the terms of an authentic vocation),6 according to Husserl, has to look ﬁrst of all to its beginning, that is to say, to the ‘‘pre-philosophic period’’ or the operativeness of natural man. Its signiﬁcance does not therefore derive tout court from the birth of 69 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 69–79. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

70

NICOLETTA GHIGI

philosophy, but rather reveals itself even before its eﬀective appearance in human history and, more precisely, when men lived a ‘‘natural life’’, ‘‘characterized as a straightforwardly naive living into the world’’,7 in accordance with a natural attitude. As Husserl puts it: ‘‘in an attitude that comes quite naturally to the historically factual humanities, the internal and external situation of these humanities, once it has become concrete, must at a certain moment give rise to motives that will at ﬁrst motivate individual men and groups within them to change their ways’’.8 Now, before analyzing these motives and the particular situation that determines the evolution of mankind towards philosophy, let us try to understand the signiﬁcance of this particular attitude, the attitude peculiar to man’s origin. Husserl goes on to explain: ‘‘In general terms, ‘attitude’ means a habitually solidiﬁed style of life of the will in thereby pretraced directions of the will or interests, ultimate purposes, cultural achievements, the overall style of which is thus already determined’’.9 In other words, even the natural attitude, like the more speciﬁcally philosophical one, is characterized, as we shall see, by ‘‘moving towards something’’ as ‘‘objective’’ or ‘‘means’’, always in the horizon of the world, but with the diﬀerence that in this case the world or the attitude itself is not thematized at all, is not considered as a theme in itself. In this sense, the interests and the ends peculiar to the natural attitude can be said to be wholly practical precisely on account of their being strictly concerned with the sphere of day-to-day life and the ‘‘temporally limited’’. For this reason, according to Husserl, the natural attitude, quite apart from being profoundly practical in the sense that has just been delineated, is also altogether individualistically relative, that is to say, is bound up not only with the various populations, but even more so with individual men in particular situations, the expressions of which always evoke the same ‘‘natural need’’, albeit expressed in diﬀerent ways, of the natural attitude. The passage from this attitude to an attitude that is not merely concerned with the practical sphere as the primary object of its interest matures, according to Husserl, in the course of history and, more speciﬁcally, Greek history, as the result of a cultural upheaval; in particular, due to contact betweem populations10 and, even before that, the mythicoreligious formulation of superhuman entities. It is this attitude that, by means of the creation of fantastic images of superhuman entities and imagined stories of these entities that act as explanation of natural events, provides the functional answers to the questions that man sets himself regarding the things he cannot immediately explain.11 It is clear, as

HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

71

Husserl goes on to observe, that this attitude is not wholly displaced from the practical sphere, inasmuch as the functionality as it were, of the created mythical forces that are deemed to be really operating, is concerned with the world of practical interests, with natural day-to-day life. In a certain sense, therefore, the world becomes ‘‘practically thematic’’, because in this second phase of humanity, i.e., ‘‘in this practical mythical knowledge of the world’’, the world is eﬀectively thematized in a universally valid manner, so that the mythico-practical notions that men furnish about it in this attitude can be said to be universally valid for them and, for this reason, ‘‘have to be considered as scientiﬁc, because they derive from a scientiﬁc and experimental knowledge of the world’’.12 The thematization of the world, though still bound up with its practical functionality, subsequently made possible a further thematization derived from a ‘‘non-practical’’ attitude that concerned itself with a purely abstract world: here we have the theoretical attitude that gave rise to philosophy. Husserl explains this second passage from the mythico-practical attitude to the theoretical attitude in the following terms: ‘‘A decisive breach with this universal, but mythico-practical attitude was represented by the ‘theoretical’ attitude’’, non-practical in every sense, the attitude of the hauma´ fein, to which the great thinkers of the ﬁrst conclusive phase of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, attributed the origin of philosophy’’.13 In this new attitude the objective of human interests is concerned primarily with the ‘‘pure theoretical activity’’ by means of which man observes the world in its totality, trying to construct an eﬀectively valid and referential knowledge of it. Thus, the man ‘‘who observes’’ becomes a philosopher ‘‘or, rather, on this basis his life opens to the motivations that are possible only in this atttude, to new ends and methods of thought, so that philosophy eventually comes into being and he becomes a philosopher’’.14 In other words, observation, i.e., theoretical activity, comes into being in connection with a gnoseological need of the individual, but its peculiar feature is not by any means its detachment from the world, but rather precisely this remaining in practical life in order to be able to explain its signiﬁcance and its ends.15 The ‘‘discovery’’ of a ‘‘theory’’ does not therefore come into being in any way as a refusal of practical life, but rather as the natural result of, as it were, an ‘‘internal’’ need of naturalness itself. But, if observation is concerned with concrete things, why is it that ‘‘theory’’ ends up becoming explicated as an abstract explanation of the ideal? And, above all, why did it end up by becoming counterposed to

72

NICOLETTA GHIGI

its own natural source, that of the originary hauma´ fein, thus becoming its own objective foundation?

2. BIRTH OF THE PHILOSOPHER’S VOCATION AND THE UNATTAINED OBJECTIVE

Let us recapitulate the previous analyses, adding a further distinction within the evolutionary process of mankind. From a natural attitude, man has evolved to a forma mentis such as to create a world ‘‘of its own right’’, abstract, that is the ideal reference of the everyday world (of everydayness). Subsequently, and in the light of this ideality, a substantial diﬀerence has come to be counterposed between what is called opinion (regarding the world of practical interests), i.e., the doxa, and the ideal world of ideal truths, of objectivity, the episteme, which can be recognized even in its diversity (that is to say, in confrontation with other peoples (nations) for whom, notwithstanding the diﬀerent interpretations, the concept of the Universe in its own is always valid). As Husserl notes: ‘‘With this ﬁrst emergence of the identical entity (and, more precisely, not as emergence of the identical in mere particulars, as is suggested by the traditional and universal bond as myth in the unity of a world-embracing myth, but rather as globally universal) over man’s being in tradition, we thus have the ﬁrst and universal transformation of being in its day-today sense, a mere subjectively mutable and traditional understanding of being.’’16 The philosopher works in the direction of this objectivity working with his curiosity for the facts of the world, and therefore with observations of phenomena and happenings that occur in it. This assumes a ‘‘disinterested’’ attitude vis-a`-vis the world that aims only at the revelation of universally valid, ideal truths. ‘‘Thus, through individual personalities like Thales, etc., there comes into being a new humanity, men who, by means of philosophical life, create a new cultural form’’,17 and this is followed by a ‘‘professional community of philosophers’’ and then a series of philosophical schools that ‘‘discuss’’ the philosophical systems and formations of their founders. Now, in this state of things, the man who observes the world with curiosity becomes transformed into the philosopher-man, that is to say, the man who has chosen, by vocation, to work ‘‘on philosophy’’ and therefore to exercise a profession intended to render observations universally truthful and objectively valid.

HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

73

‘‘There thus comes into being a particular humanity and, in connection with the operations of a new culture, a particular profession. Philosophical knowledge of the world does not only produce these results of a particular kind, but also a speciﬁc attitude that soon came to involve, also all the other aspects of human life, all its needs and purposes, with all the purposes of historical tradition. ... There is thus formed a new and intimate community, one might say a community of purely ideal interests – men who live by philosophy. ...’’18 At this moment, therefore, there comes into being also a purely philosophical tradition based on that attitude (Haltung), that is to say, on the will of arriving at an ever more perfect ideality, which every philosophical system has as its objective. Nevertheless, as Husserl goes on to explain, it is precisely from the formation of this tradition that there derive the ﬁrst fundamental misunderstandings. Unlike other professions, philosophy does not change over the course of time and is not subject to plural meaning and goals, but is singular in its focus, one and the same for all time, growing and becoming enriched throught the epochs but without in any way modifying either its originary task or its ends. ‘‘The intention of philosophy. Can a craft have the same scope as another? Shoemaker or philosopher? The boot and the philosophy of history. Change of the traditional historical purposes ... but the diﬀerence (consists of this): that the boot of one is not the boot of another, while philosophy is just one, if it truly is philosophy’’.19 In other words, if each one elaborates a truth of his own and claims it to be the only valid one, we do not have philosophy, but precisely the fabrication of objects that diﬀer from each other in time, while their functionality remains the same. And it is precisely in this sense, inasmuch as it is the explication of the sense of life, that philosophy has to be at the base of every ‘‘functionality’’ and of every ‘‘ambition’’; it is to this end that the vocation of the philosopher must be dedicated. Philosophers have to become conscious of the fact that the objective of their work is that of founding the absolute premise, the pre-condition that constitutes the foundation of all diversities and, consequently, the sole ‘‘universal knowledge’’, founded in a deﬁnitive manner, intersubjectively, by common asset and positive science’’.20 If it does not reach to this, the profession of the philosopher remains far from attaining its objective and, in this way, perpetuates a tradition that can only reiterate the originary errors and misunderstandings, which, for their part, confound the vocation of the philosopher and, perhaps, even disregard it altogether.

74

NICOLETTA GHIGI

Indeed, the history of philosophy shows that the discovery of ideality, that is to say, the theoretical attitude that, as we saw, goes back to the ancient world, invests the activity of the philosopher to the point of ensuring that, right from the ﬁrst moment and then in an ever more pronounced manner the process of objectivization became extended even to the world ‘‘of the spirit’’, so much so as to subject even this sphere to a particular mathematization. And, according to Husserl, this constitutes an ingenuity even more profound than that of the ﬁrst philosophers and their non-scientiﬁc truths. Indeed, the ideal truths of mathematics always come into being in relation to men in particular contexts and are therefore wholly ‘‘subjective-relative’’. ‘‘The truth ‘in se’ of science’’, as Derrida explains in this connection, ‘‘is nevertheless truth of the subjective-relative world in which it has its basis’’.21 For this reason, its scientiﬁcness can never attain the truth in an objective manner. And, when it is unaware of the obvious and forgetful of its originary and purely theoretical purpose, this idealizing attitude becomes transmitted to the modern epoch, where it ends up by retaining the spirit to be ‘‘real’’ and is thereby founded on a unique causality: ‘‘The sense of the rational explanation is everywhere the same, but in such a manner that any explanation of the spirit, if it is to be unique and therefore universally philosophical, has to lead back to the physical sphere’’.22 In this sense, therefore, in contrast with its own intention, completely forgetful of ‘‘the intuitive world around us’’ and, consequently, of the ‘‘operating subject’’, the philosopher’s profession has become characterized as a way of hiding the authentic signiﬁcance of the originary task of philosophy, which was centred on man, on his rational capacity of understanding the world around him or, put in other words, the spirit of humanity. 3. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ATTITUDE AND TRADITION

‘‘There had to come a philosopher who became conscious of the fact that possession of the philosophical task due to an inherited tradition, from school or from literary teaching, does not yet mourn the intellectively evident possibility (einsichtige Mo¨glichkeit) of the task and not even, what amounts to the same thing, the method given only together with this insight (Einsicht), a philosopher becomes conscious also of the fact that philosophy, as a personal project, is a personal responsibility and can be realized only by personal and responsible action. And again: a philosopher who is thereby motivated to elevate himself critically not only beyond historical tradition (and therefore, ﬁrst of all, to exercise an epoche` in

HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

75

relation to it), but [... to do this ...] also and a priori (vorweg) as regards his own task, the task that guides his professional life – because even in this task there is a prejudice delving from tradition as regards the possibility of carrying it out and possibly also as regards the hitherto practiced method, since this, too, derives from tradition’’.23 Only if philosophy becomes a personal intention, free – and altogether free – of the crystallization of tradition and the mistaken assumptions it conserves as it transmits itself from one epoch to another, will it be possible to bring the theoretical attitude inspired by the haumafein, back to its originary purity. In other words, only if the philosopher decides to assume this responsibility of elevating himself beyond tradition and reproposing the objectives of philosophy in their authenticity, will a philosophical method become possible, that is to say, a method that refuses assumptions and has as its objective awareness of the inﬁnite and, at one and the same time, the scientiﬁc nature of philosophical research. And, even more so, when he elevates himself beyond tradition, the philosopher has to operate an epoche` also as regards his personal methodological prejudices, because – even in his particular choices and his natural positions – there is, as it were, an implicit ‘‘preconceived residue’’ of the tradition. In this connection Husserl notes: ‘‘Only when the spirit recedes from the naive attitude that is directed outwards and returns to itself, remaining with itself and purely with itself, can it do justice to itself ’’.24 ‘‘The tradition or, better, the valuation of tradition has for these reasons to be preceded by a self-consideration (Selbstbesinnung), that is to say, a critical activity of a higher order, in which each act and each attainment of my ego critically explicits its sense’’.25 It is this self-consideration that makes possible a critical or authentically historical consideration of the tradition that will retrospectively be able to arrive at the very origins of its own formation, reaching its pre-conditions. Now, it is precisely in this surrounding pre-scientiﬁc world that there are to be found the obvious things, i.e., the absolutely obvious certainties that have to constitute the focal point of the considerations regarding the method of all philosophical research. Indeed, the method cannot but spring from awareness of these obvious things and their inﬁnite reach. Consequently there springs, from awareness of the inﬁnity and unattainability of a deﬁnitive truth in the ﬁeld of the science of the spirit, as Husserl puts it, ‘‘ ‘a science of the spirit’ that is objective in the sense of attributing to souls, to the personal communities an existence in the form of space-time has never existed, nor will it ever exist’’.26

76

NICOLETTA GHIGI

In this sense, therefore, tradition and the schools that have formed in contraposition to each other in the attempt to arrive at objective truth, each claiming to have produced the true philosophy, have done nothing other than prevent philosophy from really constituting itself as science, the sole true and absolute science, i.e., constructed on such a self-consideration. Pursuing the logical coherence of the systems, in fact, the ‘‘history of ideas’’ has produced a method conceived to be objective, but is altogether incongruent in relation ‘‘to the man who philosophizes’’ and decidedly useless as regards requests for the sense of his life. On the other hand, as was obvious at its beginning from the natural attitude, the objective and the task of philosophical research are wholly relative to that originary theoretical attitude, which – when sustained by self-consideration – can undoubtedly become transformed into a phenomenological attitude. This is based precisely on that egological awareness vis-a`-vis the world that, among others, is the only one capable of providing a method for ‘‘grasping the original signiﬁcance and fundamental sense of philosophy’’.27 For this reason, the phenomenological attitude must be the objective of the scientiﬁc research of the philosopher and his life must concern itself responsibly with the comprehension of the spirit that permeates human existence and calls for being rendered explicit in all its existential and ontological importance. 4. THE PHILOSOPHER’S TASK AS A V OCAT ION FOR L IFE

But, how does one arrive at this responsibility? And what is its ultimate end, the mission of the philosopher? As we noted, it is only in the phenomenological attitude, that springs from a transcendental consideration of life, that it becomes possible to realize a method that aims at constructing an authentic philosophy. The task of the philosopher, i.e., the sense of his professional approach, is therefore that of ﬁnding the value and speciﬁcity of this authenticity by analyzing ‘‘the structure of the universal terrain that is the world of experience’’.28 But as we said before, this process has to take into account, ﬁrst of all, a historical consideration, a critique of the assumption of the tradition and, following this critique of the assumptions, go on to disclose the authentic sense of philosophy in relation to that world of experience. ‘‘Here’’, as Husserl tells us, ‘‘by considering the world and the world that surrounds life ... it soon comes to the fore that this world is given only as a horizon, that it can have a cognitive sense only inasmuch as it is an inﬁnite idea’’,29 namely that its peculiarity, the peculiarity of tracing

HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

77

the sense of philosophy, cannot he anything other than an ideal, an inﬁnite idea that one longs for without ever attaining it as a total possession. ‘‘It would be a preconceived idea to hold tout court, as Descartes does, that the ideal of a philosophy can be realized. ... In the ego there is included an apodictic inﬁnity; conceiving it as synthetically exhaustible by means of a progressus in inﬁnitum would be an absurdity’’.30 Against the philosophy of decay (Verfallphilosophie), against everything that diﬀers and moves away from the sense of life, from the value and the needs of humanity that, in life, in the world around it, aims at realizing itself in its objectives, the philosopher has to adopt the phenomenological attitude, the attitude of consciousness of self-consideration and awareness of being and, on the other hand, awareness that he cannot be anything other than in life. Only in this way can his mission be performed. Indeed, when this inﬁnite idea becomes thematized, when the sense revealed by it becomes evident, when man in the light of a self-consideration will want to live his existence in relation to his humanity, his instincts and also his reason, the philosopher will truly be able to consider his mission as complete. Only then, and only by virtue of this realization, philosophy will at long last set out on the road to its scientiﬁc foundation, that is to say, its foundation relative to humanity and the spirit that expresses itself in it. ‘‘If in fact it is philosophy that opens for us the possibility of a perfectly rational subjective life’’, comments Bianchi, ‘‘it will have to place itself in the service of reason and keep vigil against every possible weakness and irrationality ... the person who has to assume the responsibility of this research could not be anybody other than the philosopher, the functionary of humanity, the strategist of the struggle against irrationality’’.31 In the light of these motives, philosophy has to become a reﬂection of humanity about itself and its own ratio, a reﬂection that will grasp the authentic sense of the apodicticity of this rationality and lead it back to its source, the ego – apodictic inﬁnity – rather than taking it away from its origins. For these reasons, moreover, the philosopher’s profession can and must be said to be a vocation, a feeling from ‘‘within’’ to return to oneself, in se, to one’s own humanity, and ultimately a mission, an authentic mission of life to which one has to dedicate all one’s energies. The philosopher is the harbinger of the sense of life and, consequently, his – and, indeed, could not be anything other than – an extreme, an ultimate responsibility. ‘‘We know that as serious philosophers we are called to this task. ... And in our philosophizing we therefore are – indeed, how could it be otherwise? – functionaries of humanity. In our personal interior vocation,

78

NICOLETTA GHIGI

the wholly personal responsibility for our truly being philosophers includes also the responsibility for the true being of humanity, which is such only inasmuch as it is oriented towards a telos and which, if it can be realized at all, can be realized only through philosophy – through us, but only if we are philosophers in all seriousness’’.32 University of Perugia NOTES 1 E. Husserl, Aufsa¨tze und Vortra¨ge (1922–1937) (Husserliana XXVII), T. Nenon and H. Rainer (eds.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), p. 3. 2 E. Husserl, Briefwechsel. Die Go¨ttinger Schule (Husserliana Dokumente, Vol. III), K. Schumann (ed.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), p. 163. 3 Ibid., p. 12. 4 E. Husserl, Aufsa¨tze und Vortra¨ge (1922–1937) (Husserliana XXVII), op. cit., p. 3. 5 Ibid., p. 107. 6 In fact, as Baccarini seems to suggest, ‘‘the German term Beruf, profession, also means vocation’’ (E. Baccarini, L a fenomenologia. Filosoﬁa come vocazione (Rome: Nuova Universale Studium, 1981). Furthermore, in the Presentation preceding the translation of these articles in the Japanese review, ‘‘The Kaizo’’, Sinigaglia deems Beruf to be an ‘‘almost intranslatable’’ term if it is not related to its original meaning of ‘‘calling’’, ‘‘vocation’’ (Presentation of E. Husserl, L ’idea di Europa. Cinque saggi sul rinnovamento, C. Sinigaglia (ed.). Milan: Raﬀaello Cortina, 1999, p. XXI). 7 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europa¨ischen W issenschaften und die transzendentale Pha¨nomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die pha¨nomenologische Philosophie (Husserliana VI), W. Biemel (ed.) (The Hague: M. Nijhoﬀ, 1963), p. 327. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 326. 10 In connection, Husserl states: ‘‘Learning to know many foreign peoples and being led by one’s primary interest in one’s own history to study that of the surrounding nations, there comes into being an interest for a self-comprehension of one’s own national existence, against the characterizations of foreigners, so that, from this point onwards, there comes into the new ﬁeld of view the same nuclei of being to which reference is made by the various mythologems in the modes of the surrounding mundanities’’ (E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europa¨ischen W issenschaften und die transzendentale Pha¨nomenologie. Erga¨nzungsband. T exte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1937 (Husserliana XXIX), R. N. Smith (eds.) (Dordrecht/Boston/ London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), p. 388. 11 Similarly, Vico called this explanation ‘‘wisdom of the myth’’ and deﬁned the will of these men of the myth to ‘‘explain’’ the natural events as a vis rationis that was followed by the elaboration of ‘‘fantastic universals’’ (G. B. Vico, Principi di una scienza nuova d’inforno alla cumune natura delle nazioni, in questa terza impressione dal medesimo autore in gran numero di luoghi corretta, schiarita, e notabilmente accresciuta (1744), in Opere, P. Cristofolini (ed.) (Florence: 1971), p. 394). 12 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europa¨ischen W issenschaften und die transzendentale Pha¨nomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die pha¨nomenologische Philosophie, op. cit., p. 331.

HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

79

13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Indeed, Husserl comments: ‘‘The intention is that of obtaining general thoughts that make it possible to understand the universe, full of enigmas, in its unbeknown inﬁnitude: to understand objectivity ...’’ (E. Husserl, Aufsa¨tze und Vortra¨ge (1922–1937), op. cit., p. 80). 16 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europa¨ischen W issenschaften und die transzendentale Pha¨nomenologie. Erga¨nzungsband. T exte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1937, op. cit., pp. 388–389. 17 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europa¨ischen W issenschaften und die transzendentale Pha¨nomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die pha¨nomenologische Philosophie, op. cit., pp. 332–333. 18 Ibid., p. 334. 19 E. Husserl, Manuscript BI6I, p. 16, Italian translation of A. Ales Bello, Il mestiere del ﬁlosofo. Paradossi e antinomie del relativismo antropologico, in ‘‘Idee. Rivista di ﬁlosoﬁa’’ 11 (1989): 89. 20 Ibid. 21 This even refers to the word ‘‘intuition’’, J. Derrida, Introduzione a ‘‘L ’origine della geometria’’ di Husserl, C. Martino (ed.) (Milan: Jakabook, 1987), p. 177. 22 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europa¨ischen W issenschaften und die transzendentale Pha¨nomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die pha¨nomenologische Philosophie, op. cit., pp. 341–342. 23 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europa¨ischen W issenschaften und die transzendentale Pha¨nomenologie. Erga¨nzungband. T exte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1937, op. cit., p. 401. 24 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europa¨ischen W issenschaften und die transzendentale Pha¨nomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die pha¨nomenologische Philosophie, op. cit., pp. 345–346. The seemingly Augustinian inspiration of returning in se comes to the fore in the Meditations, which conclude with Noli foras ire, says Ausustine, in re redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas (E. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vortra¨ge (Husserliana I), S. Strasser (ed.) (The Hague: M. Nijhoﬀ, 1950), p. 183). 25 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europa¨ischen W issenschaften und die transzendentale Pha¨nomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die pha¨nomenologische Philosophie, op. cit., Note, pp. 486–487. 26 Ibid., p. 343. 27 E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Pha¨nomenologie und pha¨nomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einfu¨hrung in die reine Pha¨nomenologie (1913) (Husserliana III), W. Biemel (ed.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoﬀ, 1950), p. 59. 28 A. Ales Bello, Il mestiere del ﬁlosofo. Paradossi e antinomie del relativismo antropologico, op. cit., p. 84. 29 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europa¨ischen W issenschaften und die transzendentale Pha¨nomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die pha¨nomenologische Philosophie, op. cit., p. 499. 30 Ibid., p. 426. Pieretti notes that ‘‘if philosophy is to absolve the function of founding science in a conclusive manner, it is called upon to start from the very beginning time and again, excluding any kind of assumption as such. ... In actual practice philosophy therefore unfolds as need for absolute knowledge and thus as desire therefore, aspiration to attain it rathen than eﬀective possession of such knowledge’’ (A. Pieretti, ‘‘T he ‘L ebenswelt’ and the Meaning of Philosophy’’, Analecta Husserliana XXXV, 1991, pp. 352–353). 31 I. A. Bianchi, Etica husserliana. Studio sui manoscritti inediti degli anni 1920–1934 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1999), pp. 88–89. 32 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europa¨ischen W issenschaften und die transzendentale Pha¨nomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die pha¨nomenologische Philosophie, op. cit., p. 15.

JEFFREY WATTLES

TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF COURAGEOUS WILLING

What is the phenomenologist’s vocation in the world of life? If we think of the world in terms of its present challenges, then we can answer, to begin with, that our vocation is to cultivate courageous living in response to these challenges. This is a universal human task. The phenomenologist, speciﬁcally, can draw on the resources of phenomenology to articulate courageous living in helpful ways. In facing the problems of the world – environmental, biological, social, economic, political, and cultural – the mind staggers. The uncertainties are great and the disappointments deep; we sometimes confront apparent defeat; the sheer diﬃculty of the tasks is daunting; immensities loom; and there is much that is inexplicable. Such problems call for well-focused resources of mind, body, soul, and spirit, mobilized in decisions of an integrated personality, cooperating in teamwork with others. At a time when scientiﬁc understanding, philosophic wisdom, and spiritual inspiration need to be creatively joined, nothing is easier than to abandon hope. Phenomenology can help to keep hope strong by developing accounts of willing that show new paths for growth in courageous living. In what follows I narrow the topic (for the most part) from courageous living to courageous willing. I take it that willing has a major impact on living, including on how we experience things. To be sure, willing does not arise in a cognitive vacuum. In the classical case, willing rests upon deliberation, which rests in turn upon evaluation, which rests upon interpretation, which rests upon perception. In other words, one’s grasp of fact is basic to one’s interpretation of a situation, which in turn founds one’s grasp of the values implicit in the situation, the values that willing strives to actualize. A fatalistic or pessimistic outlook subverts courageous willing. In what follows I make sorties into the phenomenology of some relevant spiritual experiences, but much of what I propose could be aﬃrmed by Bertrand Russell, when he proclaimed a vision of humanity’s potential glory in science, art, and ethics, despite what he took to be the fact that the prospect for human greatness is a cosmic accident destined to eternal annihilation.1 The coming sections ﬁrst rehearse some contributions of William James to a phenomenology of courageous willing, then describe a typology of 81 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 81–95. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

82

JEFFREY WATTLES

challenges and correlated responses, and last indicate how the spiritual domain of life referred to in the second section responds to the contemporary need for a measure. I. COURAGEOUS WILLING

William James is a prime resource for a phenomenology of courageous willing. His philosophy of the ‘‘strenuous’’ life celebrates vigorous responses to problems. Like Paul Ricoeur and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, James shows a healthy respect for reality and its constraints, while allowing a spiritual perspective to repeatedly come through to invigorate hope. Courageous living, at its maximum, is heroic living, and James gives a characterization of the hero in his essay ‘‘Will’’: The huge world that girdles us about puts all sorts of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. Some of the tests we meet by actions that are easy, and some of the questions we answer in articulately formulated words. But the deepest question that is ever asked admits of no reply but the dumb turning of the will and tightening of our heart-strings as we say, ‘‘Yes, I will even have it so!’’ When a dreadful object is presented, or when life as a whole turns up its dark abysses to our view, then the worthless ones among us lose their hold on the situation altogether, and either escape from its diﬃculties by averting their attention, or if they cannot do that, collapse into yielding masses of plaintiveness and fear. The eﬀort required for facing and consenting to such objects is beyond their power to make. But the heroic mind does diﬀerently. To it, too, the objects are sinister and dreadful, unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for things. But it can face them if necessary, without for that losing its hold upon the rest of life. The world thus ﬁnds in the heroic man its worthy match and mate; and the eﬀort which he is able to put forth to hold himself erect and keep his heart unshaken is the direct measure of his worth and function in the game of human life. He can stand this Universe. He can meet it and keep up his faith in it in presence of those same features which lay his weaker brethren low. He can still ﬁnd a zest in it, not by ‘‘ostrich-like forgetfulness,’’ but by pure inward willingness to face it with these deterrent objects there. And hereby he makes himself one of the masters and the lords of life. He must be counted with henceforth; he forms a part of human destiny.2

Given a description of the hero, the question arises how we attain or approach that level of living. To some extent, we are stimulated to high-energy living by various factors. In ‘‘The Energies of Men,’’ James lists eight kinds of stimuli that operate either in crisis situations or in a sustained way: excitements, ideas, eﬀorts, duty, crowd-pressure, the example of others, contagion, and ‘‘conversions, whether they be political, scientiﬁc, philosophic, or religious’’.3 James expands on the example of others in the same paragraph just quoted:

TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF COURAGEOUS WILLING

83

Just as our courage is so often a reﬂex of another’s courage, so our faith is apt to be a faith in someone else’s faith. We draw new life from the heroic example. The prophet has drunk more deeply than anyone of the cup of bitterness, but his countenance is so unshaken and he speaks such mighty words of cheer that his will becomes our will, and our life is kindled at his own.4

Despite James’s keen personal interest in religion, he repeatedly notes the generality of the salient features that he grasps in religious living. Not only may there be non-religious conversions, but the qualitative transformation of heroic work may aﬀect any kind of eﬀort. James notes that high-energy living shows not only a quantitative change but also a qualitative transformation; and he notes that the eﬀorts involved may be ‘‘physical work, intellectual, work, moral work, or spiritual work.’’5 In ‘‘The Energies of Men’’ James sees heroic living resulting from a liberation of the organism’s latent energies, which most of us are unaccustomed to using because we are blocked in various ways by the force of competing functions, such as ideas that run counter to what we would otherwise choose. In ‘‘Will,’’ James makes two especially relevant claims. First, he proposes that ‘‘eVort of attention is ... the essential phenomenon of will.’’ He asks how a particular ‘‘idea of action’’ ‘‘comes to prevail stably in the mind.’’ ‘‘The whole diﬃculty is a mental diﬃculty, a diﬃculty with an ideal object of our thought. It is, in one word, an idea to which our will applies itself, an idea which if we let it go would slip away, but which we will not let go. Consent to the idea’s undivided presence, this is eVort’s sole achievement.’’6 James’s T he Varieties of Religious Experience adds to his picture of heroic living. As a result of ‘‘conversion,’’ the individual gains enhanced access to energies and inspiration coming from beyond the conscious mind. One of the deﬁning marks of religious living is that it manifests either a lyrical or a heroic character. Thus we can say that courageous living in some cases results from the change in the ‘‘personal center of energy’’ that occurs in religious conversion Building on selected ideas of James, then, one may synthesize the following view. Courageous living integrates every dimension of the human being, from (1) the life in the cells of the body, through (2) the unconscious and conscious mind, to (3) the immanent-and-transcendent divine spirit. Faith, mobilizing the full powers of the personality, achieves this vital integration.

84

JEFFREY WATTLES II. TYPES OF CHALLENGE

Philosophy can assist positive motivation in becoming more eﬀective by diﬀerentiating between types of challenges. Since these types may be combined, a given problem may seem needlessly overwhelming, but distinguishing them as an aspect of a task helps one focus inner resources on the problem. Since Descartes proposed to solve complex problems by breaking them into their simplest elements, later philosophy has persuaded us that there are no atomic elements that can be truly isolated from the whole. Nevertheless, it remains true that focusing on elemental aspects of a problem creates practical leverage. The types of challenges discussed here are uncertainty, disappointment, apparent defeat, diﬃculties, the immensity of a task, and the inexplicable. Since ‘‘diﬃculties’’ is a general term, embracing all the other types of challenge in this list, it seems odd to list it as a separate category. Nevertheless, the list makes sense if we consider it from a narrative perspective. First we encounter uncertainty, then, perhaps disappointment; the situation becomes more acute if we face apparent defeat. Finally, having thus far mobilized our resources, step by step, there remains the task of directly facing the speciﬁc diﬃculties of the case. As we do so, taking up the labor of the task before us, we may feel overwhelmed by the immensity of it all. Finally, there may be things that we remain unable to explain.

1. Uncertainty In virtue of the most primitive intuition that all animals share, an amoeba instinctively reaches out to encompass a particle of food, and it instinctively withdraws to protect itself if poked. Uncertainty often elicits a protective response rather than a positive, eager response. Although the uncertainty of a playful game is a positive stimulus, when the stakes are high and the self feels threatened, uncertainty becomes an obstacle to eﬀective performance. However, it is possible to reﬂect upon uncertainty so as to elicit the emergence of the positive attitude. Reﬂection enables new meanings and values to come to light, and the lure of these values (using Whitehead’s phrase) motivates the act of will that assumes the positive attitude. Moreover, it is possible to make this positive response to uncertainty a habit, so that the very recognition of uncertainty as such is enough to stimulate a positive response.

TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF COURAGEOUS WILLING

85

Regarding degrees of uncertainty or conﬁdence in a belief, Husserl portrayed doxic modalities along a spectrum running from fully certain aﬃrmation to equally certain rejection.8 In between are shades of ‘‘probable,’’ ‘‘doubtful,’’ simply ‘‘uncertain,’’ and ‘‘probably false.’’ As Husserl recognized, there is a fundamental certainty that underlies doxic modiﬁcations of certainty. For example, when we ﬁnd something to be doubtful we ﬁnd it certainly doubtful. Note that Husserl would distinguish noetic uncertainty – the uncertainty of the conscious subject – from noematic uncertainty, which pertains to the thematic proposition or situation under consideration. We may fall into complete error, being certain of what is false. For example, when paralyzed by a challenge we may be seized by a false certainty, such as ‘‘I am alone in having to deal with this problem.’’ Our very understanding of the world may be infected with false certainties. To translate Husserl’s analysis of modalities of belief into the realm of action could lead to something like the following analysis. There is a fundamental conﬁdence, the sense ‘‘I can,’’ which sustains our actions primordially. This ‘‘I can’’ remains fundamental even when we fearfully withdraw from something that is poking us. We continue to assume, in this case, that we can withdraw and that doing so will in some measure distance ourselves from the unwelcome provocation. The ‘‘I can’’ is furthermore associated with conﬁdence in our ability to discern the path ahead and to pursue our course eﬀectively. It is precisely this conﬁdence that may be modiﬁed in situations of uncertainty. We may move from conﬁdence to the sense that success is merely probable, possible, or doubtful. The action to be taken may be clear, but the consequences may be unclear. Or the action to be taken may be unclear. Reﬂection on the uncertainties gives an opportunity for the spontaneous conﬁdence of the ‘‘I can’’ to infuse our future-regarding attention.9 Facing possibilities honestly and thinking through strategies of response allows belief in the reality of our power as agents to be renewed. The ‘‘I can’’ may expand to a ‘‘we can.’’ The more faith one has in the other person or persons involved, the more robust will be the ‘‘we can.’’ Because of the intimate correlation between consciousness and world, doubt makes the world look more frightening and hostile, while faith makes the world look more inviting and friendly. The ‘‘I can’’ envisions the world as a realm where, to a signiﬁcant degree, we know things to be ‘‘work-with-able.’’ The world is a realm in which we can cope, solve problems, cooperate, and achieve goals. Of course it is essential not to set expectations too high; moreover, though our ideals be sublime, our ability to live up to them grows gradually.

86

JEFFREY WATTLES

Reﬂection allows the mind to thematize fear and doubt, thus to distance oneself from the immediacy of these emotions so as to allow them to be replaced by intelligent prudence and realistic conﬁdence. Aristotle’s analysis of akrasia, the failure of self-control, includes the insight that success in action depends in part upon the mind’s ability to sustain a proper understanding of the situation. For example, a temptation must be regarded under the aspects of its being harmful and wrong rather than under the aspects of its being attractive and available; or, better yet, the situation is seen so resolutely and constructively that temptation does not arise. Reﬂection enhances the power of choice to direct attention to those features of a situation associated with positive potentials. Such ‘‘positive thinking’’ must not be confused with blind optimism. In a bad situation, a tactical retreat may be advisable; in a period of civilizational decline, the best one may be able to do is to slow the decline and prepare for a later upturn. The reﬂection in question promotes the mental poise that avoids irrational responses and realistically discerns the requirements of the situation. William James is the philosopher of positive attitude in the presence of uncertainty, and we return to his work for an illustration. Suppose, for example, that I am climbing in the Alps, and have had the ill-luck to work myself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Being without similar experience, I have no evidence of my ability to perform it successfully; but hope and conﬁdence in myself make me sure I shall not miss my aim, and nerve my feet to execute what without those subjective emotions would perhaps have been impossible. But suppose that, on the contrary, the emotions of fear and mistrust preponderate; or suppose that, having just read the Ethics of Belief, I feel it would be sinful to act upon an assumption unveriﬁed by previous experience – why, then I shall hesitate so long that at last, exhausted and trembling, and launching myself in a moment of despair, I miss my footing and roll into the abyss.10

For James, the great questions of life cannot be decided by scientiﬁc evidence or by intellectual reasoning. Rather, they call for a choice of attitude which alone holds the key to many successes that would otherwise be missed. The ideal of a vigorous, even heroic, response to challenges should not be taken to extremes. The ideal does not imply hastily and harshly suppressing sadnesss, for example, which leads to a divided self, not an integrated self. Moreover, in my opinion, James goes too far in the direction of voluntarism, giving too little credit to the way that a realization of truth can guide the decisions of the will. Consider, for example, the diﬀerence between the will to believe (which is prepared to override

TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF COURAGEOUS WILLING

87

one’s better judgment) and the will that believes, namely in the light of its recognition of truth. When facing uncertainty one may have the chance to consider possible alternatives with some thoroughness, so as to allow inner resources to emerge to assist one in facing unwelcome possibilities. If strategic planning in business and politics helps mobilize the resources of reason, how much more beneﬁt may one gain from opening oneself to a fresh infusion from the depths of inner life! The creativity of the inner life surfaces in occurrences of insight when, for example, a great scientist is in a moment of undirected relaxation and openness, e.g., Archimedes in his bath, Newton under the apple tree. Sometimes the answer comes in moments of surrender where one releases conscious eﬀort on a problem. An ideal process of reﬂection makes time for letting go of one’s grasp of the problem in order to become receptive to an incursion from beyond the conscious mind. 2. Disappointment Disappointment, whether occasioned by factors outside or within oneself, explodes hope previously held. Whether the hope was a deﬁnite, explicit expectation or a tacit protention, disappointment changes one’s emotional course and often one’s practical course as well. Josef Pieper distinguishes two kinds of hope: particular hopes, correlated with events in the world, and fundamental hope, which has no object that can be found in the world. He notes, ‘‘Precisely in disappointment, and perhaps in it alone, we are oﬀered the challenge of entering into this broader existential realm of hope per se.’’11 Fundamental or existential hope cannot be disappointed by any worldly outcome, and it persists even in the face of death. Fundamental hope ﬁnds expression in the protention toward and expectation of a life after death. Religions articulate these expectations diﬀerently, but they generally oﬀer the faithful something positive to look forward to. From the perspective of faith, one’s essential interests are not at stake in any situation in which one may be called upon to sacriﬁce. One’s essential future is secure. The resulting conﬁdence liberates energy for decisive and committed living. Assurance of eternal life, however, may become fanatical if religious conviction is not integrated, balanced with scientiﬁc realism, philosophic interpretation of meanings, ever-expanding spiritual experience, the recreation oﬀered by the beauties of nature, the education of vision oﬀered by the arts, and sturdy ethical commitments.12

88

JEFFREY WATTLES

Contemplating history in an age when humankind is threatened by nuclear weapons, Pieper raises the question whether there can be a credible, non-empirical, ‘‘prophetic’’ insight into the historical future of humankind. Of course individuals will judge for themselves what they ﬁnd credible or not. Nevertheless, the promise of an advanced civilization on our planet gives some content to the notion of human destiny. Acknowledging that neither empirical science nor philosophical reasoning could prove the validity of the notion, Immanuel Kant called it an Idea, suggesting that it could help us organize our empirical knowledge of history and guide our practical participation in history. Spiritual hope for human progress toward a great planetary destiny links fundamental hope with a partly determinate worldly goal. Although this hope might be empirically refuted, it has an extraordinary resilience, since nothing short of the destruction of the human race would refute it. This spiritual hope could be a unifying factor in today’s world. Fundamental hope enhances our readiness to tread the path upon which disappointment forces us. This path, too, leads to eventual triumph. Even if irreparable losses have been sustained, a basis for a more durable future achievement will eventually be constructed. This path, too, has opportunities for growth and service. The more we sense that the good we do is never lost, that our best eﬀorts that seemed to have been in vain have indeed been invested in a better future, the more we will be able to absorb disappointment, grow, and redirect our productive energies eﬀectively. 3. Apparent defeat On countless occasions people have, as the phrase goes, ‘‘snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.’’ In sports, an athlete or a team comes from behind to win an upset victory. In the midst of the competition, the eventual victor ﬁnds a gleam of hope, a live opportunity for striving, setting aside fear, perhaps in the knowledge that a heroic eﬀort will shine regardless of the outcome. In 1915, commenting on the disillusionment in Europe brought on by World War I, Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Prize-winning poet from India, wrote a letter to his English friend C. F. Andrews, concluding with the following paragraph. Will Europe never understand the genesis of the present war, and realize that the true cause lies in her own growing skepticism toward her own ideals – those ideals that have helped

TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF COURAGEOUS WILLING

89

her to be great? She seems to have exhausted the oil that once lighted her lamp. Now she is feeling a distrust against the oil itself, as if it were not at all necessary for her light.13

For many European authors disillusioned by the war, talk of truth, beauty, and goodness seemed hollow. Husserl, seeing the decline of faith in ideals well before the ﬁrst World War, had an urgent sense of the historical import of his life work, which aimed to restore sturdy foundations for the scientiﬁc and philosophical grasp of truth and for the achievements in beauty and goodness which depend on a realization of truth.14 Husserl’s adventuresome and pioneering spirit exempliﬁes the response to the challenge of apparent defeat.

4. DiYculties When the reﬂective analysis has been done and we face the diﬃculties directly, the challenge becomes one of mobilizing our full resources. This is a moment when turning within can be of tremendous help. Some would call this prayer, some would call it meditation, while others would refuse such rubrics altogether. I will propose a map for religious experience, inviting redescription by those who question whether the component of religious faith is essential. We can sketch a phenomenology of the divine presence using distinctions familiar in phenomenology.15 Sometimes the divine is the object of attention, the Thou-focus of personal prayer or worship. Sometimes the divine is the all-encompassing background of experience. Sometimes the divine is felt in the modiﬁed quality of a given act of consciousness. And sometimes the divine is heard from within the very origin of our conscious acts. (Note that combining the ﬁrst two moments yields a concept of God that speaks to Heidegger’s worry about ontotheology, since God becomes the self-focalization of inﬁnity, personalizing to make relationship possible.16 What happens to the background when a relationship becomes maximally full? Phenomenologically, in Martin Buber’s phrase, the Thou ‘‘ﬁlls the ﬁrmament.’’17) To receive what we need spiritually in facing diﬃculties, all that is needed is to turn receptively, holding up our cup to be ﬁlled. This is easier said than done when the mind is turbulent or when callouses of resistance have made the mind less permeable to divine blessings. Nevertheless, the experience of turning within and ﬁnding can be very simply stated.

90

JEFFREY WATTLES

To invigorate in the presence of diﬃculties, it is not enough to receive inspiration. Receptivity prepares a forward step. After receiving all that one can of wisdom and truth, one focuses energy in a personal decision that launches the action. 5. Immensity Sometimes we falter because the task ahead seems so great. It will take so much time and eﬀort, and our ﬁnite resources seem hardly adequate. There is a curious mix of insight and blindness when we notice our limits in confronting a huge task. The insight is that we are ﬁnite. The blindness is to overlook that we have access to inexhaustible resources of mind and spirit. These resources nourish such basic mental activities as intuitive perceptual orientation, associating ideas, mobilizing courage, exploring knowledge, taking counsel with others, worshipping, and seeking wisdom. Classical philosophy oﬀers a neglected basis for the thought that the human mind has access to circuits of mind stemming from trans-human sources. In Plato’s Ion, Socrates oﬀers a suggestive interpretation to Ion, who has just won a prize for his recitation of Homer. It’s a divine power that moves you, as a ‘‘magnetic’’ stone moves iron rings. ... This stone not only pulls those rings, if they’re iron, it also puts power in the rings, so that they in turn can do just what the stone does – pull other rings – so that there’s sometimes a very long chain of iron pieces and rings hanging from one another. And the power in all of them depends on this stone. In the same way, the Muse makes some people inspired herself, and then through those who are inspired a chain of other enthusiasts is suspended. You know, none of the epic poets, if they’re good, are masters of their subject; they are inspired, possessed, and that is how they utter all those beautiful poems. ... This spectator is the last of the rings. ... The middle ring is you, the rhapsode or actor, and the ﬁrst one is the poet himself. The god pulls people’s souls through all these wherever he wants, looping the power down from one to another. And just as if it hung from that stone, there’s an enormous chain of choral dancers and dance teachers and assistant teachers hanging oﬀ to the sides of the rings that are suspended from the Muse. One poet is attached to one Muse, another to another (we say he is ‘‘possessed,’’ and that’s near enough, for he is held). From these ﬁrst rings, from the poets, they are attached in their turn and inspired, from one poet, some from another; some from Orpheus, some from Musaeus, and many are possessed and held from Homer. You are one of them, Ion, and you are possessed from Homer. And when anyone sings the work of another poet, you’re asleep and you’re lost about what to say; but when any song of that poet is sounded, you are immediately awake, your soul is dancing, and you have plenty to say. ...18

Here are the main points in this speculation about circuits of mind. 1. There are mind circuits of divine origin.

TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF COURAGEOUS WILLING

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

91

They are multiple. We are diﬀerentially receptive to them. They link humans to the divine. They link humans to one another. They communicate divine blessings.

Aristotle puts more pieces of the puzzle in play. Although Plato’s metaphorical and mythic speculations on mind circuits did not appeal to him, Aristotle includes in his account of the highest level of psyche (‘‘soul’’) something akin to a circuit of divine mind. For Aristotle the highest function of psyche is intellectual activity, the mind’s contemplative engagement in eternal, unchanging truth and divine reality. What does the human mind have to do with divinity? The text we have of Aristotle’s De Anima preserves a hint, however controversial its interpretation, that a single divine mind operates in the highest thinking of all humans.19 Our highest thinking participates in, or approximates, the activity of the divine mind. Most religious philosophers would deﬁnitely distinguish in principle between the human mind and the divine ministry that illumines and guides it, however blended they may be phenomenologically. In the face of immensity it is customary to weaken, but refreshing the mind spiritually renews conﬁdence and facilitates the concentration and patience to needed persevere. Even if the notion of mind circuits seem but a work of the imagination, it may still have heuristic value.

6. T he inexplicable We all elaborate, more or less articulately, ideas about ourselves and the world. However, no matter how extensive our knowledge or how developed our philosophy, we come across facts that do not readily harmonize with reality as we conceive it. If religionists have a hard time explaining how a great and good God could create a world in which we ﬁnd so much evil, atheists have a hard time explaining how chance and necessity emerging from physical chaos could ever evolve life with all the truth, beauty, and goodness that we enjoy. There are wonders and horrors that surpass our comprehension. Even for a person of faith, catastrophes may be overwhelming. But even if catastrophes remain inexplicable, they need not paralyze, at least not permanently. Nevertheless, spiritual communion usually does not clarify such puzzles directly; as Job discovered, the relief comes on a level diﬀerent from that of the question.

92

JEFFREY WATTLES III. FINDING A MEASURE IN THE ONTOPOETIC LEVEL OF LIFE

Finally, I want to develop the import of the preceding ideas toward a phenomenology of spiritual experience to deal with a question raised in the dialogue regarding Professor Tymieniecka’s lectures and writings. How can the ‘‘ontopoetic’’ level of life provide a measure?20 The question deserves some explanation, including, ﬁrst, an observation about the human predicament. Modern humanity seeks a measure at a time when traditional and static standards have become widely discredited. Where a measure is lacking altogether, the resulting chaos becomes intolerable. Second, we can make an observation about philosophic resources. Phenomenology has begun the careful description of a layer of life that underlies our cognitive achievements. Consciousness can only achieve its awareness of things, meanings, values, and persons through the spontaneities of a deeper level of life. Let us here accept the term ‘‘ontopoetic’’ for this primordial constitutive level. In answer to the problem of the loss of conﬁdence in traditional proposals regarding a divine measure, the idea hinted at above is that the measure can be found within the mind. It is unnecessary to dream of the divine far oﬀ in the skies when the treasure lies within. Religious traditions testify to this discovery: Hinduism speaks of the atman, the eternal spirit Self, Buddhism speaks of the ‘‘Buddha-nature’’ within; Judaism tells of ‘‘the spirit in man, the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts’’; Jesus taught that ‘‘the kingdom of heaven is within you’’; the Qur’an preserves the teaching of the spirit of God, ‘‘closer to you than your jugular vein.’’21 The ontopoetic level of life can provide a measure only if the precognitive spiritual input is sought in a post-cognitive way. Let me explain. It is necessary to diﬀerentiate, to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the pre-cognitive layer of life. The work of the divine is so silent, so behindthe-scenes, and its results are so mingled with the rest of our mental processes, that to diﬀerentiate the divine may seem like an arbitrary act of faith. Sometimes, of course, people have an experience of a quality sharply diﬀerentiated from that of ordinary experiences, an extraordinary perception of truth, beauty, or goodness. When we seek the divine, when we are probing for wisdom and energy for the task at hand, we listen, we attune as best we can, we let the deep harmony be initiated from beyond the human will. However, the faint stirrings of life that we may notice in such a moment of suspended attention may not be the expression of divinity, for they may originate

TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF COURAGEOUS WILLING

93

simply in the energies, impulses, and ideas of the subconscious. To improve our discernment of revealed truth, beauty, and goodness we must discipline our receptivity through responsible engagement with science and philosophy. In other words, we must satisfy the ‘‘cognitive’’ requirements as part of our quest. Our sense of beauty must mature through experience of the beauties of nature and the charm of the arts. We do well to fulﬁll the demands of ethical deliberation. The quest culminating in divine illumination is to a remarkable degree portrayed by Aeschylus in T he Suppliant Maidens.22 The drama begins with the arrival of a ship bringing ﬁfty Egyptian women and their father/spokesman to the shores of Argos. They seek protection from pursuing Egyptian men who would force them into ‘‘impious marriage.’’ The women introduce themselves to Pelasgus the king of Argos by revealing their kinship with the Argives, their special claim to protection. They narrate their genealogy, a lineage that Aeschylus may not have meant the audience to take literally. To portray these dark Egyptian women as kin to the Argives, as equally the descendants of Zeus, is Aeschylus’ spiritual insight. In modern terms, the universal fatherhood of God is the source of the brotherhood of man. Even after accepting that the women and their father are originally also Argives, the king has a decision to make, and he is in the throes of uncertainty. From the outset we were reminded that the will of Zeus is ‘‘not easily traced. Everywhere it gleams, even in blackness.’’ The king acknowledges, ‘‘I am at a loss, and fearful is my heart.’’ The king’s dilemma is that if he protects the women, he risks destructive war with the pursuing Egyptians; if the king does not protect them, the women threaten suicide upon the altar for suppliants, a move that would bring divine retribution. What is needed to clarify the decision? ‘‘We need profound, preserving care, that plunges/ Like a diver deep in troubles seas,/ Keen and unblurred his eye, to make the end / Without disaster for us and for the city. ...’’ In the moment of decision, the crucial factor is ‘‘the height of mortal fear,’’ making the king unwilling to oﬀend Zeus, who is also a suppliant like these maidens. As the king turns to appeal to the people (who sustain his request), he expresses his discovery of the principle of goodness that governs this situation: ‘‘Everyone,/ To those weaker than themselves, is kind.’’ The link between the drama and the preceding phenomenological proposal is that the king’s courageous eﬀort to struggle responsibly with the (‘‘cognitive’’) facts and duties before him enables him successfully to plunge like a diver in troubled seas (the ‘‘ontopoetic’’ level of life) to ﬁnd the will of God (the wisdom and energy of the divine within).

94

JEFFREY WATTLES

At its best, courageous willing is a devotion to goodness based on a realization of truth whose beauty is felt. A full realization of the truth of a situation requires not only scientiﬁc realism, but also a spiritual idealism to which faith alone gives access. As the mind ﬁlls with the vision of truth and becomes saturated with beauty, it prepares to participate in goodness. Faith opens the mind so that the divine life within may connect with the life inherent in the cells of the body. The result is a thoroughgoing vitality in the human system, liberating the potential for courageous living. Kent State University NOTES 1 Bertrand Russell, ‘‘A Free Man’s Worship,’’ in W hy I Am Not a Christian (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), pp. 104–116. 2 William James, T he W ritings of W illiam James, John J. McDermott (ed.) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 715–716. 3 Ibid., pp. 674, 675, and 681. 4 Ibid., p. 716. 5 Ibid., pp. 672–673. 6 Ibid., pp. 709 and 711. 7 William James, T he Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Macmillan, 1961); the pages supporting the exposition in this paragraph are 405, 398, 399, 377, and 175. 8 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1982), pp. 103–108. 9 Jean Nabert’s Elements for an Ethic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969) opens with three chapters that portray a deep and spontaneous self-aﬃrmation that emerges to overcome the self-doubt occasioned by reﬂection on fault, failure, and solitude. 10 William James, ‘‘The Sentiment of Rationality,’’ in Essays in Pragmatism, Alburey Castell (ed.) (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. 27. 11 Josef Pieper, Hope and History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, [1967] 1994), p. 30. 12 This thought is developed in Jeﬀrey Wattles, ‘‘Religious Experience, Fanaticism, and Kant,’’ in T he Ohio Academy of Religion Scholarly Papers 2002, R. Blake Michael (ed.) (Delaware, Ohio: Ohio Wesleyan University, 2002), pp. 27–34. 13 Rabindranath Tagore, A T agore Reader, Amiya Chakravarty (ed.) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 25. 14 The ‘‘eﬀect’’ of truth on beauty and goodness is indicated by the following quotation: ‘‘If the general idea of truth in itself becomes the universal norm of all the relative truths that play a role in human life – actual and conjectural situation truths – then this fact aﬀects all traditional norms, those of right, of beauty, of purpose, of dominant values in persons, values having a personal character, etc.’’ Edmund Husserl, ‘‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man,’’ in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, Quentin Lauer (ed.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 174–175. 15 The phenomenology of spiritual experience is developed in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, L ogos and L ife: T he T hree Movements of the Soul, A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta

TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF COURAGEOUS WILLING

95

Husserliana XXV (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1988); see especially pp. 18–35 and 88–95. She notes, for example, that ‘‘the spiritual act exhibits its presence in immanent perception in absolute evidence, several diverse aspects of which establish certitude of its actual presence’’ (p. 28). 16 The ﬁrst chapter of Nicolas Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom (London: Geoﬀrey Bles: The Centenary Press, 1934), sets forth a useful concept of personality. 17 Martin Buber, I and T hou (New York: Scribener, 1970), p. 59. 18 Plato, Ion, tr. Paul Woodruﬀ, in Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 533d2–e9 and 535e7–536d1. 19 Aristotle, De Anima, III.5, 429b5; 430a22–25. 20 Here is a quotation establishing the theme. ‘‘Bewildered humanity is challenged to seek by a need to ﬁnd new ways to assess gains and losses and make socioeconomic and cultural adjustments and resolve political and religious conﬂicts. Our bewilderment over life’s new enigmas may issue in a New Enlightenment, a new awareness of all of the forces carrying life and with that ever widening horizons. We are challenged to enter into our depths in order to achieve a new understanding of our place in the cosmos and the web of life, to ﬁnd new wisdom for charting our paths together and fresh inspiration to animate our personal conduct. I will here submit that the key issue for this New Enlightenment is that of measure, the measure of all things concerning life. Just as important is the discovery of motivation, the force needed for the commitment to apply measure. We have to realize that ethics is rooted in the two factors of measure and motivation. Without these ethics cannot address the demands of situations.’’ Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Impetus and Equipoise in the L ife-Strategies of Reason: L ogos and L ife, Book 4, A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, LXX (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), p. 615. 21 For the eternal spirit Self, the atman, see the Bhagavad-Gita, chapter 2. For the Buddhanature as the ‘‘self,’’ see the Mahaparinirvana Sutra 3.75. For ‘‘the spirit in man,’’ see Proverbs 20.27; for the ‘‘kingdom within,’’ Luke 17.21; for the presence of God closer than your jugular vein, see the Qur’an, Sura 50, verse 16 (cf. 8:24). 22 Aeschylus, T he Suppliant Maidens, S. G. Benardete (trans.), in Aeschylus II (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956). The quotations cited are from lines 88, 379, 407–410, 487, and 487–488.

MING-QIAN MA

BECOMING PHENOMENOLOGY: STYLE, POETIC TEXTURE, AND THE PRAGMATIC TURN IN GILLES DELEUZE AND MICHEL SERRES1

Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry. – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value It is by considering language that we would best see how we are to and how we are not to return to the things themselves. ... [Language] is a power for error, since it cuts the continuous tissue that joins us vitally to the things ... – Maurice Merleau-Ponty, T he V isible and the Invisible It is necessary for thinking to become explicitly aware of the matter here called opening. ... What the word designates in the connection we are now thinking, free openness, is a ‘‘primal phenomenon’’ [Urphanomen], to use a word of Goethe’s. We would have to say a ‘‘primal matter’’ [Ursache]. Goethe notes (Maxims and Reﬂections, n. 993): ‘‘Look for nothing behind phenomena: they themselves are what is to be learned.’’ This means the phenomenon itself, in the present case the opening, sets us the task of learning from it while questioning it, that is, of letting it say something to us. – Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’’

In contemporary French philosophy, the radical critique of phenomenology can be seen as following a historical-intellectual itinerary. Having taken the linguistic turn (or anti-linguistic turn, whichever the case might be) and left it behind, it veers toward and reaches now the pragmatic turn.2 The pragmatics in question, as evidenced explicitly in Gilles Deleuze and implicitly in Michel Serres, should not be confused, however, with any kinds of pragmatics in the hitherto tradition of philosophy. To the extent it presents language as the site of a philosophical problem to be inquired into and conceptualized, it is, rather, what Jean-Jacques Lecercle has described as ‘‘misprision of Anglo-Saxon speech-act theory’’ represented, in particular, by J. L. Austin, J. R. Searle, and H. P. Grice (DL , p. 20).3 Out of this misprision emerges then ‘‘a pragmatics with a diﬀerence,’’ or a ‘‘new pragmatics, with a strong continental ﬂavour,’’ articulating an ‘‘other philosophy of language,’’ (DL , pp. 28, 162, 247). More speciﬁcally put, this diﬀerent pragmatics is ‘‘Schizoanalysis,’’ which ‘‘has no other meaning: Make a rhizome,’’ so announces Deleuze in A T housand Plateaus, and the best way to do it is to ‘‘experiment’’ (p. 251).4 97 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 97–116. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

98

MING-QIAN MA

Thus displaced from its analytic paradigm, this version of pragmatics is diﬀerent or new or continental in that it is, among other things, literary or poetic in nature, which ﬁnds its expressions in two aspects. On the one hand, as already amply demonstrated in the works of Deleuze and Serres and frequently noticed by critics and philosophers alike, its reading of literature, or its engagement with literary texts, presents itself, both conceptually and methodologically, as that which constitutes intrinsically any philosophical rethinking.5 ‘‘So the point of entry into language, in its problematic aspect, before common sense has had time to answer all the questions,’’ explains Lecercle, for instance, ‘‘is the literary text’’ and, it is in this sense that, ‘‘the new pragmatics is, at the same time and indissolubly, a new poetics’’ (DL , p. 199). On the other hand, and this is the issue to be addressed in this paper, since ‘‘language is the very material on which to experiment for any argument to gain some meaning,’’ as Bruno Latour asserts (‘‘Enlightenment,’’ p. 96), the new poetics as such also entails a new form of writing philosophy, which is, at the same time and indissolubly, literary, featuring a poetic texture. In other words, this new form of writing is characterized by the absence of a ‘‘meta-language,’’ be it philosophical or scientiﬁc, that results from what Latour refers to, albeit in a broader context, as ‘‘a cross-over, in the generic sense, whereby characters of one language are crossed with attributes of another origin’’ (‘‘Enlightenment,’’ pp. 90–9l).6 That being the case, both in Deleuze’s empirical attempt to see the world as diﬀerence ‘‘diVering,’’ as diﬀerence showing itself in itself, in which ‘‘phenomena ﬂash their meaning like signs,’’7 and in Serres’s ‘‘preCopernican version of things’’ whereby ‘‘to see things from the point of view of the known, not of the knowing’’ (Latour, ‘‘Enlightenment,’’ p. 89), this literary or poetic form of writing, which advances a new pragmatics, is itself practiced (more in Serres) and theorized (more in Deleuze) ‘‘under the concept of ‘style’ ’’ (DL , p. 160). I

In his study of the French philosophical tradition in general and the works of Michel Serres in particular, Latour makes the following observation: ‘‘The deepest content of what [philosophers] have to say is ﬁrst of all a style, a form, a particular way of saying it’’ (‘‘Enlightenment,’’ p. 96). Style is the deepest philosophical content because, similar to that in sports, according to Deleuze, ‘‘Style amounts to innovation,’’ engaging in ‘‘qualitative transformations.’’8 As such, ‘‘Style in philosophy strains

BECOMING PHENOMENOLOGY

99

toward three diﬀerent poles,’’ as Deleuze has thus speciﬁed, ‘‘concepts, or new ways of thinking; percepts, or new ways of seeing and hearing; and aﬀects, or new ways of feeling’’ (N, pp. 164–165). To do so, the concept of style is, for both Deleuze and Serres, predicated upon a dual premise: anti-Hegelian in its position against negation and dialectics, and antiHusserlian in its stance against the phenomenological methods of reduction, both calling attention to a de-grounding of language and subject as the two sides of the same construct. Though brief and un-systematic, Deleuze’s critique of phenomenology with ‘‘The imprint of the Hegelian dialectic,’’ which reduces ‘‘The whole phenomenology’’ to ‘‘an epiphenomenology,’’ brings to the fore the polemic issues of ‘‘words and representations’’ with which Hegel, Deleuze argues, creates ‘‘a false movement’’ (DR, pp. 51, 52).9 His distrust of language, as Lecercle has pointed out, is Bergsonian, in that language is considered as that which ‘‘ﬁxes reality as it names it according to the needs of society,’’ thus conspiring with ‘‘common sense’’ (DL , p. 21). Moreover, Deleuze deﬁnes the nature and function of common sense as constitutively grounding and operatively totalizing. He writes in T he L ogic of Sense: Subjectively, common sense subsumes under itself the various faculties of the soul, or the diﬀerentiated organs of the body, and brings them to bear upon a unity which is capable of saying ‘‘I.’’ One and the same self perceives, imagines, remembers, knows, etc.; one and the same self breathes, sleeps, walks, and eats. ... Language does not seem possible without this subject which expresses and manifests itself in it, and which says what it does. Objectively, common sense subsumes under itself the given diversity and relates it to the unity of a particular form of object or an individualized form of a world. It is the same object which I see, smell, taste, or touch; it is the same object which I perceive, imagine, and remember ... ; and, it is the same world that I breath, walk, am awake or asleep in, as I move from one object to another following the laws of a determined system. Here again, language does not seem possible outside of these identities which it designates. (p. 78)10

Hence a tripartite construct of common sense-I-language. Self-referentially constituted, this construct functions as the reductive mechanism of phenomenology. Husserl, Deleuze goes on to say, is not too diﬀerent in his methods of reduction. His failure to ‘‘[conceive] sense as a full (impenetrable) neutrality’’ lies in the fact that, by ‘‘[conserving] the form of consciousness within the transcendental,’’ Husserlian phenomenology is shown to have one primary concern – i.e., ‘‘retaining in sense the rational mode of a good sense and a common sense’’ (L S, p. 102). What is more, the form of consciousness in question, which is reserved in the transcendental, is none other than the very form of language.11 In ‘‘The Crisis of

100

MING-QIAN MA

Subjectivity from Nietzsche to Heidegger,’’ Gianni Vattimo highlights this issue in his discussion of ‘‘Nietzsche’s radical unmasking of the superﬁciality of the I’’: What we consider conscious experience is whatever we have a language for, names and possibilities of description in a socially convened and imposed model language. The world of consciousness will therefore tend to attain the conﬁguration of a world of awareness shared by society and imposed on us via the conditioning that language requires. (p. 9)12

In this regard, Deleuze’s position – and that of Serres, too, though more implicit and more paradoxical – is anticipated by Maurice MerleauPonty, whose following statement in T he V isible and the Invisible can be read as a succinct preface to the concept of style to be practiced and theorized in Deleuze and Serres: [N]egation and especially interrogation, which do not express any property intrinsic to the things, can be sustained only by the apparatus of language. ... One has to believe, then, that ... there is or could be a language of coincidence, a manner of making the things themselves speak – and this is what [the philosopher] seeks. It would be a language of which he would not be the organizer, words he would not assemble, that would combine through him by virtue of a natural intertwining of their meaning, through the occult trading of the metaphor – where what counts is no longer the manifest meaning of each word and of each image, but the lateral relations, the kinships that are implicated in their transfers and their exchanges. It is indeed a language of this sort that Bergson himself required for the philosopher. (pp. 96, 125)

There are two issues in Merleau-Ponty’s above statement from which Deleuze can be seen as having developed his concept of style. The ﬁrst is the de-grounding of the subject, or the stepping down of the subject as the organizer of language. For Deleuze, the concept of the subject, insofar as his rethinking of phenomenology is concerned, cannot be divorced from the concept of life and, as such, the ‘‘subject-type individualizations (‘that’s you ... ,’ ‘that’s me ...’)’’ make sense only when they are absorbed into the ‘‘event-type individualizations where there’s no subject: a wind, an atmosphere, a time of day, a battle’’ (N, p. 115). Deleuze explains it further, using Foucault as his example, when he thus writes: One can’t assume that a life, or a work of art, is individuated as a subject; quite the reverse. Take Foucault himself: you weren’t aware of him as a person exactly. Even in trivial situations, say when he came into a room, it was more like a changed atmosphere, a sort of event, an electric or magnetic ﬁeld or something. That didn’t in the least rule out warmth or make you feel uncomfortable, but it wasn’t like a person. It was a set of intensities. (N, p. 115)

BECOMING PHENOMENOLOGY

101

In this sense, any type of subjectiﬁcation becomes, Deleuze continues, quoting Foucault, ‘‘an art of oneself that’s the exact opposite of oneself ...’’ or, to put it in Deleuze’s own words, ‘‘If there’s a subject, it’s a subject without any identity’’ (N, p. 115). More speciﬁcally, a subject without an identity is a subject disarmed of its Cartesian Cogito; it is, in post-dialectic terms, a subject ‘‘enfeebled’’ by what Gianni Vattimo calls, in ‘‘Dialectics, Diﬀerence, and Weak Thought,’’ a ‘‘weak thought,’’ which means, in this context, ‘‘the absence of an authentic project of its own’’ (p. 160). Deﬁned ‘‘not as a given determinate substance, but as a ‘having-to-be’,’’ a subject is, in this light, ‘‘an opening upon possibility,’’ as Vattimo later expounds further from a Heideggerian perspective, which is actualized ‘‘only when it thinks itself inauthentically, with the horizon of the public and everyday ‘they’ ’’ (‘‘Crisis,’’ p. 13). The second issue is the de-grounding of language, a turning away from language as the structural determinant in the linguistic sense toward a language as a collective assemblage with internal, pragmatic variables (T P, p. 85). In this respect, Deleuze’s position is explicitly MerleauPontian or, as Merleau-Ponty would say, Bergsonian. For language, as Deleuze has argued similarly, following Louis Hjelmslev and William Labov, is always ‘‘in immanent continuous variation’’ and, as a result, ‘‘Content is not a signiﬁed nor expression of a signiﬁer; rather, both are variables of the assemblage’’ (T P, pp. 97, 91). More importantly, sense comes into being in this way not in the form of the manifest or denotative meaning of language but in the form of lateral relations or kinships implicated in the occult trading of the metaphor – i.e., in the form of possibilities, of potential, and of becoming, promised in the process of metaphorical transfers and exchanges. With subject and language thus de-centered, style, according to Deleuze, becomes ‘‘the most natural thing in the world,’’ having nothing to do with ‘‘an individual psychological creation’’ (T P, p. 97). ‘‘The very concept of style’’ in Deleuze, as Lecercle states, ‘‘is a protest against theories of the individuality, and originality, of the author’’; it is, in other words, a concept of ‘‘the impersonality of style,’’ which is ‘‘a tenet [Deleuze] shares with Foucault’’ (DL , pp. 221, 223). Deﬁned negatively, then, ‘‘style is a name not for a form of diction (the choice of the proper, or the metaphorical, word), not for a structure of signiﬁers, not for a deliberate organization of language, not even for the result of spontaneous inspiration,’’ Lecercle speciﬁes; it is, in fact, ‘‘non-style,’’ being not an ‘‘ornament,’’ nor an ‘‘expression of the writer’s linguistic talent’’; in brief,

102

MING-QIAN MA

‘‘style is not the man,’’ the latter being no more than ‘‘the eﬀect’’ of the former (DL , pp. 221, 245, 219, 223).13 Deﬁned positively, style, Deleuze claims, is ‘‘nothing other than the procedure of a continuous variation’’ (T P, p. 97). In Negotiations, he oﬀers a detailed deﬁnition of style in relation to writing as the site of becoming, of becoming-life, formulated as a problem (Lecercle, DL , p. 221).14 Deleuze writes: Style in philosophy is the movement of concepts. This movement’s only present, of course, in the sentences, but the sole point of the sentences is to give life, a life of its own. Style is a set of variations in language, a modulation, and a straining of one’s whole language toward something outside it. ... One’s always writing to bring something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of ﬂight. The language for doing that can’t be a homogeneous system, it’s something unstable, always heterogeneous, in which style carves diﬀerences of potential between which thing can pass, come to pass, a spark can ﬂash and break out of language itself, to make us see and think what was lying in the shadow around the words, things we were hardly aware existed. ... There’s style when the words produce sparks leaping between them, even over great distances. (N, pp. 140, 141)

As ‘‘an assemblage of enunciation,’’ style thus ‘‘unavoidably produces a language within a language’’ when actualized in writing (T P, p. 97). Furthermore, as an expression of ‘‘an event rather than an essence,’’ Deleuze continues, style, being the active production of a new language within a language, ‘‘is always a matter of syntax’’ that ‘‘strains toward the movement of concepts’’; and it is through this straining toward conceptual movements that style is able to give life, to free life from the representational entrapment, so as to ‘‘bring us new percepts and new aVects that amount to philosophy’s own nonphilosophical understanding’’ (N, pp. 25, 164). ‘‘The foreign language within language,’’ style, as Deleuze describes in W hat is Philosophy, thus ‘‘summons forth’’ (p. 176) things to come. It is that in which, and in which alone, becoming can be expressed (D, p. 3). To bring unknown things to life, to summon forth new worlds to come, style, more speciﬁcally, engages the (re)organization of the materials of writing. Situating Deleuze’s concept of style in the context of literary ‘‘high modernism,’’ Lecercle theorizes style’s straining toward becoming in terms of two simultaneous moments: Style is the treatment of the materials that turns the work into a work of art; it is the establishment of unknown or unexpected relations between objects, through the organization of materials. And it is deﬁned in two moments: it works through metaphor (in so far as it establishes unknown relations), but those metaphors are ‘‘essentially’’ metamorphoses, when

BECOMING PHENOMENOLOGY

103

the objects related in style exchange their determinations and their names. Thus are a new world, a new point of view on the world, an essence reached. (DL , p. 219)15

Outlined in the above statement is the movement of metaphor itself being metamorphosed, in which the principles of similarity and substitution grounded in the knowing give way to the phenomena of diﬀerence and co-existence manifested in the unknown. Deleuze’s radical rejection of metaphor as representational in favor of metamorphosis in terms of becoming is most clearly articulated in Kaf ka: T oward a Minor L iterature, where metamorphosis is deﬁned, by way of a contrast, as ‘‘an asignifying intensive utilization of language’’: Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor. There is no longer any proper sense or ﬁgurative sense, but only a distribution of states that is part of the range of the word. The thing and other things are no longer anything but intensities overrun by deterritorialized sound or words that are following their line of escape. It is no longer a question of resemblance between the comportment of an animal and that of a man; it is even less a question of a simple wordplay. There is no longer man or animal, since each deterritorializes the other, in a conjunction of ﬂux, in a continuum of reversible intensities. Instead, it is now a question of becoming that includes the maximum of diﬀerence as a diﬀerence of intensity, the crossing of a barrier, a rising or a falling, a bending or an erecting, an accent on the word. (p. 22)

Stated as such, this concept of metamorphosis resonates, in one sense, with Merleau-Ponty’s speciﬁcations of the ‘‘occult trading of metaphor’’ mentioned earlier. As a treatment or re-organization of the representational, arborescent language into an a-signifying, rhizomatic one, metamorphosis thus spatializes the metaphoric linearity constitutive of identity and substitution into a distribution, into lines of ﬂight. It maps, in this sense, a particular kind of transfer, a transfer, that is, with a diﬀerence. For one thing, this notion of transfer is, again, a misprision in that, visa`-vis the Jakobsonian, metaphoric transfer that is essential and vertical, foregrounding depth, i.e., ‘‘paradigmatic’’ and ‘‘geological,’’ Deleuze’s metamorphic transfer is physical and horizontal, privileging surface, i.e., ‘‘syntagmatic’’ and ‘‘geographical’’ (DL , pp. 27, 232).16 For another to understand Deleuze’s – and Serres’s, for that matter – concept of style and its poetic texture of becoming, this syntagmatic and geographical transfer, as Lecercle has rightly emphasized, ‘‘has to be taken literally’’ (DL , p. 27). II

Given his position against metaphor, Deleuze’s own style of writing seems, at ﬁrst glance, to be paradoxical if not outright self-contradictory. For

104

MING-QIAN MA

his acknowledgement that he does not recognize the diﬀerence between literature and philosophy results in a body of writing in which not only is literature everywhere (N, p. 142) but, and more importantly, so are passages of meditation written with highly poetic, that is, metaphoric quality. This stylistic phenomenon belies, as has been argued so far, a philosophical endeavor, which, upon closer look, proves to be rather ambitious in its conceptual scope. What is indeed signiﬁcant, then, is the fact that, in its ﬁrst moment of organizing the materials of writing, Deleuze’s style is metaphoric in more ways than one, ranging from the most literary to the most quotidian, and going beyond the most explicit to the most implicit; in other words, it engages metaphor in the broadest sense and in the most extensive manner possible, implicating all levels as well as all forms of its comparative expressions, to the point, for instance, of including even the use of examples. Such a comprehensive approach to or treatment of writing material is imperative in that, for Deleuze, the second moment of metamorphosis aims at not so much metaphor per se as the very metaphoricity of language itself. No evidence is, perhaps, more subtly exemplary in this respect than a passage from DiVerence and Repetition, in which Deleuze tries to explain the concept of ‘‘diﬀerence.’’ He writes: The diﬀerence ‘‘between’’ two things is only empirical, and the corresponding determinations are only extrinsic. However, instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself – and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it. L ightning, for example, distinguishes itself from the black sky but must also trail it behind, as though it were distinguishing itself from that which does not distinguish itself from it. It is as if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing to be ground. (DR, p. 28)17

Unmistakable is the poetic quality of the above passage, as is shown, in particular, in the italicized section. It articulates a lyricism, musically rhythmic and visually graphic, invoking an impressionist painting not without a certain Gothic touch. Equally unmistakable therein is the presence of a metaphor, whatever its kind, whereby ‘‘diﬀerence’’ is compared to ‘‘lightning’’; hence the ﬁrst moment of establishing an unexpected relationship. This ﬁrst moment, together with its momentary, metaphoric relationship, lasts indeed no more than just a moment, however; for ‘‘lightning’’ turns out to be a vehicle without, so to speak, an engine. More speciﬁcally put, the metaphor collapses or is metamorphosed immediately because ‘‘lightning,’’ to which ‘‘diﬀerence’’ is compared, is itself none other than a linguistic illusion. For ‘‘lightning,’’ in the second

BECOMING PHENOMENOLOGY

105

moment of metamorphosis, deterritorializes ‘‘diﬀerence’’ as hitherto traditionally understood by deterritorializing itself, in the very move to establish its own identity through a comparison, as nothing but the phantom or epiphenomenology predicated upon an ‘‘as if.’’ Repeated twice in the short space of two sentences, Deleuze’s intensiﬁed use of ‘‘as if ’’/‘‘as though’’ invites a review, however brief, of Hans Vaihinger’s thesis in T he Philosophy of ‘‘As If ’’, a thesis pertinent to Deleuze’s critical position toward representational language as well as his ‘‘notorious hostility to metaphor’’ (DL , p. 25). Vaihinger’s book is, in sum, a study of the ‘‘Preponderance of the Means over the End’’ in the development of human thought, a development ‘‘partly in connection with the progress of mathematics, mechanics and jurisprudence’’ (pp. xlvi, 95). One such privileged means to which Vaihinger calls attention is language. According to his analysis, this linguistic construct of ‘‘as if ’’ is a ﬁction-making mechanism. Conventionally used as a construct conducive to identity-formation by way of comparison, it nevertheless bespeaks a logic of the Same, the condition of which is, rather ironically, rooted in its own impossibility. For the word ‘‘if ’’ in the ‘‘as if ’’ combination actually negates the word ‘‘as’’ as constitutive of a ‘‘comparative apperception,’’ Vaihinger contends, since ‘‘if ’’ denotes ‘‘the assumption of a condition, and indeed, in this instance, of an impossible case’’ (p. 92). Dissecting ‘‘as if ’’ into ‘‘something must be treated as it would be treated ... if it ... ,’’ Vaihinger points out that contained in ‘‘as if ’’ there is ‘‘a clear statement of the necessity (possibility or actuality), of an inclusion under an impossible or unreal assumption’’ (p. 93). The apodosis, otherwise manifest and audible like the one introduced by ‘‘then’’ in the ‘‘if ... then’’ construct, is ‘‘merely concealed and suppressed. It lurks unheard between the ‘as’ and the ‘if ’ ’’ (p. 258). In this way, the ‘‘as if ’’ collocation constitutes a formula, argues Vaihinger, one that ‘‘states that reality as given, the particular is compared with something whose impossibility or unreality is at the same time admitted’’ (p. 93). In light of Vaihinger’s insight, Deleuze’s use of the ‘‘as if ’’ construct in his explanation of ‘‘diﬀerence’’ can be seen as initiating a double process (or, a dual moment) of metaphor being metamorphosed. It is a double process in which ‘‘diﬀerence,’’ as the subject or tenor of a metaphoric relationship, succeeds in ﬁnding its resemblance in ‘‘lightning’’ as its metaphoric term or vehicle, only to be denied its identity; for ‘‘lightning’’ itself struggles to have barely reached its own ground for the metaphoric term of identity only to ﬁnd that ground groundless. A conjunction leading a comparative clause, the ‘‘as if ’’ collocation, when so deployed

106

MING-QIAN MA

in Deleuze’s elaboration on ‘‘diﬀerence,’’ thus ushers in what Lecercle calls ‘‘a creative syntax’’ (DL , p. 233). Such syntax is creative in that, by targeting the metaphoric fabric of language, it operates ‘‘through its tension towards silence, towards the ineﬀable, towards the limits of language’’ (DL , p. 233). It strains towards the breaking point in language where sparks begin to ﬂash, as Deleuze has maintained, whereby to summon forth what has been hidden in the shadows of language, and to bring into visibility things that have otherwise been assumed as nonexisting. Hence the ‘‘two aspects’’ or the ‘‘two operations’’ of which ‘‘Style – the foreign language within language – is made up,’’ argues Deleuze: ‘‘the tension in language and the limit of language’’ (ECC, pp. 112, 113). Furthermore, this limit of language, when strained through an internal problematic of ‘‘as if,’’ is manifested in what Deleuze refers to as stammering or stuttering.18 ‘‘W hen a language is so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer,’’ Deleuze explains further, ‘‘then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence. When a language is strained in this way, language in its entirety is submitted to a pressure that makes it fall silent’’ (ECC, p. 113). That being said, ‘‘A style is managing to stammer in one own language,’’ Deleuze claims, ‘‘Not being a stammerer in one’s speech, but being a stammerer of language itself. Being like a foreigner in one’s own language’’ (D, p. 4). In this sense, the language of metamorphosis is then a language that stammers or stutters, literally, which is evinced, when written, in a poetic texture. A case in point is Deleuze’s own style of writing in this passage on diﬀerence. Given its nature and function as a representational makebelieve, and considering its textual location at the end of the passage as the strategic site for a ﬁnal metaphoric grounding, the ‘‘as if ’’ collocation epitomizes, for instance, both the tension and the limit of language, in that its intense and repeated attempts at a metaphoric equilibrium prove to be symptomatic of its own inability to achieve that equilibrium. Though heading a comparative clause, it nevertheless is strained by a syntactic line constituted, not by a set of symmetric substitutes, but by ‘‘curves, rings, bends, and deviations’’ of what Deleuze calls ‘‘a ramiﬁed variation of language’’ (ECC, p. 112). So powerful, in fact, is this centrifugal or rhizomatic straining toward ‘‘the outside of language’’ (ECC, p. 112) that language starts to stutter, not ﬁguratively but literally, as is evidenced in an excessive verbal repetition. Within an excerpt of only eighty-seven words, for instance, not only is the conjunction ‘‘as if ’’ repeated twice in quick succession within the short span of two sentences, but also the verb

BECOMING PHENOMENOLOGY

107

‘‘distinguish,’’ in its various forms, is reiterated seven times. To make language stutter even worse, there is, in addition, the word ‘‘something’’ which is used three times, the pronoun ‘‘itself,’’ six times, and the prepositional phrase led by ‘‘from,’’ six times again. As a result, this passage on diﬀerence does not, or indeed cannot, say very much, for the severe stuttering of language therein has impeded the expressive capability of language to the point where it borders upon silence, where, that is, it is forced to face its own outside. Deleuze’s style, as such, turns out to be particularly ﬁtting insofar it engages a radical re-conceptualization of diﬀerence as ‘‘internal,’’ as ‘‘the ultimate unity’’ (DR, pp. 26, 56). For diﬀerence, as diﬀerence diﬀering (diﬀerentiating and being diﬀerentiated), as an inﬁnitely metamorphic distribution and transfer, is beyond metaphoric language. In this sense, stuttering presents a philosophical gesture. Or, as Lecercle puts it in a more apt and succinct way, ‘‘Stuttering language is the name of the work or play of negation at the linguistic level, which entails consequences, in the shape of variation and the blurring or subversion of constraints at the rhetorical or stylistic level, and eventually points towards the utterly Other which human language, at its limit, enables us to glimpse, beyond the world, at the metaphysical level’’ (DL , p. 230). The site wherein to catch a glimpse of this utterly Other is a poetic text featuring a poetic texture. It is a poetic texture in the sense that the transparent metaphoric ﬁxity and directionality of the text is quantiﬁed into translucent metamorphic intensity and reversibility. Resulting from such quantiﬁcation is a geographical space, a landscape of some sort, in which there is an endlessly metamorphic retreat, a rhizomatic detour, a horizontal expansion or distribution of lines of escape, without any determinable or foreseeable metaphoric or geological determinations. It is an inﬁnitely metamorphic multiplying and over-ﬂowing, overrunning metaphoric barriers and demarcations, unfolding in the one and same move a continuous variation, a modulation, a ﬁeld of ceaseless ﬂux of intensities and diﬀerences impregnated with becoming. Moreover, this poetic texture, with its horizontal, spatial opening, demands to be traversed. Rather than representation, it is, in other words, ‘‘ ‘experience,’ transcendental empiricism or science of the sensible’’ (DR, p. 56). It entails what Deleuze has described earlier as a non-philosophical understanding, an experiential awakening to new percepts and new aﬀects, achievable only by one’s merging into and becoming part of (or more accurately, becoming) that landscape or geographical setting. The poetic texture is, in this sense, the

108

MING-QIAN MA

very texture of becoming in progress. It is phenomenology purged of the phantom or ‘‘epi-’’ (DR, p. 52). III

Equally unsystematic and unequivocal, Michel Serres’s critique of phenomenology as ‘‘Lots of phenomenology and no sensation – everything via language’’ foregrounds, as does Deleuze, the vexed issue of language as representational.19 In both analytic and continental philosophies, Serres asserts, ‘‘the return to things themselves halts at the same barrier – the logic’’ (CSCT, p. 132), which he identiﬁes, among other polemics considered, with language. Serres writes: All around us language replaces experience. The sign, so soft, substitutes itself for the thing, which is hard. I cannot think of this substitution as an equivalence. It is more of an abuse and a violence. The sound of a coin is not worth the coin; the smell of cooking does not ﬁll the hungry stomach; publicity is not the equivalent of quality; the tongue that talks annuls that tongue that tastes or the one that receives and gives a kiss. (CSCT, p. 132)

This concern with ‘‘the relation of language to things,’’ as Latour observes, presents itself as one of the major topics in Serres’s writing, especially in ‘‘his latest book L es Cinq Sens (‘The Body’s Five Senses’)’’ (‘‘Enlightenment,’’ p. 89). In her study of Serres’s works in general and his L es cinq sens in particular, Maria L. Assad also captures this point which, she makes it clear, ‘‘reﬂects Serres’s grave reservations about a long Platonic tradition in philosophical systems and his implied criticism of its modern expression in France via phenomenology and its mutations.’’20 Situating the issue more speciﬁcally in the context of L es cinq sens, Assad thus summarizes Serres’s position: Serres maintains that we have forgotten this fundamental relationship of one-ness, that our sensate bodies have become separated from our being as subjects, that the data of the physical world, ﬁltering through our senses, no longer reach our intellect in their full immediacy. A screen has been put between the two, which we call ‘‘language.’’ The screen prevents passage and it allows passage; it bends, distorts, refracts, or alters what passes; it is a ﬁlter of words and signs through which we become aware of and experience the objects of the physical world – but screened. (Reading, p. 65)

Against this dilemma, Serres resorts to an alternative, which turns out to be ‘‘totally un-French, that is to say un-German,’’ according to Latour, in that his is that of ‘‘an empiricist’’ (‘‘Enlightenment,’’ p. 89).21 This ‘‘empiricist approach to reality,’’ as Assad has put it (Reading, p. 66),

BECOMING PHENOMENOLOGY

109

presents a philosophy characterized by Latour as ‘‘a-critical’’ or ‘‘precritical’’ (‘‘Enlightenment,’’ pp. 85, 90). ‘‘Serres is not a Critique philosopher,’’ Latour thus concludes in his review of Serres’s position in the history of philosophy since Descartes; ‘‘He is not part of the ‘Critique’ philosophical movement’’ (‘‘Enlightenment,’’ p. 85). Rather, he is a post-Cartesian thinker who, being an opening upon possibilities (as Vattimo described earlier), is enfeebled by weak thought, thus incapable of any authentic projects of his own. As such, his a-critical or pre-critical philosophy pivots upon two premises. On the one hand, Latour argues, Serres’s philosophy is free from negation and dialectics, which ‘‘are the great masters of history, the midwives of our societies’’; and on the other hand, it rejects ‘‘a reduction of the world into two packs, a little one that is sure and certain, the immense rest which is simply believed and in dire need of being criticized, founded, re-educated, straightened up’’ (‘‘Enlightenment,’’ pp. 91, 85). In stark contrast to Critique philosophy that ‘‘always looks for a lifeboat’’ in negation and reduction, as Latour contends, Serres’s a-critical philosophy is the philisophy of adding or addition – i.e., a returning the knowledge of things back to things themselves rather than a reducing things to the knowledge of them (‘‘Enlightenment,’’ pp. 85, 89). And this a-critical philosophy of addition is realized by way of style, which is, as Latour rightly insists, ‘‘part and parcel of [Serres’s] very philosophical argument’’ (‘‘Enlightenment,’’ p. 96). ‘‘Style is the sign of innovation,’’ Serres proclaims, ‘‘of passage into new territory’’ (CSCT, p. 26). It is a way of writing that strains toward the unthinkable. For Serres, more speciﬁcally, style is that by which he breaks away from the rut of the classical and the technical, i.e., reductive, discourses which, Serres believes, do not have ‘‘the terms and operators capable of describing’’ the radically new, one for which, therefore, ‘‘it [is] necessary to ﬁnd a new language’’ (CSCT , pp. 71, 72). Central to Serres’s concept of style is, among other things, a Deleuzean rethinking of the issue of ‘‘recognition,’’ against which Serres deﬁnes style as follows: A unique style comes from the gesture, the project, the itinerary, the risk – indeed, from the acceptance of a speciﬁc solitude. ... Repetition of content or method entails no risk, whereas style reﬂects in its mirror the nature of danger. In venturing as far as possible toward nonrecognition, style runs the risk even of autism. (CSCT, p. 94)

Furthermore, this non-recognition or autism of style makes a Deleuzean mockery of the common sense and the good sense. For Serres’s style, together with its ‘‘ ‘poetic’ eﬀect,’’ is identiﬁed, ironically indeed, by his

110

MING-QIAN MA

use of ‘‘more and more natural, everyday language’’ (CSCT, p. 72). Hence a paradox, in that ‘‘the diﬃculty’’ of Serres’s style, or its non-recognizability, lies in its being ‘‘too plain,’’ argues Latour, featuring a ‘‘clarity without a scholarly domain’’ (‘‘Enlightenment,’’ p. 96). In other words, Serres’s style, as Latour puts it with a Deleuzean overtone, is a style ‘‘unbounded by the delineation of territories’’ (‘‘Enlightenment,’’ p. 97). Straining toward new concepts in philosophy, Serres’s style ﬁnds its most dynamic manifestations in some of his writings in which he engages in a radical rethinking of time. Two passages are especially exemplary. In his conversations with Latour, for instance, Serres thus writes: Time does not always ﬂow according to a line ... nor according to a plan but, rather, according to an extraordinary complex mixture, as though it reﬂected stopping points, ruptures, deep wells, chimneys of thunderous acceleration, rendings, gaps – all sown at random, at least in a visible disorder. ... Time is paradoxical; it folds or twists; it is as various as the dance of ﬂames in a brazier – here interrupted, there vertical, mobile, and unexpected. (CSCT, pp. 57, 58)

In Genesis, for which ‘‘the question of (poetic) style is ... of utmost importance,’’ as Assad points out (Reading, p. 29), Serres writes similarly, with an emphasis on time’s ‘‘texture of being and the way that it passes’’ (p. 115): [Time], at times, is composed of instants, and that, at times, it ﬂows by, devoid of units. It is discontinuous and it is continuous. It passes and it does not pass. It comes back on itself, sometimes, and, sometimes, it lapses or is lost, absented. ... Time becomes expansive and contracts, all at once dense and soon spread out. Full, empty, intense or ﬂat, vertiginous, banal, cut quite lengthily by an abrupt fault, uniformly full, blank continuously. ... Time is lacunary and sporadic, it is badly stitched tatter, it passes, loose, a mosaic. Time is a pure multiplicity ... time, nonlinear, is, most often, a sheet or a ﬁeld. (p. 115)

Stylistically, both passages above present a conceptual aﬃnity with the writings of Deleuze. Finding ‘‘technical language’’ abhorrent (CSCT, p. 72), Serres opts for a style which is, for one thing, very literary or poetic in that it is particularly visual and imagistic in a fragmented fashion, moving with a rapidity that invokes a modernist ﬁlm montage. For another, it is blatantly metaphoric, as is amply evidenced in his repeated comparisons of time to ‘‘the dance of ﬂames,’’ ‘‘badly stitched tatter,’’ and ‘‘a sheet or a ﬁeld,’’ among others. But as in Deleuze’s writing, the metaphoric relationships thus established do not hold, as they simultaneously go through a double process of metaphor being metamorphosed by way of an ‘‘as though’’ construct, which invalidates the very metaphoric grounding itself.

BECOMING PHENOMENOLOGY

111

More important, however, is another aspect of Serres’s style. As an innovative push towards radically new concepts, percepts, and aﬀects, it highlights the tension and limit of language by pitting two kinds of syntax against each other. Interlaced repeatedly in quick intervals are, for instance, two types of sentences constituted, respectively, by two kinds of verbs: the intransitive and the copula. While the former is used to describe the motion or movement of time running loose and wild, the latter is used to establish a resemblance or identity of time abstracted and tamed. When so arranged syntactically, Serres’s style can be seen as staging an intense and prolonged struggle of and within language, of escape and capture, of breaking free and being imprisoned. But the check-and-balance therein is tilted, it seems, in favor of lines of ﬂights in sentences with intransitive verbs. For Serres’s style in both passages is also marked by a lengthiness and a wordiness that result from a rather repetitive alternation from one type of sentence to another without ever arriving at one with a conclusive copula, which in turn suggests, from this perspective, that time, as is thus newly conceived, always remain a step ahead of the hunt and the conﬁnes of conventional thinking, evading the metaphoric alignment and venturing continuously towards the metamorphic outside of language. Hence the implied issue of speed, which presents itself as another related feature of Serres’s style. It is clear that the manner in which the above passages on time are composed betrays a fast pace. All the sentences, often abbreviated into short phrases or even words, follow one another close at heel in a jerky but rapid rhythm, each pushing and being pushed, too impatient and too quick-footed, as it were, to stay in its own place. For Serres, such a style of speed is imperative in terms of his empiricist approach to the world, in that it constitutes the initial thrust toward the metamorphic unknown prior to metaphoric appropriations and usurpations. In his discussion of speed as ‘‘a fundamental category of intelligence’’ related to mathematics (CSCT, p. 68), for instance, Serres presents it as the superior quality intrinsic to sense intuition, as that which facilitates a pre-critical, sense-oriented, unconditional embrace of the world. But as a force straining language towards its outside, speed is, not surprisingly, always sacriﬁced for and taken over by the slowness and the eventual stasis of the common sense and the good sense. Serres delineates such a process demonstratively, writing in a way which mimics the loss of velocity through a pace of delivery that slows down, gradually but literally, from its initial tempo: ‘‘Intuition initiates and commands, abstraction follows it, and ﬁnally proof sorts things out and sets them

112

MING-QIAN MA

down, in its pedestrian way, as it can’’ (CSCT, p. 68). Indeed, in this slowing down sequence outlined in Serres’s description, the facticity of the world is processed into the epiphenomenology of the world. Poetic, no doubt, Serres’s text, when written with such a style of speed, is endowed with a poetic texture featuring a palpable tangibility. It is a texture that consists of a rugged geographical terrain, literally, one in which language, speeding towards its own limits over the changing features of the landscape, exists in a state of continuous variation. Within this rugged geographical terrain, time, when pressured by the speeding language toward its own outside, ceases to be an abstract concept understood in the traditional sense. Rather, it ﬁnds the expression of its own being metamorphosed into a ‘‘texture,’’ as Serres mentions earlier, into a percept of distribution, as it now ‘‘percolates’’ through ruptures, deep wells, gaps, and rendings, unveiling in the process ‘‘things that are evident, concrete, decisive, and new’’ (CSCT, p. 58). Further, time, being percolating as distributing, is inﬁnitely metamorphic, for the contour of the terrain through which it percolates and over which it distributes is rugged, presenting varying physical details at every point. As such, time never is; rather, it is always becoming, or becoming-time. In this sense, Serres’s poetic texture is the very texture of the being of time, being here meaning none other than becoming or becoming-time. IV

In contemporary French philosophy, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres present a radical rethinking of phenomenology that does not take what the latter dubs as ‘‘superhighways’’ (CSCT, p. 39). By way of a philosophy of diﬀerence and a philosophy of addition, both pursue an empiricist approach to the world, interested not in reaching the small islands of certainty scattered on the ‘‘rough water’’ (‘‘Enlightenment,’’ p. 85) but the in-between of these islands, i.e., in the rough water of the phenomenal world itself. To the extent that neither of them is considered a phenomenologist in the conventional sense, Deleuze and Serres can be seen as engaging in the hitherto most thorough re-conceptualization of phenomenology from a position outside of – but not outside – phenomenology. Emerging from this position, then, is a new, intransitive thinking. For both philosophers, phenomenology, as that of diﬀerence diﬀering and addition adding, is the phenomenology of becoming, properly speaking, or becoming-phenomenology, one whose suﬃx ‘‘-logy’’ as a disciplinary identity tag is being deterritorialized and metamorphosed. As is thus

BECOMING PHENOMENOLOGY

113

articulated by Deleuze and Serres, becoming phenomenology is, to put it in Latour’s apt words once more, the phenomenology of ‘‘Enlightenment, without the Critique’’ (‘‘Enlightenment,’’ p. 97). T he State University of New York at BuValo NOTES 1 In his important study titled Deleuze and L anguage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), Jean-Jacques Lecercle explains his use of the name ‘‘Deleuze’’ as follows: ‘‘I have referred to the name ‘Deleuze’ as denoting not an individual author but a collective assemblage of enunciation. Indeed, the texts I have used are sometimes signed by Deleuze alone, often by Deleuze and Guattari, or even by Deleuze and Pamet. This passage from single author to assemblage is a philosophical gesture in the spirit of ‘Deleuze’: a dual gesture, of position and of exclusion’’ (p. 31). This book is henceforth cited as DL . Considering Lecercle’s position in this respect as oﬀering ‘‘a refreshing corrective to the bias in some contemporary ‘Deleuzean’ scholarship,’’ Steve McCaﬀery points out, in his review of Deleuze and L anguage, that ‘‘the book’s seminal achievement is to open up Deleuzean scholarship to its collaborative nature’’ (p. 145, n. 1), T extual Practice 17:1 (2003), pp. 141–146. This paper will follow Lecercle and McCaﬀery in its use of the name ‘‘Deleuze.’’ 2 Deleuze, as Lecercle has argued, seems to have taken both turns, linguistic and antilinguistic. For details, see DL , pp. 247–253. 3 Lecercle borrows the term ‘‘misprision’’ from Harold Bloom who used the term in A Map of Misreading to describe the relation of inﬂuence between two poets. In his article ‘‘The Misprision of Pragmatics: Conceptions of Language in Contemporary French Philosophy,’’ he considers the term as ‘‘an apt description of the process of importation of concepts (from other ﬁelds or other traditions) into philosophy – a process of re-appropriation, betrayal and creative misunderstanding’’ (p. 23). Henceforth cited as ‘‘Misprision.’’ For more detailed explanation of this term and the resultant Deleuzean pragmatics vis-a`-vis Anglo-Saxon pragmatics, see ‘‘Misprision,’’ pp. 22–23, and also DL , pp. 19–20, 159–165. In a general sense, the term ‘‘pragmatics’’ or ‘‘the pragmatic turn’’ here can be understood in light of William Rehg’s critique of formal pragmatics, albeit in a diﬀerent context, as he thus deﬁnes the concept: ‘‘The pragmatic turn ... can be understood negatively as a turn away from both the premoderns’ metaphysical concerns with the structures of being and the moderns’ epistemological focus on the possibility of a subject’s access to an objective world; positively, the turn consists of a turn toward the conditions and presuppositions of language use as the unavoidable context and medium for philosophical inquiry’’ (p. 116). Original emphasis. 4 Gilles Deleuze, A T housand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translation and foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Henceforth cited as T P. 5 Lecercle is very emphatic about this point in contrast with the Anglo-Saxon pragmatics, and he further exempliﬁes this contrast in his own discussion of Deleuze’s work through ‘‘several readings of a short sketch by Harold Pinter, Request Stop,’’ arguing that ‘‘This is in itself a typically continental gesture: as we all know, the role played by literary texts in contemporary French philosophy is crucial, and there is no equivalent to this in AngloSaxon philosophy’’ (‘‘Misprision,’’ pp. 23–24). Bruno Latour oﬀers a similar observation of

114

MING-QIAN MA

Serres’s work in this respect in his article titled ‘‘The Enlightenment without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres’ Philosophy.’’ He points out, through a staged example of Serres’s reading of Lucrecius’s De Natura Rerum, that ‘‘for a large part of his career Serres published books which appear to pertain to that of genre, and it is inside language departments that he is still best known abroad’’ (pp. 85, 87). This article is henceforth cited as ‘‘Enlightenment.’’ 6 Original emphasis. Unless otherwise noted, all forms of emphases in the paper proper are from the original texts. 7 Gilles Deleuze, DiVerence and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), pp. 56, 57. Henceforth cited as DR. 8 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990, translated by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia UP, 1995), p. 131. Henceforth cited as N. 9 In Deleuze’s writing, the meaning of the term ‘‘epiphenomenology,’’ as is the case with some other terms, varies according to diﬀerent contexts in which it is used. Whereas in DiVerence and Repetition, for instance, ‘‘epiphenomenology’’ is used synonymously with ‘‘phantom’’ as that, and that alone, which the Hegelian ‘‘negative and negativity’’ are able to capture (p. 52), in Essays Critical and Clinical, it is used to deﬁne ‘‘The Being of phenomenon’’ as the ‘‘object of pataphysics’’ (p. 92). Deleuze thus writes: ‘‘The phenomenon ... does not refer to consciousness, but to a Being, the Being of the phenomenon that consists precisely in its self-showing [se-montrer]. The Being of the phenomenon is the ‘‘epiphenomenon,’’ nonuseful and unconscious. ... The epiphenomenon is the Being of the phenomenon, whereas the phenomenon is only a being, or life. It is not Being, but the phenomenon that is perception – it perceives or is perceived – whereas Being is thinking. No doubt Being, or the epiphenomenon, is nothing other than the phenomenon, but it diﬀers from it absolutely: it is the self-showing of the phenomenon.’’ Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 92. Henceforth cited as ECC. 10 Gilles Deleuze, T he L ogic of Sense, translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, edited by Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1990). Henceforth cited as L S. 11 In his study, Lecercle makes the observation that ‘‘Deleuze’s phenomenology appears to be language-driven,’’ and he perceives Deleuze’s ‘‘anti-Husserlian’’ (DL , p. 22) position in the following passage from Dialogues: ‘‘It must not be said that language deforms a reality which is pre-existing or of another nature. Language is ﬁrst, it has invented the dualism. But the cult of language, the setting-up of language, linguistics itself, is worse than the old ontology from which it has taken over. We must pass through [passer par] dualisms because they are in language, it’s not a question of getting rid of them, but we must ﬁght against language, invent stammering, not in order to get back to a pre-linguistic pseudo-reality, but to trace a vocal or written line which will make language ﬂow between these dualisms, and which will deﬁne a minority usage of language, an inherent variation as Labov says.’’ Dialogues by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habbeijam (New York: Columbia UP, 1987), p. 34. Henceforth cited as D. For more details, see DL , p. 22. 12 Gianni Vattimo, ‘‘The Crisis of Subjectivity from Nietzsche to Heidegger,’’ Diferentia: Review of Italian T hought 1 (Autumn 1986), pp. 5–21. Henceforth cited as ‘‘Crisis.’’ 13 Lecercle thus explains the ‘‘paradox of style: how it can be perceived as the most individual inhabitation of language, to use Heidegger’s metaphor, and yet not be ascribed to a person’’ as follows: ‘‘There is a subject of style, but this subject is the end-product of a process of subjectivation (thus, the subject is not the origin, but the eﬀect of her style: the author does not have style, it is style that has an author, that is inscribed, and in a way

BECOMING PHENOMENOLOGY

115

embodied, in an author’s name), and this subject, both individual (an ‘inimitable’ style) and collective (an assemblage is speaking), is in no way reducible to a person’’ (DL , pp. 223–224). 14 For more sustained discussions of ‘‘the problem of writing’’ (p. lv), see Deleuze’s ECC. 15 Lecercle is very careful about the use of the term ‘‘essence,’’ and explains its meaning, interestingly enough, also in metaphorical terms: ‘‘Essences are variously deﬁned by Deleuze as absolute and ultimate diVerences, and as monads. An essence is a point of view on the world, each one expressing the world in an entirely diﬀerent way, and creating subjects in the process. From that it appears that such essences must not be taken in their transcendent, Platonic form, but must be read as immanent (or the essence as the ‘essential oil’ that gives the perfume its fragrance)’’ (DL , p. 219). 16 For the notion of syntagma in relation to the Markov chain and Lecercle’s reading of it, see DL , p. 232. 17 My emphasis. 18 In his detailed study of Deleuze’s concept of stuttering as that which ‘‘introduces slippage or subversion within systematic langue,’’ Lecercle identiﬁes two kinds of them, referred to respectively as ‘‘the paradigmatic stuttering of inclusive disjunctions’’ and ‘‘the syntagmatic stuttering of reﬂective connections’’ (DL , p. 232). For more information of these two kinds of stuttering, see DL , pp. 230–234. 19 Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and T ime, translated by Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 132. Henceforth cited as CSCT . Serres’s critique here is directed toward Merleau-Ponty and his opening remark in Phenomenology of Perception when he writes ‘‘At the outset of the study of perception, we ﬁnd in language the notion of sensation,’’ which Serres quotes in his comment (CSCT, pp. 131–132). Although this is not the place for an elaboration on this topic, it is important to point out that Serres’s critique of Merleau-Ponty on the issue of language should be understood, however, as partial and paradoxical. For Serres’s position in this regard in fact resonates, as is shown in his concern with the language-sense relationship, with that of Merleau-Ponty, and even more so, perhaps, with that in Merleau-Ponty’s work after Phenomenology of Perception, such as T he V isible and the Invisible. 20 Maria L. Assad, Reading with Michel Serres: An Encounter with T ime (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 65. Henceforth cited as Reading. 21 It is signiﬁcant to point out here that, for being an unconventional thinker, Michel Serres identiﬁes himself in particular with Gilles Deleuze. In response to Latour’s comment on the 1950s and the 1960s as ‘‘a great period for the French intelligentsia,’’ for instance, Serres replies rhetorically as follows: ‘‘But did those who didn’t choose the superhighways really contribute something new? Like Gilles Deleuze, for example. He separated himself from the traditional history of philosophy, from the human sciences, from epistemology. He is an excellent example of the dynamic movement of free and inventive thinking’’ (CSCT, p. 39). It thus comes as no surprise that the similarity between Deleuze and Serres is, to a great extent, uncanny.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Assad, Maria L. Reading with Michel Serres. An Encounter with T ime. New York: State University of New York Press, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles. A T housand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Brian Massumi (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

116

MING-QIAN MA

——. DiVerence and Repetition. Paul Patton (trans.). New York: Columbia UP, 1994. ——. Negotiations. 1972–1990. Martin Joughin (trans.). New York: Columbia UP, 1995. ——. T he L ogic of Sense. Mark Lester, Charles Stivale (trans.), Constantin V. Boundas (ed.). New York: Columbia UP, 1990. ——. Essays Critical and Clinical. Daniel W. Smith, Michael A. Greco (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. —— and Felix Guattari. W hat Is Philosophy. Hugh Tomlinson, Graham Burchell (trans.). New York: Columbia UP, 1994. —— and Felix Guattari. Kaf ka: T oward a Minor L iterature. Dana Polan (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. —— and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberiam (trans.). New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Latour, Bruno. ‘‘The Enlightenment without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres’s Philosophy,’’ in Phillips Griﬃths (ed.), Contemporary French Philosophy. Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series: 21. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1987, pp. 83–97. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Deleuze and L anguage. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. ——. ‘‘The Misprision of Pragmatics: Conceptions of Language in Contemporary French Philosophy,’’ in Phillips Griﬃths (ed.), Contemporaiy French Philosophy. Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series: 21. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1987, pp. 21–40. McCaﬀery, Steve. ‘‘Review of Deleuze and L anguage.’’ T extual Practice 17:1 (2003): 141–146. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. T he V isible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968. Rehg, William. ‘‘Adjusting the Pragmatic Turn: Ethnomethodology and Critical Argumentation Theory,’’ in William Rehg, James Bohman (eds.), Pluralism and the Pragmatic T urn: T he T ransformation of Critical T heory. New York: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 115–143. Serres, Michel. Genesis. Genevieve James, James Nielson (trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. —— and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and T ime. Roxanne Lapidus (trans.). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995. Vaihinger, Hans. T he Philosophy of ‘‘As If ’’. A System of the T heoretical, Practical, and Religious Fictions of Mankind. C. K. Ogden (trans.). New York: Harcourt, 1925. Vattimo, Gianni. ‘‘The Crisis of Subjectivity from Nietzsche to Heidegger.’’ DiVerentia 1 (Autumn 1986): 5–21. ——. ‘‘Dialectics, Diﬀerence, and Weak Thought.’’ Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 10:1 (Spring 1984): 151–164.

SECTION III SHARING-IN-LIFE

ELLA BUCENIECE

HOW CAN WE BE TOGETHER: INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND COMMUNICATION

Thinking is not non-activity but it is activity-in-itself in dialogue with the fate of the world M. Heidegerr

The world, and the human world in particular, is impossible without the I. This stance, initiated so convincingly by Descartes, reached its apotheosis in German Idealism by way of drawing a line of demarcation between I and not-I and by rising, through criticism, to the level of the ideal-I. Yet I, just as with any other entity, is impossible without relations, and therefore we can legitimately inquire with Nietzsche: is a thing without relations really a thing? Nowadays, as humanity turns into a planetary community, on the one hand, and as the existential legitimacy of the human community is rapidly vanishing, on the other, when the cultural gap between the ‘‘world of success’’ and ‘‘the world of traditions’’ (A. Touraine), between the superorganised socium and the principal untenability of the subject yawns ever wider, the question inevitably arises: how can we be together? Alain Touraine sets this question in an even sadder vein: ‘‘Are we able to live together? Being equal and diﬀerent?’’ – and concedes that this question arises ‘‘not out of hope but in pain at the sight of the disintegration of the ties’’. The concepts which may help to fasten the loose ties, or at least help to look for the tattered ends of the same, are, obviously enough, intersubjectivity and communication. These notions have become indispensable tools for the apprehension of the modern world, which is attested by the growing number of publications discussing these themes. The general development of the discussion, in my opinion, is taking the following path: initially due to the work of J. Habermas, N. Luhmann, P. Ricoeur, and J. Baudrillard, the concept of communication (including, of course, the structure of communication as well) was the dominant one, while lately the theme of intersubjectivity has come to the fore (N. Crossley, P. Ricoeur, A. Touraine, E. Gidden, etc.). Secondly, the structure of intersubjectivity was previously discussed in the context of such features as intimacy, passivity (non-action), even solipsism (E. Husserl, E. Levinas), 119 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 119–128. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

120

ELLA BUCENIECE

while the structure of communication was thematized with action, behaviour, non-personity as a system, with consensus, etc. Thirdly, the previous approaches either did not relate these concepts together at all (investigation of intersubjectivity in Husserl’s phenomenology as a self-referential theme), or – just the opposite – they were not diﬀerentiated enough, but used synonymously for the stylistic enrichment of the language and not as essentially distinct elements of the discourse. For these reasons the gist of the proposition which I want to particularly accentuate is the following. First, the Husserlian understanding of intersubjectivity may serve as the basis for the formation of the present-day concept of communication because it anticipates a diﬀerent understanding of I, which is also the main precondition for communication. By way of modifying Husserl’s call to ‘‘go back to the things themselves’’, today we need to go back to Husserl. Secondly, I intend to demonstrate the speciﬁcs and the diﬀerence between intersubjective behaviour and communicative action (let it be noted that I have intentionally changed the usual terminology concerning intersubjective act and communicative behaviour). I also want to investigate the mutual interconnection of the two concepts so as to be able to engage in ‘‘a dialogue with the fate of the world’’. I will do this even though the existing diﬀerence and the tension between the system of thought and the real L ebenswelt is notoriously diﬃcult, if not impossible, to overcome.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND THE OTHER SUBJECT

The theme of intersubjectivity in Husserl’s phenomenology has been rather thoroughly dealt with, and scholarly eﬀorts continue. We can draw attention to one of the latest publications on the theme: an entry by Kathleen Haney in the encyclopaedia ‘‘Phenomenology – World-Wide’’, edited by A.-T. Tymienecka. Discussing the theme of intersubjectivity, the author speaks of Husserl’s thought on communication: ‘‘Husserl’s doctrine of intersubjectivity is central in his metaphysics as well as to his ethics and politics. The topic of intersubjectivity also includes or makes available various phenomenological themes such as communication [author emphasis], empathy, alterity, community, and personalisms’’.1 I fully agree with this conclusion, the more so because Husserl had been dealing with such communitarian themes as state, language, rights etc. as far back as 1910, in an article ‘‘Gemeinschaft und Norm’’. However, since this was before detailed discussion of the concepts of transcendental

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND COMMUNICATION

121

ego and of intersubjectivity, these themes were lacking their ‘‘basic argumentation foundation’’. Husserl’s starting point in ‘‘Cartesian Meditations’’ is analogous to that chosen by his illustrious fore-runner (it is evident from the title of Husserl’s work that he was intentionally seeking associations and intersubjective relations with Descartes). For Descartes ego is the one and only accessible reality allowing no doubts, and its foundation is to be looked for in the cogito principle thus turning ego into epistemological bases for the formation of the manifold I – not-I relations. The constitutive Ego of Husserl does not leave the precincts of the experience of our consciousness, and within world is constituted simultaneously. At the close of the ﬁfth Cartesian Meditation, Husserl puts it in a nutshell: ‘‘So vervirklicht sich die Idee einer universalen Philosophie – ganz anderns, als Descartes und sein Zeitalter es sich ... dachten – nicht als ein universales System deduktiever Theorie, als ob alles Seienbe in der Einheit eines Rechnung stu¨nde, sondern – ... als ein System von pha¨nomenologischen, in der Thematik korrelativen Disziplinen auf dem untersten Grundenicht der Axioms ego cogito, oder einer universalen Selbstbesinnung ... , einer philosophischen universalen Selbsterkenntnis, zuna¨chst einer monadischen, und dann intermonadischen’’.2 However, most scholars, including Teodors Celms, considered Husserlian argumentation solipsistic and spiritualistic. Indeed, Husserl’s approach was not traditional and was liable to be misunderstood, because he started not with the relations between I and the Other, but with a radically diﬀerent understanding of the I. The intention of the subject, according to Husserl, is not I – not-I, but rather I – I, where the second I is another I of the Self. Thus the subject as it were acquires a kind of plurality; for the ability of the Ego to accept the Other has to be preceded by a similar experience in the consciousness of the Ego Itself while constituting its Alter Ego. I do not intend to present a systematic analyses of Husserl’s views on intersubjectivity (I refer to the aforementioned article by K. Haney, where this has been suﬃciently dealt with), but I will attempt to accentuate those aspects of his theory which speak to Husserl’s understanding of the alterity of the subject constituting intersubjectivity. Actually, Husserl was the ﬁrst one to demonstrate not only how relations with others and with the world are formed, but also how the subject itself is in the world, instead of being positioned outside it in role of ex-temporal observer. Thus, it is only because of the constitution of the transcendental ego, that the possibility of intersubjectivity, and the foundation of the world as a necessary world really arises. This is why

122

ELLA BUCENIECE

the relations with the Other and with the world are not contingent and non-essential, but form the very foundations of the objective world. As Kurt R. Meist states in his article ‘‘Intersubjektivita¨t zwischen Natur und Geshichte. Einige Anmerknungen u¨ber Probleme einer transzendentalen Letzbegru¨ndung’’: Dem Ich, sei es das eigene oder das fremde, eignet die Welt nicht wie ein kontingenter Annex, vielmehr gilt, das sich ein solches Bewußtsein selber als notwendig (praenexe) Prius der – nur aus sich selber kontingent bestimmten – Faktizita¨t der Welt im ganzen Dennen muß, wie ein jeder Norma auf eine Noesis verweist ...’’.3 In Cartesian Meditation 5 Husserl makes use of an even stronger reduction of this world for the constitution of the objective world in the transcendental Ego. Preconditions of intersubjectivity are formed alongside with formation of the objective world, because ‘‘Jedenfalls also in mir, im Rahmen meines transzendental reduzierten reinen Bewußtseinslebens erfahre ich die Welt mitsamt den Anderen und dem Erfahrungssinn gema¨ß nicht als mein sozusagen privates synthetischen Gebilde, sondern als mir fremde, als intersubjektive, fu¨r jedermann daseiende, in ihren Objekten jedermann zuga¨ngliche Welt’’.4

However, this is not the meaning of ‘‘the other’’ as yet, but only something that confronts I as objects. K. Haney remarks: ‘‘The preegoic ‘I’ antedates and makes possible the I that can constitute itself and its world as mundane’’.5 My further experience of the ego brings me to the cognizance of the others as subjects who cognize the world, which is the same one cognized by me. Thus, in revealing the sphere of the selfhood (Eigenheitsspha¨re), the meaning of the ‘‘other subject’’ becomes apparent and a universal layer of meaning is consequently formed. Yet initially ego is constituted in the sphere of my selfhood not as ‘‘I myself ’’ but as ego which is mirrored in my I, that is, as my alter ego: it is ‘‘the other’’ pointing towards me. Thus, the meaning of ‘‘the other’’ is what positions my ego. Therefore intentional constitution of ‘‘the other’’ is subjective activity as an act which accepts (that is, ﬁrst of all constitutes within the self ) the other. In a similar manner in the personal sphere (Eigenartspha¨re), which is acquired by way of reduction, the other appears ﬁrst of all not in subjectivity, but in the meaning: ‘‘the single in nature’’, or bodies, and again in the ﬁrst place as my living body6 – the only object which I possess and which I control in my experience. Due to the tactile, auditory, and other perceptions, this experience acquires the modes of ‘‘I do’’, ‘‘I am able’’; in other words, the meaning of my I as a psycho-physical entity is determined by my action.7 Here we can also note a diﬀerence from Descartes, for – to follow the conclusion of K. Haney – for Husserl ‘‘cogito is incarnated’’.8 My body as a psycho-physical object in the world (in Welt) is tied up (verﬂochten) with other bodies, and at the same time

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND COMMUNICATION

123

I get to know (erfahre) them as other subjects for this world, insofar as other subjects include me in their experience in a similar way.9 The subjective experience of the other not indicated directly but through ‘‘appresentative association’’ and analogy. During the second reduction (as during the ﬁrst one), the constitutive intersubjectivity begins with the physical body of the other by way of using the analogy of the appresentive pairing, where the primordial ego is in a position to transcend itself. The ﬁrst pair relation distinguished by Husserl is the mother-child pair. The intersubjective world is not identical with the world of any of the members of the pair, for each of them obtains of his/her own primordial sphere. The way the psycho-physical world of an individual gets transcended in the world of intersubjectivity is elegantly demonstrated by K. Haney using a linguistic analogy: by bracketing the letter ‘‘m’’ in the word (m)other the ‘‘other’’ is constituted.10 I hold that for Husserl the task of intersubjectivity was ﬁrst and foremost to constitute the subject of the other, thus establishing the alterity of each subject, and, secondly, to constitute the community of those alterities, for the transcendental ego itself is a peculiar form of community. That Husserl speciﬁcally wanted to accentuate the diﬀerences existing within community is attested to by the fact that he made use of the Leibnizean notion of monad. Yet, in a marked diﬀerence from Leibniz, he considers the task of monadial adjustment, or the formation of intersubjective world as apohal responsibility of each subject, not just a coincidental placing of the diﬀerent worlds together: ‘‘Natu¨rlich hat Leibniz recht, wenn er sagt daß undendlich viele Monaden und Monadengruppen denkbar sind, aber darum nicht alle diese Mo¨glichkeiten kompo¨ssibel, und wieder, daß unendlich viele Welten ha¨tten ‘‘Geschaﬀen’’ sein ko¨nnen, aber nicht mehrere zugleich, da sie inkompo¨ssibel sind’’.11 It has to be remarked also that Husserl constitutes community not only in the form of intersubjectivity, but also in ‘‘usforms’’ – at ﬁrst in Cartesian Meditation 5, but chieﬂy elaborating this theme in ‘‘Crisis’’. Besides, in ‘‘Crisis’’, as K. Held has pointed out, the world is constituted not only as objective but as ‘‘eine Welt einer vernu¨nftig kommunizierenden Menscheit’’.12 And, by way of concluding the theme of Husserl’s views on alterity in relation to intersubjectivity, I want to stress once again that he makes use of analogy and association and these devices presuppose the imagination and creativity endemic to the subject. Without these qualities there is not the slightest possibility of building up a shared world. The precondition of inter-subjectivity is subjectivity or the other subject. This stance is taken also by P. Riceour

124

ELLA BUCENIECE

in one of his latest works ‘‘The Hermeneutics of Action’’, where the concept of intersubjectivity is discussed within the context of the structure of hermeneutic activity.13 In order to be engaged in an activity of living together with the other, one must ﬁrst of all possess an inclination to do so. The wishing (or not wishing) is contained within the subject and it can not be produced by any ethical regulations or juridical codes. The precondition for mutual understanding is willingness, hospitality, forgiveness of the alter ego of the subject, and it is only on the basis of these qualities that living with the other can take place. COMMUNICATION AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY

The understanding of intersubjectivity has developed in various directions since Husserl. I will mention a few. First is the direction of ‘‘radical intersubjectivity’’ (N. Crossley’s designation). It investigates the ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘Thou’’ relations, the alterity, the corporal subject, speech and language, etc. (see the works of M. Buber, E. Levinas, M. Merleau-Ponty, P. Ricoeur). Second is ‘‘mundane intersubjectivity’’ (A. Schu¨tz’s term), which deals with the phenomenology of the social world, social actors and their lifeworlds, with the interaction and the meaning-formation of various regional and life-cycle groups (contemporaries, predecessors, successors), etc. A. Schu¨tz’s approach stretches the borders of intersubjectivity to such an extent that he actually enters the zone of communicative action, which is marked by the disposal of the phenomenological reduction. Here in the process of the formation of communicative structure such devices as mediators, codes, arrangement of activities, etc. are being used instead of I-poles and the constitution of meaning within them. L ebenswelt has turned out to be the most productive of all Husserlian concepts in this line of argumentation. One of the most profound investigations of L ebenswelt has been performed by J. Habermas. Intersubjectivity and L ebenswelt for Habermas are primordial notions, yet he discusses their place and meaning in a system-based fashion: ‘‘The lifeworld has been relegated to the position of a subsystem within the system’’.14 Habermas oﬀers a communicative critique of phenomenology, applying it to the Husserlian notion of L ebenswelt (which in the case of Husserl was intersubjective experience) by concentrating on the sociological nuances of this notion being formed by ‘‘structural components of culture, society (legitimate order) and person (personal competence)’’.15 Habermas explains his position in the following way:

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND COMMUNICATION

125

An dieser Stelle kann ich den Begriﬀ der Lebenswelt zuna¨chst als Korelat zu Versta¨ndigungsprozessen einfu¨hren. Kommunikativ handelade Subjekte versta¨ndigen sich stets im Horizont einer Lebenswelt. Ihre Lebenswelt baut sich aus mehr oder weniger diﬀusen, stets unproblematische Hintergrund beziehungen’’.16

Actually, one has to agree with P. N. Zima, that in order to understand the relation between communication and lifeworld in Habermas’s philosophy, it is necessary to bear in mind that he ‘‘uses two notions of Lebenswelt: one – formally-pragmatic which is an idealization in the transcendentally phenomenological meaning, and another one – sociological, which takes account of the conﬂict-saturated reality’’.17 The ﬁrst one serves to produce ideal speech situations (Sprechsituation), and ideal discourse, construed by Habermas as metacommunicative talk.18 However, not just any action or interaction is recognized by Habermas as communicative action. He distinguishes between teleological (orientated towards the objective world), normative (orientated towards the social world), dramaturgical (orientated towards the subjective world), and, lastly, communicative action. Communicative action, the meaning of which is understanding, is not orientated towards any of the ﬁrst three worlds, but it serves to relativize their meanings. Yet, Habermas considers that all the members of a discourse produce basically similar meanings in the process of communication, and this is the most widely critiqued aspect of his theory. Habermas does not identify the system with the L ebenswelt, for the reason that society may be viewed as a system, not that it is a system (otherwise the L ebenswelt perspective of the other would be denied).19 Habermas also points out the tendency of the system to increasingly dissociate itself from L ebenswelt in the course of evolution. And the lifeworld itself, consisting as it does of two spheres (private and public) displays an increasing domination of the latter – due to the inﬂuence of mass media and agencies of opinion. The result is that the lifeworld gets integrated into the system and loses its capacity of symbolic reproduction. A peculiar communication theory has been worked out by another phenomenologically orientated systems specialist, N. Luhmann. I want to accentuate just two aspects of his approach – what associates and what dissociates his theory from phenomenology. First and foremost Luhmann’s approach (at least on the level of the titles of his works) reminds one of structural functionalism, of systems theories and of the semantics of communication. Yet, the phenomenological approach for his system is also in evidence, as he is looking for structures that are self-

126

ELLA BUCENIECE

referential, and in doing so he justiﬁably turns to social phenomena. The elements of societal structure are not only functional, but also capable of self-observation. In line with this premise, relations between communication and intersubjectivity are construed, and Luhmann performs this as a separation (Unterscheidung). The procedure of separation, which in Luhmann’s theory is of primordial importance, actually performs, in my opinion, the function of a reduction. Luhmann writes: ‘‘This is why communication is a precondition for intersubjectivity and not vice versa’’.20 Communicative systems, being self-referential, are also self-regulative, becoming self-creativity or autopoiesis. According to J. Arnoldi, ‘‘Luhmann turned away from action towards communication’’, as a symbolic communication, which is observing or meaning-constituting. Social systems are systems, that make sense of their environment’’.21 Luhmann’s conception of communication seems to be involved in performing a constant balancing act on the borderline of the awareness of paradox and contingency (‘Kontingenz’ being Luhmann’s stock term). Thus he succeeds in showing his reader that: 1) the process of communication presupposes mind, yet it is not to be identiﬁed with self-awareness and individual experience; 2) meanings are created in the process of communication, yet they are not the result of relations with the other; 3) organic systems are impossible without communication, but they do not produce communication intermittently – communication is an event in the system and this event is autopoiesis.22 On the basis of such an approach Luhmann created a diagnosis for the present time: ‘‘... during those few centuries that are accessible for review the complexity of communication has increased – the scope, the tempo and the amount of themes has grown, while the same does not hold with regard to the realized potentialities of individual lives and minds or the transferring of meanings from one mind to the other’’.23 Communication as such does not tell us anything about the world, it only makes distinctions in what we are given to know about it and what we are not given to know.24 The world that is given becomes reorganized into a complexity of diﬀerences. And although Luhmann holds that there is neither conscious communication nor communicative thinking or perception, for ‘‘people do not communicate, only communication can communicate25 (mind is a medium)’’, I am of the opinion that this is a very convincing precondition for intersubjectivity – because in order to achieve understanding, communication has to be grasped, or else a situation may arise like the one described by E. Jonesko in ‘‘Waiting for Godot’’.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND COMMUNICATION

127

If N. Luhmann bases his system-functioning theory on the principle of autopoiesis, A.-T. Tymieniecka puts ontopoiesis at the very centre of her Phenomenology of Life. If N. Luhmann distinguishes various systems with their speciﬁc codes, A.-T. Tymieniecka (if I understand her adequately) binds these systems together under the common code of ‘‘Unityof-Everything-There-is-Alive’’, and postulates ‘‘life-self-individualizing poiesis’’ as the central principle of this dynamic and evolving system.26 Life in this process is both self-centered, and inward/outwardly oriented and entelechially pregnant. In her book L ogos and L ife, A.-T. Tymieniecka has also turned to themes of societal existence – social contract, interaction, etc.27 In the end, by way of recapitulation, I want to remind readers that my aim was to disclose the variety of conceptions which are connected with Husserl’s notion of intersubjectivity and to investigate the degree to which each one of them refers back to it. Secondly, one can conclude that the subject occupies a place of ever decreasing importance and meaning within our present-day intersubjective communicative activity. By way of a psychoanalytical terminological analogy, one can say that the superego dominates the ego in most of our societal, individual and daily practices (A. Giddens reveals this in his work ‘‘Transformation of Intimacy’’). It is Husserl who has radically stressed the origin and the continuity of ego constitution with special reference to intersubjectivity. Yet the postHusserlian world has dramatically changed, and therefore a question (or even a perplexity) may arise as to my initial call to ‘‘go back to Husserl’’. The answer may seem to be a modest one – to turn, for example, to Husserlian texts, because his phenomenology, as he himself strove to understand it, is a working philosophy (Arbeitsphilosophie), which requires not just readers of the texts, but co-workers (Mitarbeiter) in their apprehension. This is intersubjectivity, and one of the ways to go back to oneself. L atvian University Institute of Philosophy and Sociology

NOTES 1 K. Haney, ‘‘The Role of Intersubjectivity and Empathy in Husserl’s Foundational Project,’’ in A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Phenomenology World-W ide (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), p. 147. 2 E. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen (Hamburg: Meiner, 1987), s. 160–161.

128

ELLA BUCENIECE

3 K. R. Meist, ‘‘Intersubjektivita¨t zwischen Natur und Geschichte. Einige Anmerkungen u¨ber Probleme einer transzendentalen Letztbegru¨ndung,’’ in Perspektiven und Probleme der Husserlishen Pha¨nomenologie (Freiburg/Mu¨nchen: Alber, 1991), s. 270. 4 E. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen (Hamburg: Meiner, 1987), s. 95–96. 5 K. Haney, op. cit., p. 150. 6 E. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen (Hamburg: Meiner, 1987), s. 99. 7 Husserl began to investigate the consequences (Ausfu¨hrungen) of ‘‘I am able’’ already before the thematization of intersubjectivity, demonstrating in Ideas II not only their physicality but also their meaning-formative character: ‘‘Jede Bewegung des Leibes ist seelenvoll, das Kommen und Gehen, das Stehen und Sitzen, Laufen und Tanzen’’ (Husserliana, Bd. IV. The Hague, S. 240). 8 K. Haney, op. cit., p. 150. 9 E. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, op. cit., s. 93. 10 K. Haney, op. cit., p. 151. 11 E. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, op. cit., s. 60. 12 K. Held, ‘‘Heimwelt, Fremdwelt, eine Welt,’’ in Perspektiven und Probleme der Husserlishen Pha¨nomenologie (Freiburg/Mu¨nchen: Alber, 1991), s. 305. 13 P. Ricoeur, Fragility and Responsibility. L ove and Justice, in Richard Kearney(ed.), Paul Ricoeur, T he Hermeneutics of Action (London: Sage, 1996). 14 N. Crossley, Intersubjectivity: T he Fabric of Social Becoming (London: Sage, 2002), p. 99. 15 A. Linkenbach, Opake Gestalten des Denkens Ju¨rgen Habermass und die Rationalita¨t fremder L ebensformen (Mu¨nchen, 1986), s. 253. 16 J. Habermas. T heorie des kommunikativen Handeln I (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), s. 107. 17 P. N. Zima, Moderne/Postmoderne (Tu¨bingen: Basel, 2001), s. 203. 18 Ibid., s. 206. 19 W. Reese-Scha¨ﬂer, Ju¨rgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main, 2001), s. 61. 20 N. Luhmann, Die W issenschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), s. 19. 21 J. Arnoldi, Niklas Luhmann, An Introduction, – // T heory, Culture & Society // (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, Vol. 18(1), 2001), p. 3. 22 N. Luhmann, op. cit., s. 13–14. 23 Ibid., s. 23. 24 Ibid., s. 27. 25 Ibid., s. 31. 26 A.-T. Tymieniecka, Impetus and Equipoise in the L ife-Strategies of Reason, L ogos and L ife, Book 4 (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 2000), pp. 264–265. 27 A.-T. Tymieniecka, ibid., pp. 204–265.

CHIEDOZIE OKORO

A CRITIQUE OF THE POLARITY IN EDMUND HUSSERL’S INTERSUBJECTIVITY THEORY

Every philosophy has both a universalizing and a particularizing mission. By the particularizing mission of a philosophy we not only mean the cultural contents of that philosophy, but also the zeal to eulogize and celebrate one’s culture. Usually, there should be a symbiosis between the particularizing and universalizing mission of philosophy. In a like manner, it is quite normal for a philosopher to celebrate his culture. Nevertheless, when the celebration of culture is taken to a point of discrimination against other cultures, the particularizing mission of philosophy begins to limit the universalizing essence of philosophy. This sharp divide between the universalizing and particularizing mission of philosophy amounts to a polarity. Technically deﬁned, polarity is that mentality which propagates the doctrine of ‘‘monistic dualism’’. Monistic dualism is the chief blemish of classical metaphysics. It is that attitude of excluding the middle, which in traditional logic is known as the law of excluded middle. Of the two options available, once one of them is certiﬁed to be the case and the other is condemned as absolutely wrong or unacceptable. Within the conﬁnes of science, this mentality is acceptable and it is indeed the procedure of science, whose essential goal is to prove whether a given situation is true or false. But when such impositional, absolutist and logocentric attitudes are carried into the realm of intercultural relations, it is bound to generate bitterness and rancour. Now, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology carries within it the polarity syndrome. That is to say, if we accept that Husserl’s phenomenology is intended to establish a philosophical foundation, it will inculcate the rigour and resoluteness required for clear visioning into the individual ego and the intersubjective egos of professional and cultural groups. At this level Husserl’s universalizing mission is strongly visible. It is one which every human, group or race must strive to accomplish, that is, if the entity or group in question ever hopes to depart the lebenswelt and levitate towards the olympian height of the phenomenological standpoint, where thinking becomes imaginative and visioning becomes beatiﬁc so that particularities are abandoned for essences. Intersubjectivity at this level is the key to incontrovertible truth and the way to a science and a technology tempered by humanism. However, at the second level of 129 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 129–144. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

130

CHIEDOZIE OKORO

intercultural relations, Husserl’s intersubjectivity theory suﬀers bathos. As with Immanuel Kant, Husserl does a somersault, lapsing from transcendental philosophy back into anthropologism, the science of egology becoming discriminatory; eidetic ideation is made a European property and what results is the Europeanization of phenomenology. Husserl stated that phenomenology, as an eidetic science was to be a pure science of essences that are dispassionately disclosed. At the point where presuppositionlessness becomes prejudiced, the universal essence of phenomenology is diminished. This discrepancy in Husserl’s phenomenology is most visible when one performs a hermeneutics of his theory of intersubjectivity. Thus, interpretations from the technical analysis of Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity reveals that the polarity that occurs in Husserl’s phenomenology stems from his failure to liberate himself from the Greek eidos and European modernism, both of which promote the doctrine of Eurocentrism. In fact, Husserl’s phenomenology is often described as the consolidation and rehabilitation of the European spartan spirit of making philosophy a continental project, to the exclusion of non-Europeans. THE PURPOSE OF HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL ORIENTATION

Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology has a similar but deeper objective than the philosophies of Descartes and Kant. All three were concerned with the delineation of the processes by which the human mind establishes objective knowledge of the world. This led to the problem of clarity, incontrovertible or indubitable truth. The three admired the ‘‘rigour’’ of science (particularly mathematics and physics), they sought for ways to make philosophy become as rigorous, if not more rigorous than, science. Incidentally, the three agree that psychology is incompetent in accomplishing this task. The three also grappled with the task of establishing an apodictic philosophical foundation for science. All of these materialize in the radicalization of philosophy and science. At the time of Descartes and Kant, the concern of Europe was how to domesticate science. To this challenge, Cartesian rationalism and idealism aimed to create a ‘‘plan for a universal science capable of raising human nature to its highest degree of perfection’’ (Sorell, 1987, 46). In actual fact, this objective of Descartes’ was the original title of the book Discourse on Method and Meditations. Kant’s transcendental philosophy, on the other hand, investigates how pure reason, by ways of synthesis and concept formation, proceeds about its business of architectonics or system

EDMUND HUSSERL’S INTERSUBJECTIVITY THEORY

131

construction, resulting in the organization and transformation of experience. By the time Husserl came onto the scene, the quest for a rigorous science had faltered. This quest created the problem of value orientation, just as naturalism and positivism in their drive for physical and psychical science drove humanity into the catastrophic waters of nihilism. In T he Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, Herbert Spiegelberg succinctly captures Husserl’s complaints against nihilistic science. According to Spiegelberg, ‘‘Husserl’s critique of modern science included two more serious strictures which called for radical readjustments: (1) the degeneration of science into an unphilosophical study of mere facts exempliﬁed by positivism, and (2) It’s naturalism which had rendered science incapable of coping with the problems of absolute truth and validity (1976, 79)’’. ‘‘Science itself ’’, continues Spiegelberg, ‘‘was crying out for a philosophy that would restore its contact with the deeper concerns of man. To Husserl, it was obviously his phenomenology which was to ﬁll this need’’ (p. 80). Husserl believed that science needed to be rehabilitated, not abolished. Little wonder Husserlian phenomenology proceeds by way of demolition and reconstruction. Therefore, contrary to Descartes and Kant who sought after incontrovertible knowledge and timeless truths, Husserl is more concerned with the analysis of the essences of knowledge and truth. It is at the level of essences that wisdom manifests in the form of imaginative visioning, thinking becomes lucid and beatiﬁc, and what comes out of the phenomenological crucible is the essence of science or the humanization of science. Accordingly, Husserl identiﬁes pure phenomenology as that which will help to reconstruct the ediﬁce called science and create a new foundation for the emergence of a new science. As Spiegelberg puts it, by pure phenomenology Husserl means ‘‘the study of the essential structures of consciousness comprising its ego-subject, its acts, and its contents’’ (p. 152). But how does phenomenological investigation of the subjective intentional acts help us to reach the essence of science? Husserl says that we must begin by radicalizing philosophies of the past. This radicalism, which proceeds by way of philosophic reduction, must take us away from existing theories and ‘‘turn us to the objects’’. Phenomenology becomes a science of absolute beginnings. Going back to the cogitata (objects) should culminate in the grasping of their essences. As Husserl says: ‘‘Philosophy, however, is essentially a science of the true beginnings. The science of the roots must itself be radical in its method and from every point of view. Above all, it may not rest until it has found its own absolutely clear beginnings or problems, the properly designed methods

132

CHIEDOZIE OKORO

for these problems and the basic ﬁeld of operation of clearly experienced objects’’ (1965, 71, cited by Ruch, 1977, 68). By radical philosophical reduction, Husserl means that phenomenology ‘‘is a philosophy free from presuppositions’’. If we go by the Baconian and Cartesian fashions, presuppositionlessness would mean a discrimination against the ‘‘idols’’ or a rejection of any idea that is not evidently clear and distinct. Thus the phrase ‘‘free from presuppositions’’, says Spiegelberg, ‘‘stands for the attempt to eliminate merely presuppositions that have not been thoroughly examined, or, at least in principle, been presented for such examination – it is thus not freedom from all presuppositions, but merely freedom from unclariﬁed, unveriﬁed, and unveriﬁable presuppositions’’ (1976, 83). Husserl describes the world of unclariﬁed presuppositions as the ‘‘natural standpoint’’ technically rendered in German as the lebenswelt. Philosophical reduction should take us away from the common sense way of looking at the world and graduate us into the phenomenological standpoint whereupon we embark on the process of phenomenological reduction. Focus shifts from the object to the subject as the knower and container of hyletic data. We have now entered into the main stream of consciousness as a complete process of intentionality or the transcendental investigation of subjectivity. We ransack the ego, its contents and intentional acts. Epoche or eidetic reduction as bracketing has long begun. The ego embarks upon the task of selfpuriﬁcation a process that has been technically referred to as self-reﬂexivity. The end result of this science of ideation (an egological process) is the ‘‘ego of egos’’ or the ‘‘transcendental ego’’. It is the puriﬁed ego that interprets the ‘‘meaning of a given fact of experience’’ (Ruch, 1977, 70), that is, the essences of objects. Through the theory of essences, Husserl intends to set the record about science straight. His ultimate aim is to entrench a system of thought that will guide, not instruct science. He reasoned that such philosophical systems as rationalism, empiricism, positivism, naturalism and even Kant’s transcendental philosophy, are severely limited in executing this task. They are either absolutist, impositional or suﬀer from psychologism. The extent to which Husserl succeeded in overcoming these problems, particularly the problem of psychologism, is not the issue at hand. We know that in the two volumes of L ogical Investigations, Husserl grappled with the problem of psychologism to no avail. Nor are we concerned with the investigation of the success recorded by Husserl’s attempt to radicalize science by pointing to the way of humanism. We simply show what purpose Husserl’s phenomenological orientation sets out to achieve.

EDMUND HUSSERL’S INTERSUBJECTIVITY THEORY

133

We ﬁnd this in the very words of Husserl. ‘‘I attempt to guide, not to instruct, but merely to show and describe what I see. All I claim is the right to speak according to my best lights – primarily to myself and correspondingly to others – as one who has lived through a philosophical existence in all its seriousness’’ (Husserl, 1970, quoted by Spiegelberg, 1976, 73). THE PROBLEM OF SUBJECTIVITY

Subjectivity in the Husserlian fashion captures the internal or inner functions and dynamisms (both productive and regulative) of the intentional acts of consciousness. Descartes had posited the cogito or the ‘‘I think’’ as the rock bottom or indubitable foundation of knowledge in general. Husserl does not hesitate to toe the line of Descartes. In the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl states that the aim of Cartesian philosophy is to attempt ‘‘a complete reforming of philosophy into a science grounded on an absolute foundation’’ (1960, 1). Husserl then goes on to aﬃrm that Descartes’ original intention ‘‘shall indeed continually motivate the course of our meditations’’ (p. 8). The absolute foundation upon which science is to be grounded is human subjectivity. Thus, for Husserl, pure subjectivity as ‘‘pure ego or pure consciousness’’ ‘‘is the source of all wonders’’ or ‘‘the wonder of all wonders’’ (Spiegelberg, 87). Spiegelberg goes on to explain that: ‘‘The central mystery was to Husserl not Being as such, but the fact that there is such a thing in this world as a being that is aware of its own being and of other beings. This fascination accounts for Husserl’s growing emphasis on the subjective aspect of phenomenology and for its shift from the object to the subjectivity of the existing ego’’ (p. 87). To buttress this point Spiegelberg makes Husserl’s view on this matter available: Whether we like it or not, whether (for whatever prejudices) it may sound monstrous or not, this (the ‘‘I am’’) is the fundamental fact of which I have to stand up, which, as a philosopher, I must never blink for a moment. For philosophical children this may be the dark corner haunted by the spectres of solipsism or even psychologism and relativism. The true philosopher instead of running away from them will prefer to illuminate the dark corner (quoted by Spiegelberg, 87–88).

The above citation, culled from Husserl’s Formal and T ranscendental L ogic, acknowledges the fact that subjectivity bestows upon human beings the ability for self-awareness, just as it is the very source of human transcendence. Kant made this fact known to his age when he stated that:

134

CHIEDOZIE OKORO

The fact that man is aware of an ego-concept raises him inﬁnitely above other creatures living on earth. Because of this, he is a person; And by virtue of this oneness, he remains one and the same person despite all the vicissitudes which may befall him. He is being who, by reasons of his pre-eminence and dignity is wholly diﬀerent from things, such as the irrational animals whom he can master and rule at will (1978, 9).

Heidegger himself aﬃrms that subjectivity endows Dasein with the ontological powers for existence. Which is why of all beings only man is said to possess existence, because he alone knows what it is to exist. The fact that Husserlian phenomenology makes the analysis of human subjectivity a central thesis qualiﬁes it as ‘‘transcendental’’. All our acts of consciousness, be they intentional or eidetic, begin and end with subjectivity. After all, Husserl himself characterized phenomenology as a ‘‘transcendental theory of knowledge’’ (1960, 81). This is another way of saying that phenomenology is a pure science dealing with the delineation of ‘‘human transcendental subjectivity’’ (Schacht 1972, 215). Consequently, human subjectivity as pure consciousness is both the absolute foundation of knowledge in general and the determiner of what constitutes the essence of science and truth. How then can knowledge and truth, whether scientiﬁc or otherwise, be made objective? This question takes us to the doorstep of intersubjectivity.

FROM SUBJECTIVITY TO INTERSUBJECTIVITY

Since in the Husserlian tradition subjectivity is the basis for objectivity, we deduce that for Husserl: ‘‘objectivity is subjectivity through and entire’’. The technical term used by Husserl to describe objectivity is ‘‘intersubjectivity’’. Intersubjectivity as used by Husserl, both in the Cartesian Meditations and the Ideas (1931), seems to connote two senses of objectivity. The ﬁrst concerns the facticity of the objective world before us which includes other egos, objects and the world as bare givenness. The second concerns a consensus of views about the essential character of natural objects. The connecting link between these two senses of objectivity is that it is the phenomenologically puriﬁed subjective ego(s) that determine(s) the existence and character of the outer world. And since this objective world is the same as the natural standpoint, problems ensue about how this life-world can be apprehended through phenomenological suspension. Concerning ‘‘the ‘other’ ego-subject and the intersubjective natural world – about us’’, Husserl explains that ‘‘the there is ‘as the world’ ‘out

EDMUND HUSSERL’S INTERSUBJECTIVITY THEORY

135

there’, not ‘here’ is apprehended by the ‘intersubjective community of transcendental egos’ or ‘a community of monads’ ’’ (Spiegelberg, 158 and 159). Whatever holds good for me personally, also holds good, as I know, for all other men whom I ﬁnd present – about – me. Experiencing them as men, I understand and take them as ego-subjects, units like myself, and related to their natural surroundings. But this in such wise that I apprehend the world-about them and the world-about-me ‘‘objectively’’ as one and the same world, which diﬀers in each case only through aﬀecting consciousness diﬀerently. (Culled from the Ideas by Hartman, 1967, 132)

Given that intentional acts of consciousness by transcendental egos happen a priori, the world is nonetheless prior to us. So nothing says we must apprehend the world uniformly. Reality has myriad faces, and since we ourselves are immersed in reality, our intentional acts can never be the same, nor our apprehensions of the world. But how do we resolve this dissension about the character of objects into a consensus? Husserl feels that the matter of consensus or intersubjectivity of views about the world is one that ‘‘can and must – as scientiﬁc – be undertaken’’ (Hartman, 133). Thus, to know the world ‘‘more comprehensively, more trustworthily, more perfectly than the naive lore of experience is able to do, and to solve all the problems of scientiﬁc knowledge which oﬀer themselves upon its ground, that is the goal of the sciences of the natural standpoint’’ (p. 133). It follows that objectivity in the scientiﬁc world is a joint or contributive eﬀort of depersonalized egos. Needless to say, this scientiﬁc paradigm forms the universal standpoint for objectivity. From the analysis done so far regarding Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity, the term that appears directly relevant to our thesis is ‘‘empathy’’ (einfuhlung). Husserl, adopted this term from Theodor Lipps. The term as used by Husserl means ‘‘care’’ or the capacity to share in the feelings and experiences of others. Empathy therefore, embodies humanism. But the problem is that the humanism which Husserl advocates seems to be limited to the interhuman or interpersonal level; it fails to adequately accommodate intercultural relationships.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND INTERCULTURAL RELATIONSHIPS

Commenting on the limitation of Husserlian phenomenology in promoting intercultural relationships, Michael Murray, in his celebrated work

136

CHIEDOZIE OKORO

entitled ‘‘Husserl and Heidegger: Constructing and Deconstructing Greek Philosophy’’, says of Husserl that: He never grasped the potential signiﬁcance of the marginal applied to cultural-intellectual marginality as he did when studying perceptual experience. Perhaps, this shows the eﬀect of the blinding light of the Greek eidos on the perception of cultural marginality (1988, 504).

Wondering aloud, Murray thinks that it amounts to a dark irony that in the darkest periods of European history when Hitlerian Nazism ravaged Europe, Husserl still ‘‘strikes a Eurocentrist and racist posture’’ (p. 504). Husserl developed his theories of Eurocentrism and racism in the book T he Crisis of European Science and T ranscendental Phenomenology. The book bears both a universal message and a particularizing mission. On the universal scale, its objective is to ‘‘elevate mankind through universal and scientiﬁc reason, and to transform it into a new humanity made capable of an absolute self-responsibility on the basis of absolute theoretical insights’’ (1970, 283). This daunting task is one to be accomplished by no other discipline than philosophy. For ‘‘unlike all other cultural works, philosophy is not a moment of interest which is bound to the soil of the national tradition’’ (p. 286). Good talk it seems, that tends to elevate the hope of humankind towards a brighter horizon. But it is exactly at this crucial point that we witness a sharp anti-climax in Husserl’s philosophical agenda. This anti-climax concerns the particularizing mission of Husserl’s philosophy. Philosophy he says, transcends the bounds of national (and perhaps continental) tradition. Yet Husserl went ahead to limit philosophy to the national and continental axis of the occidental world. Philosophy’s universal attribute and status renders it ‘‘unique within its own cultural ﬁeld, the ‘brain’ of its spiritual life, just as it makes Europe itself incomparable among all other cultures of the earth’’ (pp. 291 and 284). Of course, the brand of philosophy Husserl has in mind is transcendental phenomenology. Speciﬁcally, the aim of this philosophy is to examine the crisis of philosophy in Europe and to awaken Europe to the dawn of a new philosophic consciousness. Hence, the momentous issue for the present, according to Husserl, concerns the fundamental question: Whether the telos which was born in European humanity at the birth of Greek philosophy is merely a factual historical delusion, accidental acquisition of merely one among many other humankind (Menschenwherten) and historicities (GeschichtlichKeiten), or whether Greek humanity was not rather the ﬁrst breakthrough to what is essential to Humanity as such, its entelechy (p. 15).

EDMUND HUSSERL’S INTERSUBJECTIVITY THEORY

137

The above citation actually re-enacts Hegel’s ‘‘romanticism’’ and Kant’s ‘‘enlightenment’’ project. In his Philosophy of History, Hegel relays how the Absolute Spirit in its itinerary of world civilizing mission ﬁnally came to roost in Europe. Kant for his part, captures the Enlightenment in the heroic chant Sapere aoude meaning ‘‘dare to use your own intelligence’’. Kant declares this chant as the ‘‘battle cry of the Enlightenment’’ and the Enlightenment itself he deﬁned as ‘‘the emancipation of man from a state of self-imposed tutelage’’ (quoted by Popper, 1969, 177). In his philosophical anthropology, Kant drew a hierarchy of races which seems to support Europe’s imperialism and colonizing missions. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant went ahead and provided an ontological basis for European domination of the world. What Hegel and Kant did amounts to a celebration of national patriotism and continental heroism. If we go by this trend of thought it would mean that Husserl is a true compatriot of Germany and Europe. Michael Murray reiterates the point: The Europeanization and philosophical colonization of non-European peoples seems right and unquestionable to Husserl. We might Europeanize the Indian continent but we would never, on the pain of scientiﬁc suicide, Indianize ourselves (1988, 504–505).

Preposterous as it seemed to Husserl, the nineteenth century witnessed a large scale Indianization of German intellectual life. The German romantics made the best they could of Indian literature. For instance, Friedrich Schlegel has a book entitled: On the L anguage and W isdom of Indians and in the book India in the Mind of Germany (1982), Jean Sedlar relays how Indian thought inﬂuenced German philosophers such as Schelling and Schopenhauer. In 1806, Schelling wrote that he ‘‘awaited the reconciliation of all European people to the orient’’ (p. 42). In like manner, Schopenhauer, who perhaps was the most widely read philosopher in the turn of the 19th century and well into the 20th century, posited that ‘‘Platonism and Christianity were derived from Indian sources and that Indian religion was superior to European religion’’ (pp. 47–48). In Of Grammatology (1976) Jacques Derrida shows how Chinese thought inﬂuenced European philosophy and culture. He explains how intently interested Leibniz was in the Chinese character script whose appearance in the period has been described by Derrida himself as a ‘‘European hallucination’’ (pp. 80–81). Rather than express respect for non-Europeans (India and China) for their inﬂuences on European life, Husserl regrets the inﬁltration and adulteration of pure European rationality with the anthropologism of the Asians. Thus he says: ‘‘Today we have a plethora of works about Indian

138

CHIEDOZIE OKORO

philosophy, Chinese philosophy’’ (1970, 279). To Husserl, European humanity symbolizes and embodies in itself the ‘‘absolute idea’’ (p. 16). This is the compelling factor for non-Europeans to Europeanize themselves while at the same time it is an abomination for Europeans to deEuropeanize themselves. Thus far, it can be seen that when it comes to intercultural relationships, Husserl is a non-conformist. In fact, this is one area where Husserl bluntly failed to apply the criterion of phenomenological presuppositionlessness. The rigour of the phenomenological and eidetic reduction is overshadowed by naive nationalist sentiments. Needless to say, this spirit of nationalism has negatively impacted upon world aﬀairs. THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE POLARITY IN HUSSERL’S THEORY OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY

Certain terrible consequences accompany the polarity discovered in Husserl’s intersubjectivity. These consequences can be reduced to three. They include: (1) the imposition of the Greek dogma upon European philosophy (2) the creation of the myth of invincibility, and (3) the fuelling of the temperaments of intolerance, bitterness, and war. Concerning the ﬁrst point, Husserl’s phenomenology is often aptly described as the idealization and articulation of the Greek tradition and the consolidation of European modernism. Not only could Husserl speak and write Greek, he saw German philosophy (phenomenology in particular) as an extension of Greek philosophy. This Hellenistic posture, also known as the hellenization of German and European philosophies by Husserl, is adequately captured in the title of the book: T he T yranny of Greece Over Germany (Murray, 505). The adoration of Greek tradition by Husserl stems from the fact that for him ‘‘ancient Greece represents the outbreak or eruption of philosophy and its branches, the sciences’’ (Husserl, 1970, 273). In the understanding of Husserl, this Greek spirit depicts a ‘‘remarkable teleology born in the European’’ (p. 273). This European telos deﬁes origin and birthplace because it transcends map and place. Accordingly, Husserl says; ‘‘I mean not a geographical birthplace, in one land, but rather a spiritual birthplace in a nation or in individual men and human groups of this nation, the ancient Greek nation in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.; that is, the classical period which signiﬁes the emergence of the great ﬁgures of the ﬁrst culminating period of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle’’ (1970, 276, 282 and 301). Husserl’s preference for the Greek tradition lies in the fact that this

EDMUND HUSSERL’S INTERSUBJECTIVITY THEORY

139

hellenistic spirit represents a breakthrough on two fronts: ‘‘it establishes a new attitude towards the world and a completely new sort of spiritual structure’’ (p. 276). The new attitude and spirituality enthroned by Greece are epitomized by the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophical traditions, which depict the appearance of reason, science, and philosophy. But, unknown to Husserl, the Greek eidos carries in it the dogma of monistic dualism. For instance, the Parmenidean assertion that ‘‘Being is’’ amounts to a rejection of ‘‘non-Being’’, and ‘‘Becoming’’ as complete nothing. In the same vein, the Heraclitean dogma of ‘‘absolute change’’ (Becoming) amounts to a total rejection of permanence (Being) as nonsense. With the total rejection of pluralism, the spice (vitality) is taken away from life as we are left with only a choice amidst two available alternatives. This manner of thinking, to say the least, is logocentric, sectarian, and totalitarian. It compartmentalizes knowledge and the human species, just as it bears the cataclysmic consequences of vengeance and intolerance. As it pertains to the myth of invincibility, we notice that Husserlian transcendental phenomenology amounts to a transcendentalization of European culture over and above every other culture. Needless to say, Husserl and Kant have this common agenda of propagating European humanity and historicity as the ideals to be followed by non-Europeans. According to Husserl, the reason for this is because European humanity represents: The fully conscious discovery of the ‘‘idea’’ and of approximation opened up the path of logical thinking, ‘‘logical’’ science, and rational science – if we designate as rationalism the conviction that all reasonable (vernunﬂige) knowledge must be rational – then the whole modern conviction is also rationalistic (p. 313).

Husserl once more re-enacts the myths about the ‘‘birthplace’’ and telos of Western philosophy, connected by the entelechy, that is, the ‘‘strive towards a ‘norm’ and ‘poles’ of inﬁnity’’ (p. 277). This entelechy ‘‘bears within itself the future, a horizon of inﬁnity, an inﬁnity of generations renewed in the spirit of ideas that involves an inﬁnity of tasks’’ (pp. 277–278). Husserl seems to equate ‘‘idea’’ with ‘‘power’’ or ‘‘might’’. He then encourages Europeans to always ensure that world power (the idea) resides in Europe. We can thus see that for Husserl the process of ideation or egological transcendentalism, which should result in the emergence of the transcendentally puriﬁed ego, is, in reality, the Europeanization of non-European egos. Such an Europeanization exercise is expected to culminate in the idealization of Europe as the true representative of the ‘‘idea’’. This sectarian way of thinking has polarized

140

CHIEDOZIE OKORO

the world into segments of ‘‘rich North’’ and ‘‘poor South’’. It has also created a complex syndrome between the superior and the inferior. At this point, the overdose and hangover of Greek dogma on Husserl’s phenomenology becomes evident. It is such that if world aﬀairs is to be organized on the principle of Husserlian phenomenology, the spirit of dialogue and democracy will be guillotined. World politics would simply be governed by the temperament of absolutism and it is this attitude that has continued to fan the embers of war the world over. It is evident from the above that Husserl’s phenomenology is not the answer to intolerance, bitterness and war. At this point, Husserl’s doctrine of ‘‘transcendental ego’’ begins to run into troubled waters on account of its double standard. A transcendental ego that puriﬁes and romanticizes the essence of science but fails to see the good in and the essence of human intercultural relationship is at best hypocritical. And if an essential aim of Husserl’s phenomenology is to free science from nihilism, it unwittingly revisits scientiﬁc nihilism upon humankind. On this score, Heidegger, Sartre and the existential phenomenologists acted nobly when they rejected Husserl’s dogma of a ‘‘transcendental ego’’ on account of its scientiﬁc rigidity. The position of the existential phenomenologists gives credence to the fact that it amounts to a loss of humanism to pattern philosophy after the rigour of science. OVERCOMING THE POLARITY IN HUSSERL’S THEORY OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY

Three strands of thought, hermeneutic phenomenology, postmodernism and traditional African ontology combine to oﬀer way(s) of overcoming the nihilism posited upon the world by Husserlian phenomenology. The connecting point among these three strands of thought is the principle of intersubjectivity. In essence, we want to see what these other strands of thought, in contrast with Husserl’s phenomenology, make of the intersubjectivity principle. Heidegger is a renowned apostle of Being. In Being and T ime Heidegger raises the question whether the problem about Being has been suﬃciently and adequately treated. He laments the hardened forgetfulness of Being on the part of Europe, particularly ancient Greece. He also lambasts Kant and modern philosophers for making ‘‘knowledge’’, instead of Being, the central theme of philosophy. Consequent to this, Heidegger embarks upon the demolition of Western ontology. The result of such a destructuring exercise is the emergence of a new insight into the question of Being.

EDMUND HUSSERL’S INTERSUBJECTIVITY THEORY

141

Being is the very topic of ontology. The ontological study of Being reveals that Being and non-Being (nothingness) are equi-primordial. For this reason, Being can show itself in manifold and manifest senses. It can show itself now as appearance, now as semblance, and now as manifest. Whichever way Being chooses to reveal itself, depicts Being’s own way of disclosing itself. Besides, disclosure as unconcealment is an existential occurrence, which transpires between Being and Dasein. The method or way by which Dasein attunes itself to Being so that revelation or unconcealment can happen is known as phenomenology. The interpretations that accrue from the phenomenological analysis of Being are called hermeneutic. Hermeneutic phenomenology teaches that because the understanding of Being happens in phases, it follows that value, truth, and reality are all perspectival. There is no timeless foundation in the world and no absolute concept. ‘‘What has no use will have its use, what is nonsense today turns out to be the sense tomorrow, and perhaps, the most potent force’’ (see Heidegger, 1959, 8). Since reality is constantly in action, it means that there are no such things as absolute, immutable foundations. Every foundation is precarious and tenuous. To look for eternal foundations is an illusion of the mind. Postmodernism, which can be regarded as the simpliﬁcation of the tenets of existential phenomenology, also rejects the totalitarian attitude that fuels the temperament of intolerance, bitterness and war. Postmodernism is against a life of entrapment or prison life which privileges some and punishes others. In the minds of postmodern thinkers, such a sectarian attitude amounts to ‘‘fundamental blasphemy’’ (Unah 1995, 53). For this reason, postmodern thinkers vehemently attack the tradition of seeking for primordial ‘‘foundations’’. In their thinking, it is the search for foundations that promotes absolutism. Richard Rorty, for instance, wonders why philosophy should play the arbitrator in the court of the disciplines. He advocates the complete autonomy of the disciplines and cultures alike (Veatch, 1985, 308–312). It is along this line of thinking that postmodern thinkers oppose the thesis that subjectivity is the basis of intersubjectivity. To postmodern thinkers, intersubjectivity is an ‘‘open social’’ aﬀair. Based on this, they argue that dissensus is the basis for consensus. Traditional African ontology oﬀers a new dimension to the issue of intersubjectivity. For traditional Africans, spirit or vital-force is the co-ordinating principle of the universe. Spirit has the dynamism of interpenetrability. Consequently, since spirit permeates all things, it follows that interpenetrability is the principle of unity for resolving disputes. A

142

CHIEDOZIE OKORO

pain to one person is a pain to all; the guilt of an individual is the guilt of all. Nothing in the world stands alone, everything is in everything. Thus, the African gets himself immersed in an issue confronting him; he imaginatively intuits the essence and life-force of the other. This way, he comes to accept the other as himself. This traditional African approach to intersubjective discourse captures the essence of the life-world. Thinking cannot be separated from acting and in the acts of thinking and acting we ﬁnd all the departments of the human ego: the emotions, spirit, and intellect are actively involved. So, there is no disinterested focus, thinking or acting anywhere in the world. An evaluation of the three strands of thought discussed above shows that each oﬀers unique insights into the matter of intersubjectivity. We can see that all three provide fertile grounds for intercultural relationship. However, the phobia of postmodernism against the tradition of seeking for co-ordinating principles or foundations is uncalled for. It is impossible for humans to operate without some ﬁrst principles, which act as guide and guard of our daily transactions. This thesis put forward by postmodern thinkers, if adhered to, would lead humankind into nihilism. By and large the three strands of thought have one thing in common and this can be found in the theory of ‘‘openness’’. It is openness that brings about revelation and unconcealment. Truth oﬀers itself nakedly without positivistic impositions. If this doctrine of openness were adopted, it would substantially ameliorate the spirit of intolerance which fans the embers of war in the world. However, we accept with reservation the concept of openness as propagated by African ontology. The reason for this is simple. Interpenetrability, if unguided, easily relapses into syncretism, a kind of naive or junk eclecticism which has created a ‘‘conﬁdence crisis’’ and ‘‘ﬁxation complex’’ (Unah, 1996, 114–127) in Africans. Africans accept all ways as working parameters. This sort of attitude results into confusion, which explains the reason why Africa is in so much turmoil. Again, we ﬁnd Heideggerian phenomenology as the cure to this disease of syncretism. All ways are ways but all the ways cannot work at the same time. Circumstances are to be hermeneutically and phenomenologically appraised such that the most adequate method would be adopted in tackling the problem at hand. Other ways are not abolished. They in fact become points of references for enriching and augmenting our chosen parameter. This constitutes the piety of thought and the honest way to a virile civilization.

EDMUND HUSSERL’S INTERSUBJECTIVITY THEORY

143

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The complaint we bear against Husserl notwithstanding, we like to state that Husserl’s phenomenology and his theory of intersubjectivity oﬀer serious challenges to the entire world, particularly the African continent which seems to be caught up in the quagmire of large scale disorientation. Husserl poses a challenge to the nations and peoples of the world to move themselves to that olympian height of transcendental philosophy whereby the minds of nations and peoples attain the purity required for intersubjective discourse. It is a known fact that world aﬀairs is governed by unpuriﬁed egos. If the world is to know peace and lasting tranquillity, then, world aﬀairs must be taken over by beatiﬁc minds who have transcended sectional interests. However, there is no doubt that cultures have to interact. Cultures must open up and crossbreed for it is through the cross-fertilization of ideas that cultures are enriched and sustained. Without cultural intercourse, individual cultures would stagnate and atrophy. In the same way, a culture that cannot hold its own in the midst of a cacophony of cultures will run into conﬂict. The ancient Hebrews drove themselves into autarchy because they forbade intercourse with neighbouring cultures. Contemporary Africans on the other hand, ﬁnd themselves at a crossroad because they have chosen the part of selfabandonment. Thus, the world as a whole will always require the assistance of illuminated minds whose duty it is to liberate humankind from self-imposed slavery towards the loftier height of freedom. Such illuminated minds must have transcended the cultural and racial divides. The world patiently awaits the arrival of such individuals who can sift the essence of humanity. This is the highpoint gathered from our analysis of Husserl’s phenomenology when viewed from a socio-cultural perspective. University of L agos L agos, Nigeria BIBLIOGRAPHY Derrida, J. Of Grammatology. Translated by M. Yaa-Lengi. Edited by H. J. Salemson, Margolyn de Jager. London: John Hopkins University Press, 1976. Hartman, J. B. Philosophy of Recent T imes, Vol. II: Readings in T wentieth Century Philosophy. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967. Heidegger, M. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by R. Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959. Husserl, E. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by D. Cairs. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoﬀ, 1960.

144

CHIEDOZIE OKORO

——. ‘‘Philosophic als Wissenshaft.’’ In T he Ways of Knowing and T hinking, edited by E. A. Ruch. Roma: University of Lessotho Press, 1977. ——. T he Crisis of European Science and T ranscendental Phenomenology. Translated by D. Carr. Evanston; Northern University Press, 1970. Kant, I. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of V iew. Translated by V. L. Dowdell. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. Murray, M. ‘‘Husserl and Heidegger: Constructing and Deconstructing Greek Philosophy.’’ Review of Metaphysics XLI (1988): 501–518. Popper, K. Conjectures and Refutations: T he Growth of Scientiﬁc Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Rorty, R. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Ruch, E. A. T he Ways of Knowing and T hinking. Roma: University of Lesotho Press, 1977. Schacht, R. ‘‘Husserlian and Heideggerian Phenomenology.’’ Philosophical Studies 23 (1972): 293–314. Sedlar, J. India in the Mind of Germany. Washington D.C.: University Press of America, 1982. Sorell, T. Descartes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Spiegelberg, H. T he Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction. Vol. 1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoﬀ, 1976. Unah, J. I. Essays in Philosophy. Lagos: Panaf Publishing Inc., 1995. ——. Heidegger’s Existentialism: An Essay on Applied Ontology. Lagos: Panaf Publishing Inc., 1996. Veatch, H. ‘‘Deconstruction in Philosophy: has Rorty made it the Denouement of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy.’’ Review of Metaphysics XXXIX (1985): 303–320.

MATTI ITKONEN

LIVED WORDS: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF POETRY EXPERIENCED

MOTTO: THE REITERATION OF THE PAST IN ME Look now at me look well. I am that same boy – together we gathered worms from the rain-soaked asphalt. We walked the lake shore, ﬁshers, comrades, Indians. We shared a tent, then wandered on. We were drugged by the shimmer of the evening sun, we languished to the whisper of the reeds. Who broke the spell and sowed the seeds of rupture? Or rather, changed to present the past that was ours of old. Time came around; you took up the arms your forebear wielded. I was that same foe who fell sometime by the roadside. Unnumbered fates I recounted there – the tear shed for all, the suﬀering of past years brought close. And yet I was that I: friend of your childhood days who once breathed in rhythm with you. Bury me then as you lost me – eyes bright and face to face. OBSERVATIONS HERE AND NOW

In contemplating the problematics of writing one must be clear as to what is involved, otherwise the discourse never proceeds beyond rhetoric, unfocused, unfounded. It may seem strange that writing, in all its manifestations, should be seen as something which can be pinned down and marshalled into a common form – such a conception leads willy-nilly to a dichotomy of right and wrong, an evasion of experientiality. 145 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 145–163. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

146

MATTI ITKONEN

Some kind of sine qua non here is the precept whereby the writer is bound to employ given material (for example a poem), even though he might be capable of writing without it; this is the only way to an ‘‘acceptable’’ result – no text can come into being without reference to some material. Nor is there any reason to assume that the meaning of a text – as a mere experience – will be automatically transferred to the reader. (See Kaartinen, p. 33; Sinko, p. 12.) No more misleading construal of the nature of writing can be imagined. Teuvo Saavalainen has come upon something essential, an impulse in the right direction: ‘‘Not so; rather, he must be urged to return to the beginning, to backtrack and thus to discover himself ’’ (Saavalainen, p. 12). A clearer leap towards the nature of writing is to be found in the basic degree curriculum of the Tampere Institute of Social Work. It mentions as one of the objectives of the required learning diary selfknowledge; acquaintance with one’s selfhood (see OPS, pp. 29–31). The peculiar quest for universality entails a rejection of originality; one is indeed far removed from the source. Nevertheless, a return is not impossible, and here a useful pointer is to be found in the draft principles envisaged for a national teaching programme – unfortunately, it must be said, in the section on art and environmental studies – but mention is made of the possibility (better, requirement) for integration in the teaching of Finnish and communication. The draft text reads: The objective is a deepening of the student’s own aesthetic experience and self-knowledge and an activation and diversiﬁcation of his/her own creative capacity to the end that culture should become a living and personal experience (OVP, p. 54).

From the standpoint of the paedagogics of Finnish, the mother tongue can be conceived of as a skill subject, an art subject, a means of communication or an experiential and cultural discipline (see, e.g., Sarmavuori, p. 69). In the teaching of writing the aspect of experientiality has tended to be neglected; the technicians have stressed technique to the exclusion of what should be involved. Professor Lauri Olavi Routila oﬀers an interesting insight into the latent meaning of a work of art, which the work itself renders transparent. He terms the emergence of this latent meaning in material form the ‘‘phenomenalization’’ of the meaning. (See, e.g., Routila, p. 45.) Here in fact the adventure begins. APPRESENTATION – COMPLEXITY OF SUBJECT

It is foolish to imagine that phenomena can be apprehended once and for all; as if everything were present at any given instant. The requirement

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF POETRY EXPERIENCED

147

of experientiality presupposes circumspection – a peep into the background. Not all the immediately perceptible aspects of a phenomenon are given simultaneously in (direct) observation. A model backing is appresented – that is, is seen via the directly emerging aspect (as a part of that observed aspect), for example the back of a house as mediated by its facade. This formally presented image may itself become manifest in the future stream of experience, only it may appear in a form divergent from or contrary to that remembered as its appresentation – it may, inasfar as it is actualized at all, be in conﬂict with what was anticipated. If the appresented aspects (or predicted phases of awareness) – in achieving the stage of selfmanifestation – are at odds with foregoing experience, the automatic nature of the experience can be said to ‘‘explode’’. (Schutz and Luckmann, pp. 10–11; see also Husserl, 1968, pp. 316–317; Itkonen, 1993, pp. 45–47; Itkonen, 1997, p. 48.) Roman Ingarden has analysed the relationship between the aesthetic object, (inner) experience and sensory perception. He maintains that the only way in which an object is given in perception is via the experienced limited phenomena appearing to the observer. These phenomena, diﬀering from each other in content, invariably comprise within them a certain organized multiplicity. These complexities are of various kinds and their order of appearance varies (alters) according to the quality of the object and the mode in which it is given. It is true that the discrete components of objects, which owe their being to the structures of those objects, bring about their immediate emergence to the perceiving subject (and in many diﬀerent perceptions it is always the same object that is involved). Yet at the same time they can never eﬀect the manifestation of an object adequately and in its every aspect. In every act of perception certain aspects or components of the observed phenomenon (for example its reverse side or its innermost parts) remain hidden from the observed mental or physical vision. Nonetheless, together they exert an inﬂuence on the act of perceiving and the given phenomenon intuitively even while lacking concrete qualities. (Ingarden, 1964, p. 17.) Ingarden proceeds to deﬁne the subcategories of research in philosophical aesthetics. From the present standpoint the following are of interest: 1. the phenomenology of creative aesthetic behaviour (the creative process) 2. the phenomenology of receptive aesthetic experience and the phenomenology of the function of this experience in the constitution of the aesthetic object

148

MATTI ITKONEN

3. the philosophical theory of the meaning and function of art (or aesthetic objects) in human life (the metaphysics of art [?]). (See Ingarden, 1985b, pp. 18–19.) In the context of writing, what is essential is the attitude adopted towards the task (the object). This will also have its bearing on the assessment of the result. According to Ingarden there are two possible modes of perceiving (understanding) a work of art: 1. The act of perception may take place in the context of an aesthetic approach, in the search for aesthetic experience, or; 2. The act of perception may proceed in connection with (if not indeed in the service of ) some objective entirely divorced from aesthetic interest – for example scientiﬁc research or simple consumer participation, with an eye to the maximum enjoyment of something purchased. (Ingarden, 1985a, pp. 92–93.) In an inquiry into the nature of writing, interest will naturally focus on the aesthetic experience – not, that is, on some matter of mere technique, where the mode of production is the chief concern. The truth is not in the number of pages or references the writer can total up; it lies with the experiencing subject, in the aesthetic pleasure associated with the phenomenon of artistic truth, some creative and appreciative truth which may well be anathema to the epistemologist (see also Langer, p. 260). This process of laying bare the core leads back to the root sources of experience. PROTERAESTHESIS

Franz Brentano outlines the phenomenon of proteraesthesis – anterior sensation – on the basis of the following diagram (touching also upon Kant):

Figure 1. Proteraesthesis.

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF POETRY EXPERIENCED

149

The point N from which lines radiate into the past signiﬁes what the experiencing subject feels within him at a given present moment in time. All perception – including perception of the past – takes place as a present manifestation. This does not mean that nothing appears inwardly. Nevertheless what is seen (das Gesehne) is described in various past modes and the present moment on the Past 3 line – Present moment uppermost. If moreover a perception (ein Gesehenhaben) is to manifest itself, it too will assume a certain temporal modality and be directed to something whose foundation would lie in the various past modes. Likewise a recollection of this having-seen-something (ein sich an das Gesehenhaben Erinnerthaben) would emerge and so on ad inﬁnitum. Experience in no way conﬁrms this. Hence we are inwardly aware only of the moment at hand, here and now. This present moment seems nevertheless, in certain circumstances – in fact in most cases – to be both a beginning and an end. At ﬁrst glance all the foregoing seems conﬂicting in the extreme, and yet close inspection reveals these notions to be conceivable if not absolutely inevitable. (See Brentano, 1981, p. 37.) An analysis of Brentano’s notions is particularly useful in that they oﬀer a possibility of elucidating the concept of horizons. If someone is writing in his own here and now, he is working within a reality considerably more extensive than that currently present to him. It must further be stressed that this horizon is exclusively his own; memories arise out of his selfhood and anticipation takes him into what is yet to come – retention and protention meet in the present moment (see also Itkonen, 1994a, p. 83; 1994b, pp. 210–211.) It is interesting to consider how certain retentions and protentions are actualized. In the reading of a poem, for example, and in the writing of an account of it, does the reader actualize the poem or does it actualize itself ? The ever-expanding nature of horizons entails a diversity of modes of reading; one and the same reader will experience a poem (or other aesthetic object) diﬀerently at each successive approach. And at this point the nature of intentionality calls for elucidation. INTENTIONALIZE OR BECOME INTENTIONAL?

It is vital to make a distinction between the active and passive forms of reﬂexive verbs, because interpretation and ﬁnal eﬀect depend on this. Aarni Penttila¨ (214 and 534) points out that these verb forms show, by their distinctive suﬃxes, that an action is directed upon the subject (thus for example ‘I transferred myself, I moved’). Particular mention is made

150

MATTI ITKONEN

of Penttila¨ here in the conviction that his work on Finnish grammar has been undeservedly neglected. Another scholar who draws attention to the problematics of the active and passive modes is Hans Aebli. He points out how child and adult are more or less perpetually engaged in some activity, physical or mental – eating, reading and so on. William James writes of the stream of consciousness which pervades man’s waking life. Aebli expands this notion to the stream of behaviour. In the sphere of behaviour he deﬁnes functions thus: ‘‘... functions are forms of behaviour in which some end is pursued by deliberate employment of measures, objects and phenomena’’. Accordingly, for example washing the dishes is a function, tripping over an obstacle is not. (See Aebli, p. 201.) Aebli makes a valid point here, but it is in fact only at this stage that the matter becomes interesting. In the context of teaching writing, a deﬁnition of the concept of intentionality calls for further speciﬁcation. Brentano refers to the object of sense perception as the intentional object. If, for example, an individual is afraid of a ghost, the ghost is the intentional object of his fear, not the cat romping about in the attic. In Husserl’s phenomenology it makes no diﬀerence whether the phenomenon intentioned by consciousness is an actual entity present here and now (a computer) or ﬁctive (Hamlet) or illusory (a mirage). All are equally valid objects of phenomenological inquiry and each – adapted to eidetic intuition – is to be recognized as it actually is. In their emergence (presentation), phenomena possess an intuitive oneness. They are not, however, completely identiﬁed, they are identiﬁed only as objects of perception. (See Brentano, 1973, p. 317; Perrin, p. 56; Vuorinen, p. 333.) Something is still missing. We may proceed to a consideration of the noema–noesis construct as conceived by Husserl and James. Alfred Schutz takes as an example Husserl’s theory of noesis (experiencing as it takes place in an individual) and noema (the content of experience), where he comes close to some of James’s tenets. Since, by its intentional nature every thought (act of consciousness) is consciousness of something, a description of it inevitably entails a duality: 1. Noematicity, where one is dealing with the thought and its content, that is, the intentioned object of awareness as it emerges in the act of consciousness, for example as some inevitably, possibly or presumably existing object or as a present, past or future object. 2. Noeticity, where one is concerned with acts of thinking, experience

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF POETRY EXPERIENCED

151

as such (noesis) and changes and modiﬁcations in it: perception, retention, recollection and so on, together with their particular qualities of lucidity and explicitness. (Schutz, 1966, p. 6.) Every speciﬁc noesis has its own particular noematic correlate. There are modiﬁcations of thought which belong equally to the entire noetic– noematic entity – as, for example with various degrees of alertness. On the other hand there are modiﬁcations which may assume predominantly either one of these aspects. Closer analysis, however, (and this is possible only by reduction) reveals that in any intentional object there is always a noematic centre or core which it retains throughout all modiﬁcations. This core may be deﬁned as the meaning of the thought, which appears in its modus of full realization. (Ibid., pp. 6–7.) The character of experience may be further elucidated with a view to illustrating the nature of this core. James, writing of the object of perception, introduces in the same context the interesting term ‘‘fringe’’, and explains that he means by it a part of the object-independent qualities and phenomena which appear in the mind as the fringes of meaning relationships. Some – transitive – elements in the stream of thought perceive relationships rather than phenomena. But both independent and transitive components form one uninterrupted stream in which there are no isolated sensations. (See James, p. 258.) This analysis of intentionality may be furthered by the interpretations of Matti Juntunen. He holds that in Husserl’s view every act of consciousness can be seen to comprise the following components: non-intentional material (hyle) and the intentioning act (noesis). The function of this act is to objectivize the primary material. The result of the conjunction of these two components is noema. In sensory perception a distinction may be drawn between ‘‘non-intentional sensation (the hyle of sensory perception), and the intentioning act of interpretation, apperception (the noetic aspect of sensation)’’. The perceptual content (noema) is accordingly born of the intentioning interpretation of sensation. (Juntunen, pp. 111–112.)

REFLEXIVE GENESIS

Does a text speak in me or I in the text? Is the world in me or am I in the world? When one writes about a poem, two approaches are possible: 1) that from the writer or 2) that from the text. In the ﬁrst case intentionality is

152

MATTI ITKONEN

generally uppermost – the writer intends the poem, which is a correlate. He derives from the text, in the act of interpretation, a certain noema; he may be claimed to intentionalize the poem. This active genesis awakens a variety of ‘‘fringes’’ which at ﬁrst glance may appear to be quite disconnected, independent phenomena. The core – the constant – is nevertheless the reader with his own intentionings, in whose consciousness the seemingly isolated qualities are concatenated into a continuous stream. The ‘‘fringes’’ gather about the core; the mind ﬁlls with wishes, memories and expectations which, as manifested in the poem, acquire presence. The world is open in all directions. An exposition of the nature of a poem requires a more detailed deﬁnition. Poetry must be taken to be life as the reader lives it, his point of contact with the world, a mode of being-in-the-world, his own tracks on the face of the earth. Lyric, for its part, is an attempt to express this mode of being – for example to convey the pain of living to the accompaniment of the lyre. Poetry is the foundation, of which a small part is revealed through lyric. The rest remains concealed. (See also Itkonen, 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2002d, p. 161; 2003.) Can a text as such (an sich) bring itself into being? If it can, then the reader does not himself intend the text; the text gives birth to something in him, awakens something dead – or slumbering – into life. It becomes intentionalized in the reader. In this way what was formerly held to be a mere object assumes being – or more precisely the meanings in it take on presence. The order of initiation of this process depends largely upon the nature of the situation in which the encounter is actualized. THE OPEN WORLD OF FREE WILL

If a text is allowed to actualize itself, there can be no element of compulsion involved. The reader must be allowed to select for himself what he wishes to bring out in his account. In this case the text – for example a poem – will become intentionalized in him. Consideration of this openness of possibilities may be pursued in the light of Henri Bergson’s insights. In terms of the ﬁgure below Bergson conceives the ego arriving at a point of choice – faced with open possibilities. For Bergson the only reality is the living and developing self, which by abstraction can be seen to face in two opposite directions. At this point the self has passed through the states of consciousness M and O and now perceives two equally possible prospects, X and Y. These direc-

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF POETRY EXPERIENCED

153

Figure 2. The possibility of openness.

tions have thus become phenomena, actual pathways towards the point for which the mainstream of consciousness is bound. It depends entirely upon the individual self which of these pathways is adopted. The everopen possibility of choice makes of the self pure reality, something absolute; mobility per se. (See Bergson, pp. 132–136; Kolakowski, pp. 67–68.) Talk of teacher-supervised situations means all too often that the possibilities of choice are limited to two – good and bad. And here someone outside is always there to deﬁne what is good and what is bad. This someone is setting himself up as a god who in his omnipotence governs others and determines their fate. He has failed to grasp that the possibility of incessant mobility entails a multiplicity of quality, and everopen dimension of choice. Freedom of will also involves the notion of a diﬀerent next time – OY instead of OX. According to Bergson, inner experiences ﬂow freely one into the other. They may converge in an ever-varying kaleidoscope in which the coloured pieces of glass are replaced by coloured drops of liquid, ceaselessly colliding, scattering and joining again into new swiftly ﬂeeting combinations. (See e.g. Wagner, p. 29.) What a headache for the would-be godlings.

154

MATTI ITKONEN INTO EXPERIENCE

According to Ingarden, an aesthetic experience is not – contrary to what is often claimed – a passing sense of pleasure or displeasure arising as a reaction (response) to some fact of sensory perception. An aesthetic experience is rather a ‘‘combined process’’ involving a variety of phases and a characteristic development of heterogeneous elements. The duration and complexity of this process depend, of course, on whether in a given case the object confronting the observer is simple or complex. Sometimes a mere shade of colour or timbre of voice may come to constitute such an object. Here, even though the process of aesthetic experiencing is equally evanescent, it is nonetheless something other than a passing feeling of pleasure or displeasure. (Ingarden, 1961, p. 295.) Ingarden pursues his analysis with the proposition that the various phases of an aesthetic experience can be distinguished on the basis of the fact that their relatively fused structure contains three signiﬁcant elements: 1. emotional (aesthetic excitement, primary feeling [agitation], emotional reaction); 2. active, creative (formation of an aesthetic object); 3. passive, receptive (apprehension of qualities already revealed and harmonized) (Ingarden, 1968, pp. 214–215). Since the teaching situation involves an I and a You, it is not a matter of indiﬀerence how these two relate to one another. Generally the I dominates; and what is essential here is that the I should understand what the You is like – place must be made for otherness. Perhaps an analysis of hermeneutic experience will serve to put the despots in their place. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, hermeneutics generally employs the expression ‘‘historical awareness’’ for a phenomenon which may be compared to the You of experience – Gadamer capitalizes the pronoun to bring out the otherness of the other. Historical awareness is conscious of this otherness, conscious of the past in its otherness – just as an understanding of a You is aware of that You as a person, a discrete being. In the otherness of the past such an understanding does not seek the moderation of general laws but something historically unique. (Gadamer, p. 366.) The highest manifestation of hermeneutic experience is the openness to tradition of a historically oriented consciousness. This too has its analogy in the experience of an I regarding a You. It is of vital importance

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF POETRY EXPERIENCED

155

that in human relationships the You be truly apprehended as a You; the rights of the other must not be ignored; the other must be allowed to say what he has to say. Precisely here lies the open way. Only in the end this openness is not there solely for the speaker; rather, every listener is by nature open. Without this mutual receptivity there can be no genuine human bond. Togetherness always entails the ability to listen to others. (Ibid., p. 367.) EVER DEEPER

What then is the nature of this (Gadamer’s) hermeneutic experience? The chief task of the interpreter is to ﬁnd a question which a text (for example) will answer. Understanding of the text means an understanding of the question. On the other hand the text becomes no more than the object of interpretation; the interpreter is introduced by means of the question. In the logic of question and answer the text is as it were lured out by actualizing it in the process of understanding it, and this means historical potentiality. The emergent meaning horizon is thus inﬁnite, and both the text and the interpreter in their openness constitute structural elements in the fusion of horizons. In dialogical understanding, the concepts employed by the Other – a text or a You – are retrieved by accommodating them in the understanding of the interpreter. In understanding the question posed by a text we have ourselves already posed the question and thus revealed the possibilities of meaning. (See Bleicher, p. 114.) Contrary to custom, the perspective might now be reversed and the teacher brought to the fore instead of the student. Has the student been given an opportunity to be a genuine I? Has the teacher met him as a You? Of utmost importance is the aforementioned ability to listen; interaction must always entail reciprocity. It sounds somewhat outmoded now to speak of teacher-led instruction – no idea is conveyed of eliciting knowledge already accrued, of revealing what lies concealed instead of taking charge in the fusion of horizons. If the student has had no experience of being an I, his memory has also at its disposal prediction of the future, and here is an opportunity for the teacher to break the eternal round of domination and turn the teaching situation into a state of genuine openness; to listen instead of just hearing. He may progress from the mere understanding of language to an understanding of the matter or the notion itself (see also Varto, p. 39). It is a general misconception that experiences have meaning. What meaning there is is not in the experience, or rather, it lies in those

156

MATTI ITKONEN

experiences which have been understood in reﬂection. Meaning is the way in which each individual appraises his experience, it lies in the attitude an I adopts towards that part of the stream of consciousness which is already past. (See Schutz, 1984, pp. 69–70.) The teaching of writing in particular involves a burying of the past as past – a situation in which a true I (the teacher) constitutes within its original framework another as Other. This entails in a sense demolishing his presence, a depresentation in which the other I can assume validity; and this other I can subsist as itself in any company, unaltered, without pretense. This is something a teacher rarely achieves in his perceptions – otherwise the (omnipotent) teacher’s inward awareness would immediately understand the student’s experiences. (See Husserl, 1976, p. 189; Scheler, p. 249.) This is a burden all teachers must labour under. What experience of learning can a teacher oﬀer which would leave a trace of respect for the Other, of consideration for the Other as a complete existence, a zeal for the heuristic approach, an insight into the possibility of understanding other beings as entities? That would also lead to a reading of latent pointers, an act of integration bringing about oneness or wholeness? (See also Moustakas, p. 23.) In place of stolid rigidity, teaching calls for a certain measure of creative madness. METAPHYSICAL QUALITIES

According to Ingarden there are metaphysical qualities – entities – which make life worth living: a secret longing (perhaps even unwitting) for a concrete manifestation of them lies in each of us and urges us into all our works and days. Such manifestations constitute the summit and the true depths of our being. Whatever may be the metaphysical status of these modes, whatever the meaning of their revelation and realization in human life (or life in general), we are not prepared to deal with them. Nor do they fall within the sphere of any given subject. (Ingarden, 1965, p. 311.) Whether these metaphysical qualities are of positive or negative value, their revelation is of favourable import in oﬀering a contrast to the monotony of impersonal everyday experience. In their uniqueness these entities allow of no pure rational deﬁnition nor (rational) understanding in the sense that, for example, a mathematical proposition can be understood. Rather, they allow themselves to appear (one might almost say ‘‘ecstatically’’) in the given situations in which they are realized. They may, moreover, be perceived in their own incomparable and inexpressible

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF POETRY EXPERIENCED

157

uniqueness only when we ourselves live in the given situation from the outset, or at least when we feel as another would feel living in that situation. In this, however, we are not engaged in a quest for metaphysical qualities. These modes are closer to us and more purely present to us when we are not speciﬁcally engaged with them. We are simply enthralled by them, and they can be revealed to us only when they become reality. (Ibid., pp. 311–312.) In the context of writing, a metaphysical quality might comprise something surpassing past experience, a possibility for the realization of a potential residing in the self, a breakthrough from the memory of one’s own insigniﬁcance, the feeling that one is capable of achieving something without the wardship of another despotic self, and not in the beyond but here and now, when entities ‘‘greater than life’’ become reality. Now what has appeared to be objectivity reveals itself (after the epoche´) in the lifeworld as absolute subjectivity. Experience can subsist only as something for someone, for an experiencing I (see also Ingarden, 1972, p. 32; 1975, p. 21). A teacher involved with the self-manifestation of the lived trace should brand his soul with these words of Bergson’s: ‘‘I do not count votes. I content myself to gather, so to speak, the qualitative trace which the whole series has brought about.’’ (See Gurwitsch, p. 140.) Thus we pass to the core of the multiplicity of quality – of the unique horizon – the ethical being of teacherhood. SUPPLEMENTS: THE EIDOS OF RECIPROCITY

1. § It was night. Yet it was a night foreshadowing the dawning day – a day which witnesses the most remarkable dawn in history. That day is yet to come; the forces of light are still at war with the darkness. Genuine ethical motives can in no way be accepted against some general yardstick – in either private or public life. We can be thankful that Nature keeps us on the move with hunger and love and all those other incitements and endeavours which can evolve out of selﬁsh desires. (See Brentano, 1969, p. 45.) 2. § A teacher may merge his unique being with the totality. This merging does not mean thought but life. A teacher who possesses life in the totality

158

MATTI ITKONEN

exists as a totality; he lives as if he himself were the centre and source of existence – as if he were drawing to him everything of the present moment in which, after all, he himself is being put together and created. (See Levinas, 1987, p. 25.) 3. § A teacher’s memorandum It is precisely myself who supports the other and bears responsibility for him. Thus it is seen that in the human subject – at the same time as total dependency – my birthright manifests itself. My responsibility cannot be transferred, no one can replace me. What is involved is in fact an expression of the true identity of the human I; by assuming responsibility, that is, setting out from the position or deposition of the sovereign I in selfawareness – a deposition which means precisely the responsibility of the I for the Other. It is explicitly responsibility which is my sole obligation, and, in human terms, it is something I cannot refuse. This duty is the highest attribute of uniqueness. I am I only against that single yardstick of being a responsible non-transferrable I. I can stand in for anyone, but no one can stand in for me. Such is the identity of my subjectivity, which cannot be relinquished. (See Levinas, 1985, pp. 100–101.) EPILOGUE: WORDS OF BEING – IN HONOUR OF PROFESSOR ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA, MY INSPIRATION IN POETRY AND THOUGHT

T he experiencing subject ‘‘This story is not true. This is no lie. This is a tale.’’ (See e.g. Ahonen, p. 16.) Thus ‘‘writes’’ the Finnish ﬁlm director Markku Po¨lo¨nen in the opening moments of his ‘‘Badding’’. I sit in the Fantasia cinema in Jyva¨skyla¨ and I am trembling: all within me is music, my consciousness ablaze. Before my eyes I see depicted something I have never known before. I have now a model of the language in which experience of the world – the vortex of existence, the maelstrom of being – can be described. The subjective quality of an experience can never be rendered truly intersubjective – talk of the commonalty of experience is sheer nonsense. Nor is the ‘we’ form ever to be defended in phenomenological philosophy – at least not ontologically. The notion of lived language, of the primacy of the mother tongue, is the poetry of being: a unique prospect in the

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF POETRY EXPERIENCED

159

existential milieu. The possibility that it can never be veriﬁed is ever there; existence is always prior to essence. Being is and endures, the living creature vanishes – is that ontological diﬀerence by any measure linguistic? A tale in words out of the mists of youth L ife: As the sun reached the end of his arc one ray held back, the last of the day lagged a moment behind the rest. Already the dusk crept into the woods, and that sun-ray golden-winged would have ﬂed the growing dark – when it chanced upon an earth-sprite risen newly from his den; yet never ere the close of day may creatures of the dark walk out upon the earth. One living: The day is done that parched my hair to ﬂax, struck light into my being and copper on my face. A moment ago there it was – my mother’s hand on my head; there in the eyes of that girl, that ﬁrst one, in those mirrors out of which the boy stared back. The image fades, submerged – somewhere – in the man about to be. Minerva: Sound of unhurried wingbeats carries from afar. L ife: Each gazes on other – in the earth-sprite’s breast strange perturbation. ‘‘You scorch my eyes’’ he said, ‘‘but never in my life did I such beauty see! No matter though the radiance strike me blind – it is good to dwell in the dark. Come with me, I will guide you to my lair and have you for my own!’’

160

MATTI ITKONEN One living: Gone the boy, fair being guiltless no more. The glow of day ebbs out, lives now in the gnarled features of the man; the boy concealed within. Lives on as a memory, a longing staring back from the girl’s eyes. The ﬂaring up of a moment, a leap into what has been, copper on the face, blood red of sun in the sky. Young man white-capped ever on his journey home. Minerva: Wingbeats faster now, their echo already sounds back from the rock-face of adult years. L ife: The sun-ray in reply: ‘‘Dear elf, the dark will stiﬂe me; I have no wish to die. I must be on my way, for unless I reach the light right soon no hope there is for me.’’ And so the lovely sun-ray ﬂed – yet even now as he ranges in the night the earth-sprite ponders why the one should be the child of light, the other love the night. (Ela¨ma¨n vuorosanat: Helismaa, p. 27.) One living: This is the man I am, and once for all. The boy will not return, and the youth already takes his bow. See him still waving his student’s cap, smiles still, mirth twinkles in the corners of his eyes. The door falls shut, I am alone. And if I knock will he hear me; the boy with the ﬂaxen hair, will he return? Does he dwell still in the eyes of that girl – young man I thought was gone? Can I not be each of them, removed from the man I am?

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF POETRY EXPERIENCED

161

Minerva: Wings beat the air, close by now – darkness falls.

T ranslated by Robert MacGilleon Department of T eacher Education University of Jyva¨skyla¨ Finland BIBLIOGRAPHY Aebli, H. Opetuksen perusmuodot. Suomentanut Ulla Sinkkonen. Juva: WSOY, 1987/1991. Ahonen, M. ‘‘Surumielinen satu.’’ Syke, Keskisuomalaisen liite. 19.8., 2000. p. 16. Bergson, H. Essai sur les donne´es imme´diates de la conscience. 96. e´dition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1889/1961. Bleicher, J. Contemporary hermeneutics. Hermeneutics as method, philosophy and critique. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980/1987. Brentano, F. T he Origin of our Knowledge of Right and W rong. Translated by Roderick M. Chisholm, Elizabeth H. Schneewind. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1889/1969. ——. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Translated by Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, Lind L. McAlister. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1874/1973. ——. Sensory and Noetic Consciousness. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint III. Translated by Margarete Scha¨ttle, Linda L. McAlister. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929/1981. Gadamer, H-G. Hermeneutik I. Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzu¨ge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. 5. Auﬂage (durchgesehenen und erweitert). Gesammelte Werke, Band I. Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1960/1986. Gurwitsch, A. T he Field of Consciousness. Fourth Printing. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964/1982. Helismaa, R. ‘‘Pa¨iva¨nsa¨de ja menninka¨inen.’’ get on. 101 rocklyriikan parasta. Toimittanut Kauko Ro¨yhka¨. Helsinki: Tammi, 1965/2000. p. 27. Husserl, E. Pha¨nomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester (1925). Zweite Auﬂage. Herausgegeben von Walter Biemel. Husserliana, Band IX. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoﬀ, 1962/1968. ——. Die Krisis der europa¨ischen W issenschaften und die transzendentale Pha¨nomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die pha¨nomenologische Philosophie. 2. Auﬂage. Herausgegeben von Walter Biemel. Husserliana, Band VI. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoﬀ, 1954/1976. Ingarden, R. ‘‘Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Object.’’ Translated by Janina Makota with the co-operation of Shia Moser. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research XXI (1961): 289–313. ——. T ime and Modes of Being. Translated by Helen R. Michejda. Springﬁeld, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas Publishers, 1960/1964. ——. Das L iterarische Kunstwerk. Mit einem Anhang von den Funktionen der Sprache im T heaterschauspiel. Dritte, durchgesehene Auﬂage. Tu¨bingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1931/1965.

162

MATTI ITKONEN

——. Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks. Tu¨bingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1968. ——. ‘‘What is New in Husserl’s ‘Crisis’.’’ Translated by Rolf George. In Analecta Husserliana II, T he L ater Husserl and the Idea of Phenomenology. Idealism-Realism, Historicity and Nature, edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1972, pp. 23–47. ——. On the Motives which led Husserl to T ranscendental Idealism. Phaenomenologica 64. Translated by Arno´r Hannibalsson. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoﬀ, 1963/1975. ——. ‘‘Artistic and Aesthetic Values.’’ In Selected Papers in Aesthetics, edited by Peter J. McCormick. Mu¨nchen: The Catholic University of America Press, 1964/1985a, 91–106. ——. ‘‘On Philosophical Aesthetics.’’ In Selected Papers in Aesthetics, edited by Peter J. McCormick. Mu¨nchen: The Catholic University of America Press, 1968/1985b, 17–24. Itkonen, M. Minulta teille? Fenomenologinen analyysi ka¨yma¨tto¨ma¨sta¨ keskustelusta. Tampereen opettajankoulutuslaitoksen julkaisuja A 17. Tampere: Tampereen yliopiston ja¨ljennepalvelu, 1993. ——. ‘‘Matka ytimeen. Kurkotus arjen taakse – ‘na¨yn hetki’ ja Eeva-Liisa Manner.’’ Synteesi 4 (1994a), 78–85. ——. Zenit – ulkoisesta sisa¨iseen. Askeleet fenomenologiseen aikaan ja sen tajunnallistumismoduksiin Eeva-L iisa Mannerin lyriikassa. Suomen fenomenologisen instituutin julkaisuja (SUFI), volume 11. Tampere: Cityoﬀset ky, 1994b. ——. ‘‘Dialogic or Dialogistic? Dialogicity or Dialogism? A Word of Warning against Rigor Metodologiae.’’ Translated by Robert MacGilleon. Human Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1997): 47–58. ——. Ainokaiselleni. Na¨kyva¨ ja na¨kyma¨to¨n Ain’Elisabet Pennasen rakkaudessa Juhani Siljoon. Jyva¨skyla¨: Jyva¨skyla¨n yliopiston opettajankoulutuslaitos, 2002a. ——. Ajan kanssa. T uokiokuvia ja ﬁlosoﬁsia tarinoita koetusta kulttuurista. Jyva¨skyla¨: Jyva¨skyla¨n yliopiston opettajankoulutuslaitos, 2002b. ——. ‘‘Does What Has Been Survive After All? The Touch of Yesterday.’’ Phenomenological Inquiry 26 (2002c): 123–134. ——. ‘‘The Milieu: A Chart of Our Margin of Play.’’ Translated by Robert MacGilleon. In Analecta Husserliana LXXV, T he V isible and the Invisible in the Interplay between Philosophy, L iterature and Reality, edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002d, 139–155. ——. ‘‘Once I Was. A Philosophical Excursion into the Metaphors of the Mind.’’ In L ived Images. Mediations in Experience, L ife-World and I-hood, edited by Matti Itkonen, Gary Backhaus. Jyva¨skyla¨: Jyva¨skyla¨ University Press, 2003, 42–89. James, W. T he Principles of Psychology. Authorized Edition in two volumes. Volume one. New York: Dover Publications, Inc 1890/1950. Juntunen, M. Edmund Husserlin ﬁlosoﬁa. Fenomenologia ja apodiktisen tieteen idea. Ma¨ntta¨: Gaudeamus, 1986. Kaartinen, V. ‘‘Aktivoiva lukeminen – osa aineistopohjaista kirjoittamista.’’ Y lioppilasaineita 1992. Toimittaneet Anita Julin, Kaija Parko, Pirkko Tiuraniemi ja Sakari Viinama¨ki. Ha¨meenlinna: Karisto Oy.:n kirjapaino, 1992. Pp. 32–34. Kolakowski, L. Metaphysical Horror. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1988. Langer, S. K. Philosophy in a New Key. A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Third Edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1942/1979. Levinas, E. Ethics and Inﬁnity. Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1982/1985.

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF POETRY EXPERIENCED

163

——. Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoﬀ Publishers, 1987. Moustakas, C. Heuristic Research. Design, Methodology, and Applications. Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, Inc, 1990. OPS. T ampereen sosiaalialan oppilaitoksen koulukohtainen opetussuunnitelma sosiaali- ja terveysalan perustutkintoon. Sisa¨llo¨n kehitta¨misen tyo¨ryhma¨ 24.2., 1993. OPV. Opetussuunnitelman valtakunnalliset perusteet. Y hteiset opinnot. Luonnos 20.5., 1994. Penttila¨, A. Suomen kielioppi. Porvoo: WSOY, 1957. Perrin, R. Max Scheler’s Concept of the Person. An Ethics of Humanism. Hong Kong: Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd, 1991. Routila, L. O. T aidekasvatuksen tieteenala. Keuruu: Clarion, 1985. Saavalainen, T. ‘‘Ohjannan la¨hto¨kohta: mina¨, kirjoittaja.’’ Kirjoituksia kirjoittamisesta. ¨ OL :n vuosikirja XXIX. Toimittaja Anneli Va¨ha¨passi. Helsinki: Kirjapaino Oy Merkur, A 1982. Pp. 9–12. ¨ idinkielen opetustiede kansallisen kulttuurin juhlavuotena.’’ A ¨ idinkielen Sarmavuori, K. ‘‘A opetustiede. Aikakauskirja 15–16. Strategiat, mielikuvat, metakognitio. Turku: Turun yliopiston oﬀsetpaino, 1994. Pp. 64–71. Scheler, M. T he Nature of Sympathy. Translated by Peter Health. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1913/1979. Schutz, A. ‘‘William James’s Concept of the Stream of Thought Phenomenologically Interpreted.’’ In Collected Papers III. Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, edited by I. Schutz. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoﬀ, 1941/1966. Pp. 1–14. ——. T he Phenomenology of the Social World. Fifth Printing. Translated by George Walsh, Frederick Lehnert. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1932/1984. Schutz, A. and Luckmann, T. T he Structures of the L ife-World. Translated by Richard M. Zaner, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Sinko, P. ‘‘Miten abiturientit ka¨ytta¨va¨t aineistoja – ja miten niita¨ tulisi ka¨ytta¨a¨.’’ Y lioppilasaineita 1991. Toimittaneet Riitta Arvilommi, Anneli Kauppinen, Marjo ¨ OL, 1991. Pp. 12–19. Penttinen ja Sakari Viinama¨ki. Helsinki: SKS ja A Wagner, H. R. Phenomenology of Consciousness and Sociology of the L ife-world. An Introductory Study. Edmondon: The University of Alberta Press, 1983. Varto, J. ‘‘Mita¨ hermeneutiikka on? Johdattavia huomautuksia.’’ Kirjallisuuden tulkinta ja ymma¨rta¨minen. Toimittanut Arto Haapala. Suomen Estetiikan Seuran vuosikirja 6. Helsinki: Valtion painatuskeskus, 1991. Pp. 29–43. Vuorinen, J. Estetiikan klassikoita. Juva: SKS, 1993.

VELGA VEVERE

EXISTENCE AND COMMUNICATION: CHALLENGE OF THE TIMES

‘... we are what we are only through the community of mutually conscious understandings. There can be no man who is a man for himself alone, as a mere individual’. Karl Jaspers

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

In the age of hypercommunication (i.e., our current world, for better or for worse) philosophical reﬂection on the crucial matters of the human condition becomes a seemingly impossible task, a quixotic ﬁght with windmills, as it is so diﬃcult to regain the necessary tranquility of mind. We are totally involved in everyday passing aﬀairs, satisﬁed with chunks of information, suﬀering from visual and audio pollution. At the same time, the ability to get information at once and communicate across large distances empowers us. ‘‘The medium is the message’’ – this famous phrase by Marshall McLuhan captures both sides of the process. ‘‘This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced in our aﬀairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.’’1 To regard this statement as merely ‘‘technological’’ (in the sense of today’s modern technologies) is oversimpliﬁcation. Rather, the author stresses changes in our basic attitudes, perceptions, world-orientation, self-understanding, projection of ourselves in the world brought on by means of communication. This pertains to all spheres of human activity. (McLuhan gives an example of cubist paintings, where the depiction of inside and outside, bottom, back and front simultaneously brings about total awareness, and the medium becomes the message itself.) Likewise Walter Ong in his ‘‘Orality and Literacy’’ discusses how the means of expression (technology in the wider sense of this word, as it comprises writing as a form of expression opposed to oral performance) restructures consciousness: ‘‘To say writing is artiﬁcial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artiﬁcial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior 165 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 165–175. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

166

VELGA VEVERE

aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they aﬀect the word. Such transformations can be uplifting. Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation form a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also a distance.’’2 Although Ong speaks more of eﬀects on human perception caused by the onset of writing as technology, it seems to me that he touches upon the critical distinction that lies at the very core of communication per se, that is, the relation of proximity and distance. Taken to extremes, they both preclude any act of meaningful communication as the proximity turns into closure of the gap between communicators, whereas distance – into total isolation of selves or pseudo-communication. This could be what is happening to most of us today. How is one to keep the balance? How does one not only survive but thrive? The answer could be to turn to the notion of communicative rationality – establishing a common ground, i.e., communicative action, that is much more than simple mastery of negotiation skills. To my mind today too much emphasis is put on ‘‘technicalities’’ (for example, how to be successful, how to reach the goal, how to persuade, how to talk somebody into something, etc.), while forgetting to think about what it really means to communicate. In this light it could be worth looking into Søren Kierkegaard’s quest for the existential basis of communication, which largely relies upon his reﬂections on proximity and distance. SHARING-IN-LIFE AND COMMUNICATION

Let us turn to the unique conception of sharing-in-life developed by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka in the 4th book of ‘L ogos of L ife’ – ‘Impetus and equipoise in the life-strategies of reason’.3 The eﬀort here may be called a ‘‘mapping of communicative reason’’, where the author step by step proceeds to give diﬀerent qualiﬁcations of the conception, at the same time continuously emphasizing its generic unity with everything-that-isalive. Let me be bold (and maybe a little sketchy) and try to summarize these qualiﬁcations. The ﬁrst qualiﬁcation of the sharing-in-life springs out of the Stoics’ distinction between the ‘‘unspoken’’ logos, logos endiathetos, and the ‘‘spoken’’ logos, logos prophoricos. The former designates the ‘‘constitutive consciousness’’ – singular, constant, transcendent – while the latter designates the ‘‘bipolar’’ logos which establishes the unifying links among the living beings, as it combines thought and sound. Yet Tymieniecka gives

EXISTENCE AND COMMUNICATION

167

a further qualiﬁcation: ‘‘However, we wish to emphasize rather intrinsic meaningfulness of this (i.e., ‘‘spoken’’ – V.V.) logos, which may be ‘communicated’ – being ‘communicable’ – in utterance (written or spoken), which is to say that here logos has intelligible form’’.4 So the stress falls upon the societal interactions that are neither purely emotional (based on passions of hate and love), nor purely intellectual (based on reasoning and decision making). And to distinguish the speciﬁc character of the societal logos the author calls it the Dionysian reason in contrast to Apollonian clarity and intellectual certitude. The second quality of sharing-in-life (though not in consecutive order) relates to the autonomous, cooperative modes of coexistence (operational models) that are not necessarily bound up with vital existence. These modes manifest themselves as diﬀerent organizational patterns that in society could be diﬀerent from and even opposed to the ones in the world of nature. In other words, these operational modes could lead to selfdestruction as, for example, in extreme religious cult groups with their charismatic leaders. ‘‘They do promote life, but having their own signiﬁcance, they stand out above life and in certain cases seem even to contradict life’s interests’’.5 Thirdly, sharing-in-life is the manifestation of ordering principles, something that gives the human being some orientation in the world, a sense of stability and continuation. The fourth aspect of sharing-in-life arises out of the creative activity of judgement, enabling it to reach communicative knowledge. That is, consciousness moves beyond perceptive intentions into the sphere of abstract thinking, objective meanings, which, in turn, constitute the grounds of the human intellectual interaction. The ﬁfth denotation is tied up with the context of the intelligible experience of the world and life praxis. At the same time it designates man’s self-interpretation-in-existence or ciphering (the bipolar relation). If the ﬁrst relation refers to the collective experience of human interaction and the ever continuing quest for the truth, the second one refers to the uniqueness of each individual. But the question still holds – is the harmony between the two (i.e., collective experience and individual self-creation) possible? The sixth meaning of sharing-in-life presupposes the so-called ‘‘weconsciousness’’ as commitment to interests, ideas and goals held in common. ‘‘With commitment to interests, ideas, goals and ideals held in common, human persons advance from awareness of ‘self ’ to awareness of ‘we,’ and the societal spirit arises.’’6

168

VELGA VEVERE

The last aspect of this phenomenon to be mentioned in the present paper is cultivation of the logos within a group, community, and culture. Particular emphasis here falls on education in the general sense of the word. To be ‘‘acculturated’’ means to be perceptive of the universal values, as well as values of the speciﬁc societal group, since only the shared background expressed in traditions, symbols, attitudes towards life’s facts, etc., sustain the community as a self-evolving entity. These few qualiﬁcations don’t exhaust the conception of sharing-in-life, but still they point to its intrinsic relation to the universal logoic patterns in life, as well as the uniqueness of the societal logos. COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALITY

The notion of communicative rationality plays an important role in Jurgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action and in recent theories of neo-pragmatism. Basically it is the question of the possibility or impossibility of communicative rationality. What is communicative rationality? Habermas explains: ‘‘There is a peculiar rationality, inherent not in language as such but in the use of linguistic expressions, that can be reduced neither to the epistemic rationality of knowledge (as classical truth-conditional semantics supposes) nor to the purposive-rationality of action (as intentionalist semantics assumes). This communicative rationality is expressed in the unifying force of speech oriented towards reaching understanding, which secures for the participating speakers an intersubjectively shared lifeworld thereby securing at the same time the horizon within which everyone can refer to one and the same objective world.’’7 Communicative rationality, according to Habermas, is one of three forms of rationality, the other ones being epistemic (related to the use of language) and teleological (related to the purposeful nature of human action). As such, communicative rationality doesn’t form an overarching structure; rather, it fulﬁlls the integrating role because it deals with speech patterns and speech acts or communicative practices which, in turn, are intertwined with linguistic assuredness (we speak the same language) and purposiveness. This is a level where the mutual understanding can or can’t take place. This ‘‘can or can’t’’ depends upon three sets of rules, summarized by Andrea T. Baumeister.8 They are the following: ﬁrstly, all participants must speak the same language according to the same general conventions. Secondly, certain procedural rules must be observed. Thirdly, that practical discourse seeks to persuade and convince participants so as to gain their free assent. The aim of these rules is to assure discursive equality and domination

EXISTENCE AND COMMUNICATION

169

free communication. The shared lifeworld which Habermas understands as a pre-existent set of cultural givens’’ (i.e., existing social, cultural and linguistic environment) is the condition of mutual understanding. At the same time it secures the reproduction of symbolic structures through cultural tradition, social integration and socialization. The shared lifeworld thus forms the reference system against which any truth-validity claim can be measured. In other words, it presupposes the existence of extra-linguistic structures or, to say, a social framework. ‘‘The components of the lifeworld result from and are maintained through the continuation of valid knowledge, the stabilization of group solidarities, and the formation of accountable actors. The web of everyday communicative practices extends across the semantic ﬁeld of symbolic contents just as much as in the dimensions of social space and historical time, constituting the medium through which culture, society, and personality structures develop and are reproduced.’’9 Communicatively acting subjects experience their respective lifeworlds as an intersubjectively shared totality in the background, ensuring the existence of a phenomenon called ‘‘weconsciousness’’. Neo-pragmatic critical theories (for example, Richard Rorty’s), in turn try to externalize the idiosyncrasies of individual selves and thereby subvert the public/private relationship. According to Rorty, Habermas’ conception of communicative reason has an ahistorical (universal) grounding (he advocates a kind of updated rationalism) while, in opposition, his own insistence on the contingency of language makes him suspicious of the very idea of ‘‘universal validity’’. Moreover, he says: ‘‘... I want to see these common purposes against the background of an increasing sense of the radical diversity of private purposes, of the radically poetic character of individual lives, and of the merely poetic foundations of the ‘we-consciousness’ which lies behind our social institutions.’’10 Rorty arrives at the nuclear vision of communicative practices. It means that the individual is solely responsible for his or her private endeavor and that any we-consciousness (if possible at all) is a highly fragmented structure consisting of individuals coming together for a short period of time to attain certain goals. Thus in his eyes the very notion of communicative rationality is an illusion of the era of modernism; for Rorty, communication practices consist of short-term conventions. COMMUNICATION AS IMPARTING AND AS WILL TO TOTAL COMMUNICATION

The knowledge of existence, the very proof of existence, can be derived from communication. As a consequence, in existential philosophy both

170

VELGA VEVERE

concepts (through their unique conjunction) acquire a special meaning as complementary, or, more radically speaking, as mutually deﬁning. Søren Kierkegaard’s project of existential communication assumes an indirect stance, that is, it is often identiﬁed with his pseudonymous production as there (especially in the ‘‘Concluding scientiﬁc postscript’’) he speaks about communication, modes of communication, existence and truth as subjectivity and inwardness, whereas in authorized works he directly expressed his ethical and primarily religious convictions. While this view can rightfully be substantiated by the seemingly clean-cut divide between the two bodies of works – pseudonymous and authorized (i.e., signed by Kierkegaard himself ) – in my opinion, it is possible to view the authorship as the single project of existential communication, where each and every element is designed to ﬁt some place (but not the place, as they could be shuﬄed around according to diﬀerent approaches to the authorship). This conclusion is based upon the thesis that the target of the whole authorship (indirect and direct) is to communicate the individual into existence (not to forget that for Kierkegaard the authentic existence is the religious one). Namely, the man is lured, no, forced to face his existential situation, his inwardness, to launch self-knowing in order to make a conscious choice of becoming an individual. ‘‘... I ... was conscious of being a religious author and as such I was concerned with ‘the individual’ (‘the individual’ – in contrast to ‘the public’), a thought in which is contained an entire philosophy of life and of the world’’.11 Therefore, the inherent ambiguity and duplicity of the author. During his lifetime (and extensively between the years of 1843 and 1849) Kierkegaard published a series of pseudonymous works, signed by more than 20 ﬁctitious authors, and chronologically his communicative strategies included, ﬁrst, doubled reﬂection and then reduplication. Double or doubled (K. uses both terms) refers (a) to the contrasting form of aesthetic works, namely, the consistent oﬀ-stage presence of the author (‘‘... I am impersonally or personally in the third person a souZeur [prompter] ...’’12); (b) the doubled reﬂection refers also to the urge of a person to express himself and at the same time to keep everything to himself – a contradiction present in each act of communication. In turn, the notion reduplication reﬂects the relation between communication and communicator or translating the truth intellectually apprehended into the terms of actual living (existence). Elsewhere Kierkegaard prompts another distinction: between communication of knowledge [V ideos Meddelelse] and the communication of ability [Kunnens Meddelelse]. ‘‘The diﬀerence lies in the fact that they take place within two diﬀerent

EXISTENCE AND COMMUNICATION

171

mediums: the ﬁrst one within the medium of abstraction, the second one within the medium of existence’’.13 Thus only the second could be called existential communication, while the ﬁrst one Kierkegaard uses to confront the notion of objective truth, in other words, Hegel’s systematic philosophy. But what about proximity and distance in Kierkegaard’s vision of existential communication? In his opinion, keeping distance in communication is a matter of importance. Kierkegaard writes: ‘‘Wherever the subjective is of importance in knowledge and appropriation is therefore the main point, communication a work of art; it is doubly reﬂected, and its ﬁrst form is the subtlety that the subjective individuals must be held devoutly apart from one another ...’’.14 That is, the aim of doubled reﬂection consists in setting the person free. This crucial feature of communication – distancing – is studied by Alastair Hannay in his article ‘‘Something on Hermeneutics and Communication in Kierkegaard After All’’.15 Hannay starts by revoking the notion of communication as used by Kierkegaard, but going the via negative route. He declares Kierkegaard’s thought to be antithetical to hermeneutics and that communication is not among his central topics, at least in the contemporary understanding of communication as a reciprocal two-way process. Hannay turns to the Danish word Meddelelse used by Kierkegaard, traditionally translated into English as communication, but, as it happens, in Dutch it has a slightly diﬀerent meaning, a slight twist. Namely, it could be translated as imparting, contrary to giving and receiving implied in communication – as a giving away or withholding. Therefore, the real communication (communal action) in Kierkegaard doesn’t take place. ‘‘So the imparter we take to be someone who has something to impart, he or she is to some degree a teacher, wants to give something of him- or herself to the learner, but realizes the lesson can only be learned by the latter catching on, not by being instructed’’.16 So Hannay concludes that Kierkegaard is antithetical to hermeneutics. But to my mind this interpretation of Meddelelse as imparting discloses the unique character of Kierkegaard’s existential communication, because it precludes the receiver identifying with the communicator, thus opening a gap, a space. Only this distance makes it possible to communicate to someone about existence. Therefore, Kierkegaard’s dialogue is not dialogue in the proper sense of the word. It doesn’t aim towards mutual understanding (though the possibility to be heard and understood seemed not so displeasing to the author at

172

VELGA VEVERE

times), but rather towards self-understanding via a relation to others. Thus the dialogue could be qualiﬁed as disciplined dialogue. In this sense, Kierkegaard’s understanding of imparting resembles Bertold Brecht’s theatre of alienation, the V-eﬀect (VerfremdungseVekt), where stage characters are not persons we can identify with emotionally or intellectually, but are rather types, cliches that steers us in the direction of self-reﬂection. In Kierkegaard, the concern is to be alone in the face of the existential choice where at stake is the possibility of becoming of the Self as such. American theorist Frederic Jameson, speaking of Brecht’s method, characterizes it in the following way: ‘‘To make something look strange, to make us look at it with new eyes, implies the antecedence of general familiarity, of a habit which prevents us from really looking at things, a kind of perceptual numbness ...’’.17 To attain this eﬀect, a variation of strategies is to be employed: subversion and displacement of narrative; keeping the outer and inner distance, presentation of alternative possibilities, etc. Similar traits can be spotted in Kierkegaard – the interruptions (the use of appendixes in the middle of the text as, for example, A Glance at a Contemporary EVort in Danish L iterature in his ‘‘Concluding Unscientiﬁc Postscript’’), the distancing, or presenting the reader with multiple visions of the same phenomena as, for example his famous points of view and explanations. Thus the aim of Kierkegaard’s existential, indirect communication is to make the common look unfamiliar, to create some kind of existential crisis out of which the unique Self can emerge. Of course, he doesn’t deny the value of interpersonal communication or the existence of other selves, but still in the face of choice everybody stands alone. It appears that the Kierkegaardian use of the concept is non-traditional, though it is possible that we have come to use it thanks to the German and English translations as according to Alastair Hannay, the original Danish term Meddedelelse has almost nothing to do with shared knowledge. If Kierkegaard’s communication is communication at all, should we call it diﬀerently? Or should we just bear in mind the diﬀerence? At this point there is no clear answer to this question. Perhaps the term imparting could do the trick, but still we have to remember the long-standing tradition in the scholarly literature to make the distinction between Kierkegaard’s direct and indirect communication. In contrast to Kierkegaard’s vision of communication as imparting, with its estrangement and inherent triadic structure, that is, the inclusion of the totally Other in the very act of communication, another existentialist thinker, Karl Jaspers, views existence as a basic product of direct communication. Namely, instead of Kierkegaardian asymmetry (as

EXISTENCE AND COMMUNICATION

173

imparting inevitably presupposes some kind of relational imbalance), Jaspers speaks of the will to total communication. ‘‘The unlimited willto-communicate, then never means simply to submit oneself to other as such, but rather to know that other, to hear him, to will to reckon with him even unto the necessity of a transformation of oneself ’’.18 This basic will to total communication actualizes itself through the modes of Encompassing: (1) in empirical existence (communication as the art of conversation on the basis of some common conscious purpose in the world); (2) in the consciousness as such (communication of self-identical consciousness dispersed into the multiplicities of its empirical existence); and, (3) communication of spirit (emergence of the Idea of a whole out of the communal substance). Thus Jaspers, at least on some level, sees communication as sharing, as being with others while Kierkegaard sees it as becoming the self, the individual. Jaspers writes: ‘‘In general then, it applies to my being, my authenticity, and my grasp of the truth that, not only factually am I not for myself alone, but I can not even become myself alone without emerging out of my being with others.’’19 Disruption of communication, according to Jaspers, is caused by the existential recognition of the plurality of truths, and the only way out of this dead-end is to trust the truth of others. Whereas the Kierkegaardian model of communication could be called (with an apparent approximation) a disrupted dialogue (the aim is not so much to bring together as keep apart, at the same time maintaining the sense of others and the Other), the vital role in Jaspers’ interpretation of communication is played by the notion of Encompassing. Jaspers deliberately avoids any clear-cut conceptualization of this phenomenon, and it is possible to speak only of the contextual use of the notion – in everyday communication, in consciousness as such and in communication with spirit. It denotes the ultimate Being which is the foundation of our world vision, but at the same time its totality can’t be absolutely grasped by any conceptual framework. In other words, the Encompassing means that there is always more than it is possible to express in words, there is always more in man than he knows himself to be. ‘‘The Encompassing which we are is, in every form communication; the Encompassing which is Being itself exists for us only insofar as it achieves communicability by becoming speech or becoming utterable’’.20 CONCLUSION

To exist is to be understood, to exist is to have a shared lifeworld: to exist is to adopt the patterns of societal organization; to exist is to

174

VELGA VEVERE

internalize the universal (and particular) cultural values; to exist is to communicate; and to communicate is to come into existence as a Self. These are some, but not all, of the visions of existence and communication in their intrinsic interrelatedness. It is necessary to bear in mind the diﬀerences in the use of concepts themselves as they denote various phenomena. Still, altogether they point to some deeper, existential level so often distrusted by technology adepts. By no means should we abandon the advantages of modern communication highways; this paper would be possible without them. But rather we (meaning philosophers) should invite people to look into what communication really is and how it relates to being human. Institute of Philosophy and Sociology University of L atvia

NOTES 1 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. T he Extention of Man (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The MIT Press, 2001), p. 7. 2 Walter J. Ong, Orality and L iteracy. T he T echnologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 82. 3 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, L ogos and L ife: Impetus and Equipoise in the L ife-Strategies of Reason, Book 4 (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000). 4 Ibid., p. 337. 5 Ibid., p. 340. 6 Ibid., p. 440. 7 Jurgen Habermas. On the Pragmatics of Communication (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998), p. 315. 8 Andrea T. Baumeister, ‘‘Jurgen Habermas: Discourse in a Multicultural Society,’’ in L iberalism and the ‘‘Politics of DiVerence’’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 79. 9 On the Pragmatics of Communication, pp. 247–248. 10 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 67–68. 12 Søren Kierkegaard, T he Point of V iew on my Work as an Author (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), p. 21. 12 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientiﬁc Postscript (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 545. 13 Johan Taels, ‘‘Word and Speech-Act in S. Kierkegaard and (Post-)Modern Thought,’’ in Existence and Communication, Abstracts (Riga, 2003), p. 69. 14 Concluding Unscientiﬁc Postscript, p. 79. 15 Alastair Hannay, Something on Hermeneutics and Communication in Kierkegaard After All. / Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter. 42 (2001): 8–14.

EXISTENCE AND COMMUNICATION 16 17 18 19 20

Ibid., p. 12. Frederic Jameson. Brecht and Method (London, New York: Verso, 1998), p. 39. Karl Jaspers. Reason and Existenz (Noonday Press, 1955), p. 99. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 70.

175

HALI˙ L TURAN

THE EXISTENCE OF OTHER EGOS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

It is generally thought to be natural for all philosophical systems concerned with issues of morality to proceed from the assumption that there is a community of human beings, since moral value seems to emerge precisely within the frame constituted by beings assumed to be capable of acting on and communicating with each other. The possibility of this action and communication, in turn, rests on the fundamental assumption that human beings resemble each other in ‘‘body and mind’’. Hence, moral value, like anything that can be an attribute, seems to be founded on the belief that there are beings whose bodily movements and thoughts, and in particular whose ‘‘passions’’, are similar. It always seemed possible to argue that the intercourse of similar beings in the form of action and passion could constitute the ground for the justiﬁcation of the existence of the ‘‘other’’. In this paper I will try to show that this argument is fallacious, or at best gratuitous. I will argue that an account of moral value in terms of sentiments without any recourse to the existence of other egos is possible. To this end I will take David Hume’s philosophy of passion and morals in Book III of his T reatise as the exemplar of accounts of moral value based on sentiment, and consider it from a Husserlian phenomenological perspective. I

Morality as a philosophical topic seems to take the existence of the other, that is, the subject and the arbiter of moral value judgements, for granted. The question of existence may even seem trivial to some for, if value is attached to persons, then it must follow that the bearer of values necessarily exists. I, or someone else whose nature is qualiﬁed with a certain adjective, must therefore exist. In moral judgements we generally do not assign value to particular actions, but rather consider subjects as having the habit of acting in a certain manner and attach value to a particular character. Integrity, constancy, trustworthiness and the like are qualities of moral subjects, not of actions. Does not the use of these value words – or their antonyms – imply ﬁrst of all that there exist beings capable of acting? Single acts cannot be the bearers of value, they are not even 177 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 177–191. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

178

HALI˙ L TURAN

morally signiﬁcant data. Acts considered in themselves become signiﬁcant only when they help to connote coherence, or its lack. There are not isolated acts, but there are actors. Could there be anything more manifest than that deeds belong to persons, and, therefore, that persons, the bearers of value, exist? This argument seems to mark the ontological viewpoint of ordinary moral philosophy. The existence of persons, however, is by no means philosophically unproblematic. A philosophical discourse on morality may not necessarily get entangled with ontological problems, but this does not mean that ontological problems are irrelevant to moral discourse. A moral philosopher is, ﬁrst of all, one who describes morally signiﬁcant situations and/or who claims validity for her/his assignments of value. This implies that moral judgement is primarily a matter of perspective: the person who speaks of value must understand what value is from immediate experience, that is, must have undergone experiences in which she/he has learned why that particular act or character or intention has a value. That moral discourse requires experience of moral value in concrete situations, and that this experience involves certain sensuous elements, seems to be obvious. One takes what is good for oneself as potentially good in general; only what one has learned to be good from experience – not only directly partaking in the act, but also by observing its consequences from one’s point of view, or by being taught – can one both discern and advise. How do I decide that something is good for me? My judgement about the moral value of a certain act or a certain habit may have diﬀerent motives. I may have been taught that a certain habit of evaluation, or a certain disposition to act is good. This process of learning moral value seems to indicate the existence of an ‘‘external’’ source for moral knowledge. Punishment and reward must have certainly been external motives for me to accustom myself to a certain mode of behaviour and therefore to certain paradigmatic moral judgements. To avoid a punishment, I must have learned to follow a certain path, to draw an inference. For example, I must have learned to identify certain signs (modes of behaviour, that is, groups of signs) as indicating the presence of certain morally signiﬁcant facts. Having identiﬁed such signs, I must have accustomed myself to draw relations between those facts and myself. What does the situation I observe myself – either the situation in which I observe the so called ‘‘others’’ from a corner, or that in which I ﬁnd myself as one whom others expect to act – demand? What would a ‘‘good’’ or a ‘‘bad’’ act or disposition be here? What are the probable consequences? Ought I to

THE EXISTENCE OF OTHER EGOS

179

pursue or try to avoid them? What would further consequences be if I do so? What ‘‘ought’’ I to do? What ‘‘ought’’ one to do in similar cases? Morally signiﬁcant situations are almost always demanding: I am compelled to act or judge, and hence draw lessons. Every judgement thus adds something to my moral knowledge as I relate it to my paradigm. But my paradigm itself seems to have been shaped by ‘‘others’’. I must have been taught by my moral educators to follow a pattern both in my judgements and acts. This process of learning must also have been accompanied by various sensations of pleasure and pain. Considering how I came to the judgement that something is good or bad ‘‘for me’’, I can ﬁnd no other explanation than that I must have, once for the ﬁrst time and then in further corroborative cases, felt pleasure or pain as I had to deal with the exemplary situation in which I have found myself. The meanings of the words ‘‘yes’’ and ‘‘no’’ too must have been learned in exemplary situations. Does not ‘‘yes’’ mean that something, a certain act, a certain claim, some reasoning or some judgement is permissible, useful, of consequence, of utility? Do I not learn by asking questions, by trial, and do I not learn, in the ﬁnal analysis by receiving ‘‘yes’’ and ‘‘no’’ answers for anticipatory questions? It is not necessary that I always get those answers in the concrete, but it is clear that every answer to well deﬁned questions is in the form of ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’. Not all questions are answerable of course, and there are ambiguous, unprecedented cases that require further analysis, but even then my aim is to get either a ‘‘yes or a no’’ answer for a question with some presentiment. And ﬁnally, my memory suggests that in all such cases I have received an answer, the (‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’) answer has directly or mediately been associated with some pleasure or pain. If my expectation fails or my claim is rejected, I am frustrated: I feel pain. Further, this learning by experience of pleasure or pain seems to follow the same pattern in all sorts of acquiring knowledge: experiment is the only means to get decisive answers to one’s anticipatory questions about the course of nature. Similarly it is the only means to learn to distinguish morally signiﬁcant phenomena. This construal of learning as experimenting with things and ‘‘persons’’ reduces questions to bodily trials; it assumes that before one learns to formulate questions in a (formal) language one must learn how to ask in a more primitive manner, that is, how to try. This means that wellformulated questions are only supervenient, that an intuition which is not necessarily linguistic precedes well-formulated, or linguistic questions. But have I not learned by asking questions throughout my conscious life,

180

HALI˙ L TURAN

which is exclusively linguistic? And should not this act of questioning therefore be language-dependent, should not asking be inconceivable without learning a common language? This however, does not seem to be the case; for, if I take it for granted that asking is not possible without learning to formulate my questions in a language, then my learning history would be identical to my language learning history. Of course, I did and do continue to learn by asking well-formulated linguistic questions and by listening to answers, but I see that this is not the only mode of learning I have experience of. I have also learned, and can still continue to do so, without recourse to an explicit formulation of questions in a language. In some cases formulation of questions and answers are only superﬂuous and even of no use. This is clearly visible in all cases of learning by bodily means. This primitive mode of learning must therefore, I assume, be historically the primal mode of learning, and it is still operative in many cases. This suggests that learning without explicit linguistic means can be construed both in the historical and in the experiential sense as primordial. It is a common experience that certain bodily processes of learning are only ‘‘later’’ translated into linguistic formulae and that bodily learning precedes the formal expression of experience. I observe that I still continue to learn by means of direct experience without having to formulate the content of my experience in a common language. But, although it is not always necessary to put the contents of a particular experience into a linguistic form, it is almost always possible to do this, even when the formulation will be somewhat redundant, unclear, insigniﬁcant, useless and so on. Learning without explicit linguistic formulations of questions therefore seems to be primordial in the sense that my history of learning appears to have begun so, and in the sense that it is sometimes still possible to proceed for knowledge in the same manner, and further, in the sense that it is almost always possible to translate or reduce all meaningful linguistic formulations to units of ‘‘sensuous experience’’.

II

It is possible to argue, therefore, that the process of learning to judge and act morally is a ‘matter of sensuous experience’. David Hume argued that moral distinctions are dependent on a moral sense, that good and evil are known through particular pains and pleasures.1 Let us assume with Hume that one distinguishes value by experience of particular pains and

THE EXISTENCE OF OTHER EGOS

181

pleasures and try to delineate how these pains and pleasures are engendered in concrete situations. I clearly see that I have particular sensations in certain cases I consider to be morally signiﬁcant. I can never remain indiﬀerent to someone’s pain or someone’s pleasure. When I perceive or imagine a human being (or an animal) tortured, for example, I cannot but react (even nausea is a reaction) feeling with all my senses that torture is evil. A certain distaste, or pain of a peculiar kind, then seems to be the ‘‘cause’’ of my disposition, of my disapproval and my will to help the suﬀerer. Or, again, I can never remain indiﬀerent to someone’s ‘‘vanity’’ when I perceive the signs of what is called vanity: the peculiar movements of the eyes, lips, hands, and of course the choice of words and intonation, all aﬀect me at once as the sign of the value this person attaches to her or himself. Likewise, I recognize all morally signiﬁcant ‘‘sentiments’’ in others through bodily signs. Of course, language plays an important part in all these cases of recognition. Moral signiﬁcance is understood through signs, and language supplies the most abstract, most intricate and indeed the most eﬃcient of those signs. It could, however, hardly be asserted that explicit linguistic formulations of articulate language are the sole vehicles of those feelings, for this would be tantamount to saying that moral life begins only with language. In communication of moral value, bodily signs other than those of articulate language sometimes seem to be even more important than what the words convey. One can safely assume that what value words ultimately refer to are memories of ‘‘inner’’ experiences accompanied and marked by primitive signs, elements of inarticulate language, of certain ‘‘outer’’ bodily movements. There must be particular signs I have come to identify as someone else’s ‘‘pain’’, for example, perceptions which are exemplary in the sense that they are signs of someone’s pain, and, as I have already noted, it is still possible for me to make use of these signs in my actual experience without further recourse to words. Even an intricate feeling like remorse, for example, can be recognized from bodily signs, and indeed I continue to make use of these signs in my actual experience in order to verify the sincerity of linguistic expressions people use to describe their emotions. In short, I recognize others’ feelings by looking for similarities between the signs by means of which I judge that they have those feelings and those signs in exemplary cases of experience in which I must have come to recognize these feelings as such, and have learned to call them as such.

182

HALI˙ L TURAN

Hume identiﬁed ‘‘sympathy’’ as a characteristic of human nature. Following Hume, I will consider sympathy to be a capacity of being aﬀected by those signs I have been speaking of. However, the origin of this feeling seems so remote in time and therefore my memories of the past are so dim that it is very diﬃcult for me to decide whether I originally had an inclination by ‘‘nature’’ to ‘‘sympathy’’ towards other’s feelings. That it could be otherwise is obvious: this actual nature of mine may have been shaped through a learning process, that is, I may have learned (or been trained) to simulate pain and pleasure of ‘‘others’’. I may have learned what causing pain is ‘‘by example’’, and may also have learned that pain is mostly evil, that it causes disagreeable feelings both in ‘‘others’’ and in me. I may likewise have learned how to cause pleasure in someone else and have therewith learned that it has good consequences for me. I clearly see that it is still possible for me to experience this primordial sense of approval in my dealings with others, and this experience is indeed the most reliable means to scrutinize my own moral behaviour. Discordance is always painful, whereas true harmony always appears to be pleasant. If there is a close relation between blame and approval and ‘‘sympathy’’, as Hume held,2 praise and blame may have acquired their meanings in the past through experience of particular pains and pleasures. ‘‘Sympathy’’ likewise may have its roots in associations of ideas where those pains and pleasures are involved, and it can be understood as a ‘‘habit’’ or ‘‘custom’’ in the Humean sense.3 What I call ‘‘inanimate nature’’ appears to ‘‘cause’’ similar eﬀects as certain similar perceptions in my mind, regardless of the space and time of the sort of experience in question. This nature does not evolve, rather, my experience with it yields a regularity of representations. But I do not observe the same simple regularity in my experience with ‘‘animate nature’’. My experience with the animate nature seems to be diﬀerent from the inanimate in the sense that it is almost impossible to ﬁnd suﬃciently similar settings in my dealings with ‘‘others’’, settings that I may call practically ‘‘identical’’. There is hardly a diﬀerence between my judgements concerning the feelings of the person with whom I converse, and my judgements concerning the nature of an inanimate object, with respect to my ‘‘ﬁrst recognition’’ of the properties or characteristics as such. I immediately recognize anger, for example, as anger, and conceive its consequences just as immediately as I perceive ﬁre and its pernicious eﬀects. But there is still a distinction between the recognition of something as ‘‘ﬁre’’, and the recognition of a facial expression and words and sounds, as ‘‘anger’’ with

THE EXISTENCE OF OTHER EGOS

183

respect to the reliability of the judgement, and this is related primarily to the degree of complexity of the setting. The distinction becomes still more evident if I consider the recognition, say, of ‘‘remorse’’. Practically, there are no grounds for doubt in naming a particular combination of sensations ‘‘ﬁre’’, whereas in moral experience I always have reasons to doubt. I can hardly be fully assured that a certain conjunction of signs of an animate body indicates genuine ‘‘remorse’’. I always need consequential evidence to conﬁrm my initial judgement that this group of signs indicates that this person is truly remorseful. Judgements concerning inanimate objects and concerning ‘‘others’’ are both possible thanks to certain conjunctions of signs, but the co-temporal and consequent corroborative signs that constitute the ground of these judgements diﬀer widely in quantity. The time needed to be certain (as far as this is possible) that this person is remorseful, is much greater, for I have to wait until a great number of signs cohere and corroborate my initial judgement. I may be interpreting signs falsely, or the person in question may be trying to deceive me. Leaving aside the question of whether there are ‘‘real persons’’, I can hardly be fully assured that the conjunction of signs constitutes a genuine expression of the morally signiﬁcant feeling in question. I need to deal with a complex structure of these signs and compare them with my previous similar experiences, and so on. But although I have to consider a greater number of vague signs and therefore am liable to err in my judgement, do I not recognize the feeling as clearly as possible and become convinced – at least for a certain period – of its reality? Once I come to a decision about the nature of the event or act, I conceive that my judgement is true. In the ﬁnal analysis, if I have a sensation, then I have no doubt that I have it. The ground of my judgement is constituted by sensations, and my judgement itself rests on the recognition of a feeling within. I necessarily experience a peculiar sensation of sorrow when I judge that the person in whose behaviour I am interested is, or most probably is, remorseful. Whether this judgement is ultimately reliable or not is only of secondary importance. This peculiar initial feeling that persists is the sole ground of my judgement about my own moral state; without it no aﬀection and hence no moral reaction would be possible. This sentiment compels me to act, for I feel this suﬀering as ‘‘mine’’. I recall my previous experiences, and unless I discern open clues of malevolent deception, I remain in the state of aﬀection. That I can easily simulate pains and pleasures of others, and even voluntarily deceive myself about the genuineness of an other’s aﬀections is best exempliﬁed in artistic contemplation, primarily in mimetic susceptibility.

184

HALI˙ L TURAN

Hume held that ‘‘sympathy’’ renders moral acts possible by forming a tie between human beings. It seems that a Humean understanding of the function of ‘‘sympathy’’ in explicating moral behaviour involves a belief concerning the sense and the nature of the existence of others. In this picture, moral subjects appear to have identical or similar natures. And, in the Humean account, ‘‘others’’ are assumed to exist in the same ‘‘sense’’ as the moralist-meditator, from whose viewpoint all moral acts are described and evaluated. Perhaps one could approach the issue of the existence of ‘‘others’’ from the Humean moral perspective. It may be argued, for instance, that the immediate experience of ‘‘sympathy’’ constitutes the evidence by means of which the existence of a community of minds or sentient beings can be shown. The above construal of the ontological viewpoint of Humean moral philosophy underlies also the view that the origin of moral knowledge is in education or training. For, the possibility of moral education and learning (like that of all other forms of education and learning) is generally thought to imply the existence of beings who are both active and passive. But is the experience of ‘‘sympathy’’ or action and passion, which I cannot deny that I have, suﬃcient to demonstrate the existence of other human beings? Or are assumptions concerning the existence and nature of other minds or sentient beings only heuristic principles that enable one to carry out an inquiry of morality? No doubt, so-called others ‘‘appear’’ to be existing most concretely in their acts in the moral domain, primarily in their acts as educators. But if this ‘‘appearance’’ is not suﬃcient for a demonstration, one must be careful not to proceed fallaciously from a heuristic principle in philosophy of morals to an ontological assertion. I act ‘‘as if ’’ there are sentient beings like me when I act ‘‘as if ’’ to engender or avoid certain passions not in myself but in ‘‘others’’. It is true that I have moral sentiments and cannot remain indiﬀerent to others’ pains and pleasures. I can clearly distinguish the signs of pain and pleasure in the body of a person or a suﬃciently similar animate being. Starting from the similarity of signs in similar cases of experience, I think that I recognize others’ feelings in certain settings. This process of recognition is backed up and corroborated by an impression of genuineness. But how could one argue from a ‘‘similarity’’ in feelings or passions to the existence of others, given that such an assertion of ‘‘similarity’’ itself necessarily refers one back to the problem of the existence of others? First of all, it is possible to draw a sound relation of similarity between any two things only when the properties of these two things can clearly be recognized. In the case of drawing a relation of similarity between my

THE EXISTENCE OF OTHER EGOS

185

sentiments and those of others, however, I have no idea what the actual nature of one of the things I relate is; it is precisely for an indubitable knowledge of the nature of an other’s perceptions that I am at a loss. My knowledge of an other’s sentiments is something that I invent, and this is totally diﬀerent from the knowledge of my own sentiments. I can recognize an other’s aﬀections only through the mediation of certain perceptions I consider as signs, whereas I perceive my own aﬀections immediately. I merely assume that there exist minds or sentient beings like me, and I assume them to be capable of similar ‘‘inner’’ experiences, that is, perceptions or passions similar to mine. Even if drawing a relation of similarity between my and others’ perceptions may be considered as ‘‘a special way of relating two things’’, that it is diﬀerent from drawing a simple relation of similarity between two shapes, two groups of sensations is evident. In all such pure judgements of similarity between any two things, I compare two perceptions from the same point of view, without further relating them to diﬀerent layers like myself and others. The experience of sympathy, therefore, can hardly be seen as implying the existence of minds similar to mine. Sympathy may be an indication of a ‘‘possibility’’ of the existence of similar beings, but the fact that I am aﬀected by certain ‘‘outer’’ perceptions is not an evidence by means of which the existence of others can be demonstrated once and for all. It is as fallacious to try to demonstrate the existence of similar sentient beings or similar minds by an appeal to their apparent actions on my mind, as to try to demonstrate the existence of matter by an appeal to its eﬀects on my body. I cannot deny that both matter and other minds ‘‘appear’’ to exist, but they exist only in the sense that certain appearances are temporally and spatially connected with certain others in my perceptions. Hence, that I ‘‘sympathize’’ with someone else, that is, feel someone else’s pain or pleasure, means only that I associate some ‘‘inner’’ perceptions with some ‘‘external’’; but the judgement of diﬀerence denoted by the very adjectives is only contingent. I only compare two groups of perceptions for which I can ﬁnd no ultimately reliable criterion to distinguish as ‘‘internal’’ or ‘‘external’’. An account which makes use of sentiments or passions as ultimate elements to explain how moral behaviour is possible, like the Humean philosophy of morality, neither conﬁrms nor necessarily depends on the belief there are other minds. My moral sentiments or passions belong to my private sphere of experience, and although I may designate an ‘‘outward’’ direction in my apparent care for others’ feelings, what I, the moral subject, am acquainted with are precisely my own sentiments of pleasure

186

HALI˙ L TURAN

and pain when I act ‘‘as if ’’ to cause pleasure or to avoid pain in ‘‘others’’. Further, no account of origin in the sense of education, of action of someone else on my mind can ground the existence of others any better than my supposed action on someone else. The term ‘‘sympathy’’, as the preﬁx ‘‘syn’’ suggests, may seem to indicate a coexistence of similar beings, or minds, but such connotations of language can hardly constitute a ground for a serious philosophical argument. A philosophy of morality which recognizes sentiment as the foundation of moral value must remain within the domain where the sentiment originates in order to be ontologically consistent. Moral values come into existence paired with sentiments in the private sphere of experience, and any further attempt to relate ends of actions to sentiments in some other hypothetical sphere would hardly be warranted by the methodological principles of this moral philosophy. Only this much is certain: the pleasures and pains I consider as related to a ‘‘possible’’ similar being’s similar sentiments are only ‘‘my’’ pleasures and pains projected onto a group of perceptions in a particular manner. Hence, my intention to please or to avoid pain of ‘‘someone else’’ is actually only an intention to give pleasure to ‘‘myself ’’ or to alleviate ‘‘my’’ pain. Whether my act gives pleasure to, or alleviates the pain of a similar being, an ego like myself, will remain forever unknown to me. I can never know whether my act ‘‘touches’’ actual beings. But fortunately this is not an impediment for knowledge of moral value, nor does it say anything against the possibility of moral judgements and acts. The knowledge that my acts really aﬀect others does not seem to be necessary for acting out of care, or for acting out of moral considerations. The will to cause pleasure as much and as often as possible does not require the knowledge of attainment of that end ‘‘outside’’ in the particular form of aﬀecting similar beings. Acting solely out of care for so-called ‘‘others’’ actually means nothing other than seeking a ‘‘particular’’ gratiﬁcation in my own consciousness. But this does not mean that moral acts are ‘‘egoistic’’, in contrast to ‘‘altruistic’’, simply because this distinction points back to a presupposition that there are egos similar to mine, and therefore that it is possible to interpret an act as performed out of consideration for ‘‘myself ’’ or for the ‘‘other’’. Likewise, although ‘‘my’’ pleasure or pain appears to be caused by the act of some other ego similar to myself, what I am directly acquainted with is the pleasure or the pain itself, and the assumption of a mind as some active being ‘‘outside’’ is only supervenient. It is possible for me to learn to judge and act in order to aﬀect others and be aﬀected by them, but what I ordinarily call ‘‘others’ actions and passions’’ are nothing but my own aﬀections. If I limit the

THE EXISTENCE OF OTHER EGOS

187

legitimate domain of knowledge to my own perceptions, then I also have to admit that others’ actions or passions are inaccessible to me, unless in the form of ‘‘outer signs’’. That a sentiment like sympathy is accompanied by images of similar bodies to mine can, therefore, hardly be a conclusive argument for the action of other egos on my ego.

III

Edmund Husserl considered the problem of the existence of the other in full depth in the last section of his Cartesian Meditations, in order to show that his phenomenological method does not lead to solipsism.4 Humean moral philosophy rests on the assumption that all human beings – whose existence is taken for granted – have a natural tendency to avoid pains and have pleasure in observing pleasures of others. Husserl, in his argument for the existence of other egos, relies much on an experiential given, namely Einfu¨hlung, which seems to have an aﬃnity to the Humean notion of ‘‘sympathy’’. Husserl’s argument in the Fifth Meditation neither aims to demonstrate nor is grounded on the possibility of moral acts. However, the experience of empathy or ‘‘Einfu¨hlung’’ to which he assigns a fundamental role in his demonstration5 of the existence of an egocommunity can certainly be correlated with moral experience. Since it is clear that Husserl’s demonstration (or explication) depends largely on the meditator’s experience of ‘‘Einfu¨hlung’’, without which, I think, moral sensitivity to other’s pains and pleasures would be inconceivable, an inquiry into how Husserl makes use of this notion deserves special attention in the present inquiry. Husserl’s account of ‘‘experiencing someone else’’ (Fremderfahrung), like Hume’ s account of the possibility of moral acts, seems to rest ultimately on the recognition of a ‘‘similarity’’. These two accounts are dissimilar with respect to their aims; nevertheless they appear to be similar with respect to the basic experiential tools they employ. Let us consider Husserl’s explication of the other becoming constituted in the meditator’s ‘‘private sphere of existence’’ through Einfu¨hlung: In changeable harmonious multiplicities of experience I experience others as actually existing and, on the one hand, as world Objects – not as mere physical things belonging to Nature, though indeed as such things in respect of one side of them. They are in fact experienced also as governing physically in their respective natural organisms. Thus peculiarly involved with animate organisms, as ‘‘psychophysical’’ Objects, they are ‘‘in’’ the world. On the other hand, I experience them at the same time as subjects for this world, as experiencing it (this

188

HALI˙ L TURAN

same world that I experience) and, in so doing, experiencing me too, even as I experience the world and others in it.6

The Husserlian conception of experience of the other (Fremderfahrung) as actually existing and experiencing ‘‘the same world’’ could well cohere with an account of morality like Hume’s. Hume depicts moral subjects as motivated primarily by their belief that others have similar perceptions, similar pains and pleasures, that others exist in and experience the same world. The only distinction between animate and inanimate bodies is that those animate bodies resemble my own body. Those hands, feet, eyes, etc., which I perceive to ‘‘function’’ in a similar sense as my own hands, feet, and eyes, suggest that the body I distinguish from inanimate nature is ‘‘governed’’ in a similar manner as my own body. It is the recognition of a similarity in movements, therefore, which brings about a recognition of a similar sense of existence. I perceive the whole body as being governed, as being driven to certain familiar ends and ﬁnally I assume that this body is aﬀected in the same manner as I am, and is undergoing similar experiences. Hence I recognize the anger or cheer of someone else, or the pain or pleasure of the other. Through the recognition of an ‘‘organismal conduct’’, I constitute the other: With this the Ego at ﬁrst is determined only as governing thus somatically [so leiblich waltendes] and, in a familiar manner, proves himself continually, so far as the whole stylistic form of the sensible processes manifest to me primordially must correspond to the form whose type is familiar from my own organismal governing [leibliches Walten] ... as a further consequence, an ‘‘emphatizing’’ of deﬁnite contents belonging to the ‘‘higher psychic sphere’’ arises. Such contents too are indicated somatically and in the conduct of the organism toward the outside world – for example: as the outward conduct of someone who is angry or cheerful, which I easily understand from my own conduct under similar circumstances.7

Understanding others’ psychic occurrences is possible through the recognition of ‘‘similarity’’ between bodies and ultimately between perceptions of peculiar movements one observes as associated with one’s own psychic experiences. Only those perceptions of movements of similar bodies that appear harmonious and coherent, that is, in agreement with the movements I observe in my own body, indicate the existence of a ‘‘psychophysical’’ unity like myself. But ‘‘harmony’’ can only be comprehended by the recognition of a similarity between my internal perceptions concerning the conduct of my body and some other similar body that I know I do not govern. Einfu¨hlung, therefore, is activated upon the perception of similarity between two ‘‘diﬀerent’’ perceptions, namely between my (inner) perception of my mental act of governing my body, and my

THE EXISTENCE OF OTHER EGOS

189

perception of movements of bodies outside, that is, of bodies I observe that I do not govern. I see that I cannot govern the outer body as I can my own, but I transfer this sense of governing, which I experience in my own conduct, to this body on account of similarity: ‘‘only a similarity connecting, within my primordial sphere, that body over there with my body can serve as the motivational basis for the ‘analogizing’ apprehension of that body as another animate organism.’’8 Thus, I constitute the other through an ‘‘apperceptive transfer’’ of sense. It is evident that Husserl explicates the existence of others basically in terms of similarity. Other notions that Husserl appeals to in the Fifth Meditation, namely mirroring, pairing, association, consistency, harmony, assimilative (vera¨hnlichende) apperception, analogizing and the like, are all linked to similarity in the sense that they presuppose, or are derivatives, of it. The veriﬁcation of the intuition that the body I have before me is governed by an ego similar to mine, and ultimately that there is an ego or monad community, follows from similarity. I am not guided by a ‘‘static’’ similarity, rather I recognize that an external body is governed by an ego only if I note a similarity between successions of its movements and my experience of governing the corresponding parts of my own body: The experienced animate organism of another continues to prove itself as actually an animate organism, solely in its changing but incessantly harmonious ‘‘behavior’’. Such harmonious behavior (as having a physical side that indicates something psychic appresentatively) must present itself fulﬁllingly in original experience, and do so throughout the continuous change in behaviour from phase to phase. The organism becomes experienced as a pseudoorganism, precisely if there is something discordant about its behavior.9

Methodological constraints of the Husserlian analysis forbid a conception of interaction between the ‘‘private sphere of experience’’ and other ‘‘monads’’. But the explication of the sense of existence, or the constitution of the other in the private sphere of experience, does admit a reciprocal uncovering of possibilities of ‘‘mutual’’ understanding. Continuous veriﬁcation of harmony corresponds more or less to communication as ‘‘ideal inﬂuence’’ in the Leibnizian sense. Husserl, however, refuses to call the other (existing in the sense of a Lebnizian monad) a substance. This would demand knowledge of the other ‘‘within’’. Acknowledging the existence of the other as such would fall beyond the legitimate limits of phenomenological analysis; this is evident from Husserl’s deﬁnition of the other: ‘‘Whatever ... is experienced in that founded manner which characterizes a primordially unfulﬁllable experience – an experience that does

190

HALI˙ L TURAN

not give something itself originally but that consistently veriﬁes something indicated – is ‘other’.’’10 IV

Husserl’s account in the Fifth Meditation seems to aim at something more than a mere delineation of the existence-sense of the other. In thinking that understanding the other by Einfu¨hlung is primarily, and presumably only uncovering oneself, Husserl limits all knowledge to the private sphere of experience of the meditator. The experience of the other in this picture, although Husserl seems to be reluctant to admit it, is nothing other than self-knowledge. There is nothing in the Husserlian phenomenological method that would permit one to assume that ‘‘others’’ who appear to be independent are actually independent beings in the sense of monads existing both for themselves and for each other. Einfu¨hlung, naturally, is only an inner experience and, like sympathy, can never indicate the ‘‘existence’’ of others in the concrete sense of the term. Similarly, objective value is only ‘‘apparently’’ constituted by a monadic community, and this appearance can hardly account for the existence of value as valid for all. I have argued that a theory of morals which recognizes moral sense as the foundation of moral acts and judgements, like that of David Hume, cannot demonstrate the existence of other sentient beings, other egos or monads. Such a theory can at most make an arbitrary assumption about existence, and cannot legitimately make use of this assumption itself to demonstrate the existence of others. It seems that a Husserlian analysis could be consistently carried out for the interpretation of moral acts and judgements, in accounting for the possibility of moral acts, if its scope is limited exclusively to an explication of the ‘‘existence-sense’’ of others. Moral value appears to be shaped by a community, by inculcation, by the action of independently existing egos; but it only ‘‘appears’’ to be so. Likewise, moral approbation or blame only ‘‘appears’’ to indicate pleasure or pain in others. A proper method of inquiry in knowledge must ﬁrst of all distinguish the apparent from the warranted. If concepts like the other, community, action, passion and the like are re-interpreted as having sense only within the private, that is within the only legitimate sphere of experience and knowledge, then an inquiry in terms of sentiments alone could suﬃce to explain the possibility of moral acts and judgements. What one has to acknowledge is that although the moral act appears to be performed out of care ‘‘for the other’’ (as it must so appear in order to be called a ‘‘moral’’ act), the only

THE EXISTENCE OF OTHER EGOS

191

ground upon which both one’s motives and the consequences of one’s acts become intelligible is one’s private sphere of experience. The moral act then becomes, in the legitimate epistemological sense, an act seeking pleasure and avoiding pain ‘‘for oneself ’’, without therefore necessarily being a selﬁsh act. Middle East T echnical University, Ankara Department of Philosophy NOTES 1 David Hume, A T reatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.) (2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 471. 2 Ibid., pp. 574–591. This relation becomes best visible in Hume’s account of approbation of ‘‘artiﬁcial virtues’’, principally of justice: ‘‘... as the means to an end can only be agreeable, where the end is agreeable; and as the good of society, where our own interest is not concerned, or that of our friends, pleases only by sympathy: It follows, that sympathy is the source of esteem, which we pay to artiﬁcial virtues’’ (p. 577); Hume makes the same point in the Enquiry as: ‘‘... no qualities are more entitled to the general good-will and approbation of mankind than beneﬁcence to humanity, friendship and gratitude, natural aﬀection and public spirit, or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others, and a generous concern for our kind and species.’’ An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, L. A. Selby Bigge (ed.) (3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 178. 3 Perhaps the most concrete evidence in Hume’s texts that would support this interpretation is the following: ‘‘... the parents govern by the advantage of their superior strength and wisdom. ... In a little time, custom and habit operating on the tender minds of the children, makes them sensible of the advantages, which they may reap from the society, as well as fashions them by degrees for it, by rubbing oﬀ those corners and untoward aﬀections, which prevent their coalition.’’ T reatise, p. 486. It is very clear that for Hume value is closely related to ‘‘advantage’’, that is, to pleasure. 4 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, Dorion Cairns (trans.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), p. 89. 5 Husserl’s argument may also be viewed as solely aiming at an explication of the ‘‘existence sense’’ of others, rather than a demonstration of their existence simpliciter, but his claim of having dissolved the ‘‘illusion of solipsism’’ nevertheless suggests that Husserl believed to have demonstrated the existence of a monadic community. See Cartesian Meditations, p. 150. 6 Ibid., p. 91. 7 Ibid., pp. 119–120. 8 Ibid., p. 111. 9 Ibid., p. 114. 10 Ibid., pp. 114–115.

SECTION IV ECOLOGICAL CONCERN AND THEIR GROUNDWORK IN THE UNITY-OF-EVERYTHING-THERE-IS-ALIVE

Zaiga Ikere in front of Santa Sophia

ZAIGA IKERE

THE BEINGNESS OF LIVING BEINGS IN ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA’S PHILOSOPHY

The present paper will consider the concepts of beingness and life as treated in Professor Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s philosophy of life, and it will also discuss the implications of Tymieniecka’s notion of beingness of living beings might have for contemporary educational theory and its anthropocentric and ecocentric approaches. The central theme of Tymieniecka’s philosophy is life. The recognition of life as the central subject of philosophy was delayed till the ﬁrst half of the 20th century, and among other philosophers Ortega y Gasset’s attention was turned to it. As Professor Tymieniecka admits, his voice, however, did not carry far enough and quickly faded.1 In most cases, philosophers have failed to ﬁnd the crucial links between philosophy and the sciences of life. This was the task undertaken by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. She launched her programme of investigation with a dialogue with the sciences. As marked by the philosopher Gary Backhaus, this continuing dialogue with the sciences reaches its highest realization in the 1990s with her studies of new scientiﬁc paradigms of open dynamic systems and selforganizing systems, which are understood as complementing the cosmological system of the Phenomenology of Life.2 In the ontopoietic strain of the Phenomenology of Life such issues as the irreversible processes of temporality, the complexities of self-organization, the entelechial linkage of individual and speciation, and the creative condition of the investigator are treated. The study of the inner workings of nature by both the sciences and the Phenomenology of Life form two complementary ways to investigate reality. A number of philosophers sharing Tymieniecka’s views on Phenomenology of Life stress that the central theme facing contemporary philosophy is life. Thus Latvian philosopher Professor Ella Buceniece voices the opinion that It could be said ... with regard to the present state of philosophy that here, as in science, the amount of knowledge increases about something that is decreasing – Life and Living as such. A dangerous hiatus has appeared in the modern world between science, cognition and the knowledge of Life (L ebenswissen) as an art of Living. The domination of metaphysical

195 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 195–200. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

196

ZAIGA IKERE

ideas and objective principles over Life has created a situation in which Life has become suppressed theoretically and extermined quite literally. ... To engage in philosophy today means to return to Life ... and not just becoming rigidly objective. To philosophize is to become involved in the eternal present and to face the consequences.3

A.-T.Tymieniecka characterizes the human situation as living together with everything that constitutes the entirety of our existential spread within an inﬁnite realm of ‘‘all that is alive’’.4 Phenomenology of Life as presented by Professor A.-T. Tymieniecka might be compared to a magniﬁcent ediﬁce, the central components of which (laid as the cornerstones of the structure) are the concepts of beingness and life. The concept of beingness is diﬀerent from the traditional concept of Being or Sein. In her writing ‘‘Logos and Life’’, Book 3 (published in 1990), the author gives the reasons for the introduction, use and meaning of the term. She exposes her mode of arguing in the following way: Traditional metaphysics inquired into the last principles of what is ... the traditional ontologies sought in the notion ‘‘Being’’ an ever-present and everywhere the same last principle that maintains whatever there is whether in stasis or in ﬂux. ... Modern philosophers shifted the quest for the last principles of what-there-is to the constitutive-envisioning power of the human mind. The human mind was thought to provide the explanation of how what-there-is – as-it-is emerges within the transcendental circuit of human functioning. With the surging of a new metaphysical vision, one in which what-there-is is seen to consist in an ever-renewed constructive progress, the emphasis shifts from ‘‘what-there-is’’ to the ways and modes of becoming. One further step taken beyond the metaphysical views of Whitehead, Bergson, etc. ... and we reach the real crux of the matter; the vision of life.5 The philosopher maintains that ‘‘it is ... life which carries the ﬂux of becoming. Becoming is not a haphazard topsy-turvy coming together and going asunder. It is the poiesis of life as a constructive progress which establishes the relative stability of instants of whatthere-is.’’6

And now one comes to the crux of the matter, i.e., to the essence of the term and concept of beingness. Tymieniecka explains: ‘‘No longer can the notion of being function as a principle of the principles which sustain what-there-is. The principle, rather, is ‘beingness’, which is what individualizes something and through which, as through a vehicle, life expands. This means that the new vision of what-there-is-and-was, as it originates and unfurls in its beingness ... focuses precisely upon the life course of this beingness in its generic progress.’’7 With regard to the concepts of being and beingness philosopher W. Kim Rogers admits: ‘‘Tymieniecka’s metaphysical focus is not on Being or Sein but rather on the way of being or beingness of living beings, and, especially, human beings.’’8

THE BEINGNESS OF LIVING BEINGS

197

Such an approach is characterized as process philosophy. Gary Backhaus remarks: ‘‘ ‘Beingness’ replaces ‘being’ because Tymieniecka rejects substantive ontology and subscribes to her own version of process philosophy, focusing on self-individuating, relatively stable, real entities of becoming and their ontopoiesis.’’9 Does this approach mean that the human role is diminished? On the contrary, throughout her philosophy Tymieniecka stresses the particular situation of a human being and advances her theory of the Human Condition. According to her philosophy: ‘‘The Human Condition establishes the human living being in a most particular situation with respect to total life expanse, the entire existential schema of living beingness. Simultaneously it gives the human being a central position – a knot position – with respect to the spheres within which a living being is suspended, and lastly, it gives a man a unique responsibility toward all.’’10 Hence follow Tymieniecka’s principles of interdependence, interrelatedness, sharing-in-life and ethical consequences for a human being. Tymieniecka’s interpretation of human signiﬁcance is quite opposite to that of Rene Descarte’s principle ‘‘cogito ergo sum’’. Descartes attempted to ﬁnd in the thinking thing a being which is certain because it needs nothing outside itself to exist. In this connection I would like here to touch brieﬂy upon the ideas of another thinker who likewise started his quest by opposing Descartes tenet and also put LIFE at the centre of the whole mode of existential meaning. This thinker is a theologian and a doctor Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) with his famous teaching of feeling piety, reverence towards life. His way of reasoning was as follows: if we begin thinking from the point of view of ‘‘cogito ergo sum’’, then we become slaves and prisoners of abstractions. All that follows from cogito ergo sum does not lead man outside the boundaries of thinking and thought. Thinking is directed towards objects and implies such a factor as willing to live, will for life. When a man thinks about himself and his place in the outward world he reaﬃrms himself as a desire, will to live among other wills to live. According to Schweitzer, the basis of self-indentiﬁcation for a man is not the act of thinking as for Descartes, but that of will for life. Schweitzer maintains that when man thinks in abstraction, he does not ﬁnd in himself a pure thought, but the willing to live which manifests itself in thinking. Only such a thought is vital enough to conﬁrm man’s will to live. By conﬁrming his will to live, man expresses his speciﬁcally human piety he feels towards life. Will for life conﬁrms itself and becomes the beginning of thought. It is through action, agency that piety towards life is mani-

198

ZAIGA IKERE

fested. Then the thinking man becomes an ethical person and his will for life turns into an ethical task. A. Schweitzer’s belief is that a real philosophy should be guided by the unmediated and overwhelming act of consciousness which is ‘I am a life that wants to live among other lives that want to live.’11 Hence his conclusion is that it is the ethical good that serves for life’s maintenance and sustainability; evil is that that causes life’s annihilation. According to Tymieniecka’s process philosophy, ‘‘the genesis of life consists of self-individualizing progress ... the initial spontaneity of life drives toward the surging of innumerable diﬀerentiating processes by gathering in the germinal seeds/propensities ... and linking them together in self-individualizing complexes’’.12 What is focal in Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life is that these self-individualizing entities unfold their beingness within the progressive unity of world totality. There are various phases of life’s progress. The Human Condition characterizes itself as a new phase in the-everything-there-is-alive: ‘‘Living beingness, the vehicle of life carries the constructive progress of life in a twofold perspective. 1) It individualizes life’s very own unfolding through successive steps of its inward/outward functioning ... 2) There is still the perspective of the evolutive progress of types in which the advance of individual living beingness proceeds ... evolving stepwise, the types reach the phase of the Human Condition, zenith of the advance.’’13 Tymieniecka does not deny the speciﬁcity of man, but underlines his key position within the entirety of life’s expansion. Hence we come to the contemporary notions of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism. These approaches also considerably inﬂuence present-day educational thought. In the 1960s discussion about the role of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism began in reference to environmental problems. The anthropocentric approach was considered to be the main cause of global disasters. In recent years the inconsistency of anthropocentric assumptions and the need for a transition to a new understanding of ecocentrism have been emphasized by a number of scholars with regard to education.14 In reference to anthropocentrism Professor Tymieniecka holds that all philosophical anthropologies which start by focusing on the speciﬁcity of man as he is within himself and alone inevitably run into anthropocentrism and into dichotomies of various kinds. The philosopher advances a programme to overcome the anthropocentric boundaries. The outlines of the programme are as follows: 1) The investigator should suspend his privileged ... position and begin by acknowledging the entire milieu, the entire sphere within which he as a human being operates ... 2) Instead

THE BEINGNESS OF LIVING BEINGS

199

of focusing at the start on the speciﬁcity of the human being within this sphere, the investigator should, instead of isolating him, immerse him within the sphere of existence which carries his beingness; and 3) since the inquirer as a human being is undertaking the inquiry insofar as he/she is endowed with speciﬁcally human features and cannot be ousted from the central position which he occupies precisely as a human being ... we should, must, ﬁnd such a point of departure that the investigator can approach the human being together with his existential context.15

Though, at the early stages of exposition of ecocentric ideas, discussions of ecocentrism were considered unworthy and unscientiﬁc, currently these ideas are applied in holistic theory within education as one of its contexts and tools. Ecocentrism was gradually introduced and has found its place in holistic ecology.16 The mission of education to provide a learning environment that ensures coherence between individual consciousness and the evolutionary essence of the ecosphere, as well as disengagement from the anthropocentric biases, has been admitted. To protect anthropocentrism, attempts to add ethical aspects to this view have been made. Society’s growing concern for sustainable development tend to promote the belief that in educational philosophy anthropocentrism and ecocentrism should play mutually complementary roles.17 Ecocentric views have initiated ecophilosophy and the development of such trends in educational thought as ecopedagogy and ecopsychology. New approaches as to the cosmological processes and the Earth, ecosphere, diversity of species, human beings as a species among other species were created. In such approaches the impact is laid upon the ability of human beings to create and sustain the diverse relationships with other species. If the aim of education is perceived in the context of anthropocentrism, it means to educate a human being toward certain results: abilities or types of action. The creation of new knowledge and new technologies is directed toward the satisfaction of the seemingly endless needs of human beings as a species. Analysis of the aim of education in the context of ecocentrism shows that the main precondition for the existence of all types of life, human beings included, is the psychological coalescence with the ecosphere. Education that adopts ecocentric views stimulates people to join in the ecosphere and foster the development of humanity as the spiritual dimension of the ecosphere. The task facing contemporary education if it reaches for the sustainable development of mankind and the Earth as its existential

200

ZAIGA IKERE

goal is to learn to reach harmony between the individual consciousness and the entirety of everything-there-is-alive, the totality of beingness. University of Daugavpils NOTES 1 See A.-T. Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Great Plan of Life,’’ in Analecta Husserliana, Vol. LII, A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), p. 8. 2 See G. Backhaus, ‘‘Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka: The Trajectory of her Thought from Eidetic Phenomenology to the Phenomenology of Life.’’ Phenomenological Inquiry Vol. 25 (2001): 23. 3 E. Buceniece, ‘‘The Art of the Liberation of Life and Philosophy as Educator: F. Nietzsche, E. Husserl, Z. Maurina,’’ in Analecta Husserliana, Vol. LX VIII, A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), p. 115. 4 A.-T. Tymieniecka, L ogos and L ife: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason, Book 1 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), p. 305. 5 A.-T. Tymieniecka, L ogos and L ife. T he Passions of the Soul and the Elements in the OntoPoiesis of Culture, Book 3 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), p. 9. 6 Ibid., p. 9. 7 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 8 W. Kim Rogers, ‘‘On the Ontology of Life: The Recent Contributions of Tymieniecka, Gibson, and Shotter to the Development of an Ecological Approach to Philosophy,’’ in Analecta Husserliana, Vol. LXVIII, A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), p. 88. 9 G. Backhaus, op. cit., p. 18. 10 A.-T. Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Human Condition within the Unity-of-everything-there-isalive,’’ in Analecta Husserliana, A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), p. 13. 11 See A. Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik, Gesammelte Werke, Bd.2 (Mu¨nchen, 1978). 12 A.-T. Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Great Plan of Life,’’ in Analecta Husserliana, Vol. LII, A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), p. 10. 13 A.-T. Tymieniecka, L ogos and L ife. T he Passions of the Soul and the Elements in the OntoPoiesis of Culture, Book 3 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), p. 10. 14 See T. Berry, T he Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York, 1999); T he Dream of the Earth (San Francisco, 1988); W. Fox, T oward a T ranspersonal Ecology Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995). 15 A.-T. Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Human Condition within the Unity-of-everything-there-isalive,’’ in Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXI, A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), p. 8. 16 See E. P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1953). 17 See D. Hutchinson. Growing up Green: Education for Ecological Renewal (New York & London: Teachers’ College Press, Columbia University, 1998).

AYHAN SOL

ON THE IDEA OF ENVIRONMENT

The global environmental crisis, ﬁrst felt in the 1960s, has challenged philosophers to develop a new system of ethics. These new ethics, which were also stimulated by social issues, have eventually ﬂourished into theories of excessive variation. In order for the new environmental ethics to be a cure for present problems, a notion of the environment needs to be developed, one that can embrace all life forms in a single global environment without sacriﬁcing the intimacy with the local. Unfortunately, only a few philosophers have written explicitly on the idea of environment. These views cluster around two opposite accounts, namely the intentional and the ecological. Although both parties start with relational deﬁnitions (that is, environment encompassing a living organism) the nature of the relation seems to diﬀer. For the intentional view, the relation is an intentional one in the sense that an environment is a ﬁeld of meanings or signiﬁcance for a conscious organism. In ecological language, the environment as a causal system may also be relational since the causal interaction between entities and their surroundings means that they are related. However, the causal relationship does not require that the entity within the environment have an awareness and understanding of that environment. Although the intentional view allows a more intimate relationship between an organism and its environment, it has certain drawbacks. First, non-conscious organisms, such as plants, are left without environment. Secondly, since the environment of a conscious creature is the one that it actually experiences, the environment in this sense remains local and may not be able to provide a comprehensive foundation for the solution of present-day global environmental problems. On the other hand, the ecological approach, with its causal deﬁnition, allows non-conscious creatures to have an environment since it does not demand consciousness for the organism to be environed. Furthermore, some ecological views are more promising in confronting global environmental problems than the intentional approach because these do not end up with restricted environments, such as the ﬁelds of signiﬁcance of conscious beings. However, since the notion of environment is causal in character, the relationship between an organism and its environment cannot capture the intimacy provided by the intentional view. It cannot 201 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 201–216. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

202

AYHAN SOL

distinguish the relationship between an inanimate object and its surroundings from that of an organism and its environment. I propose a new view that construes the environment in terms of ‘‘an-entity-having-an-interest-in-something’’ and ‘‘something-being-in-oragainst-an-entity’s interest’’, adapted from Paul Taylor. I use the former to deﬁne the environment for conscious beings, which corresponds to local environments, and the latter for both conscious and non-conscious living beings, corresponding to wider environments. I endeavor to show that this view avoids the shortcomings and preserves the virtues of the other views. THE SURROUNDING AND THE SURROUNDED

The dictionary meaning of the word ‘‘environment’’ seems to be an appropriate point to begin an examination of the idea of the environment. According to Gerald L. Young, the Old French words virer and viron that mean ‘‘a circle’’, ‘‘around’’, ‘‘the country around’’, or ‘‘circuit’’ seem to be the original source of the term.1 The French words environ or environner currently in use, and having been derived from the old words, also have quite similar meanings, ‘‘around’’, ‘‘round about’’, ‘‘to surround’’, ‘‘to encompass’’. The English word environment means ‘‘the total of the things or circumstances around an organism (including humans)’’ whereas ‘‘environs is limited to the surrounding neighborhood of a speciﬁc place – the neighborhood or vicinity’’.2 Young in Environmental Encyclopedia argues that ‘‘[e]nvironment must be a relative word, because it always refers to something ‘environed’ or enclosed’’.3 Kenneth Mellanby in T he Fontana Dictionary of Modern T hought deﬁnes environment as ‘‘the sum total of the biological, chemical, and physical factors in some circumscribed area, usually an area associated with a particular living organism’’.4 The dictionary deﬁnitions suggest that an environment consists of a surrounding and something to be surrounded. Tim Ingold agrees that ‘‘[l]iterally, an environment is that which surrounds, and therefore – at the very least – it presupposes something to be surrounded’’.5 He, however, maintains that the environment is not ‘‘a vast container’’, similar to the classical concept of the niche, full of living and non-living objects. The ecological notion of niche is deﬁned independently of an occupant, for the idea of adaptation itself requires the existence of niches to be eventually occupied by organisms. Ingold states that the environment, as a container (or niche), does not require that the occupant perceive it, or

ON THE IDEA OF ENVIRONMENT

203

act within it. A vase, for instance, may be said to be in such an environment or niche.6 Robin Attﬁeld, however, argues that ‘‘[e]nvironments ... can and do exist before the creatures they eventually environ, and as such are not invariably processes even partly constructed by the activity of those creatures’’.7 The distinction between the environment and nature disappears, for ‘‘[l]ike the environment, the natural world precedes and transcends our existence, comprises an encompassing system’’.8 Furthermore, the only diﬀerence between nature and environment is that the former also includes extraterrestrial objects. However, even this diﬀerence dissolves at the terrestrial level where the environment and nature coincide. Attﬁeld seems to extend the boundary of the environment of an entity to everything surrounding the entity. Young also admits that etymologically ‘‘the word environment is identiﬁed, to some extent at least, with a totality, the everything that encompasses each and all of us’’.9 David Cooper, however, objects that ‘‘[a]n environment, etymologically, is what surrounds; but ‘surround’ was never understood ... in a geographical, geometrical sense’’.10 Otherwise it would mean that ‘‘I am surrounded by everything located in a circle drawn around me: by everything there is, in fact, if the radii are long enough’’.11 Cooper thus suggests that the French word milieu12 or the Spanish ambiente13 provides a more relevant sense of the environment. ‘‘Fish which spend their lives patrolling a few square yards of coral are in the ocean, but only a tiny fraction of the ocean belongs to their ambience, their environment’’.14 He also warns that what is suggested by these terms is not simply proximity or short radii. Furthermore, the sharp distinction between the organism and its surrounding implied by the geometrical and geographical senses is not biologically or ecologically accurate. As Rene´ Dubos points out, this distinction begins to fade ‘‘when one considers biological nature and the external world not as separate static entities, but as interacting components in complex dynamic systems’’.15 Young also suggests that, ‘‘the environment ... is not simply an inert phenomenon to be impacted without response or without aﬀecting the organism in return.’’16 ECOLOGICAL AND INTENTIONAL VIEWS

There seems to be an agreement about the interactive relation between an environment and the creature environed. Nevertheless, the views regarding the nature of this relation vary. For instance, in ecological

204

AYHAN SOL

language this relation is a causal one, since ‘‘entities which exert a causal inﬂuence on something are clearly related to it’’.17 Herbert L. Mason and Jean H. Langenheim also deﬁne environment in terms of the relation between the organism and ‘‘physical phenomena that enter a signiﬁcant relation with the organism’’.18 Here, although the relation is restricted to the immediate environmental phenomena, the interaction involved is a causal one. In intentional language, however, this relation is deﬁned in terms of the necessary situatedness of a conscious being. Cooper suggests that ‘‘in the language of phenomenology’’ an organism is not situated anywhere, for ‘‘[a]n environment ... is something for a creature, a ﬁeld of meanings or signiﬁcance’’.19 Attﬁeld, however, objects that since ‘‘particular environmental factors and impacts are contingencies’’ some being’s situatedness in a particular place is neither necessary nor inevitable.20 By denying the necessary situatedness, the causal conception may not capture the intimacy between the organism and its environment. Indeed, as Cooper argues, ‘‘[t]he sun has massive causal inﬂuence on all life, but ... it was not considered part of a creature’s environment’’.21 Nigel Dower agrees with Cooper that ‘‘[a]n environment as a ﬁeld of signiﬁcance essentially stands in an intentional relation as an intentional object’.22 He also aﬃrms that ‘‘[a]n environment as that which objectively exerts causal inﬂuences on the state of an entity is still something to be explained in relational terms, vis. Causal terms’’.23 But of course the entity is not required to have awareness of its causal environment. For instance, changing climate may create unfavorable conditions for a tree but the tree is not aware of changes in its environment. Cooper admits that, ‘‘there are obvious contingent correlations between a ﬁeld of signiﬁcance, what is geographically close and what causally impinges on a creature’’.24 However, he contends that these are only contingent because distant events and objects may also be part of someone’s intentional environment through television or telephone. He thus suggests that the terms ‘‘milieu’’, ‘‘ambience’’ and ‘‘neighbourhood’’ are more promising since all these terms establish closer relationships between a creature and its surroundings. An animal’s being in its milieu or ambience is fairly similar to a child’s familiarity with her school: The child knows her way around, recognizes her friends, is aware of fashionable clothes, knows how and when she should express her sentiments. In short, the child is ‘‘at home’’ there. Evidently, a creature’s knowledge of its environment is not the same as, for instance, a geologist knowing a terrain quite well from its map, for this knowledge does not make this terrain the geologist’s environment, since what is required is merely practical

ON THE IDEA OF ENVIRONMENT

205

knowledge or ‘‘unreﬂective familiarity’’. Furthermore ‘‘[a]n environment as milieu is not something a creature is merely in, but something it has. This is why it can ﬁnd itself without one, as when ... a badger [is] removed to a laboratory’’.25 If, however, the environment of a creature is deﬁned in terms merely of geographical or geometrical relation, a creature would always be in an environment. Cooper asserts that ecological accounts of environments cannot capture the intimate relationship between an organism and its environment, for ecological views take into account only spatial, temporal and causal relations. Even if the last claim is true, it does not follow that these notions, i.e., space, time, and causality, cannot capture the familiarity a creature may have with its environment. For instance, Mason and Langenheim’s operational environment, which is deﬁned in terms of the relations of time (‘‘organism-timed’’) and space (‘‘organism spaced’’), pictures the relation between a creature and its environment in such a way that the creature may be, in fact, deprived of its operational environment. They argue that, ‘‘[s]ince the individual organism varies in its environmental demands throughout its ontogeny, to select any given time would of necessity leave out some signiﬁcant aspect of its environmental relations’’.26 Thus, I think, an organism will be robbed of its operational environment if it is removed to new surroundings. Removing an organism from the environment with which it has ‘‘interacted’’ for most of its life will put an end to the ongoing interaction process between the organism and its environment. Of course, such interpretations of physical interaction between organisms and their environments do not invalidate the virtues of the intentional view. For instance, in this view, the creature can be said to be ‘‘part of its environment’’, and in turn ‘‘the environment is part of it’’.27 In other words, ‘‘it is what the creature has ... made its own, through activities which confer sense on the items in its ﬁeld, and indeed constitute these items as a ﬁeld’’.28 Nor does it seem possible to assimilate intentional relationships into the ecological view, for, as Cooper says, the environment as a ﬁeld of signiﬁcance is excluded from ecology as ‘‘prettiness and ugliness’’ are excluded from biological theories.29 In the ﬁnal analysis, scientiﬁc views have to construe a creature’s interaction with its environment as a mechanistic process because these views leave outside everything that is ‘‘special for a creature’’.30 For Cooper, the alleged sensitivity of ecologists to ‘‘purposes and values’’ does not show that these terms can be incorporated into ecology or evolutionary theory.31

206

AYHAN SOL

However, Attﬁeld asserts that ‘‘environments need not ... be fundamentally historical, or incapable of detached, objective study, or even have a signiﬁcance’’.32 He argues that the objective concepts, in contrast to the intentional ones, allow non-conscious beings to have environments. Accordingly, ‘‘a causal or objective environment (such as a rainforest) or its components (trees, orchids, snakes and insects, say) may be recognized as bearers of value, whether intrinsically or otherwise’’.33 Furthermore ‘‘[an objective] environment will usually be the shared environment of many people and other creatures, underpinning the ﬁelds of signiﬁcance of them all; so it comprises an interpersonal environment’’.34 LOCAL ENVIRONMENTS VERSUS NON-LOCAL/GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTS

Cooper holds that the new ethics are not convincing when they claim that we should regard nature or the environment with reverence, because The Environment (as described by Attﬁeld, for example) cannot be an object of reverence. He says ‘‘[a] person can only revere what enters into his life, and which belongs, prominently so, within his ﬁeld of signiﬁcance’’.35 He does not claim that The Environment is not an appropriate object of reverence because of its geographical distance from persons involved. The sun, for example, has been an object of reverence for many civilizations, but it is not ‘‘the sun considered as a large ball of gas millions of miles away, but the sun as the grower of crops, whose appearance or retreat cheers or depresses the day’’.36 Thus in this sense, the sun is a quite familiar object. It seems then that we can have regard for those objects that have signiﬁcance for our daily lives and of which we can have immediate experience. David Wood distinguishes the objects of our immediate experience from the objects given to us more indirectly. ‘‘If my tree is dying, I notice. But the earth’s dying, slowly, is not obvious, not something I can see at a glance out of my window. So there is a gap between what I see and what may really be happening’’.37 Accordingly, we immediately become conscious of changes in our local environment and can act or react promptly. How about the environments that are far away from us or have no immediate signiﬁcance to us? Cooper responds that, ‘‘[w]hile my environmental concerns begin with my environment, I recognize that other people (and animals, too) have, or should have, their environments’’.38 So my recognition of the environments of other beings is mediated through my recognition of my own environment. I, nevertheless,

ON THE IDEA OF ENVIRONMENT

207

wonder as to whether this view would hinder me from acting for these environments as quickly and willingly as I do for my own environment. Cooper says that once I understand the signiﬁcance of my environment for myself, I will realize that other people also have regard for their environments that they too want to defend. Hence each of us will protect our own environment and co-operate with others in their eﬀorts in a ‘‘mutually supporting league of little, local pockets of resistance – and not through exhortations to ‘global awareness’ ’’.39 Attﬁeld admits that ‘‘there is such a sense, and an environment can be regarded as an experiential and interactive process rather than a causal system’’.40 He also agrees that a ﬁeld of signiﬁcance can be extended from local to global since each person in her pocket of resistance can understand the concern of others for their pockets. However, he warns that we should not allow this restricted sense of the environment to predominate over other more objective senses. Andrew Belsey also argues that since most of the present environmental problems are global we should develop a global perspective so as to retain the idea of The Environment. He sees a possibility for this in our ability of situating the local within the global. He believes that ‘‘it is at least partly through cosmology that we are able to give meanings to our locally-lived lives’’.41 The intentional notion of the environment is not alone in its inability to account for the idea of the global environment as such. For instance, Young’s critical assessment of Mason and Langenheim’s operational deﬁnition, which is a non-intentional notion, applies equally well to the intentional view. Young argues that ‘‘Mason and Langenheim’s limited deﬁnition might have utility in human ecology, but examination of human ecological relationships also requires (as much or more) a conception of environment that is holistic’’.42 Such a holistic concept can incorporate ‘‘all of the surroundings of the human organism, that impresses on people the need for concern and responsibility toward a larger world than that which immediately impinges on each person’’.43 According to Young, restricted notions such as the operational environment cannot account for how we conceptualize and relate to greater spatial and temporal scales. He says that there are simply too many facets of the present day world that must be included within the human environment. Thus we should not think in terms only of biological ecology in the case of human ecology, and that human ecology and general ecology should be distinguished from each other. ‘‘The diﬀerentiation is necessary in recognition

208

AYHAN SOL

that phenomenology of the human environment is inevitably more complex as well as more abstract than entities studied in biological ecology’’.44 I am concerned that such an abstraction might hinder us from having regard for local environments. Val Plumwood, for instance, states that ‘‘[s]pecial relationship with, care for, or empathy with particular aspects of nature as experiences rather than with nature as abstraction are essential to provide a depth and type of concern that is not otherwise possible’’.45 He also asserts that ‘‘because this ‘transpersonal’ identiﬁcation is so indiscriminate and intent on denying particular meanings, it cannot allow for the deep and highly particularistic attachment to place’’.46 Hence I believe that although restricted deﬁnitions like Mason and Langenheim’s operational environment cannot capture the multi-dimensional nature of humans (or even other organisms) holistic deﬁnitions may be too comprehensive to be useful at all. Many contemporary conservationists have been motivated by their particular attachment to the land with which they have a very special relationship. Young admits that, ‘‘[t]hinking about environment in the comprehensive sense ... that everything is the environment ... can mire a person in helplessness, condemning one to a sort of wallowing in an incomprehensible complexity, unable to move or do anything’’.47 Nevertheless he insists that, ‘‘such scope and complexity ... intensify rather than eliminate the very real need for a certain kind of transcendence. ... [H]uman consciousness regarding environment(s) ... needs to be raised, not restricted’’.48 As present-day environmental problems become increasingly global, people must become more sensitive to the problems that involve people in distant places because these problems inﬂuence their own environments and lives, though indirectly. In the same vein, people must be aware that their actions have an eﬀect on these places and on the lives of these people. It appears today that nothing remains local. Hence, restricted conceptions of environment, such as operational and intentional environments, may not be suitable to further this objective. Young believes that, ‘‘[i]nternalization of a larger environment ... might ... help people to care about, and assume responsibility for, what happens to that environment and to organisms in it’’.49 He does not, of course, deny the signiﬁcance of restricted approaches to action on immediate environmental problems, but he insists that such a restricted view can lead to inaction regarding problems ‘‘in the environment-at-large and long term’’.50 He thinks that although both approaches are needed ‘‘in study of the interactional, interdependent world of contemporary humankind, the holistic deﬁnition must have a place’’.51 Nevertheless, Young warns that conﬁning ourselves

ON THE IDEA OF ENVIRONMENT

209

strictly to restricted or holistic deﬁnitions would cause more harm than good. Hence the need for a synthesis becomes essential. Each human being lives in a diﬀerent environment than any other human because every single one screens their surroundings through their own individual experience and perceptions. Yet all human beings live in the same environment, an external reality that all share, draw sustenance from, and excrete into. So understanding environment becomes a dialectic, a resolution and synthesis of individual characteristics and shared conditions.52

LIVING AND NON-LIVING

Although objective concepts have certain advantages, they are unable to distinguish between living beings and lifeless objects because any entity can be said to be in a causal or operational interaction with its surroundings. For instance, an intrusion of magma (causally) interacts with the host rock by exchanging chemical ﬂuids, but this interaction does not seem to be the same as the interaction that a plant enters into with its environment. It is my opinion that living beings have incomparably more complex and intimate relations with their environment than nonliving entities, and the idea of causal or operational interaction cannot account for most of them. Distinguishing between the living and nonliving may not, however, be as easy as it seems. For instance, David Wood says, ‘‘[a] rock is not a machine or an organism. But even a rock has a certain organized integrity’’.53 It seems then that rocks and organisms are structurally similar, and the diﬀerences between them that can be expressed in terms of organized integrity is only of degree, as in the case of the diﬀerence between a crystal and an amorphous mineral. According to Wood, regarding living beings that also have integrity ‘‘we need to speak of selforganization and (dynamically) of growth, self-maintenance, self-protection, and reproduction’’.54 But it seems to me that even some of these notions, if interpreted liberally, may be attributed to nonliving entities. Growth, for instance, may be attributed to stalactites that, in fact, grow as long as ﬂuids with the right chemical composition keep coming to the environment. It appears, however, that we cannot meaningfully argue that a stalactite ‘‘protects’’ or ‘‘maintains’’ itself, although there is a kind of maintaining which does not depend upon its internal ‘‘power’’. It may be argued with Wood that ‘‘the organized integrity that they [things] manifest, comes in many forms ... [and] their unity depends, typically, on the relationships between their parts’’.55 While the relationship between parts (e.g., constituting minerals) of a rock is static, there is

210

AYHAN SOL

a continuous interaction between parts of an organism. As Wood asserts, ‘‘[w]hat we commonly take to be typical of living systems ... is that they each actively maintain some boundary with what lies ‘outside’ them. Such boundaries are, in part, the products of the very process that maintain them’’.56 Although nonliving entities also have boundaries that distinguish them from other entities, living systems, as they grow and adapt to their surroundings, must continuously transform ‘‘the shape and location’’ of their boundaries in order to maintain their integrity.57 Furthermore, organisms have certain functions that are characteristically ‘‘organized around survival and reproduction’’.58 We can also maintain the distinction between the living and nonliving by looking at their relationship with their surroundings. As opposed to lifeless entities that merely react to their surroundings, living beings actively interact with their environments. In other words, organisms do not simply exist as rocks but they struggle to survive and reproduce. Murray Bookchin argues that in order to represent how survival operates we have to admit not only of simple mechanistic interactions between an organism and its environment, but also of an element of choice by the organism. He says that ‘‘it is not only the environment that ‘chooses’ what ‘species’ are ‘ﬁt’ to survive but species themselves ... that introduce a dim element of ‘choice’ – by no means ‘intersubjective’ or ‘willfull’ in the human meaning of these terms’’.59 This alleged active role that organisms play in their evolution and relationship with their environments seems to presuppose that life itself is not ‘‘the passive tabula rasa on which eternal forces which we loosely call ‘the environment’ inscribe the destiny of a ‘species’ ’’.60 Rather, according to Bookchin, ‘‘L ife is active, interactive, procreative, relational, and contextual’’.61 This representation of life, though objectionable from a mechanistic point of view, seems to be in accordance with our intuition that living beings consist of more than ‘‘the passive lump of stuﬀ ’’ or ‘‘metabolic matter’’ of which they are made. Contrary to this lifeless matter that passively waits for the activity of external forces and is mechanically shaped by them, living beings struggle to survive and reproduce. Bookchin maintains that ‘‘there is a sense in which life is self-directive in its own evolutionary development, not passively reactive to an inorganic and organic world that impinges upon it from outside and ‘determines’ its destiny’’.62 He even goes as far as to claim that ‘‘[e]very organism is in some sense ‘willful,’ insofar as it seeks to preserve itself, to maintain its identity, to resist a kind of biological entropy that threatens its integrity and complexity’’.63 He does not of course argue that this willfulness or freedom to choose means that even

ON THE IDEA OF ENVIRONMENT

211

a very simple organism plans and acts in the same way as conscious beings do. Rather, he means that a mechanistic explanation is not suﬃcient to satisfy our observations of the forceful struggle of living organisms for survival. He believes that ‘‘[a]ctivity and striving are presupposed in our very deﬁnition of metabolism. In fact, metabolic activity is coextensive with the notion of activity as such and imparts an identity, indeed, a rudimentary ‘self,’ to every organism’’.64 I believe these intuitions regarding the distinction between the living and nonliving require that a deﬁnition of the environment be able to distinguish between living beings and lifeless matter as well as conscious and non-conscious beings. THE INTEREST VIEW OF THE ENVIRONMENT

The above notions of the environment have both advantages and disadvantages. The intentional view of the environment as a ﬁeld of meaning or signiﬁcance captures the intimacy between a conscious organism and its environment, but does not allow non-conscious organisms to have their own environment. Moreover it seems to be rather weak in responding to global environmental problems due to the conceptual diﬃculties in moving on from local to global environments. The latter is particularly important because, in the last decades, humans have faced global environmental problems which threaten all living beings. Ecological views, on the other hand, grant that both conscious and non-conscious beings have environments; albeit, they cannot distinguish between living and nonliving beings. Furthermore, ecological views provide a suitable conceptual framework for developing policies to act on global problems, since the distinction between local and global environments can be formulated in terms of proximate and remote causal factors. However, the intimate relationship that conscious organisms have with their environment cannot be described in terms of causal interaction. Consequently, any notions of the environment should be able to satisfy the following conditions: (1) they should allow only living beings to have environments; (2) they should maintain the distinction between conscious and non-conscious living beings; (3) they should be able to endorse the intimacy between a conscious being and its environment (or at least they should be compatible with those views that capture such intimacy); (4) their conceptual framework should allow us to deal with global environmental problems. I think the idea of the environment that I am about to introduce can satisfy all these conditions. I have developed this notion on the basis of

212

AYHAN SOL

two concepts that Paul Taylor oﬀered when establishing his well-known concept of ‘‘an entity-having-a-good-of-its-own.’’ Taylor states that, ‘‘[s]ome entities in the universe are such that we can meaningfully speak of their having a good of their own, while other entities are of a kind that makes such a judgement nonsense’’.65 In order to establish whether an entity has a good of its own, he suggests a distinction between ‘‘an entity having an interest in something’’ and ‘‘something being in an entity’s interest’’. In short, an entity can be said to have a good of its own if this entity has an interest in something and/or something is in this entity’s interest. Taylor argues that entities that have interest in something are conscious beings because only conscious beings can fulﬁll the requirement of ‘‘having ends and seeking means to achieve their ends’’. On the other hand, the second category, namely ‘‘something being in an entity’s interest’’, includes both conscious and non-conscious beings. Although it is easier to agree that something may be in a conscious being’s interest, the latter may need clariﬁcation. According to Taylor, ‘‘[s]omething can be in a being’s interest and so beneﬁt it, but the being itself might have no interest in it. Indeed, it might not be the kind of entity that can have interests at all’’.66 Hence in order to know whether something is in X’s interest we have to ask whether ‘‘this promotes or protects the good of X’’. Taylor asserts that this can be objectively established by knowing about the nature of a being. As we know more about a being, we come to know more about things that promote its well-being. Since Taylor attempts to establish the good of a being, his use of the term interest seems to include only those things that promote or protect an entity’s well-being. However, I use ‘‘interest’’ in a more extended sense to include the objects that may be beneﬁcial or detrimental to the entities in question. So I would like to redeﬁne Taylor’s two concepts as follows: (i) a conscious being has an interest in those objects that promote or hinder its well-being, and (ii) those objects that promote or hinder a conscious or nonconscious being’s well-being are in or against its interest. From (i) and (ii), I deﬁne environments for such creatures thusly: (I) a conscious being’s environment consists of those objects in which this being has an interest, and (II) a non-conscious being’s environment consists of those objects that are in or against its interest. Of course, a conscious being’s environment consists also of those objects that are in or against its interest. It is evident that for conscious beings there is a more restricted surrounding that consists only of those objects in which this being has an interest. In other words, although non-conscious beings have only one

ON THE IDEA OF ENVIRONMENT

213

uniform environment consisting merely of those objects that are in or against their interests, conscious beings have two ‘‘encircling’’ environments, one determined by objects that are in or against their interest and the other by objects in which they have interest. (Perhaps in some special cases, these two environments may be identical.) It also seems clear that a conscious being has a more intimate relationship with its environment determined by those objects in which it has interest since these objects are actively pursued or avoided by the being. I think the interest view has obvious advantages over both ecological and intentional views. The distinction between conscious and non-conscious beings is preserved in terms of the distinction between an-entityhaving-an-interest-in-something and something-being-in-or-against-anentity’s-interest. The intimacy that a conscious being has with its environment can be expressed in the interest view, for this relation is not based on a simple causal or operational interaction. This relation is realized by active involvement of the being with its surroundings. Although interests and intentions are diﬀerent notions, a being’s ‘‘ﬁeld of interest’’ (deﬁned by ‘‘having interest’’) may coincide with the being’s ‘‘ﬁeld of signiﬁcance’’ as deﬁned by Cooper. However, the distinction between these two views can also be maintained, for a being’s environment as a ﬁeld of interest does not mean to this being the same thing as its environment as a ﬁeld of signiﬁcance. Furthermore, although, as Cooper argues, causal (mechanistic) and intentional views are incompatible, because intentions have no place in the mechanistic views of ecology or biology, the interest and intentional views are compatible, since a being’s having interests requires that it have intentions. One may object that the environment deﬁned by something-being-inan-entity’s-interest coincides with the causal environment. I think this is not true, for there appear to be some exceptions. For instance, abstract objects in a Platonist sense may be to a being’s interest but such objects, by deﬁnition, do not have any causal impact on this being. Also future events that have no causal impact on a being may be in a being’s interest. Furthermore, many objects that may have causal impact on a being may not be in this being’s interest. For instance, certain odors that may have causal impact on a plant may or may not be in the plant’s interest. In other words, these odors may or may not beneﬁt or harm the plant. The proposed view can also account for the distinction between living beings and nonliving entities. As pointed out by Taylor, it is meaningful to claim that something can be in or against only a living being’s interest. So the interest view can easily avoid dealing with the environments of

214

AYHAN SOL

lifeless objects. (Lifeless objects are merely part of the environments of living beings.) As we have seen, Cooper’s intentional view allows us to take into account only those objects that are signiﬁcant for our daily lives, and of which we have immediate experience. The causal view, on the other hand, enables us to extend our consideration to all objects with which we causally interact, but it does not capture the intimate relationship that we may have with our local environments. The interest view, however, provides a quite ﬂexible framework that allows going back and forth between local and global problems, since this framework is based on ‘‘anentity-having-interest’’ and ‘‘something-being-in-or-against-an-entity’sinterest’’ that respectively deﬁne one’s proximate and distant environments. This leaves more freedom to the subject in developing interests in various problems, since he or she may have a wider ﬁeld of interest that can extend to environmental problems occurring in geographically or culturally distant parts of the world, rather than a ﬁeld of meanings which includes only local problems signiﬁcant to daily life. For instance, although at a particular time someone may have interest only in local events in which she is involved, other events that are in her interest may very easily be brought into her ﬁeld of interest. In other words, she can develop interest in something that is already in her interest even if she did not earlier have any interest in it at all. In fact, human beings do have interests in a wide variety of environmental problems. Therefore, I think the proposed view fares better regarding local and global environmental problems than both the intentional and causal views. Department of Philosophy Middle East T echnical University Ankara, T urkey.

NOTES 1 Gerald L. Young, ‘‘Environment: term and concept in the social sciences.’’ Social Science Information 25: 1 (1986): 86. 2 Ibid. 3 Gerald L. Young, ‘‘Environment,’’ in William P. Cunningham, Terence Ball, Terence H. Cooper, Eville Gorham, Malcolm T. Hepworth, and Alfred A. Marcus (eds.), Environmental Encyclopedia (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1994), p. 280. 4 Kenneth Mellanby, ‘‘Ecosystem,’’ in A. Bullock and O. Stalybrass (eds.), T he Fontana Dictionary of Modern T hought (London: Collins, 1977), p. 207.

ON THE IDEA OF ENVIRONMENT

215

5 Tim Ingold, ‘‘Culture and the Perception of the Environment,’’ in Elizabeth Croll and David Parkins (eds.), Bush Base: Forest Farm: Culture, Environment and Development (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 40. 6 Ingold argues that an inanimate object and its ‘‘environment’’ are related only as parts of the environment of an external observer. Of course, the environments of non-human animals can also be described independently of the animals in question. So, for instance, the tree which is the environment of a squirrel ‘‘is not part of the environment for the squirrel, it is part of the environment of the squirrel for the detached observer’’ (p. 41). 7 Robin Attﬁeld, T he Ethics of the Global Environment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 13. 8 Ibid., p. 15. 9 Young, 1986, op. cit., p. 86. 10 David E. Cooper, ‘‘The idea of environment,’’ in D. E. Cooper and J. A. Palmer (eds.), T he Environment in Question: Ethics and Global Issues (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 167. 11 Ibid., p. 168. 12 Young (1986) warns that, ‘‘[milieu] ... has a number of limitations that make it far from satisfactory as a direct substitute or synonym for environment. For one thing, milieu is too closely associated with social class, with artistic, aesthetic and cultural considerations. ... When one thinks of milieu, one imagines an environment of elegance – whereas humans must deal with quite the worst as well as the best and the in-between’’ (p. 107). 13 Young (1986) asserts that, ‘‘[a]mbience as a substitute or alternative to environment deserves a sort of footnote to milieu because it has the same kind of implicit reference to social appeal. ... But ambience includes as well the encompassing or enveloping implications of environment in its holistic sense: ambience is usually deﬁned as a surrounding or pervading atmosphere or environment ... one surrounding on all sides ... an encompassing sphere, a tone, quality or mood’’ (p. 108). 14 Cooper, op. cit., p. 168. 15 Rene´ Dubos, ‘‘Environment,’’ in Philip P. Wiener (ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), p. 120. 16 Young, 1986, op. cit., p. 86. 17 Attﬁeld, op. cit., p. 12. 18 Herbert L. Mason and Jean H. Langenheim, ‘‘Language Analysis and the Concept of Environment,’’ Ecology 38: 2 (1957), p. 330. 19 Cooper, op. cit., p. 169. 20 Attﬁeld, op. cit., p. 13. 21 Cooper, op. cit., p. 168. 22 Nigel Dower, ‘‘The Idea of the Environment,’’ in R. Attﬁeld and A. Belsey (eds.), Philosophy and the Natural Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 146. 23 Ibid. 24 Cooper, op. cit., p. 168. 25 Ibid. 26 Mason and Langenheim, op. cit., p. 331. 27 Cooper, op. cit., p. 178. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 171. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid.

216

AYHAN SOL

32 Attﬁeld, op. cit., p. 13. 33 Ibid., p. 12. 34 Ibid. 35 Cooper, op. cit., p. 174. 36 Ibid., p. 175. 37 David Wood, ‘‘What is Ecophenomenology?’’ Research in Phenomenology 31 (2001): 93. 38 Cooper, op. cit., p. 179. 39 Ibid. 40 Attﬁeld, op. cit., p. 11. 41 Andrew Belsey, ‘‘Chaos and Order, Environment and Anarchy,’’ in R. Attﬁeld and A. Belsey (eds.), Philosophy and the Natural Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 163. 42 Young, 1986, op. cit., p. 93. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Val Plumwood, ‘‘Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism,’’ in Michael Boylan (ed.), Environmental Ethics (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2001), p. 95. 46 Ibid., p. 102. 47 Young, 1986, op. cit., p. 95. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., p. 96. 50 Ibid. 51 Gerald L. Young, 1994, op. cit., p. 281. 52 Ibid. 53 David Wood, op. cit., p. 86. 54 Ibid., p. 87. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., p. 91. 59 Murray Bookchin, ‘‘What is Social Ecology?’’, in Michael Boylan (ed.), Environmental Ethics (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2001), p. 66. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., p. 67. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., p. 74. 64 Ibid. 65 Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature: A T heory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 60. 66 Ibid., p. 63.

NIKOLAY MILKOV

THE MEANING OF LIFE: A TOPOLOGICAL APPROACH

1. OPENING

In his Notebooks, T ractatus and ‘‘Lecture on Ethics’’, Wittgenstein suggested a new approach to the problems of philosophical anthropology. His task was to locate man’s place in the cosmos with scientiﬁc rigour. This project was something of an answer to Russell’s explorations on this theme in his essay ‘‘The Essence of Religion’’ (Russell 1912), but accomplished on a higher level of exactness. Indeed, after Wittgenstein read Russell’s paper, he criticised his teacher and friend in that the latter discussed in public themes which are too private, in a way that was far from being exact. In June 1916–January 1917, however, in his Notebooks, Wittgenstein developed an exact method of treating the same problems of philosophical anthropology which Russell discussed in 1912. In this essay I intend to show that what was new in Wittgenstein’s treatment of the problems of philosophical anthropology was the formal method of topology.

2. EVADING THE PROBLEM

The problem of the meaning of life is relatively new in philosophy. The ﬁrst who openly began to speak about it – in the 1880s – was Leo Tolstoy.1 That very fact already shows that this problem is not easy to identify. At the same time, in the last few decades we witnessed a dramatic increase of literature on the ‘meaning of life’. This legitimates the question: did that literature really address the very problem which was initially raised? I claim that the authors who wrote on the meaning of life in the last century systematically evaded the kernel of the problem in question – what I shall call below the existential paradox. In other words, many investigations on the meaning of life were in fact not such investigations at all. To be more speciﬁc, under the rubric of the meaning of life, two usually quite diﬀerent problems are discussed. Therefore, when we start to examine this theme, it is of utmost importance to set out what exact aspect of this theme we are going to discuss, and what remains without notice. 217 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 217–234. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

218

NIKOLAY MILKOV

(1) Many philosophers merely try to set out what makes our everyday life meaningful, when life is meaningless, and how can we make it meaningful. Such discussions of the problem of the meaning of life were suggested in Sylvan and Griﬃn 1986, Wiggins 1987, Flanagan 1996, Kekes 2000, and in many other works. According to David Wiggins, for example, there is no one meaning of life that we can ﬁnd, or discover. The meaning of life is to be constructed, or invented; we ourselves must create it. The meaning of life cannot come from outside. Unfortunately, when we are asked ‘‘What is the meaning of life?’’, ‘‘we bewitch ourselves to think we are looking for some one thing like the Garden of Hesperides, [or] the Holy Grail’’ (Wiggins 1987, p. 136). This is, apparently, an anti-realistic solution of the problem of the purpose of life – called misleadingly the meaning of life – in the wake of Michael Dummet’s anti-realistic philosophy of language. It claims that we cannot ﬁnd the object under analysis in reality; we must rather construct it. Another anti-realist, Owen Flanagan, discussing the ‘‘meaning of life’’, claims: ‘‘Life’s meaning comes, if it does come, from having chances to express and carry through on projects that matter, that have value and worth, ﬁrst and third personally’’ (Flanagan 1996, p. viii). We create our life, with all its meaning; we are the constructors of our narrative. Speciﬁcally, we create our ‘‘I’’, telling stories about it. We, as persons, are nothing but centres of narrative gravity. (2) Another group of philosophers – Karl Jaspers, Thomas Nagel, Ernst Tugendhat, among them – following the old existentialist tradition, have connected the problem of the meaning of life with the absurd.2 Now, as Thomas Nagel has noted, the absurdity of life is diﬃcult to articulate. Despite the fact that ‘‘most people feel on occasion that life is absurd, ... they could not really explain why life is absurd’’ (Nagel 1971, p. 13). Usually – a notorious example here is Blaise Pascal – they refer to the fact that we are but tiny specks in the inﬁnite vastness of the universe.3 The importance of the problem of the absurd results from the fact that an experience of it makes life profoundly meaningless. Unfortunately, philosophers who discuss the absurd scarcely treat it in clear-cut terms. A typical example in this respect is Karl Jaspers. According to this author, absurdity emerges most often in extreme situations: ﬁght, contingency, death, guilt. These are ‘‘borderline situations’’ (Grenzsituationen) in which we lose the ‘‘hold that [usually] supports every experience and every thought’’ (Jaspers 1919, p. 229). This, of course, is not an exact deﬁnition of the absurd. Indeed, Jaspers’s Grenzsituationen are complex situations which, as just seen, can be deﬁned

THE MEANING OF LIFE

219

in at least four diﬀerent ways. In contrast, in this paper I am going to show that absurdity has a simple (not complex) structure. 3. THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM OF THE MEANING OF LIFE: THE EXISTENTIAL PARADOX

Another sloppiness apparent in Jaspers’s understanding of the absurd is that we do not lose our hold on life in the face of extreme situations only. In truth, we have our most intensive experiences of the absurd when we are not faced with, what he calls, borderline situations. This can be illustrated through the experience that Count Leo Tolstoy (b. 1828) had in the ﬁrst days of September 1869,4 when he was 41. Soon after he ﬁnished War and Peace, Tolstoy decided to buy a new property in the Penza region. One day, when travelling with this intention, he stayed for a night in Arzamas, a small town some 800 km east of Moscow. Suddenly, at two o’clock a.m., he awoke with a strong feeling of horror, unknown to him before. Here is the description of this experience as told ﬁfteen years later in his unﬁnished, and unpublished in his lifetime, story ‘‘Memoirs of a Madman’’: When I awoke, there was nobody in the room. ... I have gone to the corridor, wanting to escape from what tormented me. But it came with me and shadowed everything. I was even more horriﬁed now than before. ‘‘But what folly is this?’’ I told myself. ‘‘Why am I depressed? What am I frightened of ?’’ – ‘‘Of me,’’ answered the voice of Death. ‘‘I am here!’’ A ﬁt of chill has gone onto my skin. Yes, of the death. She comes, she is here, but she must not be. If the death would be really before me, I wouldn’t experience the same that I experienced when I am afraid of her. But now I was not afraid of her; rather, I saw, I felt that the death is coming, and in the same time felt that she must not be. My whole essence felt the need, the right to live, and in the same time the triumph of death. And this inner split was horrible. (Tolstoy 1884, p. 469)

Apparently, the kernel of this experience was the clash of two mutually exclusive beliefs in one mind. According to another description, Tolstoy felt that night that ‘‘there is nothing in life but death, but it must not be like this.’’ (Shklovsky 1967, p. 315; my italics). These two beliefs were felt to be absolutely true – they were seen in the mental eye with the best possible clarity – and at the same time to contradict in most severe ways. I shall call the clash of these beliefs the existential paradox. The ‘‘must’’ here comes from the conviction that we are eternal (this is our ‘‘hold’’ in life of which Jaspers spoke). This conviction makes the mundane purposes we follow in life (for example, buying new property) of ultimate importance: they are something necessary.5 Faced with the Nothingness that we experience when we contemplate the existential paradox, these purposes lose their point.

220

NIKOLAY MILKOV

I shall note here that at the age of 41, Tolstoy had already experienced extreme, life-threatening situations and was subdued to mortal anguish many times. Indeed, in 1848–52 he performed military service on the Caucasus (Chechnya) where he fought against the rebels. During the Crimean War 1853–5 he worked as a military journalist at the foremost front. He also took part in bear-hunting many times and was even wounded by a bear. At no time, however, did he experience such a disgusting horror as that night in Arzamas. Now, Tolstoy described it as something like a mental giddiness.6,7 But he also noted that, unexpectedly, the next day all these troubles were forgotten. Tolstoy continued to pursue his quotidian agenda – among other things, he bought the new property. Some weeks later, however, the same troubles appeared all of a sudden again, in a milder form though. Despite this, Leo Tolstoy continued his literary career in the years to come in a brilliant way. Indeed, he wrote and published Anna Karenina after this incident (in 1876–7). His conversion to religious-philosophical themes took place some ten years after his Arzamas experience: around 1879. This story gives us ground to make the following preliminary conclusion. Most often, we experience the existential paradox without warning. As a rule, this experience does not leave immediate traces on us. The traces that it leaves are long-term – the perfect knowledge that all our ‘‘very important’’ mundane purposes are totally vain. Usually, people react to such experience later, and diﬀerently. Some go to a monastery, others undergo another kind of radical conversion. Still others – the vast majority – continue their habitual lives, but with this new knowledge in the background. Typically, the sudden experience of the existential paradox occurs after sleep. Apparently, the reason for this is that in waking life, we are occupied with reacting to stimuli we receive from the real environment: to the necessity (g´ a˙na´ ckg) of reality (cf. Freud 1916, Ch. 5). When sleeping, in contrast, we follow the narrative of the dream. It is in short-term sleep, however, that we are bared of all distractions – of both reality and of dreams – and so can see the whole truth about our place in the universe.8 A very important point is that the absurdity of the existential paradox is experienced quite seldom;9 for example, Leo Tolstoy experienced it, in this intensity, only once. As a result, it is very diﬃcult to identify it. It is also diﬃcult to contemplate it when we decide to investigate it theoretically: this is a slippery experience. The problem of those philosophers who write on the absurd is that they cannot reconstruct what exactly the experience of the absurd is. In their academic thought-experiments they

THE MEANING OF LIFE

221

usually only remind themselves of a part of the problem.10 This point explains why those philosophers who discuss the absurd theoretically, in fact do not have in mind exactly this most important experience, which lies at the bottom of the problem of the meaning of life, but something similar to it – for example, Jaspers’ Grenzsituationen, or Sartre’s world teaming with naked existences. 4. THE LOGICAL STRUCTURE OF EXISTENTIAL ANGST

In the last section, I noted that the feeling of the absurd is caused by a crystal-clear picture in our mental eye of the complete truth of two facts which are absolutely contradictory. This implies that the existential paradox is only a kind of philosophical paradox which, similar to most philosophical paradoxes, is of a purely logical nature.11 My claim here is that, even if that paradox cannot be solved, the logic of its structure can be laid down in a clear form. Indeed, in what follows in this section, I shall try to articulate the speciﬁc logic of the existential paradox in more detail. Now, my opening guess is that absurdity is a state of intellectual giddiness, similar to that described by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (see Wittgenstein 1953, § 412). To remind the reader, in this section Wittgenstein sets out that we face intellectual giddiness when we contemplate the problem of how the mind is connected with the brain.12 But what are the speciﬁc logical and epistemological grounds of the absurd? According to Wittgenstein’s Tractarian epistemology, people make pictures of reality: they cognize (erkennen) the facts of the world. What they cognize is, more precisely, how the objects of the world hang together one to another: that is what knowledge consists of. Not only this, however. Knowledge is also linked to emotions. This point is connected with the fact that knowledge actually consists in aﬃrming some of the pictures of reality that we perceive as true, and in denying others as false. Now, this aﬃrming and denying is also emotionally laden. The emotional side of our cognitive life ﬁnds expression in the fact that we strive to know (Aristotle, Met., 980a). The same point was articulated by Wittgenstein: ‘‘We are happy through the life of knowledge – in spite of the misery of the world.’’ (Wittgenstein 1961, p. 81) This means that the very fact that we cognise things, facts, and events makes us happy (of course, to this happiness can be added the misery of the facts we cognize).

222

NIKOLAY MILKOV

Now, the logic of the existential paradox can be described just so: when experiencing existential absurdity, our intrinsically aﬃrmative knowledge is faced with the fact that its source – my person – will perish. This is a self-referential paradox that stirs the mental giddiness in us when we realize it. Let’s try to put this point in other words. We as persons are something like machines for picture-producing, for knowing – for emotionally underpinned knowing, or machines for cognitive aﬃrming. When experiencing the existential paradox, our self-referential awareness as knowledge-producing machines contradicts the knowledge that I – the source of knowledge – will perish. Exactly that contradiction gives rise to the existential absurdity – to the strong feeling that our life is absurd.13 Some authors argue that life is absurd not simply because it lasts seventy years; it would be also absurd ‘‘if it lasted through eternity’’ (Nagel 1971, p. 12). Unfortunately, common sense says – with Woody Allen – something diﬀerent: what is important is not to die.14 Here I agree with common sense and claim that philosophers who defend the view that even eternal, and necessary, life is intrinsically absurd, take their arguments from accidental reasons. In particular, Bernard Williams refers ˇ apek’s character Elina Macropulos, who is 342 to the case of Karel C years old.15 She had lost all her friends, the ability to enjoy tennis, la belle cuisine, etc. The consequences: ‘‘Her unending life has come to a state of boredom, indiﬀerence and coldness’’ (Williams 1973, p. 82). For her death is not an absurd option; it is a welcome event. My answer to this argument is that we can imagine the following case: a person who is 342 years old and who leads (including physically) such a form of life that she doesn’t lose her interest in sports, making friends, and other meaning-creating activities. She recurrently rejuvinates, sets her practical interests and aims anew, etc. I am sure that even this person, if in clear consciousness and in moral and physical health, can experience the same existential paradox which Tolstoy experienced in Arzamas. My conclusion: you cannot beat logic with natural arguments. At the most, you change the subject this way: e.g., instead of speaking about the existential paradox, you can start speaking about the problems which old, or annoyed, or sick people face in life. 5. TOPOLOGY OF EXISTENCE

Until now I have only tried to outline the problem of the meaning of life. What remains to be done is to solve it: to ﬁnd a solution to the existential paradox.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

223

Such a solution was advanced by Wittgenstein. According to his topology of persons, there are three meanings of ‘‘subject’’: empirical, metaphysical, and willing, which, at least in theory, must be kept separate. (1) There is no empirical subject, i.e., a knowing subject of ﬂesh and blood. Such a subject does not pertain to the facts of the world. Empirical subjects are a transcendental illusion. Instead, there is an epistemological subject which has the character of a point. As a matter of fact, ‘‘this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual ﬁeld. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual ﬁeld allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye’’ (Wittgenstein 1922, 5.633). In the same way, we experience the facts of the world without being one of these facts – when knowing, we do not experience ourselves as empirical subjects. But we are one of the points of the world. This way of seeing the subject is a form of radical realism. It claims that the world is the totality of facts – ‘‘The world I found’’ (Wittgenstein 1961, p. 49) – which the subject experiences, and nothing beyond it. By the way, Wittgenstein’s motive for accepting this view was his attempt to exclude the a priori (the subject, in this case) from philosophical psychology. In logic, he excluded the a priori by eliminating logical objects, of any form. But why are we susceptible to this transcendental illusion: the empirical self ? Apparently, it ‘‘occurs because a person does not have to think his identity – [s]he lives it.16 Of course, one needs criteria of other people’s identities, but not, it seems, of one’s own’’ (Pears 1996, p. 126; italics mine). The philosopher, however, leads an examined life; she reﬂects upon her identity as a subject. In short: lay people accept that their empirical subject exists. This belief, however, is false, and the true philosopher realizes that upon reﬂection. (2) Intrinsically connected with the meaning of life is the metaphysical subject. (i) This is the subject of values and purposes. She brings meaning into life; that is why she is also called metaphysical. It is this subject that experiences existential absurdity. At that, the absurdity is always related to the (pseudo) empirical person: indeed, we fear the death of our body. Now, Wittgenstein wards oﬀ the absurd by accepting that the metaphysical subject does not lie on the plane of ideas (pictures), which the supposed empirical subject experiences. Rather, it is its boundary. We can illustrate this boundary on the example of happy people and unhappy people. Often they experience the same facts of the world, but in a diﬀerent way, with a diﬀerent attitude, which expands, or, respectively, contracts, the

224

NIKOLAY MILKOV

boundary of the world. In a word, the attitude to the world sets out the boundary of the world.17 (ii) The epistemological subject, which we have already mentioned in (1), can also be seen as a metaphysical subject. Being a point, however, she is the inner boundary of the subject – as diﬀerent from the outer metaphysical subject (or the pure metaphysical subject) which is connected with the meaning of life. Incidentally, the relation between the epistemological and the pure metaphysical subjects, as two forms of the metaphysical subject per se, is similar to that of the contradiction and tautology in Wittgenstein’s Tractarian logic. ‘‘Contradiction is the outer limit of propositions: tautology is the unsubstantial point at the centre’’ (Wittgenstein 1922, 5.143). (3) The willing subject is the source of acting, of cognitive acting, i.e., she is the source of knowledge. It neither lies on the plane of ideas, nor on its (outer) boundary. Nevertheless, its eVects are to be seen both on the plane of ideas, as well as on its boundary – in the metaphysical subject: indeed, it is the will that makes the world meaningful/meaningless. How this? In order to answer this question, we must outline the speciﬁc structure of the willing subject. Above all, (i) the will is an attitude to the world – to the facts in it. That is why the will is neither an extenseless point (like the epistemological subject), nor does it lie on the outer boundary of facts (like the pure metaphysical subject). She is also not another fact, or point, or surface, which lies among the facts and objects of the world, like the epistemological or the quasi empirical subject. However, she determines the form and the dimension of the outer boundary of facts. It, more precisely, settles which facts are included in the horizon of the subject and which are not. Further, (ii) a main characteristic of the will is that it communicates the feeling of ‘‘mine’’. Now, it is this feeling that brings with itself lifemeaning. ‘‘Things acquire ‘signiﬁcance’ only through their relation to my will’’ (Wittgenstein 1961, p. 84). But where does this ‘‘signiﬁcance’’, or meaning, come from? My answer to this question is not topological but more widely geometrical, and is thoroughly in the spirit of the early Wittgenstein. Above all, meanings and values are connected with the plurality of the world: with the empirical fact that the world has diﬀerent geometrical places, or, more precisely, points in space. The existential paradox is a consequence of the fact that – as Helmut Plessner has pointed out – on the evolutionary scale, starting with the animals (in contrast to plants), the biological units

THE MEANING OF LIFE

225

are centred around one such point. As diﬀerent from animals, however, subjects reﬂect – they are eccentric. This makes human knowledge selfreferential. Indeed, while animals have experience only, humans experience this experience (see Plessner 1928, p. 18). Pure metaphysical subjects emerge this way; they are attached to empirical and epistemological subjects – with the help of the will – as attitude to them. ‘‘My will fastens on to the world somewhere, and does not fasten on to other things’’ (Wittgenstein 1961, p. 88). This ‘‘somewhere’’ is me as a geometrically deﬁned empirical/epistemological subject. Through this complex structure of the subject, the world will (to be discussed in § 7) receives diﬀerent biographies. To put this in conventional terms: diﬀerent empirical subjects follow in life their speciﬁc trajectories. This fact is conditioned by biological, geographic, and social factors: speciﬁc place and time of birth, social, cultural and biological environment, etc. These diﬀerent biographies make us to believe that our essence (soul/will) is qualitatively diﬀerent from that of all other persons. In consequence, we embrace solipsistic beliefs. In truth, however, we are identical with the one and the same world will or world soul (these latter are identical too; and here we anticipate the subject of § 7 again). In a sense, we are the world soul. Being the (whole) world soul, however – in the course of our life – we become local patriots of our empirical history. As a result, we start to love ourselves more than anything else in the world.18 This fundamental importance of the self caused Wittgenstein to exclaim: ‘‘If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed’’ (Wittgenstein 1961, p. 91). 6. COMMENTARY

If we embrace this topology of persons, we shall see that there is only one real subject and this is the willing subject. She determines the metaphysical subject which is the outer boundary of the world – the horizon of the empirical subject – and so does not lie in the world of facts. From here it follows that no event in real life (in, what Wittgenstein calls, the world of ideas) can harm us. Indeed, the facts in the world are not good or evil. ‘‘Whoever realizes this will not want to produce a pre-eminent place for his own body or for the human body. He will regard humans and beasts quite naively as objects which are similar and which belong together.’’19 (ibid., p. 82) He will also not regard himself as qualitatively diﬀerent from other humans. The solipsist, in contrast, believes that ‘‘I am qualitatively diﬀerent from all other persons – I am the world.’’

226

NIKOLAY MILKOV

We see here once again that the existential paradox, as experienced by Tolstoy in his hotel room in Arzamas in 1869, was a transcendental illusion. Further, Wittgenstein’s method of tracing the boundaries of logic and of the world was introduced as quasi ‘‘taming’’ logical objects and the empirical subject. In the sphere of philosophical anthropology, the aim of this manoeuvre was to make the subject one-dimensional, so that she cannot look at herself from a point that lies beyond her. Wittgenstein embraced this approach in an attempt to evade cases of self-reference of person’s knowledge, including cases of existential paradox.20 This is a clear topological solution of the existential problems of the person. It is true that Karl Jaspers’ theory of person is prima facie topological too: indeed, it speaks of ‘‘borderline situations and experiences’’. Unfortunately, ‘‘borderline experience’’ means to Jaspers experience in which we are deprived from that hold which we have by every ‘‘inner’’ experience. In contrast, Wittgenstein’s ‘‘limit of the world’’ aims at putting aspects of the person on diﬀerent planes and surfaces. Some readers would ﬁnd that this solution of the existential paradox refers to construction of persons, and, in this way, contradicts my criticism of the constructivist (anti-realist) theories of meaning of life laid out in § 2, (1). Indeed, Wittgenstein claimed that a person, as we know her in life, consists of three (plus one) subjects which are – at least in theory – to be kept separate. In fact, however, there is a substantial diﬀerence between them. While Wittgenstein’s theory was analytic, the anti-realists’ conception of the meaning of life is synthetic. Wittgenstein’s strategy was to ﬁnd out how persons are constructed in order to analyse them to their elements, demonstrating in this way that their complexity creates transcendental illusion in the form of the existential paradox. The anti-realists, by contrast, try to show that the meaning of life is a positive, complex construction. 7. SOLIPSISM, WORLD SOUL, WORLD WILL

Our discussion above has shown that persons know the world, being geometrically ﬁxed points. This explains (1) why, traditionally, the soul, which parallels the person in philosophy of religion (no person without a soul!), is conceived as simple. (2) This nature of persons also explains why Wittgenstein deﬁnes life itself referring to the uniqueness of my life (indeed, points are unique, even when they are numerically identical): my life is a consciousness of the uniqueness of my life. From this consciousness, our solipsistic intuition emerges: the intuition that only I exist. Its

THE MEANING OF LIFE

227

eﬀect is the striving for religion, science, and art.21 The hope is that our achievements in these realms would aﬃrm our domination – in expression – over the world.22 Some additional remarks on this point are in order here. We have already seen that according to Wittgenstein’s T ractatus, the world is a sum of facts (or of ideas, pictures), the value of which is one and the same: there are no lows and downs in it. One implication of this position is that all epistemological subjects relate to one and the same world (this, by the way, makes scientiﬁc, public, etc. discourse possible). We all believe – correctly – in one and the same world, about which we think and speak. That is why solipsism in the world – as a truth about the world – is wrong. Yes, we are all something of solipsists. We all believe that, in a sense, ‘‘I am the true person, and that other human beings are not persons in exactly this sense in which I am – not really.’’ That belief of ours, however, contradicts the fact that we, as empirical subjects, are nothing. This means that we cannot express (articulate) our solipsism, or, more precisely, our solipsistic intuition, in a logically impeccable form. But we nevertheless understand (and mean) it, and what we mean with it is correct: ‘‘[W]hat the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest’’ (Wittgenstein 1922, 5.62). What is more, in the same way in which the world is one for all subjects, the will is also one: the will of every one of us is part and parcel of the world will, and every one of us experiences the world will as her own will (Wittgenstein 1961, p. 85). And that’s not the whole story. As a matter of fact, the will is nothing but the soul. This also explains why there is one world soul, or anima mundi ‘‘which I for preference call my soul’’ (p. 49). Wittgenstein also expressed this point with the words: ‘‘Man is the microcosm: I am my world’’ (p. 84). In contrast to similar conceptions of Plato,23 Plotinus,24 Spinoza,25 Tolstoy,26 and Robert Nozick,27 however, Wittgenstein’s particular souls are not parts of this world soul that return to it after the death, or in a moment of insight;28 they are identical with it. This treatment of the relation between microcosm and macrocosm is unique in the history of philosophy, and it diﬀers radically from the shaky position of all other philosophers who try to solve the existential paradox in terms of some mereological relation of the person to the world soul. This latter position is shaky because it fails to notice that there is no necessary directed relation from the world soul to the person, which conveys meaning to her life.29 This, however, is not true for Wittgenstein’s philosophical anthropology, which is not grounded on

228

NIKOLAY MILKOV

a mereological relation of persons to the world soul but on their eﬀective identity. 8. LIFE WITHOUT ANGST, MEANINGFUL LIFE

Two implications can be made from these deliberations, depending on how we react to the existential paradox; immediately or long-term. (1) Immediate reaction to borderline situations. If we realize how human personality is made, we can further take steps to free ourselves from anguish before the upcoming death. We have already seen that (i) what is absent in such a vision of the person is our empirical subject; (ii) we know that our pure metaphysical and epistemological subjects do not pertain to the empirical world but are rather parts of its boundary; and that (iii) our willing subject is not connected with the facts of reality but is rather an attitude to it. Of course, similar to many conventional illusions, we cannot avoid being trapped in the existential paradox – in what was called ‘‘vegetative angst of the death’’ (the angst people experience in a plane in ﬂames, or in a car falling in an abyss) (see Tugendhat 2001, p. 70). When we are so trapped, however, we can remember that it is an illusion and we can further make eﬀorts to ﬁnd ways out of it. I said ‘‘can’’ since this is a practical, not theoretical, task. We ﬁnd the best example of a philosopher’s sang-froid in the face of extreme situations in Wittgenstein’s war-time Notebooks, which describes his experience of baptism by ﬁre on June 4–6, 1916, when he was confronted with a most likely death for the ﬁrst time: In permanent life threat. The night was, thanks to God, rather calm. Time and again I experience severe forms of anguish. This is the school of the false understanding of life.30 (Wittgenstein 1991, p. 70) In the time of welfare, we don’t think of the weakness of the ﬂesh; when we, however, reﬂect in times of need, it comes into our consciousness. And we address the spirit. ... I do not stop to say in my spirit the words of Tolstoy: ‘‘Man is weak in ﬂesh, bur free through his spirit.’’ (ibid., p. 21)

The person is free through her spirit because she renounces any inﬂuence on the happenings of her life. She does not live in time but in the present, and is in this way happy. And ‘‘a man who is happy has no fear. Not even in face of death’’ (Wittgenstein 1961, p. 74). When I compare this solution of the absurdity of life of Tolstoy– Wittgenstein to Thomas Nagel’s irony (see Nagel 1971, pp. 20, 23), or Albert Camus’ scorn (see Camus 1942, p. 90) in the face of death, I ﬁnd

THE MEANING OF LIFE

229

the latter not convincing.31 They are all too romantic and so incompatible with the sober spirit of exact philosophy. I do remember, of course, that there are many other non-philosophical techniques which help to diminish, or even to eliminate, the vegetative fear of death. Such techniques are in possession of the kamikaze pilots, for example, or of other war heroes. Be this as it may, it is a matter of fact that Wittgenstein’s performance at the front was qualitatively diﬀerent from the performance of his comrades. He was the person who retained composure in critical situations, and helped the soldiers of his unit to preserve countenance – a performance for which he was decorated with high military honours. (2) Meaningful L ife; the Purpose of L ife. But how are we to change our life in the long term? Well, we must ﬁnd the right attitude towards life; this means that we must simply live happy and in harmony. That is the life which sees the world (its facts) sub specie aeternitatis, as a limited whole, beyond time. Opposed to it is the life which sees the world from within – together with all particular objects. This also means: ‘‘The man is fulﬁlling the purpose of existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except to live. That is to say, who is content’’ (Wittgenstein 1961, p. 73). In contrast, when we strive to achieve some particular ‘‘high’’ purpose, including riches, or fame, we lose the simplicity of the problem-free life. Conclusion: We must live a ‘‘life that can renounce the amenities of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate’’ (ibid., p. 81). This idea of the purpose of life is close to that of Tolstoy. Indeed, the main idea of his famous short story ‘‘The Death of Ivan Il’ich’’ is that what makes the end of our life unbearable is our ﬁxation on our property and other amenities of life: on what we conventionally consider our ‘‘achievements’’. It is the loss of these goods that makes the thought of the end of our life unbearable. If, however, we profoundly dissociate ourselves from these particular objects, and if we also concentrate on our belonging to the community of all men (not only of our relatives, nation, or race), a community which is a part of God himself, then death ceases to be horriﬁc and paradoxical. Thomas Nagel, in contrast, deﬁnes death as evil ‘‘because it brings to end all the goods that life contains’’ (Nagel 1970, pp. 1–2). Death also deprives us of many possibilities of life. It is a matter of fact, however, that these possibilities are so multifarious that, also when alive, we make use of only a very small faction of them. We lose innumerable possible

230

NIKOLAY MILKOV

goods also when alive and active. This point shows Nagel’s argument to be inconsistent.

9. EPILOGUE

In this ﬁnal section I shall recapitulate the results I reached in this essay. In his early philosophical writings Wittgenstein advanced a new approach to the problems of philosophical anthropology. It was based on the apparatus of topology and the more wide resources of geometry. This approach helped him to develop an exact philosophy of human personality and in particular of the absurd side of life. I found out that the feeling that life is absurd comes from the existential paradox: from realizing two strongly contradictory truths about our existence, that our prime action as persons is to cognize, and that we eventually cognize that this cognizing has an end. From a logical point of view, this is nothing but a case of the self-referential paradox. Further, I found that this paradox is very diﬃcult to contemplate so that most philosophers who write on the absurd failed to get hold of the proper subject per se. Wittgenstein solved this paradox by showing that in persons there are three diﬀerent subjects: empirical, metaphysical (plus epistemological) and volitional. Analysing them, he showed that: (1) There is no empirical subject; it is rather an illusion. (2) The metaphysical subject is merely the outer boundary of the empirical subject. She expounds or contracts depending on the (3) volitional subject which is nothing but our attitude to the world. Further, (2a) the inner side of the metaphysical subject is the knowing, epistemological subject, who has the character of a point. Wittgenstein also demonstrated that the existential paradox is a transcendental illusion which results from the confusion of these three (plus one) subjects, or of the relation between them. His positive philosophy of person claimed that persons are not parts of, but are rather identical with, the world soul. This latter point resolved the existential paradox. This solution has two practical implications. When caught in Grenzsituationen, we must try to ﬁnd our identity with the world soul. In the long term, we shall simply live our life happily, without setting transcendental objectives. In this way we shall ‘‘fulﬁl the purpose of existence.’’ University of Bielefeld

THE MEANING OF LIFE

231

NOTES 1 Before that, philosophers used to talk about the purpose of life, or of what makes life meaningful. For an alternate view see Gerhardt 1995. 2 See also Nozick 1981, p. 582. 3 ‘‘What is the [place of ] man in nature? Nothing in respect to inﬁnity, everything in respect to nothing’’ (Pascal 1669, p. 136). 4 This is documented in a letter from Tolstoy to his wife Sonya (Soﬁa) on September 4, 1869. 5 The lack of necessity of our existence vexed Sartre; he described it in his L a Nause´e (see Sartre 1938, p. 152). Blaise Pascal described it so: ‘‘We are burning of desire to ﬁnd a solid platform and ﬁnal and constant footing [of our existence] in order to build a tower that reaches the inﬁnity. But our footing cracks, and the earth opens in abyss’’ (Pascal 1669, p. 139). 6 ‘‘There was a horror, horror similar to that before vomiting, but mental horror. Terrible, horrible; it seemed that death is horrible, but if I thought of life, it was the dying life that was horrible. As if life and death were melting together into one. Something was braking my soul, but cannot brake it’’ (Tolstoy 1884, p. 470). 7 Similar to (Sartre’s) Antoine Roquentin’s nause´e which was prima facie caused not by the existential paradox but rather by wondering at the innumerable ‘‘existences’’ (i.e. data) of the world. I cannot escape the feeling, however, that what Sartre meant in L a Nause´e (Sartre 1938, pp. 150 ﬀ.) was the same existential paradox described by Tolstoy, simply set out in another perspective. Indeed, his problem was that the data are contingent, not necessary; they could fail to exist. Antoine Roquentin’s nauseating insight was that the existence, of any object, is not grounded; and in the same time that the existence, as such, is of absolute necessity. Consequently, we, as existents, too, are both absolutely necessary, and at the same time are not. 8 In fact, this point also lies at the centre of the attention of the anti-realist (or constructivist) philosophers of the ‘‘meaning of life’’. Unfortunately, they accept that distraction from the existential paradox is its solution. I answer to their acceptance that it is true that the problem of the meaning of life disappears when we construct convincing narratives about ourselves. This, however, happens only because the problem is evaded, not because it is solved. 9 Cf. with Bertrand Russell’s claim that we contemplate the true subject-matter of philosophical logic ‘‘once in six months for half a minute’’ (Russell 1956, p. 185). 10 Here we must have in mind that even such a pure genius of the narrative as Leo Tolstoy, a man who was famous for his ability to describe any situation or event in just a few words, apparently failed to communicate the horror of his experience in its authentic form simply because he tried to put it in words ﬁfteen years after he actually experienced it. 11 Incidentally, philosophers readily agree that existential paradox has a structure similar to some logical, or epistemological paradoxes (see Nozick 1981, p. 603; Nagel 1986, p. 218; Wiggins 1987, p. 128). 12 Jaspers too connects the Grenzsituationen with the paradox of the mind–body relation (see Jaspers 1919, p. 230). 13 This point was expressed in practical terms – and so, not in a clear and distinct form – by Thomas Nagel: ‘‘We cannot live human lives without energy and attention, nor without making choices which show that we take some things more seriously than others. Yet we have always available a point of view outside the particular form of our lives, from which the seriousness appears gratuitous. These two inescapable viewpoints collide in us, and that is what makes life absurd’’ (Nagel 1971, p. 14). Some ﬁfteen years later Nagel suggested a new

232

NIKOLAY MILKOV

– unsatisfactory again – deﬁnition of the absurd in terms of a conﬂict between two perspectives on our life: inner (personal), and outer (realistic): ‘‘The sense of the absurd is just a perception of the limits of this eﬀort, reached when we ascend higher on the transcendental ladder than our merely human individuality can follow, even with the help of considerable readjustment’’ (Nagel 1986, p. 221). 14 Here I mean the saying: ‘‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying,’’ which is attributed to Woody Allen. ˇ apek 1922. 15 See C 16 She lives her identity, woven up from her narratives, exactly as described by the antirealist philosophers of the meaning of life (e.g., Owen Flanagan). This point shows that the anti-realist’s argument over the meaning of life is based on a transcendental illusion. 17 Incidentally, this conception of a metaphysical subject parallels Wittgenstein’s understanding of logic. In the same way in which the empirical world has its boundaries, logic has its boundaries too. Moreover, the two boundaries are, in a sense, identical. The boundaries of my world are also the boundaries of my language. The point is that what is expressed in language is nothing but how things relate to one another in the states of aﬀairs, and also how the states of aﬀairs relate to one another. And since the sum of all things and states of aﬀairs has a boundary, language has a boundary too. 18 See on this Frankfurt 1999. This is the famous amour de soi of which Jean-Jacques Rousseau already spoke. 19 This point has important implications for the philosophy of animals. 20 This method has been seen as ‘‘an example of Wittgenstein’s tendency always to transcend a problem. He attempts, modo suo, to dissolve it by moving to a higher level’’ (McGuinness 2001, p. 3). 21 ‘‘Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness of my life arises religion – science – art. And this consciousness is life itself ’’ (Wittgenstein 1961, p. 79). 22 This Nietzschean theme will be the subject of another paper of mine. 23 See Plato, Philebus 30a5–6. 24 See Plotinus 1964, pp. 127 f. 25 See Spinoza 1677. 26 On Tolstoy’s identiﬁcation of persons with the world-soul see Milkov 2004, III, § 3. 27 See Nozick 1981. 28 This conception is also held, for example, by Hindu philosophy. The world soul (Brahman) regularly (in millions of cases!) transforms into particular souls (Atman), which after their death return to the world soul. See on this Cornish 1998, pp. 250 f. 29 This argument was ﬁrst formulated in Sylvan and Griﬃn 1986, § 4. 30 The expressions ‘‘true life’’ and ‘‘false life’’ play a central role in Leo Tolstoy’s interpretation of the New T estament. See Tolstoy 1881, Ch. 5 and 6; pp. 847 ﬀ., 860 ﬀ. This point reveals a trace of inﬂuence of Leo Tolstoy’s philosophy of life on that of Wittgenstein, discussed in Milkov 2003. 31 In 1986 Nagel admits: ‘‘[T]here is no credible way of eliminating the inner conﬂict’’ between inner and outer perspectives on human person. (Nagel 1986, p. 221)

BIBLIOGRAPHY Camus, Albert. T he Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O‘Brien. New York: Vintage, 1959 (1st ed. 1942).

THE MEANING OF LIFE

233

Cornish, Kimberley. Der Jude aus L inz: Hitler und W ittgenstein. A. Johansen (u¨b.). Berlin: Ullstein, 1998. ˇ apek, Karel. ‘‘Veˇc Makropulos.’’ In Spisy, vol. 7. Praha: C ˇ esky´ spisovatel, 1992 (1st ed. C 1922), pp. 179–259. Flanagan, Owen. Self Expressions: Mind, Morals, and the Meaning of L ife. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Frankfurt, Harry. Necessity, Volition, and L ove. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Translated by J. Riviere. New York: Pocket Books, 1958 (1st ed. 1916). Gerhardt, Volker. ‘‘Der Sinn des Lebens.’’ In Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 9. Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1995, pp. 815–824. Jaspers, Karl. Psychologie der Weltanschauungen. Mu¨nchen: Piper, 1985 (1st ed. 1919). Kekes, John. ‘‘The Meaning of Life.’’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 24 (2000): 17–34. McGuinness, Brian. ‘‘ ‘Solipsism’ in the T ractatus.’’ In D. Charles and W. Child (eds.), W ittgensteinian T hemes: Essays in Honour of David Pears. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 1–11. ¨ hnlichkeiten.’’ Prima philosophia Milkov, Nikolay. ‘‘Tolstoi und Wittgenstein: Einﬂuss und A 16 (2003): 187–206. ——. ‘‘Leo Tolstois Darlegung des Evangelium und seine teologisch-philosophische Ethik.’’ Perspektiven der Philosophie. Neues Jahrbuch, 30 (2004) (to appear). Nagel, Thomas. ‘‘Death,’’ 1970, in 1979, pp. 1–10. ——. ‘‘The Absurd,’’ 1971, in 1979, pp. 11–23. ——. Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. ——. ‘‘Birth, Death, and the Meaning of Life,’’ in T he V iew From Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 208–31. Nozick, Robert. ‘‘Philosophy and the Meaning of Life,’’ in Philosophical Explanations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981, pp. 571–647. Pascal, Blaise. L a Pense´es. Edited by Luis Lafuma. Paris: Seuil, 1952 (1st ed. 1669). Pears, David. ‘‘The Originality of Wittgenstein’s Investigations of Solipsism.’’ European Journal of Philosophy, 4 (1996): 124–136. Plessner, Helmut. Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Berlin: de Gruyrer, 1928. Plotinus. T he Essential Plotinus. Edited and translated by Elmer O’Brien. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1964. Russell, Bertrand. ‘‘The Essence of Religion,’’ in T he Basic W ritings of Bertrand Russell, R. E. Egner and L. E. Denonn (eds.). London: Allen & Unwin, 1963, pp. 565–76 (1st published 1912). ——. L ogic and Knowledge. Essays 1901–1950. Edited by R. C. Marsh. London: Kegan Paul, 1956. Sartre, Jean-Paul L a nause´e, in Œuvres romanesque. Paris: Gallimard, 1981 (1st ed. 1938). Shklovsky, Victor. L ev T olstoi. Moscow: Molodaja Gvardia (in Russian), 1967. Spinoza, Benedictus de. Ethica ordone geometrico demonstrata. Translated by George Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford Univsity Press, 2000 (1st ed. 1677). Sylvan, Richard and Griﬃn, Nicholas. ‘‘Unravelling the Meanings of Life?’’ Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research 4 (1986): 23–72. Tolstoy, Leo. A Short Presentation of the New T estament, in 1928–58, vol. 24, pp. 801–938. ——. ‘‘Memoirs of a Madman,’’ in 1928–58, vol. 26, pp. 454–66.

234

NIKOLAY MILKOV

——. Complete W ritings [Polnoe sobranbie sochinenii ], 90 volumes (in Russian), V. G. Chertkov (ed.). Moscow, 1928–58. ¨ ber den Tod,’’ in Aufsa¨tze 1992–2000. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, Tugendhat, Ernst. ‘‘U 2001, pp. 67–90. Wiggins, David. ‘‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life,’’ in Needs, Values, T ruth. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987, pp. 87–138. Williams, Bernard. ‘‘The Macropoulos Case; Reﬂections on the Tedium of Immortality,’’ in Problems of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, pp. 81–100. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. T ractatus logico-philosophicus. Translated by D. Pears and B. McGuinness. London: Routledge (1st ed. 1922). ——. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by Elisabeth Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. ——. Notebooks 1914–1916. Translated by Elisabeth Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979 (1st ed. 1961). ——. Geheime T agebu¨cher 1914–1916. Translated by Wilhelm Baum. Wien: Turia & Kant, 1991.

ALEX ANTONITES

EPISTEMOLOGICAL RELATIVISM AS A CHALLENGE TO LIFE SCIENCES – DO WE STILL NEED UNIVERSALS?

When I refer to phenomenology, the main focus is on Husserl, but also on more contemporary phenomenologists like Alvin Diemer, Joseph Kockelmans, W. Luijpen, Anna-Maria Theresa Tymieniecka and others. The challenge of contempororary relativism and materialism involves the concept that universals and consciousness are superﬂuous. There are several diﬀerences between contemporary epistemological thinking concerning science and such thought during the time of Husserl. Yet there are also striking similarities; relativism has once again become a critical issue. The ways in which relativism ﬁgured in Husserl’s time and today are somewhat diﬀerent, yet the claims made are largely convergent. By universals is meant claims that are made in science that are quite general and which can be validated. Such claims would cut through divergent cultural contexts and scientiﬁc traditions. When Husserl wrote his Crisis, epistemological relativism (psychologism, historicism and biologism) as well as materialism/naturalism formed his contextual background. Husserl’s phenomenological project was to restore objectivity, but he also directed himself against absolutist claims in science, scientism. This led to accusations of relativism (ironically!), subjectivism and even irrationalism. It is remarkable that this kind of thinking is repeated today, but much stronger and with more radical developments. New brands of epistemological relativism, as well as cultural relativism, have become foci of attention. A question is: are universals still valid in both natural and human sciences? Does the restored objectivity of Husserl still hold? Husserl attacked various philosophical positions which were drifting in the sea of relativism. Husserl’s problem was that they lost sight of their ultimate basis. The objectivity and universality of scientiﬁc knowledge and theories, for Husserl, linked up with the unambiguousness and univocality of expressions used in scientiﬁc discourse. Shifting of meaning must thus be prevented. Husserl’s target included the human sciences. Husserl intended phenomenology to cure the sickness of an age which suﬀered from skepticism resulting from relativism. In his Prolegomena on pure logic, it is quite clear that histori235 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 235–247. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

236

ALEX ANTONITES

cism, if consistently pursued, leads to extreme skeptical subjectivism. The ideas of truth, objectivity, and rationality in science would then, like all ideas, lose their absolute validity. It is being argued by some today that contemporary developments in science and culture have moved beyond phenomenology’s views on objectivity and rationality. They claim that phenomenology is a static approach which can no longer account for new developments; Husserl’s concept of transcendental consciousness is particularly coming under ﬁre. Universals can no longer be justiﬁed, they claim. But is this the case? Let us examine. Since Husserl, phenomenology, like any dynamic and well constituted tradition, has grown, changed and developed. Phenomenology is not a closed static system as was and is assumed by many critics. As in all other traditions, most, if not all, phenomenologically oriented thinkers and scientists do not follow Husserl in exact detail. However I argue in this article that there are insights revealed by phenomenology which, I think, remain part of the dynamics of phenomenology in particular and philosophy in general. Some of these insights could be regarded as a shining jewel in contemporary times, with its ﬂuidity and uncertainties. Husserl addressed the challenge of materialism and responded to materialism’s claims to privileged explanations – a kind of claim still coming forward today. In the context of his time, materialism was a more crude ontological materialism. Husserl was speciﬁcally annoyed by materialism’s simplistic, reductionsitic strategies reducing consciousness, mind, and freedom to simple material states. Although such crude materialisms still occur in our times, materialism in general became more methodological. It is amazing that materialism still forms the context of and a challenge to phenomenology. Unlike in Husserl’s time, there are several varieties of materialism today. One variety, eliminativism, mostly bases its critique against the L ebenswelt (the life world) and its way of talking and thinking. Husserl’s main problem was that scientiﬁc thinking turned everything upside down – this in fact is the crisis of the Crisis. The L ebenswelt was forgotten. In fact the scientiﬁcally constituted worlds became the ‘‘lebenswelt’’! Even though naturalism/materialism did not directly attack the idea of the lebenswelt, it took the scientiﬁc ‘‘thematization of the world’’ (as Husserl would have called it) for granted as the basis of science. Science then became its own basis. Contemporary eliminativism turns the clock backward to before and during Husserl’s time. It directly and explicitly places the lebenswelt under ﬁre. It argues for its systematic removal from not only science, but from everyday life as well. Eliminativism argues that

EPISTEMOLOGICAL RELATIVISM

237

just as humankind realized in the past that a belief in witches is superstition and to be abolished, likewise we ought to eliminate contemporary beliefs in concepts such as consciousness, thoughts, values, joy, and fear. One would not be wrong to claim that eliminativism is essentially a philosophy intended to replace the L ebenswelt and its everyday life way of thinking. How? It is argued that, for example, instead of saying that ‘‘this morning I awoke with a feeling of joy’’ I must rather replace this talk with something like the following: ‘‘At 6:00 I moved into a physical upright position at an angle of 30 degrees; in the left quadrant of my brain neurons ﬁred at a frequency of 012,47 ps.’’ Other varieties of materialism do not go as far as this. For instance, identity theory argues that all phenomena can ultimately be explained by natural causes, and this adheres more with science than any other world view. Debates that ensued pointed to the fact that consciousness, however, remained a very hard nut to crack. Materialism seemingly failed to account for ﬁrst person experiences and the subjective phenomenology of human consciousness – the sense of being a personal volitional entity, diﬀerent in character from the non-conscious, third person, impersonal, material world. Materialism regarded its account as more plausible than that of idealism or dualism. Materialism is seen by phenomenology as a detotalising (J. Le Senne) of reality, whereas idealism posits the primate of subjectivity. So, phenomenology, in both Husserl’s and contemporary times, succeeded in positioning itself as an approach which is neither idealism or a simple naturalism. This approach provides a coherent and worthwhile vantage point to make sense of the issues of objectivity, rationality and epistemological claims of a universal nature. New varieties of naturalism have come into existence and constitute new but intriguing challenges to contemporary phenomenology. These naturalism/materialism theories depart from a simplistic reductionistic approach. Although they reject a dualistic approach, like those of Descartes and Eccles, they accept consciousness as being a non-physical substance. The same applies to intentionality (in a teleological sense, consciousness as purposive and goal setting). Likewise they consider freedom and autonomy in a serious fashion. Here I am thinking of John Searle, J. Sperry and Colin McGinn. Their approaches led to controversy and debates with the more ‘‘classical’’ approaches of materialism. One might regard these trends of thinking as related to phenomenology. One could even ask whether the ‘‘background’’ of phenomenology did not perhaps tacitly inspire these thinkers. If not, it is another example of how

238

ALEX ANTONITES

scientists and philosophers, while working and thinking independent of each other, arrive at comparable conclusions. The fact is that the insights uncovered by phenomenology became accepted outside phenomenology proper to such an extent that these other ways of thinking became related to phenomenology. So, far from being bypassed by new thinking, phenomenology either inspired new thinking or converged with core parts of other philosophical and scientiﬁc traditions. An important part of Husserl’s context was the position of the natural sciences. What is the position today between the natural sciences and phenomenology? It appears that the concept of matter has changed radically. Comically, many materialist thinkers still operate within the classical style materialism, while naturalism consistent with natural scientiﬁc thinking has already moved away from and beyond that point! No longer do we have a crude concept of matter. The Cartesian project of reducing all physical entities to their smallest component parts is only accepted partially and conditionally. This and what followed from it, constitutes a new kind of crisis than that seen in Husserl’s Crisis. Is this crisis more harmful or more favorable to phenomenology? By the beginning of 2003, major postulates of the earlier scientiﬁc conception had been controverted. ‘‘We are left with the broken pieces of the old view and desperately long for a new Promethean worldview. ... We are aware too that we are in need of illumination to give us direction, signiﬁcance, purpose. We need the measure of things. There is a need for a key by which to grasp things at their core, to open their intricate avenues leading on to a clear perspective on all so that the very secret of existence, its orientation, its reasoning may be grasped’’ (Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka: 15). Unlike in Husserl’s time, the long established certainties of modern science were radically undermined. Since Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, laws of Euclidean geometry no longer provide the universally necessary structure of nature. Husserl never had much of a problem with mathematics and the exact physical sciences as such, but rather with the way one sees the position of sciences vis a vis the L ebenswelt. The very same rigid mechanical causality and determinism of the universe that phenomenology addressed, is now severely challenged from another source: the acausal thinking of quantum theory and the nonlinearity of complexity theory in the late twentieth century. Quantum theory’s non-local connections between particles is a most radical theory. Exciting new views on space and time challenged common sense and so once again the L ebenswelt. However, this is something totally diﬀerent

EPISTEMOLOGICAL RELATIVISM

239

than eliminativism. Serious investigation of new dimensions are being undertaken by physicists and especially astronomers today. Einstein’s statement nearly became proverbial: ‘‘It is as if the ground has been pulled out from under one, with no ﬁrm one to be seen anywhere upon which one could have built’’. This is understandable if quantum theory points out that there is no linear cause and eﬀect, that ‘‘eﬀects’’ exist without a cause. Even physical existence becomes problematic. This is philosophically highly signiﬁcant: an acausal thematizing of our life world. This indeterminism is a much stronger refutation of the simple reductionistic, materialistic way of thinking than Husserl could ever have dreamed of ! This is why I think there is much that is positive in the newer scientiﬁc developments, from a phenomenological perspective. Although not the same in all respects, quantum theory’s claim to give consciousness a major role in the constitution of the object and so objectivity, comes surprisingly close to phenomenology’s view of objectivity as steering between objectivism and subjectivism. An eﬀective remedy for the sickness of relativism is a scientiﬁc critique which ﬂuctuates between the subjective and objective, but never falls ‘‘out’’ into subjectivism or objectivism. In this I see an important contribution from phenomenology. Both phenomenology and quantum theory avoid the extremes of materialism and idealism’s monism. The theory of relativity did something similar. The deep interconnectedness of phenomena encourages a new holistic thinking about the world is philosophy as well as in life sciences. The reductionist program of Cartesianism, criticized by Husserl, reducing all reality to its smallest components, can no longer be maintained. I think that it could be argued that matter, in physics, is no longer the classical materialist matter. It seems, if one interprets it philosophically, that quantum theory (but especially complexity theory) absorbed important elements of phenomenology and idealism. This is remarkable in that quantum theory, and to an extent, complexity theory, refer to the natural sciences! I am sure that Husserl would have welcomed many of these developments. The new models of reality opened the door for a fundamental rapprochement with humankind’s humanistic aspirations. This could only be welcomed by phenomenology. Furthermore, what is new in these aforementioned two theories made it all the more diﬃcult to speak of a total coherent conception of the world as in Husserl’s time. Physicists fail to come to any consensus as to how the existing evidence should be interpreted with respect to the

240

ALEX ANTONITES

deﬁnition of ultimate nature. Instead, conceptual contradictions, disjunctions, and paradoxes are ubiquitious and stubbornly evade solution. A certain seemingly irreducible irrationality, already recognized in the human psyche, now emerges in the structure of the physical world itself. In the Greek cultural-scientiﬁc context, human rationality reﬂected cosmic rationality. Now it seems that a parallel could likewise be drawn between the irrationality of much of the universe and of humans. To incoherence was added unintelligibility, and they seemed to be insuperable obstacles to human intuition. Objects are not seen primarily as things, but processes, patterns and relationships, particles eﬀecting each other even over long cosmic distances, but without any known causal link (fundamental ﬂuctuations of energy in a total vacuum). Sub-atomic particles being in one place, the next moment in another but not having traveled the distance in between the two points or places. All of these concepts are largely unintelligible, paradoxical, and even, seemingly, irrational. However, it goes much further: the world fades out and eludes us – we are confronted with something ineﬀable and mysterious. This incoherence, unintelligibility, and indeterminism reinforced a feeling of alienation, but in a most exciting universe. From this it does not follow that laws, causality, facticity, or order disappeared from science. The rigorous methods that Husserl favored may no longer be necessary, but this does not obviate the constraints put forth by phenomenology. Further, the mathematics that describe these phenomena are as exact as ever. But what it describes is paradoxically ambiguous. It does not follow that everything became incoherent. Far from it. But science no longer provides a total picture and is valid only conditionally and limitedly. Both co-exist! That is coherence and incoherence, a causal world and an acausal world. Alice in Wonderland may be at home here! It means that quantum and relativity theory not only undid the absolute certainties of the Newtonian paradigm, not only freed us from absolutes, but much more – they freed us from solid ground at all! For the theory of relativity there are no ﬁxed points in the universe. Everything is in movement. Looking philosophically at the current situation in science, one could state safely the following: ﬁrst, that theories are not copies of an independent world, they do not mirror essences, but are rather conjectures which refer to the world; secondly, the equations of quantum theory do not describe an en soi (a total independent world in itself ), a real world. This current situation no longer points to a crude materialist ontology.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL RELATIVISM

241

Theories as conjectures and the absence of an en soi world in quantum theory, are both consistent with intentionality and the phenomenological denial of a totally an sich world, even though Husserl would see transcendental subjectivity as a solid ground. In fact this is a largely unnoticed but exciting convergence between thinking on an en soi world and the concepts of phenomenology. What Husserl would have found strange and had problems with (perhaps only initially), but which would largely be welcomed by contemporary phenomenologists, is the accepted fact that many non-scientiﬁc (not unscientiﬁc) factors play a crucial role in science, and that a more tentative view of scientiﬁc knowledge became acceptable. The challenge of contemporary thinking, namely that we do not have an a priori (independent of experience) access to timeless universal truths, will have to be addressed by phenomenology. Especially in the life sciences, the concept of experience was broadened beyond the traditional empiricist understanding. This included a sensitivity to new and other dimensions of experience. This applied to art and to a stronger emphasis on the qualitative meaning of inner conscious and subconscious events. The life sciences also show a stronger focus upon the profoundly complex and the ambiguous: openendedness, indeterminate sets of attitudes, plasticity, constant change of reality and knowledge, the reality of concrete experience over against ﬁxed abstract principles are all the focus now. Contrary to what some phenomenologists might accept, a conviction became very strong that no single a priori thought system should govern belief or investigation. Objective essences within things or things in themselves are neither accessible or positable, so that the value of all truths and assumptions must be continually subjected to critical thinking and interpretation. The critical search for truth is more tolerant of ambiguity, complementarity and pluralism, and its outcome will necessarily be relative knowledge, more fallible than absolute and certain. Both the life and natural sciences focus on the fallibility and selfcorrecting nature of their knowledge. Hence the quest for certainty must be endlessly self-revising. Nothing is taken for granted and no absolutes appear. Reality is not a solid ﬁxed entity. It is in ﬂux, an unfolding process, an open universe, continually aﬀected and molded by one’s actions and beliefs. It is possibility rather than actuality. Humans are not remote spectators viewing a ﬁxed world. One is always and necessarily engaged in reality, transforming while at the same time being transformed. It may be that Husserl would have found this perhaps a little too radical. This would not be a surprising development as Einstein, being revolution-

242

ALEX ANTONITES

ary as can be seen in his theory of relativity, just could not accept the paradoxical nature of quantum theory. Even so, this is indeed a challenge for phenomenology. But would it necessarily also precipitate into a crisis? Not necessarily. Although largely new in comparison to thinking in Husserl’s time, the dynamic spirit of contemporary phenomenology could relatively easily accommodate this thinking. As already indicated, these new developments in the natural and life sciences are not inconsistent with a phenomenological approach. However, phenomenology would let the rapprochement and accommodating of these new developments lead to a total relativism. This is where phenomenology plays a sobering and important role. It would be a misunderstanding to think that science (natural and human sciences) relinquish their way of playing the game of science, namely doing it in terms of the criteria of objectivity, rationality, validity and testing. The dialectical unity which the phenomenological philosopher of science, Alvin Diemer, saw between subject and object in science is even more so today a key to the understanding of contemporary scientiﬁc developments. The scope of science was broadened, but science did not become non-science or an irrational endeavour as such. However, scientiﬁc studies came to include the indeterminate, unambiguous, paradoxical and even mysterious (once again in both natural and human sciences). If Husserl became acquainted with all these contemporary develoments, it may have required some hard thinking on his part. Phenomenology would not follow everything in any new approach or theory. It places healthy constraints, and has a sobering eﬀect. So, for example, the radical new understanding of the world introduced by modern science does not preclude coming to general and universal statements about it. Universals are not simply the province of scientiﬁc investigation. It is rather how one views it. In what way can phenomenology have a sobering eﬀect, as we noted a moment ago? We referred to quantum and complexity theories’ serious challenge to our every day life world by being explicitly counter intuitive. A world where eﬀects without causes occur, or action over cosmic distances. My view is that the positing of the L ebenswelt is now even more important than in the time of Husserl. It is also the basis of counter intuitive insights. The restoration therefore of the L ebenswelt where the sun and not earth still comes up, where one thing causes another, shows that there are other valid experiences than the scientiﬁc. Take the L ebenswelt away and you saw oﬀ the branch upon which you are sitting. We may even lose our head! Phenomenology worked (and I think was

EPISTEMOLOGICAL RELATIVISM

243

largely successful) for the restoration of the original meanings of our life world. Grounding ideas on empirical fact, for Hussserl, is like putting the cart before the horse. Linking up with this is phenomenology’s position that experience is immediate presence, a dialogue of immediate presence and immediate reality. Phenomenology resisted the view of knowledge as a mirror like reﬂection of an en soi world, long before contemporary philosophy of science started to do something similar. Intentionality overcame Cartesian dualism, the res cogitans and res extensa and a passive reﬂection of monde en soi, as in naı¨ve varieties of realism. This involves the Zuru¨ck zu den Sachen selbst (back to the things themselves) of original experience. Scientiﬁc accounts of quantiﬁable pulses with measurable strength, physiological processes and nerve circuits are valid, but are secondary to the original experiences. In Husserl’s time the challenge to phenomenology was largely on the object side. But today the challenge has shifted to the subject side. Relativism and skepticism are strong once again, but more radical than in Husserl’s time. New trends of thinking like those of Richard Rorty and Alan Gross also rejected (like Husserl) epistemological dualism. However they went much further, and it can be construed that they are washing the baby away with the bathwater. It is not the world or object to which our knowledge refers to that is taken into account. In contemporary relativist thought, dialogue is also acccepted as important, yes, but only on the subject side of the epistemological relationship. The dialogue is not with the world. In fact the object side becomes blurred and even disappears. As far as the concept of objectivity still applies, it means only a counting of heads. It is a decision of the community. Knowledge is not knowledge about something, but a consensus reached amongst ourselves. The diﬀerence between fact and opinion fades away. The new en soi is the subject. It is here that phenomenological intentionality seems to address the problem of objectivity in a meaningful way. Intentionality means that knowledge, consciousness, is essentially directedness towards, an intending of the world which is not consciousness. When consciousness is intentionality, one cannot ask whether that to which consciousness is directed really exists in fact, but rather only whether the factual existing things co-constitute what consciousness is. Without factually existing things, consciousness would not be what it is, namely, intentionality. This would account for another contemporary challenge, namely the nonobservables in science, where objects are either not at all or only indirectly

244

ALEX ANTONITES

perceived. Consciousness is presence to world. In this intentional structure, consciousness is itself not a total independent (from the world) reality. This means to let the world actively be what it is. A world separated from consciousness is unthinkable, since the world is attached to consciousness. Thinking is a way of being enmeshed in, entangled in the world. I cannot say what the world is without consciousness. Objectivity cannot be interpreted objectivistically. Objectivity of the world does not mean a world independent of consciousness. A world totally independent of consciousness is a non-sens and implies a denial of all real consciousness, because a real consciousness is an intentional one, enmeshed in the world. Yet, on the other hand, I cannot claim anything goes, say about the world whatever comes to my mind. This is also not a real world. Objectivity may not be interpreted subjectivistically as mere consensus. Consensus yes, but always consensus about a world. Consciousness is an active revealing of things, intellectus agens, but is also receptive of things themselves. Therefore, phenomenology resisted absolutistic interpretations of knowledge. All truth is subjective, all knowledge expresses objectivity-for-a-subject. Yes all knowledge is relative, indeed, but this means relative-to-a-subject. Intentionality as directedness upon the world is a unity of mutual, reciprocal implication of consciousness and world (Kwant), parole parlante of Merleau Ponty or Heidegger’s wenn kein Dasein existiert ist keine Welt da – the is can only mean beingfor subjects. Humankind is in a sense itself a conﬁrmation of the world. Being is conscious-being-in the world. Welterfahrenden L eben (Husserl) or Seinsverstandnis say that I am originally present in existence, e.g., counting numbers: you know what counting is, because counting is consciousness of counting. Intentionality can endure the challenge of classical and contemporary objectivism, but also contemporary subjectivism. Indeed, it does not merely endure, but in a way gives a fresh, meaningful account of the situation in the subjectivism/objectivism debate. However, Husserl’s strenge W issenschaft (rigid science) characterized by the objective generality of its claims (about universals), was not realized exactly as he foresaw. Husserl meant to meet the requirement of objectivity by wesenschau as the result of eidetic reduction. In this particularities fell away so that only essences were seen. He characterized his philosophy as a science from ultimate foundations (W issenschaft aus letzter Begrundung). These foundations are revealed with apodictic evidence, and cannot include any presuppositions. Husserl found the ultimate ground for our world experience in the ﬁeld of transcendental subjectivity.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL RELATIVISM

245

A while ago we referred to a stronger sensitivity in science for pluralism, ambiguity, complementarity and an emphasis on fallibility rather than on ﬁxed certainties. We are not spectators far removed from a static ﬁxed world. Phenomenology has never ignored contexts, never reduced one context or world to another. In fact, quite to the contrary. The world of the commercial travellers is diﬀerent from that of the politician, or architect. It is especially the openendedness of the world in science in contemporary times which phenomenology need not regard as alien. Phenomenology stated that the grasping of the world indicates that existence is not static. The subject does not get bogged down in the world. Being human is dynamic, a matter of acting. Many worlds are entangled in this one, and meaning is not conceivable without a particular praxis. The Einstellung (situatedness) of water to the drinker is diﬀerent than that of the swimmer and the chemical scientist with his/her H O. To 2 believe that water has only one meaning, namely H O is impoverished 2 scientism. To proclaim a practitioner of natural science as human, and its world as the world, is an absolutizing of a particular way of doing science. The L ebenswelt is an inﬁnitely rich world. There is thus not only one world, not only one meaning of a monde-en-soi, but many worlds. In these worlds, humans are subjects in many relationships. Integral experiences are the starting point of all thinking and judging. Experience serves as an encounter of the subject with many Einstellungen, with reality, expressing divergent and diﬀerent meaning systems. The unity of subject and world is a dialectical unity of dialogue. It implies an openness of subject to that which is not subject. Once again the subject is not bogged down in the facticity of its body or world. Being in the world is being equally original to the world. There is not only one singular facticity. Humans are not exhausted by their facticity. They are what they are not and are not what they are (Sartre). They are self-projects, initiative of relationships. Humans are never ‘‘down’’, never an arrived result. To be a human is to zu sein. Tymieniecka describes it this way: to be, is to become. With their lumen naturale humans are continuously propelled forward, transcend the facticity, to the fulﬁllment of so many possibilities. Should new meaning be realized, it opens new possibilities for the subject, because there just is no factual-being without can-being. Then humankind is propelled forward anew. Existence is disquiet, continous transcending movement, because humans are never at ease or rest with any facticity. Humans are historical beings. Their presence is never completed. In light of this, I can see no obstacle in

246

ALEX ANTONITES

phenomenology’s taking account of contemporary events in science and culture. Several times we referred to how diﬀerent contemporary thinking is from the time of Husserl and how diﬃcult it may have been for Husserl to accommodate the new concepts. However, we want to end by showing that Husserl himself also was not a static thinker. He himself, especially near the end of his life, started to rethink many of his views. For example, Husserl began to realize that transcendental subjectivity was not pure, but an impure consciousness surrounded by a body of horizons, historicity, passivity, the life world, inter-subjectivity. It seemed that phenomenology was no longer able to be a presuppositionless philosophy under the transparent gaze of transcendental subjectivity. This turn in Hussserl’s thought represents a move from a static to a genetic phenomenology. It is no longer aimed at a timeless essential structure of our lived experience. It now considers the temporal development of the ego. And correlatively the history of sense with which all objects have been endowed. The ego constitutes itself for itself in, so to speak, the unity of a history. Husserl came to the brink of hermeneutics. In the past Husserl emphasized vorurteilslosigkeit (without prejudices) whereas hermeneutics gives a positive role for prejudices. Husserl changed his mind on this and gradually noticed the decisive role of historical prejudices. We see this also in that his cautionings against relativism did not prevent Husserl from attaching importance to historical contexts in his last writings. In fact his ‘‘T he origin of geometry’’, posthumously published, was, according to Ludwig Landgrebe (204), a setback for transcendental subjectivsm as a historical apriorism1 or as the completion of modern rationalism. Hussserl said that since all new acquisitions are in turn sedimented and become working materials, the problems, clarifying investigations, the insights of principle are historical. We are constantly, vitally conscious of this horizon (of human civilization) and speciﬁcally of a temporal horizon implied in our given present horizon that corresponds essentially to the one cultural world surrounding the life-world with its peculiar manner of being. This world, for every historical period and civilization, has its particular features and is called tradition. We stand, then, within the historical, even though we may know very little about it in a deﬁnite way. Husserl’s position was approaching that of hermeneutics. Yet this was not a retreat to relativism or historicism. For he remained ﬁrmly attached to the quest for universalism in the form of transcendental phenomenology.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL RELATIVISM

247

I would formulate it somewhat diﬀerently: we cannot avoid a measure of universality. Genuine science, for phenomenology, must remain a matter of supratemporal ideas. This is largely the case in spite of radical changes. No human being can communicate without universally held logical principles. I do not think that this universalism implies an essentialist en soi world. The universalism is a constituted universalism. To conclude: phenomenology did address the challenges of our times. Phenomenology’s way of steering between too much emphasis on the subject or too much emphasis on the object, oﬀers a meaningful vantage point from which to make sense of contemporary developments in science. Phenomenological intentionality likewise survives as a jewel in these changes. It appears that in spite of even radical changes, universals are still there and have their place in science. Because phenomenology is not a static monolithic entity but dynamically revises and changes itself, it is a good candidate for taking an active part in the stream of surging and forward moving contemporary science and philosophy of science. University of Pretoria NOTES 1 L. Landgrebe, Der Weg der Phanomenologie (Gutersloh: Guterslohre Verlagshaus, 1963). 2 A.-T. Tymieniecka, ‘‘The ontopoiesis of life as a new philosophical paradigm’’. Phenomenological Inquiry 22 (1998), p. 15.

A group of participants with Hannah Scolnicov

HANNA SCOLNICOV

MEETING ONE’S DEATH IN ARCADIA

The et in Arcadia ego theme has been explored in three famous paintings by two artists, and widely discussed in an essay that has become a classic in its own right. The present paper will take as its starting point the interpretation oﬀered in that essay and proceed to analyze the paintings as artistic expressions of the phenomenology of life and death. Erwin Panofsky ﬁrst published his essay ‘‘Et in Arcadia ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’’ in 1936. In this study he traced the history of the theme and discussed the three paintings.1 The earliest of these, in which the phrase appears for the ﬁrst time, is the work of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as il Guercino (1591–1666), and was painted around 1618 (Figure 1). The other two are both the work of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) and were painted in 1627 and 1638 respectively (Figures 2 and 3). The ﬁrst of the Poussin paintings belongs to the Chatsworth Collection and the second hangs in the Louvre.2 In the short description of the three pictures that follows I shall single out those features that are relevant to my subsequent iconographic interpretation. Guercino paints a disrupted pastoral scene in which two shepherds holding crooks observe a skull placed on a low monument against a wooded background. Through foreshortening, the skull looms large on the lower right side of the painting. The ﬂy and the maggot add the horror of decomposition to the frightening skull. The inscription et in Arcadia ego appears on the front of the monument, facing the spectator, but at an angle that makes it impossible for the shepherds to see it. Poussin’s earlier, Chatsworth version, although it retains the dramatic diagonal structure and most of the components of Guercino’s painting, already diﬀers markedly from it. The two shepherds are now clad in Classical-looking wraps, and one of them is bearded and wears a wreath. To them is added a female ﬁgure, likewise only lightly clad and baring a breast and a thigh, as well as the mythical ﬁgure of the river Alpheus, pouring out water from his vase. Even more pertinent to the theme of this paper are the transformation of the tomb into a Classical sarcophagus, the diminished importance of the skull and, especially, the increased prominence of the inscription, which now appears on the side facing the shepherds and is subject to their intense scrutiny. In contrast to the excitement conveyed through the concerted movement of the ﬁgures in the earlier version, Poussin’s later version exudes 249 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 249–261. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

250

HANNA SCOLNICOV

Figure 1. Guercino, Et in Arcadia ego, 1618 (Corsini Gallery)

calm and composure. It is a more contemplative, philosophical painting. The whole scene has been re-arranged on a frontal plane, facing the spectator. The scene is squarely set within the framing landscape and the female ﬁgure is fully dressed and coiﬀed. The river god is replaced by a third shepherd and the inscription is centered. The ﬁgures have been placed symmetrically so that the structure has become more stable. The skull is completely gone, but a diﬀerent symbol of death appears: the shadow of the bearded youth on the plain stone monument resembles the shape of death holding a scythe. As in the earlier painting, here too the shepherds are engaged in deciphering the meaning of the inscription.3 I shall focus on the last of these paintings, but with reference to the two earlier ones, in order to show the signiﬁcant changes introduced by the later Poussin into the treatment of his theme. Although the object of my analysis is painting, it will not be conducted from an art-historical perspective, but rather from a phenomenological point of view. I shall

MEETING ONE’S DEATH IN ARCADIA

Figure 2. Poussin, Et in Arcadia ego, 1627 (Chatsworth Collection)

251

Figure 3.

Poussin, Et in Arcadia ego, 1638 (Louvre Museum)

252 HANNA SCOLNICOV

MEETING ONE’S DEATH IN ARCADIA

253

refrain from discussing many of the salient features of the paintings, limiting myself to an emblematic interpretation. As I will show, the three depictions of the et in Arcadia ego theme portray the moment of awakening of the consciousness of death, the sudden encounter of unsuspecting youth with a tomb bearing an enigmatic inscription. This experience of the protagonists is conveyed to the spectator or reader, i.e., ourselves, and we in turn are summoned, in the midst of our insouciant life, into an Arcadia of our own, to confront our mortality. Through the pictorial focus on the epitaph, on the written words, the work of art calls on the spectator to respond to the ‘‘ego’’ of he who lived in Arcadia and is now buried there, or of the allegorical ﬁgure of Death, depending on the interpretation of the phrase. Panofsky has shown that, from a strictly philological point of view, the Latin phrase should mean: ‘‘Even in Arcady there am I’’, indicating that the speaker is Death.4 Therefore he assumes that these words issue from the skull or Death’shead in Guercino’s painting as well as in the earlier Poussin. The elimination of Death’s-head in the last picture of the series spells for Panofsky a shift to a new, ungrammatical use of the phrase to mean: ‘‘I, too, lived in Arcady’’. He concludes that the speaker is now necessarily the dead man interred in the portrayed tomb. The iconographical changes introduced in the Louvre painting thus amount to a radical change of meaning. In French, the change is neatly summarized as the substitution of le mort (the dead man) for la Mort (Death). In this paper I argue that the three pictures are diﬀerent versions of the drama of the sudden encounter with death, or rather of the confrontation with one’s own death. The awareness of one’s own mortal nature entails the consciousness of being alive, of one’s own life. These then are philosophical paintings in the fullest sense of the word and it is not surprising therefore that the two artists depicted both the inscribed phrase and its contemplation. The phenomenology of death is clearly indivisible from the phenomenology of life and the three paintings can therefore be regarded as graded reﬁnements in the expression of the phenomenology of both life and death. As artistic expressions, they exploit the tension between the verbal and the visual, the formulation of the thought and the representation of the thinkers. Taken together, they constitute a short series of paintings that deﬁne a visual icon for the abstract idea formulated by et in Arcadia ego. The repetition with variations of the theme succeeds in establishing an iconography for the phenomenology of life and death.

254

HANNA SCOLNICOV

Though antiquarian in their general appearance, the pictures deviate from Classical funerary art, aimed at commemorating the deceased. What we have instead is the creation of a new emblem, couched in both the verbal and the visual languages of ancient mythology: a Latin phrase and neo-Classical ﬁgures. Guercino seems to have invented the new iconography that was then followed and developed by Poussin. The elements of this iconography may be seen as dramatically related to each other. The protagonists of the drama are the young shepherds who encounter death, their allegorical antagonist, in a number of guises: the skull, the tomb and the epitaph. The wooded Arcadian landscape provides an idyllic setting for this drama. In this idealized land of Arcadia, the carefree, innocent shepherds discover the tomb.5 In the seventeenth-century paintings of et in Arcadia ego, death is perceived as a sudden intrusion into a peaceful, pastoral milieu. The surprised shepherds in Arcadia discover death in the shape of the funerary monument. We who observe the paintings, consider death at two removes. We see the shepherds grappling with the meaning of their encounter, and we watch the painter’s rendering of that scene. This aesthetic distancing from the encounter itself allows us to step back from the pictures and reﬂect on its meaning. Arcadia Arcadia is the neo-Classical parallel of the Judeo-Christian Paradise. Like paradise, it harks back to an ancient creation myth. The nostalgia for the carefree existence in the Golden Age is like the longing for the world before the Fall. The mythical Arcadia is conceptually as remote from the actual geographic area, an arid part of the Peloponnese, as the Garden of Eden is from Iraq. As described in Virgil’s Eclogues, it is an idyllic and blissful place, where young shepherds and shepherdesses roam with their ﬂocks in an everlasting spring and engage in poetry contests. Arcadia is the Classical site of the pastoral tradition, the land of Pan and his followers. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the shepherds in Arcadia are eternally in the ﬂower of youth. Death in Arcadia is not death of old age. It does not form a part of the completed life cycle, but is perceived as the death of a young person. Death thus stands out as a disruption rather than a completion of life and as the antithesis of the very idea of an idyllic Arcadia. Conversely, life in Arcadia, as also in Paradise, is an imaginative construction of a universe without the knowledge of death.

MEETING ONE’S DEATH IN ARCADIA

255

The tomb in Arcadia thus deconstructs the myth of Arcadia, exposing it as a neo-Classical sham while stressing its allure. Unlike Shakespeare’s enumeration of the seven ages of man in As You L ike It,6 there is no sense of the process of aging in the paintings. In Shakespeare, the cycle of life ends with senility, ‘‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’’ (Act 2, scene 7, line 166), with a gradual decomposition and loss of the senses, but with no mention of death itself. Not so in the tomb in Arcadia theme which is concerned with the sudden, unprepared encounter of youth with death. The pastoral tradition is an attempt by a sophisticated urban society to return to a beautiful and innocent nature, a golden world of myth. The three et in Arcadia ego paintings both reinforce the nostalgia for the Classical past and explode it, by reminding both the protagonists and the spectators that death is present everywhere, even in Arcadia.

Neo-Classicism Death is confronted in the et in Arcadia ego paintings, especially in the last of the series, where much of the traditional iconography of death has been eliminated, as a cessation of life, an indecipherable enigma devoid of any metaphysical dimension. The neo-Classical style of the period enabled the painters to express this bold new conception of death in the pagan idioms of the past. Ancient visual images were imitated, the mythical Arcadia was invoked, and an enigmatic Latin phrase was fabricated. The enigma of death was interpreted as an examination of the past, as an examination of our own relationship with the Classical heritage. From this point of view, neo-Classicism may be seen as tantamount to a growing self-perception of ourselves in relation to those who preceded us and are long since dead. There are clearly many other neo-Classical subjects that were treated by painters and writers, but the et in Arcadia ego theme crystallizes and pinpoints the intellectual and emotional thrust of neo-classicism. Referencing the past enabled Guercino and Poussin to by-pass the Christian conception of death and develop a startlingly secular conception, in the guise of ancient paganism. The combination of the ‘‘Classical’’ features and clothing of the young shepherds, of the ancient monument and the statuesque positioning of the ﬁgures creates the detached, antiquated atmosphere of the Louvre painting. This distancing in time serves to intensify the dialectic of life and death embodied in the painting. But despite being constructed as a

256

HANNA SCOLNICOV

depiction of by-gone times in a distant country, the pseudo-Classical theme is made to bear directly on us, here and now. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the pictorial treatment of the theme is its clearly pagan aspect, the way in which it implicitly contradicts the Christian cycle of birth, passion and resurrection, the full-ﬂedged iconographic tradition of Christian devotional painting, from the nativity, through the cruciﬁxion, and up to the second coming. The protagonists in the two pictures of Poussin, though not in Guercino’s, are Classicallyclad shepherds and the tomb bears the inscription that announces the past existence of he who, like the present shepherds, inhabited Arcadia, the land of Classical myth. We are clearly out of the Christian story and deep into a neo-Classical narrative. Indeed, one could well argue that, by referring to a past within the past and by linking the present moment of the onlooker with that past, the pictorial treatment of the topic epitomizes the very essence of neo-Classicism, its very deﬁnition. T he skull A skull appears both in Guercino’s et in Arcadia ego and in Poussin’s ﬁrst depiction of the theme, but not in his later painting. One of the traditional icons of death, the skull was used as a memento mori both in medieval and Renaissance times. In the devotional context, remembering death was a continuous spiritual exercise which pre-supposed an afterlife. The constant contemplation of the image of death was intended to lead to a rejection of the snares of this world in favour of the world to come. The religious emphasis on remembering one’s end and preparing one’s soul for death is totally absent in these deliberately pagan paintings. Furthermore, unlike the memento mori, which was always kept in sight, a constant reminder of one’s mortality, the experience conveyed by the et in Arcadia ego paintings is of a sudden, unexpected encounter.7 T he epitaph Although enigmatic, the words inscribed on the tomb oﬀer a clue to the analysis of the paintings. The function of the inscription on the tomb is doubled by being also an inscription in the paintings. Any appearance of writing within a painting is intriguing, the words suggesting the attitude the artist would like the onlookers to assume towards his work. The use of written words indicates that the painter feels he has reached the limit

MEETING ONE’S DEATH IN ARCADIA

257

of the artistic eloquence of his medium. As a copy of a (ﬁctional!) carved inscription, the abstract idea contained in the phrase et in Arcadia ego becomes a pictorial element. With the disappearance of the skull in the last painting, the epitaph becomes especially prominent. The inscription on the tomb is puzzling and makes us stop in front of the picture to ponder its meaning, much like the shepherds who attempt to decipher its message. The tomb bears neither a name nor an eﬃgy, but the deceased communicates with the living, speaking out in the ﬁrst person. What he has to say, however, is totally impersonal. This is no traditional epitaph commemorating the dead or the heroic circumstances of his death. In no way does it refer to his life, his family, or his deeds. He does not even have a name. The lack of a commemorative epitaph is especially noticeable in view of the earliest source of the ‘‘Tomb in Arcadia’’ theme, in Virgil’s Eclogues V, where two shepherds lament the death of their friend Daphnis and one of them suggests the erection of a monument to him. Of special interest is the phrasing of the epitaph it should bear: A lasting monument to Daphnis raise With this inscription to record his praise: ‘‘Daphnis, the ﬁelds’ delight, the shepherds’ love, Renown’d on earth and deiﬁ’d above; Whose ﬂocks excelled the fairest on the plains, But less than he himself surpassed the swains.’’8

The absence of a personalized epitaph in these paintings can now be seen in perspective, as more than a mere omission. Rather, it is a deliberate expunging of the persona of Daphnis, the mythical shepherd commemorated in the poem through the quoted epitaph.9 The indeterminate epitaph quoted in the paintings gains in strength through this comparison with its origins. In choosing to avoid Virgil’s commemorative epitaph, both Guercino and Poussin extracted the tomb in Arcadia from its original narrative context and transformed it into an icon of death in the midst of life. The anonymity and impersonality of this conception suggests also a comparison with the death of Everyman in the late medieval morality play of that name.10 Everyman is an allegorical ﬁgure, ageless and characterless, a dramatic persona abstracted of any personalizing trait so that he can represent the full variety of human beings. He is totally unprepared for the summons of Death, but ﬁnds spiritual comfort in the ﬁnal sacraments oﬀered by the Church and in his faith in the afterlife. No similar

258

HANNA SCOLNICOV

religious message is conveyed by the depictions of death in Arcadia. The lonely monument bears witness to mortality with no afterlife, without even the promise of remembrance. In the act of deciphering the inscription, of pronouncing the ‘‘ego’’, the spectator is drawn into the depicted scene, becoming himself its subject: ‘‘I too am in Arcadia’’. Like the young shepherds, we too are implicated in the sentence. The viewer is no less baﬄed by the enigma presented in the pictures than the protagonists. The eﬀect is especially striking in Poussin’s Louvre painting, where, after the elimination of the redundant symbols of death, i.e., the skull, the ﬂy, the mouse and the maggot, all we are left with is a large, square stone tomb. The tomb guards its secrets, presenting us only with an ambiguous epitaph, which, through a linguistic quirk, engulfs the onlooker. Poussin’s addition of a female ﬁgure11 to Guercino’s male ﬁgures enables the female spectator too to become involved in the drama of the moment. In spelling out the words on the monument, we realize that it is not just the dead man who was, like us, in Arcadia, but also, conversely, that we, like him, are destined for death. The anonymity of tomb and inscription serves the iconographic comprehensiveness of the abstract idea expressed by the epitaph. The strong pictorial emphasis on the inscribed epitaph in the Louvre painting suggests that Poussin realized, avant la lettre, the indexical nature of its subject, of the ﬁrst person pronoun. The concept of an ‘‘indexical’’, or of ‘‘deixis’’, is useful for exposing the context-dependent reference of the epitaph. In his essay on Poussin’s painting,12 Louis Marin stresses ‘‘the deictic coordinates of the typical situation where the utterance is emitted, as well as adverbs of time and place.’’ In my interpretation, the indexical ‘‘ego’’ refers simultaneously both to the dead man and to whoever reads the inscription.13 Marin may seem to be working his way towards a reading similar to my own when he states that ‘‘the typical situation of emission is egocentric, every linguistic exchange implying automatically the shift of the centre of the deictic system when emission passes from one interlocutor to the other.’’14 However, his interest lies in introducing a notion of ‘‘the deictic structure of painting’’ through ‘‘the transference of the linguistic model of communication to painting’’, and in the place of the absent painter as the enunciator of the message. He analyzes the painting extensively in terms of the pointed index ﬁngers and directed gazes. When he does refer to the verbal element, he puts forward the idea that in the epitaph, ‘‘the writer inscribes here and now – that is, after his death – his ego as a

MEETING ONE’S DEATH IN ARCADIA

259

dead man’’. Marin also thinks that the eﬀect of reading the inscription establishes ‘‘a serene contemplation exorcising all anxiety’’.15 ‘‘My death’’ In fact, contrary to Marin’s conclusions, the viewer of the picture who reads out the indexical pronoun ‘‘ego’’ is forced to refer the ‘‘ego’’ to himself, hence to confront his or her own mortality. The perception of ‘‘my death’’ is quite diﬀerent from the perception of other deaths. This can be illustrated by a familiar example, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. When Hamlet picks up Yorick’s skull, he holds it at arm’s length and expostulates about the disappearance of all signs of life from the beloved face (Act 5, scene 1, lines 182–216). This famous passage is a very moving contemplation of the death of another. But when Hamlet hesitates to enter ‘‘the undiscovered country, / from whose bourn no traveller returns’’ (Act 3, scene 1, lines 78–79), when he refrains from committing suicide because he fears the unknown, he confronts his own death. Peter Koestenbaum has explicated the crucial diﬀerence between ‘‘my death’’ and the death of others. The death of another is the elimination of ‘‘an object within the world’’ without the elimination of ‘‘the observing ego or subject’’. We observe or imagine the death of another, but ‘‘my own death means the total disintegration and dissolution of my world. The death of myself is well described phenomenologically by the terms ‘void’ or ‘encounter’ with Nothingness’’. When I think about the death of others, I assume ‘‘the continuous presence of my own self or ego as the inescapable observer’’, whereas apprehending my own death means that I as observer must cease to be.16 The distinction between the deaths of others and my own death has interesting implications for the et in Arcadia ego theme. If the speaking subject of Poussin’s Louvre painting is the dead man, the Arcadian shepherd who used to live there, just like the young people who now surround his tomb, then I, as reader, realize through the indexical nature of the ‘‘ego’’ that the picture, although ostensibly dealing with the death of another, is ultimately about my own death. The painting establishes a dialectic of life and death between the shepherds and the tomb, and also between the live spectator and the mythical ﬁgures. The youthful appearance of the shepherds emphasizes the transient nature of their strength and vigour. But in fact, the only live character is the spectator who looks at the painting but remains outside it. The arrangement of the monument and ﬁgures in a plane facing the

260

HANNA SCOLNICOV

onlooker emphasizes our exclusion from the world of the picture. But the indexical nature of the inscription indicates that before long we shall be drawn to the other side of the ﬂat surface of the picture which now separates us. At present, as observers, we contemplate the tomb and the young people grappling with their own destiny, i.e. we contemplate the death of others. But in substituting one’s own ‘‘I’’ for the ‘‘ego’’ of he who has vanished without leaving any personal traces, each of us must grapple with his or her own death. It is the teasing conundrum contained in the inscription that makes us pause in front of Poussin’s Louvre painting, and to a lesser extent also in front of the two earlier paintings, in a way we do not in front of other, neo-Classical works. The powerful visual language of the painting combines with the inscribed verbal riddle to make us realize that this particular painting concerns us, that it encapsulates the enigma of our own life – and death. T el-Aviv University

NOTES 1 Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the V isual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 295–320. 2 ∞Other paintings of the et in Arcadia ego theme followed, notably Sir Joshua Reynolds’ double portrait of Mrs. Bouverie and Mrs. Crewe facing the funerary inscription (1766–67, in the Marquess of Crewe Collection). 3 For a descriptive discussion of the three paintings, cf. Pierre Rosenberg, Nicolas Poussin (London: Cassell, 1995), pp. 64–70. 4 Cf. Panofsky, p. 307. 5 Cf. Franc¸oise Duvignaud, T erre mythique, terre fantasme´e: L ’Arcadie (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1994), pp. 84–86. 6 T he Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Miﬄin, 1974). 7 On this point I disagree with Panofsky, pp. 309–310, who thinks that ‘‘Guercino’s picture turns out to be a mediaeval memento mori in humanistic disguise – a favorite concept of Christian moral theology shifted to the ideal milieu of classical and classicizing pastorals’’. 8 T he Works of V irgil, John Dryden (trans.), with an introduction by James Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), Pastoral V, p. 21. 9 If Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1502) is also a source for the paintings (Panofsky, pp. 303–304), then the elimination of the epitaph to be inscribed on the tomb of Phyllis is similarly indicative of the painters’ universalizing attitude. 10 Everyman, a modernized version by John Gassner, in John Gassner (ed.), Medieval and T udor Drama (New York: Bantam Books, 1963), pp. 204–230. 11 Although it is customary to see her as a shepherdess, some critics have pointed out her noble carriage and clothing, and Claude Le´vi-Strauss has even gone so far as to suggest that

MEETING ONE’S DEATH IN ARCADIA

261

she is a ﬁgure of Death or Destiny and that she is the implicit speaker of the words engraved on the tomb. Cf. ‘‘En regardant Poussin’’, Regarder e´couter lire (Paris: Plon, 1993), p. 20. 12 Louis Main, ‘‘Towards a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin’s T he Arcadian Shepherds’’, in Norman Bryson (ed.), Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 63–90. 13 For more on indexicality, see Ste´phane Chauvier, Dire ‘‘Je’’: Essai sur la subjectivite´ (Paris: Vrin, 2001), pp. 132–145. See also Jeﬀ Coulter, T he Social Construction of Mind: Studies in ethnomethodology and linguistic philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1979), ‘‘The concept of ‘I’ in linguistic philosophy’’, pp. 121–124. 14 Marin, p. 73. 15 Marin, p. 86. 16 Peter Koestenbaum, ‘‘The Vitality of Death’’ and ‘‘Outlines of an Existential Theory of Neuroses’’, as quoted by Paul Edwards, ‘‘My Death’’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), T he Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 417–418.

SECTION V CIPHERING LIFE: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

MARI´ A LUCRECIA ROVALETTI

OBJECTIVIZATION OF TIME IN THE OBSESSIVE WORLD

... the lucidity with which obsessive people know their trouble without being able to control it makes the paradox of their existence more evident and thus increases the interest of the psychiatrist (von Gebsattel, Antropologı´a Me´dica, 105).

A CULTURAL WORLD, MEDIATED BY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS

Unlike other superior mammals, human beings do not have a speciﬁc environment ﬁrmly structured because of the ‘‘poverty’’ of their biological constitution. To solve this ‘‘basic deﬁciency’’, they need to be placed within a speciﬁc cultural and social order which is mediated by the ‘‘signiﬁcant others’’ who look after them. This integration makes it possible to internalize norms, rules and traditions and, at the same time, it is a support that replaces instinctive regulation. Through primary socialization, the child acquires a pre-theoretical knowledge, in the ﬁrst place with regard to the institutional world. This is a world that is constituted by the sum of what ‘‘everybody knows’’ and that provides the proper rules of behavior, that is, a body of ‘‘recipe knowledge’’ (Schutz) that will enable him to adapt to the norms of his culture, with its areas of control, allowance, and interdiction. There is a progressive diﬀerentiation that the child establishes between his Ego and others as of the moment of his birth. During this process he undergoes many vicissitudes, according to each phase and evolutionary crisis, such as the moment of weaning, the Oedipus conﬂict, latency, puberty and adolescence. The cultural frame is introduced from the beginning through parental roles. Therefore, the way in which the relation between nature and culture is articulated, especially in the ﬁelds of sexuality1 and aggression,2 becomes essential. On the one hand, too early and severe teaching to control his sphincter and a restrictive control of motor development by the mother may restrain the phase of early rebelliousness, the T rotphase (Spitz), the ﬁrst sign of autonomy, but, on the other, the establishment of a ‘‘normative order’’ by a rigorous, authoritarian father creates an early sense of guilt, since the children are focused on the need 265 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 265–274. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

266

MARI´ A LUCRECIA ROVALETTI

for being obedient. When this incorporation of the Homo sapiens species to culture is produced in an over-adapted way, it may lead to the constitution of an ‘‘obsessive world’’. As for these persons, ‘‘in their revolt against order, they constantly attempt to break the ordering structure and function’’ (Lang, 8), and they do so through abstract thoughts and magical rituals. The neutralization of aggression is created through the omnipotence of thought. Obsession allows the simultaneous coexistence of generative impulsions of disorder and reiterated defenses against them. In this case, the constraint (Zwang) replaces freedom. Because the ordinary moments of everyday life lose their quality of invitation or request, the person, instead of being an open possibility and a subject of desire, becomes the object of a command that is imposed upon him. Nevertheless, the relationship between the obsessive person and the order represented by the primary ‘‘other’’ appears as deeply ambivalent. Actually, he responds at the same time with an over-adaptation and wishes to fulﬁl his desires and acquire his autonomy, which leads him to fantasies of destruction of that order and its representatives, even the authors of the law. As Lang points out (1985, 6) this well-known aggressiveness ‘‘seems to be based on the other. The person’s deep feelings of guilt and anxiety seem to come from this source. The obsessive-neurotic individual3 is prone to profane, and he is an imaginary criminal par excellence’’. This is the reason why the obsessive individual must constantly hide his desires and instinctive (pulsional) needs; he must ‘‘repress’’ them, ‘‘isolate’’ them, ‘‘displace’’ them. He must, in a retroactive way, annul any attempt of realization, he must impose himself penance on his mortal sins, be puriﬁed through magical rituals of cleanness so as not to be exposed to the threat of destruction and condemnation. In this way he must permanently assure – even through displacement and magic, that the other, whose death he wishes, is still alive. Thus, the one that seeks to subvert the order becomes a fanatic protector of this same order, whereas the one who has suﬀered the constraint of cleanness habits and deeply inside revolts against them becomes a perfectionist for cleanness (Lang, 1985, 6–7).

In spite of this revolt against order, the obsessive individual can internalize this order with its rules. This is the reason why he never regards the forbidden impulsions which arise as anxiety for his conscience (Benedetti, 80), as totally strange to him and, despite the apparent familiarity with which he experiences the obsessive phenomena, he feels guilty because of them.

THE OBJECTIVIZATION OF TIME IN THE OBSESSIVE WORLD

267

THE DISEASE OF THE ACTION OR THE INCAPACITY FOR CONCLUDING

In order to overcome their organic deﬁciencies, human beings need to transform the environment through their activity, thus constituting a world. This is what Gehlen calles a ‘‘praxical being’’ (ein handeln Wessen). It is precisely within the obsessive person that this ‘‘capacity of acting’’ is transformed, and this becomes an obstacle to start new actions or ﬁnish the ones that the obsessive has already begun. Each action requires complicated preparation behaviors and long introductions which never come to an end. This insecurity makes him suﬀer and paralyses him. A patient used to say: ‘‘I know I have put on my jacket but I am not convinced.’’ ‘‘I know that I have turned oﬀ the gas, but just in case ...’’ ‘‘I know I did not turn on the gas and that, besides, I have already checked it, but I need to be sure and check again’’. ‘‘If I sum up all this time ... how many books I could have read ...’’

Although he is rationally aware of his actions and has no confusion at all, he suddenly doubts and cannot be calm unless he restarts the actions or controls them, at least until a pre-ﬁxed point in time which he tries desperately to maintain. This is the reason why he can never feel sure that the task has been accomplished. ‘‘I need powerful ways to be able to start or ﬁnish’’ (von Gebsattel, 1966, 141). The impossibility of concluding something has to do with the fact that his activity lacks a structured vital history and, thus, the experience of ﬁnalization. That is, it does not have a sense. However perfect it might be, the completed action does not bring about the personal experience of the ﬁnished event. Being unable to keep a distance (entfernen, Heidegger), he cannot achieve a real proximity to reality. The more this pathology progresses, the more enclosed he becomes in a mechanical program, and the narrower his possibilities of action. He can only lead a life with a lot of eﬀort, without really participating in it. According to Leclaire’s metaphor, he plays the role of the dead in the bridge. EXISTING AS A PROGRAM

The obsession with order, perfection, accuracy and control of everything expresses a ‘‘mania for precision’’: even if an action is ﬁnished, it never becomes complete; even if it is accomplished, it will never be perfect. This

268

MARI´ A LUCRECIA ROVALETTI

forces the obsessive individual to carry out a ‘‘ceremonial’’ which divides actions in parts and subparts exactly determined according to their content, exactly separated and in an exact ﬁxed order. Von Gebsattel talks about a ‘‘duty of decomposing’’ (saccadieren) of all movements, a fragmentation that ends up extending to all the person’s vital activities. Things are not lived and used (Zuhandenheit), but considered in their simple ‘‘subsistence’’ (Vorhandenheit), to use Heidegger’s terms. This behavior in which an action is fragmented into gestures and elemental actions according to a rigid sequential order is opposed to the behavior of a healthy being, for whom an action develops according to a continuous and spontaneous movement in which each phase contains its precedent and announces the following. This repeated operation of the ‘‘power of braking ‘’, that is the de-composition of activities, shows the peculiar characteristic of the obsessive will. It is not a question of dividing the action to learn better, but of protecting himself from those amorphous forces that range from error and inaccuracy to dirt and sin. Strauss points out that ‘‘repugnance’’ is present as a defense against fusion with decay and putrefaction. Lack of accuracy brings about guilt and annoyance. Inaccuracy turns out to be similar to dirt. Since inaccuracy is comparable to dirt, as soon as the obsessive faces diﬃculty, however unimportant it might be, he feels that it can make dirt become visible. Strauss shows this correspondence: Exact=pure=clean Inexact=impure=dirty The time of life becomes a tyrannical chronometry which rules existence with clockwork regularity. The vital structure of the totality of the action is replaced by a voluntary ‘‘ordering schema’’ of the act. The divided action lacks the articulation between a ‘‘not anymore’’ (past), an ‘‘immediate’’ (present) and an ‘‘after’’ (future); instead, we just ﬁnd a series of present punctual events; ‘‘ﬂuency is replaced by ﬁat, by the analyzing command’’ (von Gebsattel 1996, 147). Inmanent time becomes objective time that divides all reality into parts and makes it look geometric. The movement from punctual moments to other punctual moments indicates a homogenization of time and a loss of the temporal structure of action. The person tries to control this order, but a minimal fault annuls the total eﬀect of the act. This is also experienced as a guilty omission compelling a repetition, but this time, repeating each step with more attention and thoroughness.

THE OBJECTIVIZATION OF TIME IN THE OBSESSIVE WORLD

269

Being a fanatic of programming what can and cannot happen, the individual is capable of ruling himself. Nevertheless, this unmodiﬁable rigidity in the program transforms the peculiarity and originality of the vital course of events into a chain of problems. In contrast with the healthy person, what is new is neither a supporting motive nor a direction to follow, and he cannot let himself be carried away by the innovative forces of life. The unexpected and the new is the enemy of the obsessive, who can only keep aloof from the world. Repetition has a reassuring eﬀect: routine is opposed to the anxious uncertainty of an anticipated future. The obsessive person needs to classify his memories regularly, make a list of the tasks and future projects to be accomplished. In the same way, he tries to be precise about time and ﬁx it. But this rigid order destroys temporal ﬂuidity. The linear direction of time is stopped and replaced by a cyclic operation, enclosed in itself and repeating in an unending and exhaustive way. The obsessive return and the obsessive stereotype replace anticipation. In normal life, every fault is erased by overcoming the past and projecting oneself into the future. The obsessive, on the contrary, cannot let go of the past that attracts him and seems to be something unﬁnished: he suﬀers from a past which is too imposing, qualitatively and quantitatively marked by the trace of a precocious happiness; too early, too precious. Nothing new is worthy in comparison to it. In this ‘‘inversion of the temporal structure’’ (von Gebsattel 1966, 145), it is the past and not the future which leads the patient to his phobic obsession with cleanliness, a parable of a life which is a standstill and unable to be puriﬁed. The future is abolished, and the obsessive conspires against the near future, ﬁlling it with tasks to do, order, classify and ﬁnish in an endless ﬁxedness and repetition. The movement of ‘‘becoming’’ is stopped, and the future is lost. It even changes its direction and sinks into threat of the formless. This is the reason why Jean Sutter (1990, 168) says that the person is a ‘‘deserter of the combats of existence’’ that tries to mask the others. The obsessive person shows an avoidance of chronogenesis for the beneﬁt of a dry chronometry, and this tyrannized chronology hides a hate of time that goes by, transforms us and faces us with our ﬁnite condition. (Chamond, 1992, 84)

Nevertheless, this formal simpliﬁcation creates the possibility of a positive behavior, whereas the situation seems to have no exit. Paralyzed when faced with duty, he is incapable of anticipating; only be facing the

270

MARI´ A LUCRECIA ROVALETTI

simpliﬁed and artiﬁcial world he can ﬁnd himself capable of action. This is shown by Lang when he considers the dialectical quality of defense: it is an impoverishment, but also an attempt to protect the self. The symptom is ambivalent, for it is pathological but at the same time prevents the person from experiencing a deeper unhappiness. With regard to these ‘‘obsessive behaviors’’, Jaspers refers to ‘‘counter-regulation mechanisms’’ facing insecurity, fear and disorder. Lang speaks of ‘‘behaviors of additional security’’ that enable the person to keep some order in spite of his own desires of destruction. This ‘‘rigid order’’ represents the best ‘‘defenses against the amorphous forces’’4 (von Gebsattel 1966, 187) that the obsessive can reach, but as a static and programmed project it is closed to all novelty.

AN IMPRISONED TEMPORALITY

This need for representing any data or fact with precision ends up homogenizing what is signiﬁcant and what is non-signiﬁcant, and all the richness of life is completely lost. This immobility evokes a petriﬁcation of existence. The rhythmic repetition of ﬁxed rituals imprisons obsessive temporality in a hyper-regulation that invades the whole of a person’s life. In order to master time, he needs to objectivize it, making it homogenous and canceling any variability and ﬂuency. Time becomes geometric, spatial. The person cannot live a ‘‘living present’’ (Husserl) because his defense mechanisms try to deny, ﬁx or fragment temporal ﬂuidity. The retroactive annulment produces an evasive temporality; isolation reproduces a sort of cut in the psychic life between the representations and their emotions, creating a fragmented personal experience, a cold speech with no feelings and a merely rational logic. The obsessive makes time wait. The future produces anxiety because he is the prisoner of a past which he cannot overcome and to which he is still attached: a past intensely marked by the love-hate ambivalence that makes any idea of the future impossible. The only option is to remain enclosed in the repetition of what is identical. In its reiterative monotony, the obsessive ritual responds to a circular and non-vectorial temporality (Chamond). Nevertheless, the ritual provides two kinds of pleasures: one is to restore fulﬁllment and support a narcissistic megalomania in the rhythmic erotogenic activity, whereas the other tries to eroticize the temporal development itself as a movement. The segmented time, support of the obsessive ritual, becomes the eroti-

THE OBJECTIVIZATION OF TIME IN THE OBSESSIVE WORLD

271

cized time-object: the rhythm with no content becomes libidinized, displacing the emotion that stems from an unbearable idea. According to Lang (1985), the immobility of the vital course of events (von Gebsattel) would express an immobilized relationship with death which, in its antinomy of desire and rejection, eliminates any possibility of a creative relationship with the future. This is observed mainly in the way in which the obsessive enters the world of the law: he wants to destroy the order and, at the same time, preserve it. However, any attempt to lock this world crossed by destructive forces in a fortress will lead to failure, because the enemy dwells in its own internal world, besieged by inopportune, unsustainable, obscene and blasphemous thoughts that he wants to silence at any cost. The obsessive’s existence is a constant ﬁght between two worlds: the attack of the antieidos (the formless, disorder, dirt, corruption, rottenness, microbes ...), and the world of defense (obsessions, compulsions, rituals ...). DEATH, THE DRAMA OF A FIGHT

The life of the obsessive person becomes a ﬁght against the life he leads as a shadow. Since this life is focused on the loss of its own form – its own eidos – the symbols of those powers diluting the form are exposed to the anti-eidos in all its possible activities: paralyzation, dirt, putrefaction and, ﬁnally, death. ‘‘La mort s’annonce de facon permanent dans la physiognomie de la perte de forme et il faut constantemment la refouler’’ (Tellenbach, 94). Although death condenses the inexplicable, the inevitable, the lack in form, obsessive behaviors can protect against them. Relations of coexistence revolve under the sign of love and destruction. This is why the obsessive-neurotic individual does his best to protect himself against death but is at the same time fascinated by it: ‘‘he exists from death and is ﬁxated on it’’ (Lang, 1985). This sort of original repression that veils death constitutes an existential way of Dasein which is in no way less constitutional than the revealing of his own being as a ‘‘being towards death’’. The incapacity for being aware of the reality of death and our uncertainty in connection with it makes us create operations to balance this feeling of helplessness and create some distance through a symbolic dimension. This does not necessarily involve a denial of facing the real but a will to survive, a cultural manifestation of magniﬁcation and a dream of a world. The ﬁrst traces of human culture, vestiges and oﬀerings are symbols of something else, and they are not reduced to their concrete

272

MARI´ A LUCRECIA ROVALETTI

immediateness. They are a testimony of death because they are the deadthing, an indication that goes beyond the blind immediateness of death. The obsessive person, ‘‘fenced by the anxiety of repetition and the risk of falling into a delusion, suspends time, becomes immobile, appears to be dead’’ (Minard, 232). However, death may acquire another sense when facing the problem of freedom. Precisely when these kind of patients, ... succeed in escaping from psychotic disintegration through their counter-thoughts and counter-actions is because they are trying, at any cost, to oppose a free realization of themselves to their determination: their annulments are a barrier for the counter-ﬁnality of their existence, and their compulsions acquire the sense of a compulsion to freedom. The drama of their ﬁght constitutes the greatness of their struggle. (Chamond, 2000)

Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientı´ﬁcas y T e´cnicas (CONICET) Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) Argentina NOTES 1 As is shown by the primary law of regulation of incest, expressed in the Oedipus conﬂict, in the anal-phase the child ﬁnds pleasure in playing with his excrement (expulsion-retention) and gives pleasure to others by obeying their authority, thus obtaining approval or disapproval. He is aware of the power he has on his familiar surroundings through the satisfaction or lack of respect of the cleanness habits. 2 The aggression expresses an attempt, highly guilty, of revolt against parental demands, such as the requirements that the child be clean (sphincter control), ordered and obedient. The ﬁght between the rejected instincts of the Superego are expressed in the ambivalence observed in the permanent oscillation between desire and prohibition. 3 Psychoanalysis understands this pathology as a partial regression to the sadistic-anal phase with an excessive ﬁxation on it. 4 For the psychotic patient, who has a defective incorporation of the human order, these mechanisms are not enough, and a new way of facing the basic deﬁciency appears: delusion. That is why schizophrenics with some previous obsessive symptoms have a relatively good prognosis (Muller).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Azorin, J.L., Cavallere, M. and Giudicelli, S. ‘‘Le destin de l’obse´de´.’’ Bulletin de la Socie´te´ de Psychiatrie de Marseille et du Sud Est Me´dite´rrane´en, 37 (1979): 167–174. Ballerini, A. and Stanghellini, G. ‘‘Obsession and revelation: anthropo-phenomenological questions.’’ Comprendre. Archive International pour l’Anthropologie Phe´nome´nologique, 5 (1990): 21–26. Ballu´s, C. and Vallejo, J. ‘‘Epidemiology and risk factors in obsessive-compulsive disorders.’’ In Problems of psychiatry in general practice: neurasthenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder,

THE OBJECTIVIZATION OF TIME IN THE OBSESSIVE WORLD

273

advances in treatment of depression, teaching and training of the GP, M. Gastpar and P. Kielholz (eds). New York: Hogrefe & Huber, 1991, 130–134. Baravalle, G., Jorge, C. H., Ferrer, N. Y. and Vacarezza, L. E. Manı´a, dudas y rituales; teorı´a y clı´nica psicoanalı´tica de la neurosis obsesiva. Barcelona-Buenos Aires-Me´xico: Paidos, 1997. Benedetti, G. Psychodynamik der Zwangsneurose. Darmstad: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978. Callieri, B. ‘‘Aspetti antropologici della religiosita` anancastica.’’ Archivio di Psicologia, Neurologia e Psichiatria, Anno XX (Marzo-Giugno 1959), Fasc. II–III: 205–212. Chamond, Jeanine. ‘‘Pe´nibles devenirs dans les ne´vroses; Hyste´rie, la temporalite´ close´.’’ Cliniques Me´diterrane´ennes (Toulouse: Eres), (1992) 35/36: 75–90 (Inscribed at L es T emps pour les Devenirs); ——. ‘‘Prolego´menos al ana´lisis existencial de las neurosis: los estilos histe´rico, obsesivo y fo´bico’’. Presentetion a la V conferencia Internacional de Psicologı´a y Psiquiatrı´a fenomenolo´gica. Buenos Aires: Facultad de Psicologı´a UBA, 2000. (To be published). Charron, G. Freud et le proble`me de la culpabilite´. Ottawa: Universite´ de Ottawa, 1979. Corveleyn, J. ‘‘Hyste´rie et ne´vrose obsessionnelle.’’ En J. Florence; A., Vergote; J., Corveleyn; R., Bernet; P., Moyaert; L., Cassiers. Psychanalyse: l’homme et ses destins. Bruxelles: Peeters; 1993, 49–108. Deve`ze, O. Approches phe´nome´nologiques de la maladie obsessionnelle, Memoire: pre´sent, le 9 Janvier 1988 pour obtenir le C.E.S. de psychiatrie, Nice, Faculte´ de Medecine; 1988; ——. ‘‘La souillure qui s’approche’’, Comprendre, 2 (1988): 22–32; ——. ‘‘La spatialisation del’obse´de´’’, Nervure, 2 (7) (nov 1989): 8–12; ——. ‘‘Habiter: a propos du cas E. Sp., de V. E. von Gebsattel’’, L ’Evolution psychiatrique; 55 (3) ( juill-sept 1990): 493–502; ——. ‘‘Les ‘rituels’: e´tude descriptive de l’activite´ compulsionnelle-obsessionnelle’’, Synapse, 53 (avril 1989): 62–67. Ebtinger, R. and Patris, M. ‘‘Souci de l’obsessionnel: corps propre et corps social.’’ Confrontations psychiatriques, 20 (1981): 107–144. Freud, S. ‘‘Inhibicio´n, sı´ntoma y angustia’’, vol. III; ‘‘Ana´lisis de un caso de neurosis obsesiva: ‘El hombre de las Ratas’ ’’, vol.II; ‘‘Psicoana´lisis, Cinco Lecciones’’, vol. T omo II, in Obras completas. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1973. Gebsattel, V. E. von, Antropologı´a Me´dica. Madrid: Rialp, 1966. Gebsattel, V. E. von, Imago hominis: contribuciones a una antropologı´a de la personalidad, Madrid: Gredos, 1964); ——. ‘‘El mundo de los compulsivos’’ in Existencia, R. May (ed.). Madrid: Gredos, 1964. Hesnard, A. L es phobies et la ne´vrose phobique. Paris: Payot, 1961. Holmberg, G. ‘‘Obsessive-compulsive disorders in adults.’’ In Problems of psychiatry in general practice: neurasthenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, advances in treatment of depression, teaching and training of the GP, M. Gastpar and P. Kielholz (eds.). New York: Hogrefe & Huber, 1991, 148–153. Husserl, E. Zur Pha¨nomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins,Huss. X. The Hague: Nijhof, 1966. Janet, P. L es neuroses. Paris: Flammarion, 1909. Jaspers, K. Psicopatologı´a General. Me´xico: F.C.E., 1993. Lang, H. ‘‘Existence et de´fense.’’ In Psychiatrie et existence, P. Fe´dida and J. Schotte (eds.). Grenoble: J. Millon, 1991;

274

MARI´ A LUCRECIA ROVALETTI

——. ‘‘Reﬂexiones antropolo´gicas sobre el feno´meno de la obsesio´n.’’ Revista Chilena de Neuro-psiquiatrı´a, 23 (1985): 3–9. Lanteri-Laura, G. et al. Ne´vrose obsesionelle, Encyclope´die Me´dico-Chirugicale, 3:37370 D10–5 (1965). Lebovici, S. ‘‘Ne´vrose obsessionnelle de l’adolescence.’’ Confrontations Psychiatriques, 29 (1988): 125–39. Leclaire, S. ‘‘L’obsessionnel et son de´sir.’’ L ’ Evolution psychiatrique, 3 (1959): 383–412 Merleau-Ponty, M. Phe´nome´nologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Minard, M., Monfouga-Boustra, M., Boustra, J. ‘‘Les obsessions entre mythe et rite, approche ethnopsychanalytique.’’ Confrontations psychiatriques, 20 (1981): 227–243. Morano Dominguez, C. Creer despues de Freud. Madrid: Editorial Paulinas, 1991. Pe´licier, Y. Introduction a` la vie de l«obse´de´. Paris: Laboratorios Pﬁzer, 1976. Rapoport, J. L. and Swedo, Susan E. ‘‘Obsessive-compulsive disorders in children.’’ In Problems of psychiatry in general practice: neurasthenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, advances in treatment of depression, teaching and training of the GP, M. Gastpar, P. Kielholz (eds.). New York: Hogrefe & Huber, 1991, 154–159. Reed, G. F. ‘‘Discussion: The obsessional-compulsive experience: a phenomenological reemphasis.’’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 37, (March 1977): 381–385. Stanguellini, G. and Ballerini, A. Obssesione e rivelazione. Riﬂessione sui rapporti tra ossessivita` e delirio. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1992. Sibony, D. ‘‘Propos sur la ne´vrose obsessionnelle.’’ In L a haine du de´sir. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984. Straus, E. ‘‘La patologı´a de la compulsio´n.’’ In Psicologı´a Fenomenolo´gica. Buenos Aires: Paido´s, 1971. Sutter, J. L ’anticipation: psychologie et psychopathologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. Tellenbach, H. ‘‘L’espace et l’obsession.’’ In Espace et psychopathologie, Y. Pe´licier (coord.). Paris: Economica, 1983, 89–98. Vergote, A. Dette et de´sir: deux axes chre´tiens et la de´rive pathologique. Paris: Seuil, 1978.

WILFRIED VER EECKE1 AND RICHARD COBB-STEVENS

PHENOMENOLOGY, LINGUISTIC INTENTIONALITY, AFFECTIVITY AND VILLEMOES’ NEW THERAPY FOR SCHIZOPHRENICS

PART I. PHENOMENOLOGY, LINGUISTIC INTENTIONALITY AND HELPING THE MENTALLY ILL ( W. VER EECKE)

Introduction Phenomenology is a discipline that helps people to avoid two forms of reductionism. It avoids the reduction of the mind to the brain by pointing to the many active intentionalities present in our everyday life. It also helps avoid crude psychological reductionism of the kind that is not attentive to the many diﬀerent kinds and forms of intentionalities of which human beings are capable.2 In this paper, I will pay particular attention to linguistic intentionality and its crucial role in the method of treating schizophrenics developed by Palle Villemoes, a Swedish psychiatrist.

Phenomenology and L inguistic Intentionality In his essay ‘‘Words, Pictures, and Symbols,’’ Robert Sokolowski points out that perception can give rise to two series of intentionalities. The ﬁrst series consist of perception, remembering, imagination, and anticipation. The second series consists of perception, signiﬁcation (using a word to refer to something), picturing, and indication (smoke is seen as an indication of ﬁre). Perceptively, Sokolowski diﬀerentiates the two series by claiming that the ﬁrst series is much more closely connected to sensibility than the second series. The second series, claims Sokolowski creates objects that are more intellectual and thus more closely allied with activities of the mind (Sokolowski 2000, 85–86). I want to dwell on one form of intentionality in the second series: signiﬁcation. Sokolowski calls this signitive intention (Sokolowski, 78). He gives the revealing example of an emerging signitive intention: one looks at a piece of paper covered with a seemingly meaningless collection of dots; slowly, the dots resolve into recognizable words: ‘‘The Burritt Hotel.’’ Compared with perception, Sokolowski points out that signitive 275 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 275–290. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

276

WILFRIED VER EECKE AND RICHARD COBB-STEVENS

intention diﬀers in at least three fundamental ways. First, perception refers to what is present as present. Signitive intention refers to the absent and can make it present in its absence. To be more speciﬁc, by reading the words ‘‘The Burritt Hotel’’ I know that I am not in the physical presence of that hotel. I am, however, present to the Hotel in some way. If I am not physically present to the hotel then I can still be mentally present to it or make it mentally present to me. Signitive intention is thus a more mental intention than perception. As perception is present in animals whereas signitive intention is not, Sokolowski concludes that this form of intention is thus more characteristically human than perception (86). Second, perception consists of a fulﬁlled intention augmented by a number of empty intentions. The fulﬁlled intention in perception is understood to be a perspectival view that can be complemented by other perspectival views. When I see the front of a desk I perceive it as an object by my awareness that it has sides and a back. These latter Sokolowski calls empty intentions. In perception the co-intended empty intentions are ‘‘continuous and ever changing’’ with the slightest change of the human body, of its head, or even of its eyes (79). On the other hand, a signitive intention makes the object present ‘‘all at once and as a whole’’ (79). The words ‘‘The Burritt Hotel’’ refer to the hotel in its totality rather than in a perspectival way. The word therefore can be said to refer to the object at once. Signitive intention is discrete, not continuous as in perception. Signitve intention is also more choppy and identiﬁable rather than smooth and gradual like perception (79). Third, signitive intentions allow for the connection of the word used with other possible words, which can then be put into a syntactic statement. Thus, having referred to a hotel, I know that I can use other words to comprehend the intended object. If it is a hotel, it must have an entrance, it must have a reception area, it must have rooms with beds, etc. Thus signitive intention prepares the way for linguistic reasoning (79). Sokolowski therefore concludes that signitive intention is (potentially) a more rational intention. Another phenomenologist, De Waelhens has pointed out that the use of words has another characteristic worth describing. De Waelhens uses as his starting point the description by Freud of his one and half year old grandson (De Waelhens/Ver Eecke, 143 ﬀ; Freud, S.E., XVIII, 14–17). Freud assures us that his grandchild had normal and warm relations with his mother. Contrary to other children of his age, the child did not cry when his mother went away. He seemed to be able either to cover over or to repress the pain that other children experience when they are separated from their mother. Freud observed that his grandchild had

VILLEMOES’ NEW THERAPY FOR SCHIZOPHRENICS

277

developed a game. He had a spool which he threw over the side of his crib and then pulled it back. While throwing it over the side of the crib, the boy would say -o- and when pulling the spool back the child would say -a-. With the help of the mother, Freud interpreted the sounds -oand -a- as meaning fort (gone) and da (here). Freud argued that the child ﬁrst mentally substituted the spool for the mother and then actively played the game of the mother leaving and returning. The spool performed the function of the transitional object from the theory of Winnicott (Winnicott 1991, 1–25). It was an aﬀective substitute for the mother. But in making the spool a substitute for the mother, the child became the one who decided on the re-appearance or the disappearance of the mother. The child could play at making the mother re-appear and disappear. He was in control and thus could enjoy his mastery of the fading of the mother. The joy at playing through the disappearance and re-appearance of the mother could still be destroyed by the loss of the spool. However, in substituting the sounds -o- and -a- which in turn stood for the words ‘‘gone’’ and ‘‘here’’ the child had deﬁnitively overcome the pain of experiencing the disappearance of the mother. Freud calls this one of the greatest developmental achievements of the child. De Waelhens brings the description of Freud’s grandson into connection with Freud’s theoretical concept of primal repression (De Waelhens/ Ver Eecke, 143–167). Freud observed that repression created a curious situation. After an experience was repressed, consciousness did not have the ability to undo that repression because – so Freud observed – the repressed got entangled with other repressed phenomena and thus was, as it were, held back by its connections with the other repressed phenomena. Such reasoning about repression creates a diﬃculty for Freudian theory similar to that found in Aristotle’s theoretical explanation of movement by prior movement. Both authors had to accept that the ﬁrst phenomenon – be it the ﬁrst movement or the ﬁrst repression – had to be of a totally diﬀerent kind. Before Aristotle knew what the nature of the ﬁrst movement was he had to accept that it was diﬀerent from all other movements. Similarly, before Freud could know what the nature of the ﬁrst repression was – called the primal or primary repression – he was forced to introduce the concept.3 De Waelhens points out that children are very attached to their mothers. Children cry when their mothers leave them. Successfully using a transitional object and then later successfully using words to deal with the disappearance of the mother is to be interpreted as the child succeeding in allowing the mother to disappear without experiencing the pain normally associated with the disappearance

278

WILFRIED VER EECKE AND RICHARD COBB-STEVENS

of the mother. De Waelhens connects the successful introduction of words to deal with the disappearance of the mother with the introduction of primal repression. I now wish to connect the claims of De Waelhens to the descriptions and analyses of Sokolowski. Sokolowski points out that perception has a sensible dimension and that the senses present us with a world we experience as something continuous. Signitive intentions, on the contrary, are choppy (79). Signitive intentions present objects ‘‘all at once and as a whole’’ (ibid.). Using words to refer to a perceived reality thus does not leave the perceptual world untouched. Sokolowski implies that the use of words – signitive intentionality – chops and cuts up the perceived world. Instead of a continuous perceptual world, I now have a chopped up world consisting of discrete objects: a table, a desk, etc. Furthermore, instead of perceptual objects consisting of empty intentions I now possess mental objects in their totality.4 The inﬁnite richness of perceptual impressions is erased in favor of an abstract concept. Commenting on Hegel, Koje`ve calls this function of the word the killing of the object in all its perceptual richness (Koje`ve, 140). If words have a repressive capability with reference to the perceptual richness of the world, can we not imagine that words also have a repressive potential with reference to aﬀective attachments to the perceptual world? In particular, what of the world of the child that includes its mother and its aﬀective attachment to her: could not the use of words to replace the mother indicate a comparable loss of the mother as De Waelhens teaches us in his interpretation of Freud’s concept of primal repression? Sokolowski also points to a more positive function of the signitive intention concerning the use of words. Sokolowski calls it the entrance into linguistic reasoning. Indeed, when I say that it is ‘‘The Burritt Hotel’’ and I approach it but the building does not have a door on the street side by which I approach the hotel, the word hotel used for the building tells me that a hotel has an entrance. A word and the possible connections with other words related to that object provide a guide for my behavior in the world of objects. As I am calling the building a hotel, even if I do not see a door on the street side of the building, I am not paralyzed. I know there must be an entrance somewhere. Conﬁdently, I walk around the building until I discover the entrance. Thus the transformation of the experiential world of perception into a linguistic world provides me with freedom because it provides a guide for action. Signitive intentionality makes use of words. But the use of words requires that we submit to all kinds of rules. First, there are the phonetic

VILLEMOES’ NEW THERAPY FOR SCHIZOPHRENICS

279

rules. One needs to make the eﬀort to diﬀerentiate properly between the sounds such as -r- and -l- or between -t- and -th.5 Second, one needs to accept as obligatory the arbitrary connection made in a particular culture between words and objects. Two stories illustrate the presence of rules in the use of words and the psychological reactions that are possible to such rules. In the early years of our family life we spoke Dutch at home while the children spoke English in pre-K. One morning, I asked my daughter to open ‘‘de venster,’’ to which my daughter replied somewhat angrily: ‘‘This is not a ‘venster,’ it is a ‘window.’ ’’ She felt that a rule had been broken. Later in our family life, when we had two children, I remember them coming to the breakfast table and, while pointing to the peanut butter jar, saying that it was jam. Then they would point to the jar of jam and say that it was peanut butter. While violating the rule of language, my children would burst into laughter. I could interpret their joy only as an enjoyment of violating the rules of social life in an area where the violation did not present a threat. Clearly, if speaking, if signitive intentionality demands the submission to rules, do we not need to suppose that the children will need some help to accept the burden of submitting to these rules? This is precisely what Husserl observes in his small essay ‘‘The Child. The First Empathy.’’6 He writes that ‘‘Names ﬁrst of all have the objective world as a presupposition. From its mother, its father, and so on, the child learns to understand the naming of those things to which they refer’’ (5). Clearly, the statement by Husserl implies that naming makes no sense if there is not an objective world to be named. Informed by Sokolowski, we can claim more. We can claim that naming implies that the sensible world is transformed in an objective world: i.e., a world consisting not just of sense data, but of objects – that is, separable entities with characteristics not revealed by our mere senses. In imitating the adult’s act of naming, the child learns to use the mental objects of the naming intentionally and so create the objective world presupposed in the adult’s act of naming. The child thus borrows a form of intentionality it does not yet possess. We can therefore suppose that the child enriches its subjectivity and its sense of agency by using the borrowed form of signitive intentionality. This line of reasoning leads to a puzzle, also noted by Husserl: ‘‘How does the child come to say ‘I’?’’ Husserl then generalizes the puzzle to include questions such as to how the child learns to understand personal pronouns and what have, in the contemporary literature, come to be known as indexicals (5). As ‘I’ means something diﬀerent when used by

280

WILFRIED VER EECKE AND RICHARD COBB-STEVENS

the mother as when used by the child, the use of pronouns will only be possible if the child has established some form of distance between itself and its mother. A New T reatment Method for Schizophrenics The previous remarks should allow us to understand the therapeutic method developed by the Swedish psychiatrist, Villemoes. It is well known that schizophrenics do not use pronouns properly (De Waelhens/Ver Eecke, 207). Thus, when asked if their parents liked them, schizophrenics answer that no they did not like them. As schizophrenics do not know how to use pronouns, Villemoes concludes that therapists should not treat schizophrenics as dialogue partners. They should not, for instance, position the patients in front of them. Rather, Villemoes puts the patients next to him, three feet apart and in the chair closest to the door.7 He further argues that one should ask no questions of such patients and, when the patients ask questions, one should acknowledge the questions but not answer them. Instead, Villemoes describes the environment of the patient. In contrast to the treatment of autistic patients who need to be taught the use of words, Villemoes emphasizes that schizophrenics need to be taught the use of the structural functions of language. The therapist should use genitives, prepositions, adverbs, adjectives, and conjunctions. The use of a structuring language transforms the world of the patients. As the insights of Sokolowski help us to understand, the use of language has a repressive function in that it represses the richness and the captivating aspects of sense perception in favor of the mental present in linguistic intentionality – I am here substituting the term ‘‘linguistic intentionality’’ for Sokolowski’ s ‘‘signitive intentionality.’’ One of the ﬁrst positive consequences of Villemoes describing the sensual world of the schizophrenics is that they stop being startled by changes in the perceptual world. Two more changes emerge in the behavior of the schizophrenics. They start idolizing the therapist and they start re-arranging the objects in their room. Villemoes’ interpretation of these three signs of change is sophisticated, but sheds light on and is in turn clariﬁed by Sokolowski’s and Husserl’s phenomenology of linguistic intentionality. A ﬁrst insight by Villemoes that can be connected with an insight of Sokolowski is that the work with the schizophrenics in promoting linguistic intentionality requires great emotional eﬀort. Sokolowski made us aware that linguistic intentionality performs a repressive function with reference to the rich textual-

VILLEMOES’ NEW THERAPY FOR SCHIZOPHRENICS

281

ity of the perceptual world. Villemoes requires that the referring mental health worker speaks well of him and his method. He thus actively promotes idolization. Furthermore, Villemoes tells us that he avoids antagonizing his patients. His advice not only includes the admonition that the therapist should not contradict what the patient says but also the recommendations that the patient not be put in front of the therapist (an oppositional position) and that the therapist not ask questions of the patient. One central problem emerges when one reﬂects on the method developed by Villemoes in relation to Sokolowski’s and Husserl’s ideas about linguistic (signitive) intentionality. All three authors, in one way or another, are able to explain why acquiring linguistic (signitive) intentionality requires the help of another and why that help cannot be given without the patient (or the child) having a deep emotional attachment to the therapist (or the parent). The basic reason for this requirement is that linguistic (signitive) intentionality is a new form of intentionality that provides the patient (or the child) with a new world where the rich and continuously-sliding texture of the perceptual world is replaced by a world cut up into entities formed by linguistic units. This is a new intentional world wherein the connections between these cut up units are suggested and articulated by linguistic operations (for instance, a hotel has an entrance, a table is something to put things on). This new world does not emerge spontaneously from perception. Rather, the new world frequently reveals implausible connections. Thus, one of my children angrily rejected my question if she had been asked by the doctor to lay on her table. Dad, she replied, you do not lay on a table! After some explanation she reconciled herself to the curious usage of the word ‘‘table’’ which forbids that you sit on it at home but are required to lay on it in a doctor’s oﬃce. Only others, trusted others, can reliably introduce linguistic (signitive) intentionality and the new world it creates. But what about pronouns and indexicals? When talking to my child I address her as you. When referring to me I say I. How can one imagine that a child (or a patient) learns to say ‘‘I’’ when addressed as ‘‘you’’? A possible solution to this puzzle can be formulated along the following lines. For the child to learn that the world is not just a rich textured perceptual world but also a world cut up in pieces according to linguistic units, the child needs to accept the burden of seeing the world through the eyes of another. As pronouns (and indexicals) apply diﬀerently to me and to any other person, the use of pronouns cannot be learned by a person (be it child or patient) unless that person is able to cut himself

282

WILFRIED VER EECKE AND RICHARD COBB-STEVENS

oﬀ from others (including parents or therapist). In child development we notice that the no-saying period precedes the acquisition of the use of pronouns (Ver Eecke 1984, 77–78). We should therefore expect that the successful therapy of Villemoes introduces something equivalent to the no-saying of the child. Interestingly, we do ﬁnd such a stage embodied in Villemoes’ therapeutic technique. I like to interpret the act of delegation of power, which in Villemoes’ method marks the transition from the ﬁrst phase to the second phase of treatment, as equivalent to the no-saying period of the child. Villemoes starts the second phase of his treatment – after enough of an idolization has been established – by taking oﬀ his watch before the session and then telling the patient that he – the therapist – has no watch and that therefore the patient is responsible for keeping time. From then on the patient has the last word in the session. The patient is given the power to cut, in this case to cut oﬀ the session, and thus seems to learn the power inherent in linguistic (signitive) intentionality. In this second phase Villemoes concentrates on describing historical scenes: the patient’s kindergarden school, the road to kindergarden. Three moments in this second phase are worth reporting. The ﬁrst is that the patient starts to make subtle and coordinated movements. It seems as if the patient develops a body schema. The second is that the patient begins to be able to have empathy with other people. Patients start identifying with others without fearing that they will lose their own identity. Third, the patient starts making what Villemoes calls symbolic identiﬁcations. A patient says, for instance, that he is not a thief. Such a statement is quite diﬀerent from the statement of a mentally ill person claiming that he is Napoleon. In this last case, the patient does not feel obliged to march to Moscow. In the former case, however, the patient announces that he accepts the obligations implied by the words: ‘‘I am not a thief.’’ In such a symbolic identiﬁcation with a word, the patient becomes a subject. Conclusion Phenomenology provides a solid method to discover and analyze the rich varieties of human intentionalities. In particular, both Husserl and Sokolowski have pointed to the creative and puzzling dimensions of linguistic (signitive) intentionality. The new treatment method of Villemoes for schizophrenic patients concentrates on the structuring eﬀects that language performs for the human subject. Phenomenology

VILLEMOES’ NEW THERAPY FOR SCHIZOPHRENICS

283

thus plays and continues to play a crucial role in providing insights into the constructive treatment of mentally ill patients. The phenomenological approach to mental illness aims at more than symptom reduction, it aims at restoring or introducing new forms of intentionality that promote, create, or restore subjectivity. PART II. THE AFFECTIVE DIMENSION IN LINGUISTIC INTENTIONALITY ( R. COBB-STEVENS)

Introduction Professor Ver Eecke’s paper presents a concise summary of Robert Sokolowski’s account of linguistic intentionality and makes some fresh and strikingly evocative suggestions about how that account may provide a philosophical basis for the treatment of mentally ill patients. In what follows, I propose to consider three themes that are interwoven in this essay: (1) language as mastery over presence and absence, (2) personal pronouns and indexicals as keys to the development of the self, and (3) syntax as the manifestation of intelligence and responsible agency. In each instance, I shall call attention to the ways in which Ver Eecke’s emphasis on the importance of the aVective dimension of each of these human achievements adds a richness and depth not only to the clinical process of healing but also to the philosophical understanding of linguistic intentionality itself. 1. Words as Consolation for the T rauma of Absence A fundamental tenet of 20th century philosophy is that philosophical questions are best approached through language. Husserl agreed with this conviction but he also thought that linguistic analysis must be complemented by a detailed analysis of the relationship between linguistic articulations and perceptual discriminations. Like Aristotle, he was convinced that speech gives syntactical articulation and thus completion to the inarticulate but nonetheless meaningful insights of cognitive intuition. There is therefore a continuity between intuitive and discursive logos. There is also a certain priority of seeing over speaking. Loving parents and other caring adults introduce young children to the realm of meaning by encouraging them to imitate the phonemes and words of an established language used by the parents to refer to things, animals, and persons in their environment. As Husserl points out, children could never succeed

284

WILFRIED VER EECKE AND RICHARD COBB-STEVENS

in taking these sounds as meaningful if they could not already discern their referents as identities presented again and again in a series of perspectival views which highlight diﬀerent features of the same things. In the L ogical Investigations, he observes that when we use words to refer to things, we identify them by way of their features. In short, our words express the contents of our perceptions. Of course, we make use of the network of meanings encoded in our dictionaries but these meanings are ultimately derived from the contents of perceptions. Husserl thus essentially reaﬃrms Aristotle’s account of the derivation of nouns and predicates from the ‘‘looks’’ (eide) of things. What presents itself to our intelligence when we perceive a particular thing is the ‘‘look’’ that it shares with a family of things. We grasp the ‘‘look’’ as a shape, or form, had by this particular thing and shared or shareable by other particulars (Husserl VI, #40–52; Aristotle, On Interpretation, 2b7–14; 16b25–26; Metaphysics, Z, 103 1b 6–7; 20–21). Husserl further suggests that children could not get the point of linguistic references if they could not already in some incohative way appreciate particular things and their features as token instances of types. Indeed, how could they begin to take phonemes and words produced repeatedly by one adult, or by diﬀerent adults having diﬀerent tonalities and accents, as meaningful signs if they did not already have some understanding of the token-type relationship? Even more remarkable than the ability to give linguistic expression to what we see is the ability to refer to things in their absence. Sokolowski points out that many readers of Husserl are at ﬁrst skeptical of his claim that we truly intend what is absent. We are so accustomed to thinking of cognition in terms of the modern notion of mind as an enclosed theater of representations that we feel obliged to posit something present as the immediate target of our signitive intentions of absent things: e.g., an image, a concept, a sense impression, the word itself (Sokolowski 2000, 36). But Husserl insists on our capacity to intend absent things themselves as identities across presence and absence. Signitive intentionality, he claims, is what constitutes us as rational beings who are not limited to a closed environment but enjoy an openness to a world. Language thus reveals our transcending mode of being. This is also the point of Freud’s analysis of the fort-da game. Freud’s grandson takes delight is this game because it provides him with control over the absence and presence of the spool and thus permits him to resolve symbolically the trauma of occasional absence of his mother. More importantly, by alternately voicing the ‘‘o’’ and ‘‘a’’ sounds (baby talk for fort and da) in conjunction with the disappearance and reappearance of the spool/mother, the child

VILLEMOES’ NEW THERAPY FOR SCHIZOPHRENICS

285

learns to interrelate absence and presence meaningfully. The child no longer undergoes absence as annihilation and presence as overwhelming immediacy. Privation and presence are both transformed. Signiﬁed rather than merely undergone, they are transformed into intentionality. Prof. Ver Eecke calls attention to De Waelhens’ emphasis on the aﬀective dimension of this discovery of the power of words. The price of this joyful discovery must be the repression of the immediacy and intimacy of uninterrupted presence. We must give up the object of desire in order to reclaim it as an object of cognition. Paul Ricoeur suggests that there is a similarity between Freud’s analysis of this healthy repression and his account of the process of mourning the loss of a beloved person. As opposed to melancholia which involves an unhealthy identiﬁcation with the lost object of aﬀection, mourning succeeds ‘‘... in a giving up of brute presence and an intending in presence and absence’’ (Ricoeur, 385). This comparison suggests the following question: could the healing strategy developed by Dr. Villemoes also help persons suﬀering from melancholia? In a recent lecture, Sokolowski develops the thesis that ‘‘... the phonemic element of words is more associated with emotion and the syntactic structure is more associated with reason’’ (Sokolowski, 2002). He adds that vowels are especially linked to feelings whereas consonants generally introduce intelligibility. Consonants clip the ﬂow of sound and thus permit the formation of distinct and recognizable words. I ﬁnd this analysis particularly convincing because of an initial diﬃculty I encountered as an adult in learning French. Because of the smooth ﬂow (elision) of French words into one another (e.g., ‘‘Je suis alle´ en ville ce matin’’) the learner ﬁnds it diﬃcult to break the ﬂow of sound into distinct words. I remember the frustrating but intriguing experience of being able to grasp the feelings communicated by my professors and other interlocutors well before I could understand what they were talking about. The vowels were doing their job, but the consonants were not ‘‘hacking it’’ (so to speak). It might be said that this adult experience is somewhat akin to that had by the child engaged in the fort-da game. Of course, the adult already knows that words permit mastery over presence and absence, but while waiting for a new dawn of meaning, the adult can re-experience the consolation had in childhood at the ﬁrst intimation of this power of language. 2. Repression and Indexicality Husserl suggests that indexical reference is inherently egocentric. To think of something indexically (as ‘‘this’’, ‘‘mine,’’ or ‘‘here’’) is to think of it in

286

WILFRIED VER EECKE AND RICHARD COBB-STEVENS

relation to oneself. Moreover, perception itself, inasmuch as it targets this particular as having some speciﬁc property or properties, is an indexical mode of experience. Perception presents this object as now, here, before me. It follows that perception necessarily entails a tacit awareness of subjective perspective on the part of the perceiver. Even deﬁnite descriptions used to identify particulars that are not sensibly present are never completely free of indexical components. Such descriptions tacitly depend on prior demonstrative identiﬁcations of particulars evoked by the descriptive terms (Zahavi, 24–27). The point is this: indexicals cannot be adequately translated into exclusively objective terms because they make references from a particular position that is experienced by the speaker as a center of coordinates rather than as a position locatable from some imagined centerless perspective. It follows that all types of reference that depend ultimately upon demonstrative reference must imply the ability of interlocutors to imagine themselves as enjoying the perspective of the original subject making the demonstrative reference. Husserl points out that, in order to appreciate the indexical references of a speaker, I must be able to construe my ‘‘here’’ as his ‘‘there’’ and my ‘‘left’’ as his ‘‘right.’’ Even when I attempt to conceive of the whole world, including myself and my interlocutor, from a neutral standpoint (‘‘as if from nowhere,’’ as Thomas Nagel puts it), I must acknowledge that I am the subject of this impersonal conception of the world that contains myself and others. The reference is still essentially indexical. I realize that the impersonal conception is attached to and developed from my original ﬁrst-person perspective. This is not a trivial discovery for it moves the sense of self-awareness to a higher level which evokes ‘‘... a strange sense that I am and am not the hub of the universe’’ (Nagel, 64). As Pascal pointed out, it is not only a source of wonder but also of anxiety that I can alternately make references from a ﬁrst-person point of view and from the standpoint of a possessor of an objective conception of the world that contains myself. The ability to move with facility from one to another of these points of view is what permits us to engage in the pleasures of irony, humor, and philosophical contemplation of the human predicament; but this same ability is also what makes us vulnerable to shame, guilt, and anxiety. Given the complexity of the intellectual operations requisite for the transition from a ﬁrst-person perspective, to a second-person (intersubjective) perspective, to a third-person (impersonal) perspective (all the while acknowledging that the intersubjective and impersonal perspectives ultimately remain nonetheless my perspectives), there is little wonder that some mentally ill persons have diﬃculty in making these transitions. It

VILLEMOES’ NEW THERAPY FOR SCHIZOPHRENICS

287

seems to me that the genius of Villemoes’ method of dealing with such patients lies in its slow and patient reconstruction of the steps involved in these transitions. His method recreates the conditions of the patient’s initial childhood learning experiences by ﬁrst establishing a non-confrontational climate of trust and even idolization, and then encouraging the patient to re-learn from a ﬁrst-person perspective the complex intellectual and aﬀective maneuvers necessary for appreciating the perspectives of others. The patient must ﬁrst re-discover the pleasures and consolations of naming things and articulating the relationships between things and their features, thereby solidifying the sense of self that emerges from the construction of a world from a mobile but continuously personal perspective. Villemoes’ technique of next allowing the patient control of the timepiece and thus the length of the session encourages the transition from an exclusively egocentric perspective to an emergent intersubjective perspective. A question occurs to me at this point: does Villemoes have some similar strategy for encouraging a further expansion of the patient’s perspective that might make possible a third-person point of view on the self and world? Is there a speciﬁc mode of repression requisite for the achievement of the impersonal point of view that is necessary for scientiﬁc inquiry and philosophical contemplation? 3. Syntax and Freedom Sokolowski observes that persons inhabit not only an environment but also ‘‘a space of reasons’’ wherein they are able to deliberate and to act in ways that determine who they will become. He also reminds us that access to the space of reasons requires a process of intellectual and aﬀective maturation. All of the capacities we associate with the realm of rationality (freedom, contemplation, irony, and humor) are not innate faculties automatically shared equally among all human beings. These capacities have their source in the ‘‘ability to think in the medium of speech’’ (Sokolowski, 2002). They are more fully developed when the syntactical potential of that medium is more fully realized. Husserl’s theory of parts and wholes, and of the categorial structures of speech acts pay oﬀ richly in this context. Husserl observed that categorial objects (states of aﬀairs expressed by propositions) emerge as a result of intellectual articulations made possible by the syntactical power of language. The things and situations we perceive are thus brought into the ﬁeld of rationality where connections form a logical network rather than a merely perceptual ﬂow. Sokolowski emphasizes that this elevation

288

WILFRIED VER EECKE AND RICHARD COBB-STEVENS

of perceived objects and situations into the realm of rationality does not subjectivize things in the world or convert them into mere constructs. Indeed, our syntactical operations make possible a ‘‘more complete and intersubjectively veriﬁable manifestation of things.’’ The layering of levels of syntax makes possible ever more nuanced displays of things and situations in the world, as, for example, in the sequential concatenation of parts within parts required by such operations as nominalization and quotation. Sokolowski points out that syntax is also involved in the phenomenon of human laughter and in the very phonemic structure of basic words. Vowels are associated more with elemental feelings and with the moans and cries that express those feelings. Consonants are the ﬁrst indications of rationality: They clip, fence in, and structure the vowels, thus creating phonemes and eventually words, and thus introducing the multifold variations that diﬀerent languages bring to the task of articulation. I am reminded here of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s evocative remark: ‘‘Wherever language and men exist, there is not only a freedom from the pressure of the environment, but this freedom from habitat is also freedom in relation to the names that we give things, as stated in the profound account of Genesis, according to which Adam received from God the authority to name creatures’’ (Gadamer, 402). Husserl observes that categorial formings, since they are not part of the sensuous presentation of things, leave their objects sensuously unchanged. Even when we perform new categorial operations on earlier categorial articulations, we do not thereby tamper with the underlying perceptually given situation. When, for example, we nominalize an expressed state of aﬀairs thus making it part of a further state of aﬀairs, the initial state of aﬀairs remains as it was before. It is changed in a purely formal way by being transformed into the subject of a new predication. Sokolowski remarks that this marvelous transparency of categorial forms shows that they are something intellectual. Hence, we are free to carry out many kinds of categorial shaping, although we must maintain consistency and continuous respect for the underlying perceptual data. When we come to know the vocabulary and rules of grammar of our language well, we may even tinker with them for the sake of humor or irony. This is why Prof. Ver Eecke found the playful re-naming of jars of peanut butter and jam by his children to be a sign of advanced intelligence rather than mere confusion. I am reminded here of Kant’s analysis of how certain aesthetic judgments relate to instances of beauty which by reason of their indeterminate character cannot be classiﬁed, i.e., brought under a concept or rule. The experience of such beauty elicits the free

VILLEMOES’ NEW THERAPY FOR SCHIZOPHRENICS

289

play of our faculties of imagination and understanding. Our delight in this free play, he suggests, is a discovery of a certain freedom: ‘‘... Whatever lends itself to unstudied and purposive play by the imagination is always new to us and we never tire of looking at it’’ (Kant, Hackett, 93; Akademie Edition, 243). Prof. Ver Eecke describes how, given the opportunity to engage in free categorial reconstruction of scenes from their childhood, Villemoes’ patients begin to make more coordinated movements, to rearrange objects in the present environment, and ﬁnally to achieve empathy with other persons. The unstudied and yet purposive play of these categorial achievements are for them an introduction to the freedom that accompanies the exercise of rationality. It must be a source of great satisfaction for this doctor to witness these results. I am grateful to Wilfried Ver Eecke for introducing me to this moving and hopeful account of one doctor’s eﬀorts to heal. W ilfried Ver Eecke Georgetown University Richard Cobb-Stevens Boston College NOTES 1 I, W. Ver Eecke, wish to thank Mark Nowacki for the many stylistic improvements he suggested for my part of the paper. My paper was delivered at the APA meeting in 2002 and at the Phenomenology session during the World Congress of Philosophy in Istanbul in August 2003, organized by Dr. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. The comments by Professor Richard Cobb-Stevens grew out of his comments given at the APA meeting and stress the novelty of the paper. 2 John Brough drew attention to this double form of reductionism exposed by phenomenology. 3 For a good, short summary of the problems connected with the concept of ‘‘Primal Repression’’ see J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis (1973), 333–334. 4 A similar view of the relation between sense data and words is developed by Hegel in his Phenomenology in the passage called ‘‘Perception: or the Thing and Deception’’ (Hegel 1977, 67–79). 5 For a classic study of the features deﬁning phonemes which also gives a hint of the great challenge involved in mastering the pronounciation of diﬀerent phonemes see R. Jakobson and M. Halle 1956, 1–51. 6 Manuscript of Husserl referred to as Ms K III 11, pp. 7–11. Published (as Appendix A) with Italian translation (as Appendix B) by Mario Sancipriano. 7 There are two English summaries of the therapeutic method developed by Palle Villemoes: Bo Edenius, 166–176; and De Waelhens/Ver Eecke, 109–117.

290

WILFRIED VER EECKE AND RICHARD COBB-STEVENS BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Waelhens, A. and Ver Eecke, W. Phenomenology and L acan on Schizophrenia, After the Decade of the Brain. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001. Edenius, B. Om en T eori fo¨r psykos utveckling av en behandlingsmetod [Medical Dissertations, New Series nr 597]. Umea˚: Umea˚ University, 1999. Freud, S. S.E. Vol. 18: Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Vol. 18, pp. 1–64). London: Hogarth, 1920. Gadamer, H-G. T ruth and Method. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Hegel, G. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Husserl, E. T he Child. Manuscript K III 11, 1935 (pp. 4–7). ——. L ogical Investigations. Translated by J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Jakobson, R. and Halle, M. Fundamentals of L anguage. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1956. Kant, I. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. Koje`ve, A. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Translated by J. J. Nichols. New York: Basic Books, 1969. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J-B. T he L anguage of Psychoanalysis. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1973. Nagel, T. T he L ast Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. Sancipriano, M. ‘‘L’ ‘Urkind’ di Husserl.’’ Aut Aut, 86 (1965), 7–26. Sokolowski, R. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ——. ‘‘Words, Pictures, and Symbols.’’ In Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 77–87. ——. ‘‘Language, the Human Person, and Christian Faith.’’ Lecture given at the Catholic University of America, April 19, 2002. Ver Eecke, W. Saying ‘No’. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1984. Winnicott, D. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge, 1991. Zahavi, D. Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999.

SECTION VI FURTHER EXCAVATING OF THE ‘‘CONCEPTION’’ OF THE ‘‘LIFE-WORLD’’

Angela Ales Bello and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka with the background of the Bosphorus

ANGELA ALES BELLO

PHENOMENOLOGICAL HYLETICS AND THE LIFEWORLD

It is possible to trace a guiding thread running through the phenomenological analyses of Edmund Husserl in an attempt to unify his researches, which generally move in a radial pattern, following the multifarious directions suggested by the things (Sachen) that he was examining. But the aim in tracing this thread is not to draw up a kind of ‘‘scholastic’’ of his thought, but rather to reconstruct the fresco that became delineated in his mind in the endeavour to give an account of reality and ﬁnd answers that can be used as a starting point for a personal and autonomous approach. The basic lines of this fresco are not pre-emptively traced by the phenomenologist himself, as happens in the case of an artist, who ﬁrst draws an outline of his work and then transfers it onto the wall. Indeed, precisely because we are here concerned with tracing the pathways of reality, the design, the map cannot be drawn a priori; phenomenological procedure, unlike that of many philosophers who cannot resist the temptation of laying it down beforehand, endeavours to be descriptive of what reality has to oﬀer. Reality in its complexity cannot be traced by means of a preconceived scheme or pattern, but calls for analytical patience, an examination of one part after another. This can probably be best compared with what one does in the case of a jigsaw puzzle, which can be solved in limited zones that which give you some idea of the whole, but do not immediately reconstruct the totality, because, given the limitation of the human being, this can never be grasped entirely. Husserl’s way of proceeding can therefore serve as a great research lesson, stimulating us to travel autonomously along a tortuous and sometimes even labyrinthine road, but the only one in keeping with the complexity of reality. I take my cue from two territories highlighted by Husserl’s researches, one of which is very well known but diﬃcult to describe, that of the lifeworld. The other is not often visited since it is only barely known: phenomenological hyletics. These territories can constitute points of access to the solution of the puzzle concerning reality – and this, all said and done, is the objective of the inquiry that we call ‘‘philosophy’’. The access way constituted by the life world, as described by Husserl, especially in the Crisis of the European Sciences, enables us to enter the 293 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 293–301. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

294

ANGELA ALES BELLO

human world as a cultural and historical world. We encounter the human expressions that we call culture, meet man’s industriousness that manifests itself in the transformation of the given natural world and the variety of productions. Nevertheless, beneath these diversities we can trace certain capacities, the characteristics of creativeness and expressiveness that constitute this world. But if we want to understand why all this happens, we cannot allow ourselves to be dragged along by the ‘‘Heraclitean river’’ – as Husserl would have said – of these productions, for in actual fact we note that there are many disciplines, especially in the Western cultural environment, that came into being precisely in order to sail this river: the aesthetic disciplines concerned with artistic production, the scientiﬁc ones concerned with knowledge of nature, the historical ones concerned with the analysis of the human vicissitudes, the sociological and psychological disciplines, and so on. We note that in Western culture and also in some other cultures – I am thinking, above all, of the oriental ones – there presented itself a radical need, the need of delving more deeply to understand how and why all this happens. In our culture this need has been called philosophy and it came to be understood that we cannot place our trust in particular researches. Rather, it is essential to suspend their validity, place them in parentheses, as it were, subject them to epoche´. This is the reason why Husserl wanted to insert himself in the furrow of Western philosophy, which came into being as Erste Philosophie, ﬁrst philosophy, as Strenge W issenschaft, rigorous science, already with the Greek philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, but this intention, most valid per se, has to be taken to completion. This is the ‘‘craft’’ of the philosopher, his existential calling, his Beruf ; he has to put everything in parentheses, which does not mean denying, but subjecting to critical scrutiny. We are here concerned with a risky operation, because it could lead us into the wastelands; in fact, we risk not ﬁnding any point of support, to walk in a desert and to lose even human production. After having put human products in parentheses, on the other hand, we ﬁnd ourselves face to face with the human beings who produced them along the historical road of which we have memory and who continue to produce them. There thus arises the problem of ‘‘who are we who ask ourselves the question regarding the meaning of the cultural productions and who are those who produced them?’’ The pronoun ‘‘we’’ here has a twofold meaning: we are those who search (do the research), but we are also those who produce. The ﬁrst ‘‘we’’ reveals our insertion in an eﬀective community of researchers of which we have memory and whom we ﬁnd to be present

PHENOMENOLOGICAL HYLETICS AND THE LIFEWORLD

295

even in our own days, while the second ‘‘we’’ is the one of humanity and the human groups as producers of culture. But by what right or title does the ﬁrst ‘‘we’’ detach itself from the second, and who forms part of it? The ‘‘we’’ of the philosophers is made up of individual human beings, but that is also true of the ‘‘we’’ of the producers. We thus come face to face with the ‘‘phenomenon’’ of the multiplicity of human beings: how can we try to clarify it? I think that Husserl asked himself these questions in the last decade of the nineteenth century, ﬁrst as a mathematician and disciple of Weierstrasse in Berlin, and then as disciple of the philosopher-psychologist Brentano in Vienna. Around himself he noted a cultural climate, the positivist one, oriented above all to exalt scientiﬁc knowledge as the new conquest of humanity. He could not but admire the sciences, as he was still to say in his lectures in Prague and Vienna in the thirties, but the problem was: who are the producers and who inquires into the signiﬁcance of these phenomena and to which phenomena does one have to regress in order to obtain a clariﬁcation and a ‘foundation’’? Who are the human beings? And who am I who ask myself these questions? As we can readily see, the we dissolves into the I. Human beings come towards me in their individuality and I come to meet myself. Western philosophy, reﬂecting about the we, has long since dissolved it in the I. This is not only in modern times, from Descartes and Kant onwards, but ever since the beginnings, when Parmenides was led by the Goddess into a new territory in which the truth was to be revealed to him. Husserl commences from the I in the ever-present tension between his personal, empirical, particular I and the structure of this I that he found present in all the others. And thus another tension becomes established between the I and the others: could it be that I am alone and imagine it all? This is the great temptation of solipsism, which Husserl rejects as psychological dissimulation, because in myself I already ﬁnd the opening towards the other, as he was to say in a conclusive manner in his Cartesian Meditations. But if I want to test whether this is true, I have to enter into myself. The motto written at the temple of Delphi and adopted by Socrates, ‘‘Know thyself ’’, which has conferred a fundamental imprint upon philosophy and, as one might say, the whole of Western culture, ﬁnds supporters in every epoch – from Augustine to Descartes – and is revisited by Husserl in an original manner. The epoche´, which opens a path of regressive search, leaves the we and the I as residue in the tension of the two moments. One realizes how Husserl can speak of a reduction to the subject or also, and at the same

296

ANGELA ALES BELLO

time, of a reduction to intersubjectivity, but the road he chose in his programmatic work Ideas pertaining to a pure Phenomenology and a phenomenological Philosophy was the one that passes through the residue of subjectivity, certainly not the empirical subject, but rather the one that emerges from the inquiry performed on the fundamental structures that I ﬁnd in myself ‘‘and’’ in the others. And what is it that I discover in myself and the others? This discovery, indicated and suggested by the studies of psychic acts carried out by Brentano, constitutes the original moment of Husserl’s position. It is based on the preliminary conﬁdence according to which we can intuitively grasp every phenomenon that gives itself, can understand its ‘‘sense’’ – and here we have what Husserl deﬁnes as reduction to the essence or eidetic reduction and constitutes the ﬁrst step of his method and what phenomena can I grasp in the full sense if not those relating to my own interiority? Here there opens the dimension of the acts that are lived by me, the dimension of the Erlebnisse. This dimension becomes delineated as the territory of the transcendental, that is to say, the presence of cognitive, aﬀective, valutative structures that, being common to all the human beings, also render possible mutual exchanges and enables us to deﬁne them as human. The lived act that Husserl privileges as the way of accessing this dimension is the act of perception. Are we here concerned with an empiristic residue, a disavowal of other acts that are similarly important? I think that the choice was due to the fact that perception provides the perceived object in its ‘‘bodily’’ presence (leibhaft), though I don’t think that the goal is that of intuitive, immediate knowledge of the perceived object as a physical object, because in reality this object cannot be known other than by adumbrations (Abschattungen). Rather, we are here concerned with the fact that perception is emblematic of a direct knowledge, of an eﬀective ﬁlling, that seems to realize the paradigm of a ‘‘presence’’ unlike other acts such as memory, imagination and fantasy. Perception may therefore be taken as an example of a realization, be it even partial and limited, of the ‘‘principle of all the principles’’, according to which true knowledge of phenomena is obtained when they are grasped as they give themselves and in the limits with which they give themselves. Perception is taken into consideration not so much from the point of view of ﬁlling the perceived given, but rather in relation to the quality of the act itself, which ‘‘gives’’ without mediations and, indeed, realizes the ideal of intuitively grasped evidence. In actual fact, inasmuch as they are objects, the phenomena that make possible a full and intuitive knowledge are precisely the Erlebnisse. It is easier for the researcher to grasp their

PHENOMENOLOGICAL HYLETICS AND THE LIFEWORLD

297

sense, their essence; this is emphasized not only by Husserl, but in his wake also by Edith Stein, and that is the reason why analysis of interiority is a winning approach. This does not mean remaining closed in interiority, but rather digging even deeper, because deep down within it there is yet another exit, a further opening that takes its place beside the one peculiar of the lived experience of empathy, understood as an aperture to the alter ego, and it is this exit that can be reached by means of the analysis of the territory of hyletics. PHENOMENOLOGICAL HYLETICS: WHAT IS IT?

If the discovery of the Erlebnisse constitutes Husserl’s genial discovery and the characteristic feature of his inquiry, their analysis highlights the duplicity of the intentional noetic moment and the hyletic or material moment. The description of this duplicity is already to be found in the ﬁrst volume of Ideen zu einer reinen Pha¨nomenologie und pha¨nomenologischen Philosophie1 and is further developed in the second volume2 in connection with the analysis of the living body (L eib), which has localizations regarding not only the sensorial sensations that exercise a constitutive function for the objects that appear in space, but also regarding completely diﬀerent group sensations. Husserl is referring to sensorial sensations, the sensations of pleasure and pain, of bodily well-being or discomfort deriving from a bodily indisposition,3 and this represents a particularly important point. That this argument continues to be present in his researches is conﬁrmed by a copious number of manuscripts of groups C and D dating to the thirties, in which he considers the two moments I have just mentioned. The function of hyletics in the ﬁeld of sensations is studied particularly in Ms. Trans. D 18, dedicated to the formation of the kinaesthetic system that is concerned with the relationship between one’s own body and the changes of the surrounding world with reference to the oculomotorial ﬁeld. In Ms. Trans. D 10 I Husserl speciﬁes that the kinaesthetic system becomes constituted in relation to the constitution of the hyletic objects,4 but it is in Ms. C 10 that one grasps the connection between the hyletic units and the aﬀections. Even though the hyletic universe is a non-egological universe that becomes constituted without the intervention of the I, nevertheless ‘‘das Ich ist immer ‘dabei’ ’’, the I is always present as place of the aﬀections, is always active in some way.5 A good example of this concept is contained in a text in which one would hardly expect to ﬁnd such an application, Der Auf bau der

298

ANGELA ALES BELLO

menschlichen Person, which assembles the lectures given by Edith Stein in the winter semester 1932–32 at the Mu¨nster Institute of Scientiﬁc Pedagogy. Reﬂecting on the theme of the spirit, the author aﬃrms that the world of the spirit embraces the whole of the created world. Edith Stein sought to demonstrate this by examining a block of granite. In her opinion, we undoubtedly have here a material formation in which, nevertheless, there is revealed a sense (it is full of sense). Even though we do not perceive a personal spirituality this formation is constituted in accordance with a structural principle of its own, of which its speciﬁc weight, its consistence and its hardness form essential parts; and also its mass, the fact that it ‘‘presents itself ’’ in enormous blocks and not in grains or fragments.6 What is important for us, and is valid on the plane of the aﬀections referred to by Husserl, consists of the fact that it attracts our attention in a singular manner. In fact, its irremovable consistency and its mass are something that comes under our senses and our reason notes as a reality. Our senses and reason are struck interiorly; something is revealed to us in them; we read something in this reality.7 The ‘‘something’’ that is identiﬁed at this point is not only a symbolic sense, even though this is present, but there emerges the hyletic moment of the Erlebnis, because the block speaks to us of an imperturbable stability and a sure reliability as a quality in keeping with it. The imperturbability, the stability, the reliability are interior resonances and give a sense of wellbeing or discomfort, the sense that Husserl described in connection with the hyletic aspect of lived experiences, a sense that is not the same as the one that can be aroused by clay or sand. Continuing the comparison with the Husserlian analyses and grasping the assonances that, inasmuch as they refer to each other, clarify the results the two phenomenologists arrive at, it will not be out of place to come back to some passages of Husserl’s text I previously cited. I have in mind the reference to the two groups of localized sensations, which perform a role – of materials, in fact – similar to that of the primary sensations for the intentional Erlebnisse, such as hardness, whiteness, etc. Inasmuch as they are localized sensations, these groups of sensations – according to Husserl – have an immediate somatic localization, such that for every human being, they concern, in an immediate intuitive manner, his body (L eib) inasmuch as it is his own body, as a subjective objectivity, that distinguishes itself from the purely material thing ‘‘own body’’ by means of the stratum of localized sensations.8 These are ‘‘diﬃcult to analyze and illustrate’’ – as Husserl continues – while the latter form the basis of the life of desire, of will, the sensations of tension and relaxation

PHENOMENOLOGICAL HYLETICS AND THE LIFEWORLD

299

of energy, the sensations of internal inhibition, of paralysis, of liberation.9 Connected with this stratum are the intentional functions, the materials assume a spiritual function, just as happens in the case of the primary sensations that come to form part of the perceptions through which constitutive judgments, etc., became subsequently constituted.10 There is thus indicated a stratiﬁcation that has a two fold slope (aspect): a cognitive one, formed by the primary sensations, perceptions, perceptive judgments; and a psychico-reactive one, formed by sensorial sentiments and valuations. The perceptive, judicative and valuative level is on the side of noetics. The relationship between hyletics and noetics is thus clearly delineated, but the hyletic moment seems to drag the noetic one, and hence Husserl’s peremptory aﬃrmation: ‘‘... A man’s entire consciousness is in a certain way with his body through its hyletic base’’;11 but the duality is not eliminated, indeed, the intentional Erlebnisse are not localized and do not constitute a stratum of one’s body. The autonomy of the spiritual moment with respect to the material one, which yet makes possible its manifestation, is in this way conﬁrmed and corroborated. Indeed, inasmuch as it is a tactile grasping of form, perception is not in the ﬁnger that touches and in which the tactile sensations are localized. Thought is not really localized intuitively in the head as the localized sensations of tension.12 Husserl notes that often we express ourselves in this way, and one may wonder why this should be so; one can reply that the attractive force of the hyletic localization makes us concentrate attention on our body, where the term hyletic is not intended to indicate matter in the traditional sense, but a new type of materiality that he had already proposed in § 85 of the ﬁrst volume of Ideen. He was looking for a new term at that point and thought he found it in the Greek word hyle. It is a question of identiﬁcation of a new territory that had never before been clearly delineated and for this reason there also lack the words to express it. HYLETICS AND TELEOLOGY

Though the manifestation of hyletics is primarily in the gnoseological ambit, numerous remarks made by Husserl suggest a greater function. As we have seen hyletics concerns ﬁrst and foremost the aﬀective and impulsive sphere that underlies – and in this sense one can speak of hyle, i.e., of matter – noetic valuation. Analyzing human acts in their stratiﬁcation, Husserl aﬃrms that in them there is present a ‘‘blind’’ and ‘‘organic’’ entelechy that acts at the impulsive level. It becomes explicit at the level

300

ANGELA ALES BELLO

of the will, passing from an impulsive intentionality to a conscious one. Following the road of practico-ethical behaviour and not its purely gnoseological counterpart, it is possible to gain greater insight into the theme of entelechy and its teleological sense. Undoubtedly Husserl’s insistence on the teleology of history is better known, which is to be understood as the discovery of an immanent end in history and as an ethical appeal for the realization of that end. But the ultimate reasons of the existence of this dimension are traced in what he called necessary ‘‘reference to the originary facts of the hyle’’,13 which would seem incomprehensible if the intentionality present at the impulsive level had not been highlighted. In this case, once again, there manifest the cross-reference that Husserl always makes from the sphere of cognitive and ethical awareness, which he calls the categorical sphere, to the precategorial sphere. And the road he indicates, which on the logic level runs from formal logic to transcendental logic (Formal and transcendental L ogic) and, on the gnoseological level, from consciousness to the passive syntheses (Analysis of the passive Syntheses), are at the basis of the formation of all knowledge in the web of subject and object, before these two moments become eﬀectively distinct. More generally, the ‘‘archaeological’’ excavation that I am here trying to reconstruct by moving through Husserl’s scant analyses serves to uncover the ‘‘ultimate reasons’’ that are associated with the prime or more obvious reasons. This excavation, which commences in interiority, serves, as we have seen, to leave it by the road of hyletics, because the ‘‘ultimate reasons’’ are to be found in the fact that nothing is ‘‘by chance’’. Quite the contrary, one has to trace, and right from the most profound dimensions, a ‘‘teleology’’, a ﬁnality and therefore the reference to an ‘‘originary facticity’’ can be fully comprehended if one grasps that it has its foundation in God.14 Only then will one understand the deﬁnition that Husserl gave of teleology as the ‘‘form of all the forms’’, because through it we can grasp the ultimate signiﬁcance of reality.15 In more general terms one might say that the metaphysical problem is resolved by means of the gnoseological one, but maintains an autonomy of its own. The phenomenological road, moves from the subject that – in the last resort – is he who poses the questions, longs for knowledge and enlarges himself in the attempt of grasping the structure of reality in its ultimate dimensions. We thus have a twofold circular movement: from the objectivities of the cultural systems to subjectivity and vice versa, from the excavation in subjectivity to the aperture to the objectivity of the ultimate foundation:

PHENOMENOLOGICAL HYLETICS AND THE LIFEWORLD

301

from exteriority to interiority and from the latter to the former. The life world refers us to hyletics, and hyletics to the life world. L ateran University Rome English version by Herbert Garrett NOTES 1 Husserliana, Vol. III. 2 Husserliana, Vol. IV. 3 Ibid., § 39. 4 In alle reale Apperzeptionen, in die der Weltlichkeit, geht sie ein als vermittelnd, als die jewilige Apperzeption der kina¨sthetischen Situation in ihrem Horizont vermo¨glicher Wandlungen, in weicher hyletisch konstituiertes Seiendes allzeit sein eigenes Sein hat und es nur haben kann, das Sein des im Modus infolge mit motivierten ‘‘Nachsatzes’’ der auf dem vertrauten Wege kina¨sthetischen Vermo¨glichkeit und der vertrauten Weise, wie sich abhebendes Hyletisches mit den vermo¨glich verlaufenden Kina¨sthesen mitwandelt und seine optimale Gestalt immer wieder zeigt bei der vermo¨glich wiederhergestellten selben Situation identiﬁzierbarer ‘Nachsa¨tze’ ’’ (p. 23). 5 ‘‘Urstro¨mendes und urkonstituierendes Nicht-Ich ist das hyletische Universum in sich konstituirende und stets schon konstituiert habende, ein zeitigend-zeitliches Urgeschehen, das nicht aus Quellen des Ich, das also ohne Ichbeteiligung statt hat; aber das Ich ist immer ‘dabei’, in der Wachheit als aﬃziertes der Abgehobenheiten und als immer irgendwie aktives’’ (p. 25). 6 E. Stein, Der Auf bau der menschlichen Person, Edith Steins Werke, Vol. d.XVI ( Freiburg: Herder, i.Br., 1994). 7 Ibid. 8 E. Husserl, Ideen II, op. cit., § 39. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 E. Husserl, Ideen II, op. cit., § 39. 12 Ibid. 13 E. Husserl, Zur Pha¨nomenologie der Intersubjektivita¨t, III, Husserliana XV, p. 386. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 94.

KONRAD ROKSTAD

PHENOMENOLOGY, THE LIFE-WORLD AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

Fairly often, theoretical philosophy, the concern about philosophy’s own deepest ‘‘intrinsic’’ questions, is viewed as something which excludes concern about the life-relevant, practical questions surrounding the human condition in the present-day, changing World. Theoretical philosophy – and perhaps particularly phenomenology with its transcendental turn does not – we often hear – oﬀer any concern in regard to lifeengagement and the ‘‘urgent’’ problems of our time. In this paper I will question this opposition by arguing for the following thesis: By pursuing its own ‘‘deepest intrinsic’’ questions, philosophy will – at the same time – have to address issues having essential life-relevance. This might be the one primary aspect of the thesis, but we could probably also add: If we, each of us and humanity as a whole, really are to live as civilised people and understand what it means to be human in the World, philosophy can’t escape those issues.1 I will try to give this thesis a signiﬁcant philosophical content. My argument will proceed along the following lines: The concept of the L ifeworld – as it is developed in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl – provides the main clue. Especially in his later phenomenology, primarily related to T he Crisis of European Sciences and T ranscendental Phenomenology (1936),2 the ‘Life-world’ appears as a universal problem (not as a partial problem) in the core of philosophy itself. As such it yields decisive insight into the problem of the transcendental, constituting the deepest, most theoretical (‘‘intrinsic’’) questions of philosophy. Yet, at the same time, the Life-world constitutes the total historical ﬁeld in which we all live and conduct our lives, facing what might be characterised as the ‘‘urgent problems of today.’’ In this perspective the sciences will be of special interest, as they have had – and, of course, still have – a decisive impact on the total actual situation, constituting both opportunities and problems. Philosophy, taking the form of ‘‘critical theory’’ in relation to the sciences, and having a motivation grounded in the ambiguous tendencies of the actual historical situation, might then pursue its ‘‘theoretical’’ questions by addressing the ‘‘urgent’’ problems greatly aﬀecting the human condition. And it does so by correlating and methodically analysing the Life-world, conducting a transcendental investigation which criti303 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 303–313. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

304

KONRAD ROKSTAD

cally tries to justify both itself and the sciences. It can do this, however, by being at the same time situated in the middle of the philosophicscientiﬁc tradition – which has made us what we are as philosophers. Thus history too will appear to be an aspect having essential relevance. First, then, let us simply ask: What are the ‘‘urgent’’ problems pervading and aﬀecting the human condition in our present world? There are, of course, many issues and problems which might be characterised in this way: there is still the possibility of war and mass-destruction, of ecological crisis, there are hunger and health-problems aﬀecting large groups of people, oppression, terrorism, injustice of various forms. And the list could have been extended and elaborated much more. There is also the obvious fact that the most urgent problems are changing – as times are, and they are dependent on the special circumstances under which people experiencing them are living. Hunger, for instance, is not an urgent problem in the Nordic countries of today. But it once was and it certainly is a very serious problem for people in other regions of the world. The possibility of nuclear war and mass-destruction is not as threatening as it was during the Cold War, but oppression and terrorism are, etc. And, of course, this is an integral part of the human situation itself, as times are always changing, diﬀerent people having diﬀerent surrounding worlds and are living under diﬀerent human conditions. Thus, we might say there will always be historical, cultural and geographical issues related to the question of deciding which urgent problems are aﬀecting the human condition. Nevertheless, it seems we have to face problems that are seriously aﬀecting larger groups of people – and, nowadays, we must view the question on a global scale, within a global perspective. The relativity, the diﬀerent surrounding worlds and the multitude of perspectives in which we each and all are living our lives, do not (however) alter the fact that the World is one.3 Considering those problems just indicated and attempting to provide an answer, you might, of course, enter the realm of moral philosophy and conduct an ethical analysis. But this is not what I will be doing. Rather, I will begin by reﬂecting on an issue which could be characterised as a problem of communication, community and intersubjectivity on a global level. First, then, I will take a look at the sciences that have constituted the preconditions for the current situation. Speaking of One World, and the possibility for mass-destruction, ecological crisis, etc., it seems that you have to take the achievements of the sciences into consideration in order to understand what all this is about. Technology might seem to be a key-concept in this regard, as the sciences have made it

THE LIFE-WORLD AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

305

possible. We have technology developed and applied on an increasingly expanding scale, reaching each and every ‘‘corner’’ of the globe. Particularly because of communication-technology of various kinds, the world has become one – and in a realisable sense. And, of course, our global economy is crossing and even breaking down national borders and diﬀerences between people – as well as creating new ones. Nevertheless, as this globalisation – or should we rather say ‘‘westernalisation’’ of the World – is taking place and advancing with accelerating speed, there will always remain some grounding in the place where each and every one of us as bodily persons are (and have to be) located. No matter how globally your conduct and ﬁelds of interest are organised, no matter how you move around, having contacts all over the globe, still at each moment you have to be located in some place. And probably you also have to have some kind of motivation which is grounded not in this total global ﬁeld that has been made possible and constituted by technology, but rather in yourself as a person within some special surrounding world in which you are actually living. Even if technology, with its rationality – which is certainly making its mark on increasing numbers of aspects within our total situation – is what your life is governed by, you can’t escape being bodily situated within a surrounding world, which is (to use a lesser known expression by Husserl)4 your ‘‘Home-world’’ also meeting with an ‘‘Alien world’’, transcending and contrasting that which is yours. And this, I would say, is the case even if you have never thought about it. Then, what is it I am really saying? My point is simply this: Even if the technological rationality – including of course sciences, western economics, etc., is conquering both our minds and the ‘‘whole’’ world, that tendency can’t obliterate the diﬀerence and the distinction between what is ‘‘home’’ and what is ‘‘alien’’ – nor the diﬀerence between what is ‘me’ and what is the ‘other’. As that technological rationality is advancing further and further, pervading and dominating what is our ‘‘home’’, then we need to ﬁnd new means – not in the sense of technology, but in the sense of a new grounding for understanding and respecting them both. Respect both for the alien, the other and for the ‘‘domestic’’, ourselves, is essential even for the use and expansion of technology, at least if it is to serve the common essential interests of living human beings. This does not, however, imply that the alien and the domestic/home are being transformed into mutually excluding perspectives, not reaching each other, expanding into each other. On the contrary, it is essential that the two communicate in a manner which implies that both of them

306

KONRAD ROKSTAD

‘‘expand’’ into each other – and at the same time ‘‘expanding’’ their own identity. Nor does it imply the suspension of technology or science – not even that perspective in which western civilisation is considered to be something special with some universal mission. The problem, however, is to give meaning to the core of this ‘‘special-universal’’. And, then, one precondition enabling this would be the way one meets with the other, the alien. And another is what is essential in the sciences – not only as they factually have become but also as they are genuine parts of that whole scientiﬁc-philosophical tradition within which we are living. But maybe the most essential problem is how we conceive of ourselves as the subjects of our lives. As subjects living as individuals within the world – given the human condition each and everyone experiences – this might appear to be rather puzzling. But, then, within our special surrounding world that both changes and carries with it a scientiﬁc-philosophical tradition, how is an adequate conception of ourselves possible? Is it possible and can it enable reﬂection into the preconditions making both sciences and communication across diﬀerences and borders rationally possible? How? In the spirit of especially the later Husserl, I will suggest that the concept of the ‘Life world’ is the most promising candidate for enabling us to conduct an analysis and reﬂection into those ﬁelds of problems, thus deciding essentials. The Life-world is, in a way, identical with our Home- or Surrounding world, yet it always transcends it, always leading us onto what is other, what is alien. Thus, the Life-world constitutes both what is mine and what is not mine, the other. The Life-world is always an essentially open ﬁeld for actions, practices, but also for reﬂections and theory-making such as sciences perform – and all this within a more or less open ﬁeld of very diﬀerent kinds of communication correlating with traditions of various kinds. Within this open ﬁeld that is constituted by the concept of the Life-world you may ﬁnd clues, even transcendental clues constituting the Subjectivity and transcending your own perspective, really ‘‘communalising’’ with others, making communities which are grounded in genuine mutuality, without reducing the essential identity of either the other or yourself. The problem then is to decide what those clues are, i.e., what are the main features of the Life-world that make it this open ﬁeld for transcending and expanding each other – grounding rational communities which incorporate genuine mutuality? I will only mention some of those ‘‘clues’’ which are essential – and at the same time are also perhaps the most obvious. First, it is the Body – you always have to have a body, and even those individuals inhabiting,

THE LIFE-WORLD AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

307

living within an apparently complete alien world have to have a body. Without your own body, and the body of the other, you could not even characterise that world as an alien human world, not to speak of meeting with those inhabiting it and trying to establish contact and community. Then you have to be living in a Nature, and you might even say a nature which already is common, because Nature is – as the World is – one. And you have to have some language, some ability for conceptualising, communicating, some cultural and historical consciousness or dimension, etc. But, of course, the problem still remains – what is the more explicit character of those clues just mentioned? What is the essential nature of the Body, the ability for conceptualising, what is the one Nature, the one World? And not to forget, is there any essential Nature? What does it mean and how is it possible? To the western mind, with our civilisation dominantly marked with the stamp of science – a science connected with a rationality of objectivism and technology, diﬀering interests, forces and powers – organised and institutionalised within a global economy, it is all to easy to let the technological and ‘‘objectivistic’’ rationality decide, using the sciences (only) as means, even monopolising the perspective of ‘‘eﬃciency’’ and forgetting the whole set of problems constituting preconditions for such an enterprise. The danger of ‘‘forgetting’’ especially includes the potential for criticism which the genuine sciences always have to keep in readiness. It relates to the ability for openly engaging the alien, the fundamentally Other, as someone with a potential for autonomy. We have to realise our own autonomy as something which is by no means secured for all times. We risk losing it if we (each of us, and each generation) don’t make eﬀorts to develop and secure it, reﬂecting on those preconditions for keeping it in the manner of genuine re-generation. The autonomy of western civilisation, science, etc., is deeply rooted in history, in the tradition we actually live within – and thus it is de facto habitualized. Yet, as a de facto ‘‘habit’’, we always run the risk of forgetting that it is an integral part of what we ourselves have become and essentially are – thus losing it. The ﬁrst precondition, then, appears to be not to forget oneself as a subject of engaged living, acting in a world with others, experiencing and conceptualising within the tradition which has made us what we have become – both as living people within a civilised world and as philosophers. We are now in a position to relate more explicitly to the Husserl of the Crisis and to deal with the problem of deciding what is ‘Nature’, ‘the Body’, and ‘conceptualisation’ are. Both the scientiﬁc-philosophic tradition and the Life-world will then appear to be issues of great and maybe

308

KONRAD ROKSTAD

even transcendental signiﬁcance. In the remainder of this paper I will – very brieﬂy5 – present some main lines of the critical reﬂection Husserl is conducting in the Crisis, laying the ground open for the never ending task of securing what he conceives of as the genuine Autonomy of mankind. Finally, our concluding remarks will be presented with comments on how philosophers – as philosophers – might meet this situation. In the Crisis, Part I, Husserl speaks of ‘‘The Crisis of the Sciences as Expression of the Radical Life-Crisis of European Humanity’’. He ﬁrst gives a more precise characterisation of what is meant by speaking of ‘‘the Crisis of the sciences’’ (as they rather obviously have been, and still are, very successful). What he means is that the idea of science has been positivistically reduced to mere factual science, and science has lost its meaning for life. This is what is missing – the sciences substantially contributing to some autonomy of European humanity. This idea ﬁrst came into existence at the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece, and then – after about two millennium – was brought onto a new and more advanced level by the formulation of the idea of philosophy in the Renaissance. This idea was initially successful, but then failed – and lost any knowledge of the reasons or motives for this failure. An ideal of universal philosophy was constituted, but it very soon went through a process of inner dissolution, which was not understood, and is now reﬂected in the crisis that aﬀects both the sciences and humanity today. Thus the actual situation might motivate a renewed reﬂection into this historical process, in which we try to realise and understand the reasons for that failure leading into this actual crisis situation. We will then have to read the history of modern philosophy as a struggle for the meaning of man. This description very roughly expresses the idea that Husserl is elaborating in Part I of the Crisis, essentially connecting what he conceives of as (an actual) life-crisis with what he speaks of as the crisis of the sciences. The whole project has two main aspects which are interrelated: On the one hand, you have to engage in a critical-historical reﬂection, in which you realise both those moves made in the modern history of philosophy (as this was, from the outset, interrelated with the development of modern science) and the motive for the dissolution of the ideal. On the other hand, we have to delve into the genuine philosophical problem, the transcendental problem, which now emerges from those critical historical reﬂections demanding extensive analyses of the Life-world. If the transcendental is to appear to be more than a residual concept and, in the genuine sense, is to yield eﬀective means against that objectivism thus results from

THE LIFE-WORLD AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

309

the positivistic reduction of the idea of science, the Life-world must reappear with its essential signiﬁcance for constituting sense phenomenologically. Thus the framework that Husserl is working within is set, and the historical analysis begins by analysing Galileo’s use of mathematics to describe nature, a turning point that laid the foundation for modern science. This involves both what was history for Galileo himself, i.e., the established pure geometry (which he did not conceive of as history) and aspects of the Life-world, indicating the critical perspective of those critical-historical analyses to come. The origin of the modern opposition between physicalistic objectivism and transcendental subjectivism is clariﬁed by showing how a well known (‘‘Cartesian’’) dualism has its origin in the prevailing exemplary role of natural science, which prescribes the rationality of the world ‘‘more geometric’’. This is the reason for the incomprehensibility of the problems of reason; it is, at the same time, a presupposition for the specialisation of the sciences which grounds naturalistic psychology. Modern physicalistic rationalism is characterised, and diﬃculties entailed in it relating to psychology are indicated by the incomprehensibility of the always functioning subjectivity. The outcome then is a detailed elaboration of the content of the struggle between objectivism and transcendentalism in the sense of modern spiritual history.6 At this point Husserl reﬂects on the method of his historical manner of investigation7 and thereafter immediately moves into another historical reﬂection. He begins with Descartes – who he considers not only the founder of the modern idea of objectivistic rationalism but also of the transcendental motif which explodes that same rationalism. Primarily, then, the historical reﬂection makes its way through Descartes, Hume, and Kant, ﬁnding that there is a genuine ambiguity throughout which reﬂects the struggle between objectivism and transcendentalism. On the one hand, those philosophers, each in their own way, contribute to the development from the ﬁrst establishment of the new science to the objectivistic tendencies that are now pervasive (and creating crisis). On the other hand, they also contribute to the development of genuine transcendentalism. To put it simply, Descartes contributes to the discovery of the transcendental ego by means of his special form of the ‘‘epoche´’’, ‘‘methodical doubt’’. Hume, by his scepticism and his shaking of objectivism, contributes to a radical understanding of the ‘‘world-enigma’’. And Kant, of course, gives the ﬁrst really systematic formulation of a transcendental

310

KONRAD ROKSTAD

philosophy. This carries the whole investigation into its main concern, the genuine phenomenological clariﬁcation of the transcendental problem. This clariﬁcation – which is itself now meant to be genuinely transcendental – presupposes that such an historical reﬂection has been made. Even though the investigations ahead are to conduct a transcendental reduction, constituting the sense of the transcendental in an apodictic manner, the historicity of what we have become is necessary for the accomplishment of such investigations. And this, having been exposed in historical reﬂection, will have to include the Life-world, too.8 Thus the Life-world is disclosed – not as a partial theme, but as a universal ﬁeld for genuine phenomenological analysis, genetically constituting the sense of the transcendental including both analyses of subjectivity and of intersubjectivity. Let’s brieﬂy look back – what has happened? It started out with talk about autonomy and a description of the struggle for understanding mankind, ‘the greatest historical phenomena’. All of this, of course, has a historical origin, but as such it is primarily an actual problem, situated in the actual situation – now characterised by that opposition between the transcendental and objectivism. Historical reﬂection, being a genuine self-reﬂection, yields ‘‘power’’ because this whole issue is not really something external, it is rather what we ourselves have become – our genuine historicity, which settles the horizon for actually understanding mankind and ourselves. Thus we as philosophers might appear to be real functionaries of mankind, substantially contributing to that autonomy to which the sciences are of decisive signiﬁcance. My concluding remarks will be brief. First I will say a few words about what is happening in the rest of the Crisis, Part III, which makes up the main substance of the book. Thereafter I will clarify some implications that follow from this whole exposition, and which are directly related to my exposition. I will also comment on those issues we started out with, the question of philosophy and the human condition in the changing world. In Part III the issue is the clariﬁcation of the Transcendental Problem, and two ways are developed for achieving this: The ﬁrst one by inquiring into (and from) the pre-given life-world, and the second, from psychology. Husserl then carries out reduction-procedures (which he has been much criticised for) and conducts a constitutional analysis in a genetic sense, so that the sense of transcendental subjectivity is constituted, or rather constitutes itself, in its ‘‘pure’’ essence. Nevertheless, the whole historicity, both the Life-world, the philosophical-scientiﬁc tradition, the actual situa-

THE LIFE-WORLD AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

311

tion with the struggle between objectivism and transcendentalism, and the autonomy of which we have spoken, are still present in his analysis. I will, of course, consider this ﬁeld of analysis to be something theoretical, and the manner in which it is conducted as something particular to the philosophical, transcendental phenomenological practice of Husserl. This is in a way analogous to how scientists have their own special ‘‘internal’’ methods and manners for doing their work. And I would not join those critics who disqualify Husserl’s enterprise in this regard, because I think they misconceive both the meaning of ‘reduction’ and the conception of the ‘transcendental’ in Husserl. But this is not the issue now. The other point I will comment on is the potential for criticism which this concept of the Life-world allows in its view against the sciences. Of course, it will have – and surely it is meant to have – such potential. But here I think we have to be more precise and speciﬁc. Even though Husserl is extensively criticising Galileo and the grounding of modern natural science, I would not say that his primary concern is an ‘‘internal’’ criticism directed at the theories and practices of the natural or other special sciences. I will rather say that he considers those as good and sound as they can get – perhaps with the exception of psychology, a science decisively dependent on an adequate understanding of the body and the mind as they are primary elements both naturally and transcendentally interwoven in the constitution of the human condition. Husserl’s main concern is with the grounding, the potential universal grounding of the sciences, as they have become theories and practices within human life that have a decisive impact within and on that same life as a civilised life. Thus the Life-world, the Body, the Mind, Nature, Intersubjectivity, and Objectivity have become decisive ﬁelds of study for phenomenological clariﬁcation, showing Transcendental Subjectivity to be relevant to this entire situation. My ﬁnal comment brings us back to where we started. I think the ‘‘urgent problems’’ aﬀecting the human condition in the changing world of today are of a rather permanent character. These are problems concerned with relations between people, persons, cultures, etc., and, of course they are concerned with the conservation and development of our Lifeworld as being something genuinely common within a world marked by science and technology, as well as diﬀerent and often conﬂicting interests. These are never ending issues and problems – as long as there are people living in the world they will exist. Consequently, philosophy can’t just implement its methods and conduct analyses which immediately ‘‘solve’’ these problems, simply telling people what to do. Philosophers do not

312

KONRAD ROKSTAD

have and hold T he Key. But, not forgetting what they have become and that they are also humans and members of living communities, they have both the responsibility and the means of making a substantial contribution – by reﬂecting critically on grounding – not only regarding sciences but also with regard to what civilised human life essentially means. Even though philosophy is a profession with its theoretical practices and ‘‘intrinsic’’ issues and problems, I would say this might indicate how philosophy, by pursuing its own ‘‘theoretical’’ questions, can contribute substantially to a better understanding of issues with decisive signiﬁcance to human beings living in the changing, present day world. University of Bergen Norway

NOTES 1 This way of putting it might call for some further explanation – the essence being genuinely phenomenological. Taken from the ‘‘most intrinsic’’ philosophical questions, the ‘‘obligation’’ regarding life will appear more like an ‘‘epistemological’’ obligation – philosophy having to have its ‘‘material’’ given by the phenomena of life. That’s the ﬁrst aspect of the thesis. The other aspect is saying something about some motivation (civilised life, understanding, etc.) also being constitutive for the sense of even asking about ‘‘urgent problems’’ and issues like that. Then you might, of course, say that philosophy is already incorporated in the human situation/condition (in the world) in a ‘‘natural’’ plain manner – itself being non-philosophical (you don’t have to be a philosopher to be concerned about civilised life, understanding, etc.). But this again will constitute some sort of precondition for both theoretical and practical philosophy. This may well have been how it was for Socrates/Plato too – developing the ‘‘most’’ theoretical within an essential practical motivation also reﬂecting the actual situation they were living in. And I would say it is how the actual situation appears today. What, then, constitutes the ‘‘ultimate’’ essential justiﬁcation for saying all this, is (so far only implicit) a philosophical ‘‘thesis’’ saying that life has priority. Plainly speaking, then, this means that even the ‘‘most theoretical’’, be it transcendental, metaphysical, ontological, scientiﬁc, etc., will have to – so to speak – be ‘‘standing on’’ life as its always functioning (historical) ground. Thus the Life-world (and the historicity) of the later Husserl is yielding the key; my paper will be explicating some main aspects of a perspective as indicated by this. 2 In this paper I will be refering to T he Crisis of European Sciences and T ranscendental Phenomenology, translated by D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 3 The meaning of all this is not, however, very clear. And if it were, would it have any signiﬁcance regarding the problems of philosophy? Then again, does philosophy have any signiﬁcance for such actual problems which themselves are of a non-philosophical nature? 4 Husserl is using it in texts published in Zur Pha¨nomenologie der Intersubjectivitda¨t, Dritter Teil, Husserliana XV, ed. Iso Kern (The Hague, 1973). 5 The exposition only presents some summary views (of parts of the Crisis) which in a very programmatic manner provide some clues for reﬂecting on the problem we are dealing with.

THE LIFE-WORLD AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

313

The substantial exposition has to come later on, including a much wider collection of works by Husserl. 6 This is the main train of thought in the analysis Husserl is presenting in §§ 9–14 of the Crisis. 7 It is given in § 15 of the Crisis, which is very interesting, and the following from pp. 70–71 might well be reﬂected on: ‘‘Our task is to make comprehensible the teleology in the historical becoming of philosophy, especially modern philosophy, and at the same time to achieve clarity about ourselves, who are the bearers of this teleology, who take part in carrying it out through our personal intentions. We are attempting to elicit and understand the unity running through all the [philosophical] projects of history that oppose one another and work to gather in their changing forms. In a constant critique, which always regards the total historical complex as a personal one, we are attempting ultimately to discern the historical task which we can acknowledge as the only one which is personally our own. This we seek to discern not from the outside, from facts, as if the temporal becoming in which we ourselves have evolved were merely an external causal series. Rather, we seek to discern it from inside [...]’’. 8 More speciﬁcally addressing the Kantian conception of the transcendental, Husserl is saying the following as he is moving from the historical into what is his transcendental analysis: ‘‘[...] Kant [...] has no idea that in his philosophizing he stands on unquestioned presuppositions and that the undoubtedly great discoveries in his theories are there only in concealment [...] are not ﬁnished results [...] not ﬁnished theories [...]. What he oﬀers demands new work and, above all, critical anaiysis. An example of a great discovery – is the ‘‘understanding’’ which has, in respect to nature, two functions: understanding interpreting itself, in explicit self-reﬂection, as normative laws, and, on the other hand, understanding ruling in concealment, i.e., ruling as constitutive of the already developed and always further developing meaning-conﬁguration ‘‘intuitively given surrounding world’’. This discovery could never be actually grounded or even be fully comprehensible in the manner of Kantian theory [...] [... they ...] have an unquestioned ground of presuppositions which codetermine the meaning of his questions. Science to whose truths and methods Kant attributes actual validity become a problem, and with them the spheres of being themselves to which these sciences refer. They become a problem in virtue of certain questions which take knowing subjectivity, too, into account [...] transcendentally forming subjectivity [...] transcendental achievements of sensibility, of the understanding, etc., and on the highest level, theories about functions of the ‘‘I’’ of ‘‘transcendental apperception.’’ [...]. Naturally, from the very start in the Kantian manner of posing questions, the everyday surrounding world of life is presupposed as existing – the surrounding world in which all of us (even I who am now philosophizing) consciously have our existence; here also the sciences, as cultural facts in the world, with their scientists and theories. In this world we are objects among objects in the sense of the life-world, namely as being here and there, in the plain certainty of experience, before anything that is established scientiﬁcally, whether in physiology, psychology, or sociology. On the other hand, we are subjects for this world, namely, as the ego-subjects experiencing it, contemplating it, valuing it, related to it purposefully; for us this surrounding world has only the ontic meaning given to it by our experiencings, our thoughts, our valuations, etc.; and it has the modes of validity [...] which we [...] bring about [...] or else possess from earlier on as habitual acquisitions and bear within us [...] which we can reacutalize at will. To be sure, all this undergoes manifold alterations, whereas ‘‘the’’ world as existing in a uniﬁed way, persists throughout, being corrected only in its content.’’ (Crisis, pp. 103–105)

ELI˙ F C ¸ IRAKMAN

TRANSCENDENCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION: REFLECTIONS ON KANT, HEIDEGGER AND LEVINAS

In the last sentence of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the boundary of human reason is discerned by the incomprehensibility of the unconditional necessity of the moral law.1 Nevertheless, Kant states that we can comprehend this incomprehensibility. The Kantian delimitation determines the human condition in a speciﬁc way: the objective ground of our moral obligation is incomprehensible and yet it is unconditionally necessary and absolute. The force of this predicament determines the human condition both as the need for transcendence and as the impossibility of grasping that transcendence. The human condition, which is qualiﬁed both with the issue of transcendence and its impossibility, is subject to the terms and conditions of a life-order (the jurisdiction of a higher Law) that is antinomic in character. Thus I shall argue that the problem in this antinomic character of life resides in its implication of an ‘‘unhappy’’ human condition. In simple terms, we are destined to evolve as ‘‘unhappy consciousnesses’’ oscillating between what is actual and what lies beyond. In this paper, I shall inspect the repercussions of this Kantian predicament – the ground of our absolute obligation as ‘‘unknown’’ – in the philosophical accounts of Heidegger and Levinas. I shall discuss a common assumption that all these approaches share: the unconditional condition and that what it conditions cannot be conceived as homogeneous, or as synchronic. For this reason, they must be conceived as transcendentally diﬀerent and, therefore, as the locus of diﬀerence. Here, Kant’s critical distinction between phenomena and noumena, Heidegger’s earlier formulation of the ontological distinction between beings and Being (and, later, its modiﬁcation into an originary diﬀerence) and Levinas’ diachrony between the order of Being and the order of Good are setting the agenda for the terms and conditions of their transcendental approach, privileging the condition of possibility over against actuality. No matter how diﬀerent their thematizations are, they all try to indicate the unconditioned condition that determines us. As I shall argue, the ‘‘tribunal’’ of Reason (Vernunft) in Kant, of Being (Sein) in Heidegger and of the Other (l’autrui) in Levinas are all meant to be the ‘‘jurisdiction’’ of the realm of transcendence. In this jurisdiction, 315 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 315–337. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

316

ELI˙ F C ¸ IRAKMAN

the ground must be comprehended in its incomprehensibility. I shall claim that the comprehension of the incomprehensibility of the ground of this jurisdiction turns out to be the condition of possibility of freedom (in Kant), of history (in Heidegger) and of ethical responsibility (in Levinas). Therefore, this jurisdiction deﬁnes being-human as having no power to comprehend the ground of its law, judgement, action, clearing, and responsibility. In other words, we can never recognize how this jurisdiction ultimately conditions, destines, determines and commands us. We can never comprehend the ‘‘how’’ of freedom, of history or of responsibility. Thus we can never comprehend the ‘‘how’’ of life and the order in which we participate. However, the comprehension of our human limitation (of what we cannot know) is envisaged as our obligation to follow the call of this jurisdiction. Finally, the repercussions of this Kantian predicament culminates in the imperative: ‘‘you must, therefore you cannot’’.2 With this imperative, we are imported into the heart of absence – the absence of destination that destines us, the absent ground of law that obliges the one whom it destines to lack destination.3 In this context, it is possible to ask whether the absent ground of transcendence, i.e., the Law, could not be the sublimation of what we ﬁnd absent in ourselves, or whether this incomprehensibility does not uncover what is incomprehensible in us, i.e., our undecidability. This question must also be asked from another angle: whether this absence could not be the sublimation of what we refuse to ﬁnd present in ourselves, or whether this incomprehensibility is not just an appearance of what is very comprehensible in us, i.e., our self-limited but mutually constituted self-understandings. In this paper, I approach the issue of transcendence and human condition under the guidance of these open-ended questions. I. THE PROBLEM OF THE ‘‘UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS’’: ‘‘HERE AND NOW’’ OR THE BEYOND?

Let me ﬁrst clarify how and why I use the expression ‘‘unhappy consciousness’’ before going into the details of my argument that the human condition could be interpreted as ‘‘unhappy’’ in the philosophical accounts of Kant, Heidegger and Levinas. I borrow the term ‘‘unhappy consciousness’’ from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.4 Hegel conceives ‘‘unhappy consciousness’’ as one of the modes of self-consciousness that is apparent in its experience of life. It is obviously a particular and deﬁcient mode of recognising the truth of the self and the meaning of life. The reason for its deﬁciency resides in the estrangement of consciousness from itself, that is, in its self-diremption. Nevertheless, it is one of the appearances of

TRANSCENDENCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

317

self-consciousness that must be run through in order to see what is involved in its constant attempts of self-appropriation. Hegel, in the Phenomenology, exhibits the self-formative activity of consciousness with reference to its logic of appearance. In other words, he brings out an exhibition of the diﬀerent forms of self-relation. Here, my purpose is to re-think the issue of transcendence in the context of an ‘‘unhappy’’ selfrelation. The adjective ‘‘unhappy’’ here simply refers to diﬀerent modes of self-dividedness and to all dualistic thought. Therefore, what I would like to point out is the problem that consists in approaching the issue of transcendence from the condition of an ‘‘unhappy’’ selfhood. In this context, I shall question how it is possible to conceive the thought of Kant, Heidegger and Levinas as particular expressions of this ‘‘unhappy’’ condition. I argue that Kant’s critical distinction between what is empirical and what is intelligible, Heidegger’s ontological diVerence between Being and beings, and Levinas’ ethical diVerence between self and the Other all share this unhappy condition by attaching themselves both to the possibility of transcendence and to its impossibility. They are all meant to be the means of struggle against ‘‘the threat of an entanglement of levels’’.5 They indicate a struggle against conﬂating the intelligible with the empirical (in Kant), the ontological with the ontical (in Heidegger), or the ethical with the ontological level (in Levinas). Thus I regard this threat as the reason why they all inevitably remain within the terms and conditions of a transcendental approach that is searching for the necessary conditions of possibility and, in this manner, proposing to surpass behind or beyond what is apparent. Above all, I am not here venturing the ambitious idea that the history of philosophical thought could be reduced to the stations of consciousness that are exempliﬁed in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Instead, I am trying to inspect a common predicament haunting the accounts of Kant, Heidegger and Levinas. In this context, I will treat the Hegelian ‘‘unhappy consciousness’’ as a source of inspiration in order to render this common predicament more explicit. In Hegel’s Phenomenology, unhappy consciousness is described as one of the stations in which self-consciousness ﬁnds itself on the way to absolute knowing. What is peculiar to this form of self-consciousness resides in its overcoming the skeptical attitude by aﬃrming the dividedness of its own self – its self-contradictory being – that which the skeptic refuses as constituting its truth. In other terms, the unhappy consciousness is the skeptic that recognizes its performative contradiction as belonging to its own self and acknowledges its source within itself. The appropriated division within unhappy consciousness consists in the

318

ELI˙ F C ¸ IRAKMAN

aﬃrmation of the following double bind. On the one hand, unhappy consciousness is the awareness of sensuousness, individuality, contingency and ﬁnitude endowed with all the changing dimensions of existence. On the other hand, it is the awareness of its substantiality, identity and essence endowed with all the unchanging dimensions of its pure thinking. However, unhappy consciousness cannot give an account of its pure thinking, or it sees the ground of its pure thinking as residing outside and beyond itself. Therefore, it does not take the essence – its unchangeable being or its pure thinking – as its own. Rather, it sees its own identity as located beyond itself. The unhappy consciousness is removing the contradiction between ‘‘what is here and now’’ and ‘‘what is beyond’’ by making it absolute for itself. In other words, it recognizes its truth – its being divided – by positing the absolute heterogeneity of its facticity and transcendence. The condition of unhappy consciousness can be interpreted as issuing from a desire to raise above life. The meaning of life changes as consciousness gradually becomes aware of its attitude towards life. For instance, the meaning of life is biological-natural when consciousness cannot risk what is naturally ‘‘given’’ to it in the face of death. When it sinks back to its factical life, consciousness takes the determination of being a servile consciousness gradually discovering a mind of its own. After stoic and skeptic consciousnesses, the ﬁnal stage of this relation between desire and life is exhibited as the unhappy consciousness, through which we witness the tension between the ideal and the real. Thus, the uniﬁed awareness of the life that is ‘‘here and now’’ (life in its particularity, or facticity) and the life that is ‘‘beyond’’ (life in its universality, or alterity) reveals the possibility and the impossibility of transcendence at the same time. For, it reveals the contradiction as residing within the single consciousness. Transcendence is possible to the extent that desire is directed towards what is not given or present, i.e., the ‘‘other’’. However, since the object of desire (the ‘‘other’’) is non-present or transcendent, desire seems to defy any satisfaction. Thus transcendence must be an impossible obligation. Desperately desired unity with the desired ‘‘other’’ must be an inﬁnite task within which desire can ‘‘enjoy’’ or ‘‘suﬀer’’ its freedom by acknowledging its ground as residing over and above, or as beyond, itself. The unhappy consciousness, bound by its own ﬁnite acts of transcendence, is self-divided as it becomes aware of the fact that the ground of its acts (freedom) must remain transcendental, external or incomprehensible. It is as if a secret agenda working behind the back of consciousness’ freedom by being the condition of its possibility and impossibility at the same time. The self is ‘‘out of joint’’. On the one hand, it is this particular

TRANSCENDENCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

319

existence, attached to life and its contigencies; it is subject to the ﬂow of time and to the external world. On the other hand, it envisages its essence as residing in a pure thinking which it feels as an unattainable beyond.6 This is the aporia involved in coming to terms with life, desire, freedom and transcendence. One of the signiﬁcant points in the above exposition can be expressed as follows: the skeptical attitude is succeeded by the unhappy one, that is, the despair and suspension regarding common sense and the factical existence dissolve in the hope of ﬁnding some peace through the idea of transcendence. However, the contradiction is not resolved but rather reappears as something inherent to consciousness. The unhappy consciousness exhibits the supersession of the incessant doubt that skepticism suﬀers. The meaning of this surpassing resides in the appropriation of skeptical doubt, or in the transfomation of it into an inner diremption of self. What is lost or what is not-yet regained is the unity with oneself, or, in general, the unity of thought and being. The horizon of the achievement of unity turns out to be a matter of transcendence: an existence chasing after its ‘‘other’’ in order to be one with it, but knowing that this can never happen in the actual state of aﬀairs, in the ‘‘here and now’’. Thus, Hegel claims the following: ‘‘where that ‘other’ is sought, it cannot be found, for it is supposed to be just a beyond, something that cannot be found’’.7 This double bind opens up the incessant interplay of presence and absence – of what is actual and what is ideal – in the experience of consciousness. Hegel’s section on the ‘‘unhappy consciousness’’ shows how the dualism of life and thought is intrinsic to the experience of consciousness, though it is not the whole of its truth. For one thing, the next stage in the Phenomenolgy shows how Self-Consciousness develops itself into Reason by searching to ﬁnd a way or a method of assuring the unity of life and thought which must be common to all experience. The resolution of the previous ‘‘unhappy’’ state occurs through the discovery of the right ways (Laws) of Reason through which consciousness can give a universal justiﬁed account of its unity from its own resources. The discovery of this method signals the renewed possibility of transcendence: it is the Kantian discovery of the transcendental method. II. THE KANTIAN PROBLEM OF THE UNITY OF REASON: THE ANTINOMY OF LAW

This methodological turning point could be interpreted as Kant’s transcendental philosophy taking its initiation from the critical investigation

320

ELI˙ F C ¸ IRAKMAN

of the limits of pure reason as the faculty of the principles of thought. What follows from this critical inquiry is a ‘‘metaphysics’’ of subjectivity: the discovery of the cognitive and the practical powers of man under the self-limitation and self-legislation of pure reason. This new metaphysics, presented as the tribunal of pure reason, is intended to ground the rational essence of man. Moreover, since this ‘‘tribunal of pure reason’’ designates an inquiry as the terms and conditions of the legislation of pure reason in theory and in practice, and since it is conducted by pure reason itself so that it is a self-examination, it sets what must be the case: the transcendental dimension of knowledge signifying the formal conditions of possibility or, simply, the terms and conditions of being-rational in cognition and in practice. This task of grounding the rational powers of man is made possible ﬁrst by dissecting the powers of man and, then, by showing how these powers should not be contaminated with each other. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s discovery of the cognitive and practical powers of man under the self-limitation and self-legislation of pure reason indicates that the ground of law must be sought in two distinct functions of pure reason, that is, in its law-setting and law-giving activities.8 The essential capacity of being-human is, in turn, deﬁned by means of these two functions of pure reason. Thus, rationality is an imperative in us. We are all bound to be rational. However, reason is not in unity with itself as it posits two diﬀerent grounds for the law: one is theoretical and the other is practical. These two distinct grounds indicate, in turn, two distinct characters of the rationality of man. On the one hand, man is ﬁnite in his law setting capacity. On the other hand, man is free in his law-giving capacity. In the Kantian account, the unity of reason and, therefore, the unity of the ground of law turn out to be a question of causality. The core of Kant’s third antinomy displays the contradiction between the causality of freedom and the causality of nature.9 Pure reason falls into this contradiction when, in a speculative manner, it endeavours to complete the series of natural causes. However, it cannot complete this series unless it posits a spontaneous or a free cause (an unconditioned condition). This conﬂict arises from a natural and unavoidable double endeavour of pure reason. On the one hand, pure reason seeks to ﬁnd an unconditioned totality of all conditions for any given conditioned state. On the other hand, it endeavours to avoid the illegitimate extension of categories to entities that can never become the objects of possible experience. In other words, pure reason seeks both an unconditioned unity satisfying the conditions of thought (a rule) and a unity satisfying

TRANSCENDENCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

321

the conditions of experience (regularity). Rule and regularity, respectively, give an order to our thinking and experience. Rule is the orderliness of our practice. Regularity is the orderliness of occurrence. For Kant, rule and regularity indicate diﬀerent kinds of causality. On the one hand, there is the causality of freedom, i.e., laws of freedom. On the other hand, there is the causality of natural necessity, i.e., laws of nature. At the theoretical level, the problem arises when the possibility of the representation of the unconditioned totality of appearances is questioned. Since this possibility resides beyond the empirical realm, it is only intelligible but not knowable. The representation of an unconditioned totality surpasses appearances, and in this respect, it is transcendent. Thus, Kant ﬁnds the resolution of the antinomy by drawing a transcendental distinction between the order of phenomena and the order of noumena. In this respect, he thinks laws of natural necessity and laws of freedom are absolutely seperated, that is, neither of them is absolute, but their seperation is made absolute. In other words, the transcendental method is the ground for the absolute separation of the theoretical and the practical employment of pure reason. The cognitive power of man is conveyed as a constitutive power limited by what is given under the pure forms of sensibility, i.e., time and space, and what is thought by means of categories. Therefore, the cognitive subject can only come to know the phenomenal world and its phenomenal self out of its self-limitation. For this reason, the synthesis of appearances is always conditioned and incomplete. This is the essential meaning of human ﬁnitude. However, Kant also argues that human ﬁnitude ought to be surpassed by means of leaving a room for faith which amounts to the postulation of the transcendental ideas of Reason. So, ﬁnally, the Kantian tribunal concludes with the statement that there ought to be an unconditioned condition residing at the foundation of all human cognition and action although we can never comprehend the ground of its objective determination. Moreover, the comprehension of this unconditional condition in its incomprehensibility must be conceived as the sole task of philosophy. In the Critique of Judgment, the problem turns out to be the question of the unity of morality and happiness or, in other words, the harmony between a self-suﬃcient, ﬁnal purpose that is absolutely independent from nature and the sum total of all those purposes that can be achieved through nature outside or within man.10 Kant argues as follows: ‘‘the latter kind of purpose is man’s happiness on earth ... the matter of all his purposes on earth, and if he makes it his whole purpose it makes him unable to set a ﬁnal purpose for his own existence and to harmonize with

322

ELI˙ F C ¸ IRAKMAN

this ﬁnal purpose’’.11 This ﬁnal purpose is the man considered as a noumenon, i.e., the subject of the moral law, to which all other purposes are subordinated.12 With this statement, practical reason, as the a priori source of the unconditioned legislation of the moral subject, proves its primacy in Kantian philosophy. In this respect, the possibility of transcendence is posited merely as a matter of practical faith in what is not accessible, i.e., the Moral Law. The possibility of transcendence resides in the impossibility of its realization or fulﬁllment. The ideality of the Moral Law is, in fact, the condition of the possibility of ethical action and human freedom. Slavoj Zize´k perfectly describes the deadlock that I try to inspect in the issue of transcendence as follows: ‘‘the overlapping of the condition of impossibility (the inaccessibility of the noumenal realm to ﬁnite human conscience) with the condition of possibility (humanity can act morally, out of Duty, only insofar as the noumenal realm is unaccessible to human beings)’’.13 I shall entitle this deadlock the antinomy of law in order to stress upon the problem in thinking the ground of law as both incomprehensible and absolute.14 For I argue that such a thinking directly refers to the unhappy condition of being-human. Thus, in Kant, the ideal thought of the ﬁnal harmony between nature and freedom could be interpreted as the idealization of a uniﬁed self-relation which is prescribed as a Beyond. In the following sections, I shall inspect the reprecussions of the antinomy of law in the philosophies of Heidegger and Levinas.

III. THE REPERCUSSIONS OF KANTIAN ANTINOMY: THE CASES OF HEIDEGGER AND LEVINAS

Both Heidegger and Levinas try to overcome the limitations of Kantian philosophy. Heidegger with regard to Kantian philosophy and Levinas with regard to both Kantian and Heideggerian philosophy. Both introduce lines of criticism that intend to push further the limits of the previous account or accounts. In challenging these limits, both Heidegger and Levinas focus on what lies beneath the formerly established conditions of inquiry. These eﬀorts of overcoming the shortcomings and of pushing further, or challenging the limits of the previously laid ground, lead them to ﬁnd new conditions of possibility that ground life and the experience of human being. I claim that these new conditions are the indications of diﬀerent conﬁgurations of the antinomy of law. The exploration of these diﬀerent conﬁgurations tells us how the human condition is envisaged in an ‘‘unhappy’’ state in the face of its absolute obligation: transcendence.

TRANSCENDENCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

323

Kant’s transcendental philosophy introduces the unity of method – the Law of Reason – as the incomprehensible ground of the duality of the orders of practical inﬁnity and ﬁnite sensibility. Through this method, the separation of these orders is established. In this context, Heidegger’s deconstructive retrieval of Kant’s transcendental philosophy can be read as pushing the limits of Kant’s transcendental approach to its end in order to delimit its hidden inner possibility. Heidegger conceives Kant’s ground-laying as the disclosure of the inner possibility of ontology, which he entitles as Dasein. In Being and T ime, Heidegger proposes the project of a phenomenology that is transcendental in method by establishing the necessary conditions of possibility of understanding beings in terms of their Being.15 Thus he works within the terms of a transcendental distinction that is drawn between beings and Being. This transcendental distinction is necessary for clarifying the meaning of Being. Fundamental ontology is a quest for meaning that resides in the manifestation of the Being of beings. For this purpose, the essential meaning of the unity of ﬁnitude and freedom must be disclosed. Heidegger conceives this task as making explicit what is implicitly thought in Kant’s transcendental philosophy: the unity of spontaneity (projection, understanding, transcendence) and receptivity (throwness, ﬁnitude, facticity). The ground of this unity is sought in the structure of the self-appropriation of Dasein, revealing the signiﬁcance of the ﬁnitude, worldliness and resoluteness of our human predicament, i.e., the meaning of transcendence. In Being and T ime, the ontological distinction between Being (Sein) and beings (Seiendes) becomes the essential step for the prospect of a fundamental ontology that searches the transcendental conditions of possibility of understanding Being in its unity. Thus Heidegger’s approach searches the ground of inquiry in the Being of Dasein. The Being of Dasein constitutes the transcendental horizon within which the meaning of Being is disclosed. In this quest for meaning, Heidegger stresses the distinctive character of Dasein, for whom the question of Being is an issue. In other words, Heidegger interprets the meaning of ‘‘transcendental’’ as forming (bilden) the horizon for beings to appear. The condition of possibility of this horizon is our primordial pre-understanding of Being, or our always already being-in-the-world, i.e., Dasein.16 In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger deﬁnes the issue of transcendence as follows: ‘‘This going-beyond to the ‘wholly other,’ however, requires a being-inthere (Darinnensein), in a ‘medium’ within which this ‘wholly other’ – that the knowing creature itself is not and over which it is not the master – can be encountered’’.17 In Being and T ime, Heidegger elaborates this

324

ELI˙ F C ¸ IRAKMAN

‘‘medium’’ as ‘‘the world’’ (die Welt): the ﬁnite historical horizon of the disclosure of Being. In T he Essence of Reasons, the world means ‘‘a How (das W ie) of the Being of being rather than the being itself ’ and, for this reason, it is ‘‘ultimately the possibility of every How as limit and measure’’.18 Moreover, the world is essentially related to Dasein in the sense that it is Dasein who ‘‘forms the world’’ or ‘‘lets world happen’’.19 It is the medium for the self-appropriation of Dasein since in approaching being through the world, Dasein makes a self of itself, i.e., a being which is free to be’’.20 Dasein’s facticity is distinct from the factuality of some extant entity since it is thrown into existence. Thus, existence is an issue for Dasein, or a project that it must take over. Therefore, the issue of transcendence is deﬁned in terms of the fallen and prospecting aspects of existence. Transcendence is not a matter of cutting oneself oﬀ from the world but a movement of disclosure through which Dasein encounters its own facticity; its being-in-the-world. It is qualiﬁed as coming back to one’s essence and gathering oneself as a whole. As Michel Haar suggests it is the very quest for the pure form of the self in one’s ownmost temporality.21 The quest for the meaning of Being turns out to be a question of the unity of authentic self-relation. This is not an inward relation to self but a relation to Being. There is a need for self-appropriation because man is not what he is and does not have what he has. Haar characterizes this condition as the poverty of man: ‘‘Man is always lacking in something. This something is not some entity, but his very being: that relation to being that he cannot possess, but only exhibit in the ek-static movement of existence. He is the entity that he is only in having lost being and in ﬁnding it again, so as to lose it anew’’.22 This ‘‘poverty of man’’ discloses the reason why the human condition is in an ‘‘unhappy’’, or in an ‘‘uncanny’’ state. Therefore, given that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is conducted by the being which we ourselves are, i.e., Dasein, and since what is investigated is nothing but the meaning of Being in general, this quest for meaning seeks the terms and conditions of Beinghuman in the ‘‘uncanny’’ freedom ruling as the self-appropriation of Dasein. Against Kant, Heidegger refuses to see the problem of freedom in terms of the problem of causality. Although Heidegger’s account of freedom underwent some changes between his early and later thinking, he never accepted the Kantian conception of freedom as the spontaneity of a cause, that is, as the spontaneity of a pure will. Heidegger explains the source of Kant’s inscription of double causality by connecting it back to Kant’s understanding of both things and persons as ‘‘existing’’. Heidegger claims

TRANSCENDENCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

325

that the genuine meaning of existence is Dasein. For him, this is the reason why Kant’s double inscription paves the way to an illegitimate distinction between metaphysics of nature and metaphysics of morals. Unlike Kant, the problem Heidegger focuses on is the possibility of the unity of existence. The unity of existence consists in reconciling freedom and ﬁnitude. The mark of ﬁnitude, for Heidegger, is our rootedness in time deﬁning our resoluteness to be open to the manifestness of beings and to the disclosure of their Being. Moreover, our rootedness in time makes possible our self-disclosure. Unlike Kant, Heidegger tries to elaborate the original togetherness of time and self. Thus, Heidegger shows how the transcendence and facticity of Dasein are not a duality, but a unity, a rule in the simplicity of the ‘‘fate’’ of Dasein. The fate of Dasein is the temporalization of the necessity of past (‘‘facticity’’) in the futurity of freedom (‘‘transcendence’’). The antagonism of freedom and necessity is resolved within the unity of Dasein’s ability to be, in its ﬁnite freedom. Heidegger overcomes the Kantian duality of temporal nature and atemporal freedom by elaborating a question concerning the unity of Dasein that is explored through fundamental ontology. In this context, freedom is regarded as the ﬁnite transcendence of Dasein. In his later thinking, Heidegger decentralizes the self-referential unity of human existence. Freedom is regarded ontologically as the letting-be of Being and as the operation of the truth of Being. Thus, Heidegger later defends the idea that the truth of Being is in excess of existence. In this manner, he takes a ‘‘turn’’ (Kehre) from the project of fundamental ontology to the thinking of Being. The advent of the truth of Being involves always an ontological necessity of covering its truth (concealment) and an ontological freedom of uncovering its truth (unconcealment). The truth of Being is in conﬂict. In this context, the role of human freedom would consist in its ﬁnite power to institute, to hear and to follow the operation of Being. Then, for Heidegger, the genuine meaning of human freedom would consist in nothing, but in being open to the destining, sending, ordaining and disclosure of Being. Human freedom consists in being open to the conﬂict within the operation of truth (un-concealment). Thus, man is destined to being, and in this destination man is the occasion (Gelegenheit) of the freedom of Being. In this regard, the meaning of transcendence resides not any more in the self-appropriation (Eigentlichkeit) of man but in his being appropriated (vereignet) by Being. In Heidegger’s early thinking, the ground of the ontological distinction is understood in terms of the transcendence of temporal existence. Later, Heidegger abandons the idea of temporal existence as the locus of tran-

326

ELI˙ F C ¸ IRAKMAN

scendence and transforms the distinction into an ontological diﬀerence where its ground must be sought in the Event of Being (das Ereignis).23 Moreover, Dasein is no longer qualiﬁed as individual existence. Rather, it is envisaged as a ﬁeld of individualization, as the possibility of man to be open to the conﬂict within the un-truth (a-letheia) of Being. However, since the freedom of Being necessitates the interplay of absence and presence, concealment and unconcealment, the freedom of Being is always over and beyond man’s ﬁnite ability to embody. So the letting-be of Being (Sein-lassen) – as the freedom that bursts open as the free region within which beings come to presence – is never exhausted by the ﬁnite embodiment of this region by man. For one thing, the Event of Being resonates in between Da-sein (being-there, turning-toward) and Weg-sein (not beingthere, turning-away). Since the Event of Being consists in giving and withdrawing, this double bind has a double implication for man: freedom (appropriation) and alienation (expropriation). The question of how man ﬁnds himself in the eventfulness of Being is answered in terms of being destined to unfold in between the twofold possibility: Da-sein and Wegsein. This twofold possibility of being-human is not at the disposal of man but at the disposal of Being. This is what Heidegger means by the freedom of Being. The ‘‘uncanny’’ condition of human existence gains a stronger meaning in the face of the Event of Being which necessitates the conﬂict of essence (truth) and counter-essence (untruth), and which causes man to dwell in this conﬂict, or to be open to its vibration. As Dominique Janicaud points, the Event of Being can no longer be understood or known since it only occurs and its advent is without reason.24 Above all, Heidegger regards freedom as belonging to the verbal sense of Being. This verbal sense of Being consists in letting-be, sending, presencing, destining, assigning, grounding and concealing. cloaking, withdrawing. There is an originary conﬂict within this verbal sense of Being. The conﬂict of Being turns out to be an imperative for us: ‘‘the renunciation of all conceptualization in the face of the event (Ereignis)’’.25 It is the incomprehensible – non-phenomenal – origin of the phenomenal presence of beings. In his early thinking, Heidegger interprets the Kantian categorical imperative in terms of the call of conscience. Both the Kantian categorical imperative and the Heideggerian call of conscience make possible the self-responsibility and resolution of man. In both early Heidegger and in Kant, we ﬁnd an understanding of autonomy ruling either as the selfsubmission of Dasein, or as the self-legislation of the moral person. It is a notion of autonomy linking freedom (transcendence) with obligation

TRANSCENDENCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

327

(ought-to-be). For Heidegger, freedom is the very decision of the historical form of Dasein, which is not grounded in any rational universal law. In Heidegger, the meaning of law ﬁgures in the possibility of Dasein to become its own Being, or in its self-appropriation. The ground of law resides in the essential unfolding of Dasein, which consists in Dasein’s being-towards death. Dasein is delivered over to itself through the anticipation of death as its own. The anticipation of this unsurpassable possibility dispels all accidental and the provisional possibilities, and becomes the condition of possibility of all existential choices. This overcoming is called the anticipatory resoluteness deﬁning the decision to take up one’s existence as ﬁnitude. This decision is a primordial ontological decision, and, in this respect, it must work as the condition of possibility of all existential choices if these choices, possess any authenticity at all. Therefore, the content of the decision, deﬁned by anticipatory resoluteness, is empty since it only designates the essential existential condition, which is ﬁnitude. In the light of ﬁnitude, Dasein must appropriate itself. This formal decision issues from the call of conscience, which calls Dasein back to its own ability-to-be (Seinko¨nnen). The call of conscience calls the Being of Dasein as ‘‘an entity which has to be as it is and as it can be’’.26 The obligation that binds Dasein by the call of conscience is to be a whole within the possibilities inherent in one’s past and future, i.e., the possibilities of ecstatic temporality. Therefore, Being is an imperative in Dasein. The content of this imperative is empty. It only commands us to be by pointing out our ﬁnite ability-to-be. For Heidegger, Dasein’s choices and principles of conduct are grounded in nothing but in its abyssal freedom which ‘‘puts Dasein’s Being-in-the-world face to face with the ‘‘nothing’’ of the world; in the face of this ‘nothing’, Dasein is anxious with anxiety about its ownmost potentiality-for Being’’.27 Both the self-legislation of the moral person in Kant and the selfappropriation of Dasein in Heidegger assume a formal decisionism. This means that it is impossible for the Kantian moral person to receive a positive injunction from the categorical imperative. It is the obligation of the moral person to determine the content of his duty. This obligation assumes the freedom of the moral person (the possibility of autonomy). It is also impossible for Dasein to receive a positive injunction from the call of conscience. It is the obligation of Dasein to determine the content of its duty. This obligation assumes Dasein’s freedom to be a whole (the possibility of self-appropriation). Therefore, in the accounts Kant and Heidegger, this formal decisionism implies the connection between freedom and obligation. However, it is just because of this formal decisionism

328

ELI˙ F C ¸ IRAKMAN

that it is impossible to know what the categorical imperative and the call of conscience command. Their commands are unknowable but absolute in deﬁning our obligation and freedom. In his later thinking, Heidegger no longer understands the question of Being with recourse to the project of fundamental ontology. He distances himself from his retrieval of the Kantian categorical imperative. In this respect, he also renounces the meaning of law as the self-assertion of Dasein. Rather, the Event of Being is the primary focus of his new outlook. The Event is no longer the self-appropriation of Dasein, but rather it means man’s appropriation by Being. For one thing, the advent of the truth of Being no longer coincides with the disclosure of ﬁnite existence, since the presencing of Being is always in excess of what is present. The Event of Being consists in the resonation of absence at the heart of presence. Being is never present, but rather, is the condition of all presence. Being’s assignment consists in its need of a place to shelter and to institute its truth. For this reason, Being needs man as an open site (Da) of its (dis)closure. The diﬃculty in Heidegger’s thinking of the Event (the belonging together of man and Being) displays itself in the passage from the pre-metaphysical to the metaphysical, from the originary Event of truth to the institution of truth by man. In Heidegger’s later thinking, the ground of law is the Being that gives, dispenses, orders, ordains, and destines. Moreover, the law is the assignment contained in the dispensation of Being.28 In Heidegger’s thinking, one can conceive the resonance of the antinomy of law in general as follows: the ground of law as the presencing of Being is in itself unknowable since it is always in excess of what is present, but it is absolute by being the condition of all presence. Levinas has introduced an ‘‘ethical’’ turning point by challenging both Kantian rational subjectivity and the Heideggerian ontology of human existence. Levinas delimits the meaning of transcendence neither in terms of the self-realization of a rational subject nor in terms of the ﬁnite freedom of Dasein but in terms of what is foreign and exterior to the self of man, i.e., the radical alterity of the Other. This radical alterity shatters the framework of the solitude of the subject by assigning and commanding its terms and conditions. Since this assignment comes over and beyond the powers of the subject and its ability to be, and since what is commanded is nothing but the ethical signiﬁcance in the face of the Other, then this ethical signiﬁcance of the Other determines the terms and conditions of transcendence: the ‘‘Law’’ of ethical inﬁnity. For Levinas, both Kantian and Heideggerian accounts of transcendence display themselves within a paradigm of the solitude of subjectivity. They

TRANSCENDENCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

329

assume the subject as alone, that is, as not constituted primarily by its subjection to the Other. Levinas qualiﬁes the limiting condition of Kantian and Heideggerian accounts with a ‘‘transcendental’’ ethical dimension. This ethical dimension is conceived as over and beyond Kantian morality and Heideggerian ontology. It is transcendental because it is the primordial condition of possibility of both morality and ontology. In Existence and Existents, Levinas describes how the problem of freedom displays itself within the structure of a solitary subject.29 The problem consists in the conﬂict between the freedom of the subject (its mastery over existence by having a self of its own) and the necessity of existence (the fact that it exists). In Levinas, the birth of an ego is marked with this tension of freedom and necessity. The birth of an ego consists in its existential instantiation. This instantiation means that a being (an existent) separates itself from ‘‘the existence in general’’ and becomes an individual self. Thus, the ego is separate from the impersonal existence by becoming an individual existent. However, it falls back into this impersonal existence just because of the fact that it exists. In this regard, Levinas inspects the source of the ‘‘unhappy’’ state within the self-identical ego, within a solitary existent in the face of impersonal existence. Levinas claims that the tension between existence and the existent can only be resolved by the ‘‘alterity’’ of the Other. Thus, the Other drives the selfidentical ego out of its enchainment to existence. For one thing, since the ‘‘I’’ alone cannot pardon its being, or unchain its ties with impersonal existence, its liberation from this tension can only come from its submission to the other person. The resolution of the dialectic of this ‘‘unhappy’’ state could be made possible only by the ethical responsibility for the Other. However, because this responsibility for the Other is the inﬁnite obligation of the self, it only designates an impossible possibility revealing the absolute ethical signiﬁcance in Levinas’ thinking. The core of Levinas’ criticism of Kant and Heidegger is that they both exhibit freedom as the self-referential positioning which initiates responsibility as the commitment of the subject to its own authentic being, or to its rational essence. For Levinas, early Heidegger’s account of transcendence and Kant’s account of autonomy display the meaning of freedom as the mode of remaining the same in the midst of the other. They point to a relation between me and myself. For instance, Kantian autonomy means the self-legislation and the self-determination of the subject, or giving law to oneself. What Heidegger means by ‘‘transcendence’’ is the appropriation of the self, being-open to what primordially belongs to the self as its ownmost possibility, or to be at home with oneself. For Levinas,

330

ELI˙ F C ¸ IRAKMAN

if the ultimate signiﬁcance of freedom rests in transcendence, then this meaning of transcendence subordinates the Other to the self-appropriation of the same. Rather, Levinas regards transcendence not in terms of an ‘‘existent raising itself up to an higher existence’’ but as an ‘‘excendence’’ towards the Good.30 What Levinas means by ‘‘ex-cendence’’ is the ex-posure to the otherness of the Other: ‘‘a departure from Being’’.31 It designates a relation to the Other which cannot be reduced to the selfrelation of the same. Besides, if freedom, in Kantian sense, means the exercise of the rational essence of man, which consists in the universal self-legislation of the subject, then being encompassed within the universal formulation of the law neutralizes the Other. Against Kant, Levinas argues that the subject is subject to an imperative which is not grounded in its own universal legislation, but which is expressed in the face the Other who uniquely chooses me. This imperative is unconditional, but it cannot be universalized. It produces a privileged heteronomy against autonomy because it is an unconditional commandment that comes from the Other. Levinas rehabilitates heteronomy as something positive and, in this respect, sets up Kantian morality as an opposite direction. This privileged heteronomy continuously interrupts the subject’s spontaneity and autonomy, that is, its freedom and right to be. In this way, it is thought to be liberating the self from its enchainment to its own existence. For Kant, the meaning of heteronomy is negative since it consists in subjection to the external causes and designates the ﬁnitude of man. For Levinas, heteronomy has a positive signiﬁcance because it allows the submission of the self to the Other, and, in this way, it designates the idea of inﬁnity. Thus, my freedom is intelligible only under the condition of the time of the Other. The time of the Other produces the idea of inﬁnity in me because the Other is never present, or never in the ‘‘here and now’’. The Other is always to come. Besides, the Other is never present because he had already passed. I am always late in responding to him. The time of the Other designates the past and the future, which I can never synthesize, connect or encompass in the present. I am always in the present, and for this reason I am always separated from the Other. Overall, the heteronomy designates a limitation, but this limitation does not arise because the subject is determined by necessary external causes, but because the subject’s responsibility for the Other precedes its freedom. What is common to both Kant and Levinas is the claim that freedom needs justiﬁcation. We have to justify our freedom, but in what sense? For Kant, freedom is a rightful possession of man, but it must be justiﬁed or secured, otherwise the subject would not exist as a rational being, as

TRANSCENDENCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

331

an end in itself and for others. The transcendental idea of the kingdom of ends is the securing ground of this possession because, in this kingdom, it is in the interest of everyone to respect the freedom of the other since they have the same freedom to be respected. This possession of freedom then becomes the basic principle of natural justice, that is, the universal principle of Right. However, Levinas would not agree with the Kantian way of justifying freedom because it presupposes what it needs to examine in the ﬁrst place: the idea of freedom as a rightful possession of every rational being. Levinas argues that freedom needs to be questioned just because it is presupposed as a rightful possession and as the basic principle of the Right. In T otality and Inﬁnity, Levinas argues that Kant’s understanding of freedom as spontaneity of a cause renders freedom arbitrary and violent.32 Moreover, he claims that the antinomy between freedom and necessity does not reside in the clash of two diﬀerent causalities where one is spontaneous and the other external.33 Rather, the problem of antinomy consists in the exigency of justice at the heart of freedom, or in the moment at which the freedom of the ‘‘I’’ inevitably questions its right to be spontaneous. For Levinas, the ultimate meaning of justiﬁcation must be doing ‘‘justice’’ to the Other. I can justify my freedom (my personal existence) only by doing justice to the Other. Justice consists in my duty towards the Other and towards every other. However, the plurality of others creates a problem. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Levinas describes how the double inscription of duty (duty to the singular Other and to every other) binds the subject within an impasse.34 For it is impossible for the self to synchronize its ethical responsibility for the Other and the demand of justice of the third party. They may be in conﬂict with each other. I must then know who is right or who is wrong. I commit injustice as soon as I compare those who are incomparable. It is therefore impossible to do justice both to the Other and to the third party in the same instance. The justiﬁcation of freedom in the sense of doing justice is an inﬁnite but also an ‘‘impossible’’ duty for the responsible subject. Yet, for Levinas, this impossibility is ‘‘good’’ because it initiates an endless questioning of the subject’s powers or capacities, and produces an inﬁnite ethical responsibility for the other person. For Levinas, the ground of law is the Other. This is to say that the Other is the ethical source of all laws. Levinas explicates this ethical grounding with recourse to the face of the Other. The face of the Other is nothing but an unconditional imperative for the self. In Levinas, the ‘‘recognition’’ of the imperative as the face of the Other acknowledges the

332

ELI˙ F C ¸ IRAKMAN

‘‘height’’ and the goodness of the Other. This acknowledgment produces an idea of inﬁnity in the self. Here, ‘‘recognition’’ means ‘‘welcoming’’ the Other by being responsible for him. Moreover, this responsibility puts a claim on the substance and the life of the self on its being. Hence, the recognition of the Other signiﬁes neither cognition nor the rational feeling of respect, but rather means giving one’s substance to the Other which is possible only by ethical responsibility. On the one hand, this recognition acknowledges the ‘‘face to face’’ relation as an immediate asymmetrical intersubjectivity, i.e., proximity. On the other hand, the Other is always beyond the reach and tropes of the self. In other words, he is inﬁnitely remote from the self since the otherness of the Other denotes his absolute radical alterity. The ethical relation to the Other consists in the recognition of the Other who is inﬁnitely remote from the subject’s powers of access, but who is also in proximity to appeal and to obligate the self. Accordingly, the distance and the proximity of the Other render the ground of law – the imperative in the face of the Other – unknowable and forceful or, in other words, unthematizable and absolute. Therefore, the ethical relation renounces epistemic knowing and even moral selfknowledge for the sake of the ethical recognition of the Other. In other words, because the imperative in the face of the Other is an ethical saying exceeding the signiﬁcance of every sign and of any discourse, it is unknowable, unobjectiﬁable or unthematizable. Moreover, because this imperative is unthematizable, it is absolutely ethical. From Levinas’ perspective, the face of the Other (the absolute and the non-phenomenal) designates the genuine source of the Kantian incomprehensibility of the practical unconditional necessity of the moral law. For Levinas, the face is incomprehensible because it refuses the mediation of form and light. It commands me through its nudity. The nudity of face aﬀects me, but I cannot give any account of this aﬀection. I cannot describe or thematize the expression of the face. Moreover, I cannot objectify the appeal of the imperative as the face of the Other. In this way, I argue that the imperative in the face of the Other can be regarded as the enigmatic or incomprehensible origin of the Kantian categorical imperative: the non-phenomenal, non-thematizable face of the Other. Therefore, this enigmatic character of the Law of laws (the ground of law) brings its inﬁnite ethical obligation. This obligation is inﬁnite because the more it is fulﬁlled the more it increases. This is its ethical ‘‘force’’. In other words, the moral perfection of the subject is impossible. This impossibility is an ethical one due to the inﬁnity of the Other. Because one’s ethical duty towards the Other never admits of fulﬁlment, there is an

TRANSCENDENCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

333

impossibility concerning the achievement of moral perfection. Therefore, we can conclude that, in Levinas, ethical obligation and responsibility can never have a base in the order of Being. For Levinas, the failure of both Kantian morality and Heideggerian fundamental ontology is to connect the obligation of self with its freedom. In Levinas, obligation of self and its freedom are separate because the obligation comes from the Other and is grounded in his commandment. It does not imply the freedom of self. On the contrary, the obligation designates the necessity to question one’s right to be, that is, one’s freedom. It is the radical alterity of the Other that questions my freedom, or my self-assertion and my self-legislation. Therefore, the issue of freedom is no longer conceived in terms of transcendence. Rather, transcendence is a matter of questioning one’s freedom. This questions my self-determination, i.e., the determination of the content of the imperative in terms of my concrete choices, duties, rights, etc. Moreover, in the formal decisionism of Kant and Heidegger, failure and guilt (as forms of the transgression of Law) are co-substantial with the moral and the existential duty. It is because the moral person and Dasein can never be sure of accomplishing their duty proper due to their ﬁnitude and uncanniness. For Levinas, one can never be sure of accomplishing one’s duty due to one’s inﬁnite ethical responsibility for the Other. This is to say that in the midst of the Other one is always morally unworthy. The idea of perfection implies the consciousness of one’s own imperfection, guilt, injustice and unworthiness. To repeat, in Levinas, the inﬁnity of the ethical responsibility and the resultant imperfection does not primarily indicate an ontological or an epistemological ﬁnitude. It has a much stronger signiﬁcance. It constitutes the incomprehensible ground of ethical obligation. The failure of morality and ontology consists in the subordination of the ethical to the selfrelation of the subject and of Dasein, or to the advent of Being in general. Therefore, for Levinas, the issue of transcendence could be interpreted with recourse to the ethical relation that disrupts the unhappy self-relation of the subject. However, this ethical relation, being the locus of transcendence, radicalizes the ‘‘unhappy’’ condition by making it absolute in the asymmetry of intersubjectivity (in the radical diﬀerence between the self and the Other). IV. CONCLUSION

In the comparative perspective that is pursued here, it is possible to state that the critical distinction of Kant, separating the empirical realm from

334

ELI˙ F C ¸ IRAKMAN

the intelligible realm, is radicalized by Heidegger as an ontic-ontological distinction and later as an originary diﬀerence between beings and Being. Moreover, these distinctions are radicalized by Levinas as a diachrony between the order of Being and of the Good. Each of these attempts at radicalization intends a new transcendence showing a point of excess – such as the abyss of freedom and the Event of Being or the radical alterity of the Other – as the condition shattering the limits of the previous account. When Heidegger tries to liberate himself from the duality of metaphysics of nature and of freedom, he develops another distinction between beings and Being, which becomes the condition of possibility of Kant’s distinction. When Levinas tries to liberate himself from the phenomenological interplay of beings and their Being, he calls upon the radical separation between ethics and ontology in which ethics becomes the limit exceeding the order of Being. The ethical relationship then becomes the only unconditioned condition that opens up the possibility of transcendence. This incursion of new conditions of transcendence renders the ground of transcendence more incomprehensible. However, the more the ground of transcendence is rendered incomprehensible, the more ‘‘forceful’’ – or demanding – its grounding becomes. The Kantian moral law, ﬁnding its ground in practical reason by being the non-empirical fact of reason, becomes a moral force against the empirical nature of man. Heidegger’s abyssal grounding of freedom, ﬁnding its verbal sense in the presencing of Being, becomes an ontological power that challenges and destines man. Finally, in Levinas, the ethical commandment – the Law of all laws – ﬁnds its expression in the face of the Other, becomes an ethical force against the positivity of Being. The repressive aspect of Kantian morality, the radical separation of reason and nature, becomes the repressive aspect of Heidegger’s ontology, the originary diﬀerence between Being and beings. Finally, their repressive aspects originate the repressive aspect of Levinas’ ethics, that is, the diachrony of the Good and Being. The repressive aspects of the accounts of Kant, Heidegger, and Levinas intend to create a vision for the comprehension of the incomprehensibility of the ground of transcendence, i.e., the Law. Kant envisages the reason why this ground must remain as a Beyond. What Heidegger envisions is that the ground of transcendence is always abyssal and without reasons, or in excess of what it grounds. What Levinas prescribes is the ethical signiﬁcance of this ground that could only reside in the incomprehensibility of the face of the Other. Hence, this vision is made possible once the phenomenal is distinguished from the non-phenomenal, what is present

TRANSCENDENCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

335

from the presencing, or the self from the Other. To enlighten the problematic structure of the antinomy of law is possible if it is possible to trace how the ground of transcendence (the non-phenomenal) works itself out in actuality (the phenomenal), that is, in the acts of transcendence. In Kantian philosophy, this ground works itself out in actuality by becoming the coercive and external laws of the legal realm. The legal realm is bound to fall short of the moral realm. In Heidegger’s account, it works itself out by becoming man’s institution of the truth of Being. The advent of man – his letting-be of beings – is uncanny in falling short of the Event of Being. In Levinas’ ethical thinking, the ground of transcendence works itself out in the ‘‘here and now’’ by becoming an issue of the comparison of incomparables – the Other and every other. It turns out to be an issue of justice emerging by the intrusion of the third party into the intimacy of the face-to-face relationship between self and the Other. Then the ethical self, in comparing the incomparables, is bound by an unsurpassable performative contradiction: the double inscription of duty to the singular Other and to every other that necessitates that it ever fall short of its inﬁnite responsibility. In all these accounts, the ground of transcendence as distinct from what it grounds remains transcendent by exceeding its actuality. It is the non-empirical fact of reason (in Kant), or the Event of Being (in Heidegger), or the face of the Other (in Levinas). The ground of transcendence is then qualiﬁed as transcendent. The conditions of the possibility of transcendence overlap with the conditions of its impossibility, as these conditions of possibility are conceived as always exceeding what they condition. In this paper, my argument consists in showing how Kant, Heidegger and Levinas attempt to maintain in their thinking a pure or external diﬀerence, which becomes the locus of transcendence. Thus, this pure diﬀerence shows itself as the absolute antithesis of ﬁnitude and inﬁnity, actuality and ideality, the phenomenal and the non-phenomenal. For this reason, I claim that their thinking exhibits the human condition under the rubric of its ‘‘unhappy’’ appearance. Consequently, the problem of how this transcendence in its own terms determines, conditions, or destines us remains over and beyond resolution. The incomprehensibility of this determination implies the absence of a fully recognizable transcendence, which renders our humanity undecidable, but which also deﬁnes our life in terms of our responses to this absence. What I would like to point out is that if our encounter with this lack or absence is nothing but an encounter with our limits, then our relation with this absence may become our presence in life, that is, our self-

336

ELI˙ F C ¸ IRAKMAN

relation. To participate in life’s self-movement is just to disclose our diﬀerent responses, to set them into action, to run the risk of our decisions and, ﬁnally, to venture further encounters by coming to recognize what is acknowledged in our life-experience and action. This life-experience could be conceived as the education of a soul bearing, necessarily, the mutual implication of oneself and the other in the formation and the transformation of meaning. In this mutual implication, ‘‘we’’ gradually come to recognize the ‘‘how’’ of destination (or determination) not as grounded in an incomprehensible transcendence but as our own selfconstituted limits transcended and exceeded by opening ourselves to the risk, surprise and the provisionality of our mutually constituted selfrelations. This recognition might be the ultimate diﬀerence that makes a ‘‘real’’ diﬀerence in life: a transcendence that is immanent in the processes of individuation and meaning-formation. It is the recognition of the other as immanent in my self relation and the recognition of my self-relation as always already mediated by the other. This recognition could be the sole ground of identity and diﬀerence, having the implication of meaningformation in life. In this paper, what I tried to emphasize is the distinctive role that could be assigned to the comprehension of this ground. I believe that comprehension could complement and inform the constant reconﬁguration of the dynamics of the actual and the ideal, the presence and absence, the phenomenal and the non-phenomenal, the condition and the conditioned, the immanence and transcendence, and may also disclose our mutual implication in this reconﬁguration. Middle East T echnical University NOTES 1 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Mary Gregor (trans. and ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 66. 2 Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Debate,’’ in Retreating the Political, Simon Sparks (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 53. 3 Ibid. 4 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, A.V. Miller (trans.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 126–138. 5 David Wood, ‘‘Responsibility Reinscribed (and How).’’ Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 6 (Summer 1997), pp. 103–113. 6 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 131. 7 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 131. 8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, N. K. Smith (trans.) (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929).

TRANSCENDENCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

337

9 Ibid. (A444–5/B472–3). 10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, W. S. Pluhar (trans.) (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), pp. 318–319. 11 Ibid., p. 319. 12 Ibid., p. 323. 13 Slavoj Zize´k, T he Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 12. 14 See for more discussion concerning the expression ‘‘the antinomy of law’’, Gillian Rose Dialectic of Nihilism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). 15 Martin Heidegger, Being and T ime, J. Macquarrie, E. Robinson (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). 16 Ibid., pp. 32–35. 17 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Richard Tall (trans.) (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 82. 18 Martin Heidegger, T he Essence of Reasons, T. Melick (trans.) (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1969), p. 51. 19 Ibid., p. 89. 20 Ibid., p. 85. 21 Michel Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), p. 56. 22 Ibid., p. 60. 23 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, P. Emad, K. Maly (trans.) (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999). 24 Dominique Janicaud, ‘‘Heidegger-Hegel: An Impossible ‘Dialogue’?,’’ in Endings: Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger, R. Comay, J. McCumber (eds.), N. Belmonte (trans.) (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1999), p. 35. 25 Ibid. 26 Martin Heidegger, Being and T ime, p. 321. 27 Ibid. 28 Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ in Basic W ritings, D. F. Krell (ed.), F. A. Capuzzi (trans.) in collaboration with J. G. Gray (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 238. 29 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, A. Lingis (trans.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995). 30 Ibid., p. 15. 31 Ibid. 32 Emmanuel Levinas, T otality and Inﬁnity, A. Lingis (trans.) (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1990), p. 84. 33 Ibid., p. 223. 34 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, A. Lingis (trans.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), pp. 16, 157–162.

ALAIN BEAULIEU

L’ENCHANTEMENT DU CORPS CHEZ NIETZSCHE ET HUSSERL

LA MERVEILLE DES MERVEILLES

L’analogie entre les grandes pre´occupations de Nietzsche et les proble`mes auxquels s’attaque la phe´nome´nologie husserlienne constitue un the`me d’e´tude qui a jusqu’ici e´te´ remarquablement ne´glige´. Bien suˆr, plusieurs raisons nous incitent a` conside´rer les philosophies de Nietzsche et de Husserl comme antagonistes. Il est vrai que la consolidation husserlienne d’une communaute´ spirituelle n’a, selon toute vraisemblance, que bien peu a` voir avec les processus nietzsche´ens d’individuation, que l’e´laboration phe´nome´nologique d’une the´orie de la constitution est diﬃcilement re´conciliable avec le me´pris nietzsche´en pour les doctrines de la connaissance, et que l’harmonisation du monde re´alise´e autour de la queˆte du sens par Husserl n’a apparemment rien de familier avec la culture nietzsche´enne des instincts primordiaux. Mais les querelles d’e´coles cachent parfois certains liens de sympathie. Par dela` les divergences entre les deux philosophes, Nietzsche et Husserl partagent un inte´reˆt commun et plus fondamental pour l’e´tude de la vie. Non seulement s’entendent-ils pour mettre la vie au service d’une critique des identite´s me´taphysiques, mais ils contribuent e´galement tous deux a` faire naıˆtre un nouveau paradigme de l’immanence place´ sous le signe d’un ve´ritable enchantement du corps. ` vrai dire, ces deux the`mes de la critique de la me´taphysique et de A l’enchantement du corps n’en font qu’un seul chez Husserl et Nietzsche. La re´fe´rence husserlienne et nietzsche´enne au corps vivant (L eib) vise en eﬀet a` abolir les anciennes transcendances me´taphysiques. Jan Patocka associe d’ailleurs l’ensemble des sensations kinesthe´siques par lesquelles Husserl de´ﬁnit le corps vivant dans les Ideen II et III a` un moyen permettant de «remettre en question les positions de la me´taphysique traditionnelle qu’il faut de`s lors ou renier ou re´interpre´ter.» (Patocka, 1995, p. 20) Nietzsche articule e´galement la question de la conqueˆte de l’immanence au renouvellement de la conception du corps. Il reproche a` la me´taphysique sa «rage secre`te contre les conditions premie`res de la vie, contre la valeur immode´re´e de la vie, et contre les partisans de la vie» (FP 1888 14[134]), il soustrait le corps vivant a` toute explication me´caniste en confe´rant a` la vie les pleins pouvoirs d’autoformation: 339 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 339–355. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

340

ALAIN BEAULIEU

«On ne se lasse pas de s’e´merveiller, e´crit Nietzsche, a` l’ide´e que le corps vivant [L eib] est devenu possible; que cette collectivite´ inouı¨e d’eˆtres vivants, tous de´pendants et subordonne´s, mais en un autre sens dominants et doue´s d’activite´ volontaire, puisse vivre et croıˆtre a` la fac¸on d’un tout, et subsister quelque temps-: et, de toute e´vidence, cela n’est point duˆ a` la conscience. Dans ce «miracle des miracles» [«W under der W under»], la conscience n’est qu’un instrument, rien de plus.» (FP 1885 37[4])

Le corps vivant forme une sorte de re´seau compose´ de forces, de pulsion et d’instincts. Il grouille d’une multitude d’eˆtres et de puissances (FP 1875 9[1]; 1884 26[36]; 1884 27[70]; 1885 40[15]; 1886–7 5[56]). Dans la chapitre de son Zarathoustra intitule´ «Des contempteurs du corps» (Von den Vera¨chtern des L eibes), ce «miracle des miracles» est associe´ par Nietzsche a` l’habitat merveilleux d’une grande raison conside´re´e comme supe´rieure par rapport a` la simple rationalite´ spirituelle: «Cette petite raison que tu appelles ton esprit, oˆ mon fre`re, n’est qu’un instrument de ton corps [L eib], et un bien petit instrument, un jouet de ta grande raison. Tu dis «moi», et tu es ﬁer de ce mot. Mais il y a quelque chose de plus grand, a` quoi tu refuses de croire, c’est ton corps et sa grande raison; il ne dit pas mot, mais il agit comme un Moi. [ ... ] Par-dela` tes pense´es et tes sentiments, mon fre`re, il y a un maıˆtre puissant, un sage inconnu, qui s’appelle le Soi. Il habite ton corps, il est ton corps. Il y a plus de raison dans ton corps que dans l’essence meˆme de ta sagesse.»

Fait remarquable, Husserl utilise lui aussi le terme de W under pour qualiﬁer l’expe´rience du corps vivant (L eib) qui est pre´cise´ment conside´re´ comme une «merveille des merveilles» («W under aller W under»). Husserl retire a` la the´orie de la connaissance tout caracte`re miraculeux pour mieux l’attribuer au Moi pur qui forme, avec le corps vivant, une «unite´ duelle» (Husserl, 1982, p. 247). Cette dyade est miraculeusement constitue´e d’une matie`re non exclusivement mate´rielle et d’un esprit non exclusivement spirituel. «Ce sont ces connexions [entre les ve´cus] qui, une fois qu’on les a comprises, n’ont rien de merveilleux. La merveille des merveilles [W under aller W under] est le moi pur et la pure conscience: et pre´cise´ment cette merveille disparaıˆt, de`s que la phe´nome´nologie tombe sur elle et la soumet a` l’analyse de l’essence. La merveille disparaıˆt en se me´tamorphosant en une science entie`re impliquant une profusion de proble`mes scientiﬁques diﬃciles. La merveille est un inconcevable; le proble´matique en la ﬁgure de proble`mes scientiﬁques est un concevable, il est l’inconc¸u qui pour la raison s’ave`re concevable et conc¸u, dans la solution du proble`me.» (Husserl, 1993, p. 89)

Husserl re´aﬃrme ici sa critique du «caracte`re merveilleux» attribue´ par Hermann Lotze a` la connaissance (Husserl, 1975, p. 389; cf. aussi la note du traducteur in Husserl, 1993, p. 250, note 46). La constitution des

L’ENCHANTEMENT DU CORPS CHEZ NIETZSCHE ET HUSSERL 341

phe´nome`nes n’a rien de merveilleux. Au contraire, elle est pleinement compre´hensible en e´tant fonde´e scientiﬁquement. En revanche, la ﬁnitude constituante husserlienne, c’est-a`-dire l’alliance du corps vivant et du moi pur, est une ve´ritable merveille qui ope`re de manie`re a` la fois intuitive et quasi magique. Comme on peut le constater, en de´pit du roˆle divergent attribue´ a` la conscience par Husserl et Nietzsche, ces derniers se mettent involontairement d’accord pour associer l’expe´rience du corps vivant a` un ve´ritable enchantement. Le corps vivant est en lutte contre le mode`le explicatif du corps-machine et ses attributs n’ont plus rien a` voir avec ceux d’une me´canique articule´e. De plus, la vie qui habite et parcoure le corps incarne´ constitue pour Nietzsche et Husserl un courant immanent, irre´ductible et ultime a` l’inte´rieur duquel les grandes oppositions me´taphysiques (essences/apparences, un/multiple, etc.) sont de´truites au proﬁt du seul re´gime de l’autoge´ne´ration ou de l’autopoı¨e´sis. Avant d’approfondir ces critiques du corps physique (Ko¨rper) et de confronter les conceptions de l’organisme e´labore´es par Nietzsche et Husserl a` partir des travaux de biologistes ce´le`bres (Virchow, Lange et Roux pour Nietzsche; Driesch pour Husserl), il convient de faire une rapide mise en contexte historique pour mieux situer la porte´e de la re´volution nietzsche´o-husserlienne relativement a` la question de la vitalite´ corporelle. MISE EN CONTEXTE HISTORIQUE: LES CONCEPTIONS TRADITIONNELLES DE LA VIE

Pour Platon, le philosophe a tout inte´reˆt a` s’e´loigner le plus possible de ce champ de variation continue qu’est la vie s’il veut espe´rer grandir en sagesse. «La vie, aﬃrme Socrate avant de se donner la mort, n’est qu’une longue maladie». Le monde vivant n’a rien a` nous apprendre. L’essentiel se situe plutoˆt du coˆte´ de l’aˆme immortelle qui doit se se´parer du corps pour acce´der aux ve´rite´s e´ternelles. C’est pourquoi l’ide´alisme platonicien fait l’e´loge de la mort, de cet e´tat ou` l’aˆme impe´rissable reconquiert enﬁn sa pleine nature divine par dela` les multiples transformations lie´es au devenir temporel de la matie`re (Phe´don 66a–67e). Aristote, de son coˆte´, tourne ses yeux vers le monde vivant. Le tiers des traite´s qui sont parvenus jusqu’a` nous sous le nom d’Aristote concerne d’ailleurs le champ de la «biologie» (terme cre´e´ au de´but du XIXe sie`cle). Le refus aristote´licien du dualisme radical de´fendu par Platon l’ame`ne a` s’inte´resser aux particularite´s des espe`ces qui composent le vivant.

342

ALAIN BEAULIEU

Comprendre d’un point de vue expe´rimental le fonctionnement du syste`me reproductif des plantes ou l’appareil respiratoire des animaux aquatiques doit permettre de de´couvrir les principes d’animation qui gouvernent l’aˆme. L’observation du monde naturel permet a` Aristote de conﬁrmer l’hypothe`se d’un moteur individuel, source de mouvement dans le corps des animaux et des hommes, pense´ dans les termes d’un souﬄe inne´ ou pneuma symphyton (Du sommeil, 2, 456 a 11; De la respiration, 9, 475 a 8; Des parties des animaux, II, 16, 659 b 17–19; Du mouvement des animaux, 10, 703 a 10–27; De la ge´ne´ration des animaux, II, 6, 744 a 3 et V, I, 781 a 24). Toutefois, les mouvements des corps ne sont pas a` eux-meˆmes leur propre cause. Aristote e´tablit une critique de l’aˆme automotrice (De l’aˆme, I, 3). Il y a donc pour lui une cause premie`re et ne´cessaire (dite ﬁnale) de tous les mouvements vitaux: le «premier moteur» (Me´taphysique, livre XII). «Rien n’est muˆ par hasard» (Me´taphysique, XII, 6, 34), soutient Aristote, car «s’il n’en e´tait pas ainsi, le monde viendrait de la Nuit, de la «Confusion universelle» et du Non-eˆtre.» (Me´taphysique, livre XII, 7, 19–20) En somme, meˆme si le monde de la vie naturelle est une source pour la connaissance chez Aristote, il n’en demeure pas moins que la vie ne posse`de chez lui aucun degre´ d’autonomie en de´pendant invariablement d’une perfection plus grande (Me´taphysique, XII, 7, 26–30). Les succe`s remporte´s aux XVIe et XVIIe sie`cles par la science moderne et sa me´thode expe´rimentale ont eu pour conse´quence ne´gative de de´vitaliser le monde naturel (Deleuze, 1968, p. 207; Bouveresse, 1992, p. 119). Descartes re´duit la Nature a` sa mate´rialite´ pense´e dans les termes d’un me´canisme universel. Le monde organique n’est plus dynamise´ par le souﬄe vital. Au contraire, les re`gles me´caniques et mathe´matiques qui de´terminent la res extensa ne laissent plus aucune place a` l’ide´e d’une transformation spontane´e ou d’une adaptation impre´visible des eˆtres vivants. La re´action contre la de´vitalisation carte´sienne de la Nature ne se fait pas attendre puisque les philosophies de Spinoza (E´thique, II, XII, Sc.) et de Leibniz (Monadologie, § 66) contribuent a` restaurer les forces et les puissances de la Nature en re´introduisant l’aˆme partout dans la matie`re. Chez Spinoza, tous les eˆtres ou, plus pre´cise´ment, tous les modes sont en puissance (potentia) en ayant la faculte´ de s’aﬀecter mutuellement de manie`re continue. Leibniz adopte une position similaire en faisant de la force l’essence meˆme de la matie`re. Bien instruit des sciences de son temps (la dynamique, l’embryologie, l’alchimie), Leibniz forge la notion d’«organisme» et il anticipe la cre´ation du terme «biologie» par le naturaliste Treviranus en 1802. Mais en de´pit de l’animisme universel caracte´ristique

L’ENCHANTEMENT DU CORPS CHEZ NIETZSCHE ET HUSSERL 343

des philosophies de Spinoza et de Leibniz, la vie conserve un sens me´taphysique en tant que l’omnipuissance de Dieu demeure l’ultime fondement de chaque eˆtre vivant. Dieu est lui-meˆme la Vie (Zac, 1963, chap 1: «Dieu est la vie»; Dumas, 1976. § 34: «Dieu: la Vie»). L’ide´alisme spe´culatif et le romantisme allemand se sont e´galement mis a` la recherche d’une alternative a` la de´vitalisation de la Nature. Toutefois, ce seront moins les me´tamorphoses de la vie elle-meˆme que la recherche du principe originaire a` la source du changement qui retiendra l’attention des philosophies romantiques et ide´alistes. Ce principe spe´culatif, moteur du devenir, Hegel le de´couvre dans le jeu dialectique des contraires qui s’entrechoquent sur la sce`ne du de´ploiement historique de l’Esprit. Dans ce contexte, ce ne sont pas les vies singulie`res qui inte´ressent Hegel puisqu’elles renvoient toujours au domaine de l’imme´diatete´ de´tache´e de l’universel (Hegel, 1986, p. 452 et 618). Hegel distingue la vitalite´ naturelle d’une Vie plus fondamentale de l’Esprit de´ja` a` l’œuvre dans la nature. D’un coˆte´, la vie mate´rielle de l’e´volution naturelle prive´e de toute puissance cre´atrice, et de l’autre, la Vie de l’Esprit incarne´e dans l’histoire a` la source de toutes les transformations. Plusieurs formes d’historicisme se re´clamant de la philosophie de la vie (par exemple la L ebensphilosophie de Dilthey et l’Hermeneutik der Faktizita¨t comme Selbstauslegung ou auto-explicitation de la vie facticielle chez le premier Heidegger) de meˆme que le vitalisme spiritualiste de type bergsonien reproduisent le mode`le he´ge´lien d’une Vie supe´rieure de l’Esprit dont l’existence est invariablement pre´alable aux organismes et aux manifestations socio-culturelles particulie`res. Nietzsche et Husserl n’ont donc pas e´te´ les premiers philosophes a` s’inte´resser a` la vie. Bien avant eux, Aristote et Leibniz ont meˆme contribue´ de manie`re signiﬁcative a` l’avancement des sciences de la vie. Toutefois Nietzsche et Husserl deviennent plus originaux par rapport aux tentatives ante´rieures en pensant la vie selon des modalite´s qui excluent tout recours a` la the`se cre´ationniste, aux causes surnaturelles et au me´canisme. La rupture avec ces anciennes manie`res de rendre compte de la vie est supporte´e par l’aﬃrmation d’un ensemble de puissances autopoı¨e´tiques. Dans ce contexte, la vitalite´ ne de´pend pas d’un arrie`re-monde pre´alable sur lequel elle se fonderait en devenant un terrain d’application parmi d’autres d’un plan pre´existant. Chez Nietzsche et Husserl, la vie incarne´e acquiert plutoˆt une pleine autonomie en devenant le champ philosophique premier d’expe´rimentation du monde. La de´claration nietzsche´o-husserlienne d’inde´pendance de la vie est inse´parable des de´couvertes lie´es aux the´ories de l’e´volution qui conside`r-

344

ALAIN BEAULIEU

ent e´galement le vivant comme e´tant libre par rapport a` toute transcendance exte´rieure. L’inte´gration de la vie en philosophie comme domaine autonome d’investigation a suscite´ des re´actions souvent extreˆmes. La diversite´ des re´ponses relativement au statut d’inde´pendance accorde´ au vivant va de la cre´ation de la revue Kosmos publie´e de 1877 a` 1886 par un groupe de philosophes et de biologistes (Rupp-Eisenreich, 1996, p. 848–855) jusqu’a` la critique radicale des philosophies de la vie conc¸ues par Heinrich Rickert comme simples courants a` la mode de´pourvus de toute rigueur conceptuelle (Rickert, 1920). En s’inte´ressant a` la vitalite´ du corps incarne´, Nietzsche et Husserl ont donc participe´ de manie`re originale a` cette dispute qui fut l’un des principaux de´bats de leur temps, en plus de de´ﬁnir une part essentielle de notre modernite´ philosophique. Voyons maintenant plus en de´tail la spe´ciﬁcite´ des rapports de Nietzsche et Husserl a` la biologie. NIETZSCHE ET LA BIOLOGIE

Nietzsche se donne comme taˆche de saisir les puissances les plus intimes de la vie qui ont e´chappe´ aux philosophes trop imbus de me´taphysique. Platon est ainsi qualiﬁe´ par Nietzsche de «calomniateur de la vie» (FP 1886–1887 7[9]). La lecture du livre de Friedrich Albert Lange intitule´ L ’histoire du mate´rialisme (Lange, 1911) est l’un des principaux catalyseurs de la pense´e nietzsche´enne de la vie. Contre la philosophie kantienne qui oppose l’activite´ de l’entendement et la passivite´ du monde empirique, Lange de´fend la the`se d’un sujet-organisme en e´volution constante dans son milieu comme condition de possibilite´ du monde. Lange ouvre de nouveaux horizons a` Nietzsche auxquels sa formation de philologue ne l’avait pas pre´pare´. Avec lui, Nietzsche conside`re la possibilite´ de de´passer les apories du dualisme kantien en s’inspirant des plus re´centes avance´es issues des sciences naturelles. La pense´e nietzsche´enne de´fend bien l’hypothe`se d’un rapport fondamental d’adaptation entre les organismes et leur milieu. Mais il ne souhaite pas, comme le fait Lange, e´laborer une nouvelle the´orie de la connaissance, pas plus qu’il ne se contente de re´cupe´rer la doctrine darwinienne de la se´lection naturelle pour expliquer les modalite´s de l’adaptation des organismes a` leur milieu. L’originalite´ des nombreuses re´fe´rences nietzsche´ennes aux sciences de la vie en ge´ne´ral, et a` l’e´volutionnisme darwinien en particulier, tient dans ce que Nietzsche transpose certaines avance´es des sciences biologiques et des sciences naturelles dans les sphe`res de la morale et de la politique au de´triment de tout ide´al de progre`s, de de´veloppement de la connaissance et d’e´volu-

L’ENCHANTEMENT DU CORPS CHEZ NIETZSCHE ET HUSSERL 345

tion (Stiegler, 2001, p. 5; Mu¨ller-Lauter, 1998, p. 134–135). C’est ainsi que Nietzsche, dans L a ge´ne´alogie de la morale (le titre e´voque de´ja` la manie`re si particulie`re avec laquelle Nietzsche entend tirer proﬁt des sciences de la vie), montre comment la transmission de l’ide´e d’un Bien universel, de ge´ne´rations en ge´ne´rations, constitue un danger pour la vie. Avec Nietzsche, la question de la vie de´borde le cadre des sciences biologiques pour devenir un proble`me moral. L’erreur de la me´taphysique re´side, toujours selon Nietzsche, dans sa pre´tention a` ﬁxer des identite´s sans tenir compte de la nature physiologique de la pense´e. Et si la me´taphysique croit pouvoir de´couvrir des ve´rite´s «asceptise´es» ou «de´sincarne´es», c’est parce qu’elle juge que les forces de la vie ne remplissent aucun roˆle philosophique. Nietzsche conc¸oit pre´cise´ment la vie comme e´tant ce qui e´chappe a` tout syste`me du jugement. «La valeur de la vie, e´crit Nietzsche, ne saurait eˆtre e´value´e. Pas par un vivant, car il est partie, et meˆme objet du litige, et non pas juge.» (Cre´puscule des idoles, section «Le proble`me de Socrate», § 2; cf. aussi FP 1886–1887 7[9]). Nietzsche reproche donc a` la me´taphysique de constiter un vaste syste`me de de´valorisation de la vie. L’utilisation des de´couvertes du biologiste cellulaire Rudolf Virchow contre l’Ego carte´sien et le Je pense kantien est exemplaire de la manie`re dont Nietzsche entend faire jouer la vie contre l’histoire de la me´taphysique. Virchow a adopte´ des positions anti-centralistes en soutenant qu’au niveau cellulaire aucun organe, fonction ou re´gion de l’organisme ne domine les autres (Virchow, 1874). Les nombreux passages ou` Nietzsche de´nonce le primat accorde´ par Descartes et Kant a` la conscience mettent invariablement de l’avant, de manie`re plus ou moins explicite, la the´orie cellulaire de Virchow qui a fourni la matrice a` l’anti-subjectivisme nietzsche´en. La conscience fondatrice perd sa position centrale a` la faveur d’un ensemble d’eˆtres vivants non-hie´rarchise´s qui peuplent le corps. De`s lors, la conscience qui a guide´ le destin de la philosophie moderne laisse place, tel que mentionne´, au corps vivant, a` cette «collectivite´ inouı¨e d’eˆtres vivants» et a` ce «miracle des miracles» (FP 1885 37[4]; cf. aussi Franck, 1998, section 3.1). Dans ce contexte, l’agencement des parties du corps vivant n’obe´it a` aucune loi de type me´canique. Ce sont plutoˆt des re`gles morales autoproduites qui guident les mouvements internes de l’organisme. «Cette prodigieuse synthe`se d’eˆtres vivants et d’intellects qu’on appelle l’«homme», aﬃrme Nietzsche, ne peut vivre que du moment ou` a e´te´ cre´e´ ce syste`me subtil de relations et de transmissions et par la` l’entente extreˆmement rapide entre tous ces eˆtres supe´rieurs et

346

ALAIN BEAULIEU

infe´rieurs – cela graˆce a` des interme´diaires tous vivants; mais ce n’est pas la` un proble`me de me´canique, c’est un proble`me moral.» (FP 1885 37[4])

L’œuvre du biologiste Wilhelm Roux constitue une troisie`me source importante dans le de´veloppement du vitalisme nietzsche´enne. La lecture, de`s sa sortie en 1881, du livre de Roux intitule´ L a lutte des parties dans l’organisme (Roux, 1881) fournit l’argument d’une lutte interne que Nietzsche fera jouer contre la the´orie darwinienne de l’e´volution par se´lection naturelle. Roux pense la spontane´ite´ inventive de l’organisme dans les termes d’une lutte entre les parties internes. Roux invente les concepts d’autore´gulation ou d’autoformation (Selbstgestaltung) et d’excitation a` la vie (L ebensreiz) pour de´crire l’e´tat de lutte organique interne entre les mole´cules, les cellules, les tissus, les organes, etc. Ces ne´ologismes reviennent fre´quemment sous la plume de Nietzsche (FP 1881 11 [28, 130, 131, 132, 134, 182, 241, 243, 256, 284] et FP 1883 7 [86–95, 98, 174, 178, 190, 194, 196, 197, 211, 273]). Les conﬂits inte´rieurs du corps vivants sont pour Nietzsche plus de´terminants que la mise en perspective des conﬂits externes entre les espe`ces. «L’inﬂuence des «circonstances exte´rieures» est surestime´e jusqu’a` l’absurde par Darwin; l’essentiel du processus vital est justement cette monstrueuse puissance formatrice qui, a` partir de l’inte´rieur, est cre´atrice de forme, et qui utilise, exploite les «circonstances exte´rieures» ... » (FP 1886–1887 7[25]) L’essentiel des processus vitaux se jouent a` l’inte´rieur des corps vivants, et non entre les corps physiques ou les espe`ces. Sa lecture des biologistes (Lange, Virchow, Roux) ame`ne Nietzsche a` critiquer la doctrine darwinienne sous au moins trois angles: le progre`s de l’espe`ce, le calme des processus d’adaptation et les normes de la se´lection. Le vivant n’est pas a` comprendre dans le sens implicite au darwinisme ou` il serait oriente´ vers une ﬁnalite´ dernie`re et guide´ par un ide´al moral (Stengers, 1991). Pour Nietzsche, la dynamique du vivant ne constitue ` la ﬁnalite´ il oppose les actions de jamais «un progre`s vers une ﬁn». A ¨ subjuger (Uberwa¨ltigen) et de dominer (Herrwerden) mene´es par les diﬀe´rentes parties du corps vivant. Cette rede´ﬁnition continue des puissances implique une constante remise en cause des ﬁns dernie`res. «Tout fait accompli dans le monde organique, mentionne Nietzsche, est intimement lie´ aux ide´es de subjuguer, de dominer et, encore, que toute subjugation, toute domination e´quivaut a` une interpre´tation nouvelle, a` un accommodement, ou` ne´cessairement le «sens» et le «but» qui subsistaient jusque-la` seront obscurcis ou meˆme eﬀace´s comple`tement.» (Ge´ne´alogie de la morale, II, § 12)

L’ENCHANTEMENT DU CORPS CHEZ NIETZSCHE ET HUSSERL 347

Le de´ploiement interne des instincts et des forces vitales, sans plan pre´alable et sans but apparent, n’a rien d’une se´lection lente et progressive (Darwin, p. 133 et 145). Contre le gradualisme darwinien, Nietzsche pense les mouvements internes du vivant dans les termes d’une violence primitive dont les innovations deviennent souvent brutales et dangereuses. «L’essentiel du processus vital, aﬃrme Nietzsche, est justement cette monstrueuse violence formatrice qui, a` partir de l’inte´rieur, est cre´atrice de formes.» (FP 1886–1887 7[9]) Et ailleurs: «La vie proce`de essentiellement, c’est-a`-dire dans ses fonctions e´le´mentaires, par infraction, violation, de´pouillement, destruction et qu’on ne saurait l’imaginer proce´der autrement.» (Ge´ne´alogie de la morale, II, § 11) Finalement, Nietzsche met davantage l’accent sur les processus d’individualisation que sur la stabilisation et la normalisation de l’espe`ce en son entier. Tous les passages ou` Nietzsche soutient la supe´riorite´ des plus faibles, conside´re´s comme les plus aptes a` ge´ne´rer une nouvelle puissance normative e´phe´me`re, viennent inﬁrmer la position darwinienne selon laquelle la se´lection ne donnerait l’avantage qu’aux plus forts. «Ce n’est pas en perfection, soutient Nietzsche, que croissent les espe`ces. Les faibles l’emportent de plus en plus sur les forts [...] Darwin a oublie´ l’esprit (c’est bien anglais!) or les faibles ont davantage d’esprit ... » (Cre´puscule des idoles, section: «Divagations d’un ‘‘Inactuel’’», § 14; cf. aussi Gai savoir, § 76) Cette reconnaissance de la force des organismes de´viants est aujourd’hui un fait admis par bon nombre de spe´cialistes des sciences de la vie. Le prix nobel Franc¸ois Jacob e´crit: «L’e´volution est baˆtie sur les incidents, sur les e´ve´nements rares, sur les erreurs. Cela meˆme qui entraıˆnerait un syste`me inerte a` sa destruction devient source de nouveaute´ et de complexite´ dans un syste`me vivant. L’accident peut s’y transformer en novation et l’erreur en succe`s» (Jacob, 1970, p, 317). Canguilhem croit e´galement, contre la simple variabilite´ individuelle de Darwin, que les mutations radicales et les anomalies peuvent brusquement cre´er des espe`ces nouvelles (Canguilhem, 1966, p. 89; cf. aussi de Vries, 1910). Les discontinuite´s deviennent la matie`re d’une histoire qui ne se laisse plus penser dans les termes e´volutionistes d’une adaptation lente, progressive et graduelle. L’absence de ﬁnalite´ et de norme de meˆme que la violence qui gouverne les mouvements vitaux correspondent aux principales caracte´ristiques attribue´es par Nietzsche au nouveau crite`re de se´lection conc¸u comme ` maintes occasions, Nietzsche associe sa concepvolonte´ de puissance. A tion de la vie a` la volonte´ de puissance (Par dela` le bien et le mal, § 259; Ge´ne´alogie de la morale, II, § 12). La volonte´ de puissance n’a rien a` voir

348

ALAIN BEAULIEU

avec un de´sir de dominer (Stiegler, 1998), mais elle correspond plutoˆt a` une capacite´ e´nergique qu’ont les parties de la matie`re vivante de s’aﬀecter entre elles d’un grand nombre de fac¸ons. La physiologie nietzsche´enne n’est nullement en queˆte des lois immuables de la nature. Elle ne se fonde pas sur des principes me´canistes. Au contraire, la vie nietzsche´enne s’inscrit dans un processus de variations et de luttes continues. «Les pre´tendus ‘‘lois de la nature’’ ne sont rien d’autre que des formules pour des ‘‘rapports de puissance’’.» (FP 1885 34[247]) Et ailleurs: «Il n’y a pas de loi: chaque puissance [Macht], a` chaque instant, tire son ultime conse´quence.» (FP 1888 14[79]; cf. aussi FP 1885 1[119], 36[18], 39[13], 40[55]; Mu¨ller-Lauter, 1998, p. 145–146.) HUSSERL ET LA BIOLOGIE

De toutes les sciences de la nature, la biologie fut la seule a` remplir Husserl d’une grande admiration. La biologie demeure exemplaire pour Husserl en tant qu’elle est pleinement intentionnelle. Elle demeure en eﬀet intrinse`quement lie´e a` ce qu’elle observe. Dans un court texte tardif, Husserl e´crit: «Sa proximite´ [a` la biologie] des sources de l’e´vidence lui donne une telle proximite´ a` l’e´gard de la profondeur des choses-meˆmes, que l’acce`s a` la philosophie transcendantale devrait lui eˆtre extreˆmement facile, et avec lui l’acce`s au ve´ritable a priori auquel renvoie le monde des eˆtres vivants.» (Husserl, 1976, p. 535) La biologie posse`de une ascendance sur toutes les autres sciences particulie`res en tant que le professionnel de la vie ne peut qu’eˆtre intimement et corporellement implique´ dans sa recherche (son me´tabolisme obe´it lui-meˆme aux meˆmes lois que ce qu’il observe). C’est pourquoi Husserl peut de´cerner aux ve´rite´s biologiques le titre de «connaissance ve´ritable» allant jusqu’«aux ultimes sources de l’e´vidence» (Husserl, 1976, p. 536). De plus, l’horizon de la biologie ne s’arreˆte pas a` la plane`te Terre. Au contraire, ses taˆches, a` l’instar de la phe´nome´nologie comme science rigoureuse, sont universelles. Husserl remarque qu’une e´ventuelle «biologie de Ve´nus» (Husserl, 1976, p. 536) participerait elle aussi a` la constitution originelle du sens pour le mondede-la-vie. Les re´fe´rences aux the´ories biologiques ne sont pas, dans le corpus husserlien, aussi fre´quentes que chez Nietzsche. Comme nous le verrons, seul le biologiste Hans Driesch semble avoir joue´ un roˆle explicite dans le de´veloppement de la phe´nome´nologie husserlienne. Il demeure cependant manifeste que le lexique de Husserl exprime une profonde ﬁliation avec le the`me de la vie (L eben). Que l’on pense par exemple aux expres-

L’ENCHANTEMENT DU CORPS CHEZ NIETZSCHE ET HUSSERL 349

sions Erlebnis (ve´cu), Erlebnisstrom (ﬂux du ve´cu), leibhaftig (en chair et en os), L ebenshorizont (horizon vivant), L eib (corps vivant), Urleben (vie primordiale), urtu¨mlisches L eben (vie primitive), lebendige Gegenwart (pre´sent vivant), L ebenswelt (monde-de-la-vie), etc. Ensemble, ces notions constituent une part importante de l’armature conceptuelle par laquelle Husserl souhaite penser «la me´taphysique en un sens nouveau» (Husserl, 1970, p. 269, note). Ce qui est conﬁrme´, comme nous le disions plus haut, par le fait que le «phe´nome`ne du corps vivant» est un interme´diaire permettant de remettre en question les positions de la me´taphysique traditionnelle (Patocka, 1995, p. 20). Avec les Ideen, Husserl de´couvre la dimension vivante du corps. Le corps vivant (L eib) a la particularite´ d’e´chapper a` la ge´ome´trie euclidienne en e´tant l’appareil senti des sensations. Il se distingue ainsi du corps physique (Ko¨rper) en se laissant appre´hender de manie`re intuitive. Le corps vivant occupe chez Husserl un roˆle central pour la connaissance. Il est phe´nome´nologiquement conc¸u comme le «point ze´ro» (Husserl, 1982, § 18a) et le «centre d’orientation» (Husserl, 1982, § 18c) des mouvements internes eux-meˆmes inte´gre´s dans un projet de constitution. Le mouvement des sensations du corps vivant n’est ni d’ordre psychologique ni d’ordre me´canique, mais il a plutoˆt un caracte`re kinesthe´sique (Husserl, 1976, § 28 et 47; 1982, § 18; 1993, appendice 1, § 4). De plus, Husserl e´tablit clairement une distinction entre la fonctionnalite´ et la dysfonctionnalite´ d’un organe du corps vivant. «Le monde, e´crit Husserl, se donne tel qu’il est quand le corps propre est normal; par contre, quand la corps vivant est anormal, il se donne dans des apparences anormales.» (Husserl, 1982, § 18c) Les anomalies kinesthe´siques nuisent au processus de constitution. Comment reme´dier a` cette situation? Re´ponse: en neutralisant l’organe au fonctionnement irre´gulier. «Par la mise hors-circuit du sens de´faillant nous avons une appre´hension du monde qui est demeure´e concordante», soutient Husserl qui poursuit: «un tel conﬂit [intersensoriel] pourra eˆtre re´solu du fait pre´cise´ment qu’apre`s coup il faudra re´pudier une partie du corps comme anormale.» (Husserl, 1982, § 18c) En outre, les mouvements des sensations du corps vivant perc¸us comme kinesthe´siquement de´fectueux ou de´viants sont aussitoˆt ramene´s dans l’e´tat de normalite´ constitutive et «orthoesthe´sique» (Husserl, 1982, § 18c). La possibilite´ pour le corps vivant de distinguer un organe fonctionnel d’un organe au fonctionnement irre´gulier ainsi que la faculte´ propre au corps vivant de circonscrire le lieu de de´faillance organique pour ensuite neutraliser l’organe invalide de´ﬁnissent la the´orie husserlienne de la localisation des sensations (Husserl, 1993, § 2a et appendice 1, § 4a). La re´fe´rence

350

ALAIN BEAULIEU

a` la localisation est sans doute l’exemple le plus e´clatant venant te´moigner d’un emprunt direct de la phe´nome´nologie husserlienne aux sciences de la vie. Plus pre´cise´ment, Husserl s’inspire-t-il ici des e´crits du biologiste Hans Driesch. Nous savons que Husserl avait fait une lecture attentive de l’ouvrage de Driesch intitule´ NaturbegriVe und Natururteile. Analytische Untersuchungen zur reinen und empirischen Naturwissenschaft (Husserl, 1993, note 22 du traducteur, p. 224–225). Mais c’est surtout L a philosophie de l’organisme de Driesch qui a inspire´ a` Husserl sa the´orie de la localisation (Husserl, 1993, note 12 du traducteur, p. 216–220). Driesch de´montre l’autonomie de la vie en re´fe´rence au proble`me de la localisation morphoge´ne´tique. Ses observations du monde organique ont amene´ Driesch a` croire en l’existence d’un processus non-me´canique de rege´ne´ration des fonctions le´se´es dans lequel sont engage´es toutes les cellules (Driesch, 1921, p. 101–134; cf. aussi Goldstein, 1951, p. 208–231). La localisation s’explique suivant un mode`le morphoge´ne´tique a` l’inte´rieur duquel les organismes posse`dent une capacite´ de de´veloppement qui leur est propre (par contraste avec le mode`le ontoge´ne´tique ou` l’organisation du vivant est pre´de´termine´e). Husserl fait simplement passer ce processus de restauration du corps physique au corps vivant. Les eﬀorts de Husserl visant a` corriger les anormalite´s de fonctionnement du corps vivant s’apparentent a` l’auto-normalisation des espe`ces caracte´ristique de la doctrine e´volutionniste. La vie husserlienne innove cependant par rapport a` tous les mode`les me´taphysiques du vivant, et par rapport a` la conception e´volutionniste du devenir en particulier. La vie est pour Husserl un mouvement immanent d’auto-cre´ation irre´ductible a` l’ide´e d’une cre´ation e´manent d’un eˆtre exte´rieur (Aristote), a` un processus me´canise´ (Descartes), a` une entite´ spirituelle et ide´ale (Hegel), ou encore a` une se´rie de transformations de´termine´es par un progre`s e´volutif (Darwin et les doctrines e´volutionnistes). Contre ces repre´sentations de la vie, Husserl pense un processus ou` l’ide´e d’un «devenir non-progressif» cesse d’eˆtre contradictoire. Ce qui ne signiﬁe pas pour autant que la vie phe´nome´nologique soit involutive. La phe´nome´nologie met plutoˆt entre parenthe`ses les paradigmes de la «progression» et de la «re´gression» du vivant. La me´tabiologie husserlienne suspend ainsi tout jugement relatif au devenir de la vie en adoptant une attitude de neutralite´ vis-a`-vis de la description des mutations constitutives de la vie phe´nome´nale (Beaulieu, 2003). En d’autres termes, toute description de la vie phe´nome´nale est valable sans qu’aucun crite`re ne permette de distinguer une «bonne intuition donatrice originaire» d’une «mauvaise intuition donatrice originaire». La re´sistance de la me´tabiologie husserlienne a` la me´taphysique

L’ENCHANTEMENT DU CORPS CHEZ NIETZSCHE ET HUSSERL 351

en ge´ne´ral, et aux doctrines e´volutionnistes en particulier, demeure en de´ﬁnitive inse´parable de cette vie autopoie´tique et post-e´volutive qu’elle rend possible. DIFFE´ RENCES ET PARALLE` LES ENTRE LES EXPE´ RIENCES NIETZSCHE´ ENNE ET HUSSERLIENNE DU CORPS VIVANT

L’enchantement d’une vie autonomise´e propulse le corps vivant au rang de ve´ritable merveille chez Nietzsche et Husserl. Ce miracle renvoie a` l’expe´rience d’une vie immate´rielle et autoge´ne´re´e qui de´termine les mouvements du corps. Cette conqueˆte de l’immanence par l’expe´rimentation du corps vivant comme projet commun aux entreprises de Nietzsche et Husserl laisse cependant place a` certaines incompatibilite´s entre les deux philosophes. Nous pensons bien suˆr au privile`ge (partage´ avec le corps vivant) de la conscience inhe´rent au travail de constitution chez Husserl qui s’oppose radicalement a` l’instrumentalisation de la conscience chez Nietzsche; a` l’ide´al orthoesthe´sique husserlien qui n’a aucun e´quivalent chez Nietzsche pour qui les eˆtres d’exceptions et les plus faibles sont toujours en mesure de cre´er de nouvelles normes; et enﬁn au projet husserlien de re´-orientation de la rationalite´ occidentale vers son T e´los (Husserl, 1976, § 6) compris comme le sol originaire du monde-de-la-vie (L ebenswelt) et comme «fondement du sens» (Sinnesfundament) qui est diﬃcilement compatible avec l’absence de but ultime a` accorder aux ¨ berwa¨ltigen, Herrwerden). puissantes actions vitales nietzsche´ennes (U Ces diﬀe´rences n’empeˆchent pourtant pas Nietzsche et Husserl d’adopter une strate´gie commune visant a` la fois a` de´valoriser le corps physique (Ko¨rper) et a` de´truire le dualisme classique entre le corps et l’esprit pour mieux de´crire l’expe´rience corps vivant (L eib) qui e´chappe au mode`le d’explication me´caniste en se de´ﬁnissant dore´navant par un ensemble «merveilleux» et autopoie´tique forme´ par l’agencement nonprimairement rationnel d’une multiplicite´ de kinesthe`ses constituantes chez Husserl et d’une collectivite´ de forces instinctives chez Nietzsche. Les sensations charnelles husserliennes n’obe´issent a` aucune loi de´terminable et le jeu des forces nietzsche´ennes au sein du corps vivant est irre´ductible a` un syste`me me´canise´. En ce sens, la remarque de Husserl selon laquelle le corps est «remarquablement imparfaitement» organise´ (Al-Saji, 2000, p. 55), vaut e´galement pour Nietzsche. Dans les deux cas, le fondement de l’expe´rience corporelle se de´ﬁnit par une combinaison de mouvements invisibles ou` les «vibrations» et les «luttes» sont a` chaque fois uniques. Qu’il s’agisse d’encheveˆtrement de sensations ou de combats

352

ALAIN BEAULIEU

internes entre diﬀe´rents instincts ou pulsions, le corps vivant parvient toujours a` ope´rer par lui-meˆme et miraculeusement une expe´rience du mouvement a` travers laquelle une certaine unite´ de sens est produite. PROLONGEMENT DES E´ TUDES NIETZSCHE´ ENNE ET HUSSERLIENNE DU CORPS CHEZ DELEUZE ET MERLEAU-PONTY

Deleuze et Merleau-Ponty poursuivent les analyses nietzsche´o-husserliennes relatives a` l’enchantement du corps qu’il font jouer contre l’humanisme spirituel et de´sincarne´ de la me´taphysique. Nietzsche et Husserl sont les initiateurs de cette orientation de pense´e qui a rompu avec le mode`le de l’homme conc¸u comme aboutissement de la cre´ation ou perfection naturelle pour mieux admettre la possibilite´ d’un passage entre les re`gnes (humain, animal, ve´ge´tal, etc.) au sein d’une nature inte´gralement vitalise´e. Deleuze radicalise l’attitude anti-humaniste de ses illustres pre´de´cesseurs en de´ﬁnissant le corps intensif ou le Corps sans Organes (CsO), qui apparaıˆt originairement dans les textes d’Artaud (1947–1949 et 1974), par un ensemble de forces impersonnelles ou une vie semi-organise´e, anorganique et «chaosmique» (Deleuze, 1985, p. 109; Deleuze et Guattari, 1980, p. 386, 512, 622–628; Deleuze et Guattari, 1991, p. 172) qui le traversent. Le recours deleuzien aux forces pour penser la semi-organisation vient ainsi combler ce qui, jusqu’alors, demeurait une lacune inhe´rente a` la conception phe´nome´nologique du corps vivant comme en te´moignent ces propos de Didier Franck: «Plus convaincante serait, peut-eˆtre, une analyse tenant compte des forces. Mais quand la phe´nome´nologie s’estelle jamais donne´ les moyens de de´crire et de penser les forces?» (Franck, 1981, p. 98, note 25) Le CsO re´pond e´galement a` l’appel de Nietzsche qui, dans la section «De l’enfant et du mariage» du Zarathoustra aﬃrmait: «C’est un corps [L eib] supe´rieur que tu dois cre´er.» (Einen ho¨leren L eib sollst du schaVen.) Une taˆche pleinement assume´e par Deleuze et Guattari qui se proposent pre´cise´ment de re´pondre a` la question: «Comment se faire un Corps sans Organes?» (Deleuze et Guattari, 1980, chap. 6). Le CsO n’est pas non plus en reste par rapport au mode`le de corps de´ﬁni par Spinoza. Deleuze te´moigne d’une ve´ritable fascination pour cette phrase de l’E´thique (III, II, Sc.) selon laquelle nous ne savons encore rien de ce dont le corps est capable (Deleuze, 1981, p. 166). Ce qui rejoint encore une fois les propos de Nietzsche pour qui «Le corps est une pense´e plus surprenante que jadis l’ ’’aˆme’’.» (FP 1885 36 [35]; sur le «making a body» chez Husserl, cf. aussi Behnke, 1997, p. 186) En outre, puisque les forces sont impersonnelles et autonomes par rapport a` l’inte´riorite´

L’ENCHANTEMENT DU CORPS CHEZ NIETZSCHE ET HUSSERL 353

subjective (volonte´, libre-arbitre, etc.), cela signiﬁe aussi que leur expe´rience est potentiellement commune a` l’ensemble des re`gnes. Il y a donc une capacite´ d’aﬀectabilite´ et une varie´te´ de devenirs qui permettent «une rencontre entre deux re`gnes» (Deleuze et Parnet, 1996, p. 55). Merleau-Ponty a e´te´ l’un des premiers a` tirer ces conse´quences de la vitalisation de la nature en retirant a` l’homme le privile`ge sur la perception pour mieux situer l’œil dans le monde et dans la matie`re charnelle. Au niveau du monde vivant, charnel et non me´canique, l’homme, l’animal et la nature en ge´ne´ral entretiennent d’e´troits rapports place´s sous le signe de l’«Ineinander» (Merleau-Ponty, 1994, p. 269). Il y a un «entrelacement humanite´-animalite´» (Merleau-Ponty, 1994, p. 269, note a; cf. aussi, p. 275), dont la pense´e mythique de´tient les secrets (Merleau-Ponty, 1994, p. 277), et qui conside`re errone´e la de´ﬁnition de l’homme comme un l’animal doue´ de raison (Merleau-Ponty, 1994, p. 276–277). MerleauPonty pense plutoˆt une «participation de l’animal a` notre vie perceptive» et une «participation de notre vie perceptive a` l’animalite´» qui empeˆchent de «concevoir hie´rarchiquement les rapports entre les espe`ces ou entre les espe`ces et l’homme» (Merleau-Ponty, 1994, p. 375). Toutes les espe`ces, incluant l’homme, sont invariablement de´termine´es, dans la nature charnelle, par un ensemble de mouvements instinctifs et sensoriels qui composent leur corps perceptif. Bref, la distinction entre l’homme et l’animal intervient en aval, au niveau des productions culturelles (Merleau-Ponty, 1994, p. 167). Mais de manie`re plus originaire, en amont et sur le plan de la vitalite´ naturelle ou charnelle, les possibilite´s et le mode de fonctionnement des corps animal et humain demeurent rigoureusement les meˆmes. En de´ﬁnitive, ce que l’on qualiﬁe pe´jorativement d’«anti-humanisme» de la pense´e contemporaine correspond tout simplement, et pour une bonne part, a` une rupture de la philosophie avec la de´ﬁnition de l’homme par son aˆme connaissante et/ou immortelle a` la faveur d’une exploration des possibilite´s immanentes expe´rimente´es a` partir de la corpore´ite´ vivante. Notre analyse nous a permis de de´gager une unite´ entre certains penseurs que l’on oppose habituellement. Nous avons montre´ de quelle manie`re Nietzsche et Husserl situent le corps enchante´ par une multitude d’eˆtres (forces ou sensations) dans un rapport critique vis-a`-vis de l’attitude contemptrice de la tradition me´taphysique, devenant par le fait meˆme les sources philosophiques de ce nouveau mouvement de valorisation simultane´e du corps et de la vie. McGill University, Montre´al

354

ALAIN BEAULIEU NOTE

Je tiens a` remercier le Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada pour l’appui ﬁnancier oﬀert durant la re´daction de ce texte.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alia Al-Saji, «The site of aﬀect in Husserl’s phenomenology. Sensations and the constitution of the lived body», Philosophy T oday (vol. 44, suppl. 2000), p. 51–59. Antonin Artaud, (poe`mes sans titre), revue 84 (no. 5–6, 1947–1949), p. 97–103. Antonin Artaud, «Pour en ﬁnir avec le jugement de Dieu» in Œuvres comple`tes, tome XIII (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Alain Beaulieu, «La re´sistance de la me´tabiologie husserlienne aux doctrines e´volutionnistes», Recherches husserliennes (vol. 19, 2003), p. 33–54. Elizabeth A. Behnke, «Ghost gestures: phenomenological investigations of bodily micromovements and their intercorporeal implications», Human Studies (20, 1997), p. 181–201. Rene´ Bouveresse, Spinoza et L eibniz. L ’ide´e d’animisme universel (Paris: Vrin, 1992). Georges Canguilhem, L e normal et le pathologique (Paris: PUF, 1966). Charles Darwin, L ’origine des espe`ces [1859] (Paris: Flammarion, 1992). Gilles Deleuze, L ’Image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985) ——.Spinoza et le proble`me de l’expression (Paris: Minuit, 1968). ——. Spinoza. Philosophie pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1981). Gilles Deleuze et Fe´lix Guattari, Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980). ——. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991). Gilles Deleuze et Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Minuit, 1996). Hans Driesch, NaturbegriVe und Natururteile. Analytische Untersuchungen zur reinen und empirischen Naturwissenschaft (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1904). Hans Driesch, L a philosophie de l’organisme [1909] (Paris: Marcel Rivie`re, 1921). Marie-Noe¨lle Dumas, L a pense´e de la vie chez L eibniz (Paris: Vrin, 1976). Helen Fielding. «Depth of embodiement. Spatial and temporal bodies in Foucault and Merleau-Ponty», Philosophy T oday (vol. 43, no. 1, 1999), p. 73–85. Didier Franck, Chair et corps. Sur la phe´nome´nologie de Husserl (Paris: Minuit, 1981). ——. Nietzsche et l’ombre de Dieu (Paris: PUF, 1998). Kurt Goldstein, L a structure de l’organisme [1934] (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclope´die des sciences philosophiques. I. L a science de la logique (trad. B. Bourgeois) (Paris: Vrin, 1986). Edmund Husserl, Articles sur la logique (trad. J. English) (Paris: PUF, 1975). ——. L a crise des sciences europe´ennes et la phe´nome´nologie transcendantale (trad. G. Granel) (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). ——. Ide´es directrices pour une phe´nome´nologie et une philosophie phe´nome´nologique pures, tome II (trad. E. Escoubas) (Paris: PUF, 1982). ——. Ide´es directrices pour une phe´nome´nologie et une philosophie phe´nome´nologique pures, tome III (trad. D. Tiﬀeneau) (Paris: PUF, 1993). ——. Philosophie premie`re, tome I (trad. A. Kelkel) (Paris: PUF, 1970). Friedrich Albert Langue, Histoire du mate´rialisme et la critique de son importance a` l’e´poque pre´sente [1866] (Paris: Schleicher, 1911). Franc¸ois Jacob, L a logique du vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).

L’ENCHANTEMENT DU CORPS CHEZ NIETZSCHE ET HUSSERL 355 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L ’œil et l’esprit (Paris: Folio, 1964a). ——. L a nature. Notes. Cours du colle`ge de France (Paris: Le Seuil, 1994). ——. L e visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964b). Wolfgang Mu¨ller-Lauter, Physiologie de la volonte´ de puissance (Paris: Allia, 1998). Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (hrsg. von G. Colli und M. Montinari) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967 sq.). ——. Œuvres philosophiques comple`tes – dir. M. de Gandillac d’apre`s l’e´dition allemande e´tablie par G. Colli et M. Montinari (Paris: Gallimard, 1967 sq.). Jan Patocka, Papiers phe´nome´nologiques (Grenoble: Je´roˆme Millon, 1995). Wilhelm Roux, Der Kampf der T heile im Organismus (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1881). Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, «Le darwinisme allemand», section 7: «Kosmos», in P. Tort (dir.), Dictionnaire du darwinisme et de l’e´volution (Paris: PUF, 1996), p. 848–855. Isabelle Stengers, «Comment sa passer de la ﬁnalite´?», Philosophica (1991), p. 5–17. Barbara Stiegler, «Nietzsche et Darwin», Revue philosophique de la France et de l’e´tranger, no. 3 (1998), 377–395. ——. Nietzsche et la biologie (Paris: PUF, 2001). Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, Biologie oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur (Sechs Ba¨nder) (Go¨ttingen, 1802). Rudolf Virchow, Pathologie cellulaire [1858] (Paris: Baille`re, 1874). Hugo de Vries, T he mutation T heory: Experiments and Observations on the Origin of Species in the Vegetable Kingdom (2 Vol. ) [1900–1901] (Chicago: Open Court, 1909–1910). Sylvain Zac, L ’ide´e de vie de Spinoza (Paris: PUF, 1963).

WENDY C. HAMBLET

TO BEING OR NOT TO BEING? THAT IS THE QUESTION FOR ETHICS

En arche e´n logos. John 1:1.

In the beginning was the logos – language, reason, argument, account, tale – the story. Since the beginning of human time, we have been trying to recapture that tale, to recapture the vitalizing power of beginnings, to understand who we really are. This paper investigates whether a story of Being (a truth, a myth, an ontology, a metaphysics) is necessary in order to provide a ground (an arche, a foundation, a ruling beginning) upon which to erect an ethics to guide thoughts and actions in the world, as Hans Jonas contends, or whether an ethics is more ethically productive when, with Emmanuel Levinas, we abandon our hopes of attaining a ﬁrm and secure foundation and understand the Good as an interruption in the word – an event occurring outside of our stories and our myths, our inventions, our institutions and our systems, as a rupture in our meaningful creations. * * * The logos of ontos (the story of Being) is set down in the domain of philosophy called metaphysics (meta-physis meaning above/over/beyond nature). This domain articulates the supra-physical hierarchy that names the ontological levels of Being, as distinguished from the study of Being under some particular aspect. Webster’s dictionary deﬁnes ontology/metaphysics as the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of being or reality. Quoting Archer Butler, it states: The science of ontology comprehends investigations of every real existence, either beyond the sphere of the present world or in any other way incapable of being the direct object of consciousness, which can be deduced immediately from the possession of certain feelings or principles or faculties of the human soul.

Ontology is synonymous with metaphysics, the deﬁnition concludes. Ontology is the theory of being qua being, the science of the essence of things. Aristotle calls ontology/metaphysics ‘‘ﬁrst philosophy,’’ since it studies the fundamental principles of the real. The objects of metaphysical 357 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 357–364. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

358

WENDY C. HAMBLET

cognition are, for Aristotle, ‘‘ﬁrst’’ in the natural order. They comprise the most complete generalizations available to the human intellect. Hans Jonas, student of Heidegger, lifelong friend and eminent colleague of Hannah Arendt at the New School for Social Research, is loyal to Aristotle in his placement of Being as primary of all philosophical investigations. Human beings need a metaphysics, Jonas states, because we require an ontological foundation to ground an ethics. Being comes ﬁrst, then the ‘‘how’’ of our being, described in the domain of philosophical enquiry called Ethics. Why does ethics require a ‘‘ground?’’ It is a ‘‘need of reason,’’ explains Jonas, that an ‘‘imperative of responsibility’’ have its grounding.1 And so, at the outset of his book, Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, Jonas announces his metaphysical intentions: ‘‘I enter this now abandoned arena with a certain good cheer, ready to encounter metaphysics, so often declared dead.’’2 This ‘‘cheerful’’ re-entry into ontological terrain now marked defunct is justiﬁed, for Jonas, because it is ‘‘[b]etter to have it lead one to new defeats than no longer to hear its song at all.’’3 In declaring that ethics needs the ‘‘song’’ of metaphysics, Jonas echoes the siren call of the logos of beginnings, voiced in John 1:1. Jonas reasons the need for a metaphysical grounding for ethics on the argument that Being is not only the event of the arising of beings, but deﬁnes the advent of responsibility as well. Responsibility, he posits, is an ontological fact, inscribed, from the ﬁrst, in human being as a capacity, as a power. The bare fact of that capacity’s embodiment in human being, reasons Jonas, necessitates our species’ hearkening to being, hearkening to the fragilities, the vulnerabilities, the fears and the frailties of other beings. Humans, claims Jonas, are granted being under obligation. We are only as subject to an ethical call. Human beings – because they are diﬀerent from other beings, because they are in the full awareness of the contradictoriness of mortal existence – are always already subject to the imperative, the living embodiments of the ontological fact that other beings require, and Being demands, our attendance upon others – our care for the world. Humans, for Jonas, reasonably awaken to their capacity (and the imperative contained therein) only through an awakening to Being. Attending to the logos of ontos, hearkening to the ‘‘story of Being,’’ humans come to face the true nature of their own capacities and the implications of those capacities for the human role in the care of world and other beings.4 Thus, according to Jonas, a return to the ‘‘dead’’ domain of metaphysical inquiry can open to view the commandment to responsibility inscribed in, and proceeding from, the being of things

TO BEING OR NOT TO BEING?

359

themselves. We must return to nature, explains Jonas, to rediscover a truth set down in the fundamental nature of things. We have been studying nature for millennia, some may argue, and yet the primary student of nature, the scientist, has proven his quite remarkable capacity for blindness to his responsibility with regard to the earth and its myriad beings. Jonas sees a problem with the scientiﬁc view. He explains that responsibility has become eclipsed in the study of natural science because that domain of inquiry has traditionally pursued a pure, value-free knowing, a pursuit that eclipses the ethical. Jonas suggests that, if we rethink nature from a new morally-informed perspective, we will see that the ontological chain, comprised of the myriad things of the world, have, in their mere claim on human perception, a claim on our respect as well. Simply by virtue of the fact that every singular one of these living beings comes to be, each has always already proven itself to be value-possessing. To be worthy of life is to be worthy. Moreover, continues Jonas, each, by the very fact of its mortality, demonstrates its rightful demand upon human being, its deservingness of our care. Human power has, in the technological age, reached such heights of grandeur, that humans have reached a pinnacle of power, from whose dizzying heights not even the cries of their fellows can be heard, let alone the cries of other lowly beings clamoring on the bottom rungs of being. Modern people, and especially the most powerful, have become remarkably adept at resisting the imperative of Being, deaf to the summons to care for the lesser things. In fact, in their value-free quest for knowledge, modern humans have, ironically, created a situation in which coexistence with our death-defying species has meant increased vulnerability for, rather than careful attendance upon, the more vulnerable. This is precisely why Jonas reopens the question of responsibility and places its imperative in the nature of things. Jonas insists that it falls to humans to return to Being, to rediscover their responsibility to care for the lesser things. To be ‘‘at the mercy of my power,’’ states Jonas, is to be ‘‘at the same time entrusted to it.’’5 The universal call ‘‘thou shalt not murder me’’ issues from all beings, and the cry, we would think, must be deafening, given the enormity of human destructive potential and the number of beings at risk. ‘‘Responsibility is a function of our power,’’ asserts Jonas, ‘‘and proportional to it.’’6 Therefore, by Jonas’ logic, human beings of greatest power are human beings of greatest caring potential. But, clearly, the ones with greatest power, those least limited by their lesser fellows – the Mao’s and the Hitler’s and the Stalin’s and the Mussolini’s – are hardest of hearing.

360

WENDY C. HAMBLET

How, we might ask Jonas, do we persuade the ones with great power that they must hearken to the call to responsibility? We don’t, Jonas would respond. In a radically singularizing move, Jonas states: ‘‘the call [to responsibility] is very concretely meant for me and becomes an imperative for me.’’7 Between the two ‘‘ontological poles’’ of human freedom and the valuableness of Being lies the responsibility of the human as a species, and yet the call comes to one respondent, one ethical mediator, at a time. Each is singularly summoned to insert herself in moral duty between her fellow beings and the not-being that haunts their mortal existence. Jonas ﬁnds the answer to the problem of freedom and the threat of death that is carried within it, in a metaphysics embodied in nature – in a cry issuing from the fragility of beings themselves. In this metaphysics, human power, a capacity that, ill-used, can end all life, is a gift endowed at the cost of a trust, an injunction, to use that power to good ends – to defer the death of the more vulnerable. What is the logos behind this ethic – whatever was Nature thinking! – in entrusting the future of the world and all its inhabitants to a species so deaf to the inner summons to care? How is it, if responsibility is carved into our being as a ‘‘function of our power and proportional to it,’’ that human beings, the more powerful we become, grow proportionately deaf to that imperative? Jonas’ metaphysics represents a radical overturning of traditional understandings of ontological gradation. In placing responsibility within Being, he attempts to disarm the dangerous tendencies of metaphysical thinking, placing greatest responsibility in the hands of the powerful super-species that have fought their way to the top of the great chain of Being. By placing greatest imperative at the top of the ontological chain, Jonas hopes to launch a new appeal to care for those below. The motivation is commendable. However, aside from the diﬃculty of marketing this highly improbable ‘‘story of Being’’ to a species whose awareness exceeds that of all other beings, given the overwhelming empirical evidence against it, there remains the troubling question of whether the placement of human being at the top of the ontological chain leaves open the option of interpreting that chain as a moral entity. It seems that all metaphysical visions assume a structure that threatens to order, arrange and subsume its parts rather than to celebrate their diversity. But this particular metaphysical vision reconﬁrms the rightful place of humankind as masters of the universe – a claim altogether consistent with the Enlightenment ideals that, to begin with, got the world and its myriad beings into their present most vulnera-

TO BEING OR NOT TO BEING?

361

ble state. These ‘‘questions’’ need to be addressed before a new ‘‘song of Being’’ lures the listener onto its rocky shores. A post-Holocaust world has seen where the path of mastery leads and is aware of the need for greatest attentiveness in the ways we think about Being. The questions raised by and within metaphysics are questions precisely for ethics. One could argue that philosophy, in the wisdom of its un-know-ing, has long been the birthplace of swan songs and noble lies to comfort the death-haunted and inspire the nobler instincts in a fallible and morally fragile humankind. However, it has also been argued, not least passionately by Jonas himself, that, in the wake of the horriﬁc events of the twentieth century, philosophy must admit its failure at the task of noble story-telling. It has need, indeed, to rethink its ‘‘songs’’ and to consider whether the world can aﬀord to let new metaphysical tunes ‘‘lead us to new defeats’’ – new Crusades, new witch-hunts, new conversions-at-gunpoint, new genocide projects, new nationalisms, new religious intolerances, new global economic and terrorist gangsterisms, new extermination camps and new gulags. Every power structure looks to a metaphysical vision to justify its actions in the world. The ‘‘songs of Being’’ have, thus far in the history of the species, led almost inevitably to brutality, torture and bloodshed. Ironically, the good works – the tending of the forgotten, the uplifting of the lowly and the feeding of the poor – have rarely been accomplished by the powerful named most responsible by Jonas’ imperative, but by the simple Samaritans and the selﬂess Mother Teresa’s. Can we truly say, when we look over the ledger of human works – over the centuries and the millennia since metaphysical visions were at labor grounding their ethical systems and dictating their moral imperatives – that the world is truly ‘‘better’’ for the ‘‘hearing’’ of these songs? Or, after two thousand years of their seductive melodies, ought we ﬁnally to surrender the naı¨ve hope that metaphysics leads to a ‘‘better’’ world and face the cold hard fact that human beings may be ‘‘better’’ without the alluring refrains of metaphysics? The latter suspicion guides the philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas. In a radical overturning of the identiﬁcation of ontology with metaphysics, Levinas tears us from our comforting stories and lays bare the violence of our conscious constructions, however beautiful to the eye and seductive to the ear of the artist and the listener. With Levinas’ phenomenological reformulation, metaphysics still occurs as a transcendence, but not as a transcendent structure or domain. It is, rather, as a ‘‘passing over to being’s other, an other-wise than being.’’8 This ‘‘otherwise’’ of the metaphysical is not to be confused with a passing over into

362

WENDY C. HAMBLET

not-being. ‘‘Not to be otherwise,’’ Levinas insists, ‘‘but otherwise than being.’’9 Levinas, in this diﬃcult distinction, is attempting to transcend Jonas’ account of mortal existence as a paradoxical meeting point of dialectical opposites – of mortal being as a tightrope walk between being and not-being. For Levinas, Being – whether the faceless Being-in-general from which a being issues as an act of radical freedom, or whether the be-ing of enacted freedom itself, the radical self-enclosure that describes the ‘‘ontological’’ adventure of conscious life – always subsumes its opposites. For Levinas, Being occurs as an inescapable violence to self and other, a suﬀocating encasement, a buzzing, an insomnious menace, the threat of archaic gods and haunting ‘‘elements.’’ Clearly, in Levinas, Being reveals its dark side, hidden in traditional understandings, and metaphysics ceases to be understood as a ‘‘domain’’ ordered by the fundamental principles of Being. With Levinas, metaphysics ceases to be understood at all; it ceases to be understandable. Metaphysics is not an order of Being, not an order-ing of Being. Nor is it a domain beyond being, a realm of death or a state of not-being. It occurs as a rupture in the conscious life of meanings and understandings. Levinas transcends the dialectic of being and not-being because, for him, these seeming opposites never truly accomplish separation and always remain in the service of Being. They merely: illuminate each other and unfold a speculative dialectic which is a determination of being. Or else the negativity which attempts to repel being is immediately submerged by being. The void that is hollowed out is immediately ﬁlled with the anonymous rustling of the there is, as the place left vacant by one who died is ﬁlled with the murmur of the attendants. Being’s essence dominates not-being itself.10

In Levinas’ reformulation of the structure of Being, metaphysics happens as a ‘‘diﬀerence over and beyond that which separates being from nothingness – the very diVerence of the beyond, the diﬀerence of transcendence.’’11 In a stunning recapture of an insight caught only ‘‘during ﬂashes’’ in the history of philosophy – in Plato’s Good that is not the Beautiful (Hipp. Maj. 297c & ﬀ., 303e & ﬀ.), that lies beyond Being (Rep. 7.517bc.) and that is preserver and benefactor to all (Rep. 10.608e), in Husserl’s pure ego as transcendence in immanence, in the Cartesian idea of god that is greater than the thought that would contain it, and in Nietszche’s irrepressible laughter that ‘‘reverses irreversible time in vortices ... [and] which refuses language’’2 – Levinas redeﬁnes the metaphysical as the event where the Good passes by. It does not come to presence, it is not enacted by some agent, but, rather goodness occurs as

TO BEING OR NOT TO BEING?

363

a violation of the violation that comprises the ‘‘ontological adventure’’ and a loss of the freedom that keeps beings in being. Goodness happens as a ‘‘metaphysical extraction from being,’’13 a rupture in Being itself. In undercutting Jonas’ metaphysics that posit dialectical opposition as the ground for ethics, Levinas also overturns the Socratic logic upon which philosophy took ﬂight millennia ago. He states: ... the Good is not presented to freedom; it has chosen me before I have chosen it. No one is good voluntarily.14

Responsibility for the other does not occur, for Levinas, as a function of the true being of human being, as it does with Jonas. However, Levinas remains consistent with Jonas in his placement of the call to responsibility in the face of the other vulnerable being. Responsibility for the other ‘‘commands me and ordains me’’ with no reasons other than the bare empirical fact that I am the ﬁrst on the scene. The other’s need, simply by ‘‘proximation’’ to me, compels me to respond, makes me approach, makes me ‘‘neighbour’’ to the other where I might otherwise only ever remain a stranger passing by. The moral response thus ‘‘diverges from nothingness as much as from being.’’15 Responsibility, for Levinas, occurs outside of being, outside of not-being, as a glorious excess to essence. Thus, Levinas disarms metaphysics, as it has traditionally been understood, by refusing its synonymity with Being and ontology. In so doing, goodness can still happen, but only as a rupture in the neat hierarchical ordering practiced by beings. Metaphysics may still be the meta with regard to physis, but, contra Aristotle, ‘‘ﬁrst philosophy’’ can, for Levinas, only be Ethics. As long as we think ethics as grounded in a metaphysics, no matter how seemingly benign the ordering structure, the world remains ﬁxed within a ‘‘logic of domination’’ that has ruled since the beginning of human time and mastery remains the only form in which humans can hope to compel the Good to appear. In a world that has witnessed Holocaust, and continues to witness, daily, more holocausts than the human mind can count, a rupture in the logic of orders and structures oﬀers a new way of understanding human be-ing in the world, and oﬀers hope for a new form of the Good – a gentility and a humility of such potency that it defeats freedom and mastery and the rational calculations of our super-species. Levinas’ phenomenology, as a descriptive account of human existence, is as troublesome as that of Jonas, in terms of the diﬃculty of proving it to be a description of actual moral response. Again, one can oﬀer over-

364

WENDY C. HAMBLET

whelming empirical evidence to show that many acts of kindness are altogether intentional and that many ontological worlds are impervious to metaphysical rupture. However, as a normative account of human existence, as an ideal of moral response that circumvents all calculations of utility and consequence, Levinas’ extraction of the metaphysical from the ontological makes for a ‘‘story’’ outside Being, a logos that is truly meta- with regard to ontos. Whether that ‘‘story’’ is able to humble human dreams of mastery of the universe, whether it is able to disarm Being and retrieve the Good from its powerful heights above the heavens, is another question for ethics. It is likely that only in the living of Levinas’ humbling ‘‘story’’ of the metaphysical rupture of Being can the question of whether an ethics requires a metaphysical ‘‘grounding’’ ever be ﬁnally answered. NOTES 1 Mortality and Morality, p. 55. Jonas names the article in which he asserts this claim: ‘‘The Need of Reason: Grounding an Imperative of Responsibility in the Phenomenon of Life,’’ c.f. T he Imperative of Responsibility. p. 8. 2 Mortality and Morality, p. 101. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., p. 102. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., emphasis mine. 8 Otherwise T han Being or Beyond Essence, p. 3. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., emphasis mine. 12 Ibid., p. 8. 13 Ibid., p. 8. 14 Ibid., p. 11, emphasis mine. 15 Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Jonas, Hans. T he Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the T echnological Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Jonas, Hans. Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, Lawrence Vogel (ed). Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996. Levinas, Emmamuel. Otherwise T han Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alfonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.

SECTION VII SEARCH FOR A DEEPER SOCIAL EQUILIBRIUM

Semiha Akıncı

JESSE T. AIRAUDI

IMRE KERTESZ IN THE 21st CENTURY: PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO PHILOSOPHICAL DISTORTIONS AND SOCIAL VIOLENCE

1. THE WORK OF IMRE KERTESZ IN THE CONTEXT OF MIT T EL -EUROP AND THE EVER-BRANCHING PHENOMENOLOGICAL PROJECT

Imre Kertesz’s ﬁction is a strange account of his experience of the Holocaust, strange to us who have read and viewed so many Holocaust accounts, in that it does not treat the experience as horriﬁcally evil or redemptively good as do most so-called ‘‘Holocaust writers.’’ Readers and critics are ﬁrst struck by the ‘‘ordinariness’’ of Kertesz’s particular experience, as if being arrested and deported, and subjected to imprisonment and forced labor were the most natural and logical things in the world. There are no heinous acts of atrocity, no grand gestures of rescue as one sees in, say, Schindler’s L ist. Instead, for the attentive and patient reader, there is a gradual enlightenment about the rational nature of ‘‘evil’’ and the ‘‘irrational’’ nature of good that corresponds to the phenomenological movement from philosophical analysis to an authentic uncovering of ‘‘the creative constructive activity, of the human condition’’ that is the longsought ﬂowering, or budding promise, of the Husserlian project (A.-T. Tymieniecka 686). The late-Twentieth Century was, of course, a challenge to both philosophers and writers. The ‘‘anti-foundational’’ schools severely tested both the ﬁndings of earlier phenomenological investigators and the will of researchers in the ﬁeld to continue. But, as (for example) James R. Mensch’s Postfoundational Phenomenology: Husserlian Reﬂections on Presence and Embodiment (2001) revealed in re-summoning Husserl back into the ‘‘absence’’/‘‘Presence’’ debate, the ‘‘certainty’’ investigation legitimately could, and did, continue. Phenomenology’s intuitive approach, re-verifying itself rationally at every achieved plane or platform and thus advancing in constructive praxis toward an authentic apprehension of the life-world, stands in opposition to theoretizing which reaches its impasse at absence or nothingness. In the artistic realm, the challenge of late-Twentieth Century developments was felt most acutely by MiddleEuropean writers, and my study of Imre Kertesz is, I feel, the ﬂowering 367 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 367–384. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

368

JESSE T. AIRAUDI

of earlier work of Polish, Czech, Russian, and other writers of those recently beleaguered countries. In those writers I have traced the emergence of an awareness of the ‘‘ontopoesis of life.’’ Their situations were a testing ground where the creative, human response sought to preserve itself against those inhuman organizations seeking to subdue or annihilate it. Thus, I found, Lithuanian-Polish Czeslaw Milosz, Czech Milan Kundera, and others were meeting the challenge, as section 6 will show. Coming now, in 2003, to the ﬁrst Hungarian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, at the beginning of this new century and millennium, I see through his eyes – because they too are those of an ‘‘OtherEuropean’’ but of more penetrating vision – more clearly those ‘‘new vast horizons for phenomenological investigation, horizons projected and phased theoretically by the new Archimedean point of the human creative act and its virtualities’’ (Tymieniecka 687). 2. THE CONTINUED RELEVANCY OF IMRE KERTESZ’S WORK AND ‘‘FACING WORLD PROBLEMS,’’ THE THEME OF THE 21st WORLD CONGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY

Kertesz’s Noble Prize for Literature was awarded mainly on the weight of his ﬁrst novel, Fateless, published over a quarter of a century ago (1975), some thirty years after the events portrayed in the autobiographical novel. Fateless is a Solzhenitsyn kind of a ‘‘Day in the Life ...’’ book, detailing Kertesz’s ‘‘existence’’ in 1944 when he was deported as a Jew from his home in Budapest to Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland, and later to the Buchenwald work camp in Germany. According to the Associated Press release of Kertesz’s award, of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, ‘‘about 600,000 were Hungarian’’ (H. Italie). Kertesz was liberated from Buchenwald at the end of the war in 1945. Those are the facts, and we have heard similar accountings many times before, and so we tend to ask ourselves what exactly can yet another novel, so late in the day, as it were, tell us what we do not already know, having been told much more spectacularly on the screen and more poignantly in memoirs and so many other, more lengthy novels? My study seeks to provide an answer to this question of ‘‘relevancy.’’ It is entirely appropriate that Kertesz’s work be examined in a forum dedicated to the urgent topic of ‘‘Facing World Problems,’’ as the title of the Twenty First World Congress of Philosophy has it, and even more appropriate that we examine his work in the Phenomenology section whose topic is ‘‘Phenomenology of Life Meeting the Challenges of the Present Day

IMRE KERTESZ IN THE 21st CENTURY

369

World’’ – despite the fact that Kertesz work is the result of an experience over a half-century in the past. It seems to me of more than scholarly interest that both Kertesz’s and Husserl’s emotional and intellectual ﬂowering took place in the same decades of the Twentieth Century, Kertesz’s life-changing incarceration in labor camps of the World War II era, and Husserl’s great work, the Crisis, published in 1938. Though both became available to the public only decades later, they help to address the ‘‘staggering questions raised by WW II,’’ as A.-T. Tymieniecka writes of the Crisis. Indeed, to further cite Tymieniecka, the Crisis is that ‘‘capital work’’ which gave impetus to the broadly ranging explorations of phenomenology down to the present day while yet consolidating a ‘‘kernel’’ or ‘‘germ’’ of its signiﬁcant gift to human thought: ‘‘In all this there is to be discerned a kernel of what I would call ‘authentic phenomenology’ or ‘phenomenology proper’ which sustains the diverse range of work now being undertaken in the ﬁeld, which kernel allows divergent thinkers to remain conversant and allows work at the margins to identify with the source.’’ And, as I noted in the previous section of this paper, phenomenology’s current status as a vital method of inquiry, even after strenuous challenges from more recent ‘‘anti-foundational’’ postmodern developments, yet hews to this ‘‘kernel’’ of Husserl’s initial thought while advancing and broadening in power and signiﬁcance, and it is this current line of inquiry which guides my study of the work of Kertesz. To quote Tymieniecka again on the subject, ‘‘Above all, this project advances beyond a ﬁxation on inner subjectivity and engages the societal and ethical’’ (Tymieniecka 2). It is this merging of aims, that of the Twentyﬁrst World Congress, of the Fifty-third International Phenomenology Congress, and of my ongoing study of the ‘‘imaginatio creatrix’’ in the context of ‘‘the Other-Europe’’, that brings my ‘‘marginal’’ studies of Imre Kertez and other Mittel-Europeans of our times back to ‘‘the source.’’ 3. IMRE KERTESZ’S FICTION AND ‘‘HISTORICAL REDUCTION’’

Readers who have managed to plow through one of Kertesz’s books would understand that most of the text of the novel would have to be quoted to show the extent to which Kertesz spins out the dreariness and boredom and uneventfulness captured in the novel. As the narrator relates, ‘‘This is when I found out that you could be bored in even Auschwitz – provided you were choosy. We waited and waited, and as I come to think of it, we waited for nothing to happen. This boredom, combined with the strange waiting, was, I think, approximately what

370

JESSE T. AIRAUDI

Auschwitz meant to me, but of course I am only speaking for myself ’’ (Fateless 87). Those who were not ‘‘choosy’’ and found things to excite them, lost, in many ways, an opportunity, we might say, of a life-time. It is only through Kertesz’s careful construction of the ‘‘strange waiting’’ that the error of ‘‘technization’’ that Husserl exposed in the Crisis reveals itself for what it is, so the next step, one of many in a series of intuitive enlightenment, can begin. During the strange waiting, the ‘‘natural,’’ ‘‘logical’’ (that is, system-ordained) elements of the inhuman conditions of the camps became apparent. Toward the end of Fateless, the narrator recounts a conversation with someone who remained in Budapest during those years. When an old man on a train returning to Budapest asks Kertesz if he had seen a lot of ‘‘horrors,’’ Kertesz replies, ‘‘Naturally.’’ ‘Why do you keep saying ‘‘naturally,’’ son,’ he exclaimed, seeming to lose his temper, ‘when you are referring to things that are not natural at all?’ ‘In a concentration camp,’ I said, ‘they are very natural.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ he gasped, ‘it’s true there, but ... well ... but the concentration camp is not natural.’ He seemed to have found the appropriate expression, but I didn’t even answer him, because I began to understand that there are certain subjects you can’t discuss, it seems, with strangers, ignorant people, and children, you might say.’’ (Fateless 180)

Kertesz’s powerful expose´ of perhaps the most horrendous period of human history distills that atrocity (and, necessarily, all others) to a single, logical (though inexcusable) explanation. In an interview with Swedish Academy permanent president Horace Engdalh, Kertesz stated that when he studied ‘‘the ﬁgures of nazism,’’ he understood that they had ‘‘no power of imagination at all. They were just theoreticians. They had committed dreadful deeds and they really had no concept of this’’ (Engdahl). Husserl, in the Crisis, put it this way: ‘‘Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people’’ (Crisis 6). Here, in actual political practice by the National Socialists, was Husserl’s error of ‘‘technization.’’1 At the time of the Eighth World Congress held in Prague in 1934, in a letter to the organizing committee, and in a long accompanying essay, Husserl wrote of ‘‘deep problems in the philosophy of history which truly disturb me.’’ His urgent letter, which was read in ‘‘The Mission of Philosophy in Our Time’’ session, echoes Part I of the Crisis entitled ‘‘The Crisis of the Sciences as Expression of the Radical Life-Crisis of European Humanity.’’ More explicitly, the ‘‘crisis’’ (as spelled out in the title of the second chapter) is seen as ‘‘The ‘crisis’ of science as the loss of its meaning for life.’’ In this chapter, Husserl characterizes this as ‘‘the emptying of the meaning of mathematical natural events through ‘technization’ ’’ and the ‘‘life-world as the forgotten meaning-fundament of natural science.’’

IMRE KERTESZ IN THE 21st CENTURY

371

Further chapters explore the ramiﬁcations of this ‘‘emptying of meaning’’ in other areas of human thought, psychology, for instance, which handles a ‘‘mystery ... the way a child handles explosives’’ (in the words of Merleau-Ponty). The Nazi theoreticians nearly, very nearly, blew up the world with their mishandling of the human mystery, their drive to quantify it, systematize it. Yet Kertesz passes no damning judgment on them, for in the Nobel Interview: ‘‘No,’’ the author insists, ‘‘everyone is good’’ (Nobel Interview). He is impatient with those who say the ‘‘evil’’ of the Holocaust is ‘‘unexplainable.’’ As the protagonist of Kertesz’s Kaddish for a Child Not Born says, the question of evil comes down simply to the nature of power, the nature of all power, which by itself is neither necessary nor superﬂuous, but simply a question of decision, individual decisions made or not made, neither satanic nor unfathomable and fascinatingly subtle, nor grandly spellbinding; not even during its periods of common, criminal, stupid, murderous, hysterical, or grand accomplishments, you can only view it as well organized at best. ... And please stop saying ... that Auschwitz cannot be explained, that Auschwitz is the product of irrational, incomprehensible forces, because there is always a rational explanation for wrongdoing ... (Kaddish 31).

Yet Kertesz is no quietist or nihilist. He insists that he means to teach his readers something they can use: he had begun the Nobel interview by acknowledging his debt to the German literary tradition, its language, and especially the genre he had borrowed, which he termed ‘‘the novel of education,’’ ﬁrmly correcting his interviewer on a common misapprehension that his novel lacks purpose or hope. In no way does Kertesz seek revenge because no one is guilty of any sort of sin of commission. He explained his ‘‘educational’’ technique this way: by dropping out what he calls ‘‘notes of the minor key’’ in his narrative of events as he experienced them, he ﬁnds that ‘‘the ground base of a valid value system is no longer present, and [I] wanted to recreate the original time.’’ Then, shifting to an explanation of his narrative method in terms of physics, he elucidates the eﬀect of the method: ‘‘In physics linearity means a straight line, not accelerating, recognizing no curves, and as a technique for a novel that’s not very impressive, but it’s the truth. Time does not belong to the person who experiences this time, this is prescribed to him from above, from authority, and he has to live this time, and that is the most diﬃcult thing. There, in this linearity, morals disappear.’’ Or at least one’s ‘‘traditional morals.’’ In this other, imposed ‘‘time,’’ adaptation is the only means of survival, ‘‘and that changes the perception of morals.’’ In fact, ‘‘morals always remain, but change direction, are used, changed, distorted,’’ and ‘‘everyone uses morals the way they want. And unfortunately

372

JESSE T. AIRAUDI

morals are usable’’ (Nobel Interview). Everyone is good, he insists, and no-one is exempt from the lure of ‘‘the Gorgon’’ (as he called it in his Nobel Banquet speech) of theoretizing, of technization: In his Nobel Lecture (‘‘Heureka!’’) of December 2002, Kertesz repeated a story from his 1988 novel Failure: I stood in the empty corridor of an oﬃce building, and all that happened was that from the direction of another, intersecting corridor I heard echoing footsteps. A strange excitement took hold of me. The sound grew louder and louder, and though they were clearly the steps of a single person, I suddenly had the feeling that I was hearing the footsteps of thousands. It was as if a huge procession was pounding its way down that corridor. And at that point I perceived the irresistible attractions of those footfalls, that marching multitude. In a single moment I understood the ecstasy of self-abandonment, the intoxicating pleasure of melting into the crowd.

Kertesz denies that this was an ‘‘artistic revelation’’ in some mystical sense of that term, but that it was a ‘‘vision,’’ vision deﬁned as ‘‘something real that assumes a supernatural guise – the sudden, almost violent eruption of a slowly ripening thought within me. Something conveyed in the ancient cry, ‘Heureka!’ – ‘I’ve got it!’ But what?’’ (Nobel Lecture).

4. HEUREKA!: THE APPEARANCE OF THE LIFE-HORIZON IN KERTESZ’S FICTION

For Kertesz, that sudden realization, or ‘‘reduction,’’ brought about by the traumatic imposition of linearity, results in a remarkable insight, one I believe is central to all of Kertesz’s ‘‘concatenated’’ novels.2 What he ‘‘got’’ was a way to live despite (or because of ) his terrible experience in the camps, a way to live without moralizing. (Beyond Good and Evil, as Nietzsche would say, or underneath them, as Tymieniecka would say.) In Kaddish – ‘‘concatenated’’ with Fateless in that we understand the protagonist to be the same person, though older, remembering and reﬂecting on being a Jew at the ‘‘right’’ time and place to experience the Holocaust – there is a similar ‘Heureka!’ in the form of the main character’s indelible revelation of an ‘‘awareness’’ that was not strictly his awareness but ‘‘rather an awareness concerning me, so that I knew of it but it was not at my disposal, as if, as I said, it were not exclusively my own awareness but an awareness present always and everywhere ... and which constantly and pointlessly continued to torture me to death. On the other hand, I felt quite clearly that this painful awareness was not essentially an unhappy one, and if I felt unhappy this particular moment, it was only

IMRE KERTESZ IN THE 21st CENTURY

373

as the object of this awareness. ...’’ In a moment from that single night of revelation, the protagonist grounds his self in intersubjectivity: Upon awakening, or fully falling asleep, for, as I said, it really didn’t matter which, it became impossible for me not to ascribe it to some mystery, or in other words, it was impossible to ponder the fact that this awareness was part of something else, something that I was a part of, that it didn’t belong to my body, nor entirely to my mind, albeit it was transmitted by my mind, and that this awareness was not exclusively mine and that, indeed, this awareness was perhaps the seed of my life that had occasioned and developed the whole thing, that is to say, my very existence. (Kaddish 51)

In Fateless, the ‘Heureka!’ is not caught in reﬂection but in the novelistic rendering of ‘‘original time,’’ as Kertesz has called his method, nowhere in the novel more eﬀectively than in this horribly enchanting scene: ‘‘And then as night fell, I studied the color of the sky and saw one of its marvels: Greek ﬁre, a virtual ﬁreworks of sparkles and ﬂames on the left horizon. ‘Crematoriums,’ people whispered, mumbled, repeated around me, but now only with a kind of admiration for natural occurrences. Then came the order to abterten (dissolve the rows)’’ (Fateless 85). I can think of few other novelists who can construct imagery that seamlessly reveals the telos of the natural life world embedded (as it were) in the presenttemporal. In fact, Kertesz’s ‘‘reconstituted’’ images here are as provocative as Czeslaw Milosz’s phenomenological poetry – or Keats’s (or the phenomenological poetry of the remarkable contemporary Finnish writer participating in this Congress, Matti Itkonen). In Kertesz’s image, the ancient and universal Heraclitean power and majesty of ‘‘Greek ﬁre’’ (though referring on the denotative level to the ﬁre-bombs of Greek warfare and on the historical level to the Nazi crematoria ﬁres) combined then with the temporally-particular shouted order to ‘‘dissolve the ranks’’ results in a melancholic vision of the ﬁrst emotional order. Similarly tucked away in the dark, slow ﬂow of the narrative is another coruscating image of this past-future-now-always constitution: ‘‘I can assert one thing: with time one even becomes accustomed to miracles. Gradually, I began walking to the treatment room. By some odd quirk, the doctor prescribed this one morning. I went just as I was, barefoot, wrapped in my blanket to cover my shirt, and in the crisp air among the many familiar smells, I discovered a new fragrance: that of blossoming spring. I was almost positive of this as I considered the passage of time.’’ Then, the return of the present circumstance, rather than obliterate the ‘‘discovery’’ of spring, is folded into the process of the self-presencing: ‘‘On my return, I noticed in passing two men in convicts’ uniforms who pulled or rather dragged

374

JESSE T. AIRAUDI

a large oxcart on rubber wheels, the type that they usually attach to trucks. On it I glimpsed some frozen, dangling, yellow-looking limbs and some other chopped up body parts. I quickly pulled the blanket tightly around my shoulders so as not to catch a cold. I tried to hop back to my warm room as soon as possible, to wipe my feet a little for the sake of decorum, and then to get under my blanket and settle in as quickly as possible.’’ The ranks of the particular humans dissolve amid the eternal given-ness of nature. The episode does not end with an escapist ‘‘security blanket’’ note, however, as the protagonist uses the time to converse with a fellow prisoner, who eventually, as the euphemism of the camp had it, ‘‘went ‘back home’ and an older Polish man took his place.’’ Thus, the dual nature of temporality and past-future is faithfully maintained, as throughout this section of the narrative the loudspeaker announces arrivals and departures in the camp: ‘‘In conjunction with this call, there was the inevitable ‘Leichen-kommando sum Tor!’ (that is, ‘Corpse-carriers to the gate!’)’’ (Fateless 164–165). Or as T. S. Eliot writes in ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ for us who are here, there is ‘‘may time’’ and there is ‘‘May time,’’ and that is the mystery we can live in, though our science can never absolutely ‘‘know.’’ There are further, though few, such ‘‘minor key notes’’ of genuine – that is, engaged – feeling for things among the relentless ‘‘ordinariness’’ and ‘‘naturalness’’ of the predominant ‘‘ground bass’’ elements of the narrative. Or, to change the metaphor, in the dark night of the horror, contact with things at the intersubjective level oﬀer tiny glimpses here and there that, like lightning ﬂashes, illuminate the phenomenological ‘‘uncovering’’ in the novel. What we ‘‘get’’ from these tiny ‘Heurekas!’ has a name, and ﬁnding the thing which prompts the naming and connects the two is (in Tymieniecka’s words) ‘‘a gift from the gods.’’ For many readers (and even some critics), the gift seems a long time in coming, or perhaps it does not appear at all. Zoltan Ban writes of Kertesz’s ‘‘heroism of unhappiness’’ (Ban 41), for instance. Yet Kertesz himself sees the experience, and process, diﬀerently, and he ends his novel emphatically insisting that the experience was necessary for self-enlightenment: ‘‘Even back there, in the shadow of the chimneys, in the breaks between the pain, there was something resembling happiness. Everybody will ask me about the deprivations, the ‘terrors of the camps,’ but for me, the happiness will always be the most memorable experience, perhaps. Yes, that’s what I’ll tell them the next time they ask me: about the happiness in those camps. If they ever do ask. And if I don’t forget’’ (Fateless 191). To answer the charge that the novel drags on uneventfully and without picturing

IMRE KERTESZ IN THE 21st CENTURY

375

either the horror or heroism of the prisoners or those who would help them, Kertesz informs us, via his protagonist’s conversation with someone who was spared the camps, that a patient, or even bored, gradualism is necessary so one will not be overwhelmed by another’s imposition of time, and that one can (must) use that ‘‘strange time’’ to ﬁnd another, authentic self. ‘‘By the time we learn everything, we slowly come to understand it. ... If on the other hand, there were no schedule, no gradual enlightenment, if all the knowledge descended on you at once, right on the spot, then it’s possible neither your brains nor your heart could bear it’’ (Fateless 181–182). Even as the protagonist of Fateless is being liberated from the camp, he has his choice of clothing from the storage room, but settles on his ‘‘well-worn, striped prisoner’s garment without the number and triangle, but otherwise unchanged. In fact, I chose it, I’d almost say, because I was attached to it. This way, at least, there would be no misunderstanding, I thought, and besides, I considered it a pleasant, functional, cool garment, at least now, in the summer’’ (Fateless 175). In a sense, the striped uniform is the visible emblem or badge of the phenomenological self and its temporal, experiential method of emergence. Thus, and typically, Kertesz asserts the necessity of ‘‘strange time’’ to provide, seemingly by chance, the given-ness of the life-world, and the opportunity to process it for the emergence of a present self. James R. Mensch explains the phenomenology of such this coming-to-be process in Husserlian terms (as opposed to one which assumes the self ’s ‘‘absence’’ and the ‘‘use of language’’ to represent a self, as Derrida’s concept does: For Husserl, by contrast, the self-aﬀection of consciousness is prior to language. It occurs through the aﬀecting contents that ‘‘awaken’’ it. Our being aﬀected by these contents is a self -aﬀection insofar as they are inherent in the temporal constitution that makes the self a place of presence. Such contents cause it to ‘‘be’’ as a place of presence by awakening the retentional and protentional processes that yield this place. Regarded in such terms, the ‘‘inner distance’’ that allows the self to be self-present is temporal. It arises through the subject’s being stretched out along time as it retains and protends the contents that aﬀect it. In this view, the self that now grasps itself across a temporal distance when it regards the self as it was or will be. (Mensch 20)

Mensch resolves the absence/presence problem for intersubjectivity raised by Heidegger, Derrida, and Levinas (‘‘It is, in Levina’s words, to experience the [other’s] face as ‘the rupture of phenomenology’ ’’) by the process of ‘‘being stretched out along time,’’ for ‘‘once we phenomenologically bracket the past and future, we ﬁnd something quite diﬀerent. The temporal reduction that brackets the two reveals ... the sheer immediacy of the presence or nowness existing between them. It is with this presence that

376

JESSE T. AIRAUDI

the ethics of the face-to-face encounter beings. The same holds for the empathy from which this ethics springs.’’ Mensch concludes his summary of the steps toward verifying the presence of the self by noting the importance of the process for what we are calling ‘‘Phenomenology of Life Meeting the Challenges of the Present Day World,’’ in his ‘‘ethics of embodiment’’: showing ‘‘how a persons self-presence, as springing from temporalization, is never wholly private. Both temporalization and presence are constantly shaped by other persons. This is why self-responsibility to Others is inevitably conjoined’’ (Mensch 20–21). 5. KERTESZ AND THE ‘‘FACE-TO-FACE ENCOUNTER’’

As the self emerges in the folds of the prisoner’s striped uniform, as it were, it discovers that others in similar garb are not merely captives of someone else’s imposed time, but are part of the ﬂow of the life-world, and it is at this point of ‘‘empathy’’ that Kertesz engages ‘‘history.’’ Scarcely noticed are the small acts of kindness in Fateless, the hospital attendant who gives Kertesz precious food without asking anything in return, the ‘‘sympathy,’’ or perhaps personal experiments by the hospital staﬀ to see if ‘‘they were still capable of feeling sympathy’’ (Fateless 155), and so on. But in a remarkably-constructed emblematic scene, the protagonist emerges into his ﬁrst ‘‘face-to-face-encounter’’ with the Other. It is at the point in the novel where, his body, suggesting the ‘‘common expression ... earthly remains,’’ was ‘‘sputtering along with the ﬂame turned entirely down,’’ the protagonist is being returned to Buchenwald, now in his recent experience of extreme deprivation, a desirable destination. ‘‘But,’’ he says, ‘‘still something within me burned – the ﬂame of life, as they used to say – in other words, my body was still there. I was thoroughly familiar with it, only somehow I myself no longer lived inside it.’’ The boxcar-journey scene in Fateless is central to what Mensch calls the ‘‘ethics of embodiment’’ (21), to what Husserl referred to in the Crisis as the breakthrough insight called ‘‘communalization’’ leading to a ‘‘universal a priori of correlation’’ (163–166), and bears quoting at length: Without any diﬃculty I sensed that my body lay there surrounded on the sides and above with other objects. On the cold ﬂoor of the rattling railroad car the straw was wet from a variety of suspicious ﬂuids. I sensed that my paper bandages had long since torn apart and disappeared, that my shirt and convict’s pants, which they had put on me for the journey, were sticking to my wounds. But all this no longer moved me, no longer interested me, no longer held any sway over me. Indeed, I have to say that a lot of time had passed since I had experienced this easy, peaceful, and (to call a spade a spade) comfortable quiet. After

IMRE KERTESZ IN THE 21st CENTURY

377

all, I had ﬁnally become rid of the pain of irritability: the bodies pressing against mine no longer disturbed me. Somehow I was even glad that they were there with me, that their bodies and mine were so connected and so similar, and now for the ﬁrst time I felt a strange, unusual, somewhat shy, almost clumsy feeling toward them. Perhaps it was love, I think. And I experienced the same from them as well, although they no longer encouraged me with hope as at the beginning.

The narrator goes on to say that among ‘‘a hissing through the teeth and soft complaints,’’ there were ‘‘familial’’ words ‘‘of solace and calming.’’ ‘‘But,’’ the narrator recalls, ‘‘I have to say too that those who were able didn’t skimp on the deeds, either; so, for example, very dutifully many hands from I don’t know how far passed the brass can when I announced that I had to urinate. And when ﬁnally a stone pavement and iced-over puddles were under my back instead of the ﬂoor of the boxcar – I don’t know how, or when, or by whose help – I have to say that I no longer cared that I had arrived at Buchenwald, and I had long since forgotten that this was the place I had yearned for so much’’ (Fateless 134–135). He had arrived, phenomenologically speaking, at a much more valuable place than one that would merely oﬀer hope for his bodily survival. In Husserlian terms, ‘‘The proper return to the naivete´ of life – but in a manner which rises above this naivete´ – is the only possible way to overcome the philosophical naivete´ which lies in the ‘scientiﬁc’ character of traditional objectivist philosophy’’ (Husserl, Crisis 59). Thus, in the boxcar scene, Kertesz has constructed a dual image of being and becoming, of reduction to the naivete´ of the life-world and a return which rises above the naivete´. The journey in the microcosmic boxcar allows him to ‘‘uncare’’ for the theoretical, objectivist explanation of his life, and from there, by many unknown hands, delivers him into the lebenswelt, and, what is more, into a dead, mechanical cosmos, but one with many faces. It is as powerful a construction of personal experience as that of Kertesz’s fellow Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz’s emblem for his phenomenological reduction, the boxcar which served as a boyhood home when his father worked for the Russian Army, ‘‘an army railroad car with a samovar on the ﬂoor, which used to tip over when the train started up suddenly.’’ Milosz reﬂects, ‘‘Such a lack of stability, the unconscious feeling that everything is temporary, cannot help but aﬀect, it seems to me, our mature judgments, and it can be the reason for taking governments and political systems lightly’’ (Milosz, Native Realm 43). In the realization that ‘‘everything is temporary,’’ in our shared vulnerability that results in sympathy for others, Kertesz ﬁnds himself and his

378

JESSE T. AIRAUDI

responsibility. ‘‘If you put yourself on the side of the victim,’’ Kertesz said in the Nobel Interview, you not only acquit yourself of all moral responsibility, quite conventionally, but you also (to speak in phenomenological terms) deny yourself the opportunity to uncover the given-ness of the lifeworld: ‘‘I would say that is the typical thing you ﬁnd in today’s do-good world,’’ Kertesz continues, and you ‘‘always put yourself on the side of the Third World, fauna, the Jews, etc., and then you suddenly become ‘white as snow’ with regard to everything, and you don’t understand that the world is a web in which we are all connected’’ (Kertesz Nobel Interview). It is ‘‘the web,’’ or the intersubjective life-world, that is revealed by the steady or sudden uncovering process that ‘‘novels of education’’ (as Kertesz calls his novels) provide, and it is precisely why Kertesz may be called, in Husserl’s words, one of those ‘‘functionaries of mankind’’ who educate (literally, ‘‘lead out’’) by creative rendering of a ‘‘passionate struggle for a clear, reﬂective understanding of the true reasons for this centuries-old failure’’ of philosophy (Husserl Crisis 17). Concluding his Nobel-Banquet Speech last December, Kertesz reiterated his ﬁrm conviction that systems promising utopian or mystical ‘‘solutions’’ are dangerous for humans, whereas compassion, a shared sense of vulnerability, is essential to humanity’s survival: Over the decades and one by one I rejected the misleading slogans of a misleading freedom such as ‘‘an inexplicable historical error’’, ‘‘cannot be rationalized’’, and other tautologies of that kind. They are the gestures of one who wishes to stand above the fray. I have never succumbed to the temptation of self-pity, nor, it may be, to that of true sublimity and divine perspicacity, but I have known from the beginning that my disgrace was not merely a humiliation; it also concealed redemption, if only my heart could be courageous enough to accept this redemption, this peculiarly cruel form of grace, and even to recognize grace at all in such a cruel form. And if you now ask me what still keeps me here on this earth, what keeps me alive, then, I would answer without any hesitation: love. (Kertesz Banquet Speech)

In this simple yet powerful reduction of the ‘‘moralizing’’ tendency, Kertesz builds into his novel a safeguard against utopian reiﬁcations while at the same time opening an opportunity for the appearance of a redemptive intersubjectivity. When the novel reader understands that Kertesz is neither moralizing like many Holocaust authors nor trying to sensationalize the atrocities for commercial or political proﬁt, but is in fact implicating the reader in what he himself might do when forced into linearity, the reader experiences a reduction like that of the author’s. The long, seemingly plodding chapters force the reader into a numbing linearity after which anything the central character may do is granted. Kertesz

IMRE KERTESZ IN THE 21st CENTURY

379

is adamant on this point as well: we are not to understand that this is any sort of self-acquittal, any irresponsible playing the victim card, as it were. Nor, in Kertesz’s creative world, are we permitted to create a fable of absolute evil about other humans, even if they are Nazis. For Kertesz, the epitome of this idea is the ﬁgure of the Nazi butcher of prisoners, Isle Koch, who, for example, reportedly made leather lamps out of human skin. Critic Andras Ban notes that for Kertesz she was not ‘‘the heir of the great rebels against the moral order,’’ but merely, like her hapless charges, ‘‘a ﬁgure without a destiny – just as her victims were.’’ And, Ban continues, it is precisely this ‘‘lack of a destiny, shared by both murderer and victim [that] was the central idea [of Fatelessness] , a thought that ignored taboos and sentimental judgments’’ (Ban 39). 6. MITTEL-EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL PROJECT

It is to Middle-Europe, ‘‘the Other Europe’’ so long neglected by the West, according to Czslaw Milosz, that we turn when we ponder the fate of humanity in these challenging times. It is there in particular that, as Milosz has written, we moderns have learned that ‘‘we all participate in the transformation of the image of the world which do not depend on our will, and we try to assuage their radical impact by not thinking things through to their bitter end’’ (Milosz, W itness 46). Husserl had warned in Part II of the Crisis that ‘‘we stand under the spell of these times. Being caught up in them, we at ﬁrst have no inkling of these shifts of meaning – we who think we know so well what mathematics and natural sciences ‘are’ and ‘do’ ’’ (Husserl, Crisis 58). Yet Husserl saw a way out of the ‘‘Galilean ‘discovery-concealment’: the ‘return of the ego is modern man’s opportunity’ to become servants of humanity,’’ as Paul Ricoeur put it (Ricoeur 13). And in these times, the writers who have stared the ‘‘Gorgon’’ in the eye, to use Kertesz’s phrase, and refused to fall into the ranks and march to an organization’s version of life have been MittelEuropean writers. Take, as a prime example, the writer who gave us T he Joke, a parallel in aim and phenomenological method to Kertesz’s work. This saw, as the protagonist of Fateless says, the Nazi program of extermination ‘‘[a]s something like ‘a student’s practical joke.’ ’’ The newlyarrived deportees were treated ‘‘cordially ... even surrounded by care and aﬀection. The children played ball and sang, and the place where they were suﬀocated to death was surrounded by beautiful lawns, arbors, and ﬂower beds.’’ Arrivals are told to remove all valuables, that if anyone

380

JESSE T. AIRAUDI

conceals any, a powerful X-ray machine will tell the guards, which in fact turns out to be ‘‘nothing more than a threat.’’ But this, too, Kertesz sees as something like a practical joke: Of course, I realized that this was really no joke, if I looked at it closely, because I was aware of its results from what I saw later and by the way my stomach behaved; but this was my initial reaction and basically – at least that is how I imagined things happened – it probably was planned in the same way that a practical joke is planned. After all, they probably got together, probably stuck their heads together even if they weren’t students, of course, but established grown-ups, perhaps, or, more probably, or even more certainly when I think about it, gentlemen in respectable suits, with cigars, and with medals on their breasts – all leaders, presumably, who could not be disturbed, as I pictured them.

Kertesz then imagines that they jumped up (‘‘I don’t know why, but I insisted they jumped up,’’ Kertesz interjects), congratulated and slapped each other on the back: ‘‘The commanders’ imagination was then put into reality by busy, active hands, and there could be no question, I have to admit, concerning the success of the execution’’ (Fateless 82). In exposing ‘‘the joke’’ we have played upon ourselves unwittingly, Milan Kundera echoes both the theme and the technique of Kertesz’s Fateless. At the end of T he Joke, the protagonist Ludvig learns how an individual can extricate himself from the practical joke played on us in the Twentieth Century: in the ﬁnal scene of the novel, back in his boyhood village where he consents to play in a folk ensemble with boyhood friends he had come to despise for their provincial naivete´, he hears the melancholic wedding song of life and death and eternal return of nature. In the audience he spies a man who betrayed him and voted him cast out of the Party. Ludvig learns the great secret of the enigma of the world: Everyone’s ‘‘values’’ are ‘‘pure and innocent in origin. ... The blame lay elsewhere and was so great that its shadow has fallen over a vast area, over the world of innocent things (and words) and was devastating them. We lived ... in a world of devastation; and because we lacked the ability to commiserate with the things thus devastated, we turned our backs on them, oﬀending both them and ourselves in the process’’ (Kundera 262). By performing an historical ‘‘reduction,’’ and returning to the world of his boyhood, Ludvig thus is able to ‘‘strike through the crust of the externalized ‘historical facts’ ... interrogating, exhibiting, and testing their inner meaning and hidden teleology,’’ as Husserl has it (Crisis 18). In ﬁction and poetry, Mittel-European writers have rendered the historical reductions of their protagonists and their resultant liberation with great artistic ﬁnesse. Imre Kertesz, the latest recipient of the prize honor-

IMRE KERTESZ IN THE 21st CENTURY

381

ing the world’s greatest writer, has emphasized to the world that he is a writer primarily of the ‘‘novel of education.’’ As such, he is one of those whom Husserl referred to as the ‘‘few called and chosen ones’’ engaged in the ‘‘passionate struggle for a clear, reﬂective understanding of the true reasons for this centuries-old failure’’ of philosophy. As an artist, he is the ‘‘poet’’ or ‘‘maker’’ of images for humankind, one who has rescued his own subjectivity and then fulﬁlled a duty or ‘‘responsibility’’ as a functionary of mankind. As Husserl wrote: ‘‘We as human beings, and we as ultimately functioning-accomplishing subjects’’ (Crisis 182). The artist not merely a scientiﬁc homo sapiens, man-as-knower, but homofaber, manas-maker. The irrational element of human life, Kertesz maintains, is impossible to explain; it can only be represented: ‘‘why people do good’’ is the mystery, not ‘‘How could the Holocaust have happened?’’ ‘‘And even Auschwitz ... especially Auschwitz,’’ he writes, ‘‘proved to be a most fruitful ﬁeld of exploration in this respect.’’ He goes on to tell the story of a fellow prisoner, ‘‘the Professor,’’ who not only did not steal the protagonist’s ration of food but risked his own life to get the ration to him when they became separated while being transported to another destination. ‘‘And this here is the question, this is what I’d like you to answer if you can: why did he do it?’’ Why did he give up his chance at survival, in a double sense? The answer Kertesz’s protagonist ultimately arrives at is that it is, again, that mystery or a greater, intersubjective view and a drive toward living that greater life: ‘‘there is something – and again, I beg you, don’t try to label it – there exists a pristine concept untainted by all strange material circumstances: our bodies, our souls, our hearts; an idea that exists in the minds of all of us as an identical concept, yes, an idea whose preservation, protection, constituted his, the ‘Professor’s’ only genuine chance for survival’’ (Kaddish 31–32). Though we don’t yet have Imre Kertesz’s current novelistic rendering of the nature of power and its consequences in our time to apply to our theme, that is, the ‘‘Phenomenology of Life Meeting the Challenges of the Present Day World,’’ we may proﬁtably speculate what it might address based on how other Mittel-European writers have addressed the problem of power and its consequences for individual lives. If (as Kertesz writes) ‘‘Auschwitz is the image and deeds of individual lives ... seen under the emblem of a particular organization’’ (Kaddish 31), then examining other such organizations of individual deeds in more recent history can serve to illuminate the errors of what Kertesz calls a kind of selective ‘‘cognition’’ which determines ‘‘the image and deeds world history is

382

JESSE T. AIRAUDI

comprised of ...’’ (Kaddish 29). Andres Zoltan Ban reproduces a note from Kertesz’s diary entry on Kaddish that ‘‘This is the last novel which I write in the spirit of bare existence,’’ which spirit Ban interprets as the spirit of the fateless, of ‘‘the heroism of unhappiness.’’ But, at least, Ban continues, Kertesz has come ‘‘to the gate of liberty. I think that man standing there and looking around a little anxiously will be the next protagonist in Imre Kertesz’s ﬁction’’ (Ban 41). My own reading of Kertesz’s ﬁction, of course, does not ﬁnd this ‘‘heroism of unhappiness,’’ this merely passive stoicism, but rather a happiness in that a great – albeit frightening – mystery has been revealed to him. I do agree that Kertesz’s next novel will deal with liberty, and as a kind of preview of Kertesz’s new work, we might proﬁtably reread the work of other, I think representative, Mittel-European writers like Milan Kundera who have likewise explored the rational, organizing principle of false cognition and its detriment to human life – and who has ably shown us the way to ‘‘liberty’’ via the mystery of the lebensweld. 7. CONCLUSION AND PROSPECTUS

In this ‘‘maker’’ function, the artist is responsible for the truth as his experience and intuition has uncovered it. There is a distinct danger in the role, of course, as we have seen through the results of programs (or ‘‘practical jokes’’) devised by the theoreticians of absolute truth in the late Twentieth Century. Like the phenomenologist who follows Husserl’s lead and believes that we ‘‘cannot seriously continue our previous philosophizing; it lets us hope only for philosophies, never for philosophy’’ (Crisis 17), Kertesz claims no absolute truths, he has no plan for the next generation, but he commands us to keep working: ‘‘in time, we will have to show – no matter why, or to whom, to anyone who will be ashamed because of us and (perhaps) for us – that man’s religious duty is the understanding of the world entirely independent of all wretched churches, all wretched creeds: yes, indeed, to show that in the ﬁnal analysis this and only this (the understanding of the world and the human condition), where I may search for my – what can I say to avoid the unavoidable – my salvation ...’’ (Kaddish 51–52). All the ‘‘makers’’ can hope for is to accurately render the telos of the life-world as it is given to him, not as he wished to use it to sway others, as Husserl warned in Appendix X: A world-view is thus essentially an individual accomplishment, a sort of personal religious faith; but it is distinguished from traditional faith, that of revealed religion, through the fact

IMRE KERTESZ IN THE 21st CENTURY

383

that it makes no claim to an unconditioned truth binding for all human men and communicable to all men: just as scientiﬁc truth about the absolute is not possible, so it is impossible to establish a world-view truth which is totally valid for each human being. (Crisis 390)

Indeed, in terms of a ‘‘poetics’’ of phenomenology, the artist’s ‘‘sort of a personal religious faith’’ may be that stated by Czeslaw Milosz, a ‘‘faith in the inﬁnite layers of being that are hidden with an apple, a man, or a tree; it challenges one through becoming to move closer to what is’’ (Native Realm 280). In terms of the on-going, ever-branching multiplicity of ‘‘philosophies’’ vs. philosophy envisioned by A.-T. Tymieniecka in her ‘‘Synopsis and Prospectus of Phenomenology’s Path’’ which closes the monumental Phenomenology World-W ide: Foundations, Expanding Dynamics, L ife-Engagements, Thus may the tree of phenomenology yet provide humanity with the sheltering shade that Husserl was seeking, cover from both the glaring light that withers by day and the softer beams that madden at night. (Tymieniecka 722)

I end with the conclusion to Imre Kertesz’s Nobel Lecture, a note of hope in challenging times: In short, I died once, so I could live. Perhaps that is my real story. If it is, I dedicate this work, born of a child’s death, to the millions who died and to those who still remember them. But, since we are talking about literature, after all, the kind of literature that, in the view of your Academy, is also a testimony, my work may yet serve a useful purpose in the future, and – this is my heart’s desire – may even speak to the future. Whenever I think of the traumatic impact of Auschwitz, I end up dwelling on the vitality and creativity of those living today. Thus, in thinking about Auschwitz, I reﬂect, paradoxically, not on the past but the future. (Nobel Lecture)

Baylor University NOTES 1 Husserl saw (as the chapter title ‘‘The Crisis of Science as the Loss of Meaning for Life’’ indicates) that the crisis of psychology was part of a larger human error, a historical event which he called the Galilean ‘‘discovery concealment.’’ Galileo, ‘‘at once a discovering and a concealing genius,’’ blazed the trail for ‘‘an inﬁnite number of physical discoveries’’ through ‘‘technization,’’ mathematical explanations of nature, but at the same time opened the path to error as subsequent natural scientists began to mistake the method for reality: In his view of the world from the perspective of geometry, the perspective of what appears to the senses and is mathematizable, Galileo abstracts from the subjects as persons leading a personal life; he abstracts from all that is in any way spiritual, from all cultural properties which are attached to things in human praxis. The result of this abstraction is the things

384

JESSE T. AIRAUDI

purely as bodies; but these are taken as concrete real objects, the totality of which makes up a world which becomes the subject matter of research (60). The radical error, then, can be phrased quite simply: it ‘‘is through the garb of ideas that we take for true being what is actually a method’’ (Crisis 52–53). 2 As the Swedish Academy presenter of Imre Kertesz said in his introductory speech, ‘‘No matter which Kertesz novel or essay we pick up, we soon notice that it is intimately connected to one of the other works in his literary production ... the separate parts appear to have grown together, within common root ﬁbers or circulatory systems’’ (Lindgren).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Engdahl, Horace. Interview with the 2002 Nobel Laureate in Literature. 12 December 2002. <www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2002/kertesz-interview html> Hillel, Italie. ‘‘Honoring Holocaust literature, Nobel Prize goes to Hungarian novelist Imre Kertesz.’’ Journal Gazette Oct. 10 Oct. 2002. . Kuc¸uradi, Ioanna. Philosophy Facing World Problems, Twenty-ﬁrst World Congress of Philosophy – Philosophical Society of Turkey . Kertesz, Imre. Fateless. Translated by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992. ——. Nobel Lecture: ‘‘Heureka!’’ 7 December 2002, at the Swedish Academy <www.nobel. se/literature/laureates/2002/kertesz-lecture.html>. ——. Kaddish for a Child Not Born. Translated by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997. ——. Banquet Speech <www.nobel. se/literature/laureates/2002/kerteszbanquetlovespeech. html>. Kundera, Milan. T he Joke. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982. Mensch, James R. Postfoundational Phenomenology: Husserlian Reﬂections on Presence and Embodiment. University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2001. Milosz, Czslaw. Native Realm. Translated by Catherine S. Leach. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. ——. T he W itness of Poetry: T he Charles Eliot Norton L ectures 1982–82. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1982. Ricoeur, Paul. Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Translated by Edward G. Ballards and Lester Embree Evanston. Northwestern University Press, 1967. Torgny, Lindgren. Presentation Speech of Imre Kertesz. 10 December 2002 <www. nobel.se/literature/laureates/2002/presentation-speech.html>. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa (Ed.). Phenomenology World-W ide: Foundations, Expanding Dynamics, L ife-Engagements; A Guide for Research and Study. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.

MICHAEL STAUDIGL

PHANOMENOLOGIE DER GEWALT. EINE PROBLEMSKIZZE

1. EINLEITUNG

Die Figur der ‘‘Identita¨t’’ impliziert, nach allen Destruktionen und Dekonstruktionen, die sich gegen sie wendeten, immer noch so etwas wie eine epistemologische Autonomie. Nach all den Toden, die das moderne Subjekt im letzten Jahrhundert gestorben sein soll, kehrt sie im Spiel der Diﬀerenzen wieder, das sie nun nicht mehr sto¨rt, aber in dessen Sog sie zu neuem Leben erwacht; mitunter einem Gespenst gleich, zu oft aber ga¨nzlich real. Diesseits des ‘‘kampfes um Diﬀerenze’’, und allen Erfahrungen des 20. Jahrhunderts zum Trotz, ersteht sie, so scheint es, geradezu unversehrt vor unseren Augen. Ihre Wiederkehr ist in einer Bewegung verbu¨rgt, die in einer geradezu aufkla¨rerischen Geste das u¨bemimmt, was sie der Kritik unterwirft: Identita¨t(en) als ein zentrales T hema. Gesetzt daß wir uns an eine Infragestellung der Fundamente unseres Menschseins machen wollen, die gegenwa¨rtiger – dies sei unbestritten – bedra¨ngender denn je scheint bedeutet dies ein Problem. Die Herausforderung liegt zuna¨chst in dem, was hier erwartet wird: die Fundamente unseres Menschseins infragezustellen. Damit ﬁndet sich ein genuin pha¨nomenologischer Gestus wieder: Die Ero¨ﬀnung jenes – im naiven Weltleben vergessenen und u¨berformten – Raumes der Krisis, dessen Thematisierung erst die Dimension einer ethischen ‘‘Erneuerung’’ (Husserl) ero¨ﬀnen kann; dann, wenn die ‘‘weltbefangene’’ Subjektivita¨t sich ent-menscht (Fink), von ihren Interessen zuru¨cktritt, in deren Vollzug sie ‘‘zuna¨chst und zumeist’’ aufgeht. Es handelt sich dabei, die Pha¨nomenologie kreist in ihrer Geschichte darum, um eine ‘‘unendliche Aufgabe’’, die in Form einer ‘‘regulativen Idee’’ erkenntnisleitend zu werden vermag, in ihrer Anwendung aufs Faktische jedoch gravierende Probleme aufwirft; in der scheinbar unproblematischen Beschra¨nkung, in der er dies nur zu erlauben scheint: indem sie die Konstitution von Identita¨t von ihrer symbolischen Institution trennt. Lassen sich, so ko¨nnte die Frage, die wir uns stellen, formuliert werden, die Fundamente unseres Menschseins jedoch tatsa¨chlich radikal infragestellen, ohne daß wir dabei auf jenen ‘‘Rassismus’’ zu sprechen kommen, der sich in ihrer Konstitution immer schon niedergeschlagen hat, in 385 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 385–405. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

386

MICHAEL STAUDIGL

jenen Praxen der Einschließung, Ausgrenzung, Kolonialisierung und Kapitalisierung, die das Selbstversta¨ndnis des europa¨ischen Subjekts (noch immer) pra¨gen? Die scheinbar anonymen Sedimentierungen dieser Konstitution (die sich keineswegs nur auf das Feld des Symbolischen beschra¨nken, sondern ganz konkret in Form jener Funktionen intervenieren, die das Feld der Individuation gema¨ß seiner sozialen Artikulation beschreiben) sollten uns zu denken geben. Ist die philosophische Figur der Identita¨t nicht immer auch eine Politik,1 verhandelt sie nicht die ‘‘Angst’’2 vor dem Zusammenbruch der Formen,3 den man in der Geschichte des Abendlandes immer so u¨beraus genau an gewisse Kontexte, insbesondere an den des Judentums, als der Figur des Außenstehens par excellence, an eine ‘‘unbewußte Aﬃzierung’’ also, zu binden wußte, die ‘‘im Apparat als sein Außen fort[wirkt]’’?4 Wenn wir, und genu¨gend gute Gru¨nde scheinen dafu¨r zu sprechen, im Gegenteil also davon ausgehen mu¨ssen, daß Rassismus und Antisemitismus irreduzibel sind, daß sie – als unser Rassismus und unser Antisemitismus – die Kehrseite der Begriﬀe bilden,5 so muß ‘‘Identita¨t’’ nicht nur als rhetorischer Topos problematisch bleiben. Es handelt sich bei der ihr zukommenden ‘‘Positivita¨t’’ na¨mlich keineswegs um ein kontingentes ‘‘zuna¨chst und zumeist’’, kein Pra¨dikat, das sich eidetisch reduzieren ließe, und dem man eine humanitas entgegensetzen ko¨nnte, die nicht ihrerseits schon versehrt wa¨re. Warum aber nicht? Da unser Denken6 es gewohnt ist, die Destruktion der Formen und Evidenzen mit dem ‘‘Bo¨sen’’ zu identiﬁzieren,7 jener zugleich so problematischen Figur der Philosophie, mit dem Nichts im Sinne der absoluten Nicht-Setzung, die jede Setzung aﬃziert, – was wiederum nicht weniger impliziert, als die Arbeit an einer Setzung im Sinne der Identiﬁkation, die diese Aﬀektion ausschließt. Bedenkt man dies, so la¨ßt sich das Thema der ‘‘Identita¨t’’ damit, als Manifestation desjenigen Rassismus, der der unsere ist, als jener operative Hetero-Topos retablieren, dessen Dekonstruktion uns vor die Mo¨glichkeit stellt, unsere humanitas tatsa¨chlich infragezustellen; sie also zu thematisieren, so wie sie in der Begriﬄichkeit, der Termino-logie des abendla¨ndischen Denkens eine ungeheure Positivita¨t erlangt hat, deren ‘‘entfernte Wirkungen’’ wir kaum wahrnehmen, kaum je zu ermessen vermo¨gen.8 Wenn ich mich vor diesem Hintergrund dem Thema ‘‘Gewalt’’ zuwende, insbesondere der Problematik seiner Bestimmbarkeit im Rahmen der Pha¨nomenologie, so spreche ich damit notwendigerweise zugleich u¨ber den Umgang mit dem Anderen. Die Andersheit des Anderen (sie versammelt den Anderen, die Andere, aber auch die Andersheit der Natur und

PHANOMENOLOGIE DER GEWALT

387

zuletzt jene Gottes in einem Begriﬀ ) ist hier nicht auch eine Frage, eine weitere Frage. Gehen wir um dies zu verstehen, kurz auf unsere einleitende ¨ berlegung zuru¨ck: ‘‘Gewalt’’ bezeichnet, darin wird jene ‘‘allergische’’ U Verfassung unseres Denkens, die Le´vinas mit aller Kraft beka¨mpfte, in ihren unmittelbaren Folgen greifbar, eine Form, die der ‘‘Rassismus’’ annimmt, keineswegs aber nur er. Die Frage, ob und inwiefern Rassismus notwendig gewaltta¨tig ist (eine Frage, die keineswegs die empirischen Befunde konterkarieren soll), kann ich hier nicht ero¨rtern.9 Vielleicht ko¨nnen wir fu¨r unseren Rahmen aber annehmen, daß ‘‘Gewalt’’ tatsa¨chlich die Form des Rassismus ist, und daß uns eine Kla¨rung des Begriﬀs der ‘‘Gewalt’’ auch Aufschlu¨sse daru¨ber geben ko¨nnte, wie ein philosophischer Begriﬀ des Rassismus konzipiert werden kann. Dies aber muß ja, unser einleitenden T hese zufolge, nicht weniger als ein grundsa¨tzliches Desiderat der Philosophie selbst sein; insbesondere der Pha¨nomenologie, die daran arbeitet, die Diﬀerenz des Sinnes als das Diﬀerieren seines Anspruchs (Waldenfels) zu retablieren, und sie zugleich in Relation zu dem zu setzen, was wir die Nicht-Indiﬀerenz des Aktes nennen mo¨chten, der die Alterita¨t dieser Diﬀerenzierung verhandelt (negotiate). ‘‘Die Pha¨nomenologie’’, auf die ich damit zu sprechen komme, hat sich deutlich gemacht, daß das Andere schon der einfachsten Intention eingeschrieben ist. Fremderfahrung, Ich-Fremdes im Ich, diVe´rance, Aufschub, Chiasmus bezeichnen in diesem Zusammenhang entscheidende Pha¨nomene, deren Thematisierung auf die Methode selbst nicht ohne Ru¨ckwirkung geblieben ist. So wurde deutlich, daß jede Konstitution im vielfa¨ltigen Wechselspiel von Selbst und Anderem oszilliert, daß das Selbst sich also u¨berhaupt nur in der u¨beraus heterogenen Konstitution des Anderen zu erfahren vermag, dessen Anspruch es in sich selbst wiederﬁndet.10 Die Konsequenz, daß damit die Instanz der Konstitution selbst disseminiert, frakturiert und sogar fragmentiert wird, und nicht nur das Origina¨re zerbricht (oder auch das Bild, das wir davon haben), wie Merleau-Ponty formulierte, beginnt sich also schon am Rande ihres klassischen Selbstversta¨ndnisses abzuzeichnen. Wie sich in Auseinandersetzung mit der Kritik Michel Henrys zeigen la¨ßt, ist eine Pha¨nomenologie des Anderen vor diesem Hintergrund noch immer ein Desiderat, vielleicht sogar jede Pha¨nomenologie in ihrem geradezu minimalistisch anmutenden Anspruch auf Neutralita¨t der Beschreibung (Janicaud) eine Illusion. Ist der Grund hierfu¨r aber nur darin zu verorten, daß die Konstellationen der Alterita¨t, welche die historische Pha¨nomenologie beschreibt, noch keineswegs jene Relation außer Kraft setzen, die traditionell den Gegenstand an die Methode und d. h. an den

388

MICHAEL STAUDIGL

Logos bindet, daß sie das Andere also immer nur im ‘‘Außen’’, der Distanz des noematischen Sinnes und der Intentionalita¨t anonymer Sinnbildung sich zeigen la¨ßt, sein eigenwesentliches Erscheinen im Sinne seiner SelbstGebung im Horizont des ‘‘ontologischen Monismus’’11 also gar nicht thematisch werden kann, wie die Kritik Henrys etwa zusammengefaßt werden ko¨nnte? Ist ‘‘Gewalt’’ also – dies wa¨re doch die Konsequenz dieser Auﬀassung – ein strukturelles Moment, ein Wesenszug des abendla¨ndischen Denkens und seiner ‘‘Aversion’’ gegenu¨ber dem Anderen, wie Le´vinas dies etwa ausdru¨ckt? – Ein Wesenszug, der sich, hierin wu¨rden Le´vinas und Henry u¨bereinstimmen, auf unser Versta¨ndnis von Transzendenz gru¨ndet, dessen Logik wir als ‘‘Kultur’’ vorstellen. Oder ﬁndet sich das Moment der ‘‘Gewalt’’ auch diesseits dieses Logos und derjenigen Zentrismen wieder, in die seine Herrschaft nahtlos u¨bergegangen ist? Diese Perspektive wirft jedoch ihrerseits Fragen auf: Unterstellen wir nicht, indem wir so ansetzen, eine ‘‘origina¨re Gewalt’’? Sofort bliebe zu fragen, wo jene im Spiel wa¨re und in welchem Verha¨ltnis sie zu ‘‘empirischen’’ Erfahrungen der Gewalt steht. Fassen wir dagegen – ganz im pha¨nomenologischen Sinne – die Dissemination und Fragmentierung im Rahmen der Konstitution als das authentische Moment der ‘‘Gewalt’’, ‘‘Gewalt’’ also als eine ‘‘Variable der Nachtra¨glichkeit’’, d. h. der Retardierung, Diﬀerenzierung und Verendlichung subjektiver Sinnentwu¨rfe, versuchen wir im Gegenzug also jeder Essentialisierung der ‘‘Gewalt’’ zu entgehen, so bleiben ebenso Fragen oﬀen: Wird damit na¨mlich nicht ein urspru¨ngliches, ‘‘heiles Ganzes’’ unterstellt, das sich dieser Gewalt nachtra¨glich ausgesetzt ﬁndet, ein Urspru¨ngliches, dem gegenu¨ber die Gewalt also nicht origina¨r sein ko¨nnte, dessen Ursprungs-Konstruktion jedoch ihrerseits nicht ohne jede ‘‘Gewalt’’ vonstatten zu gehen vermag? Eine Heterogenese der ‘‘Gewalt’’ zu denken, die zugleich ihre Ursprungslosigkeit indiziert, dies scheint zumindest ebenso problematisch. Ursprung oder Supplement? – In beiden Fallen scheinen wir das Pha¨nomen zu verlieren: Doch es gibt Gewalt. Das Pha¨nomen bezeichnet zwar etwas ‘‘Undenkbares’’ (Arendt), etwas ‘‘Außer-ordentliches’’ (Waldenfels), zeugt zugleich aber von einer ‘‘Unausweichlichkeit’’12, die sich keineswegs auf die Kontingenz menschlicher Handlungsentwu¨rfe (Merleau-Ponty), das metaphysische Tiefenproﬁl des Rechts (Derrida) oder die diskursive Konstruktion kontrafaktischer Realita¨ten reduzieren la¨ßt, auf Positionen also, die sich allesamt in mehr oder minder oﬀensichtlicher Weise dem Zirkel der Legitimation einschreiben. Die hier gestellten Fragen scheinen fu¨r die Konfrontation mit ihrem ‘‘Faktum’’

PHANOMENOLOGIE DER GEWALT

389

dagegen jedoch geradezu belanglos zu sein. Was es geben du¨rfte, scheint aber dennoch ein Zusammenhang zwischen ‘‘Gewalt’’ und ihrem abwesenden Ursprung bzw. ihrer Ursprungslosigkeit zu sein. Muß dessen Kenntnis fu¨r das Studium des empirischen Erscheinens dieses Pha¨nomens dann aber nicht ebenso bedeutsam sein, wenn man sich na¨mlich klar ¨ konomie ihrer Supplemente durchga¨ngig auf ein ‘‘leeres macht, daß die O Zentrum’’ bezogen bleibt, dessen Abwesenheit sie – und zwar im Rekurs auf seine symbolische Besetzbarkeit – faktisch zugleich reguliert?13 ¨ NOMEN GEWALT 2. PHA

Fragen wir nun pha¨nomenologisch nicht danach, was ‘‘Gewalt’’ ist, bzw. wo sie sich ﬁndet, sondern danach, wie sie ihrem Wesen nach verfaßt ist, wie sie sich vollzieht, um so jede Reduktion des Pha¨nomens auf eine ‘‘zivilisationsgeschichtliche Festschreibung’’ oder eine ontogenetische Variable einerseits, auf ein bloßes Moment des Diskurses oder der Theoriebildung andererseits, in denen sie unbezweifelt ebenso wirksam ist, auszuschließen. Wir nehmen also ein Beispiel allta¨glicher Gewalt, wa¨hlen einen ‘‘Leitfaden’’. Sofort fa¨llt auf, daß ‘‘Gewalt’’ in diesem epistemologischen Zusammenhang in der Form eines Gewaltaktes thematisch wird. Was ist dabei aber das Verha¨ltnis dieses Aktes zur Gewalt? Ist sie ihm, d. h. seiner eidetischen Struktur, außerwesentlich, exempliﬁziert er sie nur, oder ga¨be es ohne diesen Akt keine ‘‘Gewalt’’? Kann es sich dabei aber, kann es sich jemals, so bleibt unmittelbar zu fragen, bei unserem Beispiel damit noch um ein allta¨gliches Beispiel handeln, bleibt der ‘‘Akt’’ nicht immer ‘‘außer-ordentlich’’?14 Kann von seiner Faktizita¨t, seinen Wirkungen und der scheinbaren Kontingenz seines Auftretens abstrahiert werden, kann ein ‘‘Wesen’’ der ‘‘Gewalt’’, des gewaltta¨tigen, Gewalt ausu¨benden bzw. veru¨benden Aktes imaginativ variiert und weiterhin in eidetischer Intuition festgehalten werden? Dieser Einwand, der sich der scheinbar schlichten Konstatierung eines beliebigen Beispiels unterschiebt, das wir methodologisch zum ‘‘Leitfaden’’ unserer Analyse erheben wollten, setzt sich unmittelbar noch fort: ‘‘Gewalt’’ ist uns in vielfacher Weise vorgegeben; sie scheint in der unscheinbarsten Androhung unklar formulierter Konsequenzen ebenso durch, wie in einer (verbrecherischen) Gewalttat oder im komplexen Faktum eines Genozids. Niemand wird behaupten, daß die Qualita¨t dieser ¨ quivokationen von Gewalttaten einsinnig ist, daß ihre Autorschaft ohne A einem Genus wa¨re.15 Dennoch mo¨chte ich annehmen, daß diese Erfahrungen in zumindest einem Punkt konvergieren: ‘‘Gewalt’’ betriﬀt

390

MICHAEL STAUDIGL

in ihnen eine ‘‘Handlung’’, die auf der Figur einer Subjektivita¨t aufbaut, die in der Welt handelt und das Andere als referentiellen Rahmen ihres Handelns erkannt hat, was noch keineswegs impliziert, es damit als Anderes anerkannt zu haben. Kommen wir zur Wahl unseres Beispiels zuru¨ck, besser gesagt zur Analyse des Wahlvorgangs selbst: Die vorhin gegebenen Beispiele betreﬀen einen kleinen Ausschnitt des Spektrums an Handlungen, fu¨r die ‘‘Gewalt’’ konstitutiv zu sein scheint. ‘‘Gewalt’’ scheint gegenwa¨rtig geradezu allgegenwa¨rtig zu sein: in der diﬀusen Struktur ihrer Anwendung, in der Logik ihrer Bindung an supplementierende Strukturen und strukturelle Supplemente, in der Verzweigung, Verspa¨tung und auch Auslo¨schung ihrer unmittelbaren Wirkungen. Diese Inﬂation von ‘‘Gewalt’’ als empirischer und statistischer Kategorie benennt jedoch zugleich eine u¨beraus problematische Tendenz: Sie lo¨st na¨mlich die Bindung der Gewaltta¨tigkeit an eine ihr zuschreibbare, inaugurativ wirksame Handlung zusehends auf, was z. B. im Zusammenhang mit der Verantwortung jener Verbrechen strategisch nutzbar wird, die sich in totalita¨ren bzw. autorita¨ren Regimen ereignet haben und ereignen. Die massenmediale Inszenierung von ‘‘Schauprozessen’’ im Stile von reality T V, in denen dagegen eine origina¨re Verantwortung des je Einzelnen eingefordert und zelebriert wird, veriﬁziert dies ex negativo nur noch deutlicher. Damit also tatsa¨chlich zuru¨ck zu unserem Beispiel. Ein solches Beispiel von ‘‘Gewalt’’, das gerade aufgrund seiner allta¨glichen Außerordentlichkeit exemplarisch sein ko¨nnte, ist derjenige Akt, mit dem ein Mensch einen anderen Menschen ‘‘verletzt’’. Das Kriterium der leibhaftigen Verletzung scheint hier jedoch nicht entscheidend, eher das der Verletzlichkeit, der prinzipiellen Mo¨glichkeit, ‘‘in seiner Haut’’ getroﬀen zu werden, sowie das des inkarnierten Verletzenko¨nnens. ‘‘Gewalt’’ impliziert also L eiblichkeit, jenen Topos nahezu endloser Einschreibbarkeit und unmo¨glichen Vergessens, wie er in Nietzsches ‘‘Geda¨chtnis des Willens’’ etwa auftaucht.16 Verletzt werden zu ko¨nnen scheint nun aber vielfach mo¨glich, durch einen Schlag, einen Blick, ein Wort, oder auch durch deren Verla¨ngerung in einer ‘‘Waﬀe’’, was zudem keineswegs ‘‘Fremdeinwirkung’’ implizieren muß, sondern genauso auch durch mich selbst geschehen kann. Handelt es sich bei diesen Mo¨glichkeiten jedoch um ein und dieselbe ‘‘Verletzlichkeit’’,17 um ein und dieselbe ‘‘Heteroaﬀektion’’, die sich nur durch ihre sinnhafte AuVassung auszuzeichnen scheint, die sie einer grundsa¨tzlichen Aﬃzierbarkeit zumutet, welche sie als unsere empirische Verfassung voraussetzt? Gibt es demgegenu¨ber nicht auch ein ‘‘inneres Maß’’ der Verletzung, das sich

PHANOMENOLOGIE DER GEWALT

391

nicht als bloße Modalita¨t der Aﬀektion vorstellen la¨ßt, die Verletzung aber etwa von der bloßen Verwundung zu unterscheiden erlaubt? Der gewaltta¨tige, verletzende Akt, unmittelbare Reaktion, Ausdruck einer unmerklich gesteigerten Aggressivita¨t oder scheinbar reine Kontingenz, ist in jedem Fall ein subjektiver Akt, getragen von einer – sei es auch noch so unbestimmten, ‘‘ichlosen’’, selbstvergessenen oder auch gleichsam gegen sich selbst verschobenen – Intention, die um ihren Ausdruck ringt. Worin ist hier nun aber das Moment der ‘‘Gewalt’’ zu ﬁnden? Liegt es in jenem Akt, in der ihn beseelenden Absicht, oder in der Einheit der Erfahrung, die nicht nur diese beiden Momente umfaßt, sondern auch das Bild des Anderen mit einbegreift, dem dieser Akt galt, seine Verletzlichkeit also kalkuliert und voraussetzt? Ist die Realisierung der Intention, das ‘‘Treﬀen’’ des ‘‘Aktes’’ (aber auch sein ‘‘Verfehlen’’) die Bedingung dafu¨r, daß es sich hier um ‘‘Gewalt’’ handelt? Oder ist ‘‘Gewalt’’ unabha¨ngig von der Verwirklichung einer sie tragenden Intention und einer sie entfaltenden Aktivita¨t schon gegeben; ist eine Finalita¨t fu¨r sie u¨berhaupt konstitutiv? Entsprechend la¨ßt sich sogar fragen, ob die Ausu¨bung von Gewalt ‘‘Gewalt’’ ist. Dies ist keine Frage der Terminologie. Erscho¨pft sich ‘‘Gewalt’’ darin, oder wird sie als solche, als das was Gewalt zu ‘‘Gewalt’’ macht, darin nicht vielmehr abgeblendet, ausschließlich und unmittelbar an die Bedingungen ihrer (subjektiven) Realisierung gebunden, an jene Bedingungen, die ihre Ausu¨bung im Gegenteil u¨berschreitet, um so eine ga¨nzlich andere Figur der Subjektivita¨t hervorzurufen, als jene, die sich in ihrem Ko¨nnen ‘‘gefa¨llt’’? Konfrontiert uns die Gewalterfahrung nicht, um dies zu unterstreichen, mit einer Subjektivita¨t, die sich im Abseits beﬁndet? Was heißt das? Handelt es sich um eine Subjektivita¨t, deren Intentionalita¨t sich ‘‘erscho¨pft’’, die das Spiel der Intuition nicht mehr verarbeiten kann, die ohnma¨chtig wird, in Agonie verfa¨llt? Aber Gewalt kann doch sehr wohl kalkuliert sein, ‘‘aﬀektlos’’ und diszipliniert? – kann also keine gespaltene Subjektivita¨t implizieren, im Gegenteil: Dieses Subjekt ist bei sich, aber im Abseits, da es sich in dieses stellt, ins Abseits der Intentionalita¨t, deren Anspruch auf Selbstgebung des Pha¨nomens es genauso suspendiert, wie die teleologische Figur seiner Verantwortung, die die Pha¨nomenologie damit auf transzendentaler Ebene zu verbinden wußte. ‘‘Gewalt’’ ist hier gleichsam der Versuch des Subjekts, der Gegebenheit einen Grund zu verleihen, sie an einen solchen zuru¨ckzubinden, jene Gegebenheit, deren ‘‘Entfaltung’’ im Gegenteil die Suspension des ‘‘Prinzips des zureichenden Grundes’’ verwirklicht, wie J.-L. Marion dies zeigte.18

392

MICHAEL STAUDIGL

Wir mu¨ssen also von einem Subjekt ausgehen, das nicht erst, infolge einer sozialen Konsequenzlogik, ins Abseits gera¨t, sondern abseits ist. Diese Figur der Subjektivita¨t ist nicht nur unfa¨hig, als Gewalt erleidende na¨mlich, darauf zu antworten, da der Einbruch (und Anspruch) der Gewalt die Kategorien der ‘‘Responsivita¨t’’ zumindest tendenziell außer Kraft setzt. Die ‘‘Gewalt’’ ist kein Anspruch, auf den man schlicht antworten kann, ein Anspruch, dessen Sinn von unseren Vermo¨glichkeiten, auf ihn zu antworten, performativ gebildet wird, sondern eher eine Herausforderung, der wir unter Umsta¨nden entsprechen ko¨nnen, die aber jeden ‘‘autochthonen Logos der Antwort’’ zerbricht.18 Vielmehr setzt sie schon als gewalt-ta¨tige die Intentionalita¨t aus, setzt sie außer Kraft, da ihr Einsatz sie mit dem Faktum konfrontiert, daß das Bewußtsein sich seinem Gegenstand entzieht, auf seine eigene Initiative hin, dabei gerade nicht mehr in jenem ‘‘Egoismus’’ verfangen, den Le´vinas anspricht: Es mo¨chte eben nicht mehr in ihm, im Anderen ‘‘baden’’, das Elementale genießen, in den Fru¨chten seines Imperialismus schwelgen, also ‘‘von ihm leben’’ und damit zuletzt von ihm abha¨ngig bleiben20 – im Gegenteil. Das Andere wird selbst der Ebene des ‘‘Gegenstandes’’ entzogen, die sich im ‘‘Ruin der Vorstellung’’ zur ‘‘Ho¨he’’ und zum Erhabenen auswachsen ko¨nnte; es wird, mit den Worten Sartres, genichtet.21 Die Subjektivita¨t wird, als Gewalt ausu¨bende, somit aber geradezu unfa¨hig, zu handeln, da ihr Vollzug sie einer anonyme. Transzendenz anverwandelt und sie so selbst ins Abseits stellt. Es erreicht die Luzidita¨t und Transpha¨nomenalita¨t seines Seins nur, um nochmals mit Sartre zu sprechen, indem es die Pha¨nomenalita¨t verweigert, der sich das Andere seinerseits verweigern ko¨nnte.22 Damit aber ero¨ﬀnet sich eine Dimension der ‘‘Alteritat’’ in ihr, der sie sich nicht entziehen kann, die sie gleichwohl aber auch nicht indiﬀerent zu u¨bernehmen in der Lage ist, die sie nur ‘‘ausha¨lt’’ oder ‘‘ertra¨gt’’, wie man umgangssprachlich formuliert. Es ist – rein pha¨nomenologisch gesehen – ein Anders-als-Außen, auf das sie in ihrem Vollzug sto¨ßt, an dessen Unsagbarkeit sie gera¨t, vor dem ihre Intentionen zuru¨ckweichen, vor dessen Schweigen sich ihre Aggressivita¨t nur noch steigert, wie im Falle des Opfers, das sich nicht mehr wehrt. Die ‘‘Gewalt’’ sto¨ßt damit zuna¨chst auf eine logische Paradoxie, wie Le´vinas sie am Beispiel des Hasses exemplarisch analysiert hat: ‘‘Leiden machen heißt nicht, den Anderen auf den Rang eines Gegenstandes zu reduzieren, ¨ ußerste in seiner Subjektivitat erhalten. Das Subjekt sondern im Gegenteil ihn auf das A muß in seinem Schmerz um seine Verdinglichung wissen, aber gerade dazu muß das Subjekt Subjekt bleiben. Wer haßt, will beides. Daher der unersa¨ttliche Charakter des Hasses; er ist gerade dann befriedigt, wenn er es nicht ist; denn der Andere befriedigt den Haß nur, indem

PHANOMENOLOGIE DER GEWALT

393

er Objekt wird; aber er kann nie genu¨gend Objekt werden, da man, wa¨hrend man seine Vernichtung fordert, gleichzeitig sein Bewußtsein und sein Zeugnis verlangt. Darin liegt die logische Absurdita¨t des Hasses.’’23

Diese Paradoxie vertieft sich zugleich aber ins Ontologische, da sie eine Dynamik impliziert, die sich in mir selbst ero¨ﬀnet, wenn mein Ko¨nnen an eine ihm immanente Grenze sto¨ßt, zum Nicht-Ko¨nnen wird, – zum Un-vermo¨gen genauer, das Gegebene als Gegebenes hinzunehmen, die Destruktion der Formen anzunehmen, die davon potentiell ausgeht, die mich vorla¨dt, dis-identiﬁziert, die Autonomie meines Vermo¨gens disqualiﬁziert und in eins meine Schwa¨che investiert, indem sie mich jene Horizonte ero¨ﬀnen la¨ßt, die mich irreduzibel u¨bersteigen. Diese Grenze, an der mein Vermo¨gen in sein Gegenteil u¨bergeht, an der meine Rezeptivita¨t die Gegebenheit – die meine Intentionalita¨t im Gegenzug zu verstu¨mmeln scheint – verweigert, sich ihr verschließt und die Bedingungen der Gegebenheit zu revolutionieren sucht, ist an keinen ‘‘Limes’’ der Aﬀektion gebunden, sondern vielmehr ﬂießend. Mein Vermo¨gen ist immer auch ein Unvermo¨gen, das Andere diesseits der Formen zu belassen, in denen sich meine Selbstkonstitution propagiert, meme Erfahrung aber nicht verbleibt. Bedeutet dies aber nicht schon, daß Gewalt in diesem Sinne unsere Erfahrung strukturiert, daß sie fu¨r Erfahrung selbst irreduzibel ist, also diese nicht nur dann und wann heimsucht bzw. u¨berwa¨ltigt, sondern – und sei es eben im ‘‘Nullzustand’’, ‘‘latent’’, wie Husserl sagen wu¨rde – in ihr investiert ist? Ist Gewalt dann aber u¨berhaupt noch ein ‘‘Akt’’, im Rahmen jener Struktur ada¨quat zu beschreiben, die wir als Intentionalita¨t kennen, wie wir dies hier zuna¨chst einmal unterstellt haben? ¨T 3. GEWALT UND PASSIVITA

Wenn ‘‘Gewalt’’ strukturell darin bestehen ko¨mte, das Andere – das in die Konstitution des Selbst irreduzibel eingelassen ist – vorzustellen, um sich dadurch davon ‘‘abgrenzen’’ zu ko¨nnen, so impliziert dies eine paradoxe, an-aﬃrmative Intentionalita¨t. Wir haben in diesem Zusammenhang nun von ‘‘Unvermo¨gen’’ gesprochen, Unvermo¨gen in bezug auf das ‘‘handelnde’’ als auch das ‘‘erleidende’’ Subjekt. Handelt es sich bei ‘‘Gewalt’’ jedoch um ein essentielles Unvermo¨gen, um ein tatsa¨chliches Nicht-Ko¨nnen, dem widerstreitend, was Husserl unser fundamentales ‘‘Ich kann’’ nennt, das immer schon ‘‘dieses und jenes’’ kann, potentiell ‘‘immer wieder’’ in Szene gesetzt werden kann, also nicht bloß um eine

394

MICHAEL STAUDIGL

‘‘Hemmung’’ des Stils der apperzeptiven Tendenz? Oder besteht dieses Unvermo¨gen nicht vielmehr darin, das Korrelat einer Intention, das ‘‘etwas als etwas’’ in der ihm eigenen DiVerenz hinzunehmen (das, was Marion als die ‘‘Entfaltung’’ der Gegebenheit diesseits von Sinnvorgabe und Weltkonstitution na¨her beschrieben hat24)? Bedeutet ‘‘Gewalt’’, zuna¨chst verstanden als die ‘‘Kapitalisierung’’ der Diﬀerenz, ihre Kolonialisierung und Ausbeutung im Rahmen der Selbstkonstitution und des ‘‘Egoismus’’ also, so nicht zugleich die Entfaltung einer immanenten DiVerenz, die die Figur der Subjektivita¨t zu verschlingen droht, aber keineswegs nur ihren apperzeptiven Stil durchbricht? Die Struktur von ‘‘Gewalt’’ zeigt ja, den pha¨nomenalen Befunden zufolge, nicht weniger an, als die Aufku¨ndigung und sogar Abgru¨ndung der Erfahrung selbst, die wir mit ihr machen: Das Bedeuten zersto¨rt hier weniger seine Form, als daß die Form zuletzt das Bedeuten verunmo¨glicht, was sich als ‘‘ontologische Einsamkeit’’, als Sprachlosigkeit wiederﬁndet:25 ‘‘Gewalt’’ wa¨re, dieser Hypothese entsprechend, jene Erfahrung, die sich selbst aussetzt, sich gerade nicht erfa¨hrt, sondern sich ﬂieht. Genauer: die jene Passivita¨t zu ﬂiehen sucht, die in ihr aufbricht, wenn im Vollzug ihres scheinbar autonomen Ko¨nnens jene Dimension des Außen zerbricht, die es ihr nur erlaubte, sich vom Anderen zu distanzieren. Fassen wir zuna¨chst kurz zusammen: Die ‘‘Gewalt’’ entzieht sich also unserer Thematisierung; sie entzieht sich der Intentionalita¨t, von der sie gleichwohl getragen wird, deren Ru¨ckla¨uﬁgkeit sie aber zu entgehen sucht. In pha¨nomenologischer Terminologie bezeichnet sie nicht nur eine Grenze der Reﬂexion, ein ‘‘Grenzpha¨nomen’’, sondern vielmehr ein ‘‘gesa¨ttigtes Pha¨nomen’’ nach Marion:26 Sie u¨berbordet jede Intention, die sich ihr ¨ bermaß an Gegebenheit, versperrt sich also na¨hert, durch ein unstetiges U den Bedeutungen, die die Intentionalita¨t bereits ausgearbeitet hatte. Sie u¨berfordert diejenigen, die sie anwenden genauso, wie sie diejenigen u¨berﬂutet, die sie sich ihr ausgesetzt ﬁnden; sie stellt ein Problem in bezug auf jene Rezeptivita¨t, die sie in den Kreislauf desjenigen Sinnes reintegrieren wu¨rde, den sie aufgrund seiner Unfa¨higkeit, ihr Bedeuten aufzunehmen, gerade zu u¨bersteigen versucht. Daher ihre Sprachlosigkeit, ihr Bruch mit der ‘‘Intelligibilita¨t des Sagens’’, das Le´vinas zufolge den Anderen diesseits der Ebene der Bedeutungen und des ‘‘intentionalen Spiels’’ noch zu erreichen vermag; daher ihr Ru¨ckzug in eine PseudoImmanenz des Handelns ohne Horizont, in einen Konservativismus der Form, den sie dem Anders-als-Außen entgegensetzt, dessen Positivita¨t sie genauso bestreitet, wie die Intelligibilita¨t, die darin auﬂeuchtet. Die ‘‘Gewalt’’ zeigt sich in der Welt also nur, indem sie diese, die sie in einer

PHANOMENOLOGIE DER GEWALT

395

konspirativen Allianz mit den Anspru¨chen und Appellen des Anderen vermutet, nicht bloß u¨berschreitet, sondern indem sie diese vielmehr noch als Totalita¨tsform der Erfahrungsgenerierung suspendiert, zugleich aber alles in ihrem Horizont zu ﬁxieren sucht. ¨ berlegungen, so bleibt in diesem Folgt man der Logik dieser U Zusammenhang schließlich eine geradezu zynisch anmutende Frage zu stellen: Ist ‘‘Gewalt’’ in der Welt u¨berhaupt mo¨glich? Ich muß folgendes hinzufu¨gen, um den Elan der Kritik zu brechen, der darin angelegt ist: Oder handelt es sich dabei um eine andere Weise des Erscheinens, um die Entfaltung ga¨nzlich anderer Bedingungen, denen gema¨ß etwas sich gibt, was auch, zumindest bis zu einem gewissen Grade, erkla¨ren wu¨rde, weshalb wir der ‘‘Gewalt’’, ihrer Faktizita¨t und ihrer Intensita¨t, so wie diese in der Welt auftritt, bisweilen so ga¨nzlich hilﬂos gegenu¨berstehen; unfa¨hig, sie zu begreifen, unfa¨hig auf sie zu antworten und unfa¨hig, darin die Position einer Andersheit zu verorten, die sich im Außen bloß an-zeigt, aber eben ihrerseits immer Anders-als-Außen bleibt, vollkommen un-identiﬁzierbar, irreduzibel im Sinne einer Reduktion, die die Transzendenz anvisiert. Wie also ist ‘‘Gewalt’’ mo¨glich? Ist diese Frage nicht selbst paradox? Ist sie nicht in dem Maße mo¨glich, vorgegeben im pha¨nomenologischen Sinne, insofern es Transzendenz gibt, die Mo¨glichkeit also, das ‘‘etwas als etwas’’, genauer: das Erscheinende in seinem Erscheinen gema¨ß einem anderen Maß zu fassen, als dieser ‘‘Diﬀerenz’’ selbst, gema¨ß einer anderen Bedeutung, als der des in ihm aufbrechenden Sinnes? Wenden wir uns, um diese Frage zu beantworten, der Kritik zu, die Michel Henry an der klassischen Pha¨nomenologie (wie an der abendla¨ndischen Philosophie insgesamt) und ihrer Konzeption von Transzendenz u¨bt. Entfaltet sich ‘‘Gewalt’’ na¨mlich in der Transzendenz, so verweist die Frage nach ihrer Mo¨glichkeit auf die Frage nach der Mo¨glichkeit der Transzendenz als ihrem Medium.

¨ T, TRANSZENDENZ UND MANGEL 4. ALTERITA

Die Pha¨nomenologie hat das Andere in einer ausgezeichneten Weise zu ihrem Gegenstand erhoben, seine irreduzible Intervention im Reich einer bruchlos erscheinenden Repra¨sentation aufgezeigt. Das Andere im Sinne des anderen Menschen, die Andersheit der Welt, der Natur und der geschichtlichen Faktizita¨t sind hierfu¨r nur die prominentesten Beispiele. Gleichzeitig ist der Status der Gegebenheit des Anderen immer auch

396

MICHAEL STAUDIGL

problematisch geblieben, in seiner Gegebenheit vom Nicht-Gegebenen durchsetzt, hat er jene Weisen der Gegebenheit selbst aufgebrochen und gesto¨rt, deren zentrale Funktion die pha¨nomenologische Fundamentalanalyse gerade erst thematisch gemacht hatte. Eine ruhige und einfache Ru¨ckfu¨hrung auf anschauliche Urmodalita¨ten, wie Husserl sie auf dem Grunde der intentionalen Relation wirksam sieht, wird in diesem Zusammenhang unmo¨glich. Im Gegenteil handelt es sich hierbei um Modiﬁkationen, die nicht auf einen Urmodus zuru¨ckgefu¨hrt werden ko¨nnen, die intentionale Relation also aufsprengen.27 Das Andere, von dessen exorbitanten Gegebenheitsweisen Husserls Analysen vielfach handeln, entzieht sich solcher Originarita¨t vielmehr; die exzessive Leibhaftigkeit, mit der es die egologisch polarisierte Intentionalita¨t im Gegenteil konfrontiert, verweist auf eine Originalita¨t diesseits der Originarita¨t subjektiv verantwortbarer Abkunft. Es verweist auf eine Figur der Intentionalita¨t, die nicht mehr an ihrer Erfu¨llung arbeitet, sondern ihren Aufschub, ihre Aussetzung und ihr Exil erahnt. Zugleich wird das Andere aber, dies scheint uns eine wesentliche Entscheidung Husserls, dennoch nur in jenem Zusammenhang zum T hema, dessen Grenzen sich am Leitfaden von Weltvorgabe, intentionaler Bedeutsamkeit und intuitiv evaluierbarem Sinnanspruch scheinbar unversehrt und archetypisch rekonstruieren lassen. Husserls methodischer Rigorismus kennt keine ‘‘verlassenen Pha¨nomene’’ (Marion), vor deren Anspruch das Subjekt bereits in einer Vorgeschichte desertierte, die ihm intentional niemals zu Bewußtsein zu bringen ist. Die Welt bleibt so immer der Raum jener Transzendenz, deren Einsinnigkeit ihre mo¨gliche Verantwortung sichern sollte. Die vielfa¨ltig variierte Kritik, die man Husserl in diesem Zusammenha¨ngen entgegengestellt hat, konvergiert in mehreren Punkten. Ich mo¨chte hier nur einen herausgreifen, da das Problem, auf das ich abziele, an einem vo¨llig anderen Ort liegt: Es handelt sich um die Privilegierung der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung eines Gegenstandes und die daraus entspringende Funktion der ‘‘analogisierenden Appra¨sentation’’, deren epistemologische Integrita¨t Husserl durch eine Reihe von Wendungen zu sichern sucht. Das Problem betriﬀt hier den pha¨nomenologischen Status der Distanz, in der sich die Gegebenheit des Anderen scheinbar autonom entfaltet. Im Rahmen der Reduktion versammelt die intentionale Schau darin jenen Sinn, den das Andere fu¨r uns zu haben vermag, jenen Sinn, der sich vor dem Hintergrund der Weltobjektivita¨t abzeichnet, an deren horizonthafter Geltung und Kompossibilita¨t wir deﬁnitionsgema¨ß alle gewissermaßen gleichberechtigt arbeiten.28 Gleichzeitig erscheint

PHANOMENOLOGIE DER GEWALT

397

das Andere jedoch immer auch als eine ‘‘Gabe’’, die sich den Gesetzma¨ßigkeiten der Konstitution entzieht und alle transzendenten ¨ konomien des Tausches etwa untergra¨bt;29 als eine Relationen wie die O ‘‘Gabe’’ mithin, die in den von Husserl so sorgsam geschlossenen Ablauf jener Gegebenheitsweisen einbricht, dessen Kreis sich durch den Rekurs auf die Transzendentalita¨t des Ego apodiktisch zu schließen schien, – zumindest in einer ‘‘pra¨sumtiven Apodiktizita¨t’’, wie Husserl sich selbst zu korrigieren wußte.30 Wie sich – folgt man nun Henry – zeigen la¨ßt, ist diese Annahme einer integrativen Funktion der Schau jedoch auf nichts anderes zuru¨ckzufu¨hren, als darauf, daß die klassische Pha¨nomenologie einen Begriﬀ des Erscheinens bevorzugt und letztlich verabsolutiert hat: den des Erscheinens im Medium des welthaften Außen und Außenwerdens, das sich so am Leitfaden von Horizontvorgabe, in-tentionaler Erfu¨llung und sinnhafter Ekstase integriert. Solange man das Erscheinen nun im Rahmen dieser Konstellation betrachtet, seine Dynamik und Faktizita¨t auf dem Boden der ‘‘Vorgegebenheit der Welt’’ oder der ‘‘Weltbefangenheit’’ nach Fink etwa thematisiert, ist seine Konsistenz unantastbar; die Intentionalita¨t sichert sie in dem Maße, wie sich ihr damit ein unendliches Feld ero¨ﬀnet: Die Intentionalita¨t selbst bleibt darin jedoch problematisch, ihre Selbstgebung unthematisch – ihre ontologische Konsistenz erscho¨pft sich in der Logik der Supplemente, die sie zum Leben erweckt, in jener Logik – der ‘‘Logik der Welt’’ – also, die sie nachtra¨glich auf sich selbst anzuwenden sucht. Daß die Selbstkonstitution also zugleich die Konstitution des Anderen ist, daß sich das Andere unaufhebbar in die Figuren jeder intentionalen Selbstgegebenheit eingeschrieben ﬁndet,31 bedeutet in dieser Perspektive jedoch nichts anderes als einen origina¨ren Mangel, den die pha¨nomenologische Methode konstitutiv wendet. Diesen Mangel – und die von ihm ausgehende Teleologik – jedoch zum Paradigma des Erscheinens zu machen, zeichnet jene Situation aus, die Henry als ‘‘ontologischen Monismus’’ bezeichnet, d. h. als die Reduktion des Erscheinens auf die Konstellation des Sich-Zeigens im Außen. Dafu¨r gibt insbesondere die pha¨nomenologische Konzeption der Zeit ein hervorragendes Beispiel ab, da sich in ihr jener urspru¨ngliche Mangel exemplarisch nachweisen la¨ßt, dessen ‘‘Werden’’32 sich jedem Inhalt sinnverleihend substituiert: Die Urimpression selbst, Motor und Katalysator der Selbstgebung, bleibt darin unaufho¨rlich von jener strukturellen, pha¨nomengenerierenden Leere aﬃziert, mit der die Bewegung der Konstitution bzw. der Sinngebung u¨ber sie hinwegzieht. In diesem Werden erst konstituiert sich

398

MICHAEL STAUDIGL

dann jenes Selbst, das sich immer nur in seinen Korrelaten anzeigt, sich immer nur als intentionales oder transzendentales Leben investiert ﬁndet, ohne so jedoch einen eigenen pha¨nomenologischen Status zu erlangen bzw. aufrechterhalten zu ko¨nnen. Dieser ‘‘Mangel’’, Michel Henry diagnostiziert in ihm die Abwesenheit, das Opfer und die ‘‘To¨tung’’ des Lebens selbst,33 ist jedoch – der Verweis auf Henry soll dies in seiner a¨ußersten Konsequenz nur andeuten – keineswegs unproblematisch. Es handelt sich dabei na¨mlich nicht mehr bloß um ein frakturiertes Subjekt, um eine fragmentierte Geschichte der Instanz, die die Konstitution tra¨gt, oder um die Dissemination des Konstituierenden selbst, die den Kreislauf des Sinnes diesseits des Idealismus einer sinnbildenden Intentionalita¨t unbestritten in Atem halten. Im Gegenteil impliziert dieser ‘‘Mangel’’ nicht nur eine Krise des Sinnes, den die Intentionalita¨t inmitten der Konstitution auslo¨st, sondern grundsa¨tzlicher noch eine Krise der Pha¨nomenalita¨t, die sich aus sich selbst heraus, aus ihrem Zentrum gewissermaßen, aufzulo¨sen beginnt, ohne von dem, was sie hervorbringt, noch Zeugnis ablegen zu ko¨nnen. Alles, was sich der Transzendenz verweigert, wird zu einem ‘‘leeren Rest’’, wofu¨r die Eingliederung des ‘‘Pathischen’’ in die Heterogenese von Anspruch, Appell und Antwortgeschehen bei Waldenfels – trotz aller begru¨ndeten Sorge um den diastatischen Status des Fremden – zuletzt nur einen weiteren Beleg liefert.

¨ NOMELO-LOGIE DER ‘‘GEWALT’’ 5. PHA

Henrys Konklusion scheint vernichtend: Die Totalita¨tsstruktur des Erscheinens wird in dieser Perspektive zu einer Topologie der Irrealita¨t, deren Gesetze sich allem Erscheinenden aufzwingen, schlimmer noch als die ‘‘Tyrannei der entfremdeten Werke, die den Menschen schon nicht mehr geho¨ren’’.34 Die ‘‘Welt’’ im Sinne jener Pha¨nomenalita¨t, in der der Entzug des Sinnes das Wesen seiner Gebung bestimmt, die Welt im Sinne der intentionalen Genese, sie exempliﬁziert damit eine außerordentliche ‘‘Gewalt’’, die fu¨r Henry zuna¨chst geradezu als Paradigma jeder Gewalt zu gelten scheint: die vo¨llige Gleichgu¨ltigkeit des Erscheinens gegenu¨ber dem, was in ihm erscheint; eine Gleichgu¨ltigkeit, die vom Erscheinenden aber nicht nur kein Zeugnis abzulegen vermag, sondern es zugleich zu einer a¨ußerlichen, indiﬀerenten Andersheit macht.35 Ist damit jedoch ‘‘Gewalt’’ als solche beschrieben, so wie wir sie im Ausgang von jenem ‘‘Beispiel’’ eines singula¨ren Gewaltaktes zu erfassen suchten? Oder handelt es sich bei dieser eidetischen Struktur ‘‘negativer

PHANOMENOLOGIE DER GEWALT

399

Erscheinungswirklichkeit’’, die Henry an den traditionellen Begriﬀ der Transzendenz zu koppeln sucht, nicht eher um einen metaphysischen Begriﬀ der Gewalt, der auf die monistische Meta-Genealogie des abendla¨ndischen Denkens selbst verweist, dessen Wesensbestimmung Henry in der Pha¨nomenologie exemplarisch verwirklicht ﬁndet, aber eben nicht auf die ‘‘Gewalt’’, wie sie allta¨glich geschieht? Unterliegt Henry damit nicht, wen auch unter anderen Voraussetzungen, derselben Kritik, die Derrida gegen Le´vinas richtet, wenn er ihm vorwirft, die ‘‘Geschlossenheit’’ des Systems nicht ada¨quat zu thematisieren und so mit der Thematisierung der ‘‘Nichtpha¨nomenalita¨t’’ postwendend selbst auf eine ‘‘irreduzible Gewalt’’ zu stoßen, die er außer Betracht la¨ßt?36 Vielleicht ist dieser Einwand jedoch vorschnell eingebracht. Henry bleibt na¨mlich keineswegs bei diesem durch und durch negativ anmutenden Ergebnis stehen, das die Transzendenz in dem Maße zur Matrix aller nur mo¨glichen ‘‘Gewalt’’ erkla¨rt, wie es gleichzeitig ihre bloß illusorische Existenz besiegelt. Die Kritik der Transzendenz impliziert im Gegenteil ihre positive Begru¨ndung. Der ‘‘Gewalt’’ gleichschaltender Transzendenzgenese muß Henry zufolge ein gewaltsames Vermo¨gen korrespondieren, jene Distanz zu errichten, in der es dann deswegen nichts zu verantworten gibt, weil sich in dessen Struktur schlechthin nichts mehr an sich selbst gibt. Der entsprechende Ru¨ckgang auf das ‘‘rein pha¨nomenologische Leben’’ und die Positivita¨t seiner ‘‘Selbstentfaltung’’ fordert eine ‘‘Reduktion der Reduktion’’, eine Gegen-Reduktion. Diese versteht Intentionalita¨t, Horizont und Distanz als methodologisch verabsolutierte Leitfa¨den, die es im Hinblick auf die Mo¨glichkeit der Transzendenz zu destruieren gilt,37 um so dem Logos ihrer origina¨r praktischen ¨ berschreiten Pha¨nomenalisierung aufs neue Raum zu geben. Das Sich-U der Transzendenz impliziert in dieser Perspektive der Entfaltung jedes transzendenten Geltungsanspruchs zuvor immer schon das Vermo¨gen, bei sich bleiben zu ko¨nnen. Auf dieses hatte schon Husserl in seinen fru¨hen Vorlesungen von 1905 als entscheidende Bedingung diesseits jeder reduktiven Thematisierung hingewiesen,38 um es im Banngriﬀ der intentionalen Selbstexplikation der Transzendenzgenese jedoch unversehens zu verlieren. Es ist genau die darin investierte nicht-intentionale ‘‘Identita¨t von Erfahrendem und Erfahrenem’’ in der unverbru¨chlichen Einheit der ‘‘Lebensselbstzeugung’’,39 die Henry am Leitfaden des Begriﬀs der Selbst-Aﬀektion als das Wesen der Manifestation diesseits jeder Transzendenzrelation zu entfalten sucht.40 Diejenige ‘‘Gewalt’’, die sich Henry zufolge als Transzendenz entfaltet, erscho¨pft in dieser Perspektive damit aber ga¨nzlich den Vorbegriﬀ, den wir von ihr im Rahmen der

400

MICHAEL STAUDIGL

Transzendenzvorentscheidung haben. Dadurch bleibt sie zugleich vo¨llig ‘‘abstrakt’’,41 da sie von dem getrennt ist, was ihre Bedingung stellt: von der Dimension des Vollzugs und der ihr eigenen Pha¨nomenalita¨t. Die ‘‘Gewalt’’ ist in der Transzendenz also tatsa¨chlich nicht mo¨glich, ihre Erfahrung verliert sich in der Logik des Sinns, ohne noch eine eigene AVektionsrealita¨t zu sein oder zu vertreten. Folgt man der Entwicklung von Henrys letzten Schriften, so ﬁndet man sie dagegen im Ursprung, als Ursprung der Transzendenz selbst in actu. Nicht nur die Ethik ist in diesem Sinne – um mit Le´vinas zu sprechen – ein ‘‘Traumatismus’’, Ergebnis einer Obsession, die uns im Innersten triﬀt.42 Die Subjektivita¨t selbst ist es, die immemorial traumatisiert ist, da ihre ‘‘transzendentale Geburt’’ im Leben die radikale Unmo¨glichkeit bedeutet, sich je von sich distanzieren zu ko¨nnen, je ihre ‘‘Passibilita¨t’’ (als Identita¨t von Gebung und Rezeptivita¨t) aufzuku¨ndigen, um in den sinnfa¨lligen Raum der Transzendenz einzutreten und beruhigt zu ek-sistieren. Was bedeutet dies aber fu¨r den Begriﬀ der ‘‘Gewalt’’, der sich hier scheinbar aufgespaltet, zum einen eine strukturelle Bewegung meint, die Henry mit seiner Begriﬀ der Transzendenz beschreibt und mit dem Topos des lichthaften ‘‘Außen’’ verbindet, zum anderen aber ebenso die ‘‘Genese’’ der Immanenz selbst benennt, die die erstere hervorbringt? Wird dieser Begriﬀ, dessen Problematik wir am Leitfaden einer Subjektivita¨t zur Anzeige zu bringen suchten, deren Intentionalitat sich genauso als abgru¨ndig erwiesen hat, wie die scheinbar unzerreißbare Relation der sie tragenden Immanenz, damit nicht erneut leer? Bleibt die ‘‘Gewalt’’ damit nicht wiederum in jene verha¨ngnisvolle Opposition von Ursprung und Supplement eingespannt, in der sich ihre Positivita¨t immer nur entzieht, wie wir dies feststellen mußten? Bedenken wir aber, bevor wir uns in dieses negative Ergebnis fu¨gen, die entscheidenden Konsequenzen dieses Ansatzes. Die Welttranszendenz wird darin na¨mlich keineswegs zum ‘‘Raum des Todes’’, in den alles, was sich gibt, nur zu dem Preis eintritt, daß es zu einer Irrealita¨t wird. Vielmehr versteht Henry sie zugleich auch als den Katalysator und das Supplement des ‘‘Selbstvergessens’’ des ‘‘Lebens’’ und seiner pathischpraktischen Bedingung, die wir mit den Anderen irreduzibel teilen.43 Die Subjektivita¨t ist gleichsam das Absolute, aber dieses ist versehrt, und damit auch sie selbst,44 insofern das Selbstvergessen des Lebens als seine Notwendigkeit erscheint. Die immemoriale Gewalt der Lebensselbstu¨bereignung aber, die in jeden intentional-distanzierten ‘‘Weltgehalt’’ und seine noematische Repra¨sentanz irreduzibel eingelassen

PHANOMENOLOGIE DER GEWALT

401

ist, wird in dieser Perspektive schließlich zur Gewalt am Anderen: insofern na¨mlich, wie das subjektive Leben selbst sich nicht mehr gema¨ß den Gesetzen der Lebensselbstgebung steigert, sondern die Struktur der Objekttranszendenz als die Dimension auch des inter-subjektiven Lebens festschreibt, ohne so dessen Dynamik noch zureichend in den Blick zu bekommen. Wenn wir unter ‘‘Gewalt’’ dagegen die Konfrontation mit einer ‘‘immanenten Alterita¨t’’ verstehen, die versto¨rende Erfahrung eines Anders-als-Außen, wie wir sie anzudeuten versuchten, eine Erfahrung, die sich also nicht auf eine Pha¨nomenalita¨t reduzieren la¨ßt, so wird dadurch zugleich deutlich, inwiefern die Anspru¨che des Anderen sich diesseits jenes Raumes bereits entfalten, in dem uns die endlosen Mo¨glichkeiten eines distanzierten, sinngebenden und neutralisierenden Antwortens oﬀenstehen. Die Bedeutung dieser Einsicht, die das Problem ernst nimmt, daß sich in der Transzendenz damit nur die ‘‘Unmo¨glichkeit der Abwesenheit’’ (Lacan) verhandeln la¨ßt, keinesfalls aber jene(s), die/das ihr ‘‘a¨ußerlich’’ sind,45 bleibt – vor allem im Hinblick auf die Mo¨glichkeit einer Pha¨nomenologie des Politischen – zu ermessen.

NOTES 1 ‘‘Die ‘‘Dialektik der Anerkennung’’, die dieser Politik zugrundeliegt, impliziert immer auch eine Logik der ‘‘Adversarita¨t’’, die zuletzt in der ‘‘Vernichtung’’ des ‘‘Feindes’’ terminiert. Vgl. H. Arendt, Macht und Gewalt, 75; E. Le´vinas, T otalita¨t und Unendlichkeit, 327; P. Ricoeur, Geschichte und Wahrheit, 224 f.; dazu genauer A. Kapust, ‘‘Zivilisierte Grausamkeit’’. 2 J.-F. Lyotard (Heidegger und ‘‘die Juden’’, bes. 25–43) spricht mit Bezug auf den Antisemitismus von ‘‘urspru¨nglichem Schrecken’’ und ‘‘Urverdra¨ngung’’. 3 Vgl. D. Lapeyronnie, ‘‘Die Ordnung des Formlosen’’, 83 f., 88, 91; zur ‘‘Gestaltlosigkeit’’ ‘‘der Juden’’ in der nationalsozialistischen Rassenlehre vgl. P. Lacoue-Labarthe/J.-L. Nancy, ‘‘Der Nazi-Mythos’’, 184; J.-F. Lyotard, a. a. O., 39: ‘‘Kehrseite des Denkens’’. 4 J.-F. Lyotard, a. a. O., 45. 5 Vgl. A. David, Racisme et Antise´mitisme. 6 Vgl. Merleau-Pontys Verweis auf einen Logos, der ‘‘sich im Menschen verwirklicht, aber keineswegs als sein Eigentum’’, in Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare, 344. 7 Vgl. z. B. Hegel, Enzyklopa¨die, § 386, 35, im Zusammenhang mit den Bemerkungen zur ‘‘Unangemessenheit zur Allgemeinheit’’. 8 Zur Gewalt der Begriﬀe D. Wood, ‘‘Die Philosophie der Gewalt’’, 48 ﬀ. 9 H. Arendt, op. cit., 75, spricht von ‘‘gewalttra¨chtig’’. 10 Vgl. bes. B. Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, worauf auch unsere spa¨ter folgende Kritik abhebt. 11 Vgl. M. Henry, L ’Essence de Ia manifestation, 59 V.

402

MICHAEL STAUDIGL

12 Dazu D. Wood, art. cit., 26 ﬀ. 13 Die Figur des ‘‘nackten Lebens’’, die Agamben in Homo sacer isoliert, kann hierfu¨r wohl als exemplarisch gelten: Die Reduktion des Menschen auf eine biologische Limesgestalt gru¨ndet in einer (Bio-)Politik, die ihre Souvera¨nita¨t in jener ‘‘Ausnahme’’ ﬁndet, die sie als thanato-topologischen Raum schaﬀt. 14 Folgt man Adorno (Negative Dialektik, 10), so weist das ‘‘Beispiel’’ keine notwendige Relation mit der von ihm vertretenen Idee auf, sondern illustriert sie nur, ist ihr ‘‘gleichgu¨ltig’’ Dahingegen bringt das ‘‘Modell’’ (hier ‘‘Auschwitz’’), eine ‘‘negative Dialektik’’ in Gang, die nicht nur dem spekulativen Diskurs Einhalt gebietet, sondern vielmehr noch das Namenlose selbst diesseits der ‘‘Verausgabung’’ der Zeichen und ihres Geda¨chtnisses freisetzt. Vgl. dazu J.-F. Lyotard, ‘‘Streitgespra¨che’’, 22 ﬀ. 15 Diese sehr provisorische Aufza¨hlung unterschla¨gt zudem andere Formen insbesondere ‘‘anonymer’’, ‘‘struktureller’’ und ‘‘kollektiver’’ Gewalt; vgl. dazu B. Waldenfels, ‘‘Aporien der Gewalt’’, 16 ﬀ. Die axiologische kulturelle und auch aﬀektive Besetzung des Pha¨nomens, die z. B. im Zusammenhang psychonanalytischer oder sozialpsychiatrischer Zuga¨nge bedeutsam ist, bleibt hier ebenso ausgeblendet. Zum Status von ‘‘Gewalt’’ mit Bezug auf die Problematik des Genozids vgl. M. Dabag, ‘‘Gewalt und Genozid’’. 16 Der Begriﬀ der ‘‘Leiblichkeit’’ beschreibt hier ein Spektrum, das von der Verwundbarkeit ¨ bergreifen des Fleisches in die Ideen der ‘‘Haut’’ und der ‘‘Bleibe’’ bei Le´vinas bis hin zum U bei Merleau-Ponty reicht. 17 Vgl. dazu P. Delhom, ‘‘Verletzungen’’, 284 ﬀ., zur Diﬀerenz von ‘‘physischer’’, ‘‘geistiger’’ und ‘‘ethischer’’ Verletzung. 18 Dazu J.-L. Marion, ‘‘Le phe´nome`ne sature´’’, 83 f. u. 88 f. 19 B. Waldenfels, Antwortregister, 243. Zur Diﬀerenz von ‘‘Anspruch’’ und ‘‘Herausforderung’’, die es dagegen auch mo¨glich macht, strukturelle ‘‘Gewalt’’ pha¨nomenologisch thematisch zu machen, siehe L. Tengelyi, ‘‘Die Erfahrung und ihr Ausdruck’’, 34. 20 E. Le´vinas, op. cit., 152 f., 166 f. und o¨fter. ¨ brigen zielt die Gewalt nicht einfach darauf ab, u¨ber Anderen verfu¨gen, wie man 21 Im U u¨ber eine Sache verfu¨gt; sie ist vielmehr schon an der Grenze des Mordes, sie kommt aus einer unbegrenzten Negation.’’ (E. Le´vinas, op. cit., 327). 22 Die Gewalt kann sich nur auf em ‘‘Antlitz’’ beziehen (vgl. Le´vinas, T otalita¨t und Unendlichkeit, 282 ﬀ.), gleichwohl entgeht dieses immer der Pha¨nomenalita¨t Die a¨ußerste Gewalt besteht demgegenu¨ber darin, diese Abwesenheit selbst nicht nur zu verweigern und damit anzuerkennen, sondern sie zu negieren, den T od zu to¨ten (dazu J.-F. Lyotard, Der W iderstreit, 173 f., E. Weber, Verfolgung und T rauma, 146 ﬀ., 174). 23 E. Le´vinas, op. cit., 351. Vgl. auch A. Margalit/G. Motzkin, ‘‘The Uniqueness of the Holocaust’’, 72 ﬀ., zur Logik der ‘‘Lo¨sung’’ dieses Problems durch die NS-Ideologie. 24 J.-L. Marion, Etant donne´, 100 ﬀ. 25 Daß mit diesem ‘‘Nichts der Oﬀenbarung’’ (Scholem) sehr konkrete Folgen verbunden sind, zeigt G. Agamben (Homo sacer, 60 ﬀ.) in einer Lektu¨re von Kafkas Vor dem Gesetz, in ¨ bergang der Indiﬀerenz von Leben und Gesetz nicht mehr ‘‘Ausnahme’’, sondern der der U Regel ist. 26 Vgl. ‘‘Le phe´nome`ne sature´’’. 27 Vgl. E. Husserl, Zur Pha¨nomenologie der Intersubjektivita¨t III, 608 bzw. E. Fink, V I. Cartesianische Meditation. Erga¨nzungsband, 260.

PHANOMENOLOGIE DER GEWALT

403

28 Daß fu¨r Husserl hier ein Problem liegt, zeigt sich an seiner Unsicherheit ‘‘Kindern’’, ‘‘Verru¨ckten’’ und ‘‘Tieren’’ eine ko-konstitutive Rolle im erkenntnistheoretischen Idealismus einzura¨umen, was vom Standpunkt einer universalen ‘‘Monadologie’’ dann kein Problem mehr darstellen sollte. 29 Vgl. J. Derrida, Falschgeld, bes. 65 ﬀ. 30 Vgl. E. Husserl, Erste Philosophie, 386 ﬀ. 31 Vgl. dazu exemplarisch D. Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity. 32 Vgl. M. Henry, Radikale L ebenspha¨nomenologie, 80 f. 33 Vgl. etwa Incarnation, 105. 34 E. Le´vinas, op. cit., 355 f. 35 M. Henry, Incarnation, op. cit., 59 ﬀ. 36 J. Derrida, ‘‘Gewalt und Metaphysik’’, 166 f. u. 194. 37 Dazu R. Ku¨hn, ‘‘Die lebenspha¨nomenologische Gegen-Reduktion’’; zu den Facetten dieser ‘‘Selbstentfaltung’’ vgl. ders. u. S. Nowotny (Hg.), Michel Henry. Zur Selbstentfaltung des L ebens und der Kultur. 38 Vgl. E. Husserl, Die Idee der Pha¨nomenologie, 31. 39 M. Henry, ‘‘Ich bin die Wahrheit’’, 83. 40 Vgl. bes. ‘‘’Essence de la manifestation’’, op. cit., §§ 31 ﬀ. 41 Vgl. ebd., 263. 42 Vgl. M. Haar, ‘‘L’obsession de l’autre’’. Zum Problem des Traumas neuerdings R. Bernet, ‘‘Le sujet traumatise´’’. 43 Vgl. ‘‘Ich bin die Wahrheit’’, op. cit., 197 ﬀ.; dazu A. Steinbock, ‘‘The Problem of Forgetfulness in Michel Henry’’. 44 Vgl. M. Haar, L a philosophie franc¸aise, a. a. O., 118 ﬀ., 143. ¨ berlegungen zu den enarithmoi bei J. Rancie`re, ‘‘Konsens, Dissens, 45 Vgl. dazu die U Gewalt’’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer. Die souvera¨ne Macht und das nackte L eben. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2002. Arendt, Hannah. Macht und Gewalt. Mu¨nchen: Piper, 2000. Bernet, Rudolf. ‘‘Le sujet traumatise´.’’ Revue de Me´taphysique et de Morale (2000/2): 141–161. Dagab, Miran. ‘‘Gewalt und Genozid. Anna¨herungen und Distanzierungen’’, in ders. e. a. (Hg.), Gewalt. Strukturen. Formen. Repra¨sentationen. Mu¨nchen: Fink 2000, 170–186. David, Alain. Racisme et Antise´mitisme. Essai de philosophie sur l’envers des concepts. Paris: Ellipses 2001, mit einer Vorwort von J. Derrida. Derrida, Jacques. ‘‘Gewalt und Metaphysik. Essay u¨ber das Denken Emmanuel Le´vinas’ ’’, in ders., Die Schrift und die DiVerenz. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 21985, 121–235. ——. Falschgeld. Zeit Geben I. Mu¨nchen: Fink, 1993. Fink, Eugen. V I. Cartesianische Meditation. T eil 2: Erga¨nzungsband (Husserliana Dokumente Bd. II/2). Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988. Haar, Michel. ‘‘L’obsession de l’autre chez Le´vinas’’, in: ders., L a philosophie franc¸aise entre phe´nome´nologie et me´taphysique. Paris: P.U.F. 1999, 67–83.

404

MICHAEL STAUDIGL

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Enzyklopa¨die der philosophischen W issenschaften III (Werke in 20 Ba¨nden auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832–1848). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1986. Henry, Michel. L ’Essence de la manifestation. Paris: P.U.F., 1963. ——. Radikale L ebenspha¨nomenologie. Ausgewa¨hlte Studien zur Pha¨nomenologie. Freiburg/ Mu¨nchen: Alber, 1992. ——. ‘‘Ich bin die Wahrheit.’’ Fu¨r eine Philosophie des Christentums. Freiburg/Mu¨nchen: Alber, 1997. ——. Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair. Paris: Seuil, 2000. Husserl, Edmund. Die Idee der Pha¨nomenologie (Husserliana II). Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1950. ——. Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter T eil. T heorie der pha¨nomenologischen Reduktion (Husserliana VIII). Den Haag: Nijhoﬀ, 1959. ——. Zur Pha¨nomenologie der Intersubjektivita¨t. T exte aus dem Nachlaß. Dritter T eil: 1929–1935 (Husserliana XV), hg. von I. Kern, Den Haag: Nijhoﬀ 1973. Kapust, Antje. ‘‘Zivilisierte Graumsamkeit: Feindschaft und Vernichtung’’, in M. Dabag e. a. (Hg.), Gewalt, op. cit., 199–220. Ku¨hn, Rolf. ‘‘Die lebenspha¨nomenologische Gegen-Reduktion’’, in R. Ku¨hn/S. Nowotny (Hg.), Michel Henry. Zur Selbstentfaltung des L ebens und der Kultur. Freiburg/Mu¨nchen: Alber, 2002, 23–54. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Nancy, Jean-Luc. ‘‘Der Nazi-Mythos’’, in G. C. Tholen/E. Weber (Hg.), Das Vergessen(e). Wien: Turia+Kant, 1997, 158–190. Lapeyronnie, Didier. ‘‘Die Ordnung des Formlosen. Die soziale und politische Konstruktion von Rassismus in der franzo¨sischen Gesellschaft’’, in Mittelweg 36 (3/2001), 79–92. Levinas, Emanuel. T otalita¨t und Unendlichkeit. Versuch u¨ber die Exteriorita¨t. Freiburg/Mu¨nchen: Alber, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois. Der W iderstreit. Mu¨nchen: Fink, 1987. ——. Heidegger und ‘‘die Juden’’. Wien: Passagen, 1988. ——. ‘‘Streitgespra¨che, oder: Sa¨tze bilden, nach Auschwitz’’, in G. C. Tholen/E. Weber (Hg.), Das Vergessen(e). Wien: Turia+Kant, 1997, 18–70. Margalit, Avishai and Motzkin, Gabriel. ‘‘The Uniqueness of the Holocaust’’, in Philosophy and Public AVairs 25/1 (1996), 65–83. Marion, Jean-Luc. ‘‘Le phe´nome`ne sature´’’, in: J.-F. Courtine (Hg.), Phe´nome´nologie et the´ologie. Paris: Criterion, 1992, 79–128. ——. Etant donne´. Essai d’une phe´nome´nologie de la donation. Paris: P.U.F., 1997. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare. Mu¨nchen: Fink, 1986. Ranciere, Jacques. ‘‘Konsens, Dissens, Gewalt’’, in M. Dabag e. a. (Hg.), Gewalt, op. cit., 97–112. Ricoeur, Paul. Geschichte und Wahrheit. Mu¨nchen: List, 1974. Steinbock, Anthony, ‘‘The Problem of Forgetfulness in Michel Henry’’, in Continental Philosophy Review 32 (3/1999), 271–302. Tengelyi, Laszlo. ‘‘Die Erfahrung und ihr Ausdruck’’, in: J. Trinks (Hg.), Das Pha¨nomen und die Sprache. Wien: Turia+Kant, 1998, 25–37. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Antwortregister. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1994. ——. ‘‘Aporien der Gewalt’’, in M. Dabag e. a. (Hg.), Gewalt, op. cit., 9–24. ——. Bruchlinien der Erfahrung. Pha¨nomenologie. Psychoanalyse. Pha¨nomenotechnik. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2002.

PHANOMENOLOGIE DER GEWALT

405

Weber, Elisabeth. Verfolgung und T rauma. Zu Emmanuel L e´vinas’ Autrement qu’eˆtre ou au-dela l’essence. Wien: Passagen, 1990. Wood, David.‘‘Die Philosophie der Gewalt. Die Gewalt der Philosophie’’, in M. Dabag e. a. (Hg.), Gewalt, op. cit., 25–54. Zahavi, Dan. Self-Awareness and Alterity. A phenomenological Investigation. Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1999.

PIERO TRUPIA

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN PAINTING AGAINST THE NIHILIST DRIFT OF EUROPEAN THOUGHT

THE NEO-POSITIVIST MISAPPREHENSION

The genitive philosophies (of science, of language, of medicine, of fashions, of sport) have philosophical value if they apply the laws of the whole and of unity to the facts and not when they deduce universal and necessary laws from the facts. Through facts, experience may constitute an inductive base, but one must not limit oneself to these facts and celebrate them as a direct manifestation of the world. In this light we may consider Positivism, Neo-positivism and English analytical philosophy as genitive philosophies: they collapse into the subject of their discourse. From this subject they deduce – by analogy – general laws and universal models. Logical Neo-positivism and analytical philosophy had interesting and useful applicational developments. But they are oﬀ the beaten track when they take the proposition to be an ‘atom of truth’. Naturally, they hasten to specify: when the proposition is ‘well formulated’, i.e. grammatical. But there remains a confusion between grammar – and with it also logic – and reality. Grammar and logic are a way of speaking about reality, once this reality has been attained with other means, other modalities. The proposition is not an ‘atom of truth’ and the discourse about the world is not the world, nor is the world a series of propositions, be they even well formed. Present-day weak thinking is the latest development of this programme with lots of verbal sophistication and very little conceptual innovation. The non plus ultra of this sophistication is to be found in the recognized father of weak thinking, Martin Heidegger. For him, just as for all his predecessors, language is considered to come ﬁrst, whereas it is no more than second. Old polemics, but taken to the very limit. Michael Dummet swears by language. William Van Orman Quine vivisections it. They are conceptually distant and yet converge in considering it the ‘‘condition of thought’’ simply because they deem its contents to be useless, inconsistent and unknowable. They create further confusion when they trace this refusal of the contents of the mind back to anti-psychologism and therefore liken Husserl to Heidegger, who in 407 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 407–424. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

408

PIERO TRUPIA

actual fact is radically diﬀerent (and not only as far as this particular aspect is concerned). This is particularly true for the last phase of Heidegger’s speculation, where the novelty of the instrument, poetical language, does not lead to clarity of representation. Even poetry implodes when its reference is not outside language. The immanence of the signiﬁcant does not touch the transcendence of the signiﬁcance, the real referent. Let us therefore say that language is not a condition of thought, but of its expression. A very important function, but thought springs from somewhere other than language and independently of it. In Husserlian terms, it springs from intentionality. This simple clariﬁcation, lacking in or refused by a great deal of contemporary philosophy, lies at the origin of weak thinking. There remains the shadow of Neo-positivism with its anti-metaphysical polemics. It is lengthening on contemporary philosophical thought and thought tout court. There is talk about the post-modern, where ‘post’ has the precise meaning of a negation. If the modern, ever since Descartes, proclaimed the primacy of reason, man’s capacity of dominating reality by means of rational comprehension, the post-modern denies this primacy and this capacity. This is a negation founded on an equivocation, the misapprehension of considering neo-positivist rationalism as the non plus ultra of the modern. This conviction derives from a logicist vision of reason, operating through formalized language, according to the model of ‘formal’ or true/false logic, that is to say, capable of producing grammatically well formed and therefore true propositions. In actual fact, however, neopositivist language, already in its own day, was something very poor as compared with real language. It was neither speech, nor text, nor linguistic act, it was neither literary expression nor poetic evocation. It was simply the grammar of the proposition or of syllogistic propositional composition. It did not go beyond for the excellent and wholly irrational reason that prepositional logic could not work where there was text but no propositions. In the meantime, while neo-positivism exhausted itself in its comfortable American exile, toying with the ‘logical construction of the world’, reason, true reason, found other roads. It aﬃrmed argumentation in discourse,1 and bound up with it, but as an independent vein, the new plural logic.2 It sprang from a revival of forgotten medieval and Aristotelian programmes and models that were now giving rise to logical pluralism: from Aristotle’s modal logic to the contemporary existential and constructive

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN PAINTING

409

logics. An argumentative ﬂock to be activated for every speciﬁc need and which consigned neo-positivist propositionalism to the ﬁling cabinets. Eventually the revolution of textuality, born with the Muscovite Linguistic Circle around Jakobson, Tomasˇevskji and Brik in 1915, transferred to Czechoslovakia3 in 1929, where it became the Prague Circle, to escape the ‘cures’ of Stalin the Linguist. The crisis of reason proclaimed by post-modern thought therefore concerns neo-positivist reason incapable of facing the new complexity of the thought and contemporary social reality. Indeed, the Husserlian alternative is based precisely on the crisis of that reason. Husserl’s phenomenology shoulders this complexity and expands observable reality and the universe of speech to the dimension of the lived experience and the hyle. At long last philosophy, having enlarged its ﬁeld of inquiry, can aspire to being ‘strong’ or ‘rigorous science’. The lived experience has now become the object of inquiry, intentional consciousness has become the referent of speech. Artistic experience is not outside this model: it is ﬁlled with lived experiences and speech about reality in accordance with a speciﬁc textuality. Art, too, has suﬀered the consequences of the crisis of reason. There is a weak-thinking thought about art and there is a weak-thinking art that does not seek to represent being, to grasp the essence of reality. THE CRISIS OF FIGURATIVE REASON

Weak-thought art speaks about itself, cites and reproposes itself. Just like hermeneutics, it takes the given artistic production as its referent. Exemplary is the case of the Transavant-guard, ultimate arrival point of the crisis of the ﬁgurative arts. The Transavant-guard passes through and leaves behind all the avantgardes of the past, but uses them as a storehouse of ideas to produce a ‘post’ that has been renamed ‘trans’. In the reverberating language of its inventor at the beginning of the eighties, the critic Achille Bonito Oliva, ‘‘the artist has shattered ... the spectacles that protected his sight, the lens that rendered his vision unitary, to gain access to a piecemeal and delirious look by means of which he could model his own glance ... his work denounces ... the impossibility of considering himself as the yardstick of himself and the world’’.4 Fortunately, even in painting there had for some time become conﬁgured, side by side with phenomenology, a movement, known as ‘Ritorno all’ordine’, ‘‘return to order’’, for the reconquest of rationality in artistic

410

PIERO TRUPIA

representation. Apart from divisionism, derived from impressionism, and the parapolitic movement of futurism, Italian painting of the early twentieth century was guided by an idea of order and a persistent classical inspiration.

ORDO MUNDI

The ‘‘return to order’’ was backed by the review Valori Plastici (1918–1922) and was a reaction to futurism, launched by Marinetti with the manifesto of 1909, and German expressionism, launched by Kirchner with the manifesto of 1905. Return to order implied resumption of rationality of structure and speech in the artistic representation characteristic of the great Italian painters of the 15th and 16th century, starting with Piero della Francesca, with distant roots in Giotto’s realism, and right through to the threshold of mannerism. For the ‘return to order’ movement, too, reference had to be made to the expanded reality of the lived experiences that reﬂect reality and its order in all its immediacy. Within the lived experiences there is constituted a primigenial (ﬁrst-born) anterior synthesis that, nevertheless, is not in contrast with its cognitive counterpart. Angela Ales Bello explains Husserl’s innovative position: ‘‘Consciousness is not a series of functions independent of the things to which it is applied, but consciousness is rather the very stratiﬁcation of the active and passive constitutive operations that form the object’’.5 On the basis of this model we can aﬃrm that right from the beginning there exists a correspondence between the process of artistic creation and the process of rational knowledge of the world. Both come into being with hyletic apprehension, that is to say, with the primigenial identiﬁcation of intentioning I and intentioned thing and with the acquisition of a rational consciousness in carrying forward the cognitive process. The ﬁrst and wholly passive synthesis of the aﬀections of the I exposed to reality forms the core of what is to become the subject-object relationship. Here the two processes take diﬀerent roads: in artistic ‘knowledge’ apperceived reality is thematized in its singularity and the imperious contingency of its presence, while in ‘rational’ or scientiﬁc knowledge apperceived reality is thematized as abstract object or, if you prefer, conﬁgured in terms of some of its predicates and, more precisely, those that lend themselves to the formalized approach of the Western scientiﬁc tradition.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN PAINTING

411

Both roads towards knowledge have a rational legitimacy and a usefulness, i.e., an end, always provided that they do not exclude each other. Knowledge of the scientiﬁc type is characterized for a practical end: the handling of matter in technical terms. Artistic knowledge has a pathic end, arousing emotion face to face with the ‘miracle’ (admirable thing) of reality on account of its existence, its presence.

WORKING WITH THE GODS

It is therefore possible to respond to the dilemma presented by Anna Teresa Tymieniecka: ‘‘Artistic work, creativity is associated with the spontaneous movement of consciousness or with inspiration, which like a gift of the gods oVers the artist, poet, composer an outline of an artistic objective. T hus it astounds when poets like Vale´ry or artists like Degas tell us that they know nothing of spontaneity or inspiration but believe merely and entirely in work, study, persevering eVort.’’6 Sometimes the two procedures ﬁnd themselves side by side on the same cognitive road. A frequently cited example is the discovery of the closed hexagon of the benzene formula by August Kekule´ von Stradonitz in 1865. In his memories he revealed that in his fantasies he had on several occasions seen a serpent biting its own tail, a vision that insinuated itself into his reﬂections about the chemistry of benzene. One can therefore generalize by aﬃrming that the synthesis of the two procedures is an operational model of creativity and an answer can thus be given to the dilemma posed by Anna Teresa Tymieniecka. Kekule´’s serpent metaphorically connotes the essence of benzene, whereas its hexagonal formula is the language for expressing it. The ﬁrst moment is intuitive, the second elaborative. Every really creative artist ‘sees’ the object he wants to represent and this is a moment of blissful immediacy. But if he wants to express it, and therefore codify it for communicative purposes, he will be obliged to undertake the hard work of formalization that normally calls for the construction of a new language. This is the case of the various periods and the diﬀerent styles that followed each other in Picasso’s painting.

THESES AND ENUNCIATIONS

Philosophy is collocated above the two cognitive processes of art and science. ‘Above’ has a precise signiﬁcance: that of constituting the two

412

PIERO TRUPIA

processes and their respective languages as object of its own analysis and its own judgment. In this capacity and function the language of philosophy is a metalanguage: it establishes and judges the terms and the conditions of fungibility of the other languages. The philosophical ‘sin’ of logical neo-positivism was that of identifying itself with its object, aﬃrming that philosophical language is logical or propositional language. Language thus came to assume the improper and unsustainable role of representation of reality rather than one of its possible codiﬁcations. A ﬁrst error of neo-positivism thus comes to the fore in all its obviousness: that of dividing languages into logico-formal languages, those of the scientiﬁc approach, and languages expressive of subjective feelings, impressions and judgments, those of art, philosophy, religion. In the neopositive vision, the latter could not represent objectivity and therefore scientiﬁc truth, the only possible truth. According to a vulgar simpliﬁcation, their referent was vague, inexistent or, in their simpliﬁed neo-positivist language, ‘metaphysical’. The treatise of Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca on this subject has done justice to this matter, cancelling the hiatus between formal logic and argumentative logic. Both are useful instruments for representing reality in a language. It therefore follows, in particular, that even a poetical, evocative, imaginative language can have practical results. That was the discovery of the sophists, today normally applied in marketing language. In general, we can say that argumentative language is irreplaceable in persuasive communication. And yet the dominance in our epoch of the scientists paradigm induces us to use a language of the scientiﬁc type also in social communication. An exemplary case is the one of the ﬁght against the consumption of tobacco undertaken by many governments. The menacing announcements that now appear on smoking products – ‘‘Smoking kills’’; ‘‘Gravely harmful for children’’ – have not had any signiﬁcant eﬀect on the habits of smokers. The reason for this is the scientiﬁc abstractness of the message, theoretically but not existentially true. The purchaser says to himself: ‘‘not always, not for me, you have to die in any case, there’s pollution all round, my grandfather smoked and lived to be 90 ...’’. Linguistically the form of these warnings is that of a thesis: abstract, without a context and in the third person (singular or plural). Far more eﬃcacious would be the form of the enunciation in the ﬁrst person (singular or plural) and with a precise contextual denotation. Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology constitutes a good model: life stories told in the ﬁrst person.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN PAINTING

413

The paradigm of argumentation, other than the paradigm of deduction, tells us that even the language of art may be rational, though formalized in logics that diﬀer from formal or true/false logic. It is a plural logic therefore, just as tools are plural in their essence and determined in both their being and their form by the use for which they are intended. WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL IS RATIONAL AND WHAT IS RATIONAL IS BEAUTIFUL

That logic is an instrument and not the formal essence of reality was asserted by Aristotle, who chose to give his treatise on logic the name of Organon (instrument). Hence Husserl’s claim of a statute of rigorous science for philosophical discourse, a claim that could well be extended also to artistic discourse. The two moments of artistic creation are mimesis and diegesis. Contrary to the view held in antiquity, mimesis is not simply imitation of nature: it is a withdrawal of the contents of reality. Gertrud Stein said of Picasso that his look was like the claw of a vulture and Picasso said of himself: ‘‘I do not search, I ﬁnd’’. Mimesis commences with a direct, pre-consciential apprehension in the surrounding reality of contents and whatever is inherent in them. A vision that in the case of an artist places the factual aspect of things in parentheses. The trite aspect that Sartre stigmatized as ‘de trop’: ‘‘De trop: c’etait le seul rapport que je pusse e´tablir ... De trop le marronier ... de trop la Velle´da ... Et moi aussi etait de trop’’.7 An explanation given by Igor Stravinskij makes this even clearer: ‘‘The faculty of creating ... is always accompanied by the capacity of observing and the true creator will always ﬁnd around himself, in the most common and most humble things, elements worthy of note’’8 In his studio, Morandi collected altogether ordinary objects as possible components of his still lives: vases, bottles, furnishings. He arranged them on some ﬂat surface and then exposed himself to their message for an indeﬁnite period of time. Every now and again, when the light or his viewpoint changed, he arranged them diﬀerently until the moment when he decided to transfer the composition onto canvas. Art is thus a grasping by means of mimesis of essences in reality, even the most common and trivial. These essences are then made to shine in existing things, even the most common, and this is done by means of diegesis or, as we might say, highlighted in discourse. In this way art makes us discover in the ‘surrounding life-world’ the pure essence and, at the same time, the beauty of things and, through them, the perturbing majesty of being.

414

PIERO TRUPIA VERUM CLARUM

The classical deﬁnition of beauty given by Thomas Aquinas seems particularly convincing against this background: ‘‘Ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur: integritas, concordantia, claritas’’.9 The dazzle of this claritas comes at the moment, which may be a mere instant, of hyletic contact. It is what is called inspiration. The rest is construction of integritas and concordantia. It can be a concordantia-discors, or an integritas imperfect. It happens in contemporary art and denotes the drama of man’s cognitive insuﬃciency and the drama of the artist inasmuch as he is man. The delicate passage is to lead the beautiful back to the true, the true in the splendour of the essence, the verum clarum. It is a truth that is such only in aesthetic experience. The beautiful as the supreme form of the true. Here we have a conceptualization valid for all the arts. In music the hyletic moment grasps the manifestation of being in the world of sounds even in absentia – the ‘cipher’ in Jaspersian language – of concordantia and integritas. In the sense of Norbert Schulz it is ‘assembling’: ‘‘The signiﬁcance of an object consists of the relationship it maintains with other objects, that is, of what the object assembles’’.10 In music the assembling conﬁgures pieces of cosmic architecture in the ancient sense of harmony of the spheres. And this already arouses profound emotion of its own accord. Music is the voice that conﬁrms the universal nou: s. Music, as Stravinskij tells us, is ﬁrst of all a chrononomy, a discipline of the most impalpable, elusive and indeﬁnable natural element and yet quite inevitably present, time.11 Creative liberty and cosmic constriction, or order and innovation, characterize the presence of the human person in the world. That is a ﬁrst response to those who say that music has no meaning and expresses only itself. One could agree with this second qualiﬁcation: ‘expresses itself ’, but it does not relieve us of wondering what this ‘itself ’ might be. Stravinskij’s answer is short and to the point: ‘‘the representation of the prevalence of order over chaos’’.12 But that is not the whole of the signiﬁcance of music. It is, above all, melody, i.e., discourse in pure sounds. What is it that melody, every melody tells us? What is its signiﬁcance? A TRUE AND REASONED MUSICAL DISCOURSE

Melody is inherence of sounds that signiﬁes nostalgia of existing beings for the One, a lancinating desire of reuniﬁcation. The eternal theme of

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN PAINTING

415

the many and the one is the obligatory theme of every tale. Denied reuniﬁcation generates drama; absolute denial generates tragedy; denial in time, but not deﬁnitively, capable of being recuperated at least in hope or in regrets, generates lyric poetry; and re-conquered by struggle, it generates epics. These genres and many others are present in music. Inherence is denied in the development of a melody, because for the moment it is not recognized, is not attainable; one therefore tries again with another phrase, with a diﬀerent thematic development, one turns for help to harmony and counterpoint and, at long last, there comes fulﬁlment in a harmonic melodic form or, if you prefer, complete inherence, assembling. Complete and restful. Beethoven’s music and, in an exasperated manner, his quartets highlight this development. Contemporary dodecaphonic, post-dodecaphonic, atonal or pluritonal music may seem a negation of this interpretation of the musical discourse; but that is not the case. The equilibrium of the attained inherence of the sounds, the achieved thematic assembly is only negated due to sceptical desperation, but not for that reason annulled. Negation hides the need for conﬁrmation. Here we have a semantic brand of music: coming true, the perfection of an expectation or a delusion. Human situations are among the most common depicted. Music does not talk about them, it shows them. And here we also have the role of argumentative logic. Showing them, it speaks of them in image or by analogy. A diﬀerent speaking, but a speaking with the precise reference to those situations. The same applies regarding inherence, assembly, cosmic architecture, which are concordantia and integritas according to Thomas. Music is therefore discourse endowed with signiﬁcance, categorial discourse and therefore intensional, not extensional. Nevertheless, music is undoubtedly textual and not only of time and space. It is also textual discourse of existential situations and the human condition. The reference of the musical discourse is not constituted by the objects of the world of which we have to seek the signiﬁcances, but rather directly by these signiﬁcances (the general or cosmic signiﬁcances, as in the ﬁfth symphony of Beethoven, but also the contingent ones that we have in the ‘‘Eroica’’). A ﬁnal consideration. The deniers of the signiﬁcance and therefore of the truth character of music’s meaning concede that, even though it does not have an objective signiﬁcance, it yet expresses the feelings of the author and arouses corresponding ones in the mind of the listener. The same explanation is given for the other arts and this has given rise to a vein of criticism that illustrates the musical or ﬁgurative work by inform-

416

PIERO TRUPIA

ing us about the feelings it aroused in the mind of the critic. He is said to be the competent mediator, because he is more sensitive and better prepared than the ordinary listener. This theorization has no foundation at all. First of all, it cancels the signiﬁcance of art, whereas it is universal and, if not objective, at least objectivizable. The only subjective thing is a wholly contingent access capacity: it calls for a basic sensitivity that can be improved with education and experience. Secondly, the presence of feelings in the speaker and the listener is a constant feature of communication and is not speciﬁc to art. It is present, for example, in a warning letter to a debtor or the announcement of the result of a lottery. One could object that the feelings present in the artistic message are speciﬁc, but when we ask ourselves what they are, the answer is generic ( joy, sorrow, consolation, discomfort ...). In spite of these obvious considerations, the theory of a semantics of sentiments resists and ﬁnds maladroit applications. Nineteenth-century theory denied the signiﬁcance of music, a denial founded quite simply on an excessively narrow notion of signiﬁcance. But musicians blatantly aﬃrmed it with ‘content-music’, the so-called symphonic poems. The same considerations apply in the case of painting. The concreteness or, better, the familiarity of the pictorial sign should not deceive us: the house, the tree, the cloud in the picture are not of value by themselves and not always on account of the symbolic signiﬁcance. They are of value inasmuch as they exist and constitute a discourse on account of this reciprocal inherence and their inherence in the being from whom they come and to whom they will return. Even in abstract painting and sculpture the signs signify inherences, but here the discourse is purely categorical and therefore has an open reference: not individual things, but relationships between them. FROM GIOTTO TO DE CHIRICO: A MAGIC CONTINUITY

Italian painting in the ﬁrst two decades of the twentieth century was animated by creative ferments. The movement best known in the world was Futurism as art of the attempted or achieved revolutions. But Futurism did not produce masterpieces either in painting or in literature. On the other hand, there was no Italian impressionism, because the Italian artists who adopted this style transferred to Paris. The Italian place in the history of twentieth-century painting is occupied by De Chirico’s Metaphysics right through to the ‘magic realism’ of Carra`

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN PAINTING

417

and Morandi that followed their brief metaphysical period.13 The two outstanding Metaphysics personalities are De Chirico, the initiator, and Carra`, who at ﬁrst had been attracted by Futurism, which he abandoned in 1916 at De Chirico’s express invitation. Both De Chirico and Carra` explicitly theorized their art and claimed a proud detachment from the predominant French impressionism. De Chirico pronounced many an ironical remark about it. From 1919 onwards, Carra` proclaimed the need for once again ﬁnding contact with the tradition of Italian painting, especially Giotto, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, Morandi, and is said later to have added also Piero della Francesca.14 One is struck by the homologous architecture of the ﬁgures and the landscapes of Carra`’s paintings (L e Figlie di L oth, coll. Larese, 1919, Pescatori, 1929–1936, Milan, Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna) and Giotto’s Storie di Gioacchino in the Capella degli Scrovegni (painted between 1300 and 1310). For De Chirico, too, the truth or its simple intuition is the purpose of painting. In his writings, nevertheless, he tries to demonstrate the contrary. In line with his day, he sustains that there is no truth in art and in the absolute. But his pictorial works would have neither value nor fascination if truth, the search and the nostalgia for truth, were not present in them. Malgre´ tout et malgre´ soi. As for his contemporary Lucio Piccolo (19031969), truth is a ‘game to be hidden’. ... If we are mirror ﬁgures / led by a breath / devoid of depth and sound/even the world around us / does not stand still but is a moving painted / wall, a deceitful game / a shifty mass of shadows and ﬂashes / of forms that allure and / deny a sense – similar to the interior screen, the whirling that assails us / when we close our eyes ....15

That is precisely the painting of De Chirico in the second decade of the 20th century. A denied sense that yet comes to the fore, a human ﬁgure that is not central, is not the seeing eye, the ordering intelligence, the vigil consciousness that reﬂects and comprehends the world, but a thing among things, a mere stage appearance. And yet it is a metapresence, a look on man who does not see, but who wants to see and knows that it is possible to see. In spite of his professed philosophical negativism, De Chirico chose ‘metaphysics’ as the title of his painting. This was a provocative posture with respect to the historical moment dominated by neo-positivist skepticism and Nietzsche’s nihilism and, at the opposite end of the scale, by the scientism of the magniﬁcent fates and progressions so noisily celebrated by the futurist movement of the period.

418

PIERO TRUPIA TOWERS THAT STRAIN TO THE SKY

De Chirico had profound roots. Born of Italian parents at Volos, in the very heart of classical Greece, as a child he traveled in Europe with long formative stays in Munich, Berlin and Paris. He absorbed all the humours of his day. Having established himself in Italy, his painting revealed a triple soul: Greek classicism, Italian tradition, and Germanic nihilism, especially Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Weininger. He studied them and suﬀered their fascination: he found echoes of them in the painting of Arnold Bo¨cklin (1827–1901), Max Klinger (1857–1920), Moritz von Schwindt (1804–1871). There came to life the famous series of L e piazze d’Italia (The Squares of Italy). The Germanic culture he frequented ‘obliged’ De Chirico to deny truth and sense, but the Italian tradition and the classical heredity drove him to cultivate the mystery and enigma of the human posture in the cosmos. His ‘‘metaphysics’’ are a presence that imperiously appears in everyday life and to which things necessarily refer, a theme expressed in his L ’e´nigme de l’oracle of 1909. It is true that in the painting the oracle now appears folded back onto itself and that it does not respond to any questioner; it is true that the human ﬁgure turns its back to it, but it has open space in front of it and at its feet is a city whence it may draw its responses. A central theme of De Chirico’s painting is the tower or chimney or tower-temple in the form of a tholos. It stands out against the sky like the Tower of Babel, but this time not in vain. The construction is complete, with battlements, a cornice, a cupola. In the latter case it is crowned by triangular ﬂags ﬂuttering in a strong wind. They are arrows of time, propelled by a vector of cosmic energy against the black humour of the doctrine of cyclic time and the eternal return of the identical. The greatness of a man is to be found in the contradictions he assumes and does not deny. De Chirico’s paintings deny his doctrinal proclamations. In his pictures there is the mystery and the suggestion of a distant but accessible content of truth and the sense it embraces. Negation is in the foreground of his pictorial representation. Porticos that constitute the wings of his stage frame a proscenium of compact obscurity and reveal interiors of absolute darkness. The great metaphysical light is the protagonist in the middle distance. Grazing and keen, it comes from far oﬀ to reveal the nature of things. The buildings are invested by it and reveal their simple geometric power, the will of staying in the cosmos. In the background, the sky and the horizon are shown with a ﬁrm streak of light.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN PAINTING

419

Before it becomes a functional artifact – refuge, defence, container – architecture comes to life as witness. It is the portrayal of an order of the universe and, over and above this, an attempt of conferring an erect stature also upon matter. Alignment, megalithic circle, menhir, dolmen, cromlech, stupa, tholos. ... Here we have the creation of a space, open or closed, and, in the rhythmic succession of the compositive elements, of a time that our look may cover and dominate. Hermann Sorgel (1885–1952) says that architecture is Raum-Zeitgestaltung, shaping of space and time. In L a tour rouge of 1913, an equestrian statue in the foreground casts a long shadow. The statue is immersed in darkness, but the front side of its plinth shines brightly. The shadows are political power that endeavours to impose its imperium on that square in Italy. Beyond the proscenium, the immense tower, of a warm ochre colour, stands fully in the light. It rises, battlemented against the compact blue of the sky and creates an allotopic relationship with the black of the equestrian statue. The door and the four windows of the tower show the interior darkness, but the horizon radiates pure light. The light comes from outside and far away. L e voyage e´mouvant of 1913 shows in the foreground a forest of arches that enclose a darkness ranging from grey to black. But two arch portions let us catch a glimpse of the intense blue of the sky and the ﬁrm light of the sun on a wall. Another arch portion frames a locomotive with a great plume of steam. In L ’e´nigme de l’arrive´e et de l’apre`s midi of 1911–12 a corner of a portico in the foreground creates a shadow zone that contains two ﬁgures concentrated on themselves, their faces barely suggested and one of them, seen from the back, with a black cape, looks downward, ignoring the chessboard pattern of the ﬂoor. In the middle distance, behind a compact wall, half shadow, half light, a swollen sail is on the move and a white ivory tholos, in full sunlight, rises with double-cupola roof and two ﬂags. It is beyond the wall and its door, and therefore shows us the bright glow of the sky on the horizon. In other canvases of the same period, the negative symbol – which elsewhere is an equestrian statue – becomes a cannon, likewise in the dark, likewise in the foreground. Two human silhouettes can only barely be seen against the background of the black wall that closes the proscenium. At the side of the wall, right in the foreground, a statue, erect on a tall plinth, is exceptionally well lit, holding its arm raised at 45° from the side with the hand open in token of surprise. It stands in isotopic relationship with a large chimney-tower and a locomotive with a plume of white steam, both on the far side of the wall. The statue is from behind,

420

PIERO TRUPIA

because it looks beyond the proscenium, to the horizon, to the surprising symbols of presence: light, voyage, thrust towards up on high. The painting is L a surprise of 1913. THE UNIVERSE IN A SQUARE

It is not by any means rare to ﬁnd openings for hope in the writings of De Chirico. He speaks of Moritz von Schwindt as the ‘‘great, incomparable Schwindt, full of divine nostalgia’’.16 The metaphysical cipher of De Chirico’s painting is the neatness of the ﬁgure, the compactness of the colour, the absolute geometry of the representation, the ‘squares of Italy’, that condense the cosmos and presents consciousness of it. The objects on stage are ‘‘by themselves’’, they are not mutually inherent and do not therefore directly generate integritas, concordantia and assembly. But these are not lacking: they are created by perspective as in the tradition of Italian painting from the ﬁfteenth century onwards. This is a semantic perspective: it accelerates the vision towards the horizontal and vertical double inﬁnite of the horizon and the sky. Lastly, the light and glory are the semantic hallmark of Italian painting between the 19th and the 20th century. The impressionists painted with light, their contemporary Italians painted the light. A light that, as in einsteinian relativity, is absolute reference. It ransoms the contingency of things. The critics continued to qualify De Chirico as a nihilist and slave to the mystery. Ester Coen, in the catalogue of the exhibition in the Stable of the Quirinal, speaks of him as ... a ‘‘painter of mysteries ... of fear of the unknown ... of the impossibility of deciphering ... of the force of bringing into being ... instinctive and gravely remote emotions ... sense of dismay in the face of the desolation and the anguish of the human condition ...’’. There is none of this in De Chirico. He paints the claritas and, by means of perspective and architectonic composition, also integritas, concordantia, and assembly. His strong and ﬁrm light resolves the mystery, tells us that the existing beings, be it even in their apparent solitude, tend towards the horizon and high up, to the One. What is more, even Nietzsche, one of De Chirico’s masters, had his share of greatness in contradicting himself: I err among men as among fragments / of the future, the future that I see. / And that is all my writing verse and endeavour, that I / compose into the One whatever is fragment / and enigma and atrocious chance. / And how could I bear being man / if man were not also poet and maker of conjectures about enigmas and redeemer / of chance.17

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN PAINTING

421

De Chirico opposes the nihilism that he theoretically shares with the practical urgency of representing reality in its irreducible complexity, in marked contrast with the scientiﬁc reductionism and Heidegger’s weak thinking that was then beginning to be perceived. APERTURES TOWARDS NOTHING

I began these reﬂections with the crisis of Western rationality proclaimed by weak thinking. This crisis still exists and is considered to be the arrival point of an intellectual vicissitude that reaches back for more than two millennia. The incongruities and interrupted discourses of Heidegger’s thought, to whom weak thinking owes its origin, are taken by his successors as revealers of a new awareness founded on a virile disenchantment. The arrows are directed against the concept of essence or substance, the idea of the unity of reality, the hypothesis of a foundation of knowledge or arche´. Heidegger does not wholly forego the idea of essence, but – as it were – existentializes it. He thus speaks of an ‘epochal essence’, this in the sense of being bound to the moment, or of a ‘possible essence’, bound up with the event. In his inaugural lecture at the Colle`ge de France, ‘T he Discourse on L anguage’ (1971), Michel Foucault was to speak of the ‘ontology of actuality’. These are more than problematical expressions on account of their intimate contradiction of terms. But those who agree with weak thinking could object that the objection reﬂects an old and outworn logic. Heidegger considers the search for truth in accordance with the classical methods – one, stable and unassailable truth – a violence against the passage of time and against the healthy, and in any case, inevitable instability of things and the transience (fugacity) of events. Nevertheless, he does not forego the possibility of reaching being, but in a manner diﬀerent from the metaphysical approach. He seeks it in the contingent situations that, according to him, present horizon openings towards being – but never towards a foundation or arche´. Adorno reproached him on account of an inevitable collapse of such a being into the existing.18 Heidegger seemed aware of this diﬃculty and sought a way out by replacing the generic happening with the poetic event. In poetry, so he holds, we can grasp ‘‘inaugural openings of being’’. Adorno shares the truth-conveying power of art in general; rather, he postulates the necessity of the aesthetic moment for philosophical search. Very rightly, however, he makes a distinction between the two planes, observing that philosophy cannot assimilate the heterogeneous and the

422

PIERO TRUPIA

contingent. It has to overcome them in the contemplation of the true beyond the transient that reveals the verum-clarum of the existing (beings, things). That is the task of art. Art is negation of the factual existence as such, the existing-facts, and philosophy, with the aesthetic approach, is re-visitation of art in its aspiration to ﬁnd the true as claritas. A re-visitation that is not absorption. Let us therefore say, by way of summary, that Heidegger’s radical thought does not lose sight of the need for or desirability of some reconstruction of the unitary sense of the existing. But it is de facto impossible to ﬁnd in his analyses of actuality and – albeit later – of poetry any place where that opening of the horizon to being of which he speaks is eﬀectively thematized and described. Even less justiﬁed seems to be his identiﬁcation of Western metaphysics from Plato onwards as originating the alienating science and technology of the present age. The terminology adopted by the later Heidegger is obscure, not always because it is profound, but rather because it is indeﬁnite and ambiguously polysemantic. At the very most, it can be accepted as a research programme or a set of hypothesis. But neither he nor his disciples and followers ever developed it further. In ‘Identity and Diﬀerence’ he aﬃrms that in the Gestell (the disposition of society and the world following the indiscriminate use of technology) we can note a ﬁrst ﬂashing of the Ereignis, namely the new event that reveals being beyond its traditional metaphysical conﬁguration. He gives an explanation of it, but once again, this could be, at the very best, a research programme. If everything becomes event, the exception of consciousness becomes cancelled. Indeed, Heidegger sustains: ‘‘man and world lose the characteristics assigned to them by metaphysics: their mutual position of subject and object’’.19 Would this be a recognition of the absolute ontological value of the indistinct? A denunciation of the deceit of the many, mere ﬂeeting appearance of the eternal one? We simply do not know. Though he maintains Heidegger as his reference, Gianni Vattimo admits that ‘‘the indication of this page is very summary and schematic’’. He considers this failure to develop the theme ‘‘an essential lacuna of Heidegger’s thought’’ and he therefore concludes that the only possible conjecture in connection with this Ereignis beyond being is that it ‘‘it does not give itself as being, but eventualizes itself.’’20 Plays on words, as we can see, not up to Wittgenstein’s linguistic games.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN PAINTING

423

THE DENIAL OF DE CHIRICO

A real event of historic importance in the days of Heidegger was not grasped by him and almost certainly remained unknown to him or, if it was known, was neglected by him. I am referring to the metaphysical painting of De Chirico and Carra`. Here I have limited myself to De Chirico. De Chirico fully lived his day and age and was imbued by contemporary philosophy. He did not come across Heidegger; but he felt the fascination of the twofold nihilism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and set out to give an account of it in his painting. Happily, however, he failed to be coherent with his intentions. In his lived experiences there coexists the sense of nothingness, due to the lack of the mythological grands re´cits, and the sense of mystery, which resists and hides the truth. Hence the three diﬀerent planes of his pictorial representation. A proscenium of the denial (of sense, of unity); a scene at middle distance that a wall separates from the proscenium, a horizon and a sky where the light dominates to assert the sense and the unity of being. His language cannot therefore be anything other than the humanist language of Italian art from Giotto to Piero della Francesca: clear, luminous, deﬁnite. De Chirico is not inﬂuenced by the linguistic-discursive fragmentations of the cubism and expressionism of his day. He intentionally moves in a countercurrent direction and precedes or, rather, inspires the ‘return to order’ movement. The pictorial language of De Chirico peremptorily displays, with a strict and rigorous compositive syntax, the necessary inherence among things. His painting of the second decade is pervaded by a gravitational energy of the sense that links things in space, to the horizon, to verticality. Those things are art because they clearly are part of being. University of Florence (English version by Herbert Garrett) NOTES 1 Chaı¨m Perelman and Lucie Olbrecht-Tyteca, T raite´ de l’Argumentation. L a Nouvelle Rhe´torique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958). 2 Maria Luisa Dalla Chiara Scabia, L ogica (Milan: Mondadori, 1979). 3 Angelo Marchese, Metodi e Prove Strutturali (Milan: Principato, 1979), p. 101 et seq. 4 Achille Bonito Oliva, Introduzione al Catalogo di T ransavanguardia, Exhibition at Rivoli Castle (November 2001–March 2002, Turin) (Milan: Electa, 2001).

424

PIERO TRUPIA

5 Angela Ales Bello, ‘‘The Function of Intentionality and the Function of Creativity. AnnaTeresa Tymieniecka and Edmund Husserl: a Confrontation’’, in Analecta Husserliana (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers), to be published. 6 Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Creative Impulse and the Aesthetic Discourse of the Arts‘‘ in T he Aesthetic Discourse of the Arts, Breaking the Barriers, Analecta Husserliana XLI (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000). 7 Jean Paul Sartre, L a Nause´e (Paris: Folio-Gallimard, 1938), p. 181. 8 Igor Stravinskij, Poetica della Musica (Pordenone: Studio Tesi, 1991 (1945)), p. 40. 9 Thomas Aquinas, ‘‘Summa Theologiae’’ in T abula Aurea, 1° q. 39, 8e; 2-2, q. 145, 2e. 10 Christian Norbert Schulz, Genius L oci. Paesaggio, Ambiente, Architettura (Milan: Electa, 1992 (1979)), p. 166. 11 Igor Stravinskij, op. cit., p. 21. 12 Ibid., p. 21. 13 Franz Roh, Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus, Probleme der Neuesten Europa¨ischen Malerei (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1925). 14 Carlo Carra`, Pittura Metaﬁsica (Milan: Valecchi, 1919), p. 81. 15 ‘‘... Se noi siamo ﬁgure / di specchio che un soYo conduce / senza spessore ne´ suono, / pure il mondo d’intorno / non e` fermo ma scorrente parete / dipinta, ingannevole gioco, / equivoco d’ombre e barbagli / di forme che chiamano e / negano un senso – simile all’interno schermo, al turbinio che ci prende / se gli occhi chiudiamo ...’’, Lucio Piccolo, Gioco a Nascondere. Canti Barocchi (Milan: Mondadori, 1960), p. 12. 16 Paul Zanker, ‘‘De Chirico e la Tristezza delle Statue‘‘, ed. Ester Coen, Metaﬁsica, catalogue of the exhibition bearing the same name in the stables of the Quirinal Palace (November 2003–January 2004, Rome) (Milan: Electa, 2003), p. 130. 17 ‘‘Ich wandle unter Menschen als unter Bruchstu¨cken / der Zukunft: jener Zukunft die ich schaue. / Und das ist all mein Dichten und T rachten, dass ich / in Eins dichte und zusammen trage, was Bruchstu¨ck ist / und Ra¨thsel und grauser Zufall. / Und wie ertru¨ge ich es Mensch zu sein, / wenn der Mensch nicht auch Dichter und Ra¨thselrather und Erlo¨ser / des Zufalls wa¨re?’’ Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo. W ie man wird, was man ist, Vol. 6, G. Colli and M. Montinari (eds.) (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1999), p. 348. 18 Theodor Adorno, Dialettica Negativa (Turin: Einaudi, 1966). 19Martin Heidegger, Identita` e DiVerenza, 1957, re-published in Aut Aut , 1982, Nos. 187–188. 20 Gianni Vattimo, ‘‘Impressionismo Sociologico’’, in Micromega, No. 4. (1990): 83–95.

SEMIHA AKINCI

ON GUISES, CONCEPTS AND RELATED TOPICS

One of Frege’s most important contributions to – a certain kind of – recent philosophy has been the interplay he demonstrated as holding between language and thought, thus giving contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy ‘‘the linguistic turn’’. Objects of thought, topics, are taken to be extra-mental, objective entities which are the meanings of, and so accessible only through, linguistic expressions. The type – token distinction is taken for granted, often tacitly. One can have the same sentence on diﬀerent pages of a document, or on diﬀerent lines of the same page. Putting the matter this way is loose talk, evidently: one can have diﬀerent tokens of the same sentence type occurring on diﬀerent locations of the same document. Here again, the document type is intended, but most of what is true about the type is true of all its tokens. Not only linguistic expressions are types which have tokens: the same type of car can have tens of thousands of tokens on the road, all built according to the same plan, determining the type of which they are tokens. Helen’s cat and Eileen’s cat may be of the same type, meaning kind in this context. Tokens of the same type exemplify the same type: all their basic, identiﬁcatory characteristics are common. One of the pair of notions to be elucidated herein is the type-token pair. There follow a series of meaning customisations, in the course of which much of the objective of this paper, displaying suggested interconnections between the meanings so determined, will also be achieved. Entities which do not contain nested entities of the same sort are simple, those which do are compound. Thus intensional assertions like ‘‘SA believes that honesty pays’’, which contains the nested assertion ‘‘Honesty pays’’, is a compound assertion, hence a compound entity. Likewise the description ‘‘the colour of the Mediterranean at sunset’’ contains the nested description ‘‘The Mediterranean at sunset’’, so is a compound description. Entities which somehow call to mind other entities are signifying entities, those which do not are subsistent (self-subsistent) entities. One kind of signifying entity that which signiﬁes diﬀerent things to diﬀerent people in virtue of diﬀerent relations they have to them, such as private memories. They shall be called semiotic signiﬁers. Linguistic entities signify the same thing to all speakers of some language, and what it is they properly 425 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 425–438. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

426

SEMIHA AKINCI

signify may be determined with recourse to dictionaries (or expert users) of some language, in principle open for learning by anybody. They shall be said to have semantic signiﬁcation. Some semantically signifying entities are elements of some speciﬁc language: they have ﬁxed signiﬁcation derived from what is called ‘‘knowing the language’’ in question. Not all signiﬁers which have semantical signiﬁcance are languagebound, however: the meanings of linguistic expressions are independent of any speciﬁc language. ‘‘Cat’’, ‘‘Ka¨tze’’ and ‘‘Chat’’ all have the same meaning, which, loosely said, is the same class of animals.1 Thus meanings of expressions are one sort of signiﬁer which signiﬁes independently of any speciﬁc language. Some linguistic entities are self-contained, having no variables for speciﬁcation by entities of other linguistic sorts: proper names, singular descriptions and simple assertions are self-contained. Their meaning does not need the invocation of other linguistic entities to become complete. Intensional contexts are expressed by incomplete sentences, which have variable(s) for other sentences. ‘‘SA believes that ...’’ can be ﬁlled out with various sentences. Not every sentence makes the whole sentence true, but every proper sentence is a candidate for substitution for the sentence, assertion, variable occurring in the mentioned intensional context. In logic the intensional context would be written ‘‘SA believes that (x)’’, where x is a sentence variable. Meanings of expressions which involve variables essentially2 are incomplete signifying entities. Descriptions, except singular descriptions, involve variables essentially; their variables stand for singular entities. Thus ‘‘y is an elderly gentleman, father of three grown children’’ is a (non-singular) description, where the variable y is open to substitution by proper names of human beings.3 Thus variables indicate the sorts of entities that may complete the meaning of the expressions which contain them, to which their meaning may be applied. Meanings of linguistic expressions have lacunae in place of the variables they are the meanings of. The meaning of the binary predicate ‘‘x is greater than y’’ is the binary relation , where a and b need to be completed not by names of entities, but the meanings of those names. Meaning is the general name of any one of the various mappings from linguistic expressions (‘linex(es)’ hereafter) to either ontic or mental entities. Ontic entities are independent of any or all minds: the linex ‘ontic entity entirely unthought of, never entertained by any mind’ makes perfectly good sense. Mental entities are brief episodes in the consciousness

ON GUISES, CONCEPTS AND RELATED TOPICS

427

of particular people to which the mind in question belongs. They cease being when their mental agent ceases thinking of or entertaining them, and, as episodes, are non-recurring: one can have diﬀerent mental entities directed toward the same ontic object occurring in diﬀerent minds [a number of agents thinking of the same topic] or in the same mind on diﬀerent occasions [thinking of the same thing again and again], but no mental episode can occur either in diﬀerent minds or on diﬀerent occasions.4 Mental episodes have been called ‘ideas’ since Descartes, but the usage has been – quite conveniently – ambiguous between meaning mental episode or the topic of a mental episode, so it may be best to avoid using the – vulgarised, if you like – word altogether. In my usage topics and objects do not coincide: the images under the appropriate meaning mapping of incomplete linexes are not objects in the ontological sense, although perfectly good objects of thought. To avoid this ambiguity I suggest calling objects of thought, what can be thought of, entertained in mental episodes, topics. The meanings of all linexes, those which do as well as those which do not, involve variables, are topics.5 Of course, mental episodes are themselves topics, but a measure of intricacy is at stake in saying so.6 Three basic meaning mappings are countenanced, one for each sort of – complete – linex: proper names, predicates, and atomic sentences. The meaning of proper names are individuals, those of predicates are properties, and those of sentences are statements. [Thus while sentences pertain to speciﬁc languages, statements are independent of any language: they are not linexes but ontic entities.8] Statements are what is understood by minds, irrespective of the language the corresponding sentence is framed in, when some sentence is understood.9 Meanings of compound linexes are functions of their simple components, determined, in the case of usual languages, with recourse to loosely determined rules picked up during the course of learning some language, or, in the case of mathematics and logic, through explicitly enunciated – recursive – rules of interpretation. The sense-mapping maps meanings to their intensions, the reference function to their extensions. The intensions of an individual are the collection of guises by means of which that individual is known publicly: this usually includes at least the names of mother, father and birthplace of that individual, in the case of human members of societies which constitute the relevant bodies public. In most cases, the intension of an individual may well be unspeciﬁable, as in the case of unknown10 individuals. People acquire intensions, new guises, as they achieve fame – good

428

SEMIHA AKINCI

or bad – in their relative societies. Fictive characters, as well as mathematical entities, are individuated only through the various guises they instantiate, but may have a greater wealth of guises than mortals. Hamlet has more guises attached to him then SA does. Numbers have inﬁnitely many guises: the number two is describable as 1+1, 3−1, 4−2, etc. ‘Two’ is the proper name of the individual which bears all these guises.11 Guises are the sense of non-singular descriptions. Non-singular descriptions consist of a – not ordered – sequence of properties, the sense of predicates all of which have lacunae for the same – ordered – sequence of object(s). Thus a guise is a plurality of properties all applying to the same thing.12 While a sequence of properties is additive, in that new properties may be added or extracted without aﬀecting any other member the sequence in question, guises do not analyse into their constituent properties, since the identity condition on the permissible substitutions for their lacunae will be annulled during such analysis. The guise First feminine president of The Republic of Turkey, which has no bearers, will not analyse into the properties Feminine and President of Turkey, both of which do have bearers. It is the condition of simultaneous bearing which diﬀerentiates the guise from its constituent properties. A number of properties in conjunction is not yet a guise, unless the identity condition on their instances is put into eﬀect. Similarly, a number of guises cannot be appended: a new guise will emerge with the satisfaction of the unifying condition, although bearers of the new guise will bear all properties constitutive of either of the former guises. Such new guises, deﬁned by retaining all properties constitutive of guise G plus the additional property P , all put on the same spit, ﬁguratively, n n+1 will be an extension, G , of G .13 For example the guise EQUILATERAL n+1 n TRIANGLE is an extension of the guise TRIANGLE , whose constitutive properties are ‘plane ﬁgure’, ‘straight-edged’, ‘three-sided’, ‘having internal angles adding to a half-circle’, etc., along with the additional property ‘having sides all of equal length’. That this guise and the one deﬁnitory of ‘equi-angular triangle’ are guises of the same concept was among the earliest discoveries of geometry. References of descriptions are the collection of guises such that some – non-void14 – set of entities bear, instantiate, all guises in that collection. These references are concepts described by each of the guises in the relevant collection. Any two guises of the same concept are equal, which means they have the same reference (referents). Concepts are not epistemically accessible save through the guises they bear, so may be described only as that concept which such-and-such a guise describes. Thus the

ON GUISES, CONCEPTS AND RELATED TOPICS

429

concept having the proper name ‘Two’ can be comprehended only as the third entry in the series of natural numbers, or as the ﬁrst (only?) even prime, or as the generator of the ring of even naturals, etc. This observation is of momentous importance for epistemology, but elaboration has to be postponed. A second distinction pertinent to meanings of descriptions is the connotation–denotation distinction:15 the connotation of a description is the set of properties which are the senses of the constitutive predicates of that description, thus, a simple – additive – set of properties. The denotation is the set of things to which all properties constituting its connotation apply, are instantiated by.16 Non-void connotations may yield void denotations, as in the description ‘‘Male oﬀspring of mule parents’’, or ‘‘Closed rectilinear ﬁgure having internal angles totaling 240 degrees’’.17 An easily remembered diﬀerence between sense and connotation is that senses of descriptions are structured from a collection of properties, all of which apply to the same thing(s), whereas the constituent properties of connotations need not apply to anything, let alone the same thing as other properties in the connotation. Similarly, a salient diﬀerence between reference and denotation is that void denotations are quite common, whereas only contradictory descriptions have no reference.18 In order to point out another diﬀerence between reference and denotation, still another distinction commonly invoked in recent literature (of the Fregean orientation) is that between Platonic entities and transient entities.19 Platonic entities, it is stipulated, are entirely exempt of any sort of process: becoming, change or decay. They are not in the space-time continuum. Examples are mathematical objects, such as numbers or kinds of geometrical ﬁgures. Transient entities occur in ﬁnite intervals of spacetime: they have beginnings and ends, and change within those intervals. Monica Lewinsky, The Niagra Falls and Saturn, a satellite of our Sun, are examples. For brevities sake, Platonic entities shall be called ‘Plents ’ and transient entities ‘T rents’. References are concepts, which are paradigmatically plents, whereas denotata may well be trents. The contention that guises, concepts, properties, and conceptual structures such as theories or works of ﬁction, are plents, so exempt of temperospatial speciﬁcation, appears to conﬂict with the observation that all such entities evidently do have beginnings at least, and, quite credibly, ends as well. In the case of theories and works of ﬁction one most often can determine the date at which it came to being,20 and there would almost certainly be entirely forgotten conceptual structures, which may be a paraphrase for saying that they have passed from being. If some mysteri-

430

SEMIHA AKINCI

ous relation between the initiation of concepts and the activity of minds, singly or in tandem, is countenanced, the platonic hypothesis turns out to be indefeasible, since minds are bound at least to temporal intervals.21 The objection platonists raise against this criticism is relevant to grasping the import of the platonist position. The diﬀerence, they say, between ontic and epistemic facts are therein overlooked: concepts and conceptual structures do not come to being through the mediation of mental activity, they only come to be recognised, to be known, thereby. As members of a hitherto unknown species of apes – living in the Artic, say – would not have been summarily created at the time they were discovered, just so, concepts are not created by mental activity engaged in at a certain time: the are discovered then. Their timeless being has no locus either, strictly speaking, but Plato put into Socrates’ mouth the ﬁction that they resided in an everlasting realm, where perfect originals, the concepts, of everything known – or will ever be known, the more technically oriented platonist would contend – reside. Regrettably corrupted, warped images of these eternal prototypes cast ﬂickering shadows into this base realm of generation and degeneration, thus brieﬂy imposing a knowable garb, a network of guises, upon its multifarious paraphernalia.22 Another way of delineating the diﬀerence between plents and trents originates with Aristotle, who did not use the distinction in this context,23 however. Objects change internally if some guise which they formerly exempliﬁed no longer applies to them, i.e., they no longer exemplify that guise. Because of the identity of object condition, internal change induces alteration in the collection of concepts an object exempliﬁes, along with the guises in question. This is because the collection of guises pulled together by that concept will have altered whenever any guise so pulled together fails to apply to the unifying object. [Thus the concept identifying Venus would alter if Venus were to fail to be visible in the evening horizon.] Also, Aristotle agreed with common opinion in holding that if one guise failed to apply to some object undergoing internal change, another, complimentary, guise would begin to be instantiated, so the concept pulled together by the objects in question would alter in that way as well. This approach requires granting that object are identiﬁed not through their concepts, which may alter independently of the object, but through their proper names.24 External change does not alter any guises an object exempliﬁes, does not alter any property pertaining to it. Instead, that object comes to be, or passes from being, qua that object. The proper name which previously named some object no longer names any object at all; that object has

ON GUISES, CONCEPTS AND RELATED TOPICS

431

passed from being, although its space-time curve may be – always is, in the case of trents – continuous with that of some other object, which has come to be at that point of space-time. External change induces destruction and creation of objects en bloc, whereas internal change involves alteration of some sort in the same object.25 Thus birth and death are occasions of external change for human beings, while lumps of matter allegedly undergo no change at all, internal nor external.26 Equipped with this distinction, one may say trents sustain both internal as well as external change, whereas plents support only external change. The date at which theories and literary works came to being are, in most cases, quite dependably known, so there is no denying they do come to be. Created by minds, jointly in the case of theories, singly in the case of the beaux arts,27 structured plents do have beginnings, that appears undeniable. What about unstructured, simple ones, such as single properties? I can count at least twenty simple predicates, such as being a video recorder, an air conditioner, a skin ﬂick, dying in the gas chamber, boarding a jumbo jet, etc., which have come to circulation in the twentieth century, so I do not see any diﬀerence on that count.28 Do plents pass from being as well? That would necessitate at the very least that they be totally and irretrievably forgotten, and if that did happen, we would be barred for evermore of knowing so. Hence the question cannot be decidedly answered in the aﬃrmative, there being no examples to cite. It would appear reasonable to suppose, however, that such a fate may well befall some plents.29 Plents resist any sort of tampering, on the other hand. The nauseating profusion of contemporary versions of Shakespearian dramas has not, thankfully, altered them one whit: other, new, crap has been produced. Mistakes, or ad lib’s, cropping up during some performances of some drama, by no means aﬀect the drama itself, any more than CP patients aﬀect the concept of man, of human being. Performances are instances of dramas; what concepts faulty instances misrepresent is evident, perhaps even highlighted, in defective instances. And even the instances evince no alteration at all in the corresponding conceptual entities: when black swans were admitted to the language, the former, all-white concept was not changed. Rather, a new, more encompassing, concept was forged and admitted to concepthood. Similarly the integers were not forged by altering the natural numbers, they were deﬁned quite anew, although making reference to the naturals, but also to the addition operation and the concept of zero. All this I propose as reasons for granting that plents do sustain change, but only external change I submit that this retains what

432

SEMIHA AKINCI

is credible in platonic teaching, while rounding oﬀ the sharp edges of religious fanaticism. A distinction more or less mirroring the external vs. internal change division holds between properties: a property is a necessary property of an object if that object would fail to be itself if it lost, no longer exempliﬁed, the property in question, e.g., ‘alive’ and ‘viviparous’ are essential properties of every human being. All properties of plents are deﬁnitory, so necessary, properties. The contrast is with accidental properties, those the object may acquire or lose while retaining its self-identity. Being obese and having a good memory are accidental properties of some human beings: people do not lose their identity on growing senile and losing most short term memories – although the popular view that they cease to be ‘‘quite themselves’’ has some pathetic truth to it. Necessary properties pertain to all specimens of a certain species, are distinguishing, deﬁnitory marks characterising their bearers as specimens of the relevant species, while accidental properties may or may not belong to specimens. So necessary properties are not only necessary for the identity of individuals, but also for membership in their identifying species. Alteration in any necessary property induces external change, whereas alteration of accidental properties induces internal change. Plents sustain only external change; is there anything which sustains only internal changes? The entire universe, taken as a single unique entity, appears to be a likely candidate. If it ceased to be, receded totally from being, emptiness would replace it. If, however, vast portions of the universe consist of emptiness, without therefore receding from being totally, why would the entire universe so recede, if it were to be transformed into total emptiness? Coming to be has to occur some place in the universe, so the entire universe cannot have come to be ab vacuo either, which means it can sustain neither alternative of external change. Galaxies may come and go, but it is conceptually impossible for entire universes to come and go. Every process of change is internal w.r.t. the entire universe. So no property is necessary to it either: any sort of change is permissible. The entire universe may well be the physical locus of all compossible worlds. Do individuals, trent or plent, instantiate only one concept, the manifold of all guises they sustain, or can some instantiate more than one concept? Since concepts are balls of guises wrapped around the same individual, it stands to reason to assume there would not be guises left to constitute diﬀerent concepts of the same individual: all its guises would be wrapped around the same concept, the concept of that individual. While this is indeed the case ontically, it is not the case epistemically: not

ON GUISES, CONCEPTS AND RELATED TOPICS

433

all the guises which in fact pertain to the same object are known30 to pertain to the same object. One has to know some arithmetic and some geometry to decide that the ﬁfth root of the fourth power of the ﬁrst prime is the ratio of the diagonal of a square to its side. And telescopes were required to discover that the Evening Star is the Morning Star. An unlikely mishap revealed to his neighbours that Dr. Jekyll is Mr. Hyde. As in the last example, people may have diﬀerent concepts of the same individual, whom they do not know to be the same individual. This is a good explanation of how identity may be discovered: that diﬀerent clumps of guises are in fact wrapped around, sustained by, the same individual, may not be known prior to a certain date, a certain occasion, but discovered after that date. By the same token, it may be that a clump of guises are assumed to be wrapped around some individual, without there being such an individual. This may happen not only for concepts of trents, but of plents as well: THE NEXT LARGEST REAL NUMBER AFTER p and THE IMMEDIATE SUCCESSOR OF THE QUOTIENT OF THE DIAMETER OF A CIRCLE TO ITS RADIUS are guises which evidently pertain to the

same individual, if any, but there is no such individual. This separation of concepts from any instances, trents or plents alike, is what makes ﬁction possible, but also basic error. The phlogiston concept was indeed a concept, a bundle of guises pulled together by theory, but there was nothing of which it was a concept. The application of a mathematical theory consists, quite succinctly, in ﬁnding a manifold of objects which the relevant theory conceptualises, is a concept of. Pure mathematics is indeed kindred to ﬁction in this respect, but surprisingly many allegedly pure theories have turned out to be interpretable, to be modelled by, several diﬀerent domains. In contrast, no work of ﬁction has been lived through verbatim; indeed, the whole point to writing ﬁction is to describe livable episodes more interesting than the real thing is. What other justiﬁcation is there for the imagination? Sets are collections of things, all of which bear a property – or more – in common. Several remarks are important in this connection: (1) this bearing relation is timeless, so, in the case of sets of trents, ought to be read as ‘‘ever did bear, bears presently, or ever will bear’’; thus Jesus is a Jew, not was, and Cleopatra is a wanton woman. Of course, this is so because the properties mentioned are among the identiﬁcatory, i.e., necessary, properties of the said individuals. The lesson to be taken from this observation is that set founding properties ought to be necessary properties of all members of the set they found, otherwise alteration in set

434

SEMIHA AKINCI

populations will have to be countenanced, and this appears to go against the grain of settled semantics concerning sets. (2) Hamlet and Diana’s former husband are not members of the same set of princes: Hamlet is a ﬁctive prince, Charles, a genuine one. Fictive objects do bear properties in common with the real things, but the corresponding sets are distinguished: Pegasus is neither a member of the set of horses nor of the set of ﬂying animals, only of the set of mythical creatures. Otherwise one would countenance ﬂying horses, which is again contrary to accepted usage. So ﬁctive things call for sets having member of their own kind.32 Finally (3) sets themselves are plents, irrespective of the ontic status of their members. This is why they can change neither their population nor properties of any members. Thus the last president of the USA to hold oﬃce in the twentieth century will evermore remain a member of the set of Monica victims (?), no matter whether Hilary reforms, divorces or murders her husband. One may say membership-inducing properties are those which stick with their members, gluon properties, borrowing a word from microphysics. These remarks hold for guises and concepts as well, so will not be repeated. Kinds are extensions of guises, i.e., sets of things each exemplifying the same guise. If new properties of some epistemically accessible members of a certain kind are later discovered, this property may be taken account of by deﬁning an extension of the guise founding the former kind, by adding on the new property. In history this has taken place most frequently in cases where new procedures, formerly unavailable to people, have been put into currency for determining formerly undetectable properties, such as those depending on new means or methods of measurement or observation, or both.33 Thus the property of having RNA molecules of a certain structure, and a certain number of genes, are today taken as constituting the most basic properties of manhood, but the former discriminatory characteristics of that kind, such as having superior intelligence – compared to the beasts – or being born of human parents, are not ignored for all that. Specimens having the right RNA structure may nevertheless be ruled, if not non-human, certainly sub-human, for lack of intelligence, and specimens not born of human parents will not be considered to be human at all, regardless of RNA or gene structure. This is a semantical conclusion of the ruling that all examples of a certain guise will have all constitutive properties together. In fact, the decision to put the new property on the same spit, with the former ones rests not on the certainty that those properties will, in fact, always go together, but on the conviction that the new property is one

ON GUISES, CONCEPTS AND RELATED TOPICS

435

which all members of the former kind do posses as a matter of constitution. The suggested extension of the kind-founding guise is not entirely an ontic novelty, only an epistemic one: justice is being done, to the explication of the genuine founding properties of the kind in question, by articulating, via the extended guise, the structure kind members have in common. It is because a guise is the fundamental component of a kind that the contention that all members will have all founding properties in common is unassailable: the very deﬁnition of being a kind guarantees dependability of such universal generalisation, a guarantee no amount of ‘‘repeated observation of conduction of occurrence could possibly provide. The consequence of putting into eﬀect the suggestion to extend the fundamental guise of a certain kind by appending certain other properties to its founding guise is a semantic one, more generally, a decision eﬀected and upheld, albeit tacitly, by the intelligentsia of a certain era.34 Before this suggestion is endorsed there is no tenuously entertained hypothesis of universal ‘‘constant conjunction’’ of the new property and the former ones: there is only the report that several members of that kind have the new property as well. This report is put together with the information, strictly semantic in nature, that all members of a kind will have all their basic, necessary properties in common. The questionable point, at that stage, is whether the new property is indeed basic to the kind in question; this point is most often sought in rational reasons, such as those deriving from structural considerations, or from use of similar kind words.35 It is on the force of such rational reasons that the suggestion to recognise the new property as fundamental for that kind is accepted or rejected. Once accepted, of course, the generalisation asserting the constant conjunction of the new property with the former ones is no longer at all tenuous: it is ﬁrmly grounded in the meaning of the name for that kind. At neither side of this demarcation point is there a period of uncertainty, of inductive anticipation; the interim process is one of discussion, of evaluation of the suggestion in question; whatever else is involved, further examination of other specimens of that kind certainly is not: no scientist takes an eternity inducing more and more examples. Some sort of mental operation described by the English Empiricists – in a most disillusioning, uninspired fashion – as induction may indeed take place in the minds of some members of this group in ﬂeeting moments; even so, this observation concerning personal mental psychology has been re-considered, re-worded, re-cast, re-hashed so often that

436

SEMIHA AKINCI

never again taking it up, save as a vexing page of history, will only be for the best. Anadolu University NOTES 1 In the sequel several sorts of meaning mappings shall be suggested; the present remarks hold for values of all these diﬀerent mappings. 2 I.e., unbound. Bound variables are not variables at all, but are ingredients of a way of making general assertions. 3 Substitution by other expressions do not yield false assertions, but non-assertions, quasiexpressions devoid of meaning; semantically, though not syntactically, ill-formed. 4 This is part of the rules of use for the linex ‘episode’. 5 Whatever else are topics is not of much concern to this sort of [technical?] philosophy, although hordes of other candidates have been suggested in the literature since Descartes; to whom we are in debt for botching things so badly, a whole genre of explicatory philosophy became necessary to clean the mess up. 6 In becoming a topic, the episode has to be described by some linexes, and so becomes an intransient thing, the value of some meaning mapping. As all topics, topics in which episodes are so nested are public and intemporal: thoughts are rendered immortal by being asserted. 7 I.e., those which do not involve the occurrence of any connectives or quantiﬁers, or words having these functions in ordinary languages. 8 They are, however, mapped into situations by the sense mapping, and into conditions by the reference mapping. This stipulation induces that senses and references of linexes having the same meaning in diﬀerent languages have some common value, have the same sense, and, subject to reservations, the same reference: they are meaning-equal, and their common meaning is the statement they signify. 9 Thus diﬀerent sentences of the same language may make the same statement as well: e.g., ‘‘Othello and Desdemona are married’’, ‘‘Othello and Desdemona are man and wife’’, ‘‘Othello and Desdemona are bound in wedlock’’, ‘‘Desdemona is Othello’s wife’’ and ‘‘Othello is Desdemona’s husband’’ are ﬁve diﬀerent sentences, all of which make the same statement. 10 One cannot be said to know any bird one has encountered in ﬂight, say. One knows, properly speaking, only those individuals one can somehow describe, and then the guise which is the sense of that individual is the one speciﬁed by that identifying description. 12 One can have guises which are restricted, in virtue of their – semantic – constitution, to applying to only one individual at a time, but not guises which uniquely specify a particular individual, as proper names do. Thus the guise President of the Republic of T urkey having served in the T wentieth Century may, by dint of the semantics attaching to ‘President’, describe only one person at a time, but describes seven people successively. Feminine president of the Republic of T urkey is a perfectly good guise, but applies to nobody. 13 Husserl argued that all Frege’s deﬁnitions become true propositions when one substitutes the concept to be deﬁned with their extensions in Analecta Husserliana XXX, p. 85. 14 Fictive characters are not taken to be members of the null set, in this context; only entities accessible through contradictory descriptions are considered as having void – so

ON GUISES, CONCEPTS AND RELATED TOPICS

437

identical – reference, though diﬀering in sense. Thus Aida, to which the guises Guest and rival of Amneris, betrothed to Rhadames; Daughter of an Etophian Ruler; Beloved of Rhadames, an Egyptian prince; Buried alive with her lover on Amneris’ prompting, etc., is a concept. Authors of ﬁction, scientists, philosophers, statesmen, brieﬂy, creative men of thought, have this in common: they bequeath new concepts, new topics of comprehension, to mankind. 15 Frege countenanced contradictory concepts, asking ‘‘If there were no such objects (of thought), how could we decide they did not have being?’’. An answer is herein oﬀered: we grasp them through their sense. Although guises are bona ﬁde objects, they are not, of course, the objects which instantiate them; hence it is not nonsensical, as Frege appears to suggest, to say some guises have no instances, are not wrapped around any concepts. 16 Since Mill, whom this terminology originated from, did not know the mathematical notion of a variable, these concepts are much simpler, more pedestrian than, Frege’s pair. Confounding of the two pairs is a peccadillo often encountered in the literature, so readers ought to be forewarned. 17 With justice to Frege, one does need to know the connotation of a description to decide it has no denotation, an observation which raises the doubt that Frege himself was not that keenly aware of the diﬀerence between reference and denotation. 18 The description preceding note 14 above is contradictory, however, it contradicts the axioms of the Stoicheia, granted to be true. 19 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka draws a distinction between the Platonic/NeoPlatonic notion of ideas – which are thought to exist in eternity as archetypes and from which the mutable world proceeds in Analecta Husserliana, 2000b, L ogos and L ife, p. 111. 20 Quite precisely, in fact, for published works, less so for earlier ones, but some date can be determined, even for orally transmitted epics, etc. 21 To spatial speciﬁcations as well, if minds are taken to be bodily functions. 22 In monotheistic religious teaching, the reﬂecting light is taken to be God, who rules all there is in His wisdom. He cannot have created the conceptual realm, however, since creation implies a point in time, before which that realm had no being. So God cannot alter that realm in any way either. Since alteration also implies temporal succession, he has to rest content with acting the Demiourgos platonic teaching endorses. This conclusion has disturbed clergy and philosophers alike, not least the Spinoza, who envisaged God as the natura naturens , from which changing nature emanated as natura naturata. A. N. Whitehead was not far wrong in saying that all – later – philosophy was a series of footnotes to Plato. This goes for the work on guises as well. 23 He made the distinction to substantiate his claim that no change proper took place in the super-lunar realm, although motion was undeniable. 24 This is a major point of diﬀerence between Aristotles and Frege, a rift which divides many other philosophers as well. 25 This way of putting the matter makes it easier to see how spatio-temporal change would also be considered external change in a context where only uniform properties are recognised. I prefer to say the environment undergoes internal change under those circumstances, not objects singly. Thus if I go senile in due course, I will have undergone internal change, but if I retain all former characteristics during some interval, only the relevant segment of time will have altered – as evinced, admittedly, by internal changes in other components of that interval. 26 What if they fall into black holes? 27 Is this justiﬁcation enough for claiming that philosophy is a branch of the beaux arts as well?

438

SEMIHA AKINCI

28 Adamant platonists hold that such basic moral concepts as JUSTICE or BENEVOLENCE are eternal, but of course they do sustain change in tandem with the structure of the societies in which they are used: cruciﬁcation would not be an acceptable way of issuing justice in contemporary society. 29 I have in mind operas by Meyerbeer, perilously close to the brink. 30 Relative to a locus in space-time, to a social group living in that interval, if objective knowledge is at stake, but also relative to some minds, if subjective knowing is meant. ‘Knowledge’ is much too frequently used as if these ramiﬁcations were quite irrelevant, so it may be for the better to allude to them in passing. 31 Sets are most often used in mathematical contexts, where trents are not in consideration. But set speak has spilled over to contexts in which trents are mentioned, so I feel the above cautionary remarks are in order. 32 What is going on in this context is partly explication of settled usage, partly semantic legislation; not even I can suggest percentages, but such meaning explication cum legislation has been a standard device of philosophy since its inception. 33 These remarks hold primarily for trents, and for the period around and after the Renaissance, but not exclusively so. Thus the algebraic properties of the conic sections have been discovered, and tacked onto their deﬁnitory properties, only after the inception of analytic geometry. 34 But for this tacitness, little work would be left for the meaning philosopher, who currently undertakes the task of making such decisions and their consequences explicit, and assuring they ﬁt into some consistent and coherent scheme of thought. There need not be only one such scheme, but there does not appear to be much room for profound variation if a broad spectrum of thoughts, including those of contemporary science, is taken in consideration. 35 That only oﬀspring of parents of the same kind are themselves members of that kind is information instilled in the very semantics of ‘kind’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Analecta Husserliana LXXX. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002 Tymieniecka, A. T. L ogos and L ife: Impetus and Equipoise in the L ife-Strategies of Reason. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000b. Boolas, G. ‘‘Saving Frege From Contradiction’’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 87 (1986/87): 137–151. Currie, G. Frege: An Introduction to His Philosophy. Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1982. Frege, G. ‘‘On Sense and Nominatum’’. In H. Feigl and W. Sellars (eds.), Readings in Philosophical Analysis. New York: Appleton-Century Croft, 1947. ——. ‘‘The Thought.’’ Beitrage zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus 1, (1918): 58–77. ——. ‘‘On Sense and Denotation.’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r Philosophie und Philosophische kritik, C, (1892): 25–50 ——. Basic L aws of Arithmetic. Sena: Verlag Hermann Pohle, vol. 1 (1893), vol. 2 (1903). Sluga, H. Gottlob Frege. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Wright, C. Frege’s Conception of Numbers as Objects. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983.

KIYMET SELVI

CURRICULUM OF PRIMARY SCHOOL SCIENCE

INTRODUCTION

The role of education is to improve an individual’s capacity by means of taking consideration of his information, concepts, beliefs and values. Dewey, Frobele, Rousseau, Maslow, Rogers, Esiner and Combs gave greater attention to personal needs, interest and values in the curriculum. Curriculum development mainly asserted that the aim of a program is to encourage personal needs and interests. But we also know the aim of the program is limited to the subject and activities in the school and the stress on the group, not to use personal needs and interests. The problem is the lack of direct relation of the organized subject matter to the problems and interests of the learners (Saylor, Alexandre and Lewis, 1981). This is the main problem of education. Educational aims should involve giving attention to students’ educational needs and it should be based on clearly identiﬁed learner needs (Bellon and Handler, 1982). The aim of education should be to analyze or review student needs and progresses. The beginning of scientiﬁc study or scientiﬁc invention that is the history of science is based on ﬁrst hand human experience and observations. Scientiﬁc method tries to test ﬁrst-hand human experience and observation. Students need such experiences in school. Students in primary school don’t like ready-made information that is supplied in isolation from the students’ own experience. This is in line with what is called the ‘‘progressive’’ movement in education. ‘The term education means action, not study. Study is only the begging of education. Study means to know how to understand, to able to do things, and to practice until there are result. Only then can we call this education. This does not mean simply and studying various academic subject’ (Rung, 2000: 100).

SUBJECT-MATTER CURRICULUM IN PRIMARY SCHOOL EDUCATION

The subject is the oldest and most widely accepted form of curriculum organization. The earliest example of the subject-matter organization is in the seven arts, which were present in incipient form in the schools of 439 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 439–450. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

440

KIYMET SELVI

ancient Greece and Rome. The content of the subject-matter curriculum, planned in advance by the teacher or by the writers of the adopted textbook or curriculum, are guides that the teachers follow. Many of the curricular innovations of the 1950s, the new math, audio-lingual foreign languages, and science programs come from subject matter specialists (Oliva, 1988). The subject matter approach focuses on helping learners to acquire and retain information that is scientiﬁc experience in the past. Subject matter curriculum have been developed by listing scientiﬁc facts and interpretations that are the contents of science and which students learn (Saylor, Alexandre and Lewis, 1981). Since every day new information is added to the overall scientiﬁc content, how to choose subjects and why one is more important than another, choosing and arranging science content for science teaching in primary school is diﬃcult. The teacher is the expert in the ﬁeld and is likely to pursue a set of procedures and adopt the textbook for use in the classroom. Subject matter curriculum only organizes subject matter/disciplines, not the needs or interest of learners. In subject matter curriculums, little eﬀort is made to gauge the performance of students in the aﬀective domain, but rather focuses on the cognitive domain. The aim of science education is to understand nature and help people in daily lives. How to understand nature by science education? How to help people in daily life by science education? Subjects in science education explain principles of nature which people have discovered. But this aim is not the only reason for science education diﬃculties. The aim is reﬂective of a general viewpoint of the science curriculum. I do not mean that the curriculum aim doesn’t allow students to progress. The problem of science teaching in the school arises from putting learned materials into practice in the classroom. Teachers teach children the frame of the science curriculum in school, but should ask some questions as follows: Why should we teach science in the primary school? How can we teach science in the primary school? What is the meaning of children’s experiences about science? Why are the children’s experiences about science more important?

The admission that science is supreme in the ﬁeld of knowledge covers the whole ground of human experience. Science subjects teach the students about physics, chemistry, biology and earth science. This subject is connected with both present daily life and the future. Students should prepare

CURRICULUM OF PRIMARY SCHOOL SCIENCE

441

for the future by teaching science, but how? Does school teach the student any science contents? Does the student become aware of some of the problems? How to solve these problems in daily life? Does the student know how to think? Does the student know how to predict in the near or far future? How can students use science in their lives? Science is still taught largely as a separate and isolated subject in daily life. ‘‘This means that pure science would be contaminated if it is brought into connection with social practice’’ (Dewey, 1958: 53). Pure science comes from the past. Text and subject-matter are mostly memorized or tried in school, not in daily life. It is on the ground level that subjectmatter teach the past, what people ﬁnd or do in the science. But the prime need of every student in the science classroom is to have the capacity of seeing problems, to relate facts with their experience, to use and enjoy implementing ideas (Dewey, 1958). Science content includes the facts gathered, the generalization or concepts. ‘‘The logical aspect of subject matter is its organization and is formed by the product of exploration and inquiry in a ﬁeld often abstract and also contents and categories speciﬁc information about the ﬁeld’’ (Walker and Soltis, 1997: 45). But ‘‘children need to understand the knowledge, processes and values of science and how science knowledge is applied within society’’ (Abruscato, 2000: 16). Student’s initial knowledge of the concepts may be constructed from their observations, similar to scientists’ knowledge, but the structures organizing the knowledge are diﬀerent (Minstrell, 1989). The ﬁrst step of the scientiﬁc method begins with an observation which gives direction to collective data in our environment, in the school, in which subjects are called ‘‘practically useful’’. This method aﬀects the development of scientiﬁc understanding (Dewey, 1958). Students should learn the scientiﬁc method of science instead of four or ﬁve units of scientiﬁc history. But the scientiﬁc method and its conclusions have not achieved a fundamentally important place in education. Science is composed of knowledge or understanding and a way of arriving at knowledge. Science teaching in primary school should lead to a deeper understanding of cause and eﬀect relationships, and develop positive attitudes about science. That’s why it is not to be abstract. Some science concepts come from direct experience or observation, and this is the most important for primary school. Primary school science includes these types of concepts because it is not abstract and is easily learned through the child’s experience.

442

KIYMET SELVI

MEANING OF THE STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCE IN SCIENCE EDUCATION

A child’s nature is free, and they need activity. ‘‘The child needs to play, for in play it experiences, continually, with its whole being, and with a never to be regained intensity, but this is prevented by removing the child from its living presence to the world by untoward education as preparation’’ (Vandenberg, 2002: 589). Experience is a term that has acquired varied meaning. Experience of the students explains and answers what the student likes, what they dream, what they want, what they do, what they aim for, what their ideas are about – things essential in education. Experience is the understanding of education accumulated in actual practice as contrasted with knowledge gained by using empirical methods of research in education (Phenomenology world-wide, 2002: 726). It is necessary to release a students’ creative experience in the science classroom. ‘‘Human creativity has the possibility of going beyond the limits of objectivity. Creativity is a process in which pre-intentional forces are at work (Ryba, 2002: 449). Tymieniecka (2002:5) states that, ‘Creativity experience reveals indeed the vertiginous play of innumerable institutions of virtual and possible constitutive elements within the creative act the human being. The creativity act to have reveals itself the fulcrum that life has come to in human becoming. Properly analyzed, the creative act is the royal pat way to seeing our intuitive human powers, leading to the proper apprehension of the cultural phenomena that fashion the speciﬁcally human word, the speciﬁcally human signiﬁcance of life’.

Rung (2000) explained that the meaning of students’ experiences is to let the student do activities repeatedly until they develop their own experiences and so learn. Tyler (1969) pointed that the term ‘‘learning experience’’ refers to the interaction between the learning and the external conditions to which the learner can react. It is possible that students in the same class have diﬀerent experiences. What is meant by action is that we see the ‘‘student at the centre of the learning process’’, not the teacher. Students should learn by their capability and their experiences. Experience is essential for understanding the needs and abilities of students and for reﬂecting on the result of action on behavior (Howe and Jones, 1998). This is my primary school experience about science education subject course. This is my own experience of a science lesson when we were taught about green plants and the role of sunlight on plant growth. One day our teacher gave us the experience of an experimental observation about planted seeds such as a bean, wheat and lentil. We had thought up the experiment in school and our study was to plant some seeds.

CURRICULUM OF PRIMARY SCHOOL SCIENCE

443

Teacher explained to us how to prepare our research step by step. I put some wheat seed in a bowl which was made of glass with cotton and water. After, I put the bowl near the window from which sunlight comes onto the bowl. Every morning and every night I check the seed which I planted. First, the wheat seeds developed some roots and leaves. It was interesting because the wheat and bean gave some roots and green leaves were bigger. We observed this experiment every day and took notes about our observations. I enjoyed that experiment and I planned a further experiment. I took rice from our kitchen and put it in the same glass bowl and I applied the same process. But my rice experiment didn’t work. It didn’t develop any roots or leaves. I tested for a second time but it didn’t work. I thought again and again but everything was the same as explained by my teacher. I asked my friend but they didn’t know why my rice experiment didn’t work and I asked my teacher. The teacher explained that rice didn’t grow because it wasn’t a real seed of rice. It was processed for eating, that process damaged the rice seed. I learn through my experience that if one wants to plant some seeds they have to be suitable for planting. My wheat experiment was a ready made experience which was explained in the textbook. If I hadn’t tested rice seed I wouldn’t have learned the new information about planted seed. Our teacher noticed the misconception of my learning about that subject and she gave extra information in our classroom. I was not given any explanation as to which seed could be planted nor was it in the textbook or explained in advance by the teacher – in part, I learned it through my experience. What is the meaning of children’s experiences about science? Tyler (1969) replied this way: $ $ $ $

Learning Learning Learning Learning

experiences experiences experiences experiences

to develop skills in thinking, helpful in acquiring information, helpful in development of social attitudes, helpful in developing interest.

The concept of experience contains many things and if we analyze the concept of experience we see that it has three dimensions, past, present and future. In school, teachers and students focus on past experience. Past experience comes from subject matter content consisting of scientiﬁc facts and abstract information. In the history of science many problems have been solved by using scientiﬁc results. But our problem at the present day has not been solved in the past experience, and we have more problems than before. That is

444

KIYMET SELVI

why we need to focus our attention on the present and the future. Many scientists focus on futurist studies about science subjects. Why don’t students in the primary school like studying scientists? In the science classroom or out of the classroom, students learn past experience that is also very important for improving science understanding. But all of the students’ energy should not be spent on past experiences. The means of student’s present experiences in the classroom and out of the classroom are play, touch, and doing something. Students come to the classroom with their initial conceptions organized by their early experiences. Discussions in science lesson are rooted in common, concrete experiences, and when phenomena come from everyday experiences that are more diﬃcult to deny. Students respond better when information is linked to something they have experienced rather than to a pronouncement from authority (Minstrell, 1989: 131).

The future can’t be known, but it should be predicted. How can you predict the future? Prediction is based on students’ knowledge, experiences, skills which are problem solving skills, critical thinking, discussing with others, observation, sharing their own opinions, doing something. Students should learn if they go out on a cloudy day without a raincoat their clothes and hair will get wet. They learn if the weather is cloudy they must bring their raincoats or umbrellas. That means students gain something from their ﬁrst-hand experiences. Children use the past information that they gain from experience and they predict the near future. Maybe the next time they won’t get wet because they remember the past experience and the problem. They try to solve their problems through past experiences. Before that experience, in the classroom, the teacher might have mentioned the same subject many times but the student can’t transfer this information to their life and doesn’t care about it. Previous experiences serve as a guide and it gives direction to future experiences. Husserl states that, ‘‘every experience points to further experiences that would fulﬁll and verify the appresented horizons, which include, in the form of non-intuitive anticipations, potentially veriﬁable syntheses of harmonious further experience’’ (Rokstad, 2002: 508). Student experiences of a science lesson may allow the following: $

$

Students can share their knowledge and observations in the classroom and may contribute directly to the science lesson. Students in the science classroom can learn democratic attitudes, because they listen, discuss, support and teach each other. They share diﬀerent ideas, beliefs, observations, explanations and so on.

CURRICULUM OF PRIMARY SCHOOL SCIENCE $

$

$

445

Science students can gain an awareness of their misconceptions, defects of their learning and understanding processes. Science teacher and student can share information and gain feedback about the science subject. Science students can reveal their creativity, power, curiosity and capability. TEACHERS AND STUDENTS IN THE PRIMARY SCHOOL SCIENCE CLASSROOM

In the classroom students are beginning to learn that learning which develops intelligence and character does not come about when only the textbook and the teacher have a say: ‘‘that every individual becomes educated any as he has an opportunity to contribute something from his own experience’’ (Dewey, 1958: 36). Dewey pointed out that the teacher should enquire about students’ pre-learning and pre-knowledge at the beginning of the teaching process. This is the ﬁrst and initial step of learning in the school or anywhere. However, determining the students’ past experiences is very diﬃcult in the classroom. It takes a long time and sometimes it is impossible; if students don’t want to bring their experiences in to the classroom, teachers should not be frustrated with this situation. The teacher should motivate all students to share their ideas. There is no absolute way of dictating how to share students’ experiences in the classroom, but there are many applications which are the most important and signiﬁcant ways to establish equality and liberty in the classroom. This context can be established by both teacher and child. ‘‘The teacher has a theory, is highly capable of teaching, and has the ability to use theory to improve practice’’ (Rung, 2002). Teachers should use learning theories that give a chance for students to learn science through their experiences, and thus interact. A teacher in a science classroom should try to reconsider the relationship between theory and practice. Practice refers to the students’ experiences about subjects in the classroom. The teacher’s role is to create a science learning environment in which they share and create experiences. The best teacher is the best who continues to be the best (Abruscato, 2000). An authoritarian teacher is not suitable for a science classroom. The teacher’s role should be transformed from a traditional didactic and authoritarian one to a facilitating role. Students should participate in the decision-making process in the school. Traditionally, teachers prepare a

446

KIYMET SELVI

learning plan, conduct the lesson and evaluation. Student’s ‘‘learn’’ by memorizing, neither by doing research, nor knowing how to solve problems by themselves. Instead they learn from the textbook or teachers directly, and do not have a chance to engage in their own inquiry and do whatever they are interested in, to follow their natural curiosity (Rung, 2000). The students’ experiences need to be carefully planned and deftly guided by the teacher, because students can feel lost or get disconnected from the subject of science easily. For experiences to produce a cumulative eﬀect, they must be so organized as to reinforce each other. Through cumulation of experiences, profound changes are brought about in the learners (Tyler, 1969). This can be seen in how the curriculum about science concepts is theoretically, organized. But it is important that the organization of student experience is related to daily life and science. The teacher knows the subject they are teaching and how to communicate it eﬀectively to the student. The teacher is supposed to encourage their students to use their own intelligence and to reach their own conclusions (Hutchins, 1956). We have to understand why children should have their own experience which force them to try to ﬁnd out, because they try to have a free will and to be independent. In the school and classroom the teacher should give opportunities to students for free inquiry and discussion. School is a very important system for preparing everyone as a free and democratic individual. If we don’t teach children to become independent individuals in school, we don’t give them any chance to fulﬁll their needs. If the student is faced with some problem in daily life, they don’t worry about this problem. They try to solve the problem on their own or they ﬁnd out how to solve it. Scientiﬁc intelligence has a signiﬁcant eﬀect that leads to searching how to solve a problem. This attempt depends upon the scientiﬁc intelligence, individual powers, and capabilities of the student. We should learn what children can know and what they cannot know related to science in school. The student’s experiences, shared in the classroom, reveals whether a student’s knowledge about the subject is true, false, or a misconception. If a student’s experience is adequate, it must be supported and if it is not adequate or insuﬃcient, if it is false, it must be corrected in the classroom by other students and the teacher. From now on teachers will have to change the style and method of teaching, because today’s students must learn from daily life and through their experiences – through radio, books, TV, newspaper, the internet,

CURRICULUM OF PRIMARY SCHOOL SCIENCE

447

museums, science centre, etc. Many educators point out that the teacher should be trained with a teaching ideology that places student at the centre of the learning, and that the curriculum should include the same idea. ‘‘The teachers should accept that we don’t teach student to use their brains, to engage in active critical thinking, to be more creative, but instead students are taught in boring not fun-ﬁlled and challenging ways’’ (Rung, 2000: 81). During science teaching in school, ‘‘attention must be given to the processes of science, as well as the products, and intuitive thought and guessing must be valued’’ (Victor and Kellough, 1997: 22). Children learn best when they experience things themselves and then have time to think about those experiences, as well as talking about what they have seen and experienced. One of the best ways of learning in science is observing, measuring, collecting and classifying – through these children learn activity and thought (Howe and Jones, 1998). Dewey insisted that the most eﬀective way to learn is by participating and that it is the most important principle of learning. If the student doesn’t participate, but only listens in the classroom, they never have a chance to improve their skills in thinking, analyzing, synthesis and evaluation (Rung, 2000). Teachers must allow students to express their previous experiences in the science classroom, at the beginning and during classroom study. Each student in that science classroom has an experience related to the subject that the teacher aims to teach. From the beginning of the lesson, and during the classroom study, students’ experiences are discussed in the classroom, a process that encourages other students to think about their experiences and give attention to their environment in the future. After they discuss their beliefs and their experiences in the classroom, they share their experiences with other students. Sharing student’s experiences in the classroom is important because students become interested in science, whilst developing their communication skills. The materials of the classroom should be real items that students use in their daily life. The teacher and student should prepare their own teaching materials and often they should use hands-on teaching materials. The teacher should be the facilitator of learning, but truly the students should learn by themselves. We know how children learn. First, they observe the situation, process gain information about it. The science teacher asks some questions to understand the students’ past experiences and observations. The teacher gives some help such as clues, questions, cases, examples, special situations, puzzles, etc., to start the learning process. For example, the science

448

KIYMET SELVI

teacher asks some question that will remind them of, and that they will associate with, their past and present lives. This is the most important phase, the beginning of the learning process. The ﬁrst phase is called ‘‘discovery’’ of the science concept, which is the initial learning of science. This ﬁrst phase place the students in the center of the learning process. During the ﬁrst phase the teacher doesn’t give an explanation of the knowledge or doesn’t teach the student science, rather, the teacher gives help regarding the children’s curiosity. The teacher should apply some strategies in the classroom that pique children’s curiosity about science. The strategies should be selected and conducted so as to reveal patterns within the children’s diversity of experience. The subject-matter curriculum is isolated from daily and social life and it is set on ready-made materials of learning. The curriculum is the restricted information of the textbook. If the textbook is only a reference for the children, it must be prepared to take into consideration learning principles. Otherwise, the textbook is only the paper that includes some explanations with ink and mostly isn’t an interesting subject for the children (Rung, 2000). CONCLUSION

The school ﬁxes its attention upon the importance of the subject-matter of the curriculum as compared with the contents of student’s own experiences and ‘‘the logically formulated materials of a science or a branch of learning study, is not a substitute for having individual experiences’’ (Dewey, 1943: 20). The science curriculum approach should be changed so that the curriculum can be built, depending on conceptual and rational needs and, to some extent, the contexts of interest of the students. The science lesson should be designed to help students integrate their existing knowledge with new concepts and make them capable of organizing the memory more eﬃciently. The science curriculum will not be successful until every subject and lesson is taught in connection with its bearing upon the creation and growth of the powers of observation, inquiry, reﬂection and testing that are the heart of scientiﬁc intelligence (Dewey, 1958). It is necessary to balance subject-matter and experience in the science curriculum. A science curriculum comprised of only abstract theory or only student’s experiences is not suﬃcient. The primary school student begins learning science, and the starting point of science learning should be the interest and activity of the children, so that the student can build knowledge through

CURRICULUM OF PRIMARY SCHOOL SCIENCE

449

active mental involvement rather than through passive reception (Howe and Jones, 1998). ‘‘What is said about disregarding of the student’s present experience because of its remoteness from mature experience, and the student’s naive caprices and performances, may be repeated here with slightly altered phase’’ (Dewey, 1943: 17). Experience, meaning students’ actions which are connected with nature, with life, with subject-matter, is central in science education. Teachers should provide the ability to reﬂect on experience to their students, so that it becomes part of their own life. Teachers are concerned with the representation of the subject-matter of science. If a science teacher gives students the chance to use their experiences, it can be diﬃcult to realize science content in the classroom, because there is a heavy science content in the curriculum. A diﬀerent approach is needed for designing, teaching and evaluating the science curriculum. Building an experience-centered science curriculum from scratch requires that certain steps are taken and that some steps will be accomplished at the school or system, while others will be left to the teachers who apply activity programs in the classroom. When thinking about eﬀective teaching it is important to take into account the characteristics of the content of the learning activity and the particular educational outcomes desired (Li, 2001). The principles of individual freedom and democracy are expressed and deeply rooted in science education. In an authoritarian teacher’s role, ‘‘where the ends are transferring objective knowledge, students are left without experience in formulating opinions or taking part in discussions and debates-experiences that are at the very core of democratic society’’ (Print, Ornstrom and Nelsen, 2002: 205). The teacher should provide a democratic teaching atmosphere, teaching methods and materials. Science teaching in the primary school is composed of pure and applied science, but both of them come from past experience that is composed of scientiﬁc knowledge. In the past, science has solved many problems but now we have many problems. Maybe we have more problems than before, or we realized some problems that have not been solved by use of past experiences yet. That is why we need to focus our attention on present and future experiences.

Anadolu University T urkey

450

KIYMET SELVI BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abruscato, J. T eaching Children Science. USA: Allyn and Bacon, 2000. Bellon, J. and Handler, R. Curriculum Development and Evaluation. USA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1982. Dewey, J. T he Child and the Curriculum and the School and Society. Chicago, USA: The University of Chicago Press, 1943. ——. Philosophy of Education. Littleﬁeld: Adams & Co., 1958. Howe, A.C. and Jones, L. Engaging Children in Science. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1998. Hutchins, M. R. Freedom, Education and the Fund: Essays and Addresses, 1946–1956. New York: Meridian Books, 1956. Li, Y. L. ‘‘A model of teacher development: Social, subject knowledge, pedagogical and cognitive.’’ In T eaching EVectiveness and T eacher Development,Y. C. Cheng, M. Mc. Mok and K. T. Tsui (Eds.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. Minstrell, J. A. ‘‘Teaching science for understanding’’, L. B. Resnick and L. E. Klopfer (Eds.), T oward the T hinking Curriculum Current Cognitive Research, 1989 Yearbook, ASCD, 1989. Neuman, D. B. Experiencing Elementary Science. Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1993. Oliva, P. F. Developing the Curriculum. New York: Little Brown, 1998. ——. Phenomenology world-wide: foundations-expanding dynamics-life-engagements: A guide for research and study. Edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Analecta Husserliana LXXX. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. Print, M., Ornstrom, S. and Nelsen, H. S. ‘‘Education for democratic processes in schools and classrooms’’. European Journal of Education, 37 (2002): 193–210. Rokstad, K. ‘‘Meditations on intersubjectivity and historicity in Husserl’s trancendational phenomenology.’’ In Phenomenology world-wide: foundations-expanding dynamics-lifeengagements: A guide for research and study. Edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Analecta Husserliana LXXX. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 503–520, 2002. Ryba, T. ‘‘Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life.’’ In Phenomenology world-wide: foundations-expanding dynamics-life-engagements: A guide for research and study, AnnaTeresa Tymieniecka (Ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXX. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 430–460, 2002. Rung, K. L earning from Monkeys. Bangkok: Amarin Printed and Publishing Public Company, 2000. Saylor, J. G., Alexander, W. M. and Lewis, A. J. Curriculum Planning for Better T eaching and L earning. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981. Tyler, R. W. Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. Chicago, 1969. Tymieniecka, A. T. ‘‘Phenomenology as the inspirational force of our times.’’ In Phenomenology world-wide: foundations-expanding dynamics-life-engagements: A guide for research and study, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Ed.). Analecta Husserliana LXXX. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 1–8, 2002. Vandenberg, D. ‘‘Phenomenology and fundamental educational theory.’’ In Phenomenology world-wide: foundations-expanding dynamics-life-engagements: A guide for research and study, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Ed.). Analecta Husserliana LXXX. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 589–601, 2002. Victor, E. and Kellough, R. D. Science for Elementary and Middle School. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997. Walker, D. F. and Solist, J. F. Curriculum and Aims. New York: Teacher College Press, 1997.

ELDON C. WAIT

THE ORATOR DOES NOT THINK BEFORE, NOR EVEN WHILE, SPEAKING: HIS SPEECH IS HIS THOUGHT

What characterises western philosophy, and distinguishes it from the existential phenomenology of someone like Merleau-Ponty, is the assumption that ‘thought prevails over experience’, that the ultimate perspective which embraces and explains all other perspectives, is that of the thinker, and that the world and experience can only be for the philosopher, what they can be thought of as being. For those thinkers of the modern era, in particular the empiricists and rationalists, this means that the only relationships between subjects and between subjects and the world, which can be considered, are relationships which would be possible in the world as it is represented in scientiﬁc thought. This implies that, irrespective of our experiences, and of the results of empirical research into our powers of perception, all perception of the world and of others has to be depicted as ‘mediated’ through ‘representations’. For example, if I consider the anatomical structure of my eye and the nature of light, as these are represented in scientiﬁc thought, it is clear that the eye provides me only with images of the world. The physical and chemical properties of the world aﬀect my senses, producing ‘sensations’, from which images of the external world are formed. I have a direct or unmediated contact only with these ‘representations’, these ‘contents of consciousness’ from which I infer the existence and nature of an external world. Similarly, I have no direct contact with the experience which others have of the world and of me, I can only infer that others have thoughts and experiences from an observation and an interpretation of their behaviour. However this it is not the way in which I experience these relationships. In general, I experience myself as seeing the world itself. Perception seems to ‘open up’ to the world, rather than simply registering the eﬀects of the world on my senses.1 At the moment of perception I am more sure of the existence and nature of the object I see than I am sure of any of my sensations or images. External perception seems to precede internal perception, and to recognize an object as being external is to recognize it as being more than what it is ‘for me’. Sometimes its being ‘more than what it is for me’ is encountered in the form of its being there for others. If I am looking at an object with a companion it is not for me as if each of 451 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 451–464. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

452

ELDON C. WAIT

us contemplates his or her own private image of the object, because I experience the other as contemplating the object itself, the same object which I see.2 Not withstanding the fact that I may often be deceived, I am generally more sure that my companion is conscious, and ‘open’ to this object, than I am sure about any ‘signs’ in her behaviour or sure about the reliability with which I could interpret such signs. In other words I am more sure that this object I see exists ‘for her’ than I am sure of any of my images or cognitions, about anything that exists ‘for me’. Everything suggests therefore that I have an unmediated precognitive ‘contact’ not only with the world but also with the ‘contact’ which others have with the world. Traditional theories of perception often use the argument from illusions for defense. Here too the implicit assumption is that, like perception, the illusory perception must be depicted as an event which can take place in the world as this is represented in scientiﬁc thought. From the fact that sometimes we ‘see’ things which later we discover were never there, or that we think that we perceive when later we realize that we were only dreaming, it is argued that all perception involves an inference from signs, and that illusions are examples of incorrect inferences. But this account of how we recover from our illusions, just like the traditional accounts of how we perceive, does not accord at all with our experience. The way in which we experience the recovery from illusions never undermines our perceptual conviction that we see the things themselves. Nor does the way in which we wake up from a dream invite us to consider the possibility that we are still dreaming. The skeptic’s conclusion follows from the way in which we think about the illusory experience or the dream. When I awake from a dream it is not as if I have merely changed my hypotheses about what is real and what is dreamt; it is for me to ‘emerge’ into a world as that which has been there all along, and to leave behind a world which ‘dissipates’ as that which was never there.3 Because of the assumption that thought prevails over experience, these experiences are never given any consideration in traditional philosophy, because the unmediated contact with the world and with others which they imply is impossible within the world as it is represented in scientiﬁc thought. The question about what is it like to perceive is held to be secondary to the question about what ‘actually’ happens when we perceive. However, what I will attempt to show is that any theory which places the subject in such a scientiﬁc world takes for granted, without being able to acknowledge it, ‘precognitive’ unmediated relationships between subjects and between subjects and the world, relationships which

THINKING BEFORE SPEAKING

453

are in themselves inseparable from what they are experienced to be. Let us take, for example, Descartes famous dream argument. If I am not sure that I am awake at the moment that I ‘recognise’ the force of the dream argument, how can I be sure that the dream argument is valid, that its conclusion, ‘I could be dreaming now’, genuinely follows on its premises? It may be that the relationship of logical implication between premises and conclusion have been fabricated by the dream, just as it fabricates the entire dreamt world. My conﬁdence in the validity of the argument should presuppose an assurance that I can distinguish reliably between valid and invalid arguments, which in turn should presuppose an assurance that I am awake. The dream argument cannot seriously challenge my naive assurance of being awake, since without this assurance I could never know whether the argument is valid or invalid, and hence whether it actually challenges my naı¨ve assurance of being awake (Wait, 1998(b): 420). Descartes could, of course, reply by pointing out that all I have shown is that I can’t accept as valid an argument which would call into question my ability to distinguish between valid and invalid arguments, without placing myself in a vicious circle. I have not shown that it is self-refuting for someone else to apply the argument to me. Although I could never be sure that the dream argument is valid without ﬁrstly being sure that I am awake, the dream argument could convince someone else, that because I had confused my dream with a waking state, I was unable to distinguish reliably between my dreams and my waking states, and hence I could have no certainty that I was awake. Such a counter argument however, rests on a signiﬁcant assumption. Clearly the counter argument cannot accommodate a situation where there are two truths, one for the meditator himself and one for the external observer, for it presents that which holds true for the observer as an argument against the conclusions of the meditator, as overriding the meditator’s concerns to avoid the vicious circle. It assumes that the view from without ‘prevails over’, and therefore is relevant to, the meditator’s view from within. The counter argument therefore also assumes that from within, I as the meditator am able to recognise that what the external view is able to assume about me, is relevant to, and in fact prevails over, what I am able to assume about myself.4 It must therefore presuppose that, even starting from within, I am able to transcend the vicious circle, such that I am able to recognise that everything I am able to deduce about myself, is necessarily true only for me, that the internal consistency argument is merely an internal consistency argument. Unless I am able

454

ELDON C. WAIT

to do this, philosophy would break up into incommensurable points of view. Each thinker would be unable to recognise the force of a dream argument which concluded that he could be asleep and dreaming, but he would be able to recognise the force of this same argument when it concludes that others could be dreaming, and that they could never know whether they were dreaming or awake. Philosophy would be unable to go any further, since it would be unable to choose between the point of view from within and the point of view from without. In order to avoid such a fracturing of philosophy into incommensurable points of view, I as the meditator would have to be able to recognise that what the external view is able to assume about me, challenges everything I am able to recognise about myself, including the reliability of my powers of recognition. But how can I avoid the vicious circle? If I can recognise the possibility that I may be unable to recognise the possible as the possible and distinguish it from the impossible, I will have to recognise this possibility, without relying on my own ability to recognise the possible and distinguish it from the impossible. If I can recognise that all my representations, all my contents of consciousness, could be unreliable (because actually I could be asleep and dreaming), I must be able to recognise this without having to represent it to myself, or without this possibility ever having to be a content of my consciousness. I would, quite literally, have to have an unmediated direct contact with what I am for others, or from without. Unless I could in some way circumvent my own powers of recognition, what I recognise would negate the very act through which it was recognised. Consequently this ‘recognition’, would have to be something like an anonymous ‘recognition’ taking place through me, allowing me to ‘know’ my situation as it could be for an observer, before any acts of recognition on my part, through what can only be therefore, a precognitive, unmediated ‘direct contact’ with what I am from without.5 If philosophy is not to be fractured into incommensurable points of view, the observer should not be able to assume something about me which I am unable to assume about myself. He should not be able to assume therefore that this assurance I have of being in contact with what I am from without is no more than a psychological phenomenon, and that actually I have no unmediated contacts. Whether or not the observer can take me to have an unmediated contact with what I am from without can therefore only be decided on the basis of evidence, on the basis of his experience of me. My contact or isolation from the world would have

THINKING BEFORE SPEAKING

455

to be something which such an observer could encounter, for example ‘in’ my behaviour. Neither I nor the observer can assume that the only way in which I can know anything is by representing it to myself, nor can we assume that I can be genuinely assured only of the conclusions of my own deductions. We cannot therefore assume that thought prevails over experience and that the ultimate perspective is that of the thinker. We cannot assume that my experience of the relationship is always numerically distinguishable from the relationship itself. What experiential evidence is there, from within and from without, for such an ‘anonymous recognition’ which takes place ‘through me’, without my cognitions or representations? Is there any evidence to suggest that my ability to perceive and understand speech should be approached in terms of a capacity for being ‘drawn’ beyond my own cognitions, beyond what I am able to think or imagine, or should the perception of speech be understood in terms of the recognition and interpretation of linguistic signs which allow me, remaining within the privacy of my own mind, to reconstruct the thoughts of the speaker? What evidence is there to suggest that the ultimate perspective on the speech act is not that of the thinker, but rather that of the engaged speaker or of his audience? THE EXPERIENCE OF LANGUAGE

When I am able to put aside my thoughts about what is possible and what is impossible, and reﬂect in an authentic manner on my experience, I ﬁnd that when I am genuinely caught up in what the speaker is saying, I am not at all aware of interpreting or ‘decoding’ sounds, or of having any thoughts or inferences, marginal to the text. I am not conscious of any ‘simultaneous translation’ of the words into ideas (Wait, 1998(c): 180). The words of the speaker fully occupy my mind and the meaning inhabits the word, is ‘incarnate’ in those sounds, rather than being inferred from the sounds and grasped separately as ideas.6 Is there anything in the experience of the speaker to corroborate the experience of the audience, and is there any evidence from empirical research on speaking, to corroborate the experience of the speaker? If, as the speaker I can set aside my ideas of what is possible and what is impossible, I ﬁnd that my speaking is not an external manifestation of thoughts which I hold in the privacy of my mind. I ﬁnd that while I am speaking I need no thoughts marginal to my speaking because my speaking is my thinking, that my speech is my ‘thinking aloud’ or ‘thinking

456

ELDON C. WAIT

with others’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 180). By speaking I draw my audience into thinking with me, rather than merely providing my audience with the signs with which they could reconstruct my thoughts with their thoughts.7 The relationship I have with my own speaking is such that if anyone insists that we need to ‘know’ what we are going to say, before saying it, I would reply that if that were the case, we would need to think about what we are going to think before thinking it, imagine what we are going to imagine before imagining it. There are moments therefore when the experience I have of speaking complements and corroborates the experience my audience has of my speech. If my audience does not need to infer from my speech what I am expressing, but can ﬁnd the meaning in the very texture of the sounds themselves, then what I intend to express could not be held in my mind as an idea which could precede or accompany my speech. In that case, my audience would still have to infer this idea from my words. My acts of ‘recognition’, ‘deduction’ or ‘inference’ would have to be carried out through my speech, and not through cognitions, and my speech would have to be my thinking aloud, rather than an external manifestation of that thinking, such that by hearing my words others could be ‘drawn into thinking with me’. Language in use, rather than providing a system of codes with which each reconstructs in his mind the world as it is for the speaker, seems to make possible the abolition of the distinction between the world as it is for the speaker and the world as it is for his audience, such that they cease to be consciousnesses parallel to each other.8 If I do not hold in my mind the idea I wish to express, it follows that I could not predict the verbal images or the grammatical structures I will require. The speaker ‘plunges into speech’ like the thinker ‘plunges’ into thinking, without having to recall verbal images or grammatical rules.9 However, to say that the speaker ‘‘plunges into speech’’ without visualising how and what she is about to utter, is not to say that speaking is automated. No matter how familiar I am with a language, my spontaneous speech is never for me automatic in the sense of being controlled by a series of reﬂexes. It is not at all as if when confronted with certain premises that my organs of elocution are triggered into uttering ‘the conclusion’, as my leg begins to move when I am tapped below the knee.10 I draw the conclusion intentionally. I don’t need to recall verbal images or grammatical rules, not because my speech has become automated, but because for me, as for my audience, who are equally taken up in what I am saying, speaking as the physical

THINKING BEFORE SPEAKING

457

production of sound, in accordance with verbal images and rules of grammar, ‘surrenders its place’ to speaking as ‘thinking aloud’. My voice is transformed into an organ of thought, and there is as little need to recall verbal images and grammatical rules when I speak as there is to recall and apply rules for thinking when I think.11 Speech therefore appears to manifest and reﬁne a precognitive contact I have with others through which our perspectives blend, and engage each other like gears, and through that I am assured that the conclusions I draw in my speech are not merely the conclusions ‘for me’, reﬂecting perhaps some subjective peculiarities of my mind.12 If I am able to aspire to universality and struggle against subjectivism and relativism, it is not because I follow sets of rules, either the rules of thought or the rules of language, but because through the dialogue we literally are brought into the same world and recognize the same relationships of implication between premises and their conclusions. POSSIBLE OBJECTIONS TO THIS ACCOUNT OF SPEAKING

1) It is true that when I am engrossed in what I am saying I don’t have the impression of recalling and applying verbal images, or grammatical structures, yet my speech does not appear to be a reﬂex. Can we not however imagine mechanisms which would carry out these ‘rules for speaking’, automatically and unconsciously, without giving the impression of being like a reﬂex? If I am not aware of entertaining in my mind the idea I intend to express, could this idea not be in some way unconscious, and my speech express not only my conscious but also my unconscious ideas? To assume that we are always free to hypothesize such unconscious ideas and such unconscious encoding mechanisms, is to assume that in spite of my experience, speaking is not ‘thinking aloud’ or ‘with others’, and that the impression I have of ‘drawing others into my perspective’, and ‘sharing’ the world with them, is always an illusion. This may be to assume that ultimately each is conﬁned to his or her own perspective, and hence that philosophy is fractured into incommensurable points of view. A particular experience of drawing others into my perspective may be an illusion and there may be unconscious encoding mechanisms, but to avoid the vicious circle we need to show, not merely that such unconscious mechanisms are possible, but that there is other evidence for their existence.13 For example, when speech becomes disrupted in the event of brain injury, is this disruption ever explicable as the disruption of an uncon-

458

ELDON C. WAIT

scious encoding mechanism? If my speech was in any sense automated, if simply by thinking I could trigger a series of reﬂexes, motor forms of aphasia would be explicable either in terms of a disruption of the motor reﬂexes, the thinking processes or the trigger mechanisms. When speech becomes disrupted in the event of left brain injury however, such as in transcortical motor aphasia, the syndromes never appear to be explicable in terms of a purely motor disruption, nor in terms of a purely intellectual impairment. These patients have no diﬃculty in grasping in thought complex ideas, nor in articulating verbally complex linguistic structures. What they have lost is the ability to articulate words or phrases which express complex ideas, even when from a purely motor point of view these verbal acts may be relatively simple. If it is argued that the fault is to be found in the trigger mechanism, the question would be why only those mechanisms break down which trigger phrases which express complex ideas? Everything about the syndrome suggests that we need to transcend the traditional distinction between the motor and the semantic, and recognize these forms of motor aphasia as a restriction in the degree of complexity of the ideas which the patient is able to ‘think aloud’. 2) I am unable to explain or even represent to myself what could be meant by ‘thinking aloud’ or by ‘drawing others into my perspective’. How can a philosophy take as ultimate, as the ‘concrete’, that which we are unable to grasp in thought or represent to ourselves in any way? If my speaking grants me the assurance that our perspectives blend, and that this blending is not merely something recognised from my perspective, then even for me, my speaking cannot be fully described from my perspective. If ever my speech were for me, only what it is ‘for me’, it could never enable me to recognize anything which either challenged or corroborated my powers of recognition. I would have to recognize it therefore without knowing what it is that I recognize. The most important thing therefore about the phenomenon of ‘thinking aloud’, is that I cannot represent it to myself by thinking. I can know what it is only at the moment that I ‘think aloud’ or ‘draw others into my perspective’. What is true for me is of course true for the reﬂecting philosopher. If we insist that any philosophical account of the relationship between subjects must be one which can be represented in thought, it would be inconceivable that through such a relationship any subject could be genuinely assured that he transcends his private perspective. If the philosopher could grasp in thought ‘the contact’ between subjects, then so could I, and there would be nothing in the ‘contact’ which assured me that I had gone beyond what things are for me. We cannot assume

THINKING BEFORE SPEAKING

459

therefore that the drawing of one into the other, the blending of perspectives, and consequently speech as thinking aloud or with others, must be processes which can be represented in thought. We cannot assume therefore that the ultimate perspective is that of the thinker. For the thinker, either the contact is something ‘real’, is part of the physical world, in which case I could only know it by representing it to myself in the form of images or ideas, or it is something ‘in’ my mind. In either case my ‘contact’ could never lead me beyond the products of my own mind, or beyond the world as I represent it to myself. It is essential therefore that the philosopher avoids taking up the position of the thinker, learns to cope with that which cannot be represented in thought, and which a fortiori cannot be explained, which can only be ‘lived’ on the periphery of our conscious lives. And it is essential that he learns to take up the position of the speaker or of the audience at the moment that they are engaged in the dialogue, and enchanted by the power of language, is ‘drawn’ beyond himself, beyond his own cognitions.14 All that the philosopher can do is, through the use of language and the imagination, to ‘evoke’ a situation in which each ﬁnds himself engrossed in the dialogue. It is then that metaphorical expressions like speech as ‘thinking aloud’ or ‘with others’, strike a chord, open us up to something we recognize as speakers but not as thinkers. It is essential that behind these metaphorical expressions we do not hope to ﬁnd something accessible to direct scrutiny, something which can be abstracted from the experience of the dialogue and grasped directly in thought Before we engage in the dialogue, no analysis could ever enable us to anticipate it; once the dialogue is over, we shall, in our intellectual analyses, be unable to do anything other than ‘carry’ ourselves back to the moment when we were engrossed in it.15 Certainly, not all speech is thinking aloud or with others. We often say what we don’t mean, and don’t mean what we say. When learning to speak a foreign language we may well have to recall words and grammatical structures. We are also able to imagine speaking to others, in fact much of what is taken to be thinking is having an imaginary conversation with an imaginary audience. As we have shown above, we cannot assume that these ‘other’ forms of speech must be explicable as events in the world as this is represented in scientiﬁc thought, and consequently that they imply that there must inevitably be a metaphysical distinction between our thinking and our speaking. It will be necessary to investigate these phenomena on their own account. We are not free to make deduc-

460

ELDON C. WAIT

tions about the nature of all speech from the way in which these phenomena are represented in thought.

EVIDENCE FROM APHASIA

What evidence is there from the sciences of linguistic behaviour to suggest that there is a form of speaking which, even from without, is the way in which it is experienced on the periphery of my conscious life, and not the way in which it is represented in thought, or revealed under close scrutiny. What empirical evidence is there which suggests that this ‘thinking aloud’ is an irreducible phenomenon and that the ultimate perspective on linguistic behaviour is that of the engaged speaker and not that of the reﬂective thinker? What empirical evidence is there to corroborate that assurance we have as philosophers that we do not have to choose between a philosophy which would start from within and a philosophy which would start from without? Conduction aphasia is one of the most common syndromes which accompany left brain injury. The conduction aphasic retains the ability to understand speech addressed to him and his spontaneous expressive speech is relatively intact. By contrast his abilities to repeat words or sentences, on demand, to name objects presented to him, are all severely disrupted. Typically these patients are unable to repeat words which they themselves use in their spontaneous speech. (Luria, 1976: 265). As an illustration, many authors refer to Goldstein’s well known patient who was asked to repeat the word ‘‘No’’. After many fruitless attempts, he is often cited as having burst out saying, ‘‘No, doctor I just cannot say the word ‘no’ ’’ (Luria, 1976: 103). Goldstein himself coined the expressions ‘abstract speech’ to refer to the repetition of words and sentences, and ‘concrete speech’ to refer to expressive speech, speech linked to the concrete existential situation of the speaker. For those who believe that the expressive act is made up of elementary acts, such as the pronunciation of words, and sentences with grammatical structures, conduction aphasia presents the paradoxical picture of a disorder which aﬀects the elementary acts without aﬀecting the complex wholes. The whole therefore does not appear to be a sum of its parts (Luria, 1976: 239). The syndrome suggests that the ability to pronounce words, and construct sentences on demand in accordance with grammatical and logical forms, can be severely disrupted without aﬀecting spontaneous expressive speech in any signiﬁcant way.

THINKING BEFORE SPEAKING

461

From the point of view of the external observer, which as we have seen, in the western tradition is taken as ultimate, the articulation of ‘no’ in abstract speech, as a repetition of the word for its own sake, and the articulation of the word ‘no’ as a concrete act of refusal, are as physical acts identical. They are diﬀerent therefore only ‘for the speaker’, because the goal of the act is diﬀerent. The Russian neuro-linguist A. R. Luria argues, for example, that in concrete speech the attention of the speaker is concentrated on the thoughts in the speaker’s mind, while in abstract speech the attention of the speaker is focussed on the words and sentences to be articulated. Because it is a voluntary act, abstract speech requires ‘‘the selection of the proper phonemes and articulemes’’ (242/3: 1976). He argues that in some cases conduction aphasia is due to the disruption of kinaesthetic information. The patient is unable to execute the articulemes necessary for abstract speech because he lacks suﬃcient kinaesthetic awareness of his speech organs. Sometimes in an attempt to make up for the disruption of their kinaesthetic awareness, these patients try to feel the position of their tongue and lips with their ﬁngers and then attempt to memorise the positions which produce certain sounds (Luria, 1970: 153). The question for us is how, without kinaesthetic information, is concrete speech still possible. Like most neuro-linguists or aphasiologists thinking within the western conceptual framework, Luria is forced to argue that concrete speech is retained in the absence of kinaesthetic information because it is ‘‘automated’’. The concrete act, he says, is supported by, ‘‘well exercised habitual combinations’’ of articulemes. He implies therefore that concrete speech does not require verbal images or kinaesthetic information, because it is a reﬂex, i.e., because the organs of elocution are controlled by pre-established nervous connections, nervous connections presumably set up through the habitual use of the articulemes in a certain combination (1976: 242/3). But it is clear from the following extract taken from Luria’s own recorded observations that concrete speech does not appear in any way to be like a reﬂex. ‘‘... Having just noted the patient’s severe diﬃculty with her speech and the excessive number of pauses, wordseekings and paraphasias, in order to make her speech emotional in character I said to her: ‘nevertheless your teacher was bad, she didn’t work very hard with you and was inattentive’. However this immediately drew from the patient a highly emotional and agitated response. ‘Well, Professor, I don’t know how you can say that! ... my teacher was in fact very good and clever, and she always worked very hard with me, and now you talk like that! ...’ This time there were no pauses while seeking words, no paraphasias in the patient’s emotional speech.’’ (Luria, 1976: 251)

462

ELDON C. WAIT

Unlike a reﬂex action, her concrete speech was continuous, creative, complex and highly appropriate to the situation, directed to the goal of correcting Luria’s misconceptions about her teacher. There is nothing in her speech to suggest that it is a reﬂex, or in any way supported by ‘‘well exercised habitual combinations of articulemes’’. As we have argued above, we can introduce mechanisms to explain why spontaneous speech does not appear to be a reﬂex only we can ﬁnd other evidence for the existence of such mechanisms. If we cannot, then we have to accept that the patient’s speech is as it appears to be, and it does not appear to be a reﬂex or in any way automated. It is apparent to me that Luria and other neuro-linguists are forced to argue that concrete speech is automated because of the limitations of western thought, not because of anything they have discovered in their research. The question for us then remains. ‘‘How is it possible that, without kinaesthetic information, literally without the ability to control her organs of elocution at will, the patient is still able to execute ﬂuent concrete speech?’’ Conduction aphasia makes sense when we accept that the perspective of the engaged speaker oﬀers the most profound insight into the nature of linguistic behaviour, and not that of the thinker. For the speaker the diﬀerence between abstract and concrete speech is the diﬀerence between speech as uttering words one after the other and speech as thinking aloud. Asking the patient to repeat words and produce sentences makes her speech the object of scrutiny and, as we have argued above, transforms it into a physical act which, like any voluntary act, requires motor images, grammatical rules, and kinaesthetic information. For the patient, her concrete speech on the other hand requires no kinaesthetic information, and hence no verbal images or rules of grammar, not because the process is automated but because it is her ‘thinking aloud’ or her ‘thinking with others’. The physical articulation of words and sentences is ‘swallowed up’ in the point she is trying to make, in the rebuttal of Luria’s judgement concerning her teacher. From her point of view, she has no need to pronounce words and sentences in accordance with rules, she merely has to draw Luria into her perspective, into thinking with her. For her to do this, there is as little need for verbal images, grammatical structures and kinaesthetic information as there is a need for rules for thinking, or rules for being rational. If philosophy is not to be fractured into incommensurable points of view we will have to accept the possibility of precognitive relationships between subjects through which their perspectives blend. Our experience

THINKING BEFORE SPEAKING

463

of dialogue suggests that speaking and understanding speech manifest such precognitive relationships. We cannot therefore assume that all such experiences are illusory. The distinction made by neuro-linguists between concrete and abstract speech, in their analysis of conduction aphasia, accords with the observed phenomena only if concrete speech is accepted as a manifestation of such a precognitive relationship between speaker and audience. NOTES 1 ‘‘My eye for me is a certain power of making contact with things, and not a screen on which they are projected. The relation of my eye to the object is not given to me in the form of a geometrical projection of the object in the eye, but as it were a hold taken by my eye upon the object, indistinct in marginal vision, but closer and more deﬁnite when I focus upon the object’’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 279). 2 ‘‘When I think of Paul, I do not think of a ﬂow of private sensations indirectly related to mine through the medium of interposed signs, but of someone who has a living experience of the same world as mine ...’’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 405). 3 See for example ‘‘Dissipating Illusions’’ (Wait, 1997: 240), and ‘‘A Phenomenological Rejection of Berkeley’s Water Experiment’’ (Wait. 1998(a): 110). 4 ‘‘We do not have to choose between a philosophy that installs itself in the world itself or in the other and a philosophy which installs itself ‘in us’, between a philosophy that takes our experience ‘from within’ and a philosophy ... that would judge it from without ...’’ (MerleauPonty, 1968: 160). 5 ‘‘Our relation with the social is, like our relationship to the world, deeper than any express perception or any judgement ... We must return to the social with which we are in contact by the mere fact of existing’’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 362). (It is because of this unmediated ‘contact’ with what we are from without that Descartes’ dream argument does not appear to place us in a vicious circle. Once the contact is acknowledged however, his solipsism no longer follows.) 6 ‘‘... the spoken word (the one I utter or the one I hear) is pregnant with a meaning which can be read in the very texture of the linguistic gesture. The meaning inhabits the word, and language is not an external accompaniment to intellectual processes.’’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 193). ‘‘... when a text is read to us, provided that it is read with expression, we have no thought marginal to the text itself, for the words fully occupy our mind and exactly fulﬁl our expectations, and we feel the necessity of speech’’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 180). 7 ‘‘... The relations between the reader and the book are like those loves in which one partner initially dominates because he is more proud or more temperamental, and then the situation changes and the other, more wise and more silent, rules. The expressive moment occurs when the relationship reverses itself, where the book takes possession of the reader’’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1973:12/15). 8 ‘‘I project myself into the other person, I introduce him into my own self. Rather than imprisoning it, language is like a magic machine for transporting the ‘‘I’’ into the other person’s perspective’’ (Merleau Ponty, 1973: 19). ‘‘... speech catches us indirectly, seduces us, trails us along, transforms us into the other and him into us, abolishes the limit between mine and not mine ...’’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1973: 145).

464

ELDON C. WAIT

9 ‘‘When I am actually speaking I do not ﬁrst ﬁgure the movements involved’’ (MerleauPonty, 1973: 19). ‘‘In the same manner, the sentence of a speaker must be organised all by itself, as it were, as happens in fact in the normal use of language in which an awareness of the means of expression for themselves, the contemplation of verbal images’, is already a pathological phenomenon’’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1967: 87). 10 ‘‘To know a word or a language is ... not to be able to bring into play any pre-established nervous network’’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 180). 11 ‘‘Or as children investigated by Piaget put it, I think in my throat’’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1967: 189). 12 ‘‘To say that there is rationality is to say that perspectives blend, perceptions conﬁrm each other and that my own experiences and those of other people ‘‘intersect and engage each other like gears’’ (Merleau Ponty, 1962: xix–xx). 13 If we could ﬁnd other evidence for such encoding mechanisms, it would mean only that my experience of speaking was not my unmediated contact with others through which the world comes to exist for us. 14 The philosopher, says Merleau-Ponty, ‘‘abides at the point where the passage from the self into the world and into the other is eﬀected, at the crossing of the avenues’’ (1968: 160). 15 ‘‘The musical meaning of a sonata is inseparable from the sounds which are its vehicle: before we have heard it no analysis enables us to anticipate it; once the performance is over, we shall, in our intellectual analysis of the music, be unable to do anything by carry ourselves back to the moment of experiencing it’’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 182).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Luria, A. R. T raumatic Aphasia. Translated by B. Haigh. The Hague: Mouton, 1970. Luria, A. R. Basic Problems of Neurolinguistics. Translated by B. Haigh. The Hague: Mouton, 1976. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962. ——. T he Prose of the World. Translated by J. O’Neill. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973. ——. T he V isible and the Invisible. Translated by A. Lingis. Evanston, Ill: North-Western University Press, 1968. ——. Phenomenology, L anguage and Sociology. Edited by J. O’Neill. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974. Wait, E. C. ‘‘Dissipating Illusions.’’ Human Studies 20 (1997): 221–242. ——. ‘‘A Phenomenological Rejection of Berkeley’s Water Experiment.’’ T he South African Journal of Philosophy 17 (1988a): 101–111. ——. ‘‘How to Wake Up from Descartes’ Dream or the Impossibility of a Complete Reduction.’’ Analecta Husserliana LX (1988b): 417–430. ——. ‘‘Merleau-Ponty’s Account of the Perception of Speech and Luria’s Description of Semantic Aphasia.’’ Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 29 (1988c): 177–200.

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS A T heoretical Comparison of an Emerging Contemplative Pedagogy W ith an Ending of Cognitive Priorities in Current Education

INTRODUCTION

This study is concerned with a pedagogy that could bring forth qualities that reside in us beyond our mental capabilities. We wish to study the realm of love, freedom, compassion, sensitivity, humility, modesty, cleanliness, intuition, attention, courage, prudence, patience, courtesy, hospitality, generosity, possibly others, and create opportunities for children to verify their existence. Given obvious constraints our examination of realities such as these will be introductory, grasping for basics, clarifying an approach, acknowledging facts, avoiding speculations, and appreciating current views in their self-understanding. In this spirit we want to discover integrity, creativity, and communion – three more terms referring to realities beyond knowledge – and we want to make sure that kids can develop their character in this direction. We would like to be a little acquainted with the source of goodness, learn about truth, and witness radiant beauty or grace – to use three traditional concepts – enough perhaps for enabling young persons to move there as well, away from distrust, lying, and a world of masked pretensions. Aren’t these meta-cognitive realities taken care of in present pedagogy? More or less, that needs to be speciﬁed. We intend in this study ﬁrst to check out the soundness of the philosophical basis or the cultural/ historical worldview that held the educational views, theories and practices that are typical of our times together, or that perhaps no longer succeeds in such harmony. And, secondly, we wish to show what is possible in education when we have a better understanding of the nature of values

FIRST EXPLORATION OF VALUES

We are capable of learning and revising our views of what to do, or how to do things. We are endowed with freedom. We also have possibilities to learn about ourselves from our acts, and from what others could tell us. We have chances to undo what we did when we apologize, make 465 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXIV 465–552. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

466

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

amends, and are forgiven. In these cases we are learning indirectly about who we still are, or at least were when we acted. We can forfeit this learning when we are holding back what we intended in favor of a window-dressing self-image that we want to impress on others. Again, real inward learning changes us in the sense of wiping our slate clean, not as being more or less successful in approximating a role model, or in just becoming more conceited in self-centeredness. Inwardly we are endowed with freedom, that is, with the possibility of undergoing a cleansing of the past, also known as a dying to experience. We can’t get this freedom, or ourselves directly in front of our eyes without splitting apart into a double subject, one part studying another fragment. We may still try to do such separative observing when we attempt to understand others by analyzing their behavior within our terms, as is commonly accepted in the studies of the social sciences. We can realize that this internal division doesn’t work for ourselves because it breeds an illusion of being apart from our own suﬀering, or worse, using the gift of freedom only for our own interest instead of letting it guide us towards common ground. We can be sure that such selﬁshness removes freedom, leading to compulsions and to conﬂicts with others. Further along this route we can doubt whether self-reference can work properly on non-human reality. We dimly perceive another way of starting any relationships, namely in a uniﬁed manner, unmotivated, appreciating what’s there, ego-free. This doubt is strengthened by problems of a baﬄing nature that have been arising in autonomous ﬁelds like biology in the dilemmas of cloning, in economics by pollution of resources, in medicine by psychosomatic diseases or by side-eﬀects of drugs, by terrorism in-between nations that are not at war. These unprecedented challenges can’t be solved in the usual manner of specialization or sovereignty. They persist and spread a contagious bewilderment. Then blaming projections are staged that make lawyers very rich, and, in politics, strongmen come stalking around, fanatically asserting one-dimensional solutions, aggravating the situation further, etc. Such a noisy crisis is a call upon education for preventive medicine. In this essay we wish to answer this urgent demand for help. PROFILE OF MODERN EDUCATION: FIRST OUTLINE

To respond to this challenge we ﬁrst need to reﬂect on what kind of institution education has become in the past few centuries. Reﬂection will help us to un-condition ourselves from beliefs that have settled in after

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

467

the initial sparks of that new vision of the future had become taken for granted. This institution of education has been central to the Age of Enlightenment. Here was the headquarters of a science-based culture. This was the fountainhead of Homo Sapiens, quenching the thirst for equality in opportunity by way of compulsory education, by striving toward hundred percent literacy, by incorporating the emancipation movements of women, minorities, etc. Its anthropocentric mission had taken aim at an institution of an earlier period, religion, proclaiming that, henceforth, reasonable, science-minded persons would take better care of both material and social problems than edicts from oﬃcials in an ascribed rank-order with the king and the priest at the top. As a result of this new, self-conﬁdent, secular faith, generations of problem solvers and critical thinkers have taken up positions where expertise rather than tradition would decide the next step. MODERN VIEWS OF VALUES

What has happened in this brave new world to these aforementioned virtues that transcend practical priorities? Are these values independent of the leveled relational ﬁeld, that is the reality for the modern age? No, said the protagonists of this rational ﬂatland. Values, they would have explained, are imprinted on norms. They are, therefore, eminently measurable. Norms can be taught, and enforced if necessary. Usually, however, such harshness can be avoided by associating norms with well-deserved rewards, status, pleasures, or undeserved bribes, if it would come to that. Values are relative to cultures and historical periods, our imaginary representatives of the new nationStates of this era would have informed us. On a personal level, they are contingent on self-interest. Yes, pleasure is the heart of value. It has money-value. Poverty is, therefore, the central issue. Economics, more precisely, capitalism, a nineteenth century revolutionary would have added, has been our main problem in international conﬂict. A century later, however, workers are seen as consumers, the economy doesn’t need poverty to function properly, and the main issue is now over-consumption. Mother Nature is imposing limits. This is not a legitimacy crisis either, as prudent conservation of resources is only a wider application of the material priorities of this modern era. Nature operates without waste. Is it possible to avoid a polemical skirmish when we question the foundations of the Age of Reason? Conﬂicts between scientiﬁc theories

468

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

can be settled by experiments. A common code unites the disagreeing scholars. No such overriding community any longer existed between the new nations that sought control of the same resources due to the break-up of the Christian religion. Nor were there new standards that would have been acceptable to contestants in the institutions of the nation-States when they struggled to appropriate scarce opportunities. Eventually the solution was found in extending democracy, a non-violent battleﬁeld of shifting alliances around issues that required sacriﬁces. Other institutional innovations that supported this political centerpiece, independent courts and mass media, were internationalized as well. It has proven to be very diﬃcult to establish these institutions between nations. Scandals seem to accompany high-stake negotiations inside nations and between them. In these persisting troubles as well as in the compromises between reason with un-reasonable desires we notice ﬂaws in the foundations of the modern age. These contradictory facts continue to be overlooked in so-called post-modern views. The self-critique of capitalism is not a critique of desire itself. The pursuit of happiness in acquiring material wealth has been elevated to a human right. It will be up to education to help children ﬁnd a better way than rationalizing indulgences or repression. Democratic institutions are not designed to resolve conﬂicts in beliefs. Believers want a chance to make the whole way of life righteous and convert others to their knowledge of values. Modern individualism rejects such censorship and enforced conformity. It doesn’t mind following fashions or imitating status images because these provide many opportunities to show personal good taste or to enjoy the game part of this show-oﬀ. Probably no one would mistake these aspects for representing something of deep signiﬁcance about themselves, although cultural criticism often takes aim at mindless entertainment for lack of depth on its side. The serious side of modern people already shows up in the dramas they follow on ﬁlms, among other more persuasive manifestations of their sacriﬁces in daily life. Followers of a tradition want to live apart. They are especially eager to control education but they can’t block all e-mail and mass media that have more inﬂuence on contemporary young people than formal schooling. The modern age encourages discoveries and innovations, including changes in fashion. The older ways of life defend themselves against such economic-cultural encroachment that they fear to be a Trojan horse trampling over their hallowed but vulnerable communal mores and resources. The new culture relativizes values, the orthodoxies absolutize theirs including their customs. The industrial societies expose themselves

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

469

to hedonism, conﬁrming the contempt felt for them in the surviving older cultures. On the other hand, these outsiders can’t see their own rigidity, the superﬁciality and the loss of compassion in their contempt. Danger is coming to them from their own youth. FURTHER EXAMINATION OF VALUES

We will now attempt to present the case for treating values as independent of the relational ﬁeld without equating them with human-made norms or pleasures as modern people do, and without ﬁxing them as idols as the conservers of tradition are disposed to do. Using this phrase ‘‘presenting the case’’ would unintentionally invite the reader to become a judge. However, we must stop that cognitive disposition right now. Judgment is a measuring, weighing act in the relational ﬁeld. When we explore realities that lack phenomenal contours we are not comparing issues with past experience. The modern age entirely relies on experience, expecting more or less of the same. The person doing such framing acts is ignorant of her/his reductive mode, thereby overlooking something that is not happening to us but in us. We are neither objects undergoing some act by others, nor are we subjects initiating some action. Duality and division would only create a dark tunnel without a light at its end. The child is self-evidently a whole person with a heart, mind, and body of its own. Well, this statement had been denied in all cultures of the past. Childhood was supposedly a short passage to joining the ways of an established community. The ancestors stressed obedience. The source of order resided, not in human beings, but in keeping alive a venerated past. So, what would have made a traditional husband see his wife and his children, each as a singular person? An inward turnabout would have preceded this outer change. The great teachers of inwardness sowed this seed into the traditions existing at their time, and, centuries later it awakened this person in his traditional role of husband or father. So, generally speaking, when we reiterate that the child is a whole person we appeal to a reality that has been aﬀecting traditions for a very long time, creating a tension that eventually also engendered a cultural child called the modern age, now close to death. The antagonism between the modern era and the pre-modern cultures that seems so prominent actually does not qualify as irreconcilable conﬂict. Grandfather just has a son as stubborn as himself. To say fatalistically that human beings are forever caught up in conﬂict only helps these old folks recycle superﬁcialities as if these habits were deep-seated.

470

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

Thinking or feeling diﬀerently than adults do does not diminish the child’s wholeness. The child is free in the sense of learning from experience and not repeating mistakes. This freedom stays with the youth and it is unobtrusively there when we grow old. What a remarkable fact, something so intimate as freedom does not grow old! Still, it is a common observation that inward learning in freedom from experience is diﬃcult, especially when only outer studies are encouraged or beliefs get repeated. Often we end up bitter, caught in wounded pride because we are disappointed without self-awareness bringing us to a fresh start, wiser. A marriage may end in hate, leaving a disposition of distrust with a dark wish for revenge remaining in an unwashed soul. An old person may become irritable by mere minor changes in habits, allowing such anger to accelerate the aging process in the body. Parents and siblings may also overlook the facts of wholeness with its learning in freedom when they focus on a child’s behavior in terms of their own anxiety about social honor and shame. These norms are taught and override the spontaneous aﬀection and dislike of the child; these dislikes are not deeply rooted and they disappear when children encounter caring adults. Honor/shame are emphasized when children are seen as wild animals, as poorly socialized adults are seen. Militarism in ﬁghting against oneself as well as getting angry with others, contempt for women, hatred for mothers-in-law, etc., cluster around these falsely praised values. Social value judgments start a duality inside the child; it learns to perform acts of courtesy without feeling good. Eventually habit takes over and its insensitivity further harms the integrity of the child. Realizing these facts is a steppingstone to working with natural grace in the child and awakening true concern for others instead of seeking tokens of social approval with the hidden intent of acquiring superior status like them. The same helpful insight opens the gate to friendship and neighborliness without pretensions. The child may well do something wrong, or fail to do something right, but there may not be a deﬁciency in herself or himself as the carrier and guardian of this gift of free wholeness that can change any pattern. Love is the gift by which we could see another human being as a dynamic, ever-growing, self-transforming whole. Such love protects itself against falling into possessive desire by its own fulﬁlling nature. Acts of love are complete and don’t lead to repetition. Possessive desire, on the other hand, is based on insecurity and demands reinforcement in repetition. It is quite possible to see inwardly its self-conditioning nature. That selfawareness is more eﬀective in stopping self-rejection than a diet plan is

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

471

in controlling appetite. When we see a child falling short of our hopes for success love is not in charge of our part of the relationship. In other words, love doesn’t depend on success and doesn’t emphasize it. The other way around would be: does work lose its shadow of fear of failure when child is encouraged to learn to work enhancing qualities in any reality? The child wouldn’t be seeking advantages, but would live intensely, unselfconsciously, not needing privileges. Modesty is a similar undiﬀerentiated and unmotivated state, being there almost unnoticeably, reliably constant as freedom. We will miss it as soon as we override this state with a pursuit that would beneﬁt ourselves. When we have removed that precious and delicate governess that was leaving the other persons in the relationship in their dignity, we will notice more than an empty, hungry state. With modesty having been switched oﬀ we have moved ourselves into a world of interchangeable human lives. The word ‘‘modesty’’ no longer suits the charms we are staging there cunningly to regain a foothold. In modesty we were secure, now we are unsure. The worst aﬀected dimension is sexuality. For its part current education reinforces pride in achievement. The ego thrives, personally or in identiﬁcation with a winning group. The child gets confused in mixing status seeking with studying. The child’s ego feeds oﬀ comparison with others. Envy and loneliness have now been reaped. When we do things that we doubt as worthy of doing these promises of pleasure cover up the departure of love. This vacuum is likely to be ﬁlled with wishes to be loved, with surrogates for the real thing, seeking sensation, etc. It would be good if children learn together in friendship without peer pressure, each contributing out of their strength, doing things for their sake. METHODICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Without giving further examples we may state that non-mental values are operating a priori, that is, they are laying sound foundations under experience and knowledge. We can’t examine them as objects but proper study of objects in reality requires their presence. They can’t be experienced in the same way as we follow our feelings in relationships, sustaining our self as center of wishes, judgments, or activities. On the other hand, whenever we act out of integrity, unconditionally, with our self-center in abeyance, these values manifest themselves in our acts. Values are not norms. We don’t feel judged by them, looking over our shoulder, so to speak, whether an authority is going to give us a ticket. We don’t get

472

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

gradually closer to them. Norm-driven performances are radically diﬀerent phenomena than enactments of responses by the whole person. In the latter instance the cognitive side is in abeyance. We feel passionately. We are undergoing a transformation. Outwardly our act may seem to have increased our misery, but strangely, inwardly we would carry a lighter burden. More appropriately said, we would feel intuitively part of something holy. We would lose our fear of death when we share in something that doesn’t grow old. Practically speaking, we would feel conﬁdent, we could do a lot of work, we would be taking initiatives, and we would eﬀortlessly relate to people in depth. These moments would be memorable as signiﬁcant milestones in our life story. The practical outer side is not reciprocal to the intuitive inner side, it is in a lower hierarchical spot, receiving, not conditioning. For example, people can take many initiatives to enrich themselves. When they have too much wealth they can become generous. We can’t induce from such muniﬁcence that the giving human being is worthy of emulation. In other words, we can’t clarify values by substituting outer phenomena for their reality. Illusions arise as we lose immediate contact with phenomena in their own right when we treat them as symbols for higher reality. Examples are fetishes, idols, hallowed ground, sacred city, celebrities, etc. In scholarly terms, induction can’t be our mode of studying values. We can’t derive from descriptions of what we can see, hear, touch, etc., what the nature of good relations is, what generosity is pure and simple, and so forth. One can be generous in giving stinginess full attention. Along this line a cure for this weakness may be found. Children can realize how richly endowed they each are from within by sharing suggestions with each other when given a complex challenge. Generosity is sharing oneself as a person who loves certain things. Its essence is encompassing, unknowable, seen in a glimpse, as an epiphany, of its own kind. Obviously too, we can’t construct a simpliﬁed model of virtues and then test it out in controlled circumstances. Our hope to give helpful suggestions to educators along this deductive path would have a blind spot. We would have failed to notice that we had assumed that we might generalize about human beings and give these abstractions to experts. Surely, there is a proper place for abstractions and expertise, in conducting a business, for example, but inner change can only take place in a free act of the whole person, this one who is in her/his most important part a unique soul, equal in quality to others however dormant that quality may appear in circumstances. Such a free act is radically diﬀerent from following a plan, an idea, from applying a set of norms, or worse, from

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

473

seducing an inadequate person with rewards, or threatening a stubborn case with pain. All that would make for a broken relationship to living, aspiring reality that is in its individuality securely anchored in solid values. Inevitably, both the frustrated followers as well as the superior expert become judgmental, resentful and bitter. He or she has tried to be like others or has vainly attempted to multiply a specimen but has failed to open the inner treasure chest and receive the blessings of free interaction, shared intelligence, sparked imagination, and compassion. So, how then are we to make sure that love, freedom, patience, etc., are ﬁrmly established as the foundations of education? When we contemplate and then realize what we did when we did it wrong, this insight clears out most of the falsehood. Notably we had been objectifying the world so it would suit our mental gifts, and we had been insisting on ourselves as separate observers who were collecting mental simpliﬁcations for use as leverage in social aﬀairs. Thereby we had been setting a narrow trap made of two materials, sensorial or instrumental experience and cognition, and we had henceforth settled in an imagined, higher world consisting of concepts and images. It used to be easy to believe in these models as generators of unprecedented material progress. Social realities have proven to be more resistant to such intervention and have thwarted peaceful solutions. Now, however, we can explore another possibility by the dynamics of the very same insight into the limitations of cognition, both inductive and deductive. We begin in a state of apparent emptiness, but it is love – not a sensorial organ, not a phenomenal object, not a mental judgment, not a desire or an act of will – connecting us in appreciation for the possibly fullest manifestations in the phenomenal world. It is even possible to receive phenomena of danger, tragedy, hatred, misery, etc., in this way. Sensitivity is the guide into this reality. We are silent. This act of alert, yet passive contemplation would envelop a phenomenal reality with a gentle hospitality to please reveal itself. In this process we are learning something indirectly about this gift to us called sensitivity. We have been moved out from our emotional shelter in possessions, away from holding on to our reputation, and are cleansed from anxious distrust. It is quite possible to misappropriate this blessing by claiming that we are sensitive. Again, this word sensitivity won’t cover such egocentrism that has elevated itself above its level. Intense contact with reality in its terms leads to a response quite diﬀerent from the cognitive plan of action. These two modes of action can be compared to clarify the diﬀerences.

474

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

Inward realities, like humility, lack phenomenal contours. They can’t be focused on. They are qualities of integrity. Mental gifts can solely be used to monitor intrusions of phenomenal reality, worries, for example, or upsurges of wishful thinking, etc. Contemplation, holistic observation, or awareness – three names for the same inward act that can’t be deﬁned or measured – will receive these disturbances patiently, allowing them to reveal their nature. This episode in the limelight of inner attention would give us clarity about the transforming quality of patient awareness. The interruptions go when we have listened to them carefully, nonjudgmentally, and humbly. Living intimacy within this occurrence is a fullness that can’t be reduced to verbal memories. All we realize is that we were lifted up, crossing our problem. Looking back does not repeat the event itself. The real value of this inner change stretches forward. We don’t need to know more about what is coming towards us. Education can’t be a gathering of information; that would be receiving what is new in the terms of past experience. We know that hatred has already arrived but knowledge and more information don’t aﬀect hatred. Compassion for the bearer of hatred is more eﬀective than digging out a deeper moat and becoming resentful by the second spade full. In the cloak of compassion we are protected against the ill eﬀects of hatred. The inner gifts are a living mystery but we receive hatred properly when we are in intense contact with it. We can now turn to the consequences of these values for education. Before we get to these we need to consider a possible ambivalence in the signiﬁcance of the word theory. THEORY AND T HEORIA

Our considerations of education in the introduction distinguished pedagogy for gaining knowledge from one that would listen ﬁrst to reasons of the heart. Let us call the ﬁrst cognitive education, and the second one contemplative education. The foundation of cognitive education reﬂects the victory of science over religion in the modern age. We will now specify what principles have so far guided its educational practices. We will also indicate what troubles have arisen from these same principles that can’t be resolved on their basis. However, these same disorders are explained by this worldview, but unfortunately they persist. Eventually that nagging presence would cause a legitimacy shortage. First we need clariﬁcation of the word theory. The Greek origin of the word theory indicates that one is being part of a religious drama (theos

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

475

is Greek for deity, ria comes from rei, ﬂowing, as in panta rei, everything is in ﬂux), in other words, a ritual is enacted. Later theory refers to contemplating a spectacle (note the temple). We notice a growing separation between a ritual and what happens to an audience in a temple. In our times the word has a purely scientiﬁc sense and refers to mental abstractions tied together by axioms and causal relations or functions. We are now living in an unnatural world of tiny particles, genetic structures, composite materials, speeds of communications beyond comprehension, black holes, etc. We can’t anymore grasp the meaning of this microor macro reality by watching or listening to scientists. We know, for example, that neuro-networks are the physiological side of all bodyrelated feelings, acts, thinking, etc., and we could even let ourselves be changed by direct interference with that physiological basis. Still, we would have to refer to the language of everyday life to persuade ourselves that it was safe to abandon common sense. We can’t ignore our need to be part of divine ﬂux, realizing that its possible appearance in chemical changes can’t be experienced. Where then is this numinous source? We won’t get a rational answer. We can’t resolve the issue mentally. Nor can we deny that we live with puzzled fellow human beings like ourselves, prospectively aiming at a personal destiny, and having to do something for the ﬁrst time, on our own, to get there. Without living in this way we would amplify our fear of death as another prime instance of personal crossing over into the unknowable. This fear would kill us before our time. Retreating from personal challenges would lead us to a loss of soul while still alive, and we would be drifting aimlessly from one pressure to another. For a period, in medieval times, thinking was believed to catch the essence of phenomenal reality, hoping that speaking truth like God would change things for the better. Such conceptual realism or fundamentalism gave great importance to mental gifts, reﬂecting the position of Aristotle. Parallel to the intellectual over-estimation ran a current to do the same with emotions. Conjointly these extreme views pushed aside the teachings of love in favor of hot-headed but, heart-wise, icy-cold argumentation, arousing intoxicated emotions for crusades, pogroms and witch-hunts. These views were soon contested by skepticism that words could never achieve a peaceably commanding position above relationships and objects (conceptual nominalism). These skeptical nominalists, however, began to stress will power as the best way to get results. Sciences followed along this line, no longer bothering about what things or living beings were in their own terms. Technology was henceforth the motor of progress with

476

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

human beings running behind, not catching up. It’s easy to see afterward where willful people ended up with each other, a situation not so diﬀerent from the graves of the medieval holy warriors. However, we must expect that right education would be able to learn from these failures before the next generation recycles, or creates worse versions of value-militarism. Could contemplative pedagogy possibly help children meet a living truth instead of mistaking words for truth, showing them, for example, the truth of their own conﬂicts and fears? MID-WAY SUMMARY

We will summarize these theoretical discussions in tables, the ﬁrst containing a general cognitive theory of human relationships, and the second elaborating a cognitive theory of education. These summations will be elaborated in discussions. We will follow these with a non-cognitive value theoria of human beings pointing to the possibility of redeeming nature and the social ﬁeld from disrespectful power struggles, and a contemplative theoria of education. We are using the old Greek terms to indicate that these considerations are outside the positivist view of science. In the concluding section we will indicate what diﬀerent outcomes may be expected in three important performances required of human beings when contemplation guides them or when cognition is sovereign. There will be three possible tests of the strength of cognitive or contemplative education. Human beings, it has been often said, don’t know their nature; we are frightened as well about our mortality. We don’t live like animals in ecological niches. We are facing challenges, never succeeding in living securely in routines. We can suddenly face risks that could be deadly, both from inanimate nature, from organisms, and from fellow human beings. We say in theoretical terms: our ﬁrst axiom is, human beings face challenges, and these challenges are material or social, that is, coming from nature or from fellow humans. How do we puzzled beings approach, receive challenges? We can do so cognitively or contemplatively. That is axiom two. Cognition is the foundation under action according to a plan. Sensate experience is taken as the source of information. Instruments can improve the body’s performance. Cognition and application frame the relational ﬁeld as one oﬀering threats and opportunities, and requiring willful, purposeful and instrumental answers. Contemplation leads to action as a whole person. In non-judgmental appreciation we learn that nature and world are manifestations of an

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

477

inner order, that as soulful beings we are capable of feeling that same intelligence inside ourselves, and that we may expect to be inspired, intuitively and experimentally ﬁnding adequate responses, avoiding all divisive activities, allowing instead inner and outer realities to fuse into moments of oneness, communion, encounter, dialogue, synergy. COGNITIVE THEORY OF SOCIAL ACTION

In Table 1 we cross the outer challenge dimension of axiom one with the inner cognitive reply of axiom two. Table 1 combines two axioms and constructs a fourfold set of governing principles that are deduced from these axioms. We can use the terminology from Talcott Parsons’ theory of social action to name these principles. According to this theory human beings interact and constitute thereby a social ﬁeld that will always have the four features that are shown. In cell one is the cultural/symbolic aspect, bridging our mind with concrete reality; it is the source of legitimacy for the modern age as we discussed in the earlier section on modern values. Legitimacy holds the culture on course towards its destiny ( pattern maintenance). In the second cell on row one appears the civil society in its historical orientation to subsist (principle of communal harmony or integration). In the third cell under the material column the economy is at work according to its nature (goal attainment). In cell four under the social column the political institutions attempt to accommodate all pressures and tensions in the social ﬁeld (principle of accommodation or adaptation). Any challenge leads a community to modify its typical responses while maintaining a basic cultural pattern, i.e., a worldview, as well as making sure the established community survives. Parsons used the term latency in earlier studies for the symbolic part of the social ﬁeld (that accounts for the L in the acronym AGIL by which his theory is known). Ordinary circumstances don’t involve legitimacy issues. These remain undisturbed, latent. If there were a challenge to our beliefs, then it would reverberate in all other parts of the social ﬁeld. Demoralized workers, to give one Table 1. Cognitive Theory of Action Receive, Apply/Challenge

Material

Social

Cognition Application, Activity

1) Pattern Maintenance 3) Goal Attainment

2) Integration 4) Adaptation

478

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

example of disorder appearing in the economy (cell 3) but originating in a loss of faith in the way of life (cell 1), can’t be enticed to return to work by better pay. In the political institutions a fractured common ground (cell 1) would make people cheat on each other while the government acts upon the citizens as an alien force. Civil society (cell 2) depends on trustworthy public spaces. It will turn inward when gangs that beneﬁt from such withdrawal phenomena control the streets. Controlling the supply of drugs won’t even touch the underlying damage to the value system. When threats or new opportunities occur to family, community, or society (cell 2), they can be countered by a repertory of rebuttals, depending on whether they come from within or from without. Childhood, for example, is ﬁlled with occasions for identifying with the group. The children internalize signiﬁcant authorities who control resources and who can reward and punish them. Rites of passage are staged, for example, to transform a daughter into a daughter-in-law, thereby diminishing the double bind in the husband whose attachment to his mother could interfere with his ties to his wife. Such rituals also overcome the dual loyalty of the young woman involving her own parentage. The term integration covers such concerns. When socialization fails we would record, for example, a succession crisis, or a breakdown of marriage. These internal disorders could be resolved within the resources of the civil society. Otherwise help will be sought in the three other sub-systems of the social ﬁeld. For example, when socialization succeeds all too well it may prove impossible to reconcile rivalries with neighboring communities (cell 4). Now they are both caught in narrow beliefs (cell 1). Unless these beliefs are reformed the antagonists will destroy one another. Latent pattern maintenance and integration occupy row one, where we distinguish a cognitive eﬀort to interpret an issue from an application (row 2). The second row speciﬁes, in cell 3, what the response needs to be: goals are set, means are laid out, and a plan of action is set in motion on the material part of reality. When even the best-laid plans come to naught a ripe economy has a series of calibrating devices available, for example, a market place, wholesalers, brokers, banks, trade in futures, controlling interest rates, taxes, control of imports, subsidies, and so forth. Still, economic activity often requires compromises of a political kind, and that aspect is recognized as adaptation under the social column (cell 4). Economic activities aﬀect where people live and they require training (cell 2). If some persons start taking advantages of weaknesses they need

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

479

to cover this oﬀense to the moral order (cell 1). The media may attempt to uncover the immorality and take on duties of cell 1. Other media entrepreneurs may entertain people with them (cell 3). Foreign competition can force the closing of factories, damaging the civil society (cell 2). Reversibly, successful production for export can bring displaced foreign workers into the country, also involving cells 1 and 2, and often cell 4 as well for political action. Domestic unemployment also accompanies rapid innovations, usually causing concentrations of misery in regions that are too far from the dynamic centers to participate in their prosperity: the economic sub-system can’t generate the necessary investments in infrastructure and the political sub-system may lack the motivational base (cells 1 and 2) to address such issues. Most of the political aspects of interactive ﬁelds remain part of the three sub-systems in cells 1, 2, and 3. Management or grievance procedures fulﬁll a political need in the economy (cell 3). Parents settle conﬂicts in cell 2. Worldviews are adjusted in the institutions of cell 1. However, the political order arises in its own right to show that path to the persons and groups that are unable to ﬁnd harmony. In order to do this it faces diﬃcult problems of representation: their constituents expect to get their way but they will end up having to sacriﬁce. The judicial aspects of the social ﬁeld appear in the same manner, i.e., most conﬂicts are dealt with within the sub-systems. The judiciary proper gets diﬀerentiated in cell 4. Its modus operandi is in many ways the same as the political process. As seen from the top down column one shows how the value system controls the way material problems are understood and how solutions are reached. Column 2 sees any community engaged in keeping itself together besides accommodating neighbors or rivals. Undoubtedly, Parsons’ theory is broad in its scope. It has been criticized by scholars who place decisive importance on cell 3 (the economy) for its giving undue weight to worldviews, ordinary persons in families and neighborhoods, and politics. The theory allegedly tends toward conﬂict resolution. In reply such tendencies have been denied: the theory allows plenty of scope for conﬂict and history shows a graveyard of cultures/societies that were unable to avoid self-destruction. In contrast, cell 3 protagonists haven’t been able to hear the counter-critique that their own worldview has taken on fanatical proportions. Fanaticism is a disorder in cell 1 when religious institutions have aged and have become unable to receive new reality. The fanatic her/himself hides her/his seeking superiority in this turn to the dead past or to a utopian future by feverish moral righteousness.

480

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

Quis custodiet custodes? Who watches over the guardians of worldviews? This safeguard does not exist within the circle with four polar points. Arguments between conﬂict-theorists and Parsonians have, therefore, remained barren. Although Parsons’ theory is much richer and more balanced than conﬂict ideologies, it oﬀers no clear position to a reality that encompasses more than mental resources.

COGNITIVE THEORY OF EDUCATION

Following Parsons we apply this general theory of action to education. Education belongs to cells 1 and 2 in Table 1, due to its central position in the modern age. Within these sub-systems the same four features of all social action return. There is a material side to the challenges in education as there is a social side. These summons are responded to by mobilizing mental resources (cognition), followed by activities according to plan. Table 2 speciﬁes various aspects. We will discuss these qualiﬁcations for each of the cells in the table. For the cognitive worldview of the Age of Enlightenment education will have to link the generations together. Priority is given to the sciences and their material base. Let us go over the speciﬁcs.

PATTERN MAINTENANCE IN MODERN EDUCATION

Let us examine the seven points mentioned in cell 1 of Table 2 in more detail. These points specify the legitimacy or pattern maintenance principles underlying education in the past two centuries.

Positivism Positivism arose as a revolt against armchair pontiﬁcations about reality that we discussed as conceptual realism in the previous section on Methodical Considerations. If the pontifex had still been in good health, living in a durable house, riding over the family estate, within the orbit of a living religion, and not resigned to his sofa, he would have answered the reckless assertion that we may ﬁnd reality solely through the senses. Eventually the positivistic claim to remain tied to the world of daily life was abandoned, but the old views had no chance for resurrection because the reality to which their institutions had responded was no longer there.

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

481

Table 2. Cognitive Theory of Education Receive, Apply/Challenge

Material

Social

Cognition

Pattern Maintenance

Integration

$

$

$

$ $

$ $

Application, Activity

Positivism, selection of measurable aspects 3 R’s, natural sciences, computers/memory Separation cause/eﬀect, observer/observed Separation life/death Continuity of magic, rationalism Ethical idealism Sexuality a bio-social construct

Goal Attainment $ $

$ $ $

$ $

$

How-to education Reliance on technique and mechanical Problem-solving Admiration of ambition Vocational, professional striving to become selfreferential Teachers servants Positive feedback: want more, never content Sex education: info re: contraceptives, warnings

$

$ $ $ $

$ $ $

Child development, later/better Long childhood Role-models Art as recreation Subjective taste, likes/dislikes Dream mirror of social Loyalty, rites of passage Conditioning to scarce rewards

Adaptation $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $

Public speech Law Double bind Shared danger Conﬂict reconciliation Fear of power Timing Credibility

At ﬁrst, and continuing on, positivism, or empiricism as it is also known, selected aspects of living reality, removed all qualitative particulars from these things, and then subjected what was left to controlled experiments. After such drastic reduction could one still say that sciences are empirical? Furthermore, the sciences didn’t remain earth-bound. Matter is no longer seen as solid forever. Space stopped being a container. Time lost its objectivity. None of these changes, however, has meant as yet a threat to the authority of the sciences regarding the way of life. Quite to the contrary, the riddles of creation invite further adventures along these reductive lines.

482

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

On the other hand, none of these specialized sciences could answer anxious questions of human beings when love, illness or death would ring their bell. Attempts to replace religion with utopian fantasies didn’t succeed either. The feeling of purpose lost was reinforced when those future promises remained as far away as understanding mathematics or chemistry. Consequently, the modern school is no longer on solid cultural ground although it can still hide that fact by remaining an organizational unit, often a very large one that is part of an even more complex system. The humanities have also parted company with the sciences and then they, too, split up amongst themselves. There are so many opinions about what texts mean that the need for reliable common ground remains hungry. No managerial glue can hold together these self-multiplying disorientations. Consequently the schoolteachers wear themselves out in motivating youth who can’t see coherence. One can’t pretend that self-expression or self-set tasks can substitute for ego-free real challenges. The Pavlovian salivation in winning these games has been drying up. In other words, positivism can’t serve any longer as hearth for the culture.

3 R’s, natural sciences, computers/memory This part of the legitimacy basis of the modern era extends the points made under positivism. Research and innovation in the face of material challenges gave the primary place in the school curriculum to the natural sciences. Technology shares this throne in academia but didn’t fare as well in high school or in vocational schools. The modern age broke the occupational link between education and economy. The school curriculum, therefore, had to stop emphasizing careers and stress instead skills. Measuring skills, analytical skills, communication skills, instrumental literacy, self-presentation skills, and research skills, leaving technical skills to on-the-job training. Speciﬁc skills are prone to rapid obsolescence. The emphasis on technique invaded the arts, the study of languages, literature. The rational sorting out of these various intelligences or talents by experts reinforced the utilitarian and egalitarian beliefs of the Age of Reason. The ideal of life long learning was written on the ﬂag above the school. Can one learn a skill without being clear about the purpose it is supposed to serve? Do so many young people want to become managers to escape the servile nature of skills? Gadgets like computers and internet access to resources also lead students away from traditional skills without

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

483

clarifying what personal challenges require these resources. Fast access to the latest songs can’t substitute for real action. Memorization used to be important and old-fashioned instructors prolong its life, but the computer has made this training tool obsolete. This would be welcome to children, but then what to do? Is there anything worth remembering in this function-based economy? Boredom hangs over modern education as it does over instrument-driven work. Artiﬁcial stimulations damage the child’s soulful sense of being here for a very good reason, besides incurring the risk of turning her/him into a spoiled brat who is always expecting and demanding fun. Separation cause/eVect, observer/observed The sciences, both the ones still called natural although the name is no longer valid, and the social sciences, leave particulars and individuals aside and construct simpliﬁed models based on axioms and deduction. Leverage is sought over reality; the simulacrum is applied with that intent. Observation is recognition of behavior within the terms of the replica. In case of an unanticipated side eﬀect of the interference the specialist is not alarmed. The side eﬀect will be given the same treatment with a modiﬁed simulation, approximating one hundred percent of predictability. Probability is all we need, truth we can do without. Would a person practicing such reductive observation be aware of the domination that is being sought and what is being ignored? In education the rationalism of this historical period has framed pedagogy in terms of the children assimilating what the teacher already knows. They are being tested to conﬁrm that they have learned according to these expectations. When tests show that learning is not taking place the schools have responded with micro-managing the transmission of knowledge. The thought may eventually arise to interfere with the DNA structure to change these poor students. Beware! Students may get too smart. The procedure omits also how teacher and child could ﬁnd out what could be the possible harm of this recycling pedagogy outside of the school. With this self-enclosing feature the school loses the distinction of truth. It sees only itself in the mirror. Separation life/death Consequent upon its material focus the Enlightenment shifted its anxiety about the end of life to studies of the species. This collective reality

484

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

contradicted its admiration for the genius, for great men, for the personality, thus no relief could be found here. The schools could conveniently ignore the question of death as children consider themselves immortal, being absorbed in the present. Death would be a concern for grandparents. In case life would be cut short the shocked survivors would not receive solace from their biology class. The issue of mortality went underground and reappeared in twisted form in art and literature. The Age of Reason was both expansive, bringing autonomous peoples under the new economic principles, and emancipative, raising expectations and anger about this expansion. The new nations waged war with each other and applied force to the inhabitants of countries with needed resources. In short, upon graduation young people would face the possibility of violent death. The schools resorted to both beliefs in equality – crusading for democracy – and to social Darwinism – the white man’s burden – to prepare youngsters for sacriﬁce and get them to do so willingly. Continuity of magic, rationalism Belief in progress characterized the modern age. The sciences were bringing social change in the wake of controls over nature. Understanding human beings in psychology and the social sciences would build a just society. Religions were receding into twilight. The idealists of the early days believed instead in education as enlightened knowledge, as informed decision making. The expectation of controlling the whole of reality by way of the fragmenting sciences was a continuation of the magic that the new era held in contempt. Subjecting a person to generalizations of theories overlooked the absence of a uniﬁed theory. Loss of faith in progress and widespread cynicism after so many wars regarding the nobility of the human race have sent the modern period into an overwrought farewell. Reason has been overextending itself. Ethical idealism The Age of Reason has substituted what can be measured for whatever cannot be deﬁned. Religion is, therefore, turned into ethics. Ethics can be enforced. Behavior can be judged. Eﬀort can be called upon. Exemplary lives can be pointed to. Rewards and threats, too, can be associated with

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

485

upward aspiration. Support groups can be constituted to draw upon teamwork. Shame can be removed when we realize that we are together in facing these diﬃculties. The persistence of scandals in spite of widespread exposure can’t be overcome with ethical willpower. Addiction can’t be cured either by separating ourselves into two subjects, one, the good guy, two, the weakling. However, resignation follows when these limits of self-reform are not accepted.

Sex education a bio-social construct Sexuality has been seen as a potential source of trouble for the community since pre-historic times. The modern age began with the abandonment of arranged marriages. The mistress could be married, or, more recently, become the temporary girlfriend, perhaps one of many. Discouraged by the rise of mass society instead of the romantically expected cult of personality, sexuality became the ﬁeld for restoring individuality. Expecting erotic relations to brace the uncertain individuality of sexual partners is a ﬂaw in the beliefs of this period that stems from not being able to distinguish love from desire, with the ﬁrst enhancing the personal soul, and the latter bringing the person down into interchangeable status on a common denominator. Accordingly it is speculated that there could be a script for love in the DNA code; anyhow, love is considered a material phenomenon like desire. Moreover, pleasure is arbitrarily cut oﬀ from pain while every relationship has both aspects. Not surprising then that sexuality has not stopped generating disorder in society, sometimes exempliﬁed by public personalities for everyone to gossip about, more often by severe loneliness in private that provides sustenance to the darker side of the economy in alcohol and drug abuse.

Summary of the pattern maintenance issue In these brief paragraphs we have probed into the strength of the modern worldview in its old age. The diagnosis can be read oﬀ from Table 3. The basis of the diagnosis resides in the dilemmas of this period that didn’t get resolved with the means available in the culture. We were able to say more than modern self-understanding could by letting the fuller contemplative ways guide us.

486

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

Table 3. Summary of Pattern Maintenance in Cognitive Education Aspects of L egitimacy

Strong

Weak

Positivism, simulacra 3 R’s, Natural sciences Separation from reality Separation life/death

Reductive Skill focus Dominance Prolong life

Continuity of magic Ethical idealism

Scientism Accountability

Existential issues ignored Loss of clarity of purpose Threat to mess up life structures Overlooking violence in cursive modern values Over-extended rationalism Duality inwardly, will power over-extended Love not distinguished from desire

Sexuality a bio-social construct Reiﬁed need

COGNITIVE INTEGRATION IN EDUCATION

We want to turn now to cell two of Table 2 in order to clarify further what cognitive education does to socialize children into the world of adults. This section will have eight subsections. In harmony with its belief in progress the Age of Reason felt itself to be on top of the world. It also felt conﬁdent it would be staying there because of the dynamic scientiﬁc core of its culture. Napoleon and other colonizers went on a civilizing mission to extend this new vision for the good of humanity as a whole. There was, in principle, no fear that children would threaten their elders because there wouldn’t be any need to imitate them. They would do new things. For Rousseau and his followers, education should henceforth be child-centered. Facts as the sciences established them would have the authority formerly exercised by parents. Cognitive development followed a sequence of stages and the child was to become active in discovering these verities and become reasonable and responsible adults. The school was to be a microcosm of this well-ordered and democratic adult world. The notion of development created a simulacrum of history, framing humanity’s many journeys within a simpliﬁed linearity. The same term became sovereign in geology, archaeology, biology, psychology, economics, political science, even religion and philosophy. In all instances the adults didn’t know where they were going but they were conﬁdent in their tools. The future was expected to be an evolution of the past. The period was optimistic, encouraging, it had a can-do mind-set, and it was idealistic. It is not necessary to elaborate that the spark has gone out of this worldview but this fact has not yet been assimilated. If cognitive develop-

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

487

ment was a simplistic view of a whole human being why not add emotional development, physical development, development of self-knowledge, moral infusions over time, etc? Integration is still seen as synthesis of analytically distinguished parts. L ong childhood It has often been noticed that the modern age has prolonged childhood due to the complex specializations that need to be mastered. Tests are applied regularly to see what the children are good at and can become dedicated to. Parents no longer feel competent in these matters. Becoming a good consumer, on the other hand, can be learned in early childhood. Sexuality, too, appears earlier on; this isn’t the age of innocent children any more. The family is no longer the primary socializing agent regarding the latter two aspects either. The marketing experts don’t take responsibility for their acts stimulating desire beyond the gate of their employers. Peer pressure works often in the same irresponsible pattern. So, secure individuation is harmed while anxious individualism thrives. Role models Like the traditions before, exemplary lives continue to exercise major integrative functions in this new era. Success is demonstrated and advice is given. Glory isn’t scarce and awaits every child who makes sincere eﬀorts. Counselors stand by to encourage the frustrated and the losers. One can feel a bit like a winner by putting on a costume like the real winner is wearing. To point to conﬂict inside this relationship with role models is beyond the belief structure that has put these performers on a pedestal. Imitation adds rivalry to the insecurities of the chosen persons. How can one keep up winning? Followers, too, suﬀer in running after somebody else, collecting less than admiration, notably envy. Why not join a group of losers and score illusionary victories over weaker outsiders? In other words, the Age of Reason generates in this respect disintegration. Art as recreation In medieval times arts and crafts served primarily religion and the court but in the eﬀorts of ordinary people to make their homes, clothing, food and drink, etc., beautiful, one could see the integration of art in the

488

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

community, thereby strengthening it. In the modern era the beautiﬁcation of oneself has taken on major proportions while care for public places is much harder to bring about. In the schools with priorities in the sciences art is in a recreational position. In case of economic diﬃculties art is dispensable. The older crafts have become marginal, unable to compete with mass production of singular designs. On the other hand, new media and materials are accessible to individuals but a laissez faire attitude prevails with regard to the need for beauty in the community. Subjective taste, likes/dislikes Continuing with this point from another perspective, modern people are insistent on the importance of their own taste, although they conform to so much standardization. Apparently only a little bit of standing apart is safe. There isn’t that much emotional shelter, that is, integration in a community. Unwillingness to receive wider reality is conditioned by likes and dislikes picked up in the birth community. Multi-cultural societies present the schools with this integration challenge. Public schools were created to homogenize the children of diﬀerent traditions by equality in the study of sciences, by civil studies of the struggle for democracy as a universal political form, and by the overriding joys of sports. Later the homogeneity paradigm was dropped in favor of the hope that there was in all this diversity a hidden coherence. Shared injustices that had not been brought to light could be examined; but how could the slate be wiped clean when the perpetrators had been dead so long? Dream mirror of social The modern age took interest in dreams as mirrors of relational troubles or as forewarning of such likely events. Throughout the period authors and psychologists picked away at the half-conscious phenomena inside themselves and in others who shared them. This nightlife presented an integration issue: the conﬂict was between mind and body. Would the memory of abuse in childhood haunt the adult? Quite similar to the invention of confession in the Christian Middle Ages the modern successors created a multitude of opportunities to identify with representative suﬀerers. Would there be a happy ending? This is the age of the feuilleton, the cartoon strip, and the television series. The tension is increased to the bursting point as in ancient tragedy. Can learning be distinguished from excitement? Just to see excited students was suﬃcient.

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

489

L oyalty, rites of passage With its reliance on self-interest as postulate of the emancipated era, loyalty needed to be intensiﬁed. Traditions had made sure of loyal youth by severe rituals in which the novices were ﬁrst made intensely insecure before being rewarded with belonging to a powerful clan of elders. These obsolete rites of passage with their physical violence and intoxications still cast a shadow over current realities. But the ways of obtaining loyalty are diﬀerent in the Age of Reason. After all, it is mental agility, not prowess that counts. So, the youngsters are exposed to education as graded in hierarchical steps; even in the smallest part of the curriculum we ﬁnd these tests of self-worth. Is loyalty to the sciences spilling over into becoming a faithful spouse? Can such a person be trusted with children for a lifetime? Would there be suﬃcient numbers to defend public places? It would not seem suﬃcient.

Conditioning to scarce resources Under the paragraph dealing with role models we mentioned that glory isn’t scarce if one’s appetite isn’t too large. Material resources, however, talents, and economic opportunities aren’t so plentiful. Economics is founded on this fact. Correspondingly there are sociological theories that see nothing but class conﬂict over the control of these scarcities. The modern age speaks with two voices about this issue. With its faith in the sciences and engineering it trumpets a nearby end to poverty, but with its national loyalties it prepares for conﬂict. These contradictions haven’t been reconciled. The schools fulﬁll selective functions. A work ethic is upheld so that high achievers deserve their privileges because they are increasing community wealth. When this integration service is weak the under-privileged could threaten amassed wealth. Fortunately, society oﬀers alternatives in gambling. There is a price to pay but the worldview includes a weighing of pain in choosing a proﬁtable pleasure. The culture can’t step outside of its measuring predilection and is blind to its narrow-mindedness.

Summary of the integration aspect of modern education In Table 4 we summarize our ﬁndings regarding the success with socialization that is the generational continuity in the Age of Enlightenment.

490

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

Table 4. Integration Eﬀorts in Modern Education Integration

Strong

Weak

Child development Long childhood Role models Art as recreation Subjective taste Dreams Loyalty Scarcities

Analytical Expertise Success as cult Self-beautiﬁcation Individualism Catharsis Mental tests Material sciences and design

Person as whole Irresponsibility Paranoia, envy Ugly common ground Conformity Learning confused with excitement Social loyalty Social innovation

COGNITIVE GOAL ATTAINMENT IN EDUCATION

We turn to the application of cognitive principles in education. In what ways are young people prepared for the economy? What is done to ensure that they understand politics as the modern age sees that reality? With regard to the economy we can distinguish eight activities that prepare children and adolescents for their future work as their parents understand that part of life. How-to education Hands-on learning is the shared ground between parents and teachers of the Enlightened Age, as well as with the children themselves whose body sense pervades their experiences. W hat is the use of learning Latin, philosophy, foreign languages, etc.? In the transparency of these questions we hear the a priori material values of the period. Other purposes are suspect. Pragmatism denigrates them as idealism, or, cynically, as ways to maintain superior positions. Constructivism is the other modern concept that is sovereign over education. This idea doesn’t reach as far as Indian philosophy goes with its maya view of what human beings put together and mistake for reality: phenomenal reality is illusionary. No, what appears is all the reality there is, much of it made by human eﬀort. It is only superﬁcially rational. A bit deeper are the motives, not rational. Conﬂict is built into it as many constructors obstruct one another. Conﬂict isn’t taken too seriously either, certainly not to the level of projecting a rivalry between gods, or between God and the Devil. The Age is anti-religious. It is also anti-politics. Sciences can solve problems, working hard creates assets for everyone, words – the specialty of politicians – do not.

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

491

Corresponding to these presumptions the next generation is encouraged to prove to themselves that they can construct something that hasn’t been constructed before. Breaking records shows the continuity of glory as well as self-congratulation with this participation in dynamic change. Reliance on technique and mechanical Library shelves have been ﬁlled with, and newscasts reinforce in us on a daily basis, the priority of technical and mechanical advances over social innovations during this era. The latter patterns lag behind the ﬁrst and need to adjust. Hasn’t the nuclear bomb inaugurated the end of ordinary warfare, the birth of a world order based at least on shared fear of suicide of the whole race, if on nothing else, as yet? Aren’t contraceptives preventing, not only population growth beyond the carrying capacity of resources, but also prolonged pain in the collapse of infatuation in superﬁcial relationships? From what else than drugs may we expect an end to cancer, AIDS, perhaps abusive drug addiction itself ? In any case, young people dream of astronauts, perfect sound transmission, the ultimate Ferris wheel, the super cool sports shoe, the boyfriend in control of a spectacular car, etc. Surely, education as a social institution can’t quite fully capitalize on these sensate visions for improving learning performance, however, we can see the eﬀort, for example, in self-paced language learning that is interactive with a computer program. It would appear that the virtue of patience has been mechanized! The school of the future is perhaps only a web-site drawing on world-wide resources. Forget Socrates that midwife of self-knowledge. What is the use of that? Problem-solving The outward-going nature of this worldview is reﬂected in the critical thinking mode in all classes of the modern school. There is not one way of doing things. Critical cognition is experimental. Contests can be staged to open the gate to this innovative streak. Why address problems from within exclusive national boundaries? The task has higher priority than the question who will beneﬁt from the solution. Engineers cooperate, politicians don’t. Why keep marriage within these obsolete ethnic parameters or those of religion? If we push on with questions we can X-ray the outer, phenomenal hull of the value system of this period: underneath it declares its faith that the loss of traditional emotional shelter will be

492

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

compensated for, somehow, although that problem falls outside the problem-solving mode. Admiration of ambition The go-getter, the person with enormous vitality who brings a dream to life for everyone to see, is the hero of modern times. Entrepreneurs, nation-builders, designers, record-breakers, glamorous stars, or, reversibly, notorious criminals, represent that larger than life quality that the masses can identify with, feeling inspired to make smaller steps in the same direction. The schools stage, for this reason, limelight occasions, so that everyone can be a winner, in the poignant phrase heard at these celebrations. The term ambition is then used washed clean of all selﬁshness. The celebrated hero actually did it for the community, giving something back. Vocational, professional striving to become self-referential The schools attempt to become autonomous like corporations in order to reduce their ﬁnancial uncertainties in very complex societies that lack educational tradition. Inside the educational ﬁeld further autonomy moves are present to preempt compromises with other contenders in allocations of resources. The core of each of the specializations in education appears so reasonable, but it isn’t reason that is trusted in surviving. Similarly, teenagers participate in popularity contests with more energy than they give to academic studies. Distancing themselves from their parents they can’t face the challenges ahead without new forms of emotional support: being inside the in-group takes most of their time. The administrators feel the heat when these realities show up in low testscores in comparison with other countries. Their frantic response to micro-manage the teaching process and test every part of the learning process can be seen as one of the last hurrahs for this period in this sunset phenomenon of rationalism. T eachers servants The modern age no longer employs servants. The emancipation postulate underpins the notion of contract. However, it is not primarily a contract between two persons. Instead, the term refers to collectives. The schools

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

493

are split into three groups, administrators, teachers, and support staﬀ. Contracts bureaucratize the educational process with procedures, rules, forms, schedules, budgets, committees, etc. Diﬀerent levels of education are inter-faced with standards that are accepted even internationally. Couldn’t teachers establish contracts with students as an alternative to their present, one-sided motivational eﬀorts? Perhaps it is better to feel miserable with the anxiety regarding not so high ratings by students, always in comparison with rival-teachers, than with the despair of being taken to court. Paradoxically, the modern teacher has ended up without conﬁdence like the dispensable, low-skilled servant of earlier times. Positive feedback: want more, never content Since ancient times people have repeated pleasures, having little conﬁdence that life could oﬀer something else for the ﬁrst time tomorrow. Negative feedback would be operating if such conﬁdence would be strong: in this case the fulﬁllment of a desire would lead to a Gestalt, that is, a closure, without expectation of repetition. The modern period with its material culture has a view of the future as an expansion of what is already present. If you have two meals a day, you will have four in the near future. Drive one car? You will want four cars. Ever-new stimulations make life worthwhile. Hangover? Boredom? Answer: keep seeking stimulation. The worldview can’t step away from its own shadow. The schoolteachers of the Enlightenment era have become teachers as being ahead in knowledge. Recognition is their mode of perception of the children’s behavior. They reinforce with rewards every step in the expected direction. Discipline issues are articulated for kids who go oﬀ the trodden path. The neglected realities may explode in rebellion and in personal attacks on the staﬀ. In reaction to these mental priorities some pioneers in pedagogy resorted to notions of repression as constructed in psychoanalysis, or oppression as used in conﬂict theories in sociology. They attempted to let children decide whether they want to learn at all, what they want to study, and when. These rebellious schools, too, let children repeat ‘‘want more, never content.’’ The possibility of meeting a wise adult who is content with little and selﬂessly dedicated to a lifelong task is outside the desire focus of these theories. Sex education: information about contraceptives, warnings Corresponding to our earlier discussion of the cognitive perception of sexuality, the schools accept that this culture is heavily charged towards

494

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

these sensate realities, without seeing its own contribution to this state of aﬀairs. Henceforth, sexuality is a practical problem. Instead of focusing on meaning in relationships, sex education steps down into biological causality. This stimulates the experimental spirit of the youngsters; anybody can be played with as an orchestra. To avoid irresponsible consequences contraceptives are distributed for free. When teenage pregnancies decrease the Age of Reason congratulates itself. Summary of the goal attainment part of cognitive education When we discussed pattern maintenance we diagnosed the legitimacy shortage in the past period. When we speciﬁed how the schools socialized the children we could judge the strength in community needed for facing new challenges. Now we completed the examination of the modern school with regard to preparing students for the economy. In Table 5 we review the eight paragraphs of goal attainment in cognitive education. ADAPTATION IN COGNITIVE EDUCATION

The schools of the modern period have tried to uphold an idealistic view of the struggle for democracy in civic and history courses. The children witness real politics in the way their family comes to decisions. International realities can’t get the attention that nearby circumstantial pressures demand, for example, in the new neighbors from faraway lands. Their obvious humanity prevents abstract misjudgments. When children reach puberty and form clubs they show their strong sense of honor and Table 5. Summary of Goal Attainment in Cognitive Education Goal Attainment

Strong

Weak

How to education Reliance on technique Problem solving Admiration of ambition Self-referential professions Teachers servants

Hands-on Information Critical thinking Go-getting Self-regulation Collective contract

Positive feedback Sex education

Practice Anatomical

Built-in conﬂict Self-knowledge Emotional shelter Status seeking Fragmented common ground Anxiety re: judgments from students and colleagues Repetition, boredom, distrust future Interchangeable bodies, unreliable relationships

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

495

fairness. Here they may get acquainted with tyranny as well. Social in-groupings may also be dictatorial and create minority status for outsiders. Gossip is their forte but it is the opposite of common sense that is at the heart of good politics. Schools can simulate court procedures for infractions of rules. Schools can also give teenagers an opportunity to legislate extra-curricular events. Apart from these few deliberate eﬀorts and indirect observations the material priorities of cognitive education aﬀect how politics will be perceived after graduation. In the following eight subsections, we wish to clarify that impact. Public speech Entering a public common ground in order to address issues aﬀecting a number of persons outside their familiar milieu has always been considered risky. On the other hand, dormant gifts are awakened at these times that need to be tested for ﬁnding future leaders. The modern age is even more aware of this need for strong leadership due its own feeling more unsafe in the anonymous urban jungle. Common ground was easier to experience in traditional cultures. Therefore, teachers of history and civics courses facilitate dialogue. Schools create forensics events to strengthen skills in debate. The internet oﬀers new opportunities to exchange views about historical events with age-mates from cultures with other perspectives. These are potentials rather than common practices. National loyalty is not secure, consequently persuasion, perhaps even worse forms of lifting particular historical experiences to universal status are then justiﬁed. The Age of the Republic hasn’t been able to break the old pattern of selfgloriﬁcation that performances in the limelight could lead to. L aw When interest groups face each other their priority easily hardens as each serves as unifying enemy to the other. This contest phenomenon is familiar to children in their games. What then are the rules by which the political contest is played? And, who is the referee since there isn’t a king to blow the whistle? The rules of contest were once established in religious rituals and conducted by priests. In the anthropocentric period the pageantry of former times was staged for entertainment purposes but no longer as invocation of a common higher authority. National anthems are each

496

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

acknowledged but these reinforce the national separation. The courts have emerged over time as protectors of the established law. This is positive law, no longer the law revealed by God. There appear to be irreconcilable conﬂicts between these two versions of law, as well as within the traditional fold of religions that theologians can’t settle without creating heresies. Although these explosive phenomena lie ahead of youth, the modern schools pursue scientiﬁc achievements regarding nature and cosmos as if these would be valid in worldly aﬀairs. Due to this neglect these unresolved conﬂicts persist, as does the bully’s way to cut oﬀ dissent. The weed of cynicism is, for the same reason, accompanying the vain eﬀorts of idealism. Double bind The predominant competitive view in the economy spills over into politics. Quick solutions are expected as the can-do attitude favors the executive branch but detests the labyrinth of rules that were made to ensure fairness. Lack of results could turn the person who was elected to represent various interest groupings into a victim. On the other hand, the reality of crosspressures, double binds, etc., could lead to creative solutions. The academic diet transmits an experimental spirit in material aspects that could perhaps be applied in social aﬀairs. However, under time shortage these social studies have been trimmed. Moreover, without interaction with human beings in situations of interest no attempts at change have value. There are service programs but these lack the mutuality underpinning modern politics. Shared danger Since the removal of the draft due to highly sophisticated weapons technology the ordinary citizen misses opportunities to share in dangerous tasks. We can watch ﬁreﬁghting, rescue missions, arresting criminals, from the safety of our home. The schools are not involved in such realities. Consequently, appreciation for sacriﬁces is diminished and replaced by cowardly fear. Teenagers then create simulations to be proud of their courage. Conﬂict reconciliation The parameters of the age that initiated the sovereignty of the people see conﬂict as sheer inevitable tensions, none of them threatening the founda-

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

497

tions. Most conﬂicts can thus be accommodated in give and take. Ways have been invented to cool down passions, wear out the contestants, bring them to compromise, and share responsibility with the leaders. Both antagonists can leave the courtroom convinced that they fought successfully for their honor even if they incurred material losses. Apparently, the schools hadn’t felt the urgency to prepare children for these tolerant performances until racist discrimination contradicted the law. However, erasing these errors would require more than equal opportunity to compete. Without sharing the common ground discussed in the paragraph on law, measures focused on the economy would fall short. It seems, to this pragmatism, illusionary to examine the nature of conﬂict more closely. By deﬁnition any human being is, in self-interest, drawn into conﬂict. We can deal with it, not remove it. Conﬂict keeps everyone awake. Fear of power Although politics per se isn’t a curricular concern, children experience school shootings indirectly, funerals of family members in the armed services, fear of terrorism, increased presence of youthful persons in uniform carrying weapons, and raw simulations of violence in video games and ﬁlms. Even more dramatic than these phenomena are direct experiences with abuse between trusted adults, or child abuse itself. The school counselors alleviate these traumas by their reassuring talk and skill in getting the children to share their pain in role-play, art, and ceremony. These activities reestablish a semblance of order. When children hurt one another the teacher can call for time out, sit down the class in a circle and examine the violent incident together. These are a posteriori practices. Bullies among children are the later strongmen that are sustained by idolatry. Eventually the bully turns his/her control of force on less loyal followers. The persistence of this structure from early childhood on points to a ﬂaw in the worldview. It needs strongmen. They aren’t reasonable. Preoccupation with power and conﬂict has led to a dreadful cul-de-sac. T iming The timing of decisions is an art-like aspect of politics, requiring intuition more than planning. Premature decisiveness incurs changing direction,

498

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

being compared to a wind vane, and losing one’s face. Delaying decisions invites blame for missed opportunities. Sacriﬁces will have to be made when beneﬁts were expected. What could education do to raise such statesmen who can make these diﬃculties transparent and rally the citizens onward and upward? The cognitive schools haven’t articulated this challenge beyond appealing to stamina to keep on marching toward everreceding mastery, with the result that the nature of politics is misjudged. Educators expect generalizations to be applied when something new has to be initiated. Experiments can be started any time. Timing is at the heart of politics. Teenagers may learn some of this reality when they themselves put on a major school event but it may pass unnoticed under the more prominent sociability. Credibility On a smaller scale than in real politics the issue of lying arises inside schools and the way it is dealt with feeds back into the wider political credibility problem. Children observe cheating but betraying an age-mate would entail many further troubles. Public property isn’t taken care of when the school is identiﬁed with alien authorities. The facility can be deliberately damaged, perhaps as substitute for hurting a too powerful instructor. Promises are made and broken but the pledges aren’t taken too seriously, and perhaps the violation could be covered up. Imputing bad motives to a fellow student that prove to be false, without apologizing, that, too, diminishes the integrity of the child. In these various ways the common ground of the learning community is deteriorating. The modern school interprets these types of incidents in a technical manner. It can’t lower its standards in order to pass incompetent students. The school may, therefore, institute remedial opportunities for the slower learner who had attempted a shortcut by cheating. Such eﬀorts are made in the manner of expertise but politics precedes the use of experts. If competent graduates can’t ﬁnd challenging employment more than the credibility of the principal will be in doubt. Education is in the legitimacy spot of the Age of Enlightenment. Summary of the adaptation aspect of cognitive education In Table 6 we recapitulate the discussion of the speciﬁcs of cognitive education for participating in modern politics. We accept for this purposes the term adaptation from Parsons’ theory.

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

499

Table 6. Cognitive Pedagogy for the Political Tasks of Adaptation Adaptation

Strong

Weak

Public Speech Law

Debate Fair play in games

Double Bind

Experimental spirit in material issues Teenagers simulate danger Appeal to reason

National views persuasive Rituals protecting contest ground, positive law in conﬂict with revealed law Rising above social conﬂict

Shared Danger Conﬂict reconciliation Fear of Power Timing Credibility

Counseling Teenagers stage school events Professional standards

Neglect issue Mere economic answer to discrimination Bullying Generalizations overlook issue Pledging, mere technical response

OVERALL SUMMARY OF THE STATE OF AFFAIRS IN COGNITIVE EDUCATION

In Table 7 we assess the relative strength of cognitive education in terms of the four governing principles that were examined in the previous sections. We may say in conclusion that the nagging presence of weak points in the worldview of the Age of Reason stems from its reduction of human beings to their vital aspects, while at the same time advocating the sovereignty of such persons in democracy. For this reason it is very hard to distinguish politics from economic aﬀairs. The period is preoccupied Table 7. Strength or Weakness in Cognitive Education Governing Principle

Strong

Weak

Pattern Maintenance Integration

Reductive, Dominative, maintenance Analytical expertise, success cult, individualism Sensorial, practical, critical thinking, self-regulation Argumentative, fair play, experimental, counseling

Lacking in sense of limits, inward duality, prone to violence, confusing love Irresponsibility, envy, ugly commons, weak social loyalty

Goal attainment

Adaptation

Neglect of self-knowledge, weak emotional shelter, anxious work, distrust future, treat person as interchangeable Neglect essence of politics, weak social innovation, confuse strength with bullying

500

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

with power. Release is sought in fantasy. Dangers are not shared. Violence is expected because past experience is the basis of judgment. Individualism is simultaneously conformity. Existential issues are answered as if biological questions were asked. The common ground is ugly from neglect. Love is considered to be desire, consequently intimate relations can’t be trusted either as pleasure is expected to be more than pain; if not, then the relationship is a waste of time. CONTEMPLATIVE T HEORIA OF SOCIAL ACTION

We turn now to a contemplative theoria of social action, that we distinguished in kind from what has been discussed as a model theory of the age of the sovereign natural sciences. In that theory the cognitive a priori frames reality in terms of sensorial experience and mental acts. The sensorial base can be replaced by instrumental measurements according to a simulacrum that is displaceable. Leverage was achieved by discarding all qualitative particulars in reality as well as in ordinary notions of space, time, exceptions, etc. The social theory took on normative functions to replace the loss of religious authority. The anxious question ‘‘Are my feelings normal ?’’ was answered with expertise derived from statistical generalizations with margins of error. Social theoria is based on non-cognitive participation in undiferentiated wholeness in person and environment. Before we make distinctions like material or social challenges, or contemplation and action as a whole person, we receive living reality in a silent state of intense sensitivity that is an emanation of our own link to the sacred. Action may follow or it may not. In neither case will it be according to a mental or sensorial sieve that is conditioned by past experiences or that forecasts future beneﬁts. Even in what look like mere practical matters the contemplative mode establishes its sovereignty and enacts a prelude. Next, it controls the purpose of the response and the tone of it. In the process it takes backstage for inserting silence between punctuated performances. Finally, it makes sure the experience is properly ﬁnished without a chance to form a sieve of prejudice for fresh events and initiating responses. When we articulate the axiomatic part of social theoria it would look like this (see Table 8). At second-order after the primary acknowledgement of being inside wholeness, the social aspects are more important than the material side. In the previous age of anthropocentrism the material dimension went ﬁrst, a strange contradiction for the term just used.

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

501

Table 8. Contemplative Theoria of Action UndiVerentiated Soul/World

Sacred

Receive, Respond/Challenge

Social

Material

Contemplation Respond, Action

1) Integrity 2) Intelligent Community

3) Ecological design 4) Ecological work

In cell one of the social challenge the person is called upon ﬁrst and this person is to feel totally present in her/his integrity. It is unknowable what integrity is but it is felt as fullness in presence in spite of remaining invisible and immaterial. The security of the person is not deemed as deﬁcient and therefore there is no need to get further supplies in community or society. To the contrary, the secure person gives love to the community and in society, in self-refreshing, un-possessive, outgoing acts. Integrity is constant. It is not a cultural pattern created by ancestors to be upheld, gently by rewards, or harshly by fear. Integrity is not given to us in latent mode: we feel completely alert and suﬃcient in its presence. Integrity is not a social construct like the theories of socialization assert on the evidence that children internalize signiﬁcant authorities. That evidence is not denied but it is pointed out that such internalization will lead to a conﬂict within the child as all identiﬁcation with power does. Inward pedagogy would stop this. Integrity is not given to us with a biological location either. In earlier times our soul was sought out materially in hair, nails, semen, intestines, heart, pituary gland, in pictures and now in the DNA. Magic, seeking power, then and now, remains a violation of a mystery. Awareness eliminates that misjudgment. At third-order we can examine what quality of relationships will take care of political issues. Persons with integrity can establish communities with mutually enhancing intelligence. In the cognitive theory the individual was measured in various skills derived from past problem solving. Here we can learn from the past only to the extent the present challenge is ﬁrst intuited as unprecedented. Experts no longer play the leading role as they did under cognitive sovereignty. Belief no longer conditions the response either. Turning to the material aspects of challenges in column two, the contemplative heart/mind receives these in their terms, as manifesting that

502

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

they were created for a purpose, and that they aspire to shine forth in realizing it. This is not diﬃcult to appreciate regarding living organisms and landscapes; it implies that major openings have appeared in the selfenclosures of the materialistic period. However, we are living now to a greater extent in a fabricated environment that overextends itself over the planet at the cost of resources and self-regulating habitats. Consequently, while we can still easily see what purposes the designers and makers of such objects had in mind, it is a challenge to change them to suit the parameters of the habitat and the respect owed the dignity of the person. Here, too, many signs of such harmonies have been heralded but in the majority of cases people have become de-skilled and ignorant. The governing principle in cell 3 is called ecological design. Correspondingly, in cell 4, the economy of the emerging new era will no longer be governed by consumerism. Eventually it will be possible to break the link between work and reward that is still being underpinned by self-interest. There are already indications that these self-conditioning patterns are receding although education is the main culprit for extending their lifespan. The new design vision is capable of satisfying multiple goals. The time for narrow specialization is also ending. Consumerism has overcome the old notion that one’s self-esteem depended on success in accumulating wealth. However, skill in spending and mortgaging can’t sustain the so-called lifestyle version of status seeking either. What is now manifesting itself is greater awareness of the quality of life, the need for beauty on the common ground, and intelligent collegiality at work. The days of crash manipulation of anxiety and artiﬁcial divisions between management and staﬀ are numbered. This cell is called ecological work.

CONTEMPLATIVE EDUCATION

Now let’s extend this theoria of social action to education, in Table 9. In the paragraphs that follow, the ordering principles that are mentioned in each cell will be explained.

CONTEMPLATIVE EDUCATION FOR INTEGRITY

The modern age started with Rousseau’s call for child-centered education and this inaugurated the pedagogies of Froebel, Pestalozzi, Montessori, Piaget, and Steiner, among others. We discussed how the period analyzed the emotions along its cognitive disposition, and how it wanted to release

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

503

Table 9. Contemplative Theoria of Education, Wisdom-Centered Receive, Respond/Challenge

Social

Material

Contemplation

1) Integrity

3) Ecological Design

$

$

$

$ $ $ $

$ $

Respond, Action

Child is a whole being and grows from wholeness to wholeness Sensitivity to common ground No separation of pleasure/pain, one phenomenon Verifying, no imitation Child is an artist Beauty is in radiance of inner Dream revealing personal calling Immortal soul Sexuality as part of wholeness, not abused as power to attract

2) Intelligent Community $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $

Public speech Law Rising above double bind Shared danger Ending conﬂict Vitality Timing Truthfulness

$

$

$ $ $

Phenomenology, unmotivated state Interconnectedness, habitat focus Transformative learning Closed system, no waste Interactive exploring the unknown

4) Ecological Goal Attainment $ $

$

$ $ $

Conserving pedagogy Distinction imagination/fantasy Self-correcting, selfhealing Admiration Diversity in lerning centers Negative feedback

tensions by dramatic expressions. The schools gave children a chance to construct their grasp of reality by hands-on experiences. Contemplative pedagogy, on the other hand, gives the child opportunities to realize that it doesn’t occupy center stage, and that it needs to learn to feel invited as a guest into a most intelligent world. Here nothing is oriented in the ﬁrst place to mastery of skills, or to becoming number one. Kids need to unlearn bossing around. Every relationship, social or material, is to begin with hospitality to its fullest manifestations. Its intelligent self-regulation is to be observed and appreciated.

504

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

Child is a whole being and grows from wholeness to wholeness We mentioned this non-cognitive postulate in the earlier section on Further Exploration of Values. Vinobha Bhave coined that phrase ‘‘from wholeness to wholeness’’. Parents and teachers of the Enlightenment era looked at children from what they considered the vantage point of older age. They were eager to share their knowledge and experience. They believed that values could be taught as norms. They were pleased when the children showed them that they accepted that. The ideas of development and construction of reality were sovereign. Now the situation is becoming radically diﬀerent. The child is no longer reduced to a blank slate on which elders can write scripts as they do on computers. Each child carries unique messages that it needs to bring to fruition. The pattern of development of general skills and competencies as adults await them is secondary to the particular calling that can only be heard from within by the child itself. Like Socrates the parents are to serve these gifts as midwives help pregnant women give proper birth. Secondly, the child is equipped to be a learner. Its inner gifts manifest themselves in its lasting interests. The experts of yesteryear are still engaged in giving guidance according to the demands of society. In annual rites of passage teenagers memorize like computers to pass these gates to the world that sets highest priority in its own continuity. The cognitive age has ended in a frenzy of measuring without any concern for the wholeness of the persons that are subjected to these violations. Thirdly, the learning process operates in setting itself free of mistakes. It can be conditioned, however, as it is in the cognitive age, to repeat success. By the very focus on desirable outcomes that adults of the modern mind-set sustain they can’t distinguish practice from repetition. For example, in learning music the cognitive child focuses on its sensorial skills instead of listening intuitively to the melody and the tone. That higher focus will then govern without interference the bodily instruments. In the ﬁrst case boredom appears, and in the second case it disappears. This is veriﬁable. Contemplative pedagogy moves from wholeness to wholeness. The self-choosing, self-pacing child is free of fear, it doesn’t seek stimulation – a key term of the modern age – it pursues instead meaning. The cognitive pedagogy placed itself ahead and above the child. In reaction to its neglect of emotions a few schools emphasized the feelings of children but then failed to distinguish physical like and dislike from immaterial love. In contemplative pedagogy depth of connectedness is welcomed by carefully designing opportunities for the children to be guided by a state of awe corresponding to the presence of wholeness.

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

505

Examples of this pedagogy are in the respect shown to the child-person, in speaking with the child at the child’s level, in letting children choose challenges and pace their learning, in preparing challenges with built-in quality controls so that child can correct itself without resorting to supervising teachers, and in emphasizing to do things for their sake rather than for mastery and pride. Montessori schools have shown such alternatives over most of the twentieth century.

Sensitivity to common ground Being responsive to a reality, human or otherwise, automatically brings about a sense of caring in the children. The emphasis is now going to being part of a common ground that is alive and changing. The energy is no longer derived from competition with other children. Older children can no longer boss younger ones around. Activities and sheer exercising of bodily gifts need to be relegated to second place after ﬁrst taking in the full setting. Competency can’t frame the new and the invitation it oﬀers, posing perhaps a challenge. No ends need to be gained. The children need to receive the unprecedented reality in sharing observations, not with prejudgments based on their own, very limited past experience. It is easier to bring the children to the places and times when the reality under study is fully manifest. The school can’t replicate these phenomena in their radiance. The modern school operated, like the natural sciences of this era, by creating within its walls a replica of reality. Museums, zoos, ﬁlm studios, swimming pools, etc., could extend the simulacra of the originals. The outside world was considered altogether unsafe and chaotic although adults could manage to connect to it by moving between familiar places. Now opportunities need to be created to use the school as a retreat after getting acquainted with the full, inexhaustible mystery of living beings within their proper milieu. What, for example, is a place where children feel like singing? Not by going to a high-tech recording studio, but by visiting a meadow listening to birds, hear the wind in tall trees, sit next to the water of the lake lapping ashore. Language can be learned from people when they are eloquent about something they deeply care about. Then the pedagogy moves in wholeness. Grammatical rules go to lower rank-order. Studying milk means milking a cow. Learning about bread and cookies means spending time in a real good bakery. Every culture has precious intelligent practices to share.

506

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

No separation of pleasure from pain, these are part of one phenomenon The materialism of the modern age rested on the separation of pleasure and pain, in the search of a psychological proﬁt of surplus pleasure. The age probed into motives, distrusting any public show for covering up selfinterest. Contemplative pedagogy, to the contrary, is guided by a uniﬁed ﬁeld of love, from the student on one side, and radiance in phenomenal reality, on the other. These are two sides of one relationship. Neither pleasure nor pain will get much chance to interrupt this strong feeling of connectedness. It doesn’t come about as a mental act but it can use the mind as guard against possibly separative habits of the past. It doesn’t require concentration, a mental struggle against other desires. It can’t be improved by promising better deals after the work is over; the common conditioning mode of the old ways of teaching and parenting. In intense attention there is both enjoyment and sustained eﬀort. Children experiment in trials and errors in pursuit of their calling. Neither success nor failure is relevant as the children are pioneering on uncharted paths in the full presence of the blessings of freedom. What to do then with the unmotivated child that is bothering others, substituting their attention for the loss of its own? The carrot and the stick – conditioning tricks a` la Pavlov – are no longer available to control this child’s behavior. However, a much better possibility is opening up: appreciation of the unbroken ground makes purpose ﬂexible. The energy of vision, willpower, and anger is turned toward smaller, experimental steps. The go-getter with ambition – a prime prototype of the willpower era – recedes into the sunset of the revolutionary era, and the new, contemplative person can be better connected to fellow humans. Proﬁt is no longer sought. Quality is enhanced. Reality moves from wholeness to wholeness. The contemplative teacher can check whether the disorderly child suﬀers from failing to please authorities that talk angrily of desired results. Parents can put great pressure on children due to their own anxieties. To make matters worse they may not even want to hear these inquiries. They, too, need to change course. They can perhaps learn along with the child who isn’t disciplined for disturbing the class but gets opportunities to discover her/his share in gifts from the other side, including gratitude and self-conﬁdence. Verifying, no imitation Verifying means undergoing a transformation, for example, when fear is received non-judgmentally we can see through it. We can learn that we

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

507

make ourselves afraid when we feel dependent on others, or when we repeat past experience. Such inward learning is independent of teachers; it wells up from inside ourselves. There is no fear in this. Our dependency or our habit is beginning to unravel. The materialistic era was so purposeful and so dependent on tools that it learned very little about such relational qualities. In the emerging contemplative education self-awareness will get its morning exercises by looking into ordinary human relationships. Compassion will guide such observations, not recognition. Even when receiving rather half-hearted situations, compassion will ﬁnd ways to lift the spirit and notice a transformation in radiance. We pointed out earlier that reliance on role models planted the weeds called paranoia and envy in relationships. The role model is both attractive and repulsive. We wish to be just like her/him but can’t ﬁnd a shortcut, so, we impute a bad motive: she/he is surely withholding something. In contemplative pedagogy the person who exempliﬁes love for a part of reality can inspire a student who is called to live in another loving mode for her/his calling. It is not the image of success that was so attractive during the times consumerism and celebrity reigned; it is the non-cognitive integrity that is a fulﬁlling presence. The children can be grateful, and admiring without the shadow of resentment: they are not to imitate. Encounters with such intensely loving adults don’t need to be duplicated as if more were better. Studying few things or relationships in depth is the motto for this beginning era, away from the over-load of repeated stimulations of the modern age.

Child is an artist Art had become self-referential in the past period with artists fearing the judgment of colleagues, but it faced the new copying technology. It lost its uniqueness. Cut and paste techniques have made it also diﬃcult to trust what are presented as facts on the electronic media. In the dawning new journey ahead art is sheltered by the uniqueness of the person. Each child is an artist besides being free to live as a soul cleansed by transcendent truth. This notion of child as artist has already been realized by the pedagogy of Rudolf Steiner. In the so-called Waldorf Schools, or free schools as they are known in Europe, the children make their own textbooks that are full of their own illustrations. Art is woven into every subject matter. The harmonies of knitting a sock or making a zither help the assimilation of mathematical abstractions.

508

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

Beauty in radiance of inner Overwhelmed by what was called the objective spirit the generations of the age of natural sciences compensated for their lack of participation in that controlled environment by exaggerating their personal physical qualities and their power to attract onlookers. Self-ornamentation became a pre-occupation. Unfortunately this eﬀort was embedded in gossip. The inward turn that is ﬂourishing ever more intensely has helped already a great number of persons to realize the wonders manifest in their soul. All they need to do is to enhance them in outer expression. Instead of looking over one’s shoulder whether one is being judged favorably by others, one can learn to participate in the art of living by being intimate with one’s own inner beauty that is part of the holy gift of freedom and truthfulness. Security can’t possibly come from striving to be idolized. Traditional religion warned people against making images of the sacred; now we may extend that insight to our selves and others. Seeing the wholeness of a person won’t, henceforth, require static imagery. Love will not become stagnant. It won’t be easy to remove consumerism from the schools and the media. It involves a smaller position for the natural sciences, the elimination of collective self-gloriﬁcation in history and school events, the clariﬁcation of confusion of achievement with status seeking, the opening of opportunities to ﬁnd real friendship instead of envious peer pressure, among others. The schools founded by J. Krishnamurti are in many respects exemplary of such new possibilities. Dream revealing personal calling Living in tension and conﬂict, peaceful rest was not expected during the modern period. A vast entertainment industry was shaped to help people ﬁnd release. Dreams showed the pain of struggling with self-rejection, unreliable relationships outside of the birth community, and wounded experiences inside the family. In a more contemplative future we will be able to establish a better balance. Many signs of such self-understanding have already appeared. Retreats, widespread appreciation for the awesome peace of nature exempliﬁed in national parks, ﬂexible work hours to avoid the stress of commuting, interest in what Asia has discovered in meditation and exercises, alternative views of healing, etc., illustrate emerging patterns. The understanding of the signiﬁcance of dreams also has shifted from a repository of repression towards an intimation of our destiny. What Bachelard called the pankalon (all in beauty) quality of

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

509

reality becomes clear to us when we leave practical concerns aside, entering a playful half-dream state. Phenomenal reality is now showing its essential nature. The curriculum of the stress-rich past reaped its catharsis in literature, notably in the mode of the feuilleton. The criterion for what stories would be worth telling or assign will shift when the day of the contemplative age begins. That beginning won’t be announced on the morning news. It begins in our heart. Entertainment on the basis of the good guys endlessly returning to beat up bad guys – a dualistic feature shared by traditional cultures – is bound to cave in when the teachings of love ﬂow in full. In schools’ children will need to study examples of transformation in relationships when the other cheek is turned toward the bad guys. Then fear will not be recycled. Happiness appears in compassion at the beginning of the story and accompanies it throughout. Immortal soul The empirical age – like traditional cultures with their wish for longevity – separated living from death. It removed the graveyard out of the town’s center. It told its anxious children that death was a form of sleep. But it couldn’t assuage its fear of death by scientiﬁc studies. The contemplative approach discovers inward realities that don’t age while we grow old in our bodies. Freedom, for example, can stay fresh when we clean up after an experience. Learning to let go of the day instead of saying ‘‘I’ll be back tomorrow to get things in the shape I want them to be’’ is the challenge for education. Presently we learn linearly in piling up enough experiences till we can replace the pile with a theory. The child has an inadequate cognitive grasp of reality. The professor has the best. Contemplation deﬂates this cognitive hierarchy. What is measurable is the least important part of reality. We learn appreciation for wholeness with our integrity that is equally immeasurable. No sciences will, henceforth, be allowed to boss over this dignity of the human person. This dignity doesn’t grow old. We were already in it when we were born. It is not a human right dependent on someone else’s obligation; we can’t expect redemption from politics. Living and dying are now brought together in a daily intimacy. Here is the clue to self-renewal. The contemplative teacher can exemplify this when he stops taking shelter in the cognitive lesson plan that makes rebellious subjects out of potentially freely learning children. In her/his sensitivity the teacher no longer repeats a routine and burns out in middle

510

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

age, long before the death bell tolls. Rationalism wants complete control over inputs, throughputs, and outputs, restricting kids to talents. Contemplation seeks guidance in the challenges that are unresolved and awakens a community of learners in their psychological birthday suits. One can test the diﬀerence in quality of vitality in these contrasting pedagogies. Sexuality part of wholeness, not abused as power to attract The center of the culture was vacated when the modern age began. Human beings were promised that, henceforth, they would now occupy that throne; instead, the new culture scattered into a thousand pieces. Each fragment mistook control of itself as suﬃcient leverage to represent the whole. So it happened to sexuality. Love was seen as a higher branch of desires. Sexuality was over-loaded with expectations to compensate for the impersonal experiences in society, and away from the hundreds of obligations in the family. As in the previous era, sexuality continued to be feared as a disrupting part of life. The liberation of women shifted the blame to men for causing the breakdown of family bonds. Sexuality per se is not to be controlled; that would be repressive according to the theories and beliefs of the modern era. Seduction was the reigning term. In the contemplative era to come, the reality of inner beauty manifests itself. No more talk of sex life, work life, multiple selves in compartments, contingent friendships, loneliness, etc. The new insights into what ends the separation of pleasure from pain also stop the centrifugal disintegration of culture. Love can be welcomed as the sovereign of desire. From early age on, before teenagers awaken to sexuality, children may learn in all respects to begin relationships in awareness of the holiness of the person and the sacred world. They need to verify for themselves what qualities sprout forth when the immaterial and the invisible are contemplated, not as if sitting in a stadium, but in humbly received presence. The past period will protest. Didn’t empirical research show how children learn in concrete operational terms (to borrow Piaget’s language)? This is a self-fulﬁlling assumption. Any parent who is not too caught up in the culture that wants experts to do the talking, can deny its validity. Love of the baby is a gift to parents that they receive as the miracle it is. Meaning will go to the regulative seat in relationships. Purpose, satisfaction of needs, exercise of organic functions will be in second- or lower order. Signiﬁcance rules like a polar star, it gives steady

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

511

direction over the length of a journey. It is not exhaustible in deﬁnitions although these presuppose it and can’t say a thing without it. To live meaningfully is our ﬁrst need. Without it we get sick with a full stomach. The bio-social construction of needs and the corresponding sex education about anatomy and contraceptives will be replaced by the well-being of intimate friendship, by the modesty and humility that have properly regulated all previous experiences, and by a deep understanding that physical intimacy belongs in second-order under communion with the beloved whole person. When that communion has been strengthened across shared challenges then the time for the rites of passage into marriage has arrived. In marriage everyone is transformed. The bachelors have disappeared. Needless to say, this lies ahead; presently it is beyond the inhabitants of a culture with only ghost-like rites. Summary of the pedagogy to awaken integrity It is not possible to indicate strengths and weaknesses in a culture that is in its infancy. Still, a brief summary of the points made in the previous nine paragraphs may serve the restricted purpose of a short break in the journey. In Table 10 this review is presented. PEDAGOGY FOR INTELLIGENT COMMUNITY

We realized that the cognitive pedagogy for the political tasks of adaptation was in second worst position after the even more serious legitimacy shortages (pattern maintenance) characteristic of the modern age in its sunset. The material priorities created an anti-political milieu, usually adding insults (corruption) to the injury of not understanding the essence of politics. We will present in outline what contemplative pedagogy can do for building intelligent communities, a view of politics that goes way beyond the balancing acts of compromising. Public speech In accord with its worldview of inevitable conﬂicts, cognitive pedagogy set a bit of time aside for high school students to debate issues. History and civics courses were more restricted in ﬁnding out perspectives beyond the urgent need for patriotism in a multi-cultural society with centrifugal self-interest groupings. Contemplative pedagogy will be able to show that group intelligence arises in addressing common ground without rivalry. For

512

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

Table 10. Summary of the Pedagogy for Awakening the Integrity of Children Governing Principle

Aspects

From wholeness to wholeness Sensitive to common ground No separation of pleasures from pain Verifying, no imitation

Child messenger of gifts, lasting interests, free learner

Child is an artist Beauty in radiance of inner Dream revealing inner calling Immortal soul

Sexuality part of wholeness

Learning from full manifestations of inner radiance of worldly phenomena End of carrot/stick and focus on outcomes, begin with appreciation of wholeness Relational studies, non-judgmental compassion, truth transforms, end of linear learning Art enhancing ﬁrst-hand experiences of goodness No pursuit of images, self-esteem in fruition of inner gifts Balance of inner and outer, end of dualism and unsteady catharsis, playful interaction outside purpose driven relationships Willpower and cognitive lesson plan second order, explorations of ever-fresh living reality with ever-young awareness Friendship instead of peer pressure, enhancing each other’s inner calling, sharing challenges, sexuality removed from rivalry

example, high schools in the Ohio river basin have formed learning communities around the challenge to keep the great waterway healthy. The tasks include scientiﬁc monitoring, gathering the data and analyzing them, studying sources of pollution, making suggestions for improvement, publicizing and exhibiting the ﬁndings. Deep concern about this beautiful source of life for uncountable species automatically leads to ﬁnding the right words to share that appreciation including eﬀective action regarding required changes. The pedagogical principle is to have young persons examine a really felt dilemma in a community or in a society, a traﬃc jam, a housing shortage, a dangerous situation, etc. The simplistic dualism of being for or against can be replaced by social experimentation with persons in the community who are willing to join such a self-correcting mode of trials and errors. L aw It was a feature of the former era to let rivalry spill over from economy into politics. To assure fair play a constant fracas broke out about rules

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

513

and their enforcement. Furthermore, the international acceptance of the sovereign notion of equality in the form of democracy brought this secular version of lawmaking into irreconcilable conﬂict with theological traditions that were intent upon living according to revealed law. Violence was therefore a gloomy forecast for young soldiers. However, nothing of such issues penetrated into the curricular heart of the modern school with its anti-political postulates. Contemplative pedagogy will attempt to get children to think orchestrally, to ﬁght only for the common ground, and ﬁght in a way the enemy is treated with honor, anticipating that a future intelligent community can be constituted that includes her/him. The exemplary lives of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. can be the guide. Secondly, contemplative ways of learning reach out to cultures that are aﬀected, or were aﬀected by, decisions originating in exclusive national frameworks. Such divisive patterns need to be properly brought to the graveyard. The practice of having children carrying placards with the grievances of their parents can be changed. Addressing the far greater challenge of properly sharing scarce resources while enhancing the common ground will set the children free of the disordered past. This dying to the past will be greatly facilitated by the dawn of inward security and the corresponding end of possessive conﬂict. The nation-state is an anachronism. We wrote earlier under the cognitive heading of law that children are acquainted with fair play. The same thing can’t be said so conﬁdently about parents in the winning cult. However, it needs to be pointed out that kids soon go into aberration if the culture that envelops them has lost all sense of properly staging contests, let alone ending them in a farewell manner. In sports, people can’t stop resurrecting these win-lose situations, most likely because more important parts of their lives have expired and are closed to passion. Spectator sports only oﬀer a simulacrum of passion in excitement. Excitement needs constant repetition and is, therefore, akin to addiction. Anyhow, contemplative pedagogy has to rise to this occasion and oﬀer the children occasions to clearly experience the diﬀerence between passion and excitement. Passion is a precious gift that needs cleaning as much, or more, as their body needs a thorough wash after a big eﬀort. The role of the athlete has to end when the contest ends. The role of worker or manager can’t go home; only a person does. Self-esteem doesn’t depend on medals and promotions, or on impressions we make on others. The contemplative school oﬀers opportunities to play hard only till it’s over.

514

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

Rising above double binds Fanaticism, stubbornness, and dedication are hard to distinguish in the old cultures of seeking power. Everyone seemed bent on getting their way or on realizing the utopia they pursued together at the cost of lesser mortals. This isn’t a feature to be observed only in the revolutionary period. The traditions indulged in power-values just as much, feeling righteous on behalf of the divine whose revelations to them had raised their rank in the social ﬁeld to the top. Now it is no longer important to derive one’s sense of destiny from the collective or personal goals of striving. Whether one’s eﬀorts are shown in public isn’t decisive either. The phrase I’m making a diVerence resonates with the old glory – values that seem indestructible. The contemplative schools will examine, with the children, the dilemmas of daily life with its X-ray like, non-judgmental intuition. The parties that are pulling in opposite directions – for example, parents and peer pressure, or mother-in-law and daughter-in-law doing this to the son/husband, children and spouse, ethnic culture and mainstream – are to face inwardly the power-values that they are enacting. They do not have the best interest of the torn-up person in mind. They are expelling love while claiming to know what it is. Looking into relationships is radically diﬀerent from looking in the cognitive mode: that is always recognition, looking for clues. The latter, cognitive mode sieves reality through a priori measuring concepts based on experience and past knowledge. In contemplation we welcome the phenomenon in its own terms. Love is a priori but it doesn’t force reality through a narrow gate. It doesn’t reduce living experience to a simpliﬁed abstraction. Every morning we may see diﬀerent qualities than we did before. Furthermore, we discover facts regarding the qualities of the relational ﬁeld in which these phenomena are embedded. These facts are constructed, the old culture would say, and they are based on motives of self-interest. Therefore, this judgment enacts a demystiﬁcation without feeling guilty of a violation. The exposure is so threatening that it strongly reinforces the distrust that masked reality in the ﬁrst place. Contemplative observation doesn’t condemn selﬁshness but allows it to tell its story. In doing so its rigidity is dissolved. Contemplative awareness never controls outer performance from a sovereign inner life. Awareness unites outer and inner. Non-mental values are passively alert to the outer. There is no duality when we are in the act of attention. If duality – like mind over matter, including body – puts in a show it is held together by values, in this case power-values. The insight

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

515

that power is evil is very old; today we can’t use this word without creating further antagonism. We can only point out that duality leads to illness. Shared danger Surviving traditional cultures accuse the generations with primacy of mental abilities of having become soft in contrast to their own militancy. To be sure, the professionalization of the armed services, ﬁreﬁghting, police, nursing, etc., has left the majority of contemporaries in a spectator position, haunted by fears they can’t do much about except for purchasing alarms, and wishing for catharsis in playing magical substitutes for real danger. On the other hand the outsiders don’t notice what teachers can easily attest: the children have become bold and outspoken in this era of equality. Facing danger and risk belongs to the essence of life in its political aspect. Correspondingly, the schools must create opportunities to form intelligent communities around such challenges. Children can help when their community faces a drought, a ﬂood, or a ﬁre. They can participate in harvesting, prepare for an event, help handicapped persons, nurse wounded pets, clean up the beach after an oil-spill, etc. High school students can take on serious responsibilities over a longer span of time under guidance of retired contractors in case they learn to build low-cost houses. And, in doing so, they will ﬁnd real friendship; that will conﬁrm Plato’s insight that friendship is of the essence in politics. From early on children can learn to take initiatives together. Children can take care of the cafeteria, of landscaping and planting the yard and the learning facilities, they can be responsible for monitoring the health of the habitat, they can exchange results of studies of intelligent cultural practices with age-mates abroad and in doing so reduce prejudice and increase fellow feeling. Ending conﬂict Having built-in conﬂict, the past period preferred to speak of dealing with and managing conﬂict, expecting an endless supply of new strife of the same sort. In contemplative pedagogy this postulate is dropped. It is in the nature of insight that it not only makes the case at hand luminous, it does so simultaneously for the whole set of such conﬂicts, if not for all

516

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

conﬂict. Take, for example, a person who ﬁghts a lot, arguing with people, getting annoyed easily, being disturbed by noise, etc. In the contemplative school, children learn to listen non-judgmentally to any phenomenon. Conﬂict can be listened to. This kind of listening is free of conﬂict. Awareness helps the burdened soul receive freedom. Conﬂict begins when desires are considered ﬁxed (reiﬁcation) and get a chance to frame relationships. In the simulacra of the psychology and economics of this materialistic era, needs are considered to be the central concept. Conﬂict disappears for the rich. A loving relationship, on the other hand, embraces diﬀerent perspectives and makes them modest. Scarcity is met with the inexhaustible security of inwardness and it is thereby transformed by fair sharing. The 19th century pitched capitalism against socialism. Artiﬁcial barriers were placed between ﬁnancial, managerial, and operative aspects of doing business. A century later ecological aspects are forced into an antagonistic position. Single-mindedness is never observed in nature. A variety of needs of organisms are taken care of in the same environment. Architects present another example of designing a house, oﬃce, factory, hospital, etc., that includes attempts to give every side its due. The idea is not to compromise but to let the interactions between various needs bring about a synergy.

V itality Willfulness has since long been a pedagogical issue. Energies clash with each other. Fatigue sets in quickly when intimate persons argue with each other. Striving for superiority is accompanied by fear. Seeing this together brings freedom. Power is not pursued in the dawning of the new culture. Why pursue it when it is already there in suﬃcient supply? The natural sciences postulated a run-down of energy. That is a feature of their model of nature. Reality does not run down. In human relations a clearing up of misunderstanding rekindles vitality. Love is a constant, not losing its ﬂame by repetition and routine. Within those false securities it may appear so, but these control-values exile love and can’t see it anymore. Entertainment and excitement provide boosts to deﬂated energy. The contemplative pedagogy relies entirely on depth of attention and interest that spring up from the inner gifts of the child. The word joy refers to the quality that is then present. It does not escape from boredom but receives it in the hospitable, non-judgmental arms of inward seeing. That is fulﬁlling while simultaneously cleansing out boredom.

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

517

It used to be the case that aspiring politicians or religious leaders would rally the crowd by rousing speeches. An enemy would be created – a war on poverty, for example – to unify the self-interested audience in a cover-up. The energy would be temporary. After the speech people would leave with a headache. Inward talk is radically diﬀerent. Enemies are never created. The issue is addressed and the intelligence of the audience is set free to articulate the many aspects that need to be taken care of. Cognitive education put the teacher in the position of pedantry, namely, already knowing the answers, even misusing the name Socrates to help children discover such not so eternal memorabilia. Contemplative pedagogy proceeds in awe of the unprecedented, in a very tentative and hesitant but intelligent learning community. After the children are assured of such great goodness they can get a little bit of a taste of the low level energy of possessive power.

T iming The children of egalitarian values are bold and self-expressive, as we mentioned before. The world is a stage to them as it was for Shakespeare. The most interesting thing on this public forum is their appearance. Vanity reigns. Quickness of wit, clowning around, facetiousness, etc., seem to prepare them for the political essence of speaking the right word at the right time. If it all would be so easy! Some entertainers would have become president by now if that were the case. What we need in contemplative education is a set of opportunities to be open to the complexity of a serious situation, preferably drawn from incidents in the school or in the community. Action has to be delayed until after every aspect has been taken in while also keeping the naming and analyzing mind in abeyance. It won’t be one person who can be expected to articulate quickly the redeeming words. Before this happens the kids can alternate between solitude and circle time to deepen their connectedness with the puzzling issue. All concern with images is discarded. Popular kids and bullies who wish to extend familiar controls need to get feedback that their wishful or willful behavior is a hindrance. Examples of this pedagogy are in moral dilemmas, no longer seeking quantitative answers as the utilitarian age had practiced, avoiding dogmatic assertions, and leaving aside the probability based generalizations of the social sciences that recycle the past while advertising that they are improving matters.

518

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

T ruthfulness Peace and intelligence can’t appear when a group of people approach a challenge from their self-concerns. They won’t give up their worried state because they keep seeking security where it can’t come from. What is the truth of insecurity? In contemplative pedagogy, contrary to cognitive education, truth is a holy epiphany. The person seeking power or wealth as the way to security involves her/himself in lying. Children can learn that certain questions originate in relationships with bad qualities. Consequently these questions have to be left aside till we learn more about those negative qualities. Such learning is non-judgmental and compassionate. Under such guidance truthfulness has taken over. Now the children can only ask good questions about those bad qualities. These good questions are enactments of their own good heartedness. If a very upset person would ask for information leading to his intended victim the children can learn not to answer such a wrong question. There are no right answers to wrong questions. Lying is not needed either. The anger in the wrong question needs to be attended. That attention is the vehicle of truth. When anger opens up under this whole-heartedness, it ends. For the mind molded by the age behind us this may sound fantastic. During that time truth seemed to have disappeared altogether. So many opinionated persons, so little common sense! Words went ﬂying oﬀ in an illusionary verbal universe. In contemplative education speech is preceded by silent participation in the wholeness of reality. The school grounds must have such silent places to receive inward guidance. All loudspeakers and ampliﬁers will have to be returned to the shop. The days will begin with silent appreciation of an animal, a tree, the wind, the face of an old person, a baby, never the same thing. Every study subject begins with appreciation of the wholeness in which it plays its part. That’s suﬃcient for receiving truthfulness. No one else can measure it to control us. Summary of the pedagogy for intelligent community In Table 11 the various points of the previous paragraphs are brought together in a brief summation. PEDAGOGY FOR ECOLOGICAL DESIGN

Cognitive pedagogy governed curriculum and teacher training with the dominion-value of mind over matter even to the extent of fabricating

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

519

Table 11. Summary of the Pedagogy for Intelligent Community Governing Principle

Aspects

Public speech Law

Address issue without rivalry Fight honorably for common ground, passion distinct from excitement, ritual protection of the public forum Looking into relationships, no need to seek power or fear it, ending false duality of motive and act Children help community in its troubles, end magical substitutes of danger, initiate ventures Listening non-judgmentally to disturbance, synergy in interactions of diﬀerent needs Self-renewing relationships, joy in inward attention, ending search for stimulation Learning to ask good questions, sacred grove or pond on school campus

Rising above double bind Shared danger Ending conﬂict Vitality Truthfulness

un-natural materials, products with non-recyclable toxics, and excessively complex organizations and settlements that generated disturbing side eﬀects that were often worse than the problems that were solved. However, accountability for such unexpected disorder was inherently diﬃcult to establish as the important decisions had been made in autonomous segments of the economy of this era. There is no reason to be fatalistic about these patterns. Awareness of these ﬂaws of mental superiority has grown to the point of witnessing new patterns and expecting further dramatic changes within decades. Children need to study interconnectedness. The special sciences don’t have objects in focus; they examine only aspects of phenomenal reality. In their simulacra of these selected aspects it may look like the model’s structure is a substitute for the structure of reality as a whole. That obviously is an illusion. In contemplative learning the problem is examined in its own terms, not cut up according to specialized perspectives. Children who feel directly aﬀected by the challenge will form a circle around the issue. Emphasis is going to be placed on learning from nature concerning its super-intelligent design involving perfectly calibrated interactions, synergies, closed-loop integration of living and dying, and multiple back-up systems. Contrary to the current modes of specializing, quantifying, and losing connection with the wholeness of outer reality, without resolving the miseries of poverty, the new pedagogy is going into the opposite direction.

520

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

The air will be taken out of inﬂated politico-economical priorities. It doesn’t make any sense to motivate workers to strive for control when their rivalry artiﬁcially raises the value of the scarce object of attraction. Fear of losing control accompanies this false haven of security. Expenditures on protecting possessions go up. The contemplative school can oﬀer real emotional shelter by its abandonment of competition in learning. The old worldview extended its grip further to personal idiosyncrasies with sophisticated ways to mobilize human vanity for consumption of products and services designed by very few tastemakers. Thanks to a far deeper current of appreciation for cultural diversity the supposedly uniform globalization waters are carrying back greatly imaginative remedies against standardization. Contemplative pedagogy helps children to see through consumerism. Boys and girls alike learn to make things that they need. Clothing is not to be made into uniforms. The person of the child needs to ﬁnd its own good taste and express it modestly. Young persons need to be able to make a good house. Still, no day passes without a story of cheap labor abroad displacing workers in societies that were once industrial. Contemplative pedagogy has to include exemplary practices to put the economy on a sustainable basis involving the children in guardianship of the quality of nature’s resources. Zero-growth husbandry of the green-blue planet’s household will be the motto. To create this overall sense of acting together the new schools will be on the internet with schools abroad to exchange good examples of proper ecological ways of work that give the local folks meaningful participation in the overall well-being at that address. Their security can’t depend on consumption at the other end of the planet. Ecologically sound supplies of healthy nutrition would back up a local currency. Instead of paying monetary taxes persons young and old would give their time to build up community capital. The contemplative school will oﬀer kids opportunities to grow edibles, take care of an orchard, build a ﬁsh pond, cook balanced meals, and learn of closed-loop work without waste. The thrust of contemporary education was to mainstream every group that had not beneﬁted from the revolutionary age. Rights to all kind of freedoms and prosperity had been projected as beacon for the upward and forward march of humanity. Evolution was the key term to help the contemporaries to suﬀer patiently for their children’s improvement. It has been estimated that mainstreaming would require manifold planets like the one we are living on. Contemplative education starts with acknowl-

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

521

edging the end of this illusion. Next, in order to avoid enclosure by kin and clan – which has been the major source for feuds throughout history – it counts on the higher order of personal friendship. Friendships ﬂourish when teenagers from diﬀerent cultural backgrounds have to face common diﬃculties. A mountain climb teaches friendship. Rescue responsibilities make strong bonds. Passionate games override group self-interest if the athletes themselves make up the teams to level the playing ﬁeld. Phenomenology, un-motivated state The past period was proud of its realism and criticized Platonic dreams of a heaven of regulative ideas. We have mentioned several times that its positivism had a very restricted gate to pull in reality. Contemplative pedagogy begins relationships with feelings that don’t make distinctions between inner and outer, and that are not under sovereignty of a separative self looking for clues to protect its familiar control. The source of these sensitive feelings is a priori but unattainable, and so are the qualities radiating from reality and entering our ﬁeld of attention: their presence conveys an inexhaustible mystery. These two facts ensure the possibility of avoiding routine and choking oﬀ love by repetition. When we encounter a fellow human being in this manner then a meeting of eyes begins the relationship in wonderment. If, however, past experience is steering the emotions then we intuit that something else is happening. The art of observing in clean inner mode is to be clearly distinguished from cognitive perception, or recognition. The latter subordinates selected perspectives on reality to cause/eﬀect relationships without considering their being part of a meaningful whole. Phenomenology doesn’t drop out of the ﬁeld of meaning to causality and materiality, as is the habit of experts. Humans live with each other in search of meaning. We become restless when we can’t ﬁnd it. We pursue various purposes but meaning leaves attainment quicker than thought, will, judgment, wish, or satisfaction can catch it. Instead of causality, phenomenology has used the term intentionality to indicate the human search for meaning. We would say that the term communion conveys better what takes place when inner and outer touch one another. Intentionality connotes motive and purpose. We refer to a state of passive alertness without either. A gift is passed. Gratitude is present. Nothing needs to be achieved. Wholeness is manifest. Complete security envelops those present. For example, when Laurens Van der Post went back to South Africa after years of imprisonment during the war

522

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

he wanted to meet a rhinoceros to recuperate his spirit. So it happened. Ancestral cultures can inspire children to have such encounters. To look an owl in the eye, and feel the reciprocity, that teaches this art of observing with a full heart. It has to be a strange animal otherwise the children will want to cuddle it. This is hands-oﬀ learning. Animals have been domesticated to serve our purposes. Here we are unlearning our proclivity towards dominion. Interconnectedness, habitat focus The age of over-specialization lies behind us. It generated smart people lacking in wisdom. Fragmented expertise had been trying to compensate for its unbalancing impact. It couldn’t succeed because it kept its essentially reductive mode regarding those rescues as well. Like the un-redeeming catharses accompanying our persistent fears that we examined earlier, the attempt to ﬁnd respite in the weekend after a week of undesirable work loaded up this possibly restful time with frustrating expectations. Contemplative pedagogy receives tasks or weekends holistically and ends them when closure is reached. Its curriculum can no longer be based for ﬁrst-order governance on specialization. Computers can do the memorizing. Skills can be moved into second- or third-order regulative principles. Sovereignty goes to crucial features of the habitat of the students, the river basin, the coast, the mountain, the vegetation, the assets that need to be conserved, and the provisions that need to be made against possible emergencies. The art of seeing signs of health and illness can be learned from older inhabitants who have deepened their sensitivity by living carefully in and with the milieu. Dependencies on other localities need to be examined, and, vice versa, other habitats’ helplessness presents a challenge. Children from these interdependent regions need to study together under guidance from older persons who have been selﬂessly in tune with that setting. Holistic observing isn’t done from a mountain top; it comes about by letting particulars reveal their connectedness. The neglect of nature by the cosmic abstractions of the unnatural sciences has been objectiﬁed in asphalted school facilities behind metal fences to keep the urban jungle outside. Inside this cage a poor replica of reality couldn’t keep the attention of the students without trickery. The new, contemplative school requires simultaneous urban renewal. The irrationalities of land speculation to get rich oﬀ urban concentration need to be ended. Blind faith in the regulative intelligence of supply and

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

523

demand has not removed slums and all their well-known miseries. By studying the history of families or States that got rich in this manner, or in like manner by stealing gold and silver, such past may still release a blessing to us: it invites us to start on a new foundation. Children need to get acquainted with pioneering examples of urban forestry, agriculture, limits to sprawling growth via enclosures by green belts, and elimination of commutes by re-integration of dispersed functions (work, market, health, school, etc.). Children need to learn to build assets on the common ground such as solar heating, edible landscaping, learning centers within walking distance of the community, including re-constructing their own school, building aﬀordable homes, bicycle paths, recycling and repair centers, etc. T ransformative learning When we are fully aware of our soul’s wish to meet what is sacred in the world and feel communion from integrity to wholeness, we stop framing reality according to our limited mental gifts. We no longer avoid our rebirth into soulful individuation, or seek guidance for our lives from statistical averages based on limited past experiences. The pretensions of the social sciences to imitate the natural sciences and the professional ﬁelds that are so proud of their interventions as long as they externalize the side eﬀects they have been causing, are then falling ﬂat to the ground. Vested interests in these bankrupt practices make this demise diﬃcult. In the face of poor learning rationalism has been extending itself with ever more intrusive controls along unexamined positivistic lines. Contemplative pedagogy throws out this end-gaining and its harmful seductive sweeteners. Children henceforth are learning selﬂessly for the love of what lives and what sustains that seamless holiness. Reality is a dynamic whole, always complete. Surplus is for back-up. Human beings themselves are designed to face emergencies; they are the prime surplus capital. The wind is taken out of the illusion that human beings are deﬁcient and need to become rich and famous to feel that they live a worthwhile life, or that such isolation is suﬃcient when disaster strikes a community. There is some scarcity but rivalry for its control will have to be stopped. Competition for scarce medals is a bad way to play, and it is a worse way to work. Synergy appears when we interact with others who are each uniquely gifted and experiment together with alternatives. Comparison, fear and envy are booted out of education, a point clearly seen in action in the aforementioned schools founded by Krishnamurti.

524

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

The uniﬁed ﬁeld of meaning allows studying the simultaneity of changes in diVerent ﬁelds as pioneered by J. H. Van den Berg. Architecture, the sciences, our health, the relationships between men and women, childrearing, dress, ways of work, changes in worship, etc., they are not compartmentalized. To the contrary, they form aspects of an integrated ﬁeld. The compensatory role assigned to the arts and humanities was based on false foundations. It was folly to rationalize and specialize these parts of the good life and treat them as made up of components to be sequenced as if we were putting a puzzle together. The inversion of lower-ranked skills to prominence that followed the usurpation of the throne by the analytical mind can be properly restored when these endeavors in liberal arts are again seen as portals to self-awareness, and as expressions of devotion to what is sacred. They can no longer be forced down the unwilling throats of pleasure seekers. Freedom is an inward gift, and it is written in the constitution of contemplative education that we may trust the child, as we may ourselves, to go to the wisdom tradition when it hears its calling. The teachers will no longer perish when they abandon supplying verbose additions to the illusion that knowledge changes our heart. We can trust our heart to take care of us. Awareness of our false mental priorities is the turn about. Closed system, no waste Development was the key word of the Age of Belief in Science. If only everyone learned to read, apply contraceptives, brush their teeth, etc., there would be no end to the self-improvement of the race. The sky is the limit! By now we should know about the limits here on earth. It is a closed system that is perfectly calibrated. If we damage the parameters by burning holes in the protective ozone layer, by cutting down vast forests, by destroying species in the oceans, etc., then we have become a threat to our children. Children in contemplative schools will learn closedloop thinking from the preparation of the soil to the return of waste to soil-renewing life forms. Material will be examined regarding its use after having lost its function in education. When something is studied it will ﬁrst be observed where it serves a living wholeness. Unnatural materials will not be dumped and corrupt the food chain. Conﬂict served as a wake-up call in the boring pursuit of prosperity. A large variety of other stimulants accompanied the period that relied on mass production. The masses did become prosperous but they also became prone to intoxicating ideologies, commercial sports, violent ﬁlms,

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

525

vulgar sexuality, etc. These were considered separate phenomena, each requiring specialized expertise. Contemplative pedagogy explores the depth of the soul, a journey without an apparent limit. It shows the students that outer reality renews itself on a daily basis. Only when we seek possessions do we fail to realize that we, too, can live in self-renewal. The reality of stimulation, accumulation, and addiction would then be dissipating. Interactive exploring the unknown The ancestors sought magical formulas to reduce the risks of living dangerously, while the Age of Reason sought stability in its positivism and instrumental innovations. The traditions held on to mores and beliefs to assure themselves of continuity. The modern age has returned to ethical idealism, a normative order once protected by medieval logicians, now under scrutiny of pragmatists who quantify irreplaceable persons in search of a net proﬁt between pain and pleasure for the greater numbers. The culture still relies on formulas; how-to books are popular in the supermarket. The dawn is rising on meta-cognitive values that shine forth in interaction. Management is a command approach to reaching goals. Interaction precedes such bossing and can get work done in self-regulation by presenting all co-responsible participants the same information about progress to their common charter. The confederation of independent persons with access to the same news about markets, investments, schedules, etc., exchanging views with everyone else in the project, is the horizontalizing structure of interaction. It is already the modus operandi among specialists who each know more about a fragment than anyone else. Research-based industrial operations show this structure. Hospitals are run this way. Pilots and air-traﬃc controllers cooperate on this basis. Films are produced like this. Architects, engineers, zoning oﬃcials, building inspectors, and contractors are acquainted with it. Politicians interact with heads of departments and representatives of constituents. If done properly the synergy can be so intense that it is unforgettable. The sciences of psychology, economics, politics, and sociology that had their birthday at the beginning of the period behind us, assumed axiomatically that human beings are insecure and in need of belonging to a social group. Their statistical methodology validates their assumption. Insecurity and loneliness are not examined; they are condemned. Causality is axiomatic, too; the cause is externalized. Aggression is step three: that source has to criticized, denigrated, perhaps attacked. Contemplative

526

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

pedagogy could transform these sciences from the postulates up. The oftrepeated slogan of the sciences of the obsolete age was theory, predictability, and control. In the future the unknowable will be again, or for the ﬁrst time, appreciated as our inner security and source of belonging. We won’t emphasize needs but calling. The break between work and reward or punishment will be completed and carry us into a new culture. Summary of pedagogy for ecological design In Table 12 we summarize the contemplative views of material phenomena in their educational consequences. ECOLOGICAL GOAL ATTAINMENT IN EDUCATION

Following the earlier analysis of cognitive goal attainment in education we will distinguish substantial changes in pedagogy when humanity’s economic activities leave the ever-expansive track that collides with

Table 12. Pedagogy for Ecological Design Governing principle

Aspects

Phenomenology, un-motivated state

Meaning in relationships, communion as source of holistic action, avoiding ethnic enclosure by ﬁnding friends in facing shared risks, no acting upon part of reality, response of whole person Specialization and skills in 2nd and 3rd rank ordering principles after habitat, school center of ecological learning, urban renewal, ending land speculation, building assets on common ground Love for sake of living in wholeness, humans as surplusback-up, remove competition from learning, examine crucial simultaneous events in diverse ﬁelds as signiﬁcantly linked Study parameters of closed system of earthly nature, no dumping of unnatural materials, explore unlimited inwardness, self-renewal in nature and in soul Security and belonging in unknown, no substitution of formulas for direct response to challenge, learning to work in horizontalized ways without central command, temporary charter as work form with synergy and closure

Interconnectedness, focus on habitat

Transformative learning

Closed system, no waste

Interactive exploring of unknown

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

527

nature’s constants. As has already being witnessed for some decades, issues of the quality of life have been moving to front stage. Executives of corporations that link many countries together interact with politicians to establish self-regulating trade patterns, but their political status has as yet not been formally recognized. The United Nations isn’t sovereign over multi-national entities with secret internal trade and vast discretion in allocating overhead. Consequently, these concentrations of extra-national power avoid, or collude with their rivals to reduce risks that are larger than could be insured by most countries’ treasuries. The process is corrupted. We mentioned earlier that the modern age had material priorities and, as a result, confused politics as an extension of economics. Contemplation can clarify this boundary. Politics is an essential part of human relationships and its core is to govern, among others the economy, but also where people can live, shop, play, go to school, get buried, etc. Politics is to set stakes around the competitive playing ﬁeld of business. It is the referee, the judge and the police of fair play. To ensure this authority commemorative rituals will have to re-introduced pledging the competitors to a higher purpose than winning. Reverence for nature and treating human beings with dignity are higher values. The Age of Reason threw out rites as if they smelled of superstition. It will be up to contemplative pedagogy to renew these ceremonies. Bribing a politician will throw the responsible Chief Executive Oﬃcer in jail. Politics has to operate in the open. Business, on the other hand, patents its innovations and cloaks them in secrecy. Politics needs a free press; business seeks a favorite press. Politics needs an independent judiciary; business wants to win its case. The ﬁnancing of politics has to be severed from the economy. That will only happen when education throws Pavlovian conditioning and behaviorism into the grave with a farewell celebration. Children will then have a chance to get acquainted with uncorrupted politics while in school. When done properly politics can bring great social innovations while this creative process itself is memorable for its synergy. The how-to curricular emphasis of the still lingering, but dying modern age needs to be changed. It can’t go back to indoctrination – what-to think, believe, or desire. Children need to learn now to articulate the constants of nature. Habitats have parameters. When these are violated the milieu collapses. Continuous small dosages of poisons or imbalanced breeding of some species may lead to discontinuity. It is the same for human beings who condition their bodies to want bad things. There are constants in human beings, gifts beyond our mental abilities. If we violate

528

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

these we are in trouble. For nature’s boundary conditions monitoring instruments are required and children will feel that they are making real contributions when they can report on the state of health of air, water, trees, animals, and human beings. For their own soul children need leisure, freedom from activity, listening to silence, hearing wisdom stories, being quiet with animals, ﬂowers, etc. Adolescents need to experiment with new political forms based on regional ecologies that ensure the self-renewal of natural resources and the leisure of human beings to be available for emergencies and to strengthen the community’s assets on the common ground. That will be the new form of taxation. The folks that want to be occupied with modes of transportation, media of communications, transformation of raw materials into things in the shopping mall, are not suited within that function to represent Mother Nature’s limitations. So far they have relied on manufacturing unnatural substitutes in case resources like rubber ran out. Whether the gathering of the original material or surrogates had toxic or bad social consequences fell outside their purview. In the modern age politicians represented nations and other self-interest groups. Green parties want to speak for nature within the contest with other priorities. Developing countries wish to trade-oﬀ social and environmental demands. Ergo, politics as we know it is not aware of the need of a response that is equal to the unprecedented challenge. Finally, scientists of the old modern age construct simulacra and want to measure qualities, even wholeness, integrity, intelligence, etc.; so, what is immeasurable and irreplaceable can’t be given proper attention. The Enlightenment era did away with absolutes. It is blind to their existence. Contemplative education, itself hardly out of the womb, faces a serious challenge that is ignored by the other institutes of this historical period, especially cognitive education. Can the distinction constant/contingency be made clear? In the dawning era a hierarchy above these quarrelsome groups will have to emerge. The ingredients for this birth are already noticeable in the many institutes that are dedicated to conservation. Schools used to be looked upon as socializing vehicles to groom young people for established opportunities. Contemplative pedagogy can take on new challenges being one of the few institutions that pledged allegiance to truth. Conserving pedagogy Contemplative pedagogy aims at changing the expectations of work from expansion to secure, restricted consumption of quality products, all made

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

529

to be recyclable. It will give children conﬁdence that they can join pioneers who have set good examples. The artiﬁcial inﬂation of material values by conﬂict-ridden security-seekers, or worse, by superiority-seekers, will end as inwardness becomes sovereign in these new schools. The display of superﬁcial changes in fashion of many products besides clothing and body ornamentation will be stopped when human beings fully awaken to answer serious challenges with durable answers. It’s amazing that teenagers can goof oﬀ, killing time, when the planet’s assets are in such a seriously poor state. More astounding is the indiﬀerence to the commons evinced by the generation of their parents. Finally, it is appalling that leading politicians seem forever preoccupied with collecting funds for re-election, avoiding raising everyone’s concerns for what is already in the emergency room of the culture. The new learning centers will exemplify the new direction by replacing imbalanced curricula favoring the cosmic sciences with hands-oﬀ ecological studies and hands-on political experiences. Present education creates a nomadic graduate who will have great diﬃculty stabilizing intimate relationships with other self-centered individuals. Tourism is not only ﬂourishing in its own right – which is considered a boon to poor countries with rich traditions if we ignore the irresponsibility on the part of the aﬄuent entertainment seekers – its superﬁciality has also invaded intimate relationships, that last residue of the culture where a whole person could still show up, the rest having been leveled down. The outer, erotic attractions are replaceable. The age of consumerism seems slow in learning about its self-destruction. It has mistaken sensate experience for inward discovery of meaning. Its rationalism was justifying uncontrolled desires, it was hostile to immaterial love, and it was linear in controlling the inputs, steadily steering towards goals that were mere extensions of what had been achieved already. Ecologies ﬂourish when cared for by people who live there like trees. There is no need to seek stimulations in ever greater dosages once inward depth is veriﬁed in its wholesome, living, unrepeatable qualities. When closure is reached, hunger for more is not aroused. Rest and self-renewal in solitude are calling. Careerism needs to end in the teaching profession; there are no higher ranks. Certainly, experts in fund raising and fund spending can’t be placed above the midwives of the sacred in the child. In fact, as we said earlier about ending land speculation, education, too, has to be altogether taken out of the market economy. Teachers, like the experts regarding parameters of nature can’t be insulted with imposing criteria that belong to second- and third rank regulative principles as if

530

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

there were no ﬁrst-order obligations to the immeasurable. Furthermore, the next generation has to take the notion of labor force out of economics. Human beings are capital, of far greater value than machines and money. Distinction imagination/fantasy The planet is united by telecommunications and these gadgets have even been credited with diminishing the threat of war. The reality of inner conﬂict contradicts these fantasies. What will the dawning period rely on to prudently care for nature’s household? The source of creative responses to the new challenges is not in a remote cave: it is in intimate contact with reality. It is not in projecting our wishes and fears onto clouds, ﬂowers, strangers, etc. Marble talked to Michelangelo. The mountain Sainte Victoire spoke with Ce´zanne. Haystacks and Monet were in communion. Compassion was in Van Gogh’s hands when he revealed the truth of a postal clerk, a country doctor, peasants, etc. Things and persons are beyond cognition but they communicate with our heart. Bachelard’s work in the phenomenology of imagination can inspire further opening up of this inner-outer resource. Communion is not a subjective gift. Intelligence arises in an intensely alert presence to outer reality. The outcome is always articulated as a two-in-one, an epiphany. When a gifted engineer is touched by passionate intimacy with a culture outside his urban society with its many strangers he/she would discover the tools these seemingly out-of-time survivors need. Gandhi and Schumacher were the pioneers of such practical visions that have by now been institutionalized in hundreds of research centers for intermediate technology, and in banks that mobilize group intelligence in poor people (Mohammad Yunus started the Grameen bank in Bangla Desh in this manner, now a world-wide phenomenon). Schools can enact the basic principles and give youngsters a sense of belonging to humanity. Groups of teenagers can start a charter business for a quarter (running part of the cafeteria, for example) and learn from all the diﬃculties and surprises with an energy that is incomparably more intense than cognitive studying is able to reach. The urban societies need the same design pregnancy that starts as indicated above. Self-correcting, self-healing Tinkering, fabricating, lateral thinking, improvising, are some of the key terms of the problem-solving and -ﬁxing state of mind of the modern age.

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

531

Special types arose to get things through a Kafkaesque labyrinth of oﬃces and procedures. Politicians practiced wheeling and dealing in this spirit. Between these benders of rules and the rule-makers reigned a tacit understanding not to expose the insuﬃciencies of planning. With the diminishing importance of acting according to plan and belief, and with the rise of appreciation for the hidden intelligence in inter-connectedness, onetrack mindedness, single-purposefulness, mass production of uniform models, and dependence on thousands of speciﬁc parts are all in a sunset position. Nothing in nature is a copy of something else. Only superﬁcial observation would make it seem that way. Everything is designed for self-correction and self-healing. Forests restore themselves after a storm; at least they used to. Every living species cooperated to clean up the mess. Our present storms convey an alarming message about nature’s overall health. It would be better to understand disaster as a possibility for self-renewal. Human beings don’t have speciﬁc skills and purposes, so they can be quickly ready to do something for the ﬁrst time. Human beings are also inherently oriented toward order and beauty. Children for sure expect it; they need inviting and challenging material that has quality control by the child designed in it. There are many examples of this insight in Montessori material. Contemplative pedagogy studies how multiple problems can be tackled together, not by adding specialized perspectives but by seeing, however dimly at ﬁrst, what harmonies are required. The focus is shifting from problems – like poverty, crime, addiction, lousy housing or no housing at all, gambling, etc. – to optimizing tensions in diﬀerent functions that serve overall harmony. One example of good design is worth inﬁnitely more than all the anger and blaming surrounding the focus on miseries. Admiration If the modern age was overﬂowing with ambition to reconstruct the world, the dawning era is moving back into inwardness. Proving to others that one’s achievements have made a diﬀerence – the common phrase of the will-power era in its old age, getting more afraid of death – will recede as appreciation grows for being part of instantaneous renewal in the web of life. Fullness of life is already here, ever present. In leisure it can be felt in humility and awe. In love it is transparent in the beloved. Parents and teachers may intuit wholeness in their children. The hunger for social recognition can be cured when these inward facts are veriﬁed. Time and

532

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

causality may step down from their prominent position. Later isn’t better. Simultaneity reigns. Presently we witness a rapid turnover in the cult of stardom. Anxious cosmetic packaging, exaggerated rhythms, ampliﬁers, drug abuse, speed for its own sake, tokens of power but actual dependency on outer stimulation: all these phenomena point to a loss of personal destiny. We are amidst a cultural crisis. Contemplative pedagogy oﬀers fewer opportunities but these stretch the span of attention of children. Growth is preferred over mechanical construction; undiﬀerentiated attention leads to a deeper connectedness than willful concentration; initiating something for the ﬁrst time is sovereign over needed skills; a harmony of diverse talents allows personal rivalry to disappear; each child is discovering without having to please quicker peers or adults.

Diversity in learning centers There won’t be any further need to concentrate uniform resources into schools and hear complaints that there is never enough. Cognitive pedagogy with its textbook simulacra of reality, its instrument-driven disposition toward quantiﬁable aspects of phenomena, its principle of seeking productivity by making master teachers sit like royal spiders in a web of telecommunications wires to distant copies of the palace school, its increasing standardization of outcome measurements, curricula, career paths, and teaching methods, all that is going to sleep. The unique challenges of the habitat and the singular messengers of good tidings – our children – will require diversity in learning centers. The staﬀ that is vested in the practices of the old modern age is not likely to realize that humans are created in freedom for creative response, and with the possibility of rejuvenation. They seek to prolong the life of modern schools. These self-referential professional teachers and administrators presume that they are the essential resource of a dynamic culture, but they mean only the material part. They are caught up in the overcomplexities of a lost worldview. They, too, will join the farewell of cognitive education. The currently still so inﬂuential mind-body massage by the mass media has had a widely noticed eroding eﬀect on the inner life, leading to an outer-directed, drifting type of a human being. Suddenly, inner gravity will turn this around. Being superﬁcial is unsustainable and swings from violence to suicide.

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

533

Learning midwifery – the Socratic essence of awakening the integrity of children – will be provided by persons who can take some hours out of their daily obligations, or who are retired and have more time for education. In all speciﬁc ﬁelds the pedagogy moves from presence in the living wholeness to analysis, and then back to more time in living community. Children need to learn from those closest to dramatic new perceptions in ecology, such as foresters, aqua-culturists, hydrologists, solarand wind power experts, as well as from ordinary folks who have devoted their lives to enhancing something of great beauty, to a deep insight, to a transformation of hatred, and who became skilled artisans in the process, in gardening, home construction, electrical work, plumbing, etc., and ﬁnally, by wise storytellers, artists, community-building politicians, judges, strangers from rich traditions, etc. Teachers will run these contemplative centers, learning from their trials and errors. No dependency on remote tax funds will be required. Helping these learning centers is a form of sacriﬁce that will be hardly noticed when children give their love to these teachers. The school will have a commons and children will have leisure to participate in creating and enhancing this community capital. The school will be experimenting with new ways and with social innovations, notably in intelligent decisionmaking in real life situations. Its facility can serve the needs for renewal for the neighbors. Management of education, presently growing topsy-turvy, will be separated from the learning process. The small, neighborly size of the new schools will reduce the need for administrators. In their own accounting ﬁrm they can take care of ﬁnances for a district of learning centers without a chance to boss over Socrates’ family. Professional janitorial staﬀ will also be expelled; clean-up days will bring happy taxpaying parents to the school of their children. Their time will be one of the ways they pay tax by conserving capital, and they can see for themselves whether their taxtime is well spent.

Negative feedback The Age of Enlightenment remained in the dark about desire. Attainment of pleasure was reinforced with repetition: that is called positive feedback. Cancer can grow like this when something has gone wrong with a higher ordering principle. Boredom is joined to pleasure as a shadow; it can be fought oﬀ for a while by changing stimulations. Eventually boredom wins

534

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

anyhow, causing stress in the hospitals because physical remedies can’t stop the desire for a surplus of pleasure over pain. Contemplative pedagogy conveys clarity in boundaries: a relationship begins in undiﬀerentiated attention, it ends in comprehension, and then it dies. The technical words for comprehension are Gestalt, closure, and negative feedback. This completion is the discontinuity in good relationships. There is no holding on. An undiﬀerentiated state of mind returns. A feeling of maturation and gratitude is present. An old challenge is waiting, calling from within. In undiﬀerentiated attention it shows new depth of exploration. No resentful dependency on an alternative source of pleasure is slipping through when we participate in self-renewal under guidance by the wisdom of love. Physical satisfaction is not experienced; human beings live at the level of meaning. They are, however, free to confuse themselves; in this case we would have given a self to our body. Our ancestors made, and our children make animals talk their language. It would be better to let birds sing in their language and that is suﬃcient for our heart; we don’t need translation. Fullness of meaning excludes routine or conﬂict with desire. The person of the beloved is appreciated in its wholeness. No fetish of parts of the physique disrupts this holistic quality. Quite to the contrary, the physical functions are in abeyance; an uncharted path is to be traveled to see the potential truth. Children are vulnerable to framed emotions, as are the older generations. Religion and politics don’t hesitate to inﬂuence kids. Parents may not have listened carefully to their inner calling and may have applied themselves eagerly to envious copying of others. So, contemplative pedagogy has its work cut out. Summary of ecological goal attainment in contemplative education In Table 13 these last aspects of contemplative theoria are summarized.

OVERALL SUMMARY OF CONTEMPLATIVE T HEORIA OF EDUCATION

In cognitive education we analyzed the priority of maintaining the material base of society. The social aspects were in second place in the rank order as hopes were pinned on the leverage achieved in technology. Nature was seen as one of many and the search for extra-terrestrial life preoccupied science ﬁction and space agencies. They couldn’t see the mystery in daily relationships. There was bias against particularity, reli-

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

535

Table 13. Ecological Goal Attainment in Contemplative Education Governing principle

Aspect

Conserving pedagogy

Shift to quality, end of value inﬂation, building assets on the commons, Focus on habitat, end of nomadic labor force Intimacy with milieu as source of creative imagination, strengthening living community with appropriate instruments, ﬁnance, learning centers Shift focus from separate problems and specialized expertise to intuiting interconnected harmonies, appealing to freedom in human beings to start something for the ﬁrst time Shift from will power and social recognition to alignment with nature’s self-renewal, end of personality cult, leisure for challenges on commons Ending centralization and uniformity in resources, curriculum, textbooks, master-teachers, beginning small scale centers run by teachers and utilizing community to begin and end in holistic participation in habitat concerns Shift from calculating psychological proﬁt toward fullness and completeness of experience, undiﬀerentiated attention distinguished from molding feelings

Distinction imagination/fantasy Self-correction, selfhealing Admiration

Diversity in learning centers

Negative feedback

gion, and politics. There was a favorable place for cosmic sciences, and for specialized autonomy-seeking professions. There were no constraints in principle to steer young people away from seeking experience in sensate terms. Parental authority crumbled. The humanities fell apart under the absence of sacred constants into a proliferation of interpretations. The schools were administered in uniform economic terms following egalitarian values. The pursuit of individualism led to a shallow display of marginal diﬀerences, while resting on a sense of belonging to a mass society interested in consumption. Lack of opportunities for hands-on political participation destroyed common sense. The tolerance level of mass society was low. The constants of nature had been damaged and there had been violent disruptions of patterns. Long-term answers will have to be given. Sharing of risks and sacriﬁces will have to be enacted. The way of life in the modern age cannot be counted on. Contemplating non-judgmentally the deteriorating culture of the Age of Enlightenment has led to a new horizon that could open up further when radical changes take place in value orientation. The ﬁrst signs of change have already been showing up in green views of commerce. These promising practical examples have been preceded by changes inside human beings. The knowledge-based teaching centers have placed envi-

536

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

ronmental studies next to the recycling of views that have lost vitality. Zero-growth is taught in one class, linear expansion in another. In both courses the measurable aspects are emphasized, simulacra are constructed, and sweeteners are handed out to make rivalry for scarce grades palatable. When we summarize the previous theoria we are not intending a cognitive act. Through the window of words we may actually see possibilities of living this way. The best medicine resides in awareness that the way we live matters a lot in the eyes of our conscience. In the era of positivism conscience was considered an authority we internalized in early childhood. Hence, there were conﬂicts between our own desires and the voices of the past. We couldn’t see relationships directly without seeking approval in how to see and what to look for. What happens when we are aware of this inner conﬂict? We can at least bring the contradiction to common ground so we don’t add impatience to the disorder. Inward sensitivity dwells in a conﬂict-free hospitality to persons, events, or phenomena, and searches for their Sunday-best appearance. Contemplative pedagogy leads to a living community outside the school grounds. Part-time teachers are found here among those who have followed the wisdom of love. Cognitive instruction goes to problems and calls on experts. The school then constructs a simulacrum of reality within its walls. Contemplative methods, on the other hand, ﬁnd exemplary harmonies when the dignity of persons has been caring for the selfregulation of the habitat. In these good interconnections insight is provided in the governing parameters that avoid miseries by mobilizing group intelligence. So, we have two pillars in this new education, one in the awakening of inwardness in children, and two, examining radiant manifestations in their outer setting. In cognitive education the source of legitimacy was known. It was kept under the guard of teachers. In contemplative pedagogy the source of harmony isn’t known. It isn’t knowable. However, looking together into manifestations of mutual beneﬁt patterns will lead to trial and error experimentation, practicing group intelligence. The contemplative school is built around a commons, and it is focused on the habitat that encompasses private property. Its curriculum includes leisure to address common issues and respond by building assets such as grazing meadows, orchard, solar panels, walking and bicycle trails, places for solitude, amphitheatre for political decisions, etc. The purpose of cognitive education was to make scientists out of the most talented children. Competition was used everywhere as a sorting

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

537

device. Contemplative education places purpose under a timeless order that it wishes to receive in humility and awe. It emphasizes freedom in learning and sees evidence of a fearless and immortal reality in this gift. There is no accumulation, rivalry or possessiveness in this dawning pedagogy. Social innovations present a higher challenge than ecological changes do, although those seem formidable enough. The empiricism of the past period accepted patterns because they were there: for example, people can’t stand one another, sibling rivalry, prostitution, cheating, the arms race to make us safe, etc. All we can do, according to this worldview, is to manage and contain these phenomena. Very frustrated groups wish to undo the culture that institutionalized those patterns. Then they want their chance to do the bossing. In contemplative education Gestalt philosophy is at work: patterns are allowed to die when understood. The learner has been lifted to a new level. Memorizing is thrown out as an instructional device. Comparative grading, too, ends up in the forgettable pile. Every pedagogical task is a challenge to sharing gifts of diﬀerent persons. Ethnic predilections are to be held in abeyance. No one can assert themselves as representative for civilization, religion, political ideology, gender, ecology, or any other form of having the inside track to what is sacred. These abstract pretensions, or these displacements of ﬁrst-order qualities by second-order norms, exist only as long as vital community has not been restored or created to care for the commons. The reliable constant is freedom to clean the learning process from within. Education is not a multiversity between cultures all seeking the limelight. It oﬀers something much better than these ancient honor/shame rigidities: love and friendship, and appreciation for participating in the web of life. CHARACTER-FORMATION

We are now ready to suggest ways of giving contemplative education a chance to prove itself to the science-minded protectors of cognitive education. We propose three tests of the strength of contemplative pedagogy in comparison with the best of the current practices. In this section we will be looking into qualitative diﬀerences in character formation. We would expect noticeable diﬀerences in character strength as a result of these pedagogies. This concept, character, has a history of references to military personalities. Loyalty has played a major part in its proﬁle. The heroic is brought out in defense of some valuable community, or, spontaneously, in instant response to an emergency. Conquest and domi-

538

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

nation still are being praised at the personal level even if their possibility has been removed from the political scene due to the suicidal nature of toxic weaponry. These values still reign to some extent over gender diﬀerences; they no longer do so in a sanctioned way. Therefore, in their decline, marriages, or what is replacing them, appear more competitive and argumentative. Great attention has been given to raising children into characters who stand by their promises. Tests are at the heart of this pedagogy. An inadequate sense of selfhood has to be shed like a skin that has become too small. Paradoxically, the initiate is made to feel very small before she/he is ready to identify with the big community. The consumer culture stands opposite of these rites of passage by making quick satisfaction possible at the price of intensifying desires that can’t ever leap over their shadow, a sense of ignorance regarding one’s purpose and calling. Competition is another feature of this old-fashioned, military character type that brings out future leaders in these conﬂict-prone societies. A sense of camaraderie arises quickly, thanks to an ample supply of shared risks in the hunt and at war, separating gender, overruling even the bonds of marriage. These forms can be found in entrepreneurial circles as well. We can’t underestimate this aﬀection for brawls, for all the paraphernalia of big ﬁghts in sports or in going to war, or for dropping one’s petty self in the opportunity to sacriﬁce oneself for the greater good for some collective. This cult of power is an avoidance of gratefully caring for one’s gifts and integrity. When we turn to contemplative education we see another strength than this ancient proﬁle in courage. Plato saw it exempliﬁed in Socrates and attempted to comprehend it in his dialogues, most speciﬁcally in the Republic and in the Laws. Many other teachers have followed with their suggestions. The qualities which are higher than physical courage or seeking debating victories, and that keep up morale in defeated persons, spring from a deeper inner source. It has no connection to success. Contemplative didactics doesn’t, like cognitive education, help the child to make it in the outer, social ﬁeld; it doesn’t seek the remedy for losing in winning, but it sets challenges to the youngster to ﬁnd out from within what is her/his destiny, and, for the second time, give birth to a self that is responsive to that. This compass helps the young woman or man to journey steadily toward that pole star, all the time delivering their inward gifts to those in need and receiving enriching messages from the same source in others in return.

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

539

Contemplative pedagogy has no sense of rivalry with others, nor would the student impose standards on her/himself. All standards bring us in the grip of what is known already. To give continuity to such past achievements breeds fear for losing this emotional shelter. From that perspective, courage is bound to become a problem. Contemplative education avoids this antinomy by forming an intelligent community around issues. There is no wish in the contemplative state to strive for positions above others. Inner calling is not dependent on control of outer scarcities. Therefore, envy and jealousy won’t arise, but friendship would. It’s only because we have turned to superﬁcial things to cling to that invidious miseries exist. And it is because we are so busy with possessions that we mistake these features for deep-seated, thereby condemning ourselves to sulking about our deﬁciencies. Another quality of cooperation emerges than the homogenizing teamwork of cognitive education. No need to give a longer life to a work community than the duration of a task. No need either to sustain a ranking order between young and old; the elder person may understand self-rejuvenation and prevent youthful rigidities. No ideology about men and women could be appropriate: their cooperation is independent of so-called chemistry. To see another person as a whole, instead of as a charming actor, awareness of possible identiﬁcation with commercial or traditional imagery and prejudgments needs to be on high alert. Awareness is not an intellectual instrument; it is an inner, holistic act of compassion creating a sense of peaceful trust, removing the mind’s anxious self-seeking. Contemplative connectedness wouldn’t maintain ethnic compartments. There wouldn’t continue to exist any prosperous but possessive mainstream with poor minorities on the fringes, thanks to the eﬄorescence of inner treasures that grow richer by being shared. The wholeness of creation has many ethnic vocabularies and diversity in customs, none of which to be used for monopolistic socialization. There are various ways then that we would be able to notice that in their character graduates from contemplative schools would conduct their aﬀairs diﬀerently from their peers whose childhood had been focused on success in the social ﬁeld. The latter group would approach situations with the expectation of meeting resistance and they would judge themselves in terms of overcoming that obstruction, accompanied by anxiety about losing face, in case of failure, in the eyes of others whose approval they seek. Cognitive education can’t untie this Gordian knot of achievement with status seeking.

540

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

The contemplative group would have rejected that combative posture and wouldn’t ever seek security in superior power. These persons would begin with ﬁnding common ground with the persons involved. For example, a salesperson of this persuasion would not attempt to push a service that the client wouldn’t need. A ﬁeldworker in family planning wouldn’t begin with information in that area of concern but would explore with the families involved how they view the future in terms of opportunities and how they are preparing their children. Unlike the cognitive protagonists the contemplators would put no credence in techniques as leverage in changing behavior. Outer change would follow inner transformation. The possibility of such a turnabout would depend on the presence of transcendence (theoria), not on human eﬀort and end gaining. Without inner movement outer changes would be superﬁcial and likely to soon slide back into old forms. We actually don’t expect contemplative graduates to ever work for any lengthy period in employment with a distorted, narrow view of reality. We do anticipate instead that they would be engaged in designing ways of doing projects in consideration of the dignity of those aﬀected from the raw materials at the beginning to the clean-up end of every part of it. There wouldn’t be any irresponsible externalization of cost to gain artiﬁcial proﬁts. Without any conceited wish to be socially recognized – being assured of inner sharing in the sacred – the alumni of contemplative pedagogy would be found in a new form of politics, no longer boiling in anger in a cauldron of opinionated pressure groups that force politicians into their bad reputation of double-speak, but engaged in holistic approaches to issues. We wouldn’t hear any longer the language of the bottom line or survival, or get depressed by cynicism. We would witness a shifting of focus from symptoms in a syndrome of fatalism to oﬀering opportunities to experiment. The totalitarian tendencies of our mental capability would have been discarded in a light-hearted, playful imagination. We would also notice the absence of any interest in getting richer just because that’s the habit in those circles. The culture would have begun to liberate itself from enslaving compulsions. Unhurried we would ﬁnd simpler ways of work, traﬃc snarls would disappear, and we would take longer vacations. Illustrations can also be given from private life. Contemplative relationships between spouses would erase all marks of antagonism that we would expect to persist under the reign of cognitive qualities in character. The latter seeks fortitude in persistent outer marks of continuity and sameness. To remain youthful through diet and exercise would be an

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

541

illustration of the cognitive, will power-driven character that wants to be admired. To ﬁght against smoking habits would be honored. However, fear to lose the battle against aging or addiction would come along. Envious gossip would be there, too, regarding the hypocrisy of other losers. Imagery and idolatry of perfect bodies would play prominent parts in this value system. Victories would be sought in substitute relationships to compensate for the defeated weak parts. The same threatened purposefulness on the part of individuals would be typical of any intimate relationships between them, but intimacy would be eluding their willful priorities. Perhaps that’s why the phrase falling in love is common, and why such fallen characters try to get up again by repeating the act of making love – while love itself can’t be made – till they are exhausted in boredom, only to accuse love for being so unreliable as to leave indiﬀerence or hate behind. This inability for intimacy is also the source of endless arguments between such idiosyncratic, inﬂated egos and these conﬂicts don’t decrease by compromises because self-centeredness invariably breeds further strife and misery. The contemplative openness to the wisdom of love, on the other hand, practices dying to ego and to attachment to any particular way of doing things. A restful, passive, ﬂowery quality would adorn the features of the face, ever changing, probably leading a cognitive onlooker to a slight disorientation if such a person were still capable of holistic observation. The body of the ego-free person would not be seductively displayed to gain favorable judgments but it would radiate, especially in the eyes, but also in graceful movement. The cognitively ruled life, on the other hand, would likely present its face as a poker mask with a frown, a scowl, or a cute expression, depending on the gains and fears in particular circumstances. Eventually these features freeze irrespective of changes in conditions. Death has appeared, prematurely. Let us summarize our ﬁrst hypothesis regarding the formation of diﬀerent character types under the auspices of cognitive or contemplative education. The school is deﬁnitely not the only nurturing ground of character. The family that chooses contemplative pedagogy practices such parenting, while the adherents of the scarcity view of life have introduced their children to joining that ugly game of struggling for dominance before they sent them oﬀ to cognitive institutions. However, the journey into the future oﬀers many surprises that can’t be brushed aside. Neither school nor childhood could claim predestination status. When hypotheses are articulated we can formalize them in a matrix with one variable, the independent or causative distinction on one side,

542

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

and the variation in eﬀect on the other side. Such a matrix would look like this with three rows and three columns: Dependent eVect

Independent cause State 1 State 2

State 1

State 2

Cell 1 Cell 3

Cell 2 Cell 4

If the hypothesis is good then a diagonal pattern will appear; State 1 of the causation (row 2) will bring eﬀect 1 about in column 2, and state 2 of causation on row 3 will result in state 2 on the eﬀect side in column 3, cell 4. Statistics has a variety of methods to measure the strength of the cases along a diagonal between cells 1 and 4, with the spread of cases along the diagonal between cells 2 and 3. In Table 14 the cognitive didactics appear as causative factor with eﬀects in cell 1. Cell 2 is empty as we are outlining a pure theory. Contemplative learning occupies the second row and has eﬀects in cell 4. Cell 3 remains empty in theory, or, in this case, in theoria. The eﬀects diﬀer and these diﬀerences can be summarized as either ﬁghting for the cognitive graduate, and being sensitive for the contemplative learner. Cells 1 and 3 specify the various qualities we would expect to ﬁnd. The numbers correspond. CHARACTER AND HEALTH

The contemplative state of mind is not causative in the sense cognitive sciences use that term. It doesn’t operate in time, harvesting an eﬀect later. Acts of integrity are instantaneous, they are ego-free, they can’t be remembered, and they can’t be repeated. So, there is something forced in the presentation in Table 14. Theory and theoria are not on the same denominator. Moreover, the criteria by which the contemplative character is distinguished from the cognitive attitude are so inward that their manifestation remains elusive. Words need to function as windows to serve contemplation; in the past period linguists succeeded in making the media stand on their own obstructing a view of common ground. With this distinction between opaque or clear media of communication we turn to health. Health is

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

543

Table 14. Pedagogy and Character type: Hypotheses Pedagogy/ Character T ype Cognitive

Contemplative

Fight

Sensitive

1. Life as battle 2. Camaraderie under threat 3. Honor/shame values 4. Preference for problem solving 5. Reliance on technology and external agents 6. Command tendency, obedience 7. Assume self-centered nature of humans 8. Gender competition 9. Fight against habit 10. Masked face, weakness covered 11. Seduction 12. Lack of intimacy, willful 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Life as epiphany of goodness Seek common ground with enemy Security in sacred within Examining harmonious examples Reliance on group intelligence, playful imagination Leisure as learning to respond to shared issues Transient ways of doing things, no ﬁxation on goals, nor loyalty to exclusive group Wholeness of person controls likes/ dislikes Self-renewal, no repetition Radiance in face, unselfconscious grace in movement Love sovereign over pleasure and pain, and sexuality Appreciation of mystery in others

544

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

holistic reality, not a measurable concept. Illness can be measured in terms of the past, but medicine enters a living wholeness, not a copy of yesterday however many people wish to be nothing else than a repetition. The doctor requires the help of a transcendent factor in order to heal. It was a familiar feature of the Age of Reason to ignore its limitations. The blazons of heralds of change have in the meantime been displayed. For a contemplative outlook the body is not considered as an enslaving master who needs to be conquered. It is throughout intelligent, regulating itself in a wide variety of conditions. Its sensitivity and grace can be enhanced by holistic observing of such manifestations in exceptional persons. This mimesis is a non-verbal, physiognomic attunement with the performer. It would also be the way to learn swimming, dancing, bike riding, or all arts and crafts for that matter. Our soul dwells without a trace in this intelligent body. When we are ill we get very close to this mystery, although we can be intimate with it in good health, for sure. Unlike the mind over matter predilection of our intellect that displays itself in proud self-control and fear of better looking others, our soul trusts our body as not wanting more than it needs. This feature becomes damaged when we wedge our insatiable mind in between pleasure and pain, blaming our body for this conﬂict that is a disorder in our intellect. Aging is not feared either for the contemplative spirit is aware of an immortal presence in intense attention. Growing old would be felt as a deepening process, not as a wearing out. One is coming closer to things that matter. There can’t be any envy of younger persons as this inner light is fulﬁlling. There won’t be any speculation in bitterness about what could have been, as the fullness of attention accompanies whatever is being experienced without wishful distortion and without prolonging the experience beyond its closure: rejuvenation can be a way of life. No possessiveness on the part of inwardly youthful elders would restrict the fresh life chances of the young. Habits would not be formed either. Sociability occasions would be taken as opportunities for graceful, courtly variations and innovations. No cliche´ language and mask-like theatre would be staged. The attendants themselves would begin to halfsing-speak. There wouldn’t be any ampliﬁers. No more swooning idolatry. The transforming presence of beauty in even the smallest parts of reality would guide the contemplative lifestyle. Awareness would spread that nature herself has joined in the party in all her ﬁnery. Before short-circuiting illness to medicine the contemplative patient and doctor would examine together what qualities characterize the social ﬁeld of the ill person and what damage needs to be considered in the

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

545

ecological milieu. One can’t expect to feel physically good while one lives in fear and strain. A beginning needs to be made to address demoralizing relationships and habitat disorder. The feeling of ﬁghting for the common ground lifts the spirit. Fatalism depresses it. Contemplative medicine is, thus, no longer, and not primarily a physical science. However, the old medicine is still framing reality materially. It is burdened to the limit of its collective capacity with new diseases, with the reappearance of old ones, with side eﬀects of its treatments, with imagined illness, with the cult of youth, and with fantasies about miracle cures that are encouraged by drug commercials. Economic problems clamor for funds. Cost accountants are overtaking the hospitals in the name of making medicine aﬀordable. Doctors feel threatened by tort suits in court. Ethical puzzles have arisen in cloning research with the prospect of supplying organs in laboratory life forms. This complex cluster of issues challenges a contemplative response. Part of the answer has already shown itself in the shift to preventative focus on healthy living. Structurally the problems in health care are similar to those in education. Let us brieﬂy review our second set of hypotheses in Table 15. CHARACTER AND JUDGMENT

Finally we will investigate a third set of hypotheses concerned with judgment. Since Kant we may distinguish three kinds of situations in which we are to make up our mind. The ﬁrst of these three types concerns theory and principles and is important for science. The second set involves decisions in daily life, and the third involves appreciation of beauty. In the ﬁrst case of generalizations we look for clues in similar experiences so that we may subsume as many phenomena as we can under one unifying principle. As we mentioned before, the scientist may select only one or two aspects of the phenomena in focus that can be measured. On that basis a model can be articulated that simulates in a pure form what happens in too much intricacy in reality. Once we have such an ordering device we could spend more time experimenting with various ways to eﬀect changes. So, one way to learn good judgment in science would seem to be studying phenomena in their regularities. This worked well in the cosmic sciences for a while; presently we are amidst a mess of contextual disorder. Wholeness had been neglected. Contemplative views subordinate the positive sciences to ecology without making environmental studies another specialization or a master science. These constraints

546

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

Table 15. Character and Health Character/Health

Cult of Youth

Cognitive

1. Focus on quantiﬁable, neglect of transcendence 2. Focus on illness of person, doctor in charge 3. Discipline body 4. Dependency on drugs 5. Fear of aging, resentment of young 6. Worry about social status 7. Labyrinth of experts

Contemplative

Mystery of Health

1. Health transcendent 2. Illness in person, dialogue 3. Holistic attention to graceful person 4. Social ﬁeld and milieu explored for disorder, ﬁght for common ground 5. Aging as a deepening process, create challenges for youth 6. Inner radiance 7. Prevention, administration separate, neighborhood clinic

have to be incorporated in every special ﬁeld. Instead of focusing on aspects, the harmonies of integer reality need to be appreciated and articulated as parameters. Problems arose earlier in the social sciences. More than one principle applies ordinarily to human relations. Which orderly aspects have been chosen, and by what criterion? Did that criterion also come from observation of phenomena? Contemplation of the essence of human beings that is transcendent, leads to a prohibition to give ﬁrst rank to generalizations. All that these sciences may say refers only to changing contingencies in relationships. The gift of the free soul ascends the throne, transforming, renewing, and responding for the ﬁrst time. Turning to the second set of judgments in practical situations, we noticed that human beings are free and may learn from experience, thereby ending them and removing prejudice. They are not bound to repeat old patterns. Nature seems to be learning as a whole. On the other

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

547

hand, we have already observed earlier that children can internalize signiﬁcant authorities in a simpliﬁed modality. Consequently, there is a potential conﬂict between what they like and what the normative voice prohibits. Being torn in opposite directions is painful and could lead to poor judgment, for example, to becoming a liar, doing what one likes but hiding it from authorities. Good judgment, on the other hand, would come from bringing conﬂicts to the common ground. Furthermore, there are conﬂicts between norms. That problem was already inherent in the Ten Commandments, leading obedient subjects into bewilderment. The same complexity arises in experience: something always seems to contradict uniformity. Disagreement keeps having its anomic eﬀect on all human institutions that try but fail to become singleminded in purpose. So, sheer obedience to laws, or reliance on past experience won’t ever lead to good judgment. One-track minds can’t be good judges. Contemplation ends the separation of an ideational, normative order by pointing to the uniﬁed reality of compassion. When persons in their dignity face challenges together, group intelligence is born. Disagreements are not treated as win-loose occasions. Tentative experiments are set up instead. The third case of good taste is notorious for poor judgment as well. Perhaps this is all for the good if one thinks of the conﬂicts that would ensue when too many suitors vie for the hand of one idolized princess. Anyhow, celebrities exemplify the taste to imitate during the age of consumerism. Contemplation leads to inner-outer harmony, and reintegration of beauty into every part of life and its winter quarter. The cognitive character relies on expertise to make up its mind. Irresponsibility follows. Resentment infects followers and leaders. The contemplative attitude begins with non-judgmental life, acquaintance with the issue requiring a response. Responsibility follows, and friendship. The Age of Reason released freedom of choice and harvested an expansion of self-centeredness that destroyed or badly damaged the egalitarian political republic. Selﬁshness is accompanied by distrust, secret decisions, inﬂated scarcities, etc. People grow old worldly-wise and their grandchildren begin life cynically. Fatalism sets in. Utopian fantasies are taken seriously when common sense disappears with the vital community around a commons. The dawning era ahead sees freedom in learning and verifying, in cleansing oneself of disappointments and hurts, and in discovering phenomena in the radiance of their essential participation in the sacred.

548

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

Kant gave birth to a key term of the modern period: critical thinking. He thought that the mind itself was the source of stability in the wild upheavals in sensate experience. For example, the notion of causality is a mental gift to reality. But does this gift match the obvious self-regulation in habitats? Is the concept space necessary for the outer world, or is it already an aspect of things there? In any case, critical thinking always means criticizing other thinkers who denied the possibility of harmony between mind and nature. Marx in particular turned Kant’s head-ﬁrst view upside down, giving our bodily functions a chance to sit on the human throne. The mind would, henceforth, stop framing experience. According to Marx, the relationships between human beings in taking care of eating, building, putting on clothes, and other useful activities, had actually been determining what we had thought. Underneath the loftiest words Marx would suspect economic motives. The speaker might not have been aware of such intent, but while speaking, or while farming or manufacturing, we can’t simultaneously think of the kind of relationships we are in. If we would we might forget what we were saying, or cut our hands. Anyhow, Marx was sitting in the library thinking of those relationships, unable, of course, to keep reading at the same time. We may observe, from where we are presently sitting, that Marx’ own intentions in that library might also have been money-minded; wasn’t he very poor? And what about our own secret wish? Merely raising that same point with regard to his own assertions has started us on a dizzying slope, and while we are rapidly going nowhere we realize that his search for ultimate causation – for Kant, causation was a constant that was not infected with craziness, no it was altogether sane – was actually already a violent and arbitrary ﬁxation of absolutes. This same highhandedness had already appeared many times in religious traditions when they were seriously challenged. To pay attention to those relationships would start something, Marx hoped, more potent than what the old philosopher of Ko¨nigsberg had expected from our mind. Marx called for physical force to remove the rascals who had been robbing the workers of the capital assets they had been making. That is what he called critical doing (Praxis). The critical doer won’t listen, that would be a mental act. Nor was there any need to listen. Wasn’t Marx the prophet of a new Absolute? Critical for the Marxist apostolate means destroying a key economic relationship; too bad that murder would be involved because people are inseparable from relationships. It would be just, no need to feel guilty. Critical also continues in a second meaning: criticizing everyone who’s in disagreement as a

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

549

heretic. We already saw this version in Kant. The reader has, of course, long ago noticed this critical quality in this study. Authors should include medicine against fainting spells inside the sentences that cast these bottomless states in our mind. Unlike Kant’s mild academic criticism a Marxist Inquisition appeared to scare the wits out of potential defectors. A whole new vocabulary was crafted and distributed with evangelical fervor. Strange reliance on words for the critical doers. ... After this interlude on the ferry wheel of our mind we return to the situations that challenge us to make appropriate judgments. We realize that both Kant and Marx were looking for clues, either to subordinate the unfamiliar to mental operations or to force it through economic selection criteria. Kant wanted us to act like lawmakers in situations that were as yet unframed. Think of having to obey as a principle what you are about to decide in particulars, was what he recommended. Marx, on the other hand, revealed the hidden code of history, as others are presently engaged with the code of life as a whole. Marx and the biologists relieve us of our humanity in the name of liberating us from our bondage. For contemplative pedagogy it would be a good challenge to see clearly through such ﬁnagle. Cognitive judgment sees the species in the phenomenon: for example, visit one slum, observe externalities, no need to visit another. The essence of ‘‘slum’’ is the treasure now laid up in our mind. Holistic observation, on the other hand, meets the persons who live there in an unrepeatable encounter. Tomorrow is going to be a day in new terms. If we ‘‘live’’ in our mind with essences we can’t notice the dawn of something new. If we step out of this mental jail we would notice new aspects, we would meet storytellers, characters, singers, composers, in short, a vital community that is living in diﬃcult circumstances with possibilities to build assets on the commons. In line with its revolutionary beginnings the cognitive character judges history to be an upward ascent of social emancipation. The contemplative sees a story of awakening. After these deliberations we need to summarize our hypothesis regarding judgment. In Table 16 we present the previous discussion in a nutshell. As in the earlier tables with hypotheses the numbers in cells 1 and 3 correspond.

Hayward, California

550

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

Table 16. Character and Judgment Character/ Judgment Cognitive

Contemplative

Critical T hinking or Doing

Non-Judgmental Sensibility to Harmonies

1. Looking for regularities in selected aspects, use reduced model to change reality as a whole 2. Accept conﬂict inside, internalize authority 3. Enforce obedience, force choice in double bind 4. Celebrity-driven taste imitation 5. Reliance on expert, irresponsible, resentful 6. Freedom of choice, accept conﬂict as inherent 7. Critical thinking, mind over nature 8. Critical doing, nature over mind 9. Apply general to particular 10. Poverty seen as external 11. History is story of social emancipation 1. Priority of wholeness, parameters of harmonies in every specialization 2. Integrity as conﬂict-free state, action springs from connectedness 3. Resolve double bind on common ground 4. Inner-outer radiance 5. Non-judgmental group intelligence, experimental 6. Freedom in learning, renewal 7. Inner-outer communion 8. Personal inviolable dignity 9. Dynamics in particulars 10. Poverty inherent in selfcontempt, in seeking power 11. History is story of awakening

EDUCATION AMIDST A CULTURAL CRISIS

551

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bachelard, Gaston, Water and Dreams. Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1983. ——. Air and Dreams. Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 2002. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. Bollnow, Otto Friedrich. Die Pa¨dagogische Atmospha¨re, Untersuchungen u¨ber die gefu¨hlsma¨ßigen Zwischenmenschlichen Voraussetzungen der Erziehung. Heidelberg: Quelle und Meyer, 1970. ——. Das Wesen der Stimmungen. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1943. ——. Die Pa¨dagogik der deutschen Romantik. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1952. Broch, Hermann. Massenwahntheorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979. Brown, Lester R. Eco-Economy. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Buytendijk, F. J. J. Phe´nome´nologie de la Rencontre. Paris: Descle´e de Brouwer, 1952. Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1984. Carlgren, Frans. Education T owards Freedom, Rudolf Steiner Education: a survey of Waldorf Schools throughout the world. Peredur, East Grinstead, England: Lanthorn Press, 1981. Coles, Robert. T he Moral Intelligence of Children. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1997. De Bono, Edward. Children Solve Problems. New York: Harper, 1974. Edwards, Carolyn Pope et al. T he Hundred L anguages of Children. T he Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1993. Gadamer, Hans Georg. T ruth and Method. New York: Crossroad, 1985. Gebser, Jean. T he Ever-Present Origin. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1986. Geiger, Henry. MANAS, a Weekly of Independent Inquiry, 1948–1988. Ridgewood, New Jersey: MANAS Revival, 1999. Girard, Re´ne´. I See Satan Fall L ike L ightning. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2001. ——. V iolence and the Sacred. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 1977. Guardini, Romano. Otto Friedrich Bollnow. Begegnung und Bildung. Wu¨rzburg: Im Werkbund Verlag, 1956. ——. T he End of the Modern World. Wilmington, Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1998. Harwood, A. C. T he Recovery of Man in Childhood (Waldorf schools). New York: The Myrin Institute, 1977. Hawken, Paul, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins. Natural Capitalism. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1999. Huizinga, Johan. Homo L udens. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Jaspers, Karl. Von der Wahrheit. Mu¨nchen: Piper, 1958. ——. Was Ist Erziehung? Mu¨nchen: R. Piper & Co., 1977. Krishnamurti, J. Education and the Signiﬁcance of L ife. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1968. ——. L etters to the Schools, vol. 1 & 2. The Hague: Mirananda, 1981. ——. L ife Ahead. London: Gollancz, 1963. Langeveld, M. J. Introduction to the Pedagogical Psychology of the Highschool Student (in Dutch). Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1961. Luhmann, Niklas. Social Systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Montessori, Maria. T he Discovery of the Child. New York: Ballantine, 1972. ——. T he Secret of Childhood. New York: Ballantine, 1992.

552

WILLEM W. VAN GROENOU

Parsons, Talcott. T he System of Modern Societies. Englewood Cliﬀs, New Jersey: PrenticeHall, 1971. Scheler, Max. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ——. T he Nature of Sympathy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954. ——. On the Eternal in Man. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960. ——. Person and Self-Value. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoﬀ Publishers, 1987. ——. Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. ——. Selected Philosophical Essays. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Tagore, Rabindranath. Personality. London: MacMillan, 1921. Van den Berg, J. H. T he Changing Nature of Man. New York: Delta, 1975. Van Manen, Max. Researching L ived Experience. Albany: The State University of New York, 1990. Voegelin, Eric. Published Essays, 1966–1985. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: State University Press, 1990. ——. W hat is History? And other late unpublished writings. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.

INDEX OF NAMES Abruscato: 441, 445 Adorno, T.: 421 Aeble, H.: 150 Aeschylus: 93 Ahonen: 158 Ales Bello, A.: 410 Alexandre: 494 Allen, W.: 222 Andrews, C. F.: 88 Aquinas, T.: 414 Archimedes: 87 Arendt, H.: 358, 388 Aristotle: 18–20, 71, 91, 221, 277, 283–4, 294, 341–2, 350, 357–8, 363, 408, 413, 430 Arnoldi, J.: 126 Assad, M.: 108, 110 Attﬁeld, R.: 203–7 Augustine: 295 Austin, J. L.: 97 Bachelard: 508, 530 Backhaus, G.: 195, 197 Ban, Z.: 374, 382 Barbieri, G. F.: 249 Baudrillard, J.: 119 Baumeister, A.: 168 Beethoven, L.: 415 Bellon: 439 Belsey, A.: 207 Benedetti: 266 Bergson, H.: 152–3, 157, 196 Bianchi: 77 Bleicher: 155 Bo¨cklin, A.: 418 Bohr, N.: 238 Bookchin, M.: 210 Bouveresse: 342 Brecht, B: 172 Brentano, F.: 47, 56, 148–50, 157, 295–6 Brik: 407 Buber, M.: 89, 124 Buceniece, E.: 195

Butler, A.: 357 Cairns, D.: 56 Camus, A.: 228 Canguilhem: 347 Capek, K.: 222 Carra: 416–17, 423 Celms, T.: 121 Cezanne: 530 Chamond: 269–70, 272 Church, A.: 28 Coen, E.: 420 Combs: 439 Cooper, D.: 203, 213–14 Crossley, N.: 119, 124 d’Artaud: 352 Darwin, C.: 346–7, 350 De Chirico: 416–18, 420–1, 423 de Vries: 347 De Waelhans: 276–8, 280, 285 Degas: 411 Deleuze, G.: 97–110, 112–3, 342, 352–3 della Francesca, P.: 410, 417, 423 Derrida, J.: 74, 137, 375, 399 Descartes, R.: 77, 84, 109, 119, 121, 123, 130–1, 133, 197, 237, 295, 309, 342, 345, 350, 408, 427, 453 Dewey, J.: 33–5, 39, 439, 441, 445, 448–9 Diemer, A.: 235, 242 Dilthey, W.: 343 Dower, N.: 204 Driesch, H.: 348–50 Dubos, R.: 203 Dummet, M.: 218, 407 Eccles: 237 Edwards, P.: 14, 23 Einstein, A.: 238–9, 242 Eisner: 439 Eliot, T. S.: 374 Engdahl, H.: 370 Fichte, J. G.: 47–8, 51

553

554

INDEX OF NAMES

Fink, E.: 56, 385 Flanagan, O.: 218 Foucault, M.: 45, 100–1, 421 Franck, D.: 352 Frege, G.: 425 Freud, S.: 220, 276–7, 284–5 Friherr-Gebsattel: 267 Frobele: 439 Froebel: 502 Gadamer, H-G.: 4, 154–5, 288 Galileo: 309, 311 Gandhi, M.: 530 Garrison, J.: 33 Gehlen: 267 Gidden, E.: 119, 127 Giotto: 410, 417, 423 Go¨del, K.: 28 Goethe: 20–3, 47 Grice, H. P.: 97 Griﬃn: 218 Gross, A.: 243 Guattari, F.: 352 Guercino: 249, 254–9 Gurwitsch, A.: 157 Haar, M.: 324 Habermas, J.: 119, 124–5, 168–9 Handler: 439 Haney, K.: 120–3 Hannay, A.: 171–2 Hegel, G. W. F.: 47, 53, 99, 137, 171, 278, 316–7, 319, 343, 350 Heidegger, M.: 5, 46, 61, 89, 97, 100, 119, 134, 140–1, 244, 267–8, 315–7, 322–30, 333–5, 343, 358, 375, 407–8, 421–3 Heisenberg, W: 238 Held, K.: 122 Henry, M.: 387, 395, 397–400 Herder: 47 Hitler, A.: 359 Hjelmslev, L.: 101 Homer: 90 Hume, D.: 177–80, 182, 184, 187–8, 190, 309 Husserl, E.: 10, 27, 33–40, 45–62, 69–76, 85, 89, 99, 119–24, 127, 129–43, 147,

150–1, 156, 187–90, 235–46, 270, 279–80, 293–300, 303, 305–11, 339–42, 343–4, 348–53, 369–70, 376–80, 382, 385, 393, 396–7, 399, 407, 410, 413 Ingarden, R.: 147–8, 154, 156–7 Ingold, T.: 202 Itkonen, M.: 147, 149, 152, 373 Jacob, F.: 347 Jakobson: 409 James, W.: 39, 81–3, 86, 150–1 Jameson, F: 172 Janicaud, D.: 326, 387 Jaspers, K.: 165, 172–3, 218–19, 221, 226, 270 Jonas, H.: 357–63 Jonesko, E.: 126 Juntunen, M.: 151 Kaartinen: 146 Kant, I.: 24, 45, 88, 130–2, 134, 137, 139–40, 148, 288–9, 295, 309, 315–7, 319–31, 333–5, 345, 545, 548–9 Keats: 373 Kekes: 218 Kekule, A.: 411 Kertesz, I.: 367–83 Kierkegaard, S.: 166, 170–3 King, M. L.: 513 Kirchner: 410 Klinger, M.: 418 Koch, I.: 379 Kockelmans, J.: 235 Koestenbaum, P.: 259 Kojeve: 278 Krishnamurti, J.: 508, 523 Kuhn, H.: 54 Kundera, M.: 368, 380, 382 Labov, W.: 101 Lacan: 401 Laing: 266, 270 Landgrebe, L.: 56, 246 Lang: 266, 269–71 Lange, F. A.: 344, 346 Langenheim, J.: 204–5, 207–8

INDEX OF NAMES Langer: 148 Latour, B.: 98, 108–10, 113 Le Senne, J.: 237 Leclaire: 267 Lecercle, J-J.: 97–9, 101–3, 106–7 Leibniz, G. W.: 47, 123, 137, 342–3 Lessing: 47 Levinas, E.: 119, 124, 158, 315–7, 322, 328–35, 357, 361–4, 375, 392, 399 Lewis: 439–40 Lipps, T.: 135 Luckmann: 147 Luhmann, N.: 119, 126–7 Luijpen, W.: 235 Luke, D.: 22–3 Luria, A. R.: 460–2 Mao: 359 Marin, L.: 258–9 Marinetti: 410 Marion, J-L.: 391, 394, 396 Mark, E. C.: 412 Marx, K.: 548–9 Masaccio: 417 Maslow: 439 Mason, H.: 204–5, 207–8 McGinn, C.: 237 McLuhan, M.: 165 Meinong: 54 Meist, K.: 122 Mellanby, K.: 202 Mensch, J.: 367, 375–6 Merleau-Ponty, M.: 97, 100–1, 103, 124, 244, 352–3, 371, 451, 456 Metzger: 54 Michelangelo: 530 Milosz, C.: 368, 373, 377, 379, 382 Minard: 272 Minstrell: 441, 444 Monet: 530 Montessori: 502, 505, 531 Morandi, 413, 417 Moustakas: 156 Murray, M.: 135–7 Mussolini, B.: 359 Nagel, T.: 218, 222, 228–30, 286 Natorp: 47, 49

555

Newton, I.: 87 Nietzsche, F.: 53, 100, 119, 339–48, 351–3, 372, 417–8, 420, 423 Nozick, R.: 14, 227 Olbrecht-Tyteca: 412 Oliva, A. B.: 409, 440 Ong, W.: 165–6 Panofsky, E.: 249, 253 Parmenides: 295 Parsons: 477, 480 Pascal, B.: 15–18, 218, 286 Patocka, J.: 339, 349 Pavlov: 506 Pears: 223 Penttila¨, A.: 149–50 Perelman: 412 Perrin: 150 Pestalozzi: 502 Pfa¨nder: 54 Piaget: 502 Picasso: 411, 413 Piccolo, L.: 417 Pieper, J.: 87–8 Plato: 45, 71, 90–1, 227, 294, 341, 362, 422, 430, 538 Plessner, H.: 224–5 Plotinus: 227 Plumwood, V.: 208 Po¨lo¨nen, M.: 158 Popper, K.: 137 Poussin, N.: 249–60 Quine, W. V. O.: 407 Rickert, H.: 344 Ricoeur, P.: 57, 82, 119, 124, 285 Rogers, W. K.: 196, 439 Rokstad: 444 Rorty, R.: 141, 169, 243 Rousseau: 439, 486, 502 Routila, L. O.: 146 Roux, W.: 346 Ruch: 132 Rung: 439, 442, 446–8 Russell, B.: 81, 217 Ryba: 442

556

INDEX OF NAMES

Saavalainen, T.: 146 Sarmavuori: 146 Sartre, J-P.: 38, 45, 140, 392 Saylor: 439–40 Schacht: 134 Scheler: 27, 49, 156 Schiller, F.: 23–4, 47 Schlegel, F.: 137 Schlick, M.: 18, 23–5 Schopenhauer, A.: 15, 18, 20, 22, 137, 418, 423 Schuhmann, K.: 45, 52–3, 55, 57, 62 Schulz, N.: 414 Schumacher: 530 Schu¨tz, A.: 56, 124, 147, 150, 156, 265 Schweitzer, A.: 197–8 Searle, J. R.: 97, 237 Sedlar, J.: 137 Serres, M.: 97–103, 107–13 Shakespeare, W.: 255, 259 Shargel, E.: 33 Shelling: 137 Sinko: 146 Socrates: 90, 295, 341, 430, 533, 538 Sokolowski, R.: 275, 278–85, 287–8 Soltis: 441 Sorgel, H.: 419 Sperry, J.: 237 Spiegelberg, H.: 131, 133 Spinoza, B.: 227, 342–3 Spitz: 266 Spranger: 54 Stalin, J.: 359, 409 Stein, E.: 297–8 Stein, G.: 413 Steiner, R.: 502, 507 Strauss: 267 Stravinskij, I.: 413–14 Sutter, J.: 269 Sylvan: 218 Tagore, R.: 88 Taylor, P.: 202, 212–3 Teresa, Mother: 361 Tolstoy, L.: 15, 18, 217, 219–20, 222, 226–7, 229 Touraine, A.: 119

Tugendhat, E.: 218 Tyler: 442–3, 446 Tymieniecka, A-T.: 3, 5–9, 26–7, 82, 92, 120, 127, 158, 166, 195–8, 235, 238, 367–9, 372, 374, 382, 411, 442 Uccello: 417 Unah: 141–2 Vaihinger, H.: 105 Valery: 411 Van den Berg: 524 Van der Post: 521 Van Gogh: 530 Vandenberg: 442 Varto: 155 Vattimo, G.: 100–1, 109, 422 Veatch: 141 Ver Eecke: 276–7, 280, 282–3, 285, 288–9 Villemoe, P.: 275, 280–2, 285, 287 Virchow, R.: 345–6 Virgil: 254, 257 Voltaire: 47 von Gebsattel: 265, 268–70 von Schwindt, M.: 418, 420 von Wright, G. H.: 19, 29 Vuorinen: 150 Wagner: 34 Wait: 453, 455 Walde, M.: 52 Walker: 441 Weininger: 418 Welch, P.: 56 Whitehead, A.: 84, 196 Wiggins, D.: 218 Williams, B.: 222 Winnicott: 277 Wittgenstein, L.: 97, 217, 221, 223, 225–30 Wood, D.: 206, 209–10 y Gasset, O.: 195 Young, G. I.: 202–3, 207–8 Yunus, M.: 530 Zahavi: 286 Zima, P. N.: 125 Zizek, S.: 322

Analecta Husserliana The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research Editor-in-Chief

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, Belmont, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Volume 1 of Analecta Husserliana. 1971 ISBN 90-277-0171-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Later Husserl and the Idea of Phenomenology. Idealism – Realism, Historicity and Nature. 1972 ISBN 90-277-0223-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Phenomenological Realism of the Possible Worlds. The “A Priori’, Activity and Passivity of Consciousness, Phenomenology and Nature. 1974 ISBN 90-277-0426-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Ingardeniana. A Spectrum of Specialised Studies Establishing the Field of Research. 1976 ISBN 90-277-0628-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Crisis of Culture. Steps to Reopen the Phenomenological Investigation of Man. 1976 ISBN 90-277-0632-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Self and the Other. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part I. 1977 ISBN 90-277-0759-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Human Being in Action. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part II. 1978 ISBN 90-277-0884-3 Nitta, Y. and Hirotaka Tatematsu (eds.), Japanese Phenomenology. Phenomenology as the Trans-cultural Philosophical Approach. 1979 ISBN 90-277-0924-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Teleologies in Husserlian Phenomenology. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part III. 1979 ISBN 90-277-0981-5 Wojtyła, K., The Acting Person. Translated from Polish by A. Potocki. 1979 ISBN Hb 90-277-0969-6; Pb 90-277-0985-8 Ales Bello, A. (ed.), The Great Chain of Being and Italian Phenomenology. 1981 ISBN 90-277-1071-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Philosophical Reﬂection of Man in Literature. Selected Papers from Several Conferences held by the International Society for Phenomenology and Literature in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Includes the essay by A-T. Tymieniecka, Poetica Nova. 1982 ISBN 90-277-1312-X Kaelin, E. F., The Unhappy Consciousness. The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett. An Inquiry at the Intersection of Phenomenology and literature. 1981 ISBN 90-277-1313-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition. Individualisation of Nature and the Human Being. (Part I:) Plotting the Territory for Interdisciplinary Communication. 1983 Part II see below under Volume 21. ISBN 90-277-1447-9

Analecta Husserliana 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

Tymieniecka, A-T. and Calvin O. Schrag (eds.), Foundations of Morality, Human Rights, and the Human Sciences. Phenomenology in a Foundational Dialogue with Human Sciences. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1453-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Soul and Body in Husserlian Phenomenology. Man and Nature. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1518-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Phenomenology of Life in a Dialogue Between Chinese and Occidental Philosophy. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1620-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic – Epic – Tragic. The Literary Genre. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1702-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition. (Part 1:) The Sea. From Elemental Stirrings to Symbolic Inspiration, Language, and Life-Signiﬁcance in Literary Interpretation and Theory. 1985 For Part 2 and 3 see below under Volumes 23 and 28. ISBN 90-277-1906-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Moral Sense in the Communal Signiﬁcance of Life. Investigations in Phenomenological Praxeology: Psychiatric Therapeutics, Medical Ethics and Social Praxis within the Life- and Communal World. 1986 ISBN 90-277-2085-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition. Part II: The Meeting Point Between Occidental and Oriental Philosophies. 1986 ISBN 90-277-2185-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Morality within the Life- and Social World. Interdisciplinary Phenomenology of the Authentic Life in the “Moral Sense’. 1987 Sequel to Volumes 15 and 20. ISBN 90-277-2411-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition. Part 2: The Airy Elements in Poetic Imagination. Breath, Breeze, Wind, Tempest, Thunder, Snow, Flame, Fire, Volcano . . . 1988 ISBN 90-277-2569-1 Tymieniecka, A-T., Logos and Life. Book I: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason. 1988 ISBN Hb 90-277-2539-X; Pb 90-277-2540-3 Tymieniecka, A-T., Logos and Life. Book II: The Three Movements of the Soul. 1988 ISBN Hb 90-277-2556-X; Pb 90-277-2557-8 Kaelin, E. F. and Calvin O. Schrag (eds.), American Phenomenology. Origins and Developments. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2690-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Man within his Life-World. Contributions to Phenomenology by Scholars from East-Central Europe. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2767-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Elemental Passions of the Soul. Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, Part 3. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0180-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Man’s Self-Interpretation-in-Existence. Phenomenology and Philosophy of Life. – Introducing the Spanish Perspective. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0324-5 Rudnick, H. H. (ed.), Ingardeniana II. New Studies in the Philosophy of Roman Ingarden. With a New International Ingarden Bibliography. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0627-9

Analecta Husserliana 31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Moral Sense and Its Foundational Signiﬁcance: Self, Person, Historicity, Community. Phenomenological Praxeology and Psychiatry. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0678-3 Kronegger, M. (ed.), Phenomenology and Aesthetics. Approaches to Comparative Literature and Other Arts. Homages to A-T. Tymieniecka. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0738-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Ingardeniana III. Roman Ingarden’s Aesthetics in a New Key and the Independent Approaches of Others: The Performing Arts, the Fine Arts, and Literature. 1991 Sequel to Volumes 4 and 30 ISBN 0-7923-1014-4 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Turning Points of the New Phenomenological Era. Husserl Research – Drawing upon the Full Extent of His Development. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1134-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Husserlian Phenomenology in a New Key. Intersubjectivity, Ethos, the Societal Sphere, Human Encounter, Pathos. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1146-9 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Husserl’s Legacy in Phenomenological Philosophies. New Approaches to Reason, Language, Hermeneutics, the Human Condition. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1178-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), New Queries in Aesthetics and Metaphysics. Time, Historicity, Art, Culture, Metaphysics, the Transnatural. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1195-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Elemental Dialectic of Light and Darkness. The Passions of the Soul in the Onto-Poiesis of Life. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1601-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Reason, Life, Culture, Part I. Phenomenology in the Baltics. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-1902-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Manifestations of Reason: Life, Historicity, Culture. Reason, Life, Culture, Part II. Phenomenology in the Adriatic Countries. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2215-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Allegory Revisited. Ideals of Mankind. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2312-2 Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.), Allegory Old and New. In Literature, the Fine Arts, Music and Theatre, and Its Continuity in Culture. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2348-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): From the Sacred to the Divine. A New Phenomenological Approach. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2690-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Elemental Passion for Place in the Ontopoiesis of Life. Passions of the Soul in the Imaginatio Creatrix. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2749-7 Zhai, Z.: The Radical Choice and Moral Theory. Through Communicative Argumentation to Phenomenological Subjectivity. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2891-4 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Logic of the Living Present. Experience, Ordering, Onto-Poiesis of Culture. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2930-9

Analecta Husserliana 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Heaven, Earth, and In-Between in the Harmony of Life. Phenomenology in the Continuing Oriental/Occidental Dialogue. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3373-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life. In the Glory of its Radiating Manifestations. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book I. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3825-1 Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): Life. The Human Quest for an Ideal. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book II. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3826-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life. Phenomenology of Life as the Starting Point of Philosophy. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book III. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4126-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Passion for Place. Part II. Between the Vital Spacing and the Creative Horizons of Fulﬁlment. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4146-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Laying Down the Cornerstones of the Field. Book I. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4445-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Reincarnating Mind, or the Ontopoietic Outburst in Creative Virtualities. Harmonisations and Attunement in Cognition, the Fine Arts, Literature. Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Book II. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4461-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Ontopoietic Expansion in Human Self-Interpretationin-Existence. The I and the Other in their Creative Spacing of the Societal Circuits of Life. Phenomenology of Life and the Creative Condition. Book III. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4462-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Creative Virtualities in Human Self-Interpretation-inCulture. Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Book IV. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4545-2 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Enjoyment. From Laughter to Delight in Philosophy, Literature, the Fine Arts and Aesthetics. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4677-7 Kronegger M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): Life. Differentiation and Harmony... Vegetal, Animal, Human. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4887-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. and Matsuba, S. (eds.): Immersing in the Concrete. Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Japanese Perspective. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5093-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life - Scientiﬁc Philosophy/Phenomenology of Life and the Sciences of Life. Ontopoiesis of Life and the Human Creative Condition. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5141-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): Life - The Outburst of Life in the Human Sphere. Scientiﬁc Philosophy / Phenomenology of Life and the Sciences of Life. Book II. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5142-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Aesthetic Discourse of the Arts. Breaking the Barriers. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6006-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Creative Mimesis of Emotion. From Sorrow to Elation; Elegiac Virtuosity in Literature. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6007-9

Analecta Husserliana 63.

64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79.

Kronegger, M. (ed).: The Orchestration of The Arts – A Creative Symbiosis of Existential Powers. The Vibrating Interplay of Sound, Color, Image, Gesture, Movement, Rhythm, Fragrance, Word, Touch. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6008-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. and Z. Zalewski (eds.): Life - The Human Being Between Life and Death. A Dialogue Between Medicine and Philosophy, Recurrent Issues and New Approaches. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-5962-3 Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): The Aesthetics of Enchantment in the Fine Arts. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6183-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Origins of Life, Volume I: The Primogenital Matrix of Life and Its Context. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6246-2; Set ISBN 0-7923-6446-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Origins of Life, Volume II: The Origins of the Existential Sharing-in-Life. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6276-4; Set ISBN 0-7923-6446-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): PAIDEIA. Philosophy / Phenomenology of Life Inspiring Education of our Times. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6319-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Poetry of Life in Literature. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6408-2 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Impetus and Equipoise in the Life-Strategies of Reason. Logos and Life, volume 4. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6731-6; HB 0-7923-6730-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Passions of the Earth in Human Existence, Creativity, and Literature. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6675-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. and E. Agazzi (eds.): Life – Interpretation and the Sense of Illness within the Human Condition. Medicine and Philosophy in a Dialogue. 2001 ISBN Hb 0-7923-6983-1; Pb 0-7923-6984-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life – The Play of Life on the Stage of the World in Fine Arts, Stage-Play, and Literature. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-7032-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life-Energies, Forces and the Shaping of Life: Vital, Existential. Book I. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0627-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Visible and the Invisible in the Interplay between Philosophy, Literature and Reality. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0070-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life – Truth in its Various Perspectives. Cognition, Self-Knowledge, Creativity, Scientiﬁc Research, Sharing-in-Life, Economics...... 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0071-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Creative Matrix of the Origins. Dynamisms, Forces and the Shaping of Life. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-0789-2 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Gardens and the Passion for the Inﬁnite. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-0858-9 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Does the World exist? Plurisigniﬁcant Ciphering of Reality. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1517-8

Analecta Husserliana 80.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Phenomenology World-W ide. Foundations – Expanding Dynamics – Life-engagements. A Guide for Research and Study. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0066-9

81.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Metamorphosis. Creative Imagination in Fine Arts, Life-Projects and Human Aesthetic Aspirations. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-1709-X

82.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Mystery in its Passions. Literary Explorations. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-1705-7

83.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Imaginatio Creatrix. The Pivotal Force of the Genesis/Ontopoiesis of Human Life and Reality. 2004. ISBN 1-4020-2244-1

84.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Phenomenology of L ife. Meeting the Challenges of the Present-Day World. 2005. ISBN 1-4020-2463-0

Springer

Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos, Book 4: The Logos of Scientific Interrogation Participating in Nature-Life-Sharing in Life (Analecta Husserliana, Vol. 91)

Destiny, the Inward Quest, Temporality and Life (Analecta Husserliana)

Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twentieth Century: Book I. New Waves of Philosophical Inspirations (Analecta Husserliana)

Life – Energies, Forces and the Shaping of Life: Vital, Existential: Book 1 (Analecta Husserliana)

Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos, Book 1: Phenomenology as the Critique of Reason in Contemporary Criticism and Interpretation (Analecta Husserliana, Vol. 88)

Phenomenology of Life. Meeting the Challenges of the Present-Day World (Analecta Husserliana)