Early Phenomenology: Metaphysics, Ethics, and the Philosophy of Religion 1474276059, 9781474276054

Table of contents :
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Half title
Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy
Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction Brian Harding and Michael Kelly
Part 1 Phenomenological Occasions
1 Speculations about Bridging the Göttingen-Freiburg “Gap” in Phenomenology Lester Embree
2 A Phenomenology of Foreboding/Foreseeing Adolf Reinach
Part 2 Phenomenology of Affect, Emotion, and Volition
3. Person and Love: Dietrich von Hildebrand in Dialogue with John Zizioulas John F. Crosby
4. Envy and Ressentiment, a Difference in Kind: A Critique and Renewal of Scheler’s Phenomenological Account Michael Kelly
5. Reinach’s Phenomenology of Foreboding: Battlefield Notes, 1916–17 Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray
6. Alexander Pfänder’s Phenomenological Psychology: Philosophy Devoted to Description Marta Ubial
Part 3 Early Reactions to Phenomenology
7. José Ortega y Gasset’s Anti-idealist Interpretation of Phenomenology Brian Harding
8 Scenes of Disagreement: Nicolai Hartmann between Phenomenological Ontology and Speculative Realism Keith R. Peterson
9 Buber Meets Heidegger Robert Wood
Part 4 Early Phenomenology of Religion
10 Edith Stein and the Carmelites Jonna Bornemark
11 The Transcendence of the Person: Bonhoeffer as a Resource for Phenomenology of Religion and Ethics Brian Gregor
12 Rudolf Otto as Postmodern Phenomenologist: In Dialogue with Marion, Derrida, and Kierkegaard Merold Westphal
Index

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Early Phenomenology

Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy This series presents cutting-edge scholarship in the field of modern European thought. The wholly original arguments, perspectives, and research findings in titles in this series make it an important and stimulating resource for students and academics from across the discipline. Breathing with Luce Irigaray, edited by Lenart Skof and Emily A. Holmes Deleuze and Art, Anne Sauvagnargues Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization, Jakub Zdebik Derrida, Badiou and the Formal Imperative, Christopher Norris Desire in Ashes: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Chiara Alfano Egalitarian Moments, Devin Zane Shaw Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries, Ivan Boldyrev Why there is no Post-Structuralism in France, Johannes Angermuller Gadamer’s Poetics: A Critique of Modern Aesthetics, John Arthos Heidegger, History and the Holocaust, Mahon O’Brien Heidegger and the Emergence of the Question of Being, Jesús Adrián Escudero Husserl’s Ethics and Practical Intentionality, Susi Ferrarello Immanent Transcendence: Reconfiguring Materialism in Continental Philosophy, Patrice Haynes Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy, Bryan A. Smyth Mortal Thought: Hölderlin and Philosophy, James Luchte Nietzsche and Political Thought, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity, Helmut Heit Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy: Badiou’s Dispute with Lyotard, Matthew R. McLennan The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling, Christopher Yates Post-Rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Marxism in Post-War France, Tom Eyers Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Patricia Pisters Towards the Critique of Violence: Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, Brendan Moran and Carlo Salzani

Early Phenomenology Metaphysics, Ethics, and the Philosophy of Religion Edited by Brian Harding and Michael R. Kelly

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Brian Harding, Michael R. Kelly, and contributors, 2016 Brian Harding and Michael R. Kelly have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: ePDF: ePub:

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Contents Notes on Contributors

Introduction Brian Harding and Michael Kelly

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Part 1  Phenomenological Occasions 1

2

Speculations about Bridging the Göttingen-Freiburg “Gap” in Phenomenology Lester Embree A Phenomenology of Foreboding/Foreseeing Adolf Reinach

13

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Part 2  Phenomenology of Affect, Emotion, and Volition 3. Person and Love: Dietrich von Hildebrand in Dialogue with John Zizioulas John F. Crosby

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4. Envy and Ressentiment, a Difference in Kind: A Critique and Renewal of Scheler’s Phenomenological Account Michael Kelly

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5. Reinach’s Phenomenology of Foreboding: Battlefield Notes, 1916–17 Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray 6. Alexander Pfänder’s Phenomenological Psychology: Philosophy Devoted to Description Marta Ubiali

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Part 3  Early Reactions to Phenomenology 7. José Ortega y Gasset’s Anti-idealist Interpretation of Phenomenology 107 Brian Harding

vi Contents

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Scenes of Disagreement: Nicolai Hartmann between Phenomenological Ontology and Speculative Realism Keith R. Peterson Buber Meets Heidegger Robert Wood

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Part 4  Early Phenomenology of Religion 10 Edith Stein and the Carmelites Jonna Bornemark

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11 The Transcendence of the Person: Bonhoeffer as a Resource for Phenomenology of Religion and Ethics Brian Gregor

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12 Rudolf Otto as Postmodern Phenomenologist: In Dialogue with Marion, Derrida, and Kierkegaard Merold Westphal

213

Index 241

Notes on Contributors

Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray (King’s University College at Western University, Canada) is president of NASEP, the North American Society for Early Phenomenology. She is author of Doorway to The World of Essences: Adolf Reinach & The Early Phenomenological Movement (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller) and has published widely on early phenomenology. Jonna Bornemark (Söderton University, Sweden) is co-editor of Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers (Södertörn UP) and Vad är praktisk kunskap? (Södertörns högskolebibliotek) and the author of numerous papers on phenomenology. John Crosby (Franciscan University of Steubenville, USA) is director of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project and translator of many of von Hildebrand’s works, most recently The Nature of Love (St. Augustine’s Press). He has written numerous articles on von Hildebrand and personalist phenomenology more generally. Lester Embree (Florida Atlantic University, USA) is the author, editor or translator of numerous works on phenomenology and the history of phenomenology. Among others one may mention The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers). Brian Gregor (California State University – Dominquez Hills, USA) is author of A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: the Cruciform Self (Indiana UP) and a number of papers in continental philosophy. He is co-editor of Bonhoeffer and Continental Thought: Cruciform Philosophy (Indiana UP) and editor of Being Human, Becoming Human: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Social Thought (Pickwick). Brian Harding (Texas Woman’s University, USA) lives just outside of Denton, Texas. He is the author of Augustine and Roman Virtue (Continuum) and various papers in phenomenology and the history of philosophy.

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Michael R. Kelly (University of San Diego, USA) is the author of numerous papers on phenomenology and co-editor of Michel Henry: the Affects of Thought (Continuum) and editor of Bergson and Phenomenology (Palgrave-Macmillan). Keith R. Peterson (Colby College, USA) is the translator of Schelling’s First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (SUNY, 2004) and the author of a number of papers on Nicolai Hartmann, continental philosophy and environmental philosophy. Marta Ubiali (KU Leuven, Belgium) works at the Husserl-Archives where she is a post-Doctoral researcher. With M. Wehrle she edited Feeling and Value, Willing and Action. Essays in the Context of a Phenomenological Psychology (Springer, 2015) and is the author of a numerous papers on phenomeonlogy and phenomenological psychology. Merold Westphal (emeritus, Fordham University, USA; Honorary Professor, Australian Catholic University, Australia) is the author of many papers and books, including Transcendence and Self-Transcendence; Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue; God Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion (all with Indiana UP) and Overcoming Onto-Theology (Fordham UP). Robert Wood (University of Dallas, USA) is the author of Martin Buber’s Ontology (Northwestern UP), A Path into Metaphysics (SUNY UP), Placing Aesthetics (Ohio UP), the translator of Stephen Strasser’s Phenomenology of Feeling (Duquesne UP) and co-translator of Gabriel Marcel’s Music and Philosophy (Marquette UP). In addition he is the author of many papers on phenomenology and ancient philosophy.

Introduction Brian Harding and Michael Kelly

A generic history of phenomenology goes something like this: Edmund Husserl invented it and had a bunch of students. One of them was named Martin Heidegger; he was really smart and took phenomenology in a fairly different direction than that envisioned by Husserl. Later, Heidegger’s ideas had a decisive influence on the philosophical development of post-war France (JeanPaul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and so on) and late twentieth-century “continental” philosophy in North America. This history of phenomenology is the story of two philosophers and their influence. This short story and the type of phenomenology characteristic of this period and its legacy often dominate the discussions of both phenomenology and its history. In a sense, there is nothing objectionable in this approach. If one was asked to describe the phenomenological tradition in a few sentences, we are not sure how one could do better. Nevertheless, the same sketch often characterizes descriptions of phenomenology that run for hundreds of pages. In that case, one might complain that the focus on Husserl and Heidegger is more than a bit misleading, reducing other thinkers to mere satellites orbiting larger planets. This, in turn, creates the misapprehension that phenomenology is merely a generic name for the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger. And it is here that phenomenologists themselves might object that as important as Husserl and Heidegger are, phenomenology is not reducible to their respective works. After all, the motivation and motto of phenomenology was “To the things themselves!” not “To the Husserl-Archives!” or “To the Gesamtausgabe!” Phenomenology is supposed to clarify those dimension of living with which we are so intimately familiar as to overlook them (perceiving, imagining, valuing, willing, feeling or emoting, deliberating, believing, judging, etc.). Or, one might say that the phenomenologist ought to be articulating the structure and significance of certain elements of human experience (mereology, presence and absence, facticity and historicity, axiology and belief). As Dermot Moran and Steven Crowell recently noted, phenomenology is better thought of as

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a “disciplined practice” executed by the “able practitioner” than as a body of philosophical theses.1 In our view, there are a great number of able practitioners who have long been hidden in the shadows of Husserl and Heidegger. It is the conceit of this volume that contemporary philosophers could benefit from some of these other phenomenologists. So, this volume proposes to look at an admittedly small sampling of other early phenomenologists. We should pause to define two key terms: early and phenomenology. Let us begin with “early.” If we take the publication of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (1900) as the starting date for phenomenology, then as of this writing phenomenology is 115 years old. Early phenomenology might then be plausibly defined as anything written before June of 1957. But it might be more apt to use World War II as a dividing point between early and late phenomenology for reasons Lester Embree discusses in his piece in this volume. That is to say, we might define “early phenomenologists” as those who wrote major works prior to the Second World War. This would include Husserl and Heidegger, but also Max Scheler and Edith Stein, while excluding Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. Our aim in this volume is not to offer a comprehensive survey of the contemporary relevance of early phenomenology, but only to provide a few examples of how these “practitioners” can be useful interlocutors for contemporary phenomenologists and philosophers. Turning now to the second word, “phenomenology”, we are taking phenomenologists in a fairly broad sense so as to include thinkers who might not be considered phenomenologists of the strict observance but nonetheless are informed by or in dialogue with phenomenology. To borrow again from Lester Embree’s contribution, we are taking “phenomenology” just broad enough that it includes Hannah Arendt but excludes Carl Jung. This broad view is suggested by the nature of the project. Indeed, precisely what it means to be a phenomenologist is increasingly more fluid earlier in the phenomenological movement than one might expect; the earlier we look, the more we distance ourselves from the gravitational pull of one or two eminent phenomenologists. In focusing on early phenomenology we are focusing on phenomenology before orthodoxies solidified. Whence, in this early period we find Dietrich von Hildebrand and other realist phenomenologists rejecting, quite vociferously, Husserl’s transcendental or idealistic turn in Ideas I; we find Husserl pointing towards Rudolf Otto’s Idea of the Holy as an excellent example of phenomenology; we find José Ortega y Gasset describing his work as an anti-idealistic interpretation of phenomenology; we find Edith Stein drawing philosophical inspiration from the writings of Spanish mystics. The list could go on. But despite these

Introduction

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vast differences in tone and content, there was still a sense that all concerned were working phenomenologists; indeed Husserl continued to publish “realist phenomenology” in his Jahrbuch well after he made his own transcendental turn. It turns out that upon closer examination, the early phenomenological movement contained a multitude of philosophical and methodological commitments, developing in a wide variety of directions. Early phenomenology was, to borrow a phrase from Dominique Janicaud, wide open. One suspicion that needs to be addressed from the outset is that the neglect of certain old phenomenologists may be justified. Perhaps, after all, these thinkers were neglected because they deserved to be neglected; there were better, deeper, thinkers at work who justifiably occupied our attention. If, for example, Max Scheler has been overshadowed by Heidegger, perhaps this is because Heidegger is the better phenomenologist; perhaps the things themselves shine forth with more clarity in his works than in those of Scheler. There is no need to argue for or against that point; indeed the essays in this volume all refrain from offering theories, conspiracy or otherwise, to explain the neglect or prominence of this or that phenomenologist. This volume claims only that these other phenomenologists should be read, not that only these other phenomenologists should be read. We are not suggesting that one should become an Ortegan or Steinian rather than a Husserlian or Heideggerian. In fact, one could wonder if phenomenology might be better off if we stopped identifying ourselves in term of our preferred authors. In any case, the larger point is that by adding, retrieving, and re-reading early phenomenology, largely in the context of contemporary philosophy, new insights into phenomenology and phenomena can be gained. Rather than focusing on intellectual filiations our essays look to phenomenological practice, the questions a thinker asks, and the method he or she employs to develop its answers. In re-evaluating early phenomenologists, we should ask if their reflections help make speak that dumb, pre-reflective experience in which we live without clear understanding, if the phenomenologist brings to expression those appearances that are a part of the being of things and matters (both material and cultural) in all its myriad incarnations and incantations. Turning to lesser appreciated early phenomenologists is not an end in itself. If early phenomenology proceeded in many different directions, we hope that by turning to these early figures, we will discover new directions for phenomenology, new ways (or perhaps, revivified old ways) of getting at the things themselves. We hope to do slightly more than merely add to the story of phenomenology by looking closer at thinkers without the same fame as Husserl and Heidegger and the representatives of their legacy. Beyond merely filling in

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the historical record and reviving names, we hope that the essays included here will also give contemporary readers reasons to take these figures seriously as able practitioners of phenomenology. This book neither is nor purports to be an encyclopedia, handbook, guide, or companion to early phenomenology. While such a book would be desired, our purpose here is—ultimately—oriented less towards the past than it is towards the future. If we may venture a comparison with theology, one might describe our goal as a kind of ressourcement. In a theological context, ressourcement refers to a movement in twentieth-century Catholic theology that hoped to overcome the rigidity of nineteenth-century Neo-Scholasticism by a return to the texts of the earliest Christian writers, the Greek and Latin Fathers. This return to the beginnings of the Christian tradition was, for ressourcement theologians, not a merely historical work but done to retrieve forgotten insights that might be appropriated in a modern context. In the same way, but over a much smaller period of time, we propose that by returning to early phenomenology in all its diversity, one can retrieve forgotten insights into the things themselves. There is an important sense in which theological ressourcement would have been impossible without the work of Fr. J.-P. Migne—he earned the title “God’s Plagiarist” by playing fast and loose with nineteenth-century publishing regulation. But Migne’s flexible approach to copyright law enabled him to produce both the Patrologia Latina and Patrologia Graeca. Migne, as the two series are colloquially known, gave the educated public relatively easy access to previously rare or unavailable texts of the Latin and Greek Fathers; over a thousand years of Latin and Greek theology suddenly became readily available. While it took some time to grow, we think it is fair to suggest that twentieth-century ressourcement theology is the fruit of Migne. A few pages earlier we joked about “To the Husserl-archives” not being the motto of phenomenology, but in fact, the project that we are suggesting in this volume would be impossible without archival work. This archival element of this ressourcement has been going on, in a variety of ways, for a while: Sebastian Luft has reminded us of the importance of Neo-Kantianism for early phenomenology and edited a number of important texts; the manuscripts of Dorian Cairns and Winthrop Bell are both being edited, giving us clues to the earliest reception of phenomenology in North America; and a scholarly society, NASEP (North American Society for Early Phenomenology) has been founded. Under the aegis of NASEP a number of conferences have been organized and a number of hard-to-find texts have been made available in their online reading room. We would compare NASEP’s reading room with Migne, but having referred to him as “God’s plagiarist,” one hesitates—while association with the divine

Introduction

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is undoubtedly good, there are few words more detestable in academia than “plagiarist”! We refrain from putting the web address in text, since those things can change quite easily, but would suggest that the interested reader use their favorite search engine and look them up. The goal of this collection is not to provoke further historical research—we imagine that such research will proceed apace with or without our intervention— but to give philosophers not already interested in early phenomenology reason look into these thinkers, not simply as examples of early phenomenology but as interlocutors. That said, it must be admitted at the outset that no single volume can claim to accomplish this task, but we take some comfort in Chesterton’s dictum that anything worth doing is worth doing badly. There are obvious and regrettable omissions—one will look in vain for essays on Roman Ingarden, Alfred Schutz, or most of the numerous figures mentioned in Lester Embree’s essay. Likewise, there are topics and issues that the attentive reader will notice as lacking; we will return to the issue of lacunae later.

1 The volume is broken into four sections. The first section is entitled “Phenomenological Occasions”; the second section “Phenomenology of Affect, Emotion, and Volition”; the third section “Early Reactions to Phenomenology”; finally, the fourth section is called “Early Phenomenology of Religion.” We hope to be forgiven for thinking that they are fairly self-explanatory section titles, with the possible exception of the first section. Here we include two pieces that don’t quite fit into other categories, but which are both very useful and important for this volume. The first piece in this section is by Lester Embree. In his piece he gives a nice historical overview of early phenomenology, orienting it around the distinction between Göttingen and Freiburg phenomenology. Embree urges that contemporary phenomenologists return to the spirit of early phenomenology and embrace phenomenology as a phenomenological psychology. The second piece in this portion of the book is by an early phenomenologist, Adolf Reinach. We are proud to include in this volume a translation from Reinach’s wartime notebooks. This translation—by Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray—is discussed at length in her essay in this volume. The second section itself includes essays on Dietrich von Hildebrand, Max Scheler, Adolf Reinach, and Alexander Pfänder. All four phenomenologists are working firmly within the Göttingen School. In his discussion of Dietrich

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von Hildebrand, John Crosby argues that his phenomenological accounts of love and value can be constructively compared with those of John Zizioulas, a major theologian and Metropolitan in the Greek Orthodox Church. Given von Hildebrand’s interlocutor in this essay, one might expect it to be located in the “religion and ethics” section of the text; despite expectations, the paper finds a more natural home here insofar as it is a debate about the experience of love. However, staging a debate between von Hildebrand and Zizioulas is only the occasion for the paper; the substantive points made in the text should be of interest to philosophers more broadly. Beginning by introducing von Hildebrand’s understanding of love as a kind of value-response, Crosby moves to John Zizioulas’s criticism thereof. In analyzing these criticisms Crosby is able to show the resonances of von Hildebrand’s philosophy of love with the recent debates over the gift, subjectivity, and the like, in particular the work of Jean-Luc Marion. In his essay on Max Scheler, Michael Kelly critiques and develops Scheler’s account of envy. This essay seeks to use resources from Scheler’s phenomenology of envy and ressentiment to highlight essential phenomenological distinctions between them. By drawing a distinction between a self-directed and other-directed mode of envy absent in Scheler’s account of envy, Kelly highlights Scheler’s understanding of the difference between envy and ressentiment with respect to the good. Complementing this exegesis, Kelly offers an eidetic analysis of envy and ressentiment at the level of the intentional focus or target of the agents under the spell of these emotions and not their affects. He argues that envy is an emotion that inordinately relates to the truth or proper value-structure of life, negatively assessing the self and diminishing its happiness. Ressentiment, on the other hand, is a transformative emotion that, by distorting the truth or proper value-structure of life, generates a peculiar sense of self-satisfaction that restores and even can enhance the agent’s happiness. In short, the lived-experience of these emotions differs, then, at both the affective and objective levels. Kim Baltzer-Jaray’s paper on Adolf Reinach is based, in part, on the texts translated in section one of this volume. During his service in the First World War, Reinach became intrigued by the sense of “foreboding” that some soldiers would have—i.e., in the feeling that today was the day they would die. Reinach noticed that this seemed to be more than merely a fear—in fact, in some cases it was accompanied by fearlessness—but contained some cognitive elements. Baltzer-Jaray details Reinach’s analysis of foreboding in notebooks that he kept while at the front and explores its relevance for phenomenology of the emotions and religion.

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The final paper in this section is by Marta Ubiali and focuses on the phenomenological psychology of Alexander Pfänder. Against the common dismissal (when he is remembered at all) of Pfänder as one who had a shallow or imperfect grasp of phenomenology, Ubalai argues, on the basis of texts published in his Nachlaß, that his commitment to and understanding of phenomenology goes much deeper than is usually thought. Ubalai works towards this goal by detailing first his relationship with Husserl, second his understanding of the phenomenological method, and then finally showing how they are applied in his analysis of volition and emotion. Our third section is entitled “Early Reactions to Phenomenology.” Here we have three papers, each addressing the responses—both critical and appreciative—to phenomenology by contemporanous thinkers: José Ortega y Gasset, Nicolai Hartmann, and Martin Buber. Each of these figures is, to greater or lesser degrees, influenced by and in dialogue with phenomenology without, however, declaring allegiance to the movement. Indeed, precisely because they were sympathetic outsiders, they offer invaluable perspectives on early phenomenology. The paper on José Ortega y Gasset takes its inspiration from a strange phrase he uses in his “Preface for Germans.” There he describes his work as an ‘anti-idealistic interpretation of phenomenology.” Using this as a springboard, Brian Harding shows how Ortega’s anti-idealism influences his understanding of the phenomenological reduction as a reduction to life. Ortega understands life as the union of oneself and one’s circumstances. This understanding of life opposes Ortega to all versions of phenomenology that would purport to find deeper transcendental or ontological structures that precede our circumstances; instead, he claims that we only have access to the world in life. Ortega’s rejection of transcendental claims brings him close to recent “speculative realist” critics of phenomenology, without—Harding argues—getting him all the way there. He remains a phenomenologist, although an unusual one. The paper on Nicolai Hartmann stages two dialogues. The first is a dialogue between Hartmann and Heidegger, the second the “speculative realist” criticism of phenomenology. It argues that there is a surprising similarity between these two dialogues, despite the eight decades that separate the two. In the first part, Keith Peterson works strenuously to remove Hartmann from Heidegger’s shadow, arguing that Hartmann can be taken in some cases as a corrective of Heidegger. In the second part, he turns to Quentin Meillassoux’s recent critique of Heidegger (and phenomenology more generally) as offering a stale “correlationalism” that is in sore need of being overcome. Correlationalism,

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generally speaking, holds that being is a correlate of the mind rather than an independently existing reality. Peterson shows that many of the speculative realist criticisms of Heidegger find analogues in Hartmann’s criticisms, which in turn means that Heidegger’s responses to Hartmann might suggest possible responses to contemporary critics. The alert reader will have noted that there are “two Dietrichs” present in this volume: Bonhoeffer and von Hildebrand. We turn now to Robert Wood’s essay, which stages a “meeting” between two Martins: Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger. If the reader were to read the volume straight through, from page one to the end, he or she would have already encountered a few mentions of Buber. His importance for European philosophy in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century is often and unfortunately overlooked. Wood’s essay points to important similarities between Buber and the later Heidegger’s thought, but also to equally important differences. Long before Levinas turned his critical guns against Heidegger, Buber already told us that Heidegger’s focus on ontology blinds him to the people right in front of him; that Dasein is an abstraction from human life (despite Heidegger’s protestations to the contrary). Despite these criticisms, Wood shows us that there are equally important affinities between the thought of Buber and Heidegger. Without seeking to sand down or obscure those differences, Wood suggests that reading Buber and Heidegger together and in tension with each other opens up important philosophical paths. The final section, “Early Phenomenology of Religion,” is perhaps a surprise. But the strangeness of this section only testifies to our misapprehension of early phenomenology. In point of fact, early phenomenologists did a lot of work on the topic; at the risk of oversimplifying things, one might suggest that it is only with the ascent of Heidegger and his claim that fundamental ontology precedes ethics and religion that ethical and religious questions were marginalized in phenomenology. Whence, the recent theological turn in phenomenology might be considered a theological re-turn rather than an unwarranted novelty. Dominique Janicaud is well known for his claim that the recent theological turn in (mostly French) phenomenology is a betrayal of the founding principles of phenomenology. Whatever one thinks of Janicaud’s claim, the essays here show that the turn associated with Levinas, Marion, and others is only a more recent iteration of a long-standing interest in matters theological by phenomenologists. This section includes essays on the phenomenological reception of Rudolf Otto’s work on the holy, a discussion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s contributions to phenomenology, and Edith Stein’s phenomenological reading of Carmelite spirituality.

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Jonna Bornemark’s discussion of Edith Stein focuses on her reading of Carmelite spiritual writers, most notably San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Theresa de Avila. Bornemark begins with a short discussion of the life and career of Stein before turning her attention to her reading of the Carmelites. The turn towards religious thought, Bornemark argues, is not merely motivated by Stein’s own religious conversion, but by dissatisfaction with the intellectualism and egological focus in Husserlian phenomenology. In some respects, this is the same dissatisfaction felt by the early Heidegger, but Stein represents a radically different response to the problem. Through careful readings of Stein’s later works, Bornemark argues that even Stein’s most mystical writings are informed by phenomenology. Whence, Stein anticipates by generations the more recent discussions of mysticism and phenomenology in recent French phenomenology. Brian Gregor’s treatment of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is admittedly a surprising inclusion; he is not often placed on the list of phenomenologists. But, as Gregor argues, he was influenced heavily by phenomenology and made use of phenomenology in his own theological and moral works; recent works by Jean-Yves Lacoste and Emmanuel Falque have referenced Bonhoeffer. Gregor’s paper shows both the relevance of phenomenology for Bonhoeffer and Bonhoeffer’s relevance for phenomenology. Rather than address the totality of his work, Gregor chooses to focus on Bonhoeffer’s moral thought, in particular his understanding of the person and ethical responsibility. The reader might find it fruitful to read this paper in conjunction with Crosby’s essay on the other Dietrich included in this volume, since von Hildebrand places the person as the center of his philosophy. In any case, Gregor makes a strong case for the relevance of Bonhoeffer to contemporary phenomenology of religion and phenomenological theology. While he is not a phenomenologist in the strict sense, Rudolf Otto’s Idea of the Holy was praised by no less than Husserl as an exemplary work in phenomenology. In his contribution, Merold Westphal returns to Otto in the wake of recent work in phenomenology of religion and positions him as a post-modern philosopher of religion (avant la lettre). Westphal begins by providing a careful and provocative reading of Otto’s work that reminds the reader, among other things, that Otto’s text is based as much on anthropological fieldwork as it is on philosophical or theological study. In this, Otto can be said to truly have gone to the things themselves. Following upon his reading of Otto, the essay turns into a trialogue between Otto, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jacques Derrida, with a brief Kierkegaardian coda. The point of these contrapositions is not to definitively place Otto vis-à-vis Marion, Derrida, or Kierkegaard, but to suggest future fruitful lines of research.

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2 Earlier in the introduction we mentioned the omission of some figures. The causes of these omissions were varied. In some cases, it was difficult to find qualified and willing authors. Since the volume hoped to address the contemporary relevance of these thinkers, we needed authors who were both expert in an “old figure” but at least conversant in “new directions.” This combination was harder to find than one might expect! The difficulty in finding such authors is, in fact, part of the justification of this volume. If academia was crawling with people both familiar with “early phenomenology” and conversant in recent phenomenology, there would be little point to a volume like this. But, as it is, they are few and far between. Being good academics, we tend to specialize, even in our specialties. Experts in early phenomenology often have little use for more contemporary thinkers; conversely, students of contemporary phenomenology are often only dimly aware of the first generations of phenomenologists beyond Husserl and Heidegger: Scheler is a rumor, Ingarden a fable, and realist phenomenology a myth. (Hopefully, this volume will go a bit of the way towards rectifying the situation.) In other cases, not unfamiliar to those who’ve produced edited collections, essays were commissioned, but never showed up. We will not bore the reader with the details. The point is to say that we are aware that one could point to any number of other early phenomenologists who should have been included but have not. No doubt some readers will be profoundly disappointed to see this or that phenomenologist neglected, and some even may feel that the entire project has been marred by some omission. To those readers, we can only hope they put together a volume that includes all of the figures they feel were unjustly left out. We will be glad to read it. In addition to the contributors, to whom we—the editors—are very grateful, we would also like to acknowledge the support, advice, and encouragement given to us and the project by Jared Bly, Keith Brown, Brian Treanor, Nicolas de Warren, and especially Rodney Parker at the North American Society for Early Phenomenology (NASEP).

Note 1 D. Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 14; S. Crowell, “Is There a Phenomenological Research Program,” Synthese, 131.3 (June 2002): 428.

Part One

Phenomenological Occasions

1

Speculations about Bridging the GöttingenFreiburg “Gap” in Phenomenology1 Lester Embree

Florida Atlantic University

The task I see called for in this essay is daunting. On the one hand, it requires talent as well as knowledge in history that I am not sure that I possess even to begin with. I have done some biographic work,2 but in this case there are groups, so it is really history, and, in addition to collective socio-historical structures, there are far more historical data involved than I control. But I can nevertheless try to raise some questions in the hope that future researchers will do a better job at solving them. On the other hand, it seems desirable that an insider to our tradition address the problematics, if only to document some oral tradition. I am the author of studies of William James, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as several of Husserl, but more significantly I am a student of and a commentator on work by my teachers, Dorion Cairns and Aron Gurwitsch (and sometimes then call myself a “grand-student” of Husserl) and have also deeply studied the philosophy of Alfred Schutz, these last three sharing not only a background in the mature Husserl but also friendship and a commitment to the continuation of constitutive phenomenology not through scholarship on texts but chiefly through investigations of the things themselves. I call them “the New School three” and believe that they established not only the first but thus far also the only tendency genuinely continuing phenomenology in the USA, a tendency I myself endeavor further to continue. This seems to make me an insider in a special signification. My concern here is not investigative, however, but historical, i.e., are there one or two distinctly separate and successive tendencies in early phenomenology? An adequate account of the origin and nature of what I tentatively called the “Göttingen-Freiburg gap” could fill a book and, again, I am not capable of

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producing such a full account, but I am willing to try to raise some of the issues, which, of course, immediately leaves me open to the objection that I overlooked some of them—something that I would not mind that much hearing about. So much of what I offer is conjecture, anecdote, and only hypothesis, which sorts of content I try to cover with the word “speculation” in my title, and that signification holds chiefly for the first part of my exposition, while in the second part, the word “speculation” includes some serious hope for the future, not about the alleged discontinuity or change but about the possibility of recognizing extensive continuation not only within the past of phenomenology but also for its investigative rather than scholarly future.

1 The so-called “gap” I start with the question of what there might be a gap within. Of course, it is within phenomenology, but there are a number of narrower and wider definitions of “phenomenology.” The broadest definition which I am comfortable with for practical-historical purposes is that which includes Hannah Arendt but excludes the psychiatrist Carl Jung, who used “phenomenology” in the title of one of his books, something that Arendt did not do. Then I recognize Realistic, Constitutive, Existential, and Lifeworldly stages and tendencies under that concept. These concepts of genus and species of our tradition worked well for our editing of the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology in 1997.3 But in my heart of hearts I am a member of the tendency that can best be called “New School phenomenology,” which goes beyond Husserl to include the efforts of Cairns, Gurwitsch, and Schutz critically to continue his constitutive phenomenology. That is the form of phenomenology that began in print with the Phenomenologist’s Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft in 1911 and was expressed somewhat more clearly in his Ideen of 1913. And I hope that you are not shocked to hear that I often quote Husserl’s remark somewhere that the Logische Untersuchungen is “pre-philosophical”! In preparing this essay I could not remember my teachers mentioning any of the Göttingen figures, but subsequently I have found a few remarks about Edith Stein in the Cairns Nachlaß and of course there are references to Max Scheler in the writings of Gurwitsch and Schutz, all of which seems to amount to exceptions that prove the rule of ignoring them. So the reader should be suspicious of my interpretation as an insider within our tradition! But please balance this admission with the fact that the first book about our tradition that I read was



Speculations about Bridging the Göttingen-Freiburg “Gap” in Phenomenology 15

Herbert Spiegelberg’s The Phenomenological Movement, which I did when it came out in 1962, and that I was long a close friend of Fred Kersten (1931– 2012), a student of Spiegelberg and thus a grand-student of Alexander Pfänder as well as of Husserl. Fred regularly reminded me about the early followers of Husserl. (I will quote his last statement in this regard below.) One of the things I gather about the intention of a collection of this type is that it focuses itself historically on the time of Husserl’s literary life. I like that this period is called “early phenomenology,” because that raises the question that we do not need to address today of the difference of the forms of what can be called “later phenomenology,” existential phenomenology to begin with. (I will return to the question of the membership of early phenomenology below.) On this basis, I now ask what phenomenology is for Husserl or, more precisely, what are Husserl and the associates of his lifetime chiefly concerned with? This is a question I cannot begin to answer properly because I have read nothing by well more than half of the fifty-odd authors in early phenomenology. However, I am currently editing my teacher Dorion Cairns’s 1964 seminar on Husserl’s Ideen and in this seminar he amusingly could not confine himself to commenting on the text and, among other things, once addressed the question of what Husserl was concerned with all along. Cairns did not accept the claim that his master confined himself to eidetic research, because certainly by the time of the Cartesianische Meditationen Husserl clearly recognized not only that one could do empirical phenomenological psychology, but also empirical transcendental phenomenology, a notion that would consternate a Kantian. Others have contended that phenomenology is essentially descriptive, but Cairns referred to places where Husserl holds that phenomenology can form hypotheses and engage in explanation. He concluded that from at least the Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891) until his death Husserl was focused on mental life, which of course includes the things beyond mental life that are intended by processes in it, such things including Others and even the whole world. On that assumption, let me next suggest that the question of “What is the gap?” is best understood as one of a difference (or differences) in ways in which mental life can be approached. Many would then say that the earliest of early phenomenology is chiefly realistic, i.e., that material objects and universal essences, for example, are considered to exist independently of mental life, while subsequently, at least for Husserl’s mature philosophy, the position is transcendental. Of course Husserl was not happy that his earlier followers did not stay with him as his position changed. I remember hearing at some point in graduate

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Early Phenomenology

school that the Phenomenologist referred sarcastically to the earlier work as “Bilderbuch Phänomenologie [picture book phenomenology].” Part of the issue is whether resistance to the mature Husserl is the overwhelming difference of the earliest or first phase of early phenomenology, including whether it can be called “Göttingen (which includes some of “München”) phenomenology.” But maybe this title and also that of “Freiburg phenomenology” are not controversial. There is nevertheless quite an issue here. Studies are needed of what the various earlier followers thought transcendental phenomenology was and what their objections and alternatives to it were. Complicating this issue is how Husserl was never confident that he explained his transcendentalism very well. Part of the problem lies in his very adopting of this word, “transcendental.” In that time, few could avoid thinking of Neo-Kantianism. Today, few can avoid at least thinking of Kant, which bothers me because the chief influences evident in the Logische Untersuchungen and chiefly via Franz Brentano are John Stuart Mill and British Empiricism. Study of Kant came later. About Husserl’s transcendentalism, let me insert here the story that I tell students and especially colleagues in disciplines beyond philosophy, in the latter case as part of telling such colleagues why they should ignore the method of transcendental phenomenological epoché, reduction, and purification. The story that I tell begins with how Husserl had a doctorate in mathematics, met Brentano, then worked under the psychologist Carl Stumpf, and produced Philosophie der Arithmetik (1991) and first edition of the Logische Untersuchungen (1900–1), which are psychological studies of mathematical and logical thinking. Soon after that, Husserl found his work called philosophy and recognized that the dominant school of philosophy in Germany at that time was Neo-Kantianism, which urged a first philosophy in which a non-worldly subjectivity was used to ground the world and the special sciences of it, an approach one can see going back at least to Descartes, and at about the same time—so my story continues—Husserl recognized that mental life is temporal but that its temporality is different from the spatio-temporality of the natural world, even if it is regularly identified with spatio-temporality in what he came to call the “natural attitude.” I next go on to say that it was easy for Husserl then to see that the purely temporal mental life could be used to ground the world and the special sciences of it. But while the Kantians—paleo as well as neo—deduced their transcendental ground, Husserl reflectively observed and described it. Yet there was still a huge problem for philosophy because, inasmuch as psychology is a worldly science, the psychology-like account Husserl was developing could not be psychology



Speculations about Bridging the Göttingen-Freiburg “Gap” in Phenomenology 17

but had to be philosophy somehow. This raised the question of how mental life can be observably considered non-worldly, “demundanized,” one might also say, and thus goes on but not in space-time. The transcendental phenomenological epoché, reduction, and purification—whatever that is—solves the problem, of course. So I finally recommend that colleagues in disciplines beyond philosophy not worry about the non-worldly grounding of the world and the special sciences of it, which is strictly a philosophical problem, but urge that they can still reflectively analyze and describe mental processes and indeed even engage in theory of science after the fashion of Alfred Schutz. (Let me reiterate that this is a story and hence that it artificially selects, simplifies, and artificially arranges events.) So I suspect that the early phenomenologists implicitly if not explicitly followed Husserl in the concern for mental life but did not go along with—and might well have not understood—his turn to a new form of transcendental philosophy. Let me repeat that much scholarship is needed on the resistance to Husserl’s transcendentalism by the earliest phenomenologists, which probably has several forms. It seems, however, that Husserl’s rejection of the earliest phenomenologists may be exaggerated in the oral tradition. Thus, in his last publication, “Thoughts on the Translation of Husserl’s Ideen, Erstes Buch,”4 Fred Kersten characterizes the earliest phenomenology as non-transcendental realism and then offers the following remarks. There was, Husserl’s willingness to include in publication of his Jahrbuch essays that would certainly count as cases of “non-transcendental” phenomenological realism.— Immediate and obvious examples are Pfänder’s studies of will and striving, of “sentiments” (Vols. 1, 3), and logic (Vol. 4); Reinach’s essay on civil law (Vol. 1); Geiger’s several essays on aesthetic enjoyment and art (Vol. 1); Paul Linke’s essay on the perception of motion (Vol. 2); Hermann Ritzel’s essay on analytic judgments (Vol. 3); Conrad-Martius’s several essays on the ontology of the external world (Vols. 3, 6, 10); Dietrich von Hildebrand’s several essays on ethics (Vol. 3, 5); Arnold Metzger’s essay on epistemology (Vol. 7); Jean Hering’s essay on essence, essentiality, and idea (Vol. 4); Herbert Spiegelberg on the nature and ontology of Idea, on law, and ethics (Vol. 11).5

And Kersten continues: To be sure, there are many separate publications by those authors. Still other writers whose work might be classed under the general heading of “non-transcendental” phenomenological realism are Wilhelm Schapp on the phenomenology of perception,6 Heinrich Hofmann’s essay on sensations7

18

Early Phenomenology (which gave rise to a long review of Husserl’s Ideen and phenomenology by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset8), Theodor Conrad’s essay on the eidetic theory of mental life,9 and one of my favorites, Herbert Leyendecker’s wonderful essay on the phenomenology of illusion.10

Then again, before the First World War Husserl was aware of how his early followers were reluctant to accept his transcendental turn and nevertheless, so at least the oral tradition goes, included the first part of the Ideen, on eidetics, for their sake. So, if the philosophical difference between Göttingen and Freiburg stages or phases of early phenomenology is that of rejection versus acceptance of transcendental phenomenology, there nevertheless can be considerable continuity and “gap” is too strong a word. How there probably has been and today there can be more continuity will be returned to presently. First, however, some questions can be asked about the non-philosophical or existential aspects of the difference between the first and following phases of early phenomenology. An issue that immediately arises is that of just which philosophers belong to such an “early phenomenology,” which is to say that a sort of census is called for, and, at the same time, the further attempt can be made to distinguish Göttingen and Freiburg phenomenologists. The Call for Abstracts for the recent meetings of the newly formed North American Society for Early Phenomenology, for example, is rather good in this respect, but building from that list I have added some names, some from Kersten and some from Spiegelberg: Göttingen stage: Edmund Husserl, Maximilian Beck, Winthrop Bell, Theodor Celms, Theodor Conrad, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Johannes Daubert, Alois Fischer, Moritz Geiger, Jean Hering, August Gollinger, Adolf Grimm, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Roman Ingarden, Fritz Kaufmann, Aurel Kolnai, Alexandre Koyré, Herbert Leyendecker, Paul Linke, Hans Lipps, Dietrich Mahnke, Alexander Pfänder, Adolf Reinach, Hermann Ritzel, Wilhelm Schapp, Max Scheler, Gustav Shpet, Herbert Spiegelberg, Kurt Stavenhagen, Edith Stein, and Gerda Walther. Freiburg stage: Edmund Husserl, Hannah Arendt, Oskar Becker, Dorion Cairns, Aron Gurwitsch, Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink, Felix Kaufmann, Ludwig Landgrebe, Emmanuel Levinas, Arnold Metzger, Jan Patocka, Hans Reiner, Alfred Schutz, and Wilhelm Szilasi.

I am not sure that this “census” of almost fifty early phenomenologists is complete, but I am confident that it is fairly close. (It is of philosophers; the cultural scientists associated with Husserl, e.g., Wolfgang Köhler and David Katz, are omitted.) The first thing that strikes one in looking at these lists is how



Speculations about Bridging the Göttingen-Freiburg “Gap” in Phenomenology 19

there are almost twice as many in the earliest than in the subsequent stage. The second thing might be that there are proportionally more non-Germans in the Freiburg phase. The third might be that there are women especially in the first phase. (We should never forget that our tradition is, with Edith Stein’s work, the first to recognize gender differences systematically—and this two decades before Simone de Beauvoir did it independently again.) Incidentally, besides lectures by Husserl, the earlier group used the first edition of the Logische Untersuchungen, which edition would have been difficult to find after the war, while the editions of 1913 and 1922, which were brought closer to the thought and terminology of the Ideen, would have been more available for the “Freiburgers.” I do not know that Husserl’s move to Freiburg was itself that significant, although I do not know of early followers other than Edith Stein who moved with him. But certainly the war disrupted everybody’s lives. Husserl lost a son and among his students at least Adolph Reinach. My guess is that none of the early group considered themselves anything like students after 1918, and that certainly all of them were older and certainly had to get on with their lives. And life in Germany after the war was harder for most Germans than it had been before; some are said to have been reduced to eating bark from trees. Cairns reported Husserl telling of students needing to work in the mines around Freiburg and that he gave them copies of his books because they could not afford to buy them. The mostly foreign students in the 1920s seem to have had foreign funding. Finally, it needs to be remembered that Husserl himself lost a son and had a breakdown as well as lost his house and then lived out his life in an apartment. It seems likely that existentialism and religion were seen increasingly as more relevant than the Wissenschaftslehre that Husserl always sought. Let me insert here that the first task in understanding a philosophy is to ask what its author’s project is and in Husserl’s case it is a Wissenschaftslehre, a theory or philosophy of science, above all of logic and mathematics, but also of the naturalistic and cultural sciences, psychology first of all, and I am not sure that most Husserl scholars today recognize this, sad to say. Another issue for the study of early phenomenology is that of how much, if at all, the various early Husserlians continued with this project. (Today some analytical philosophy has a great advantage from not dropping the major theme of science theory. Here, at least, we phenomenologists have been foolish.) I have the impression that there were far more extensive personal relationships among the pre-war students and indeed that they formed groups more than happened later, the figures in the later stage being spread out more thinly

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Early Phenomenology

that those in the earlier phase, the two phases being of similar length if Husserl’s decade of retirement is included (1900–18 and 1918–38). Over half a dozen colleagues continued to visit the old man regularly, even after the Nazi time began. In sum, studies of the early phenomenologists ought not to overlook non-philosophical circumstances such as these.

2 Bridging the “gap” Above I have offered some reason for doubting that there is as much discontinuity between the two phases of early phenomenology as some believe, including non-philosophical aspects to the history, chiefly relating to the war. Insofar as there are two sets of soi-disant phenomenologists today that relate to the two phases (I call them “devotees”), I have two suggestions to offer to them separately and two suggestions for both. For the devotees of the Freiburg phenomenologists, who appear more diverse in the developments of their thinking than the Göttingen phenomenologists, I nevertheless urge serious consideration of the contributions of the colleagues in the first phase, who manifested an enormous amount of creativity and energy. For the devotees of the “Göttingeners” (if there is such a word!), I urge understanding but going beyond preoccupations with transcendental phenomenology because there is more to Husserl’s phenomenology at Freiburg than that, e.g., the work in value theory done by him during the 1920s, which is not to speak of creative developments by later Husserlians. For devotees of both phases now what I first urge has the title of “phenomenological psychology.” On the one hand, I suspect that there is a great deal, explicitly as well as implicitly, of phenomenological psychology in the phenomenology of the Göttigeners that devotees of the Freiburgers can learn from, as my friend Kersten did. On the other hand, where the devotees of the Göttigeners are concerned, already in his Sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt of 1932 Alfred Schutz confined himself to what Husserl himself called “constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude” as well as “phenomenological psychology” and sought, as Husserl himself authorized, to reinterpret his master’s transcendental analyses as phenomenological psychology. Then again, when I studied with Dorion Cairns at the New School during the 1960s, he began by teaching phenomenology as psychological phenomenology because that was easier to understand and provided the best basis for going on to transcendental phenomenology. And it was later also not difficult for me to assemble “Gurwitsch’s Theory of Cultural-Scientific Psychology.”11



Speculations about Bridging the Göttingen-Freiburg “Gap” in Phenomenology 21

Phenomenological psychology is different from most if not all contemporary academic or scientific psychology, although there seems considerable interest in it within so-called Cognitive Science today. Perhaps there is need to restore a type of psychology as a subdiscipline of philosophy like ethics continues to be. Some say that the “philosophy of mind” in the analytical tradition is a crude phenomenology done by philosophers. Briefly, phenomenological psychology is based on reflective observation and analysis of mental processes and how they are intentive to things within and beyond the mental life in which they occur. Since it is cultivated in the natural attitude, the things-as-intended-to are regarded realistically and, as intimated, one does not need to be preoccupied with first philosophy of the transcendental sort. There are other forms of metaphysics if one feels the need for metaphysics. I contend, however, that a genuine phenomenological psychology relies implicitly or explicitly on the psychological phenomenological epoché, reduction, and purification. Incidentally, I twice heard students ask my teacher Cairns in class what “pure,” “purification,” etc. meant in Husserl and heard him tell of a conversation in Freiburg with Eugen Fink in which Fink explained that the full name for this genus of procedure is “epoché, reduction, and purification” and that an epoché is the operation with the effect, on the one hand, of a reduction of the attitude of the ego and, on the other hand, the purification of the object in some respect or other. Cairns further reported that he and Fink then laughingly agreed that Husserl himself often also said “reduction” when he should have said “epoché.” I have not found this written in the Cairns papers and do not know if it is documented from Husserl or Fink, but it does make sense, the best short form of the name of the procedure being epoché. When one reads of the “pure ego,” one needs to consult context in order to decide whether it is a transcendentally pure, eidetically pure, psychologically pure, or egologically pure ego is referred to,12 the other epochés being combinable with the eidetic. There are a number of epochés in Husserl’s methodology and they are named according to their purpose. The transcendental and the eidetic epochés, reductions, and purifications are well known even if not well understood. The psychological epoché, reduction, and purification is a refraining from acceptance of somatic and environmental causes and effects of mental events and the reduction is to the phenomenological psychological attitude and the purification is to the psychologically pure mental life, including what is intended to in it. This is the perspective that I recommend for integrating most of the findings of both the Göttigen and the Freiburg contributions. If there is a gap,

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phenomenological psychology can be the bridge. And a way in which such contributions can be related to neurophysiology has been known since before World War II.13 One final recommendation to devotees of work in both of the two phases of early phenomenology. The colleagues whom I address as devotees are largely if not entirely engaged in historical study. I have not the least doubt that a great deal of such study is needed where especially the Göttingen phenomenologists are concerned. But there is something else especially about the Göttingers that I actually consider the most impressive thing. Like Husserl, they did little if any scholarship on what other phenomenologists have written. Rather, they took the example of the Logische Untersuchungen and the master’s lectures and then proceeded actually to produce phenomenological analyses, i.e., they engaged in—as the Göttinger Herbert Spiegelberg put it in the title of one of his books— Doing Phenomenology.14 Most phenomenological writings are difficult to understand well and thus there is great value in interpretations, translations, etc. But these are contributions to the secondary and not the primary literature. Their ultimate purpose is to help original investigations. Actually very little of the contributions by the almost fifty philosophers in early phenomenology is scholarship on what others have written. Should we not expect those who read the works of the early phenomenologists to be inspired by their example to do more phenomenology? The way ultimately to honor phenomenology and phenomenologists is to do more phenomenology. Sadly, this is exceptional today—if it happens at all. My highest hope, then, for new societies and for collections of the present sort is that they encourage more doing of phenomenology and not just more lovely historical scholarship. Only new investigations can prove that our tradition is alive and not merely a specialty in the history of an impressive tradition in the philosophy in the last century.

Notes 1 This paper was the keynote address at the North American Society for Early Phenomenology, Western University, Ontario, in June 2013. Since presenting it, I have come to recognize that there is no historical gap between phenomenology as pursued in relation to the two mentioned places and that it is also wrong to speak of “development,” “evolution,” or even “transition,” which have normative



2

3 4 5

6 7 8

9 10 11

12

Speculations about Bridging the Göttingen-Freiburg “Gap” in Phenomenology 23 connotations, and that just “change” is better. Nevertheless, it seems inappropriate to change the title of an essay once it has been used in public and so I have only added so-called “scare quotes” to the word “gap.” Changes have been made in the content, however. Lester Embree (ed.), “My own Life,” by Dorion Cairns, in Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism, Essays for Dorion Cairns, ed. Frederick Kersten and Richard Zaner. Phaenomenologica, vol. 50 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 1–13; “Biographical Sketch of Aron Gurwitsch,” in Life-World and Consciousness: Essays for Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. xvii–xxx; “A Representation of Edmund Husserl” (videotape), Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc., c/o Lester Embree, Department of Philosophy, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA (Fall 1989); and Alfred Schutz: Philosopher of Social Science in the 20th Century (video), Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc., c/o Lester Embree, Department of Philosophy, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA (April 1999, 46 min. Made available in DVD in Fall 2003). (Dordrecht: Springer) Lester Embree and Thomas Nenon (eds), Husserl’s Ideen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), p. 470. A bibliography as well as brief reviews of these Yearbook essays can be found in Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement. A Historical Introduction, 3rd rev. and enlarged edn, with the collaboration of Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982). Wilhelm Schapp, Beiträge zur Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung (Göttingen: W. Fr. Kaestner, 1910). Heinrich Hofmann, “Untersuchungen über den Empfindungsbegriff,” Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie, XXVI (1913): 1–135. José Ortega y Gasset, “Sobre el concepeto de sensación,” Obras Completas, Vol. 1 (Madrid: Reviste de Occidente, 1950), pp. 245–61. This essay was originally published in 1913. Theodor Conrad, Zur Wesenslehre des psychischen Lebens und Erleben (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968). Husserl Studies, Vol. 19 (2003): 43–70. Husserl Studies, Vol. 19 (2003): 43–70 and “The Nature and Role of Phenomenological Psychology in Alfred Schutz,” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 39 (2008): 141–50. Since the egological epoché seems the least known, Lester Embree, “Dorion Cairns, Alfred Schutz, and the Egological Reduction,” in Alfred Schutz and his Intellectual Partners, ed. NASU Hisashi, Lester Embree, George Psathas, and Ilja Srubar (Universitaetsverlag Konstanz: Konstanz, 2009), pp. 177–216, might be consulted.

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13 Dorion Cairns, Edition ed., Lester Embree, Fred Kersten, and Richard M. Zaner, “Phenomenology and Present-Day Psychology (1942),” Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, vol. 1 (2002): 69–77. 14 H. Spiegelberg, Doing Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975).

2

A Phenomenology of Foreboding/Foreseeing Adolf Reinach

Translated by Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray

In my half sleep I heard the talk of men resting during a pause from artillery firing. A young officer had fallen the day before; briefly before the ride [left], from which he never returned, he had, as he otherwise never did, given his fellow (officer) his trunk key, put his classified documents in order and written a farewell letter. He had therefore a foreboding of his own death. This story is tied to others. One was remarkably out of sorts and funereal before the grenade struck him; another one had his will and testament made; it is reported of many that they had said directly before their deaths that they would no longer be alive the following day. None of the infantryman doubted it, that there is (such a thing as) foreboding that lets us foreknow the future with certainty. A young staff sergeant breaks into the conversation. I hear him, how he—a bit condescendingly—argues, how little it had to do with cases of foreboding. Certainly everyone assumes before a dangerous mission that perhaps or probably he will die. If this supposition comes true (fulfills itself), then its result is mysteriously foreboding; supposing it doesn’t fulfill itself, then nobody remembers it. No, there are no forebodings; only reasonable calculations are possible that acknowledge themselves with more or less probability. The young staff sergeant becomes all the more scientific, and all the more quieter it becomes around him: foreboding are matters/things of dispositions (moods). If I am sad or ill-tempered, the world appears darker to me, and misfortune seems (to me) impending. Perhaps such a misfortune really occurs. Then the number of mysterious forebodings is increased by one. Or it does not occur, then nobody talks about the affair. The realization of gloomy dispositions are particularly frequent in wars, whom should that surprise? For this reason, the numerous “forebodings” in this time, therefore there are also a large number of such forebodings before (the

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battle of) Verdun or at the Somme (river in France) than at any quiet period on the front. It is sad enough that in our time one still believes in such things. Who could dispute these words thrown out with the strength of higher education and reasonable intelligence (enlightenment)? Concerned silence quieted the infantryman. And probably it lasted for a full minute before their spokesperson begins a new story of a cousin, who not only spoke of but also wrote of his own death. But that response to the preceding conversation is not sufficient as a scientific claim. Shrugging, the young sergeant turns away. However, in me a world ascends, for a long time, long immersed in anything but the suffocating activity of the soldier in war. What are proper forebodings/ foresights? That they are justified in themselves was just now denied. And the contradiction has increased to the claim that there would be no forebodings. Now this was certainly quite an unscientific mistake on the part of the scientific staff sergeant: to put into question the proper essence of a thing, whose essence he precisely acknowledges through the fact that he negates its own inner truth and that he tries to explain genetically its frequent occurrence. But we do not discredit him for that which is found often enough in still more scientific people than him. Whether foreboding/foreseeing carries justice or truth in itself, I do not have the means to say; it is impossible to say before I know what the proper essence of foreboding/foreseeing is. I do not know it yet. However, already the desire of the phenomenologist is awakened in me, to single out a structure from the fullness of the appearance, to seize it, to submerge oneself in it, what so far only acknowledged in the meaning of the word, henceforth it is to achieve intuitively the essence itself.

I. That every foreseeing as such necessarily requires a related content—the “foreseen” as such—so far stretched is the boundary of its possible contents here. Not only, for example, temporally but even future forebodings can refer to something. Within a scientific investigation a foreseeing of the result can rise up within me; here something forms apparently timeless (atemporal)—a more or less determinate proposition [Satz] or state of affairs [Sachverhalt]—the related content of a foreseeing. But not this foreseeing content, it being also identical with the content of a judgment or an apprehension, but rather the foreseeing as such—not the noematic, but the “noetic” side, which Husserl speaks about,



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presents the real problem. If we avail ourselves of the division, in itself quite limited but sufficient for our purposes, of the psychic world [seelischen Welt] into “spheres of feeling—willing and thinking,” then, since the foreseeing is certainly no volition, one will only be able to be undecided as to whether it could be taken as a feeling in such claims. Indeed it appears to have good sense to speak of felt foresights, of the aspect of being felt of any foreseeing. All the same, it is readily apparent that foreseeing—for example of a future event—is no feeling like joy or sorrow, no set of ego states (no state of being of the I), not in one way or another being a condition of the ego (the I). Nevertheless the foreseeing adds something new to the total wealth of knowledge—in the broadest sense of knowledge spoken; the subject here appears to grasp by means of foreseeing, correctly or incorrectly remains to be seen, something from the river of future events, which was previously not accessible to him prior. What is meant by the words “aspect of being felt of the foreseeing” cannot be clarified until a more in-depth analysis occurs. Already here, however, we are allowed to include foreseeing, like everything that allows certain states of affairs to appear to the subject as subsisting now or in the future or in general, in the domain of knowledge and therefore of thought, in the sense of that threefold division. What clearly stands out from foreboding is the horror of future fortunes, which as a feeling springs from this foresightful grasp, as does all aspirations and reluctance, willing and not willing, which is rooted in this feeling and knowledge [Wissen]. Certainly “knowledge” [Wissen] is taken here in the widest sense; in a narrow and proper sense one can contrast foresight and knowledge against each other. So, after this first superficial orientation, closer determinations are vital. In this sphere, we make the fundamental and far-reaching distinction between grounding and grounded structures. I have already pursued knowledge in the narrower sense in an earlier work (Munich Philosophical Treatises, On the Negative Judgment). Let us take knowledge [as cognition; Erkennen] in the stricter sense as the act in which a state of affairs comes to givenness for us, in which it illuminates for us and the corresponding proposition is understood by us, then the conviction that develops for us on the ground of this understanding distinguishes itself in all clarity from the state of affairs. We designate the first as knowledge [Erkennen], the second as judgment (in one of the many possible meanings of this term). Without further analysis both contrast one another clearly enough, if one considers that the case of cognition [Erkennen] concerns a temporally punctual act, which cannot endure any more or less, whereas we can live with a conviction for any length of time, and that furthermore a set of convictions can be maintained in ourselves without grounding themselves

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in an act of cognition or at any time having been grounded. From this point there is no doubt that we have to account for the grounding structures it has, not the grounded ones—i.e., those which by their essence are open to a grounding. Through foreboding/foresight we grasp—or rather we believe that we grasp—something that was previously concealed. And a conviction can also be grounded in the foreboding, which in strength and inner certainty itself need be in no way inferior to the conviction based upon knowledge [Erkennen]. From the foreboding of immanent death arises the certain conviction of having to die soon. As knowledge [Erkennen] and foresight/foreboding stand on equal rank in this relation, the task of identifying fundamental differences between the two becomes all the more urgent.

Part Two

Phenomenology of Affect, Emotion, and Volition

3

Person and Love: Dietrich von Hildebrand in Dialogue with John Zizioulas John F. Crosby

Franciscan University, Steubenville

Dietrich von Hildebrand began his study of philosophy in Munich and was from there drawn to study in Göttingen with Edmund Husserl. In Munich he knew Max Scheler, Moritz Geiger, Adolf Reinach, Johannes Daubert and others who told him about Husserl’s groundbreaking work, Logical Investigations. In 1909 von Hildebrand joined the circle of proto-phenomenologists around Husserl in Göttingen. Like most of these Göttingen students, von Hildebrand kept a critical reserve to Husserl’s later move into “transcendental” phenomenology. He always thought that the “real” Husserl was the Husserl of the Logical Investigations, and he always understood himself as representing the phenomenology of the early Husserl as interpreted by Adolf Reinach. And there is another respect in which von Hildebrand represents early phenomenology: none of the early phenomenologists was influenced more than von Hildebrand by Scheler, who was for his part a major figure in early phenomenology. Scheler’s value ethics, his philosophy of the heart, his approach to love, to sympathy, and to solidarity were all-important, deeply formative sources of von Hildebrand’s philosophy. Even though von Hildebrand was never a mere disciple of Scheler, and even though he transformed much that he received from him, von Hildebrand would not be von Hildebrand without the deep influence of Scheler. Metropolitan John Zizioulas does not call himself a “phenomenologist,” but rather “a theological personalist in the line of the Cappadocian fathers.” And yet he is sufficiently close to recent phenomenologists such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion for his critical assessment of von Hildebrand to represent an encounter of the original phenomenology with some later developments of it.

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I propose to explain von Hildebrand’s thought on value and value-response and to explain how these fundamental concepts enter in to his account of love and in particular how they lead him to his claim, central to his work on love, that love exists as a value-response. Then I will present the main objections that Zizioulas recently raised to this claim, and I will try to understand why he does not acknowledge love to be a value-response in the sense of von Hildebrand. Finally, I will respond to Zizioulas, saying where I think von Hildebrand can be defended and where I think Zizioulas successfully challenges von Hildebrand to rethink and develop some of his teaching on love. There is in fact a very fruitful dialogue waiting to be conducted between these two thinkers. The dialogue was begun by Zizioulas’s probing study of von Hildebrand’s The Nature of Love,1 in which he said: I have read The Nature of Love with great interest, and I have finished reading it with the impression that I have read one of the most important books I have come across in my life. In addition to the intellectual depth and analytical vigor of his thought I have particularly appreciated what he has to say to us on what I regard as the central theme in any dialogue between theology and philosophy; namely, the concept of the Person. (26)

I am particularly drawn to this dialogue since Zizioulas, in that study, also engages me in discussion.

1 We will understand what von Hildebrand means by holding that love exists as a value-response, only if we understand what conception of love he is thereby trying to exclude. And for this we have to go back to his thought on the basic kinds or categories of importance.2 Von Hildebrand begins by asking why some things leave me indifferent and other things light up with importance for me and awaken my interest in them. Having a glass of wine may be highly desirable for me at the end of a tense day, because the relaxation that it affords is subjectively satisfying for me. In this case the importance of the wine derives from me and my subjective satisfaction. This importance does not exist for another person who does not find the glass of wine to be subjectively satisfying. But something can become important for me in a more objective way. Having control over my bodily urges and appetites, for example, can present itself to me



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as highly desirable; I am likely to experience this most strongly when I see how harmful it is for me to live at the beck and call of my urges, to be governed by them and not to be able to govern them. Thus the virtue of temperance lights up with importance because I understand that the possession of it is beneficial for me, it is in my true interest, it helps me to flourish as a human being. The greater objectivity of this importance is shown in the fact that temperance is beneficial for every person, not just for me; any right-thinking person will agree with me in seeking it as beneficial for themselves. If a person sees temperance as only subjectively dissatisfying and fails to see any respect in which it is beneficial for himself, then we say that he is blind to his real interest, to his true good. But we would never say that the person who does not find the glass of wine to be desirable for himself is blind to some real goodness. So there are these two ways in which something can take on importance for me: either by being subjectively satisfying for me, and or by being objectively beneficial for me. We could also say, using more traditional language, that there are these two aspects of good that things can have for us. Notice that von Hildebrand does not begin from revelation, he does not bring the Trinity into his discourse; he rather begins with fundamental human experiences that are common to believer and non-believer alike. Though he underwent a deep Christian conversion and was received into the Catholic Church in 1914, and though he wrote a number of well-known works based on his Christian faith, he begins his account of good and of love in a properly phenomenological way. Now when he comes to the analysis of one person loving another person, von Hildebrand says that neither of these two kinds of importance suffices to ground love. If I am interested in a person merely as subjectively satisfying for me, I can hardly be said to love that person with a real personal love. I stand in a consuming and using relation to that person, and this is the very opposite of love. Let us suppose that a man says he loves a woman. If we discover that there is nothing more to his interest in the woman than his own sexual gratification and that apart from his sexual gratification he cares nothing for her, then everyone will say that he does not really love her. Love cannot exist on the basis of the beloved person appealing to the lover only as subjectively satisfying. This is perhaps not controversial, certainly not in the dialogue with Zizioulas. But suppose the man says that there is more to his interest in the woman than sexual gratification; suppose he says that he also desires union with her on the grounds that this is beneficial for him, that it makes him flourish, that it draws the best out of him, that it makes his character grow, that it is in his

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true interest. Even here we will have to contest his claim and say that he still does not really love her, for he does not love her for her own sake, but for his own sake. If his interest in her is entirely based on the fact that she is important for him in the sense of being beneficial for him, then we have to say that he is too little centered on her to be said to really love her. His love is deformed by a self-centered approach to the woman, who for her part will certainly not feel loved by the man. Plato teaches in the Symposium that it is the neediness of the lover that drives him to seek the beloved, who is sought as fulfilling his need. If Plato is interpreted as teaching that the beloved takes on importance for the lover only by being fulfilling for the lover, then he becomes vulnerable to the Hildebrandian objection that whoever loves in this way seeks the beloved too much for his own sake, and that he is not really a lover until he finds a way to seek her for her own sake. Von Hildebrand also thinks that in the Aristotelian tradition, and especially in its so-called eudaimonism, there is a stress on the flourishing of the lover such that the other-centeredness of love tends to be compromised. What, then, is the importance that the beloved person takes on for the one who loves him or her? How does the other light up with importance in such a way as to awaken my love for him or her? One might think that the principle of importance for the lover is simply that which is beneficial for the beloved person; what is good for the other lights up with importance for me just because it is good for the other. In this case I am drawn to love the other for her own sake and no longer just for my sake. The importance that awakens my love is now sufficiently other-centered and is no longer suspiciously self-centered. Von Hildebrand quite agrees that in loving another I am indeed interested in the good of the other just because it is the good of the other. In fact in Chapter 7 of his The Nature of Love he analyzes this gesture of “for the other” with a precision and subtlety that is almost unrivalled in the history of philosophy. But I read von Hildebrand as saying that this “for the other” is a fruit of love, and that love first constitutes itself in relation to a different kind of importance in the beloved person. With this we arrive at von Hildebrand’s idea of value. A being has value when it is important for me all in its own right; when it elicits my interest without being supported by what is subjectively satisfying for me or even by what is really beneficial for me, but when its importance is simply a certain splendor or radiance that the valuable being has from itself. For example, in being filled with admiration for the moral courage of another I experience the admired person as important in himself. He does not command my admiration by being



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beneficial for me, but by being an admirandum, by being one who is worthy of admiration. Nor do I think of the moral courage of the other as being good for that person; insofar as I admire him I take his moral courage as being good in its own right, splendid in itself. If I take his courage as being beneficial for him, then my positive stance towards him is more like benevolent well-wishing than admiration. Thus von Hildebrand calls admiration a value-response. Love too is a value-response. When I am drawn to someone in love, I have a vision of her beauty. The other as beautiful does not draw me in the first place as being beneficial for me, or as fulfilling me, as relieving my neediness, but as splendid in herself, beautiful in her own right. One will object that every human person has a need to love and that love is therefore all about need-fulfillment. Von Hildebrand responds that this need to love is a value-responding need, which means that it can only be fulfilled if love is lived as a value-response. Thus this need, unlike other needs (such as hunger), does not bring about the importance of what satisfies the need but presupposes the importance of the beloved person as being prior to my need to love. The beloved person is indeed beneficial for me, a source of happiness for me, especially when the love is mutual, but if I approach the other only under the aspect of fulfilling a need to love, my need remains unfulfilled. My desire to be happy with the beloved person has to be part of a larger motivational whole that includes value-responding love. We see, then, the particular “edge” of von Hildebrand’s affirmation that love is a value-response; he wants above all to capture that self-transcendence of the lover who is caught up in the beauty of another. The lover does not in the first place seek his own benefit or enrichment or flourishing, but in the first place he seeks the beloved, being enchanted by her beauty. Von Hildebrand wants to root out every kind of striving for one’s perfection that interferes with the selftranscendence of the lover. He also makes a great point of saying that this self-transcendence is proper to persons. When the desire for the lover’s own perfection becomes disordered, not only is the love compromised, but the lover also fails to be fully alive as a person. Thus with his concept of value-response von Hildebrand is enabled to explain the special sense in which the person is a being of transcendence. There is the further self-transcendence that lies in pursuing what is good for the other just because it is good for the other, and in fact von Hildebrand introduces the term “super value-response” to express it. This term was chosen by him so as to indicate that this further self-transcendence can never be separated from the value-responding delight in the beloved person, and is in fact rooted in this delight.3

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Von Hildebrand’s concept of value is well suited to expressing this selftranscendence. For his “value,” standing as it does in a special proximity to beauty, lends itself to expressing “valuable in itself,” or “valuable in its own right.”4

2 As far as I can see, Zizioulas does not disagree with von Hildebrand’s attempt to vindicate the self-transcendence of love vis-à-vis the eudaimonists. If we consider what von Hildebrand wants to avoid in teaching that love exists as a value-response, then I think that he and Zizioulas are of one mind. And yet Zizioulas has fundamental objections to this teaching of von Hildebrand, and in fact he has three of them. In his study of von Hildebrand Zizioulas writes: If a person is unique in an absolute metaphysical sense, any attachment to it of a moral quality would diminish or put to risk its absolute uniqueness. Values such as goodness, beauty, etc. can be applied to more than one person.

In the next sentence he indicates the theological source from which he derives this insight: “This is the case with the Persons of the Holy Trinity (all three equally good, just, omniscient or, if you wish, beautiful), and the same is true of human beings as well.” Zizioulas proceeds to show the critical bearing of this thought on von Hildebrand: If my love for one particular person is defined as a value-response,’ why limit my love to this particular person and not extend it to the rest? If the answer to this question is that I freely choose this particular person and not the others, although the same value is to be found in them too, this means that my love is not in truth a response to the value of the person but to the person as such.

He summarizes his objection to von Hildebrand like this: “To join the person to a category that could be found in another person as well would mean putting at risk its absolute metaphysical uniqueness” (24). This is a probing objection, which I will now restate in my own words. If love is a value-response, then it fails to be a true personal love. This is because value, Zizioulas assumes, is the kind of thing that can be instantiated in many individuals. The moral value of courage does not coincide with the personal uniqueness of any person but it can exist in many persons. If I am filled with



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admiration for the courage of one person, I have to be ready to show the same admiration for other equally courageous persons, and in fact be ready to show more admiration for the more courageous persons. If the value to which love responds “behaves” in the same way as the value to which admiration responds, then this value will be found in many persons, and my love cannot be for just this one person and no other, but it must, just like my admiration for courage, extend to all persons who have the value, and it must be a more intense love for those who have the value in a greater measure. Thus if my love is a valueresponse it is not a true personal love, that is, it is not a love for this person and no other, but it is a love that extends to all persons who instantiate the value. But, goes the objection, love exists always only as a personal love. If I count someone as a close friend, my love of friendship is for him and for him alone, and not for anyone else who is like him in respect of value. If I love my spouse, my love is for her and for her alone; it does not move from my spouse to some other woman as soon as I find in the other more of the value that I find in my wife. To sum up the objection: since love is always for this particular person, it cannot exist as a value-response, for this would undermine the particularity of love.5 Zizioulas is well aware that von Hildebrand acknowledges what we are here calling the particularity of love. When von Hildebrand insists on the “full thematicity” of the beloved person, he means that you love the beloved person not as the instance of some general kind, as if the person were just the “bearer” of the kind and were replaceable by other equally good bearers of it, but that you love the individual person. So the objection of Zizioulas could be put like this: von Hildebrand’s thesis that love exists as a value-response is at odds with his other thesis about the full thematicity of the beloved person. Von Hildebrand is aware of this objection, and he offers a response to it. He contests the Platonizing conception of value that Zizioulas takes for granted. He holds with Scheler that “essence has nothing [necessarily] to do with generality.”6 Scheler means that there is not only essence in the sense of a universal, and not only the universal essence concretized or instantiated in many individuals, but that there is also the radically individual essence of a person, unutterable in general terms, and such that the talk of instantiating a universal essence has no meaning. There is an essence in each person of which one cannot say that the person has it or shares in it, but of which one must say that the person is it. This is part of the reason why Scheler repeatedly emphasizes the positivity of personal individuality. He means that this individuality is not simply a “contraction” of something general or of something superindividual, but that it is based on a positive content that is unrepeatable in any other individual.

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Now, von Hildebrand builds on this account of personal individuality, and adds that an unrepeatable person has a radiance of beauty all her own and that no one sees this beauty like the one who loves that person. In saying that love is a value-response, von Hildebrand is simply saying that love is awakened by the sight of the beauty that the beloved person has as this unrepeatable person. In such a value-responding love there is no least tendency to extend one’s love to others and to replace the beloved person with another, because the universality that Zizioulas fears in the value of the beloved has in Scheler and von Hildebrand given way to a radical individuality of value, or to a radical singularity of value, as we could as well say. Thus von Hildebrand seems to overcome the objection of Zizioulas when he says: The idea of [realizing] some general value does not come into question here [with beloved persons]. The idea of participating in some value-in-general makes no sense here. The beauty of the individual person as a whole, or, as we could say, of the unique unrepeatable idea of God embodied in this person, is after all no general value type, but already as a quality it is something entirely individual and unique.7

Von Hildebrand need not deny that there is value in a person that can be taken as the instantiation of a universal value. When, for example, a person is proposed to us as exemplary in his or her courage, when we are admonished to pattern ourselves on his or her courage, the value of courage is precisely not meant as something unrepeatably his or her own; rather, it is meant as a value that ought to be common between us and the exemplary person. Von Hildebrand would acknowledge this case, and he would add (1) that the person, while functioning as exemplar, is not “fully thematic” as person and (2) that though this person can be admired, he or she cannot be loved with a personal love. The value that suffices for admiration does not suffice for personal love, which responds to the beauty of a person as this unrepeatable person. The only difference between our two thinkers on personal unrepeatability is that von Hildebrand does not derive his insights from his faith in the Holy Trinity, which is the primary source of insight for Zizioulas. Von Hildebrand of course believes what all Christians believe about the Holy Trinity, but it is other areas of his Christian faith that have influenced his personalism, not above all the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. In any case, I can find no substantive disagreement between von Hildebrand and Zizioulas on the fact that the one who loves takes the beloved person as unrepeatable person. I think that Zizioulas is mistaken when he thinks that value cannot exist as the value of this unrepeatable person.



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3 We proceed now to the second objection raised by Zizoulas to von Hildebrand. It is, I think, the weightiest objection. Zizioulas asks, speaking about the union of persons in love: is the individuality or uniqueness of the person established before or after the union (or relationship)? Do we first exist as persons and then relate? Is the person an entity (i.e., a personal identity distinct from other entities) already before he or she enters into the loving relation? (20)

Zizioulas answers these questions in the negative, and he thinks that von Hildebrand answers them in the affirmative. One might at first think that Zizioulas is simply making his own the wellknown idea of Martin Buber that I become a personal-I only in the encounter with a personal-Thou. For Buber, I am not a fully constituted person before entering into this encounter, but I become one in and through the encounter. But when we read more closely we find in Zizioulas a significant variation on this idea of Buber. We are alerted to the originality of Zizioulas’s position when we read about the “asymmetry” (22) of love: “Love always flows originally from the other towards me, not from me towards the other” (22). And this significant sentence: My self-transcendence is not so much an effect or an achievement that comes from me, as it is a call and a gift from one who loves me and calls me out of anonymity and similarity with other beings to the uniqueness implied in the name of “Thou”. (22)

If I understand Zizioulas correctly, he is here teaching (what Buber did not teach in I and Thou) a certain priority of being-loved over loving, at least for us human beings—hence the talk of asymmetry. He teaches that my loving is first of all the requital of the love of one who loves me first. What he therefore objects to in von Hildebrand’s idea of love as a value-response is that I, before being loved by another, am already enough of a person to initiate love for another (once I have apprehended the beauty of the other). This overrates the initiative that I take in loving, for it neglects the fact that I must first be loved by the other and thereby brought into my own as person; only then am I empowered to love. The concept of value-response seems problematic for Zizioulas since it seems to let my love arise only in response to the beauty I see in the other, and it seems to neglect the prior word of love spoken by the other that penetrates me and gives me to myself.

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There is a luminous passage in an early theological work of Joseph Ratzinger that captures the point that Zizioulas wants to make and also adds something to it. In speaking of the difficulty of accepting oneself and of the strong temptation to hate oneself, Ratzinger says: But how does one go about affirming, assenting to, one’s I? The answer may perhaps be unexpected: we cannot do so by our own efforts alone. Of ourselves we cannot come to terms with ourselves. Our I becomes acceptable to us only if it has first become acceptable to another I. We can love ourselves only if we have first been loved by someone else … If an individual is to accept himself, someone must say to him: “It is good that you exist”—must say it, not with words, but with that act of the entire being that we call love. For it is the way of love to will the other’s existence and, at the same time, to bring that existence forth again.8

One sees what it is that Ratzinger adds to Zizioulas: he adds as a kind of middle term the rightly ordered self-love of a person: I cannot give this self-love to myself, I can acquire it only by being loved by another; but it is this rightly ordered self-love that puts me in a position to love the one who first loved me, and to love others as well. I must admit that I see here a real difficulty for von Hildebrand. When he speaks of the requital of love, he usually speaks of the requital of the love I initiate, and not of my love as being itself already a kind of requital. Thus he says in one place: In having my love returned, as in a deep spousal love, I experience it as a tremendous gift to be loved, since I am, as it were, given to myself by being loved. When the beloved person receives and shelters my being in love, giving me a unique confirmation of my individual existence, I experience almost a new birth of my self.9

He implies that I was sufficiently alive and intact as person to initiate the love that was requited, and he does not speak of any being-loved that preceded and made possible my loving the other. Von Hildebrand also speaks of being-loved as a motive for love, but his account of this motivation is usually given in terms of value-response, something like this: the one who loves me is never so beautiful as in loving, and in loving precisely me this lover turns her face to me in the most revealing way possible; this tends to awaken my value-response of love.10 Von Hildebrand does not make a point of the fact that in being loved I am given to myself to the point of being empowered to love in return, nor does he seem to acknowledge



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that this power of eliciting my love is not simply a matter of me being drawn by the beauty of the one who loves me. Here, indeed, is the edge of the objection: one cannot explain exclusively in terms of value-response how it is that I love another; the explanation has also to include, as a distinct factor, the power of the other first loving me. Let us think this objection through by referring to several main kinds of love, and first to our love for God. This love, at least in the setting of Christianity, is always a response to a prior love. Consider how the Christian God takes the initiative in loving us. He leads the Hebrews out of Egypt when they have all but forgotten Him, and He leads them out with a display of wonders that makes them know that they are not leaving on their own initiative and power, but only through the initiative and power of God. Now these divine acts of deliverance do not just reveal the mercy and holiness of God, so that the Hebrews can be motivated to give the value-response of love to God, but they address the Hebrews in such a way as to constitute them as a people of their own, to convince them that it is good that they exist, and on this basis to elicit a grateful requital of the divine love. We see the same structure of love in the love of individual human persons for God; the rule here is: “You did not choose me but I chose you” (Jn 15.16). Abraham is called before he even knows God; he is called and given a “new name,” and he becomes a hero of faith. Here too we see the priority of the divine call, which has the power to bring forth something new in the one called; and we see that the faith and love of the one called originates as a requital of the divine initiative. Sometimes the divine initiative remains hidden to the human being who lovingly seeks God; he thinks he is seeking on his own initiative, but in fact, as St. Augustine often teaches, his seeking is a response to a prior call: “Invocata invocat Dominum.”11 We could as well say: Amata amat Dominum. Let us now consider another kind of love, the love of children for their parents. Children are loved first; parental love awakens personal life in the child; only after being awakened does the child begin to love, and its love clearly has the form of requital. Just as a child is first spoken to and thereby learns to speak, so the child is first loved there thereby learns to love. This kind of love seems to accord exactly with the conception of Zizioulas. Von Hildebrand would say that the child who is loved feels all manner of value in the parents and so loves with a love that is a value-response. Zizioulas would say that an account in terms of value-response is incomplete. Perhaps he would say along the lines of Ratzinger that the parental love declares to the child in effect, “how good it is that you exist,” thereby bringing the child into existence again, that is, calling

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it into personal life, so that the child is thereby empowered to love the parents in return. He might add that friends of the parents may see all the values of the parental love shown to the child and might give a full value-response to these parents, but that the love of the child for its parents is something more than such a value-response. For this is a love that only the child can have; only the child, and not the friends of the parents, is empowered for love by receiving the parental love. Now it must be said that not all kinds of love fit the conception of Zizioulas as easily as the love for God and the love of children for their parents. Thus the love between two friends seems to presuppose persons who are already intact as persons; each of two friends seems to requite the love of the other, and neither of them stands out as “the one who loves first,” or as “the one who is empowered to love by the love of the other.” But Zizioulas might make three responses. First, he might say that the mere fact that some categories of love cannot be exhaustively explained in terms of value-response is already a serious objection to the von Hildebrand position, which is meant to hold for all categories of love. And secondly, he might say that all human beings pass through the love of children for their parents. Thus all human beings begin to love as a requital of the love of their parents. When in later life they love others as friends, or as spouses, they are loving out of the empowerment to love that goes back to being loved by their parents. They may initiate such loves, but not absolutely; they were first loved, and only then became able to initiate love. The analogy with learning to speak holds here: children grow up and speak to other people, but their speaking began when they were first spoken to by their parents and then responded to them. And thirdly, Zizioulas might say that even in the love between friends being-loved has a power to engender love that is not entirely explainable in terms of value-response. When I am loved by a friend who stands by me faithfully when everyone else deserts me, the love of that friend has a power to reinforce my love for him that cannot be explained simply by the values that my faithful friend displays and that I respond to. Other people can see these values too, but they will not love him as I do. This means that the source of my love for him is not merely the values that he displays in being my friend, and that my love for him does not exist only as a value-response to him.



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4 I discern a third point of criticism in the study of Zizioulas, and that concerns the love of the one who loves first. What do we say of the parents who love their children first, or of God who loves man first? Is this love a value-responding love in the sense of von Hildebrand, or do we have here a further difficulty for any account of love in terms of value-response? If this love is in a sense creative of the person loved, as Zizioulas holds, then it would seem it cannot really be a value-responding love; this love seems to bring forth value in the beloved rather than respond to an already existing value. And indeed, this is just what Zizioulas says: “What can I make of my faith in God as Creator out of nothing? Did he not create out of love, and was this love conditioned by a beauty already existing in what apparently did not yet exist? When he declared His creatures very good, was this a response to a beauty of creation or a gift to creation? If God’s love can bring about new entities and endow them with beauty, this means that beauty does not pre-exist as a condition of personal love; it rather follows upon it” (25). Zizioulas proceeds to invoke the calling of Matthew as rendered in the famous painting of Caravaggio. Matthew shows himself to be astonished at being called; he is aware of nothing in himself that merits this call. Matthew himself testifies, Zizioulas seems to say, that Christ is responding to no value in himself but is calling him at of His own inscrutable initiative. And so it is with God’s love for us: it comes from His initiative, not from our worth, and thus entirely lacks any aspect of value-response. Von Hildebrand, however, wants to preserve even here his idea of love as value-response, and he has good reasons for doing this. In Chapter 3 of The Nature of Love, entitled “Die ‘Gabe’ der Liebe,” von Hildebrand acknowledges that love sometimes far exceeds what is due to the other. We can see by way of contrast just what this “exceeding the due” means. If a person is admirable in some respect, then my admiration is well proportioned to him; it does not exceed his admirable qualities but it gives him his due by admiring him insofar as he has admirable qualities. Sometimes relations of love seem to exhibit this same rational proportion; Aristotle in his account of real friendship, that is, virtue-based friendship, certainly thinks of the friends as loving each other with a love proportioned to the virtue of each (he even says that the more virtuous person should be loved more and the less virtuous less). And it may seem that all relations of love, if von Hildebrand is right about their value-response structure, exhibit this proportion between the word of love spoken by one person and the

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worthy qualities of the other. But in that chapter, “Die ‘Gabe’ der Liebe,” von Hildebrand acknowledges that a person commonly loves another with a love that exceeds this proportion. In the love between man and woman, the woman will often marvel that the man loves her so much, and she may wonder what it is that he sees in her so as to love her with such devotion; indeed, she may feel some of the astonishment that Matthew felt when he was called. The man for his part may marvel in the same way about the woman’s love for him. Such love seems to exceed all that is due to the other. Another man may come along who appreciates the excellences of the woman yet without loving her, and no one will say that he fails to give her her due. The happiness that each experiences in being loved by the other is heightened just by the thought of being loved in excess of all that is due to oneself. Jean-Luc Marion refers (I think) to this excess when he proposes his “principle of insufficient reason,” by which he means that the beloved person does not provide a sufficient reason for requiring the love of another.12 When in his Chapter 3 von Hildebrand speaks about the Gabe of love, he is referring to this excess of love in the lover. (He might even agree that he is indirectly referring to the “insufficient reason” that the beloved person seems to herself to give the lover for loving her.) But he argues, here, that this excess by no means excludes love as a value-response. The man sees something of beauty in the woman and in fact something of beauty in her as unrepeatable person. Perhaps it is just this mystery of the woman as unrepeatable person that opens the possibility of a love for her “without measure” and not subject to strict proportion. Admirable qualities do not seem to open this possibility; they should be admired in the right measure, and if you exceed that measure, then your admiration becomes disordered. But since love is a response to the very person herself and not to her qualities, as we explained above, the valueresponding gesture of love is modified fundamentally. The love for the other can, in a sense, never be too much; it can always go farther and deeper; the lover always feels that he has only just begun to love the other. At the same time, more love for the other is not “called for” in the way in which admiration is called for; no disorder arises if you do not extravagantly love the other. There is not the same “fixed measure” of appropriate love that we find with appropriate admiration; one can always love more without falling into disorder, and one is free to love extravagantly, that is, one is not required as a matter of justice to love like this. As von Hildebrand says, there is on the part of the lover a greater “contribution of the subject”; there is a moment of freely “electing” the beloved person. Love is not as “reactive” as admiration is; the lover takes an inscrutable



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initiative towards the beloved person that has no counterpart in admiration. It is just this freedom that creates the illusion that the lover is disconnected from any perceived value in the beloved person. But, in fact, the lover is still entirely under the influence of the beauty of the other as this unrepeatable person, and the extravagance of his loving expresses not the absence of value-response but a certain kind of value-response.13 Here is one way to see how important the element of value-response is in love. If we were to stress exclusively the free initiative of the lover and neglect entirely the value-response, then the one who is loved would feel ignored as person. She would have to think that the attention of the lover could have just as well fallen on someone else, that she is replaceable—as if the main thing were the loving of the lover and not the person of the beloved. In addition, one of the chief effects of being loved would be thwarted; being loved would not empower the beloved person to love him- or herself and thus to love in return (as discussed above). How should I be delivered from anonymity and handed over to myself and enabled to believe in the good of my existence, by a love that is in no way elicited by me, this unrepeatable person? Before proceeding, let us glance back at the previous discussion of whether love is awakened only by the sight of value in the one who is loved. We said that there is much merit in the challenge of Zizioulas according to which I love only after first being loved. We can now add: the realization that someone has freely chosen me beyond all due proportion, has a power to awaken my love in return, and that this power comes from the choosing and not just from the value revealed to me in the one who chooses me. Thus our reflection on the inscrutable freedom of the lover tends to reinforce the previously considered objection raised by Zizioulas. But let us now return to the present objection of Zizioulas: he cannot find in God’s love for us anything like Hildebrandian value-response, but he can only discern God’s initiative towards us. The question is whether the human love just discussed—the love between man and woman—provides any kind of response to the objection, which is an objection based on God’s love for us. In this human love we see these two moments fused together: inscrutable decision for a person and value-responding delight in the person. When, then, we are confronted in the order of divine love with the inscrutable elections of God the Creator, why do we have to reject (something like) a value-responding delight of the Creator in the persons He creates? He did not, indeed, have to create them—just as the human lover does not have to love the other. But once He has created them, they have their own creaturely otherness and it is entirely intelligible that He

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would take a value-responding delight in the work of His hands—not unlike the delight that a human artist might take in the work of his hands. Exactly this delight seems to be expressed when God on the seventh day surveys all of creation and declares it to be “very good.” The well-known expression in Genesis seems to express a divine value-response. We readily acknowledge that the goodness that God appreciates in His created persons is not something entirely outside of Himself; this goodness derives from Him and reflects and images Him. Hence the aspect of valueresponse that we called above “self-transcendence” does not really apply to God. On the other hand, in the Genesis passage God is not just appreciating Himself; He has created real otherness in creatures, and especially in created persons, whom He has endowed with the power of self-determination. We might say that He creates persons “unfinished,” so that they have to complete their creation by freely accepting their being from God. Despite the inscrutable initiative He takes towards us in creating us, the response that He awaits from us reinforces the inalienable otherness of our being. This is why we have to think of God as really responsive to who we are and how we stand towards Him. We have to suppose that He responded with delight to the “yes” of Matthew. Let us conclude like this. We have considered three objections of Zizioulas to von Hildebrand’s account of love as value-response. First, Zizioulas argues that the individuality of the beloved person is compromised by thinking of the person in terms of value. We saw that this argument rests on misunderstanding Hildebrandian value as being something that is always able to be instantiated in many individuals. This is not von Hildebrand’s view. Secondly, Zizioulas argues that we love always in response to being first loved by the one we love. The sight of beauty in the beloved person, important though it is for love, does not by itself suffice to awaken love; we have to be brought to ourselves as persons by the love of another before we are in a position to love. From this, it follows that love is more than just a value-response. I grant that there is much merit in this objection. Thirdly, Zizioulas argues that God’s loving us first cannot be a value-responding love, since His love, through its extravagance, is creative of value in us and is not responsive to value in us. I have responded that the divine extravagance that is displayed by God creating us does not exclude a kind of divine value-response, as we can see from thinking about how the Gabe of love coheres with value-response. I would just add that this dialogue with Zizioulas, even in those points in which I have tried to maintain the von Hildebrand position, has opened for



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me new perspectives in the philosophy and theology of love. It is an immensely rewarding dialogue, which should be continued.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6 7 8

Metropolitan John Zizioulas, “An Ontology of Love: a Patristic Reading of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s The Nature of Love,” in Questiones Disputatae III (Spring 2013). References to this study will be given directly in the text. Von Hildebrand’s discussion of the categories of importance in Chapter 3 of his Ethics is foundational for everything he has written in the area of ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of community, and philosophy of love. It is foundational like no other passage in his writings is foundational. It is worth observing that von Hildebrand’s manner of relating love to value is the very opposite of the manner in which Harry Frankfurt has recently tried to relate them. In his book The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), he says: “Of course, I do perceive them [my children] to have value; so far as I am concerned, indeed, their value is beyond measure. That, however, is not the basis of my love. It is really the other way around. The particular value that I attribute to my children is not inherent in them but depends upon my love for them. The reason they are so precious to me is simply that I love them so much” (40). For Frankfurt love is not itself a value-response; at most it gives rise to a kind of value-response that follows on love. Von Hildebrand need not deny this subsequent value-response, but for him it cannot hold a candle in significance to the prior value-response that is awakened by the sight of the beloved person, for this prior value-response is constitutive of love. Von Hildebrand elsewhere distinguishes “aesthetic value” as a certain kind of value. The beauty of which I speak in the text is proper to all Hildebrandian value and does not yet constitute distinctly aesthetic value. Eleanor Stump makes this objection to any account of love that explains love in terms of a response to perceived value in the person who is loved. See her “Love, by all accounts,” in Proceedings and Addresses of the APA: 80.2 (2006): 25. One will see below that this objection has no force against von Hildebrand’s view of love as value-response. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Frings and Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 489. Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, trans. John F. Crosby (South Bend: St. Augustine Press, 2009), p. 73. Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology. Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press, 1987), pp. 79–80.

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9 The Nature of Love, p. 231. 10 Ibid., pp. 233; 20–2. 11 Cf. the profound discussion of this Augustinian theme in Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self ’s Place: The Approach of St. Augustine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 21–7. 12 Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 76–82. 13 One sees that one has to make a distinction with respect to Marion’s “principle of insufficient reason.” The beauty of the other as this unrepeatable person is an entirely sufficient reason for loving her; “insufficient” can only refer to the fact that the love is not owed to her in justice. The lover finds an insufficiency of reasons of justice.

4

Envy and Ressentiment, a Difference in Kind: A Critique and Renewal of Scheler’s Phenomenological Account Michael Kelly

University of San Diego

A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones. —Proverbs 14.30 Classical phenomenology strives to clarify natural attitude intentionalities. It does not mean to replace them but to elucidate the cognitive acts and meaning structures at play in certain modes of relating to the world, most of which, phenomenology admits, are value-laden. What we value in the world and how we value it, our likes and dislikes, are disclosed primarily through our affective responses to the world and our formation of more determinate emotional responses built thereupon. When it comes to something like envy, we feel frustrated or annoyed (and dislike) seeing another person possess some thing, trait, capacity, or status that we value and desire but lack. The basic intentional structure of envy, then, is comparative and thus bilateral. The intentional structure of the emotions of envy directs feelings of frustration to the other and to oneself. Envy is self- and other-directed. While consensus in philosophical matters is rare, philosophers almost universally agree (even with mundane belief) that envy is always bad and that its badness rests in its hostile regard for another.1 This belief about envy and the resultant predominate focus (in philosophy, literature, etc.) on envy’s attack on the other has suppressed the self-directed dimension of envy. The JudeoChristian tradition, on the other hand, has captured something of this neglected phenomenological dimension of envy—as the epigram from Proverbs 14.30 warns. But how are we to capture this phenomenological insight into a more

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complete sense of the badness of envy found for example in Proverbs when even mundane belief has inherited philosophers’ almost universal agreement that the badness of envy rests in its hostile regard for another? The problem with isolating this feature of envy as its characteristic feature is that it easily conflates envy with jealousy, indignation, spite, or even more overwhelmingly envy’s closest sibling with which I am here concerned, ressentiment. Even Max Scheler’s Christian phenomenology of envy in his short work, Ressentiment, intuits but does not coherently account for the Judeo-Christian insight concerning the badness of envy in its self-directed moment. Scheler misses the self-directed dimension of envy because he (1) claims that the “causal delusion” essential to ressentiment—namely that another or rival is responsible for one’s inferiority—is also an essential feature of envy, and he defends this claim because he (2) remains within the standard philosophical reading that takes envy to be a strictly otherdirected emotion. In this essay I want to critically develop Scheler’s phenomenology of envy and ressentiment to highlight essential phenomenological distinctions between them. By drawing a distinction between a self-directed and other-directed mode of envy absent in Scheler’s account of envy, I believe we can better avail ourselves of, because we can bring further into relief, Scheler’s understanding of the difference between envy and ressentiment with respect to the good. In order to demonstrate my critical alternative to Scheler’s account, I provide an eidetic analysis of envy and ressentiment at the level of the intentional focus or target of the agents under the spell of these emotions and not their affects. Envy is an emotion that, while inordinately relating to the truth or proper value-structure of life, rots the bones of the agent or negatively assesses the self and diminishes its happiness. Ressentiment, on the other hand, is a transformative emotion that, by distorting the truth or proper value-structure of life, preserves the bones of the agent or generates a peculiar sense of self-satisfaction that restores and even can enhance the agent’s happiness. In short, the lived-experience of these emotions differs, then, at both the affective and objective levels. The phenomenological affect envy has on the agent reveals two perhaps surprising claims: (1) the badness of envy, contra the philosophical tradition, must include, perhaps primarily, its affliction of the envier rather than the envied; (2) envy is not all bad because it does not distort value apprehensions—a debased achievement reserved for ressentiment alone. Section one argues that a tension exists in Scheler’s account of the differences between envy, “true envy,” and ressentiment with respect to their intentional focus, the characteristic of impotence and the belief in the causal delusion that



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another is responsible for my inferiority. In section two, I present an alternative to Scheler’s position by proposing a view of two types of envy distinguished by their intentional focus, namely self-assessing deficiency-envy and otherassessing possessor-envy. This distinction establishes a “thick” difference between deficiency-envy and ressentiment but only a “thin” difference between possessorenvy and ressentiment. Section three returns to Scheler’s thought and distinguishes possessor-envy (the type Proverbs 14.30 warns against) from ressentiment on the grounds that the intentional focus of only the latter functions to negate values and thus dissolve the desires that caused the emotional tension in ressentiment.

1 Scheler on envy, “true envy,” and ressentiment Scheler’s excellent short work, Ressentiment, stipulates that envy and ressentiment share two basic features. First, each stems from a “tension between desire and nonfulfillment”; second, each “is connected with a tendency to make comparisons between others and oneself.”2 Both constitute what we could call a comparative-intentionality wherein the agent is pained over his lack of some desired and valued thing, trait, capacity or status that the neighbor possesses but the aggrieved agent does not. And both are likewise characterized by feelings of pain, displeasure, and so on. As these identical feelings provide no way of individuating envy from ressentiment,3 we must consider the broad distinctions Scheler notes between the two. Scheler thus stipulates that ressentiment differs from envy insofar as it is a “lasting mental attitude caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions” such as covetousness, envy, etc. (25).4 In this case, an individuating feature seems to be their temporal structure. Ressentiment appears sedimented, enduring, and dispositional, while envy appears fleeting, bound by an identifiable beginning and ending time, and episodic.5 This difference between envy and ressentiment, however, likely makes little difference when attempting to individuate them. Iago, for instance, has a long-standing mental attitude regarding Cassio. But whenever that disposition flares up into an emotion—say when Cassio appears to, is mentioned in the presence of, or even is imagined by Iago—it is difficult to tell whether this upheaval of emotion expresses envy or ressentiment, for both envy and ressentiment stem from the same intentional act of comparison and share the same affects triggered by the recognition of an unfulfilled desire that another has fulfilled. Perhaps an examination of the content of the intentional focus or target of the agent may better individuate these two emotions.

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Scheler initially seems attracted to this approach. After conceding that envy “[comes] close to ressentiment,” he proposes a first feature that individuates them. Envy intends “specific … definite objects” (25–6); ressentiment, on the other hand, is “detached from all determinate objects” (46). If we [dispatch the attitude versus emotion distinction and] follow the distinction in intentional focus between determinate objects and indeterminate objects, Iago appears to be a person of envy and not ressentiment because the envious person negatively intends some particular, definite, or determinate thing, trait, or capacity that signifies some desirable value in a way that neither (i) distorts the value itself nor (ii) dispenses with his desire for that object (thing, trait, or capacity) that signifies the value.6 Ressentiment, on the other hand, (i) negatively intends and distorts the value itself and thereby (ii) no longer finds desirable that value and likewise an indeterminate range of things things, traits or capacities that signify that value. This initial distinction between the intentional focus of these emotions and its corollary claims related to values and desiring seems correct and useful to me, and I shall return to it in my conclusion. But Scheler obscures this difference in the intentional focus of envy and ressentiment by rendering it contingent upon a second distinguishing feature, namely impotence, which occupies an ambiguous place in his phenomenological theory. As Scheler initially puts it, envy “leads to ressentiment only if there occurs … [no] act … or expression of emotion … and … this restraint is caused by a pronounced awareness of impotence” (26). More precisely, the envious will not “fall under the dominion of ressentiment if he seeks to acquire the envied possession by means of work, barter, crime, or violence” (26). The claim seems to be that envy needn’t be coupled with impotence whereas ressentiment names the specific conditions already in place, namely a state of envy that happens to be coupled with impotence. At least four possibilities exist in this case. First, it does not seem obvious to me that one cannot be envious just because one has more of a desired good than a rival—e.g., one could covet the neighbor’s less attractive wife or the Lexus-driving lottery winner might envy his neighbor because she has this year’s model, even though he could go out and buy one if he wanted— but this concern does not register with Scheler. Second, if the envious does not feel impotent and successfully acts out toward the offender (perhaps even by smearing her character), then ressentiment will not develop if this ‘fist-shaking’ satisfies the agent (30). Third, if the envious does not feel impotent yet unsuccessfully acts out toward the offender, then ressentiment eventually develops as the tension of unfulfilled desire and envy festers.



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Fourth, if the envious person does not believe he can acquire the desired thing, trait or capacity “because of weakness, physical or mental, or because of fear,” then ressentiment develops as the tension of unfulfilled desire and envy festers. The person of ressentiment, then, will necessarily be an envier, but an envier need not necessarily be a person of ressentiment because he need not feel impotence, as cases one and two suggest above. Scheler’s account to this point thus presents two features according to which we can distinguish or individuate envy and ressentiment: first, envy targets a definite, particular or determinate object while ressentiment does not; second, an awareness of impotence is a necessary condition for ressentiment while it is not for envy.7 Scheler, however, obscures this second point of distinction between envy and ressentiment—that distinction which runs along the lines of a pronounced awareness of impotence—when he introduces the notion of “true envy.” While Scheler initially claimed that the envious would not “fall under the dominion of ressentiment if he seeks to acquire the envied possession by means of work,” etc., he now claims, the experience of impotence and the causal delusion are essential preconditions of true envy. If we are merely displeased that another person owns a good, this can be an incentive for acquiring it through work, purchase, violence or robbery. Envy occurs when we fail in doing so and feel powerless. (30)

On this account, the first two cases mentioned above no longer would constitute envy because “true envy”—which I take to be Scheler’s stipulated phenomenological description aimed at capturing a discrete mental state—stymies rather than motivates actions or behaviors that would serve as the means to the end of eliminating the disparity by fulfilling the desire (rather than just diminishing the other). These two essential features of “true envy”—a sense of impotence and the causal delusion that another is responsible for one’s impotence and inferiority—hold for both of Scheler’s two types of “true envy,” both of which, in turn, I believe share essential features with ressentiment. The first type of “true envy” Scheler terms “existential-envy,” or hatred of the other person whose very existence “causes” my inferiority and psychic tension because I find that I am lesser in the face of her very character and existence, her superior strength, beauty, etc. The second type of “true envy” he terms “ressentiment-envy,” or hatred and the “illusory devaluation” of the positive values of strength, beauty, etc., itself (30). I do not find this distinction between two types of “true envy,” existential- and ressentiment-envy, very helpful, nor do I think it holds up for

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two reasons. First, since “true envy” occurs when one fails to acquire the desired good that the agent lacks but another possess, it appears quite like ressentiment given Scheler’s initial account of the distinction between these two emotions. Whereas a “profound awareness of impotence” originally appeared in Scheler’s account as a feature that distinguished ressentiment from envy, impotence now is described as the first of two essential features or necessary conditions of “true envy.”8 Second, Scheler’s theory further collapses one emotion into the other by positing as a second “essential” feature or necessary condition of “true envy,” namely the envier’s apprehension of the envied as the “cause” of the envier’s “privation” or inferior status (30). Yet this second, essential feature of “true envy”—the causal delusion—seems identical to what Nietzsche identified in his Genealogy as the essential feature of ressentiment. For Nietzsche, “this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself … is the essence of ressentiment”; indeed, ressentiment-man, Nietzsche further specifies, “looks for a cause of his distress; more exactly, for a culprit, even more precisely for a guilty culprit.”9 We should consider Scheler’s second type of “true envy” ressentiment and his first type of “true envy” as one type of envy among other types of envy (which I shall do below in sections two and three under the label of possessor-envy). Scheler’s view of the two types of “true envy” overlooks various ways in which the envying self may fail, feel impotent and then psychically construct an account of the cause and object of his emotion, seemingly running “true envy” into ressentiment. This oversight, I suspect, stems from Scheler’s construal of “true envy” as a strictly other-directed emotion that negatively intends the other as causally responsible for his comparative inferiority. If different types of enviers, however, cope with their impotence and inferior comparative status in ways otherwise than assigning causal responsibility to the other, i.e., if different types of enviers have a different intentional focus, then perhaps a phenomenological description of these differences in these types of emotional intentionalities will produce conceptual a distinction between envy and ressentiment absent from Scheler’s account. My hypothesis is that if we examine the intentional focus of these emotional agents following the “cause” of impotence, we shall see (i) that the causal delusion is not an essential feature of all types of envy and, as such, (ii) that both different type of envy and envy and ressentiment take different objects. And in instances where the causal delusion rightly characterizes one type of envy, as well as ressentiment, the intentional focus characteristic of the agent in these emotional-states also will serve to further individuate them.



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2 A different view of two types of envy: Deficiency-envy and possessor-envy Philosophical accounts of envy since Aristotle have roughly repeated his view of envy as always bad and hostilely regarding the other. Philosophers have predominately limited their analyses of envy to their moralizing worries about the envier’s potential vindictiveness at the expense of providing a fuller phenomenological account of the experience of envy that includes the envier’s experience. As envy is an essentially comparative intentionality, an adequate account of envy must detail its assessments of self and other, envier and envied,10 and thus must explore envy’s self-assessing moments in addition to its more popularly treated other assessing-moments. Scheler’s account of “true envy” explores only the ways in which existential-envy or ressentiment-envy redirects itself to the world and either determinate objects, things, or values or indeterminate objects, things, or values, respectively. Yet as Aristotle recognized in his Rhetoric—though in passing and somewhat incidentally—we “envy those whose possession of or success in a thing is a reproach to us … for it is clear that it is our own fault we have missed the good thing in question.”11 Aristotle’s thought implies that the envier not only looks askance at both the envied and himself, but also focuses, at least initially, on his own shortcomings. Nevertheless, envy is complicated; it tends to conceal itself, often even from itself, and when it appears it appears only in those exceptional instances of the most malicious revenge (which is why Iago is the paradigmatic envier). Rare is the envier who critically assesses his beliefs concerning himself, his deservingness, or the quality of his efforts to secure what he believes he deserves.12 Most enviers tend to change their beliefs about a person in the world thought responsible for their inferiority—to “falsely consider [the other] to be the cause of [their] privation,” as Scheler put it (30). Enviers thus account for their inferior standing by redirecting their painful feelings of self-assessment outward and suppressing the self-reproach mentioned by Aristotle in favor of begrudging or maligning the envied. Hence philosophers have concluded that envy always accuses or attacks the other and therein lies its malice. Yet even if enviers typically redirect or translate their envy into an approximate emotion, they first must have comparatively evaluated their shortcoming vis-à-vis the envied. The envier’s changing belief about his standing in the world, which Gabrielle Taylor notes as an essential feature of self-assessing emotions, had first to be entertained if it later was to be covered over, directed outward. Examining how different enviers process these feelings of tension and

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displeasure that reflect their new beliefs (that conflict with their old beliefs) about themselves reveals compelling reasons to favor a view of envy as a selfand other-assessing emotion—and thus two types of envy quite different than those Scheler’s view of true-envy describes. Different types of envy contain different intentional contents or objects based on different enviers’ values, beliefs and aspirations. Let’s take an example. A scholar leaves a talk by another scholar to whom the audience responded quite favorably, a talk for which this honored scholar deserved praise; our irritated scholar remarks to his companion, “So-and-so’s paper was pretentious, unclear and full of jargon.” How this agitated scholar experiences the unpleasant feelings that follow from this experience indicates important differences in the intentional structure of envy and its intentional focus as conditioned by the agent’s beliefs. If the agitated scholar targets the honored scholar for possessing a great talent or capacity in the way that Iago envied Cassio’s military status, then he may be said to suffer from other-directed possessor-envy. This type of envy wishes inordinately to possess that thing, trait or capacity in superior degree and/or exclusivity from the envied, i.e., at the expense of his neighbor or rival enjoying that something or enjoying it in superiority.13 Lacking that desirable thing, the possessor-envier considers the envied responsible for, or the cause of, his lack of honors: Since she has it, I cannot, or cannot have as much as I want, and so she is the cause of my privation and inferiority.14 The distress experienced by the possessor-envier in his inferiority couples with a hateful feeling directed toward the honored scholar who has the desired something exclusively or in superiority. The honored scholar in the possessor-envier’s view is the cause and object of the unremarkable scholar’s inferiority and thus hostility. In the case of possessor-envy, it is easy to see how it is other-directed: The possessor-envier sees the envied as someone who is the cause of, or responsible for, his not having some good. Were it not for Cassio, Iago believes he would have the fame, attention, and accolades that he at least thinks he deserves. It is difficult, however, to see how possessor-envy is self-assessing because it so vehemently yet “falsely considers [the other] to be the cause of [his] privation.” But possessor-envy is self-assessing insofar as the possessor-envier must assess that he is as worthy and deserving of the desired good; in the comparative assessment he believes he is superior, equal or equal enough to its possessor and thus he is personally pained by his lack of the desired good and hostile toward its possessor. If there is a sense of impotence, here, it is with respect to those impeding the envier and not with respect to the envier’s beliefs about himself.



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Whether this possessor-envier “subconsciously” reproves himself or gripes about an unjust disparity; whether he believes himself even to be envious or not, is not essential to envy. The self-assessment of a possessor-envier remains hidden, self-deceived; rather than hold himself accountable for some measure of self-assessment, he redirects—or magically transforms—this feeling into a proximate yet more appropriate emotion (e.g., self-justifying indignation).15 Alternatively, and parting ways with Scheler and Aristotle, if our agitated scholar were to wish to possess that desirable something in equal quality to which the honored scholar possesses it—but neither at the expense of his neighbor having it nor even in superiority to the neighbor—then he may be said to suffer from deficiency-envy. Wishing to enjoy the desired something in equivalent degree renders the affective reaction to his perceived inferiority (at least with respect to the desirable something) more ambiguous. The distress experienced by this deficiency-envier in his inferiority may couple with a begrudging feeling but not a sense of hostility directed toward the honored scholar. The deficiency-envier begrudges, i.e., unwillingly acknowledges, the superiority of the envied but focuses on self-reproof rather than attacking the other. As he only wishes to have the honor too, rather than having it at the honoree’s expense, he does not see the honoree as the cause of his inferior standing. He may feel impotent insofar as his best was not good enough. But, contra Scheler, there is no “causal delusion” here as there seems in possessor-envy. His comparative appraisal involves, however distortedly, his desire to nurture his esteem; the center of gravity in deficiency-envy—the object of the intentional focus—is the self and its shortcomings rather than the other and how her good fortune purportedly stymies the deficiency-envier’s desires.16 Opposite the case of possessor-envy, it is easy to see how deficiency-envy is self-assessing but difficult to see how it is other-assessing. Yet deficiency-envy entails an assessment of the other. As a person with whom I compare myself, the envied (with her possession) is essential to the feeling of envy, the painful reminder of my lacking a certain desirable good that comparatively disadvantages me.17 The other is assessed necessarily because the envier measures what he should or should not have based upon his view of what an apparent equal does have. Since the deficiency-envier regards the other neither as the cause of his predicament, nor an obstacle to his attaining the desirable good, the deficiency-envier may begrudge the envied but not direct hostility toward her.18 My account of two types of envy thus shares Scheler’s starting point: Envy stems from a “tension between desire and nonfulfillment … [and] is connected with a tendency to make comparisons between others and oneself ” (30–1). But

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I develop this basic observation quite differently: different agents who differently desire particular objects, traits, or capacities will experience the tension produced by this unfulfilled desire differently; this difference, in turn, conditions the beliefs those agents will form and the objects they will target in their intentional focus in order to cope with the tension generated by seeing another fulfill a desire the agent has not or cannot. Some sense of impotence may be an essential feature of all envy, but the “causal delusion” is not. And once we remove the causal delusion in the case of deficiency-envy, we remove the hostile, vicious and vindictive regard of the other often thought to be a universal feature of envy as found in Scheler’s view of “true envy.”19 As Robert Solomon rightly noted, and as Scheler may likely agree but did not pursue, the JudeoChristian tradition recognized that “envy was considered a sin not because of its malicious tendencies, since it is usually ineffective, but because it tends to demean oneself.”20

3 How do you feel now? Possessor-envy and ressentiment Apart from the comparative assessment that some rival is better positioned, deficiency-envy shares with possessor-envy and ressentiment only a sense of impotence and inferiority processed quite differently by the agent. The deficiency-envier begrudges the other her goods. He benignly regards the envied, i.e., acknowledges reluctantly that another has something that he desires but lacks. This type of regard can take the form of not celebrating that good with her and/or lamenting his lack of that good. We thus have a “thick” difference between deficiency-envy and ressentiment, for the “other” plays only a marginal role in deficiency-envy; she is neither the focus nor the cause of deficiency-envy (Taylor). Hence, deficiency-envy, unlike ressentiment, does not direct blame or feelings of moral outrage toward the other. In the interest of time, I leave this difference aside, noting only that deficiency-envy perhaps establishes that the reach of the badness of envy is most often the envier’s malignant self-appraisal. My account of possessor-envy, however, may seem indistinguishable from Scheler’s notion of ressentiment, for both emotions are characterized by a deep yet unfulfilled desire, feelings of impotence, and hateful feelings directed toward the other due to the falsely construed “causal delusion.” Possessor-envy is about my inferior status for which I believe the other responsible. The possessorenvier does not simply look on the disparity between himself and the other



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with reluctant acknowledgment (begrudgingly) but malignantly regards the envied since she is believed responsible for his inferiority. This type of regard takes the form of both not celebrating that good with her and condemning her for possessing that good. The possessor-envier will not go for a celebratory drink with our honored scholar. Seeking a source for his inferiority, he may go for drinks with others and engage in a debriefing during which they attempt to minimize the possessor of that good. Possessor-enviers thus tend to criticize the envied for reasons that go beyond their possession that triggered the envy: Iago belittles Cassio’s qualifications, skills, and achievements; Salieri harshly judged Mozart’s moral character. The possessor-envier seeks any reason why the envied does not deserve the honor: she plays the game; she’s so mean, so smug, so whatever—so long as it’s negative. Only a “thin” difference seems to exist, then, between possessor-envy and ressentiment. Despite the confusions Scheler introduces into his account of “true envy” and existential- and ressentiment-envy, we can appeal after our clarification of self- and other-directed types of envy to one of Scheler’s insights—namely, that the envious unlike ressentiment-man desires a definite and determinate object— in order to distinguish these two emotions based on their intentional focus. Scheler identifies a structural difference at the level of intentional focus between what I am calling possessor-envy and ressentiment with regard to how we “‘feel’ the values in question … when we feel unable to attain certain values” (35). This structural difference concerns two types of feelings contingent upon the agent’s beliefs about himself and the other. The first type of feeling, an intentional feeling-act concerning how we “‘feel’ [about] the values in question,” “expresses” something like what students means when they claim to “feel like Augustine is too harsh on infants.” This feeling-act is a mixed cognitive-affective valuejudgment, which as such is intentional and discloses some thing or state of affairs as likeable or unlikeable. The second type of feeling, an affective response understood as a feeling-sensation of pleasure or pain that arises “when we feel unable to attain certain values,” “indicates”(in the phenomenological sense) the tension experienced in seeing another fulfill a desire we did not or cannot fulfill.21 This affect indicates to the agent his concession that some desired thing, trait or capacity outstrips his reach or resources (at least for the present moment) and the affective value-judgment is laminated to it and discloses the painful as unlikeable. Initially, in the first instance of apprehending the other’s superiority, the affects of possessor-envy and ressentiment are identical at the level of a feeling-sensation and value-apprehension. The affects or feelings of pain and displeasure, as noted in section one, cannot help us individuate

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possessor-envy from ressentiment because they characterizes both emotional states. A closer look only at the feeling-act or intentional focus—what Scheler call the affective value-apprehension—can achieve this end. Indeed, it will do so in a way that reveals that both the intentional feeling-act or focus and its correlative feeling-sensation differ in both possessor-envy and ressentiment. Granted, the “causal-delusion” characterizes the intentional affective feelingact or value-apprehension of both the possessor-envier and ressentiment-man. A salient difference nevertheless lies in the fact that while the stymied possessorenvier may belittle the honoree and/or award, he will not belittle the value that the award signifies. While the possessor is perhaps construed as one not deserving of that good, the good itself of recognition, honor, etc. remains good in the view of the possessor-envier who still feels or apprehends these values correctly. The desire for the good remains and—and precisely because—the values signified by that good are not “illusorily devalued”. Even if, like the fox to the inaccessible grapes, the possessor-envier belittles the particular award itself and/ or its possessor, claiming perhaps to value teaching more than scholarship or integrity over reputation, for example, this emotional reaction remains a “determinate hostility,” i.e., one directed to a “specific and definite object,” the instantiation of the good (the award) and/or the possessor of the good that the possessor-envier desires but failed to acquire (48, 30). The possessor-envier has not falsified the values themselves. Good is still good, but he was mistaken (perhaps) in his belief that this particular thing accurately signifies the good, or perhaps he believes that the person who possesses the good does not deserve it (whereby indignation merely masks possessor-envy). This negative assessment of the unfulfilled desire for the award and the value it signifies, Scheler notes in a move Sartre might have admired, “relieves the tension between desire and impotence … The desire now seems unmotivated … and the tension decreases. Thus our … feeling of power increases … though on an illusory basis” (46). The causal-delusion in possessor-envy is not an illusory devaluation of values but a devaluation of some particular instantiation of those values, some particular thing that signifies those values. As Scheler insightfully writes, the possessor-envier has “only [formed] a new opinion about the true qualities of the desired object” (46). This determinate and particular illusion in possessorenvy functions to change the possessor-envier’s beliefs about the world, in order to relive the possessor-envier’s psychic-tension, but it does not strive to change the world itself. Iago never says that Cassio’s position is bad but only that Cassio is bad for the position insofar as Iago believes himself comparatively



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better. Your neighbor’s new plasma television is not bad, it’s just that he bought last year’s model or should have bought the Sony rather than the Vizio, which you would have done, of course, had you the opportunity or the liquid assets to make the purchase yourself. Possessor-envy thus minimizes but does not eliminate impotence, whereas definciency-envy neither minimizes nor eliminates impotence because there is no causal delusion at play. As such, the sense of self-satisfaction in each type of envy differs in quality and feeling. Ressentiment, however, goes further than envy, possessor or otherwise; it holds different beliefs and takes a different and indeterminate object, to use Scheler’s language. Ressentiment does not just target groups rather than individuals; this is not what Scheler means by the claim that ressentiment does not take a determinate or definite object, for a group would be a determinate or definite object itself. Ressentiment, on the contrary, claims that the values themselves of intelligence, honor, success, beauty, etc., no longer are good and thus no longer desirable. The possessor of these values, then, is no longer consciously considered causally responsible for ressentiment-man’s lack but is now seen, instead, as someone to be pitied for having such an incorrect or superficial view of the world (48). It is not just that these grapes are sour in the view of ressentiment, but that, as Scheler incisively puts it, “sweetness is bad” (46); ressentiment is thus a “falsification of the world view” (47). While possessorenvy directed itself against specific and definite objects, the intentional focus of ressentiment—its intentional feeling-act or value-apprehension—“goes beyond such determinate hostilities—it … perverts the sense of values itself … [such that] … those values which are positive to any normal feeling become negative … power, health, beauty [etc.]” (48). The causal delusion in ressentiment strives to change the world and value itself rather than just the agent’s beliefs about determinate or particular objects—things, traits, or capacities—in the world that signify those values. In reality, ressentiment does not succeed, but psychically it believes it has. The intentional focus of ressentiment is the effort to “subvert this eternal order in man’s consciousness to falsify its recognition and to deflect its actualization” (45).22 As deficiency-envy preserves impotence and unhappiness with the self, while possessor-envy minimizes without eliminating but covering over the unpleasantness it causes, ressentiment both eliminates a sense of impotence and restores a sense of self-satisfaction by illusorily devaluing the proper value-structure of things, which eliminates the desire that would otherwise remain unfulfilled. We can thus begin to see more precisely why envy surely always is bad. Beyond its hostile regard of the other and ineffective malicious tendencies, the

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true badness of envy—its primary intentional focus—lies more persistently in its debilitation of the self. Scheler misses how deficiency-envy “flogs itself,” as Chaucer noted and Proverbs 14.30 implied, and thus minimizes the envier’s happiness. But his descriptions of existential-envy capture how what I am calling possessor-envy mitigates the self ’s unhappiness by attributing its flaws to another and thus protecting a self it already does not like, as Gabrielle Taylor noted. While both types of envy “rot the bones,” things are otherwise with ressentiment. And Scheler seems to have been the first to emphasize the claim that envy is not—perhaps surprisingly—all bad even if it is bad for the envious self, for unlike ressentiment envy still desires and preserves the order of values, the good, which ressentiment-man must distort and pervert in order to “feel ‘good’, ‘pure’ and ‘human …”—perhaps all too human (48).23

Notes 1 J. D’Arms and A. D. Kerr, “Envy in the Philosophical Tradition,” in Envy: Theory and Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 38. 2 M. Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. L. B. Coser and W. W. Holdheim (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2007), pp. 30, 31. Henceforth cited parenthethically without label as this is the only text cited parenthetically. 3 Since envy, ressentiment and any other emotion of comparative assessment attributed to the inferior party in this comparison will share the same affects of pain, displeasure, and so on, the affective quality cannot distinguish these emotions. Moreover, different people experience or “feel” the same emotions differently, and the same person may feel the same emotion differently at different times in her life. J. Drummond, “‘Cognitive Impenetrability’ and the Complex Intentionality of the Emotions,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (10–11) (2004). Reprinted in Hidden Resources: Classical Perspectives on Subjectivity, ed. Dan Zahavi (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), pp. 109–26. One wonders, of course, whether or not neural imaging studies of subjects presented with these emotional cases could identify differences at the neural level and whether or not these studies were well enough constructed to draw definitive conclusions regarding “affective” differences or still remained simply pain, pleasure, dislike, and so on that would remain indistinguishable or not individuating features. 4 When combined with his belief that emotions are disclosed by feelings, his view that ressentiment may arise from any number of certain emotions creates an impasse in attempts to phenomenologically distinguish envy and ressentiment, for any number of certain different emotions would share the same feelings or



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affects such as tension, pain, and so on. Yet Scheler not only sometimes holds that “feeling is nothing but cognition,” he also offers two further features that would individuate envy from ressentiment. One wonders why one could not envy someone—those damn lottery winners that used to live down the street—every time one thinks of them for the rest of one’s life, the end of one’s life being the ending time of the state. If such is the case with envy, then wouldn’t ressentiment share the same fate with envy? It seems that this is a difference Scheler wishes to capture with respect to these two emotions, though I suspect that the emotion in this example is likely neither envy nor ressentiment insofar as it deals with a social gap and perceived injustice characteristic of resentment in the English sense. That a broad range of varied objects and persons trigger his emotions does not constitute indeterminacy. However he relates to the world with a pervasive attitude of frustration; however persistently he feels overlooked, this attitude manifests and in specific behaviors, e.g., his friendship of utility with Rodrigo and his constant whinging and scheming, and in emotions with specific and determinate objects, e.g., his envy toward Cassio, his contempt toward Othello. Iago is a man of envy and not ressentiment Three potential problems—two extrinsic to Scheler’s theory and one intrinsic— exist with this second distinction between envy and ressentiment, however. First, the experience of impotence certainly can give rise to varied emotions beyond envy and ressentiment, including humiliation, embarrassment, grief, indignation, etc. Second, different senses of impotence exist in envy and difference senses of impotence exist between envy and ressentiment. For example, unlike ressentiment, envy is an emotion that occurs in relation to a neighbor or someone close to the envier in social standing. The envier may feel impotent and frustrated over his failure to secure the desired good in question, but he could attribute this failure to himself or the other. If the former occurs, then envy appears self-directed, perhaps self-pitying or self-lacerating; this is a point Scheler does not explore. Nevertheless, if the latter occurs, then envy begins to look like ressentiment insofar as it goes on the attack against the other. Yet while I may feel a certain ressentiment toward Donald Trump and may complain that his greed or excessive consumption causes the little financial man to suffer and feel impotent, it makes little sense to say I envy him because my efforts to achieve his wealth would be in vain given the choices I have made that now restrict my earning potential. To establish certain ground rules for adjudicating these difference, one can appeal to Aristotle’s claim that envy occurs between neighbors, but more importantly to ordinary language claims. The third potential problem, since it is intrinsic to Scheler’s theory, is discussed above in the body of the text. Scheler underscores this first essential precondition of “true envy”—impotence—

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Early Phenomenology through a discussion of envy in relation to covetousness and emulation. The mere displeasure of seeing another enjoy a good we desire but lack, since it does not qualify as “true envy,” likely refers to covetousness. Two different emotions, in turn, may emerge from the coveter’s efforts to dissolve the disparity between himself and another depending on the success of the coveter’s efforts, envy or emulation. Consistent with his view of “true envy,” Scheler distinguishes envy from covetousness insofar as envy, “understood in its everyday usage, is due to a feeling of impotence which we experience when another person owns a good we covet” (29). According to Scheler’s criteria for “true envy,” true envy attacks the person who possesses the good that one desires but lacks because the true envier is impotent to rectify the situation; the coveter, however, does not attack the possessor of that good because he retains the power to rectify the situation and acquire the desired good. Emulation, on the other hand, does not thwart the agent by targeting the other negatively but instead incentivizes the inferior party (who may nevertheless resort to untoward activities to acquire the desired good). Scheler’s first, essential feature of “true envy” thus effectively quarantines emulation from envy, for he strips envy of any positive or motivating quality, as Aristotle already had done. F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1967), I.10, III.15. Since Aristotle, work on envy has tended to focus on envy’s begrudging regard of the envied and the envier’s potentially harmful actions directed toward the envied. Roughly two millennia later, this view endures. As Scheler notes, envy grows out of covetousnes—“aspiration,” as he more politely puts it (R 35)—when “a feeling of impotence … flares up into hatred against the owner” (29–30). Aristotle, Rhetoric, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R. McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1388a17. Scheler hints at an other- and self-directed sense of envy precisely in the notion of existential-envy when he writes: “existential-envy … is directed against the other person’s very nature … the strongest source of ressentiment … strips the opponent of his very existence, for this existence as such is felt to be a ‘pressure’, a ‘reproach’, and an unbearable humiliation” (30). Although humiliation constitutes a self-directed emotion, in Scheler’s account the envious converts this self-assessment into an assessment of the other. As such, he does not explore the self-directed moment of envy that necessitates the conversion of self-destruction into other-destruction. There is not a general consensus about whether envy involves believing that you deserve what the rival has. Adam Smith, for instance, seems not to make that assumption and, perhaps, even to take the opposite view: “Envy is that passion which views with malignant dislike the superiority of those who are really entitled to all the superiority they possess” (Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments,



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p. 244). Even here, however, Smith seems consistent with Aristotle, who argued that the philodoxi envied the nobles who rightly enjoyed their goods; in this case, envy is unjust since it is unmerited pain at merited good fortune, unlike pity, which is merited pain at unmerited misfortune, and indignation, which is merited pain at unmerited good fortune. L. Purshouse, “Jealousy in Relation to Envy,” Erkenntnis 60 (2) (2004): 179–205. G. Taylor, Deadly Vices (New York, Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 45. Cf., L. Purhouse, “Jealousy in Relation to Envy,” pp. 192–3. The Lexus-owning, lottery-winning neighbor can be envious without feeling impotent. It’s just that he doesn’t have the desired superiority or exclusivity. Indeed, however, this renders him neither a possessor-envier nor a deficiencyenvier, necessarily. Purshouse would call this a type of jealousy, a fear of losing what one has, exclusive or superior sense of esteem in community. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 43. The alternative, I have argued elsewhere against Taylor, who removes the envied from the picture along the lines of the analogy of hating the sin but not the sinner, is covetousness. As will be explained briefly below, Scheler likely would refuse the notion of deficiency-envy for two reasons. First, insofar as deficiency-envy need not necessarily imply impotence or the inability to improve one’s circumstance, this is not “true envy.” Second, insofar as deficiency-envy begrudges the other in the strict sense of the term (of reluctant regard) but not hatred, this type of envy would seem like an instance of being merely displeased. G. Taylor, Deadly Vices, p. 43. R. Solomon, True to our Feelings: What our Emotions are Really Telling Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 101–3. I mean to draw a parallel here between Scheler’s senses of “feeling” and expression and indication according to Husserl’s account of them in the first of his Logical Investigations. While Scheler and Schelerians may resist this relation given Scheler’s attempt to liberate feeling from brute “senselessness,” Scheler himself in Ressentiment notes that “‘feeling’ or ‘preferring’ a value is essentially an act of cognition.” Rather than reduce Scheler’s position to Husserl’s, I merely think it useful to elaborate the complexities of Scheler’s ambiguous use of “feeling” in this particular text, unlike his Formalism where this distinction is clearer. Scheler, of course, posits a genuine morality based in an eternal hierarchy of values much like that found in the work of Augustine. Contra Nietzsche, then, values are not historically conditioned even if they are realized or apprehended historically. If the point is that envy, whatever else is bad about it, can be good in that it involves correct valuations of the rival’s circumstances as compared to one’s own

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Reinach’s Phenomenology of Foreboding: Battlefield Notes, 1916–17 Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray

King’s University College, University of Western Ontario

In a conversation with Edith Stein and Fritz Kaufmann about his enlistment in the army, Adolf Reinach said: “it is not that I must go; rather I’m permitted to go.” After Germany’s declaration of war on France in the summer of 1914, Reinach, like many German intellectuals, immediately volunteered for the army with great enthusiasm, even attempting to exercise pressure to be admitted as quickly as possible. He was recruited in his hometown of Mainz in mid-August, and after two weeks of training he was assigned to the reserve battery of the 21st Field Artillery Regiment of the 21st Reserve Division under the command of his younger brother, Heinrich. By February of 1915, he was fighting in the trenches against France, and later he received the Iron Cross for his efforts during this time. By November of 1915, Reinach was stationed in Belgium, serving the supply lines to the front, and in October of 1916 he was promoted to commander of the 185th Field Artillery Regiment. It was during this time on the Belgian front that he wrote a collection of rough notes (Aufzeichnungen): Zur Phänomenologie der Ahnungen (Phenomenology of Foreseeing/Foreboding)1 dated July 1916, and later three other fragments under the heading Bruchstück einer religionsphilosophischen Ausführung (Fragment of a Treatise on the Philosophy of Religion) titled Das Absolute (the Absolute), Struktur des Erlebnisses (Structure of Experience), and Skeptische Erwägungen (Skeptical Considerations) (September/October 1917).2 On November 16, 1917, Reinach died on the battlefield in Flanders; he was 34. In this essay, I will introduce and discuss the relatively unknown and underappreciated battlefield notes. Since these are unpolished and incomplete fragments, I must attempt to draw conclusions about where Reinach intended to take his phenomenological investigation of foreboding and illustrate relationships that

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this investigation has with other themes he wrote at the time, as well as place the ideas expressed here in the context of his small but brilliant body of work.

1 The tale, as told by Reinach Reinach begins this set of notes by talking about a conversation he overheard during a break from artillery firing. A staff sergeant and an infantryman are talking about instances where fellow soldiers seemed to know they were going to die that day or very soon, and so took measures to ensure their documents and personal effects were in order. Reinach writes: A young officer had fallen earlier that day; briefly before the ride, from which he never returned, he had, what he otherwise never did, given his fellow (officer) his trunk key, his classified documents and a written farewell letter. He suspected his own death. There is one (soldier) curiously displeased and distressed, before he encountered the grenade; another one (soldier) had his will/testament made; recounting quite a lot, they prophesized it firsthand, that they would not live to see forthcoming days.3

The infantryman is convinced by the examples he has witnessed that foreboding is something very real, something that actually happens to people. The young staff sergeant, on the other hand, stands unconvinced that foreboding is real because there is a lack of scientific, testable evidence proving its existence. With some arrogance towards the infantryman and the general topic of the discussion, the staff sergeant says, according to Reinach: Certainly everyone assumes before a dangerous mission that perhaps or probably he will die. If this supposition comes true (fulfills itself), then its result is mysteriously foreboding; supposing it doesn’t fulfill itself, then nobody remembers. No, there are no forebodings, only reasonable calculations are possible that acknowledge themselves with more or less probability … If I am sad or ill-tempered, the world appears darker to me, and misfortune seems (to me) impending … The realization of gloomy dispositions are particularly frequent in wars, whom should that surprise?

The infantryman, realizing that no matter how many instances he provides of foreboding he will not be able to convince the staff sergeant, shrugs his shoulders and leaves the conversation. And so begins Reinach’s phenomenological investigation into foreboding, a task most suited for a descriptive, realist Munich phenomenologist, such as the type he was himself:



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However, in me a world ascends, for a long time, long immersed in anything but the suffocating activity of the soldier in war. What are proper forebodings? … Whether foreboding carries justice or truth in itself, I do not have the means to say; it is impossible to say before I know what its proper essence is: foreboding. Still I do not know it. However, already the desire of the phenomenologist is awakened in me, to single out from the fullness of the appearance the structure, to hold it, to let it sink in and with it, what so far only the word meaning was acquainted with, henceforth it is to achieve intuitively the essence itself.

Given the context of the discussion overheard between the staff sergeant and the infantryman, Reinach recognizes he must establish certain fundamentals concerning foreboding if he is going to convince someone like the staff sergeant, such fundamentals as evidence and knowledge being crucial here. Foreboding refers to something; it possesses intentional character, and therefore must have “content.” He writes: That every foreseeing as such necessarily requires a related content—the “foreseen” as such—so far stretched is the boundary of its possible contents here. Not only, for example, temporally but even future forebodings can refer to something … here something forms apparently timeless (atemporal)—a more or less determinate proposition (Satz) or state of affairs (Sachverhalt)—the related content of a foreseeing. But not ‘this’ foreseeing content, it being also identical with the content of a judgment or an apprehension, but rather the foreseeing as such.

Being intentional in character implies that both evidence and knowledge can be found and established regarding foreboding. But what exactly are evidence and knowledge for Reinach, especially given that what we are talking about are essences and non-empirical things, apprehensions of impendings supposed as impending?

2 Knowledge, evidence, and emotion For Reinach, evidence is a state of affairs presenting itself to us. In his “On the Theory of Negative Judgment,” evidence is described as “not exclusively the ideal case of absolute self-givenness, but any givenness of a state of affairs in an apprehending act.”4 In his lecture, “Concerning Phenomenology,” Reinach describes a priori knowledge, states of affairs being a priori in nature, as capable of irrefutable evidence, meaning its content is intuitively given in the strongest

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sense.5 States of affairs, briefly, are objective unities, some timeless and some temporal, that take on the form “being-x of Y” and are neither real nor ideal in nature. Characteristics of states of affairs include: they stand in relation of ground or consequent; they take on modalities; they obtain rather than exist; they stand in a logically contradictory relationship (either the positive or the negative obtains); and they are what is apprehended (a seeing-that, a readingoff of the state of affairs from the perceived surface of reality, a special kind of intuition) rather than perceived.6 Knowledge, for Reinach, is an accepting or receiving, “a making one’s own (of) something presenting itself.”7 To be clear, knowing is not an act of positing or a defining, mainly because the essence of these acts is not identical to knowing. When one analyzes the essence of defining, it leads back to a knowing, and this knowing is where it receives its justification and verification. That being said, one will no doubt ask here if evidence translates into knowledge: how is it that we can accept or receive “something presenting itself ”? To answer this, we must look at the two German words for knowledge: Kennen and Wissen. It is not easy to describe the difference between the two in English, but typically it is explained that Wissen is knowledge of facts or information and is strict in nature (you either know it or you don’t), whereas Kennen is an acquaintance or familiarity sort of knowing that admits degrees of intimacy (you can know someone a little or a lot). In Reinach’s phenomenology, perception (Wahrnehmung), intuition (Anschauung), and apprehension (Erkennen) are all ways we gain knowledge. Perception and intuition are what we can call modes of formal awareness, or a means of making mental contact with any and all objects (real, ideal, whatever else in between). On the basis of this contact, we can come to apprehend a given state of affairs, and it is only in apprehension that we obtain fully how an object is—or that it is at all. Hence, the end product of gaining knowledge of states of affairs yields Wissen, the end product of intuition or perception is Kennen. Because Wissen pertains to the knowledge of states of affairs, it can be expressed in judgements. The same cannot be said for Kennen. However, the intuition or perception that provides Kennen can form the foundation for a series of apprehensions that result in a highly detailed Wissen. For example, I perceive a black cat, and on this basis I apprehend that it is black in color, spatially located, has a long tail, is purring, and so on. So, from the perception of this one object, the cat, I apprehend various states of affairs. And from this apprehension of the states of affairs, I form a conviction or belief. However, knowledge is never reduced to justified belief, but rather knowledge is the ground for the belief itself.



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Reinach’s insistence on the distinction between knowledge and evidence is perhaps nowhere made more clear than in his description of foreboding that we find in his notes on the battlefield. Indeed, the force of his phenomenological description of foreboding reinforces the importance of that distinction. Reinach alludes to the fact that many, like the staff sergeant in his story, would contrast foreboding with knowledge (Wissen). But, as we have seen above, if foreboding is a state of affairs or contains relations of states of affairs, then the apprehension of those states of affairs can only yield knowledge in the sense of Wissen, which knowledge grounds my belief in the foreboding: Let us take apprehension in the stricter meaning (than the act), in which we arrive at the givenness of a state of affairs, which will illuminate and correspond to the realization of a proposition, so to divide (therefrom) the belief from the state of affairs in all clarity, (and) from this ground arises our realization.

On the difference between belief and states of affairs, he further notes that the foreboding state of affairs that I am apprehending is temporally punctual, whereas my resulting belief in it, or my belief in anything really, is something that can last varying lengths and of varying degrees. But differences aside, Reinach’s point is that one cannot form a foreboding belief without apprehending a foreboding state of affairs, and this belief also rests on the knowledge gained from the apprehension of the state of affairs. Hence, he dismisses this notion of a contrast between knowledge and foreboding as superficial and ultimately incorrect. Reinach adds to this point: placing Foreboding in the total store of knowledge—in the broadest sense of knowledge spoken—something new is added; the subject here seems, with right or wrong remains to be seen, by means of foreboding something is captured from the river of future events, which was previously not accessible.

Reinach’s broad conceptions for knowledge and evidence demonstrate not only his commitment to being a realist, but also his firm stance against reductionism, in general and also the phenomenological reduction of Husserl’s new transcendental phenomenology, and their lack of application to essences or essential structures.8 Concerning foreboding and its grounding, then, Reinach writes: there is no doubt that we have to account for the grounding structures it has, not the grounded ones—i.e., those which by their essence are open to a grounding. Through foreboding/foresight we grasp—or rather we believe that we grasp—something that was previously concealed. And a conviction can also

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We ground our forebodings and foresights in the lives we choose to live and the loves and vocations we choose to pursue. Foreboding requires human action or choice to become grounded, like a causal relationship, and once foreboding sets in, one can apprehend its essence, and its necessary, synthetic a priori nature. Foreboding, for Reinach, involves material necessity, something he discussed at length in his article ‘Kant’s Interpretation of Hume’s Problem’ (1908). Material necessity differs from modal necessity, the kind of necessity mathematical propositions possess, in that the necessity in material necessity belongs to the material content and determines the predicate in some way, as in “Q succeeds P,” whereas when “one stretch of time follows another” the necessity determines the copula, not the material content, and hence the entire state of affairs. If the foreboding apprehension contains precise details of how the person experiencing it will die, it necessary relies on the material necessity that binds the chains of their life events up to the present moment. Relations of causality are bound by material necessity and exhibit an existential relationship as well: Causality signifies a necessary connection in the successive existence of two objects … A causal connection between A and B means that the existence of B is connected in a definite manner with that of A. Neither the existence of A nor that of B is thereby directly posited. But the existence of B is conditionally connected with that of A.9

Motivation connections are an example of causal relationship bound by material necessity: they are a kind of psychological-causal relationship with the world, where one choice leads to an event, that leads to another choice, and results in another event, etc. Motivation connections are guided by several factors such as personality, past choices, past success and failure, culture, mood, status, etc. Foreboding would be one of these factors, since it speaks of definitive events that end freedom, choice, and possibility altogether, and when a person grasps it emotions arise that motivate their behavior. Foreboding is not itself an emotion, it is not a state of the ego, but rather foreboding, once apprehended, gives rise to emotions. It is quite natural that a person would respond with fear, anxiety, or dread when they come to know they will die tragically today on the battlefield, but these emotions felt are not themselves foreboding but the result of grasping the foreboding apprehension. Reinach writes:



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Indeed it appears to have good sense to speak of felt foresights, of the aspect of being felt of any foreseeing. All the same, it is readily apparent that foreseeing— for example of a future event—is no feeling like joy or sorrow, no set of ego states (no state of being of the I), not in one way or another being a condition of the ego (the I).

To specify, he adds: “What clearly stands out from foreboding is the horror of future fortunes, which as a feeling springs from this foresightful grasp … which is rooted in this feeling and knowledge (Wissen).” The emotions that result from foreboding apprehension strongly affect a person’s choices and actions because of the content (i.e., death) and the sense of temporal duress (i.e., time is running out quickly), such as with the soldier mentioned at the start of Reinach’s tale who prepared a farewell letter and put his effects in order before he rode out— things he did not usually do before leaving camp to fight. A similar argument is made about foreboding and belief: foreboding itself is also not belief, but belief arises from the apprehension of it. Reinach writes: “From the foreboding of immanent death arises the certain conviction of having to die soon.” Belief is formed after you experience or seize upon the foreboding apprehension. When you have an extremely detailed vision of your death, what you grasp essentially is knowledge—details or facts about how and when your life will end—and after that seizing arises the belief that it is true, and then emotions like fear. Belief, like judgement, always forms after the seizing upon. A soldier who foresees his own death would form a belief about what he has grasped, such as it is true and inescapable, but these beliefs he forms once again result from the apprehension and are not the foreboding itself. One aspect that makes foreboding challenging to discuss is the individual nature of its state of affairs. Apprehending foreboding is unlike apprehending the being-black of the cat or the being-green of the grass; these are situations where more than one person can apprehend the same state of affairs. If there were three soldiers heading out to fight and one has a foreboding apprehension, only he knows it, only he is capable of making judgements about it, only he has a belief in it. What does this mean for the other two? Well, the soldier with the foreboding apprehension cannot effectively show or share it with them, so they too could gain knowledge: the foreboding apprehension is of “his” own death, a state of affairs obtaining in his personal causal chain, not theirs at all. Telling them of this foreboding doesn’t allow them to gain knowledge (Wissen), since they lack the apprehension required to ground knowledge. Foreboding seems to be an individual content relationship, an apprehending “for one,” a temporal state of affairs intended for that individual alone. Most states of

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affairs, while subsistent regardless of anyone’s acknowledgement, are at least potentially accessible to everyone. With promises or enactments, for example, while they can be stated in a situation between parties without myself present, if someone explains the promise or the enactment at some later point, I can, through the structure and understanding of the words, apprehend the state of affairs involved and walk away with knowledge. However, this is rather impossible with foreboding. Foreboding is a seizing of knowledge (Wissen) of my own impending tragic death, I apprehend a state of affairs that will obtain and that obtaining signifies the end of my possibilities, and since I am the only one to apprehend it, I am the only one who has knowledge, who can judge about it, believe in it, etc. And I do this alone. It seems, here, the foreboding receiver possesses knowledge of something that is epistemologically incommunicable to others, but is communicable in the highly negative emotions it brings about, as evidenced by the infantryman’s belief in it without personal apprehension. The foreboding state of affairs apprehended is necessarily linked with the essence of death, for Reinach, as this seems to amount to the ceasing of all one’s possibilities, the end of the causal chain of actions one lives: in the apprehension of foreboding, I essentially see the state of affairs, “the not-being of myself will obtain a moment X.” At every moment, I am alive—freely thinking and acting— to the state of affairs “the being of Ms. X” obtains, and thus the “not-being of Ms. X” does not obtain (according to the law of non-contradiction). This point fits with Reinach’s work on a theory of negative judgement, since it (the not-being of X) does have an autonomous existence: at the moment of the apprehending of foreboding, I am alive and witnessing the moment of my death—the being of X comes to witness and thus know the impending not-being of X.10 The only way this can happen is if the negative state of affairs subsists independently. If this foreboding state of affairs is so highly personal, one that obtains tragically in my personal causal chain, then what is the “foreboding as such” (Ahnungen-an-sich)? Are there other states of affairs that are entirely individual, ones others are never capable of apprehending? To find the answers to these questions and a host of others that arise, further investigations are necessary, since Reinach left this unfinished. How can we, the outsiders, arrive at any understanding concerning foreboding? A natural, first course of investigation is with empathy, a concept Theodor Lipps (Reinach’s original teacher) pioneered.11 Empathy is a fusion between the observer and what is observed (object or person) and it is based on a natural instinct and inner imitation. Empathy is the way we discover that other people have selves; Lipps asserted with particular emphasis that



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our knowledge of other minds is first and foremost grounded in empathy, and thus in feelings rather than in purely intellectual operations. That being said, empathy is an intuitional knowledge (Kennen) and not an apprehending knowledge (Wissen), and so doesn’t provide the evidentiary support required to prove foreboding occurs. Empathy helps one understand the emotions resulting from an apprehension of foreboding that another has, but it does not assist with evidence or knowledge in the strict sense. This is why the staff sergeant remains unconvinced by infantryman: the proof for foreboding is too far removed to substantiate it fully, and in being so removed there can be other explanations or coincidental matters at play that explain what has occurred to others at camp. But, as Reinach pointed out earlier, Kennen can assist in gaining Wissen. Empathy seems to be something of a pre-phenomenological requirement for an investigation like Reinach’s, meaning that one would need it prior to embarking on a quest into the foreboding experiences of other people. Without empathy, how could one begin to think about the situation of those unlucky enough to have the foreboding apprehension? One couldn’t do such. Empathy is at least starting place for understanding this experience of foreboding that Reinach describes. Many of us have been lucky enough not to have a foreboding apprehension, and so empathizing with those who have had it or speculating what it would be like to have that experience is the closest we get.

3 Further explorations After exploring and discussing Reinach’s phenomenological investigation into the experience of foreboding among soldiers at his World War I camp, two important questions remain unanswered: 1. What kind of experience is the apprehension of foreboding? 2. How is it that some people experience it and others do not? The first question is necessary in order to address the essence of foreboding, while the second is necessary for understanding the nature of the occurrence. I will attempt to address these questions by looking to other parts of Reinach’s Battlefield Notes, specifically, the third section, Bruchstück einer religionsphilosophischen Ausführung (Fragment of a Treatise on the Philosophy of Religion) and its three subsections: Das Absolute (the Absolute), Struktur des Erlebnisses (Structure of Experience), Skeptische Erwägungen (Skeptical Considerations).

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Here it is the latter two subsections that will be explored as they shed the clearest and most direct light on the experience of foreboding Reinach describes. This selection of the Battlefield Notes were all written between September 20 and October 3, 1917, a couple of months prior to his death on the battlefield in Belgium.12

3.1 Three scenarios To address the first question and at the same time attempt to draw a clearer picture of the foreboding experience Reinach describes, consider the following three scenarios: First, a person has been sentenced to death. His execution is scheduled for Tuesday at 7:00 PM. An appeal to the Governor for a commutation of the sentence to life in prison is pending. Tuesday morning, the prisoner is informed that the appeal has been turned down, and that consequently, he has only eleven hours left. He asks the prison guard that one of the two books he owns be given to the inmate whose cell is at the end of the row in which the cell of the person to be executed is located—that man had expressed great interest in the book. Then, the person doomed to die tries to get ready for his death. He is very much afraid. Second, there is the soldier who wakes up on the morning of the day on which he is to participate in a dangerous mission. He has been on many similar missions before. “Today is the day,” he thinks. He writes a farewell note to his wife and asks that it be mailed. He makes sure that all his documents, including his last will and testament, are in order. He sees the company priest for confession. Then, as the truck transporting the group of soldiers sent out together with him leaves the village in which they had been stationed, he turns around and looks at the steeple of the church, convinced that he will never see it again. Tears stream down his face. Third, there is that soldier’s comrade who is on the same assignment. He is very, very much afraid that he will die today; but he fervently hopes that he will return alive. 13

The second scenario best matches the experience Reinach is writing about. The first is ill-fitting because the death is predictable, planned, and carried out by other people. This individual has broken a law or a number of laws for which a group of his peers have convicted him and sentenced him according to the established criminal code. His death, a logical (as well as legal) consequence



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of his actions and choices, is something he could have easily predicted prior to committing the crimes. Furthermore, this inmate also holds out hope to the end of being pardoned, maybe some hope that the death machine will break; in Reinach’s description of foreboding, however, there is no hope at all, none left, just a very certain knowledge that death soon will necessarily happen. The third scenario also does not quite fit because the soldier has hope, and a different sense of fear (fear of the unknown rather than the known), instead of knowledge that he will die today. In both the first and third examples, there is room for doubt, for hope, and for denial, and none of these occur in Reinach’s description of foreboding.

3.2 Characteristics of foreboding Given the discussion above of the three scenarios, the experience of foreboding that Reinach describes in his notes has the following characteristics (so far): 1. Foreboding occurs suddenly: As much as a battlefield has expected risks, this sense of foreboding “hits one like a brick wall,” write Reinach, in a moment. Yes, you could die any day in a war zone but suddenly today, this morning or afternoon, you know you are going to die—no escaping it. It’s not gradual or composed of degrees of certainty, you either have this experience or you don’t. 2. Foreboding as a “knowledge” carries a character of absolute certainty bound with the strictest necessity: With the foreboding experience there is no room for doubt or hope of a different outcome, one accepts the necessity of the events to happen. It also is not a pessimistic attitude. That is not to say that the person experiencing foreboding isn’t afraid or does not dread it, but they know in the deepest sense that this death will happen as shown. There is a deep acceptance here of what will be and what one must do; the soldier marches out onto the field knowing it will be his last actions, his last steps, his last breaths. 3. The experience of foreboding is one of helplessness—and dependence: This is connected to the sense of certainty and necessity in the last point, that one is not in control of one’s destiny, that one is swept up in the current of [one’s] life events (so to speak), and that one cannot take control of the situation to change the outcome. One is compelled by something greater to die in this way, at this time. 4. The experience of foreboding must be very detailed and specific: What

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one is “shown” (for lack of better phrasing), the apprehension of one’s death, must be very exact in its details to truly demonstrate to the receiver that that which is foreboded will be obtaining and the necessity involved. This implies a glimpse into one’s material necessity chain extending past themselves and the motivational connections that have provided the situation and not a universal determinism. This, of course, also provides the foundation for the knowledge of one’s death and grounds the belief that it will happen. And in connection with this last point, 5. The foreboding experience is purely individual, personal, and unique: The experience of foreboding is almost incommunicable because it is “your death,” it is a glimpse at your own chain of events (i.e., motivational connections) unfolding. The states of affairs involved in foreboding differ from those of claims, obligations, enactments, etc., because the states of affairs present with these speech acts are accessible to everyone, where as the ones involved with the foreboding are not: they are yours, and yours alone. It is an experience where only you feel the necessity, only you feel the certainty, and only you have the apprehension required for knowledge in the strict sense (Wissen). If you attempt to convey to someone else your foreboding experience, they can at best be empathetic, but since they lack the full apprehension and the feeling of absolute necessity they cannot truly ‘know’ the foreboding experience. At best, they can have a shallow belief in it and/or an emotional response.14 While these are the characteristics of the experience of foreboding that Reinach provides in his short story, the question still remains: What kind of experience is it? It is here where his notes on the philosophy of religion may have relevance and possibly can aid in the understanding of what kind of experience foreboding is exactly.

3.3 The experience of God One’s personal experience of and relationship with God is very similar to the experience of foreboding for many of the reasons stated above: one’s relationship with and experience of God is personal and unique, one’s knowledge of God’s existence and one’s relationship with God can be difficult to describe to others in a precise manner. As much as considerations on matters of death and God



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(matters of faith) are understandable and reasonable when one is actively living and fighting on the battlefield, it is my contention that Reinach intended these fragments collected under the title, “Treatise on the Philosophy of Religion,” to help explain aspects of the experience of foreboding. These notes, that is, seem to be Reinach’s way of coming to understand the occurrence of the experience of foreboding in his camp and cope with the other horrors of war he witnessed daily. Foreboding is neither an experience consisting of purely empirical knowledge (as cognition) nor one consisting of purely a priori knowledge. It is knowledge of a different kind. In his rough notes entitled “Structure of Experience,” Reinach writes: Let us take a priori states of affairs as those for which the predication is demanded by the subject according to its essence, and so for that reason becomes cognized (erkannt werden), by our deeply immersing ourselves in the essence of the subject, then no a priori cognition (Erkenntnis) exists here. But, on the other hand, there also exists no empirical cognition, as it’s a question not of contingent and temporally variable facts.

Accordingly, there must be a third and unique kind of knowledge, what Reinach called “experience-immanent knowledge.” He writes: To be judged quite differently … is a perception in relation to knowledge of actuality insofar as the latter must always refer back to the perception for its verification. There is, after all, even in the perception a taking-as-real, though not an actual knowledge. Quite otherwise is the taking-as-reality in feeling oneself sheltered by God; logically speaking, the former is the presupposition for the latter. However, no one would draw a logical conclusion from this. It is rather immanently contained in the sense of the experience itself. Here we must separate two aspects: on the one side the knowledge of the being-sheltered, and on the other side the knowledge of the being-there of God, i.e., immediate and mediate immanent knowledge.

When one feels sheltered by God, that knowledge is verified in every moment of feeling “being-sheltered” and is not something that can be called objective knowledge: being-sheltered cannot be known or understood apart from she who experiences being-sheltered; it is a kind of knowledge that only can be known (in the strictest sense) by the experiencer. The experience of being-sheltered by God is subjective, an individual knowledge disclosed through the feeling of being-sheltered in which I experience myself as in a relationship with God. Experience-immanent knowledge has both immediate and mediate aspects: the

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experience of being-sheltered contains immediate knowledge, and it reveals and reinforces the mediate knowledge of God’s being-there. The experiences of such things as love or gratitude for God contain only mediate knowledge and are considered derivative experiences because, like judgements, they are positions taken towards God, which positions can only be taken once there is immediate knowledge of God’s presence in some way. As Reinach elaborates, I experience my absolute dependence on God. Insofar as I myself am concerned with this experienced relation, the state of affairs does not stand before me, rather I myself experience myself in this relation, which then naturally cannot be objective for me … In the experience of dependence I find myself dependent, without reflection being necessary, which indeed also could lead only to the knowledge that I feel myself dependent.

Given this descriptive account of the experience of being-sheltered, it makes sense to say that foreboding, like the feeling of being-sheltered by God, is knowledge of this third kind, meaning immanently contained in the experience itself. In the grasping of the foreboding vision, I foresee the circumstances of my own death as the ultimate consequence of my causality, every decision I have made has led to this final moment, and thus foreboding as an experience possessing knowledge is both immanently contained in my chain of life events and in the momentary vision I witness. When one has a foresight of their own death, that knowledge is subjectively verified in the foreseeing experience: the foreboding vision being so exact and harmonious with a person’s life events and possibilities that its “taking-as-reality” is immediate and necessary. This, of course, cannot be considered objective knowledge: Experiencing foreboding cannot be known or understood apart from she who experiences foreboding; it is a kind of knowledge that only can be known (in the strictest sense) by the experiencer—by the one who witnesses their own death. If I were to have an apprehension of foreboding, on Reinach’s account, it would be a moment where I experience as a witness myself in relation to the events of my own death. Moreover, like the experience of this dependence on God that Reinach describes, when I experience the foreboding vision reflection is not necessary or even an considered option. In fact, according to his story from camp, it seems that those who have the apprehension of foreboding do not deliberate on it at all; they simply accept it, prepare for it and head out the door. Of course further investigation is needed to fully understand what this experience-immanent knowledge is, not only concerning foresight apprehension but also to discover what other experiences have this special kind of knowledge.



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Foreboding surely differs from the feeling of being-sheltered by God in that the latter can be a continuous and a lifelong experience, whereas the former is temporary and terminal. The states of affairs that I foresee surrounding my death cannot be objective (in the moment of foreboding), contrary to the being-black of the cat on the mat before me, since the foreboding states of affairs are individual, subjective, and contained immanently in the experience of it. However, these states of affairs become actualized at a later point, when it is my time to die. This is not to say that all states of affairs surrounding my death will be subjective and individual, since others can witness the actual moment of my death; for example, if I am killed on the battlefield, my death is most likely one of many in a military event, and thus there are many states of affairs obtaining, and essences present, etc. and potentially many witnesses. But in my foreboding apprehension, the states of affairs I foresee obtaining concern me, I am the subject who will die. Reinach fully acknowledges that there will be skeptics about his ideas on the experiences of foreboding, God and experience-immanent knowledge: to what extent is true knowledge furthered, how can such a subjective experience claim validity for the individual or even all men in general? So many doubts will make themselves felt to the present positions of most men with regard to the theory of knowledge, there will be so much rejection from the very beginning, that one will hardly take the trouble to formulate the deliberations exactly.

4 Concluding remarks In a letter written September 10, 1915 to Conrad-Martius, Reinach wrote: “We have lost so many a young gifted worker through the War, and I, too, do not know whether I shall be returning home.”15 And Edith Stein recalled Reinach referring to his closest circle of friends as “mourners in the first rank.”16 Of course, he originally said this in partial jest, but he also imagined this circle gathering should he be killed at war. Did Reinach have an apprehension of foreboding that fateful day in Flanders, before he set out to battle? If he did, we cannot know it. We can believe or not believe, we can empathize, but because we lack the firsthand apprehension of the foreboding vision, we cannot know its reality. I will end with some words from Husserl’s eulogy for Reinach, as I find them most fitting here: In the war itself he devoted his powers with never failing willingness to the fatherland. But his religious disposition was too deeply afflicted by the

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Notes 1 A note on my translation: In the past, on the rare occasion when this piece has been translated or discussed, Ahnungen has been translated into English as premonition. Ahnungen has a broad meaning in German; it encompasses several ideas: premonition, foresight, hunch, inkling, idea, intuitiveness, and foreboding, to name a few. In my translation that accompanies this article, you will see both foreseeing and foreboding for the simple reason that both have less of a mystical or occult sense about them, and using two words here also achieves better accuracy in English. Foreseeing serves as the neutral-toned English word, to capture descriptions that aren’t about death or horrible things but rather any kind of future seeing whatsoever. This term is best applied to the phenomenological investigation of the essence and nature of Ahnungen. Foreboding, on the other hand, serves here as the negative-toned English term, used in the cases of foreseeing one’s death such as in Reinach’s camp story, as it captures best the dread and fear felt by the soldiers when they apprehended the “horror of future fortunes” that would necessarily end their lives. 2 The only known text containing these notes (in their original German) is Adolf Reinach Sämtliche Werke, (eds) Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith (Munich: Philosophia Verlag GmbH, 1989), pp. 589–611. 3 When not otherwise referenced, quotes are from the translation in Chapter 2 of this volume. 4 Adolf Reinach, “On the Theory of Negative Judgment,” trans. D. Ferrari, in Aletheia: An International Journal of Philosophy, 2 (1981); cited herafter as TNJ. Reinach’s notion of apprehension is similar to Husserl’s notion of categorical intuition. Apprehension is a seeing-that (erkennen) and is a special kind of intuition. One perceives material things in the world, like the rose, but the state of affairs, the being-red or the not-being-yellow of the rose, is apprehended. How we come to know states of affairs differs from perception through the senses. Apprehending is the reading off of a state of affairs from the perceived surface of reality. 5 Adolf Reinach, “Concerning Phenomenology,” trans. D. Willard, in The Personalist, 50 (1969), p. 214; cited hereafter as CP.



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6 Reinach, TNJ, pp. 34–7. 7 Reinach, CP, p. 219. 8 Reinach and many of his realist colleagues and students in Munich and Göttingen rejected the idea of reductions and of bracketing, especially when essences were concerned. In his 1914 Marburg Lecture, “Concerning Phenomenology”, Reinach wrote: “People want to learn from the natural sciences, and want to ‘reduce’ experience to the furthest possible extent … Leaving the broader sense of reduction undecided, reduction certainly has no application to essences. Would one perhaps wish to reduce the essence of red, which I can view in any instance of red, to the essence of waves, which nonetheless is an evidently different essence?” (CP, p. 199). Later, he added: “essences cannot be reduced to other essences” (CP, p. 220). In the same lecture he also argued that reductions had no place in descriptive psychology either, since they impoverish and falsify the nature of consciousness. 9 Adolf Reinach, “Kant’s Interpretation of Hume’s Problem,” trans. J. N. Mohanty, in Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 7 (1976): 172. 10 Reinach sought to dispel the commonly held notion that negation in judgement did not affect the copula, but only the predicate: in the judgement “A is not B,” logicians would understand B itself as opposed to the not being-B. According to Reinach, “When, on the basis of observing the being-red of a rose, I apprehend that the rose is not white, and my conviction refers to this [negative] state of affairs, there is no function at all present, no ‘not’, which could act either on the predicate or on the copula … A negation-function first appears in the sphere of the assertion; there, however, it exercises itself on the ‘is,’ and not on the B [i.e., the predicate]” (TNJ, p. 57). Negative states of affairs as entities take on the form “the not being A of B” or “the not being white of the rose”; they obtain in the same way positive states of affairs do, and regardless of whether or not they are presented, apprehended, believed, meant, or asserted by anyone. This entails that negative states of affairs have a status independent from positive states of affairs; negative states of affairs are not derived from or an altered form of positive states of affairs. The argument presented by Reinach for the necessity of negative states of affairs as subsisting autonomously relies on the principle of contradiction: if the positive state of affairs does not obtain, then necessarily the negative state of affairs obtains. For more on this see James M. DuBois, Judgment and Sachverhalt: An Introduction to Adolf Reinach’s Phenomenological Realism (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), p. 53. 11 While Robert Vischer is said to have coined the term empathy in 1873, it is Theodor Lipps who is considered to be the father of the first scientific theory of Einfühlung (feeling into or empathy) around 1897. When translating Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature into German, Lipps became acquainted with the

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notion of sympathy, a process whereby the contents of minds become mirrors to one another, and this inspired his subsequent development of the concept empathy. Lipps used Einfühlung to explain not only how people experience inanimate objects, but also how they understand the mental states of others. In his Optische Streitfragen. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane (1892) and Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (1897), Lipps used empathy to explain optical and geometrical illusions. It also became a central concept for his aesthetics, whereby our feeling states serve as the ground for the possibility of aesthetic experience (Ästhetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst: Grundlegung der Ästhetik, Erster Teil, 1903). For further reading on Lipps’s important contributions to the concept of empathy, see The American Journal of Psychiatry, http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/ full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.07081283, David Depew’s “Empathy, Psychology, and Aesthetics: reflections on a Repair Concept,” http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1033&context=poroi, and the work of Dan Zahavi, http://cfs.ku.dk/ research-activities/empathy/ (all links accessed May 18, 2015). 12 While on leave from the front for Christmas of 1916, Reinach and his wife converted to Christianity and were baptized Protestant. Anna has said that Reinach had a religious experience while fighting on the battlefield and the only existing evidence for this are these notes, when one takes into account that the date of his conversion occurred on holiday after these fragments were written. This is another reason for my decision to connect these notes together in discussion. 13 Professor Fritz Wenisch (URI) should be credited entirely with these three scenarios; he provided them during our email correspondence about Reinach’s notes, it was his way of attempting to better understand the experience described by Reinach. I am very grateful to him for these, and providing them here will no doubt help to clarify matters for others. 14 Some may say this sounds like an anticipation of Heidegger on “authenticity” found in Reinach with a much more grounded and confirmable description (save the certainty character of foreboding). While this appears feasible because of their shared education under Husserl, Heidegger and Reinach differ greatly in theoretical alliance, ontological picture, and education backgrounds. Reinach was a realist phenomenologist whose original training consisted of descriptive psychology and jurisprudence, and hence he is most concerned with structures of consciousness and how we come to know ontological entitles like essences, states of affairs, and even justice (i.e., his work is very much in the vein of Meinong, Marty, early Brentano, and then Bolzano—Husserl’s original philosophical training) and not so much subjective, existential, transcendental phenomenology or Dasein-related subject matter. The descriptions he launches into, I would



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argue, are more a product of his education under Lipps, meaning the descriptive psychology and Lipps’s own phenomenology. Concerning foreboding, I think for Reinach the interest is in figuring out the status, the source of it, and how we come to consciously have it. I honestly think if he had survived the war he wouldn’t have liked Heidegger much at all, philosophically or politically. 15 Reinach an Conrad, BSB, Ana 379 C. I. 1., 97. 16 Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Edith Stein (Washington: ICS Publications, 1986), p. 379. As noted in this work, this comment of Reinach’s was rather prophetic. His death in 1917 brought this small circle of mourners together: Reinach’s wife Anna, his sister Pauline, and Göttingen phenomenology students Erika Gothe and Edith Stein. It was Stein who assisted Anna in putting together Reinach’s important philosophical writings, including the fragments discussed in this very paper (which she called “very beautiful things”). The two women became very close friends and it was Anna’s strength and inner peace in the wake of Adolf ’s death that inspired Stein to convert to Christianity. For more on this, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922, (Pennsylvania: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005) and Benjamin Gibbs, My Long Search For The True Faith: The Conversion of Edith Stein, http://www.carmelite.org/documents/Heritage/gibbsconversionofstein.pdf (last accessed May 18, 2015). 17 Edmund Husserl, “Adolf Reinach,” in Kantstudien 23 (1919), pp. 147–9. English translation quoted here by Lucinda Vandervort Brettler, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 35 (4) (1975): 571–4.

6

Alexander Pfänder’s Phenomenological Psychology: Philosophy Devoted to Description Marta Ubiali

Post-Doctoral Fellow at Research Foundation Flanders—FWO Husserl-Archives, KU Leuven

There is a complication in understanding the work and role of Alexander Pfänder—a complication due to the fact that although he played a very important role in the history of phenomenology, he has been assigned the status of a “minor figure” and almost completely forgotten, in spite of the appreciation and esteem that authors like Paul Ricœur, Ludwig Binswanger, and José Ortega y Gasset have for him. A widespread and at the same time misleading interpretation sees in the work of Pfänder a sort of unripe and immature expression of the very first rise of phenomenology: commentators often ascribe a misunderstanding of Husserl’s radical method to him (as well as to other representatives of the so-called early phenomenology of Munich and Göttingen), a sort of premature enthusiasm which was not followed by a proper radicalization of the deepest claims of transcendental phenomenology. It is no coincidence then that Pfänder is usually remembered for those contributions in fields of research that are certainly new and innovative (such as phenomenology of the will, motivation, attitudes [Gesinnungen]) but are sometimes considered as marginal attempts to apply a phenomenological-descriptive approach. It would seem, in brief, that Pfänder has neglected the core issues of the phenomenological method. This is, however, a myth that must be dispelled. Thanks largely to the publication of his Nachlaß, it clearly emerges that at the base of Pfänder’s commitment to the above-mentioned issues in phenomenological psychology, there has always been, since the early years of his philosophical reflection, a strong interest and an intense personal investment in the nature and role of

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phenomenology. As Spiegelberg—who, as is well known, wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Munich under the direction of Pfänder— highlights that in a certain sense it is Pfänder’s own personality that induces this kind of evaluation, since there was not “in him any of the all too common academic self-importance and ambition”; by contrast “he worked at an unhurried and steady pace and published most of his works only after having submitted them to the test of prolonged presentation and revision in his lectures. Nothing was more foreign to him than the ostentatious programs and the unfulfilled promises of first volumes.”1 There was in Pfänder a strong intellectual rigor, as von Müller describes him saying that he was an “unbestechlicher Wahrheitssucher,”2 that is an “incorruptible searcher for the truth.” The aim of these pages is therefore to bring to light, in an introductory way, some specific traits of Alexander Pfänder’s phenomenological reflections, in an attempt to understand not only the contribution he made to the historical development of phenomenology but above all to grasp the specific relevance of those questions that he raised. My investigation will develop, therefore, according to the following steps: First, in order to understand who Alexander Pfänder actually was, I will focus on the key moments of his philosophical background and especially on his encounter with Edmund Husserl. It will be the correspondence between the two that will show, in summary, the intense and at the same time problematic relationship of mutual cooperation between the two philosophers. Second, in order to overtake the prejudice about Pfänder’s apparent disregard for the fundamental issues of phenomenological method, I will focus on what phenomenology means for him. My guideline, in this respect, will be a short text by Moritz Geiger, Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung3, which will bring the specific peculiarities of Pfänder’s conception of phenomenology into sharp relief. Third, I will explain the main lines of Pfänder’s phenomenological analyses of motivation and voluntary acts, not only because these analyses have been a constant point of reference for all the subsequent history of phenomenology, from Husserl up to Ricœur, but also because they serve as a concrete example of Pfänder’s phenomenological method.

1 Alexander Pfänder4—born February 7, 1870, in Iserlohn (Germany). After graduating from secondary school in his hometown, he studied at the technische



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Hochschule in Hanover and Munich with the professional aim of becoming an engineer. Reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer attracted him to philosophy— a meaningful element if we take into account Pfänder’s later interest in the problem of will and volition. From 1894 he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the University of Munich, until in 1897 he completed his doctorate under the supervision of Theodor Lipps, with whom he enjoyed a close collaboration. His thesis was titled “Das Bewußtsein des Wollens,” a thesis that he later developed in his Habilitationsschrift “Phänomenologie des Wollens,” published in 1900, to which I will return later. In 1901 Pfänder, along with other Lipps students including Johannes Daubert, founded the Akademisch-Psychologischen Verein, a circle that had been holding regular meetings in order to discuss Lipps’s descriptive psychology. It was precisely during those years, and under the influence of Lipps, that an atmosphere of philosophical interests developed in Pfänder and other mature students, one that would soon lead them to the decisive encounter with Edmund Husserl. The members of the Verein—foremost among them Johannes Daubert5—grasped from the very beginning the disruptive innovation that had burst onto the scene of contemporary thought with the publication of the Logical Investigations. This event soon drove a wedge between the members of the club and Lipps, against whom Husserl had leveled such strong criticism: Lipps tried to defend his psychologism against Husserl’s argumentations, but despite his attempt he saw his best students gradually embracing phenomenology.6 From its first appearance, a whole generation of students recognized the Logical Investigations as the manifestation of an unprecedented philosophical novelty, expressed most concisely by a phrase which became the manifesto of the emerging phenomenological movement: “meanings inspired only by a remote, confused, inauthentic intuitions—if by any intuitions at all—are not enough: we must go back to the ‘things themselves’”.7 In these words, Husserl enclosed, so to speak, the core of phenomenology itself, that is, its will to return to the things themselves, the urgent need for a radical philosophical return to the experiential level, understood as the original locus of manifestation. For this reason the expression “Zu den Sachen selbst!” quickly became the motto of Lipps’s former students in Munich. The first encounter between Husserl and Pfänder took place in May 1904, on the occasion of a conference that Husserl held for the AkademischPsychologischen Verein.8 From that moment an intense cooperation began between the two, as evidenced by their extensive correspondence. It is now only possible to read a part of this correspondence, consisting for the most part in

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letters written by Pfänder, but on the basis of these letters it is however possible to reconstruct what Husserl wrote. There emerges a strong reciprocal appreciation and a particular sense of intellectual affinity. Right after that first meeting, for example, Pfänder communicated to Husserl his astonishment and gratitude at having met someone with whom he felt shared a “surprisingly high accordance with [his] own views.”9 He immersed himself in an enthusiastic study of the Logical Investigations, and he saw in this text the promise to fulfil those theoretical demands that he, together with Lipps’s other students, already lived and felt. For this reason, after he had read the text, he wrote to Husserl: The quiet certainty with which you summarize the data, the delicate, cautious manner in which you so subtly and penetratingly analyse data and meanings, are downright admirable and exemplary. Thus your book already makes an exceptional educational impact […] In fact I tended towards the same basic directions, but still quite often only groping in the dark. Now I have received new courage, now I see the light and clear perspectives far in the distance.10

Pfänder found in Husserl a support, therefore, in that path which he was already trying to build following Lipps’s descriptive psychology: he was fighting, indeed, against the attempt to reduce the field of psychical phenomena to a structure in which “sciences of anatomy and physiology […] are the true foundation of psychology.”11 Pfänder does not intend to deny the validity or usefulness of the experimental results of psychophysiology, but at the same time he stresses the impossibility of grasping the core of psychic phenomena by such a method: From this point of view, one can understand why, in Spiegelberg’s words, “the discovery of Husserl’s parallel struggle […] became the basis for the philosophical alliance.”12 The collaboration between Husserl and Pfänder became more intense over time, as proven not only by the numerous letters, but also by Husserl’s notes in his copies of Pfänder’s works and by the explicit or implicit references to Pfänder in Husserl’s manuscripts and works.13 All these materials are clear signs of the high regard that Husserl reserved for the Munich philosopher, such that— as Spiegelberg clearly emphasizes—“before the advent of Heidegger, Husserl thought of Pfänder as the best suited successor for his Freiburg chair.”14 Their correspondence evinces Husserl’s strong appreciation for Pfänder’s Einführung in die Psychologie, published in 1904 (Husserl having read it at the beginning of 1905), given that Pfänder writes to him: “I am very pleased with your appreciation as well as your enjoinder to not be upset by any unfriendly or uncomprehending criticism.”15 Precisely as a consequence of Husserl’s appreciation of Pfänder’s



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text, a few months later Husserl proposed that some Munich phenomenologists, including Pfänder, spend a few weeks with him in Seefeld during the summer holiday, where they took the opportunity to continue and delve deeper into their fruitful philosophical discussion.16 This joint work laid the ground for further intensive cooperation, as between 1920–7 Pfänder was the editor of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, where in 1921 he published his Logik, dedicated to Husserl. A letter from 1922 addressed to Natorp clearly proves that Husserl highly valued Pfänder as a collaborator: I am sorry that you cannot appreciate Pfänder as much as I do […] I consider Pfänder not only a very respectable worker, but also a radical philosophical personality. The departure from Lipps has long blocked his view of the transcendental problems, but in my opinion he is making progress and developing everything in his own, original way, and it is not for nothing that his lectures make such a deep impact; in spite of their dry style.17

The relationship between Husserl and Pfänder, however, is the perfect example of Spiegelberg’s famous expression: the history of phenomenology is a story of “irremediable schisms.”18 The distance between the two philosophers’ positions emerged gradually, to the point of then becoming explicit in an actual estrangement. In fact, it is interesting to note that a year before the letter to Natorp just cited, Husserl writes to Roman Ingarden: “Even Pfänder’s phenomenology is actually something essentially different than mine, and since the constitutive problems never opened out perfectly to him, he—who is otherwise honest and solid—got into a dogmatic metaphysics.”19 The first step to take, then, is to gain a more precise understanding of what phenomenology means for Pfänder.

2 First we must point out that Pfänder first used the term phenomenology independently of Husserl, since he submitted his Phänomenologie des Wollens for the Preisschrift at the University of Munich in 1899,20 that is, before the publication of the Logical Investigations. This should not necessarily be surprising, given that the term “phenomenology” is already recurrent in Lipps’s texts. It should be said, however, that in Pfänder’s text the term “phenomenology” is used only once and only in the title, and during the course of the discussion

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he never bothers to provide any methodological explanations that would spell out the reason for such a terminological choice. It is, however, in this text that Pfänder and Husserl’s shared common purpose and intentions can be clearly seen, prior to their encounter. In order to shed light on the key points of Pfänder’s conception of phenomenology and the main reasons for his disagreement with Husserl’s project, I will refer to a short but very meaningful text by Moritz Geiger: Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung. One reason that makes this text significant is its author: Moritz Geiger was another prominent member of the Munich Circle, who came from the school of Theodor Lipps and who together with Pfänder, Daubert, and others converged on Husserl’s phenomenology following the publication of the Logische Untersuchungen. He attended Husserl’s lectures in Göttingen from 1906 onward, and together with Pfänder published the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung from 1913 until 1930. He taught in Göttingen up to 1933, when he was forced to flee from Germany to the United States because of the Nazis’ rise to power, and there he became professor at Vassar College (New York), as well as visiting professor at Stanford in 1926 and 1935. His main research field was phenomenological aesthetics,21 and more specifically the phenomenology of aesthetic enjoyment,22 though he also dealt with the problem of the unconscious from a phenomenological (and not psychoanalytical) perspective,23 and later also with the topic of existential philosophy.24 Given the proximity between Pfänder and Geiger and their shared belonging to the so-called early Munich phenomenology, Geiger’s text serves as a sort of brief manifesto of their conception of phenomenology. Indeed Pfänder states explicitly in 1935, in his Philosophie auf phänomenologischer Grundlage (his more programmatic text published posthumously by Spiegelberg): “Unter Phänomenologie versteht man heute noch Verschiedenes,”25 [nowadays under the heading “phenomenology” people still understand different things]. Thus, over the years, the members of the Munich school of phenomenology developed an awareness of being the bearers of an original conception of phenomenology, a concept that has taken a different direction from that of Husserl. And yet there is a shared root. In this text Geiger describes very clearly the decisive element of the Husserlian program that was so attractive to Pfänder and the others: “the pure self-givenness had to be taken as the foundation without any limitation by sensory-intuitive or idealistic prejudices, without reducing reality to a not-given sphere.”26 In the Logical Investigations Pfänder saw the fulfillment of an expectation that he had already for a long time, as—to



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use Geiger’s expression—“the main difference between phenomenology and all the other philosophical directions of the past” lies in the fact that it is “the first attempt to let the Gegebenheiten as such speak, in all the fullness of their being, in their proliferation across all the regions of the world. The passion of phenomenology is to see distinctions.”27 From this point of view it is reasonable, therefore, to say that in his Phänomenologie des Wollens “the fundamental idea of pure phenomenology is consciously and methodically put into practice”28 (although, as it has been said, there is no trace of a systematic explanation of phenomenology as a method). Pfänder in fact calls his analyses a phenomenology of the will since he is not concerned with investigating and determining the causes behind voluntary acts, but rather “first of all the psychological facts themselves, therefore primarily the consciousness of the will.”29 It is therefore misleading, according to Pfänder, to construct psychological theories before going through a careful observation of the real content of conscious experiences; on the contrary, “the achievement of laws of psychical events must come from the investigation of the immediate facts of consciousness.”30 If Pfänder and the Munich phenomenologists enthusiastically welcomed the call to go back to the things themselves, that is back to a methodological observation of experience as the foundation for a descriptive and realistic psychology, it is also true that their path soon parted from Husserl’s. As Geiger states: from the common starting point of self-givenness it is possible to reach different conclusions about reality. Already at the beginning of the collaboration among the phenomenologists, the difference in the conception of the phenomenological method as well as the philosophical problem of reality could not remain hidden to those who looked more deeply.31

What had attracted Lipps’s students was exactly what Geiger calls the “Wendung zum Objekt” (turning to the object), which Pfänder “completely absorbed and thought through.” This turn came from the “resumption and consequent rethinking of the concept of intention as Husserl had carried them out in the Logical Investigations.”32 However from the very beginning there was a substantial difference looming on the horizon, since Husserl “already in the Logical Investigations had focused not so much on the analysis of the given, as on the given’s manner of being-given […] This meant from the beginning a ‘turn towards the subject’, which certainly did not set aside the turn towards the object (but rather even presupposed it), nor did it have to be interpreted idealistically from the start.”33 And if Husserl, according to Geiger, had soon taken the road towards a form of idealism, Pfänder instead followed a different path and

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remained faithful to the following principle: “A seen house gives itself as real, it is then to be taken as real.”34 This is the realistic accent of Munich phenomenology. The distance between Husserl and Pfänder becomes more pronounced if we consider one of the key points of Husserl’s phenomenological method, namely the phenomenological reduction. As Husserl says on several occasions, the most serious fault of the Munich phenomenologists stems from their lack of understanding of the reduction.35 Yet even in this case, we find two different paths that have a shared beginning. Indeed, it must be emphasized that in Pfänder’s reflections there is no absolute denial of the role of the reduction, but rather, on the contrary, he recognizes the need for an act that opens phenomenological reflection. In his Phänomenologie des Wollens, with respect to the analysis of the specific theme of the will, he states: Now the human will may or may not be the basic function of the human psychic life; all mental processes may be nothing more than the will’s modes of expression, all psychic events may or may not be basically a volition; in any case all such general assertions must first of all be suspended.36

According to Pfänder, “phenomenology is a philosophical science, which has a specific method.”37 This method presupposes that egological acts must be understood through their givenness, the manifestation of these acts themselves, and therefore all theories or assumptions that precede a careful observation of psychic events has to be suspended. During a conference entitled “Erkenntnislehre und Phänomenologie” given in Prague in 1929, Pfänder clearly expresses his conception of the phenomenological attitude, when he states that “the supposed foundations of knowledge, experience as well as cognition of objects, first of all requires a more thorough and unprejudiced investigation. Phenomenology will deal with this. It must guard against possible errors from the beginning, by seeking to gain the proper phenomenological attitude.”38 This does not, however, negate the main differences between Husserl’s and Pfänder’s conceptions of the phenomenological method. Spiegelberg rightly observes “that Pfänder never speaks in his own philosophy of reduction, but almost always only of epoché, sometimes of Urteilsenthaltung (suspension of judgment) or of Glaubensenthaltung (suspension of belief).”39 But it is not just a terminological difference. What Pfänder means by “epoché” is above all “a preventive agent against the threat”40 of naive or ideological assumptions or theoretical assumptions and against the risk of misunderstandings, which everyday language carries within itself.41



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Yet these preventative measures do not exhaust Husserl’s conception of the phenomenological reduction. If phenomenology presents itself from the Logical Investigations onwards as a return to experience, it becomes clear that the experience to which the phenomenological gaze has to return is the transcendental level of experience, i.e., that level of experience where all appearance is constituted. Every day we live at the level of already constituted experience, in which the world appears as a network of validity and meanings. After submitting the naive pre-givenness of this experience to the bracketing of the epoché and to the gaze of the phenomenological reduction, it is possible to interrogate the “constituted” in order to reach back to the “constitution,” that is, to grasp the intentional operations without which such an experience would be meaningless. It is by virtue of this constitution that what we experience appears to us as significant. It was precisely Husserl’s increasing insistence on the topic of constitution and on the link between phenomenology, phenomenological reduction, and constitution that provoked the disapproval of Pfänder and of the first Munich phenomenologists. For Husserl, only a transcendental phenomenology can attain the new, wished-for authentic realism, while for Pfänder, speaking about constitution implies an overstepping of the level of givenness and an unavoidable idealistic outcome. As previously reported, Pfänder acknowledges that “nowadays under the heading ‘phenemenology’ people still understand different things.” Precisely in order to bring the peculiarities of Pfänder’s phenomenological path into focus, in the following pages I will turn to his famous analysis of the category of motivation, because it is here that we find evidence for what Geiger’s claim that “Pfänder’s philosophy is completely devoted to description […] Pfänder does not accept as a basis any explanatory laws that cannot be found in what is given […] but rather only recognizes laws that are self-given.”42

3 The text I will focus on in particular is Motive und Motivation, the essay that Pfänder wrote in 1911 on the occasion of Lipps’s sixtieth birthday. This short text is in fact the one where he explores the category of motivation most fully, and it is also the text—as Karl Schuhmann reports with precision—that Husserl worked upon “more intensively than with any other of Pfänder’s work,” as Ms. A VI 3, 47–56 reveals, in which Husserl follows “step by step each of Pfänder’s Denkbewegung.”43 These manuscript pages, together with

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other manuscripts, constitute what is called the Pfänder-Konvolut, that is, the collection of manuscripts that are marked by the abbreviation “Pf ” because of their connection to topics or issues that have to do with Pfänder and that for the most part are included in the edition of the three volumes Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins.44 The issue of motivation, together with the topic of will and voluntary acts, is understandably one of the central themes of Pfänder’s philosophical thinking and Husserl’s phenomenology as well. If, as has been said earlier, the main motor of his reflection is to build a phenomenological descriptive psychology that must be free from the schemes of mechanistic naturalism, then it becomes clear why the will and motivation become key issues. In fact, even before Husserl and Pfänder, the term “motivation” had long been at the center of philosophical debate thanks to Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, and Theodor Lipps, just to mention a few of all those who, although with different methods and intentions, wanted to identify and highlight the specificity of the connections and laws that are at work within the psychical dimension. It is therefore crucial to note that Husserl’s and Pfänder’s work on the relationship between motivation and causality arise in the context of this debate. Pfänder was of course introduced to the topic of motivation by his teacher Lipps, who, in his publications around the mid-1910s, attempted to demonstrate that causation and motivation are two essentially different kinds of connection. He writes in his Leitfaden der Psychologie: “The causal relationships provide the context of the recognized real material world; motivational relationships denote the immediately experienced context of the life of consciousness.”45 He aims at recognizing the peculiarity of consciousness life over against the causal order of natural things. Summarizing the content of Motive und Motivation very briefly, we can say that in these pages Pfänder means to identify the specificity of motivation by claiming that the specifically psychical type of connection is at work only in a limited class of acts, i.e., the acts of will. He illustrates what a genuine motive is through a simple example: a person walks into a room, feels cold, and decides on the basis of the perceived cold to leave the room. In this case, the perception of cold is the reason for the action, and “motivates” the decision to leave the room. At this point the question arises as to what the essential characteristics of a motivation are for Pfänder. He lists three. (I) The first feature is the “phenomenal causation of a mental listening to demands” [die phänomenale Verursachung des geistigen Hinhörens auf Forderungen]. An object reaches the ego centripetally (in this case the perceived cold) so that “the ego-center



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turns toward it not only through attention and apperception, but also through internal and spiritual listening.”46 The ego is in a “Fragehaltung” (“interrogative position”), which is not necessarily explicit. (II) The second element is what he calls the “examination of the claim, its recognition and approval” [das Vernehmen der Forderung; ihre Anerkennung und Billigung]. It is “a cognitive recognition, namely the comprehension of an ideal indication of what I should do.” The perceived cold thus initiates a special kind of recognition, which, in Pfänder’s words, is not a “Seins-Erkenntnis” or a “Wert-Erkenntnis,” but a “Sollens-Erkenntnis,”47 that is, a motivation that pushes the subject to take a particular decision, to perform a certain action. In this specific case, the subject feels and understands that he should leave the room, as leaving is more appropriate to the felt need. (III) At this point, the third element comes into play, that is the “execution of the act of will and its support from the reason” [Vollzug des Willensaktes und seine Stützung auf den Grund]. Here there arises, in addition to the cognitive recognition, the practical one, which consists in the execution of the act of will. Pfänder summarizes: “The perceived coldness really becomes the reason for the act of will only when the ego bases its execution of this act of will on the demanding-cold, when the ego establishes and deduces the act of will from the demand.”48 Only when all these conditions are met can one rightly speak of a motivational relationship. Pfänder stresses, however, that what he calls “demand” [Forderung]49 is not to be confused with a simple inclination, or Strebung. Naturally when I feel cold, the perception of cold provokes a certain inclination and the ego feels moved by an impulse, but the practical demands that concern the motivation are definitively something else. Pfänder reinforces his thesis by claiming that when considering impulses and motivations, we find ourselves in front of two “different spheres of the soul,”50 that is the “Seelengeist” and the “Seelenleib.” For example, if someone engaged in a conversation notices a piece of candy, and without thinking grabs it and swallows it, in this case the perception of the candy does not constitute a motivation of action because it is simply the awakening of an impulse and not the consenting adhesion to the execution of an action. Motives are “ideal indications” that the ego “perceives”; they therefore do not exercise any coercive force on the ego. A motivation cannot be something that grasps the ego; rather motivation is the subject’s initiative transforming the inwardly felt inclination in order to realize a new action. Pfänder’s position nevertheless leaves some problematic issues open, which Husserl seems to be aware of, when in one of the papers belonging to the so-called Pfänder-Konvolut regarding Motive und Motivation, he writes:

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This is not the place to enter into the details of a comparison between the concept of motivation in Pfänder and Husserl, or to shed light on the problematic aspects of Motive und Motivation. Instead, our interest lies in clarifying in what sense this text constitutes a concrete example of the peculiarities of Pfänder’s phenomenology.

4 Concluding remarks After having presented Pfänder’s careful and precise analyses of motivation, the relevance of Geiger’s statement that “seeing distinctions is the passion of phenomenology” becomes all the more evident.52 For Pfänder, phenomenology is primarily a discipline that, thanks to the method of the Urteils-/Glaubensenthaltung, is based on the pure givenness of Bewusstseinserlebnisse. It thus clarifies the essential connections among the acts of consciousness in their different modalities, in order to clarify the intrinsic peculiarities of each domain and clearly establishes the differences between the various phenomena of consciousness. Pfänder faithfully and accurately follows the course already charted by Brentano and Lipps, i.e., the foundation of a descriptive and realistic psychology. Pfänder worked towards seizing essential distinctions between the dimension of the will and the more general dimension of striving, between a true voluntary Stellungnahme and the more general domain of wishes and desires, between motivation and causation, etc., in order to reconstruct a clear and precise map of the variety of acts and phenomena of consciousness, each of them captured in their essential relationships and modalities. Pfänder’s phenomenological psychology aims at grasping the givenness of egological experiences and at describing them accurately, in order to obtain fundamental psychological knowledge. The peculiarity of phenomenology is then in fact to embody the point of view of the thinking-living-feeling subject and to achieve—while remaining faithful to the first-person perspective—the Wendung zum Objekt, the “turn towards the object.” If Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology betrayed—from the point of view of Pfänder and of other early phenomenologists—the promise of



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the Logical Investigations “to return to the things themselves,” it is because it looked away from pure self-givenness of the object in order to achieve the Wendung zum Subjekt which aims at grasping the constitutive level of manifestness, a level that, according to Pfänder, falls outside pure Gegebenheit.

Notes 1 H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (The Hague 1960), p. 171. 2 K. A. Von Müller: “Der junge Privatdozent im Winter 1902/03” (in H. Spiegelberg and E. Avé-Lallemant (eds) Pfänder-Studien. Nijhoff: Dordrecht 1982), p. 328. 3 M. Geiger, “Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung” (in E. Heller and F. Löw (eds): Neue Münchener philosophische Abhandlungen. Leipzig: Barth, 1933), pp. 1–16. 4 For a detailed biography of Alexander Pfänder see A. Meyer and H. Meyer, Alexander Pfänder Ein Leben für die Philosophie (Hemer: Bürger- und Heimatverein, 2001). 5 Herbert Spiegelberg reports the famous episode that initiate the common path: “Then, as tradition has it, one day in 1903 Husserl received the visit of an unknown student of philosophy from Munich, who was said to have come all the way on his bicycle. From 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. Husserl discussed the Logische Untersuchungen with him, in whom he recognized, the first person who had really read the book. This conversation was easily the most important single event in the history of the Munich Phenomenological Circle,” (H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 171). 6 However, it has to be specified that the philosophical itinerary of Lipps and his relationship with phenomenology is much more complex than how it is too often described, as demonstrated by the fact that Husserl himself, in the preface to the second edition of his Logical Investigations (1913), corrected his previous criticism of Lipps; see R. N. Smid, “’Münchener Phänomenologie’ – Zur Frühgeschichte des Begriffs”, in Spiegelberg and Avé-Lallemant, Pfänder Studien, p. 114ff. 7 E. Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. I (trans J. N. Finley. London: Routledge 1970), 252. 8 See K. Schuhmann, Die Dialektik der Phänomenologie I. Husserl über Pfänder, (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 19ff. 9 “[…] überraschend große Übereinstimmung mit [meinen] eigenen Ansichten” (E. Husserl, Husserliana – Dokumente III 2, Die Münchener Schule, Briefwechsel, eds E. Schuhmann and K. Schuhmann. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994, p. 131).

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10 “Die ruhige Sicherheit, mit der Sie die Thatsachen ins Auge fassen, die delikate, behutsame Weise, in der Sie so feinsinnig und eindringend die Thatsachen und Bedeutungen analysieren, sind geradezu bewundernswert und vorbildlich. Dadurch kommt Ihrem Buch schon eine außerordentliche erzieherische Wirkung zu. […] Zwar tendierte ich schon nach den gleichen Grundrichtungen, aber doch noch vielfach ganz im Dunkeln tastend. Nun habe ich neuen Mut bekommen, nun sehe ich Licht und klare Perspektiven bis in weite Fernen” (E. Husserl, Husserliana – Dokumente III 2, pp. 132–3). 11 “beide Wissenschaften der Anatomie und der Physiologie […] die wahre Grundlage der Psychologie bilden” (A. Pfänder, Einführung in die Psychologie, Leipzig: Barth, 1904, p. 95). 12 H. Spiegelberg, Alexander Pfänders Phänomenologie, (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), p. 6. 13 For a complete overview of Husserl’s notes and comments on Pfänder’s in both his books and the manuscripts collected as Husserl’s “Pfänder Konvolut” see K. Schuhmann, Die Dialektik der Phänomenologie I. Husserl über Pfänder, pp. 29ff. 14 H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 171. 15 “Ich freue mich sehr über Ihre Anerkennung und über Ihre Anmunterung, mich nicht durch unfreundliche oder verständnißlose Kritik verärgern zu lassen” (E. Husserl, Husserliana – Dokumente III 2, 133). 16 See K. Schuhmann, Die Dialektik der Phänomenologie I. Husserl über Pfänder, pp. 128 ff. 17 “Es thut mir Leid, daß Sie Pfänder nicht so schätzen können wie ich es muß […]. Aber Ihnen gegenüber kann ich nicht anders als offen sein und muß also sagen, daß ich Pfänder nicht nur für einen grundsoliden Arbeiter, sondern für eine radicalphilosophische Persönlichkeit halte. Der Ausgang von Lipps hat ihm lange den Blick für die transzendentalen Probleme versperrt, aber er ist in seiner m.E. originellen, sich alles selbsterarbeitenden Art fort und fort geschritten und seine Vorlesungen üben nicht umsonst eine tiefgehende Wirkung; trotz ihrer nüchternen Art” (E. Husserl, Husserliana – Dokumente III 5: Die Neukantianer, Briefwechsel, p. 149). 18 H. Spiegelberg, “Epoché und Reduktion bei Pfänder und Husserl” (in Spiegelberg and Avé-Lallemant, Pfänder – Studien), p. 3. 19 E. Husserl, Husserliana – Dokumente III 3: Die Göttinger Schule, Briefwechsel, p. 215. 20 See R. N. Smid, “Münchener Phänomenologie”, p. 115. 21 Concerning Geiger’s phenomenological aesthetics, see M. C. Beardsley, “Experience and Value in Moritz Geiger’s Aesthetics” (in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 16.1. 1985, pp. 6–19). 22 See M. Geiger, “Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses” (in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 1. 1913, pp. 567–684).



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23 We find an important contribution to this issue in his Fragment über den Begriff des Unbewussten und die psychische Realität: Geiger’s analysis of unerlebtes Wollen pertains to the phenomenon of the will in its entirety, rather than disregarding its subconscious component. See M. Geiger, Fragment über den Begriff des Unbewussten und die psychische Realität (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1930). See also L Feroldi, “La realtà psichica e l’inconscio in Moritz Geiger” (in S. Besoli and L. Guidetti (eds) Il realismo fenomenologico. Sulla filosofia dei circoli di Monaco e Gottinga, Macerata: Quodlibet, 2000, pp. 481–99). 24 See M. Geiger, “An Introduction to Existential Philosophy”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 3 (3) (1934). 25 A. Pfänder, Philosophie auf phänomenologischer Grundlage. Einleitung in die Philosophie und Phänomenologie (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1973), p. 23. 26 “Die reine Selbstgegebenheit sollte zu Worte kommen, ohne Einschränkung durch sinlllich-anschauliche oder idealistische vorurteile, ohne Tieferlegung der Realität in eine nichtgegebene Sphäre” (M. Geiger, Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung, p. 3). 27 “Hier liegt vielleicht der prinzipiellste Unterschied der Phänomenologie gegenüber allen philosophischen Richtungen der Vergangenheit. Es ist der erste Versuch, die Gegebenheiten rein als solche sprechen zu lassen, in der ganzen Fülle ihres Seins, in der Ausbreitung über alle Gebiete der Welt. Die Differenzen zu sehen ist die Leidenschaft der Phänomenologie” (M. Geiger, Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung, p. 4). 28 “der Grundgedanke der reinen Phänomenologie bewußt und methodisch durchgeführt ist” (M. Geiger, Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung, p. 4). 29 “zunächst der psychische Tatbestand selbst, also in erster Linie das Bewusstsein des Wollens, untersucht und festgelegt sein” (A. Pfänder, Phänomenologie des Wollens. Eine psychologische Analyse, Leipzig: Barth, 1900, p. 9). Paul Ricœur, who on several occasions has acknowledged a debt to Pfänder, states that the peculiarity of Pfänder’s phenomenology of will lies in “[…] la description du vouloir dans une appréhension directe de son phénomène”; see P. Ricoeur, “Phénoménologie du vouloir et approche par le langage ordinaire” (in Spiegelberg and Avé-Lallemant, Pfänder-Studien, p. 93). 30 “die Gewinnung von Gesetzen des psychischen Geschehens muss von der Untersuchung der unmittelbaren Bewusstseinstatsachen ausgehen” (A. Pfänder, Phänomenologie des Wollens. Eine psychologische Analyse, p. 9). 31 “Von dem gemeinsamen Ausgangspunkt der Selbstgegebenheit aus läßt sich zu verschiedenartigen Folgerungen über die Realität gelangen. Schon in den Anfangstagen des Zusammenarbeitens der Phänomenologen konnten die Unterschiede der Auffassung der phänomenologischen Methode, sowie des philosophischen Realitätsproblems dem Tieferblickenden nicht verborgen bleiben” (M. Geiger, Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung, p. 12).

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32 M. Geiger, Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung, p. 13. 33 “in den Logischen Untersuchungen nicht so sehr die Analyse des Gegebenen, sondern die Art des Gegebenseins des Gegebenen ins Auge gefaßt hatte […].Das bedeutete von Anfang an eine ‚Wendung ins Subjektive‘, die freilich weder die Wendung zum Objekt wieder aufhob (vielmehr sie gerade voraussetzte), noch von vornherein idealistisch ausgedeutet werden mußte” (M. Geiger, Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung, p. 15). 34 “Ein gesehenes Haus gibt sich als real, also muß es als real hingenommen werden”, (M. Geiger, Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung, p. 15). 35 H. Spiegelberg, “Epoché und Reduktion bei Pfänder und Husserl,” p. 6. 36 “Mag nun das menschliche Wollen die Grundfunktion des menschlichen psychischen Lebens sein oder nicht; mögen alle psychischen Vorgänge nichts weiter sein als Äusserungsweisen des Willens, mag also alles psychische Geschehen im Grunde ein Wollen sein oder nicht; jedenfalls müssen alle derartigen allgemeinen Behauptungen zunächst suspendiert werden” (A. Pfänder, Phänomenologie des Wollens. Eine psychologische Analyse, p. 9). 37 A. Pfänder, Philosophie aus phänomenologischer Grundlage, p. 146. 38 “Die vermeintlichen Grundlagen der Erkenntnis, sowohl Erfahrung als auch Denken der Gegenstände, bedürfen zunächst einer gründlicheren und unbefangeneren Untersuchung. Diese will die Phänomenologie vornehmen. Sie muß sich von vornherein gegen mögliche Verirrungen schützen, indem sie die richtige phänomenologische Einstellung zu gewinnen sucht” (A. Pfänder. Philosophie aus phänomenologischer Grundlage, pp. 147–8). 39 H. Spiegelberg, “Epoché und Reduktion bei Pfänder und Husserl,” pp. 10–11. 40 H. Spiegelberg, “Epoché und Reduktion bei Pfänder und Husserl,” p. 13. 41 See K. Schuhmann, “Bewusstseinsforschung und Bewusstsein in Pfänders Phänomenologie des Wollens” (in Spiegelberg and Avé-Lallemant Pfänder-Studien), pp. 164–7; see too P. Ricoeur, “Phénoménologie du vouloir et approche par le langage ordinaire”, in the same volume, pp. 79–96. 42 “Pfänder’s Philosophie ist ganz auf Deskription gestellt […] Nicht etwa legt Pfänder’s Erklärungsgesetze zugrunde, die im Gegebenen nicht auffindbar sind, […] sondern es werden nur Gesetze anerkannt, die selbst gegeben sind” (M. Geiger, Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung, p. 11). 43 K. Schuhmann, Die Dialektik der Phänomenologie I. Husserl über Pfänder, pp. 94–5. 44 The Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins collect a substantial amount of Husserl’s manuscripts, deriving for the most part from the group A VI and the group A I. These materials were sorted, transcribed, and synthesized by Ludwig Landgrebe, whose work is now collected in the manuscripts classified under the signature M III 3 I-III. The edition in the Husserliana series, eds Prof. Ullrich Melle und Prof. Thomas Vongehr, is the publication of Husserl’s original manuscripts, collected in



45

46 47 48 49

50 51 52

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three volumes and dealing respectively with intellect, feeling, and will. For further consideration see U. Melle, “Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins: Husserls Beitrag zu einer phänomenologischen Psychologie”, (in Feeling and Value, Willing and Action: Essays in the Context of a Phenomenological Psychology, M. Ubiali and M. Wehrle (eds). Dordrecht: Springer, 2015. pp. 3–11); see too T. Vongehr “Husserl über Gemüt und Gefühl in den Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins” (in B. Centi and G. Gigliotti (eds), Fenomenologia della ragion pratica, Naples: Bibliopolis, 2004, pp. 229–51). “Die kausalen Beziehungen stellen den Zusammenhang der erkannten dinglich realen Welt her; die Motivationsbeziehungen bezeichnen den unmittelbar erlebten Zusammenhang des Bewußtseinslebens” (T. Lipps, Leitfaden der Psychologie, Saarbrücken: Vdm Verlag Dr. Müller, 2006, p. 29). A. Pfänder, Phänomenologie des Wollens. Motive und Motivation (Munich: Barth, 1963), p. 142. A. Pfänder, Phänomenologie des Wollens. Motive und Motivation, pp. 142–3. A. Pfänder, Phänomenologie des Wollens. Motive und Motivation, p. 143. It should be noted that Theodor Lipps had first associated motivation and Forderung, since he writes in his Leitfaden der Psychologie that the “Motivationszusammenhang” [motivational connection] is a “Forderungszusammenhang” [connection of request], (T. Lipps, Leitfaden der Psychologie, p. 29). A. Pfänder, Phänomenologie des Wollens. Motive und Motivation, p. 146. E. Husserl, Ms. A VI 3/5. “Hier liegt vielleicht der prinzipiellste Unterschied der Phänomenologie gegenüber allen philosophischen Richtungen der Vergangenheit. Es ist der erste Versuch, die Gegebenheiten rein als solche sprechen zu lassen, in der ganzen Fülle ihres Seins, in der Ausbreitung über alle Gebiete der Welt. Die Differenzen zu sehen ist die Leidenschaft der Phänomenologie” (M. Geiger, Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung, p. 4).

Part Three

Early Reactions to Phenomenology

7

José Ortega y Gasset’s Anti-idealist Interpretation of Phenomenology Brian Harding

Texas Woman’s University

Not many people read Ortega any more. The days when his work was well known to an English-speaking audience are far gone (in the 1930s and 1940s his books were reviewed in Time Magazine). Today, he appears as a minor figure in the yellowing pages of old anthologies of mid-century existentialism: sic transit gloria mundi. I don’t think he should be so quickly forgotten. As a way of reintroducing Ortega, let us begins with two curious phrases he uses when offering an overview of his philosophical project in the preface to the German translation of his El Tema de nuestro Tiempo, i.e., his Prologue for Germans. The first curious phrase is his apparent dismissal of phenomenology’s claim to be first philosophy or rigorous science: Phenomenology … is incapable of getting into a form or systematic shape. Its inestimable value is in the “fine structure” of fleshy tissue that it is able to offer to the architecture of a system. Whence, phenomenology was not a philosophy for us, it was … a stroke of good luck.1

The second is the self-description of his work as attempting to develop an “anti-idealist interpretation of phenomenology” (PA 48). The juxtaposition of these two passages is odd: why bother developing an anti-idealist version of something that was merely good luck? Even without the juxtaposition, the second phrase is curious: from a Husserlian perspective, it seems paradoxical, and admittedly it is hard to see how one can reconcile anti-idealism with classical phenomenology. Indeed, Ortega alludes to this problem when he writes that Husserl offered the most rigorous and sophisticated version of idealism available, such that it was Husserl’s work that enabled him to see the

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shortcomings of idealism (PA 48, 53–4 and Some Lessons on Metaphysics 186).2 This is why phenomenology was good luck: it enabled Ortega to see what was wrong with idealism; but, having seen the errors of idealism, why continue with phenomenology at all? Why not complete the rejection of idealism by completely rejecting the most rigorous and sophisticated version of idealism, phenomenology?

1 Anti-idealism and realism Ortega’s anti-idealism is sometimes claimed as a precursor to “speculative realism”—this is Graham Harmon’s strategy in his Guerilla Metaphysics.3 On this reading, Ortega’s anti-idealistic interpretation of phenomenology in fact goes beyond Husserlian and Heideggerian concern with a philosophy of access and offers an object-oriented philosophy instead. So, for Harmon, Ortega’s principle concern is with the object itself, and not how we have access to the object. Harmon’s Ortega is, simply put, a realist. Yet his reading of Ortega rests mainly on one early essay, Ortega’s 1914 “An Essay on Esthetics by Way of a Preface,” and for that reason is a bit misleading. We can point to two reasons in particular, but before we do that I should explain why it is only a bit misleading. In fact, Harmon’s approach to the essay is, in broad strokes, remarkably similar to that of Julian Marias—Ortega’s former student and colleague—who reads the essay as an early moment in Ortega’s overcoming [superación] of phenomenology.4 In both Harmon’s and Marias’s interpretation, the central point of this 1914 essay turns on Ortega’s claim that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the image of something and the experience of that same thing: “When I sense a sorrow [dolor], when I love or hate, I do not see my sorrow nor see my love or hate.”5 This passage is cited in both AO (144) and GM (106). I only become aware of sorrow, love, hate, and so forth as intentional objects when my sorrowing, loving, hating is interrupted and transforming it from something I undergo into something I look at. In so doing, Ortega continues, I transform it into a foreign object, rather than a part of myself. Here the attentive reader might notice some similarities between Ortega’s position and that of Michel Henry. When Ortega writes of the unbridgeable gulf between “a pain someone talks about” and “a pain I feel”—i.e., that that affective states cannot be understood in terms of Husserlian intentionality—one imagines that Henry would agree.6 He does not experience pain as the image of something, but experiences the pain as pain. The feeling of pain is inseparable from the appearance of pain.



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But as soon as we note this harmony, a discordant note is introduced: according to Henry, everything is given twice, first in terms of auto-affectivity and then, secondarily, in terms of object intentionality (MP 17); for Ortega things aren’t given in terms of anything. In fact, phenomenology’s reductions bracket precisely the most fundamental characteristics of both the self and things—its performative [ejecutivo] nature—to focus on a stationary subjectivity, repeating the “pecado original” of the modern age, idealism (EEP 253; AO 144). In all this, we can see why Harmon—despite Ortega’s resonances with Henry—would read Ortega the way he does. Before moving on, I have to address an issue of translation, in particular the translation of ejecutivo at its cognates. Harmon prefers to take the term as “executant” rather than the more alternative rendering as “performative.”7 His rational is as follows: Ortega’s “executancy” has nothing in common with what is now called “performativity” despite their apparent meeting point in the German word Vollzug. Performativity is a recent concept designed to combat all notions of hidden essence, which it replaces with a kind of nominalist essence fabricated on the outside by a series of public actions. Execution, by contrast, is an essentialist concept through and through, even if not in the traditional sense of an essence that could be made present in an adequate logos. Rather than list the essential properties that the philosopher could gradually make visible, the executancy of a thing is a dark and stormy essence that exceeds such properties. (GM 104)

A number of questions arise here, most notably: If the philosopher cannot give an adequate logos of the executant essence of something, does he have the right to talk about it? In other words, if the truest essence of something is always going to be concealed from the philosopher, if he is limited only to how the object in questions “publically” behaves, why posit any deep essence behind that behavior? The more cautious position, it seems to me, is to say that if executant essence exceeds the abilities of philosophers, then philosophers ought to avoid it altogether. In any case, it is far from clear that this is Ortega’s position. His account of objects in later works suggest—as I will show later—a kind of nominalism. He does come close to something like Harmon’s position at times—e.g., in the just quoted passages, or in What is Knowledge where he says that the true reality of a thing, apart from our interpretations of it, is terrifying.8 When our beliefs fall into doubt, the terrible mysteriousness of the world appears, which Ortega compares to drowning or living through an earthquake.

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So, Harmon is not altogether out of line to want to separate ejecutivo from performativity. But, despite the correctness of the above, it is only a partial reading. First of all, despite Ortega’s criticism of idealism, and indeed of phenomenology, he is equally critical of realism; whence, Marias writes: But—and this is decisive—to eliminate the possibility of the phenomenological reduction, seeing that one cannot escape the performative, Ortega does not return to what Husserl called the “natural attitude” in the sense of realism. Ortega’s position consists precisely in the overcoming of things (la superación de las cosas), and thus, of all realisms. (AO 146)

As Ortega makes clear in other writings, e.g., What is Philosophy?, the point of his overcoming of idealism is to go beyond it, not return us to realism. Ortega believes that Descartes and his idealist heirs were quite correct in their rejection of classical realism.9 Idealism is rejected as an insufficient account of our access to objects rather than rejected in the name of object-oriented philosophy. For Ortega, the error of idealism was the substantive claim that objects are accessible by means of consciousness, not the methodological point that philosophers have to give an account of how we access objects. In short, Ortega agrees with the idealist that we must explain how objects are given to us, but disagrees with the idealist’s explanation (QF 363–5). Ortega believes that the moderns were right to turn away from naive realism to ask about how we have access to objects, but they gave the wrong answer. It is not that we have access to objects in consciousness but in life. Ortega’s objection to the modern idealism, including phenomenology as he sees it, is not that it is insufficiently realist, but that it is insufficiently radical in its rejection of realism. While it turned away from naïve realism about the external world, it remained naïve in its realism about concepts, including especially the concept of “consciousness.” The overcoming of idealism championed by Ortega thus ratifies and continues the idealist critique of realism and remains a “philosophy of access.” Our philosophical theories are tools for living, not insights into the nature of reality or the mind; whence he claims that his descriptions of life are merely preparatory to an ethics—his goal is “to incite you to have care [cuidado] of your lives” (ULM 45).10 We shall return to this point later, but for now it is enough to point out that for Ortega the choice between realism and idealism is a false dilemma. There is a third option that he sometimes calls ratiovitalismo (AO 147). Ortega is quite cagey about objects themselves. Despite his references to terror, earthquakes, and drowning, Ortega for the most part says that objects



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are primarily what they are to us. Indeed, Ortega seems to deny that objects could have any essence apart from this performance: “The authentic reality of the earth has no shape, no mode of being.”11 To make a new beginning, and to introduce my own interpretive scheme, I should mention that contrary to Harmon’s take on Ortega, a phenomenological reading of Ortega seems predominant in Spanish-speaking countries.12 Indeed, recently Javier San Martín has shown that that phenomenology runs through Ortega’s work like a red thread despite the pains he takes to distance his work from particular phenomenologists.13 San Martín is particularly interested in working out the relationship between Ortega and Husserlian phenomenology, both as it was known to Ortega and as it is known to us in the wake of recent publications from the Husserl archives. While I agree with San Martín that a phenomenological reading of Ortega is the most profitable, I will take a slightly different approach to that reading. Rather than trace out detailed comparisons with Husserl or Heidegger, I will follow a method suggested by Jean-Luc Marion in Reduction and Givenness, wherein different kinds of phenomenology are sorted in terms of the kind of reduction they employ. Whence, according to Marion, Husserl’s phenomenology is said to offer a reduction to objectness, i.e., things are considered only insofar as they are intentional objects. Likewise, Heidegger’s movement away from Husserl is presented as a reduction to being: Heidegger does not consider things simply insofar as they are given to consciousness, but insofar as they are beings. Finally, Marion claims to offer a third reduction, the reduction to givenness, that thinks things neither in terms of objectness nor in terms of being, but only insofar as they are given.14 I am not interested in addressing the substantive philosophical claims made by Marion in Reduction and Givenness and elsewhere, but only adapting his schema as a way of initially approaching Ortega as phenomenologist. In a nutshell: Ortega’s anti-idealist interpretation of phenomenology can be classified as offering a fourth kind of reduction: the reduction to life. The reduction to life addresses phenomena in terms of how we live with them rather than how we are conscious of them (PA 53); as such the reduction to life is the entry into Ortega’s antiidealistic interpretation of phenomenology. I will begin by showing how Ortega understands the two major terms—“reduction” and “life.” Following this, I will address his distinction between reparar and contar con and the relevance of this for phenomenology.

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2 Ortega’s reduction The problem that immediately faces an interpretation of Ortega’s work as a fourth type of reduction, a reduction to life, is that he doesn’t use that word very often, and, even more problematically, seems to think that the idea of a reduction is wrongheaded: The most inveterate mistake has been to believe that philosophy must discover a new reality that only appears under philosophy’s lens, when the character of reality, in contrast to thought [pensamiento] consists precisely in already being there beforehand, preceding the thought [en precede al pensamiento]. Thus, the great discovery that it can make is to recognize itself as essentially secondary and the result of a preexisting reality. (PA 53)

So for Ortega, it seems that Husserl’s idea that one must bracket the natural attitude as a precondition to philosophizing authentically is not only wrong, but also the kind of mistake that takes us further from the things themselves rather than closer to them. Ortega’s argument is a simple one and certainly contestable. My goal here is not to defend Ortega’s account (although I think it is defensible) but to lay out the broad outlines for the sake of understanding his view of the difference between himself and Husserl.15 When we execute the phenomenological reduction and address things simply as objects of consciousness, we lose the most important aspects of the things: their priority to consciousness. In so doing, we lose track of the performative character of things; this claim is, as Javier San Martín puts it, the nucleus of Ortega’s critique of Husserl (FOG 165). Moreover, Ortega continues, this pure consciousness is—despite protestations to the contrary—neither indubitable nor irrefragable. Instead, it is the product of the philosopher’s manipulations, i.e., the various reductions employed by Husserl (PA 48–9). According to Ortega, the necessity of the reduction in accessing consciousness testifies to the constructed and perhaps even ad hoc nature of “pure” consciousness. When I am actively doing something, seeing something, and so forth I am—as even Husserl admits—typically doing so in the natural attitude. It is only when I pause, when I cease to act and engage in the reduction that I encounter objects in terms of “consciousness of …” A transcendental phenomenological account of something is primarily, Ortega argues, the account of a memory not the account of an actual livedexperience: phenomenology is only a peculiar way of remembering (ULM 205–6, 219–20). To be sure, the Husserlian phenomenologist has every right to engage in this kind of reflection, but she must admit (according to Ortega) that



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in doing so she sacrifices reality and replaces it with an ersatz abstraction of philosophers, as he puts it: “Pure Consciousness … makes a ghost [espectraliza] of the world” (PA 48). Likewise, in Some Lessons on Metaphysics he dismisses Husserl’s reduction as a “swindle” [escamoteo] that turns everything into thought (ULM 198); he uses the same term discussing idealism more generally later in the same text (ULM 216). This is surely the Ortegan move that speculative realists like Harmon find attractive, and rightly so, but it only part of the whole story, for it is not that Ortega rejects all reductions but only reductions that prioritize consciousness over life. As he puts it in “History as System,” the human being is not identical to Geist and the interpretation of the human being in those terms was bound to be “violent, arbitrary and a failure.”16 Instead, if one wishes to be faithful to reality, one must disintellectualize [desintelectualizar] it, returning from the transcendental structures of the idealist to the disorderly mess that is life (HCS 30). The reduction to life is Ortega’s method for deintellectualizing the real. Any reduction that Ortega could countenance will perforce be one that emphasizes, rather than marginalizes, the priority of the life and the things one lives with over thought. This, as I will argue later, is what happens in the reduction to life. But before getting to that point, I want to dwell a bit on Ortega’s appreciation of Husserl, lest my presentation seem one-sided. While he rejects the Husserlian reduction, he does agree with Husserl that something must be done to prepare the philosopher for philosophy. In this sense, as I mentioned before, he remains what Harmon would term a philosopher of access, i.e., a philosopher concerned with explaining how we have access to objects, rather than the objects themselves. But this preparation does not take the form of a phenomenological epoché as the “transcendental” Husserl began to conceive it; one might say that instead of bracketing the natural attitude, the Ortegan reduction seeks to dive deeper into it.17 This immersion in the ordinary, Ortega maintains, marks his reduction as antithetical to the various forms of idealism he was familiar with. One of the few times he uses the word “reduction,” he writes: “the question involved reducing [reducir]—it is nothing less than that—every known modality of being or concept of reality to another one which is altogether novel” (QC 117). The novelty consists in an interpretation of commonplace, non-philosophical experience, rather than, as with traditional phenomenology, reduced experience. This novelty leads to the thesis that all being is performative being [ser ejecutivo]. According to Ortega, our normal, pre-philosophical and even pre-theoretical experience of things is entirely in terms of agreeable and disagreeable, atrocious

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and benevolent, favorable and dangerous things, not intentional objects or beings (ULM 47). So my keyboard is experienced as something that makes typing easy (agreeable), while my rather lousy chair as something that makes good posture difficult (disagreeable). The sunlight in my office window is at times a facility, when it illuminates my desk, but at times a difficulty, when it heats up my office on hot days. Whence, Ortega argues we ought not think of keyboards, chairs, and light as objects given to the gaze of consciousness, but as acting upon us, creating the circumstances in which we live and act. This leads into Ortega’s famous claim that I am myself and my circumstances, and that life is the union of myself with my circumstances, but I will forbear discussing those issues until later. For now, the important point is to notice the distance between the classical, Husserlian reduction—the bracketing of the natural attitude to focus on phenomena simply as given to consciousness—and Ortega’s reduction wherein I bracket my philosophical attitude to focus on things simply as they are given in pre-reflective experience, simply as they act on me. The affinity between the Ortegan reduction and Heidegger’s famous analysis of tools in Being and Time clearly announce themselves. This is not the place, however, for a detailed treatment of Ortega’s relationship with Heidegger.18 For our purposes it should be enough to note that while for Heidegger, beings are largely hidden by their facilities, only emerging into relief when the proverbial hammer is broken, for Ortega, things are not hidden by facilities but given as both facilities and difficulties. Moreover, while Ortega, like Heidegger, associates questions regarding the being of something with difficulties, Ortega does not read any ontological implications into this fact, but interprets it as a quirk of human psychology (ULM 139–43). Moreover, Ortega claims that the interpretation of things in terms of being does not unveil hidden ontological depths (as Heidegger would have it) but rather leads to the overlaying of the performative being of things with a second-order interpretation developed mainly for pragmatic purposes. Being is only an “intellectual schema” [esquema intelectual], an interpretation of what is given in life (QC 150); in fact, the entire work of “culture” is an interpretation of life (PA 45). We admit concepts such as “being” and “essence” into our ontology only when they help us solve problems, but we should not mistake them for life itself. They were not discovered but created by those who needed them to solve certain problems (ULM 10–11; 143–4). Even as hoary and elevated a concept as being, or the being of beings, or the meaning of being, remains an interpretation of life, not life itself (QC 154–7; ULM 10–11). The upshot of this is that the reduction to life as practiced by Ortega, while



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sharing some similarities with Heidegger’s hermeneutic of facticity, is, at bottom, a completely different animal. It has no interest in the question of being. So, one might ask, assuming the uniqueness of Ortega’s reduction, how is it accomplished? What are the steps one takes to reduce things to life? The best way to see Ortega’s reduction is to look at a particular example of it. I will focus on the reduction as practiced by Ortega in Some Lessons on Metaphysics, but other texts will offer more or less similar examples. The steps in Ortega’s reduction are as follows: 1 Reflection on a chosen activity or endeavor, typically quotidian. In this instance it is attending a philosophy lecture. 2 Reflecting on this activity should reveal that whatever this activity is, it is something that a human being does. 3 This leads us to ask, in the most general terms, what is it that human beings, in fact, do? 4 Upon reflection we discover that human beings live. Before any other human activity is possible, including thought, a human being must be alive. 5 Human life requires two elements: the human and her circumstances. She cannot live without being somewhere at some time; likewise she can have no circumstances if she is not alive. 6 This leads Ortega to the claim that life, the confluence of self and circumstances, is a necessary condition for any human activity. These six steps, then, make up the outlines of Ortega’s reduction to life. In sum, every reality, idea or theory is to be reduced to life. Before a human being can do or be anything else, she must be alive. What, then, is life?

3 Ortega’s conception of life Our first step in approaching these questions is to note that Ortega does not see this reduction as leading to a theory of life but only a description (ULM 71). Ortega’s description of life does not exclude other descriptions, just as one painter’s still life does not exclude another painter’s work on the same subject. Looking more closely at Ortega’s reduction, we will notice a subtle shift in Ortega’s steps. In the first step he invites the reader or listener to reflect on what they are doing: listening to a lecture, reading a book. In so doing, he begins at the level of a concrete particular individual being doing a specific thing. As he midwifes his way through reflections on this activity, he generalizes from

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this particular being and activity to all beings and activities. This generalization happens in the move from (3) to (4) and (5). In step (3) I discover that prior to reading a book or listening to a lecture, I must be alive. Moreover, I must be living in a certain context or set of circumstances, i.e., one where those activities are available to me. So, when I reflect on my typing this paper, I realize that in order to type this chapter (a) I must be living but (b) I must also be living in circumstances—some of my making, others independent of me—wherein typing philosophy papers on a computer is a possible activity for me to engage in. In fact, Ortega claims that (a) and (b) are necessary conditions for my typing this paper. Upon further reflection, Ortega argues, we should discover that (a) and (b) are, when properly generalized, necessary conditions for any human action. A crucial question for Ortega is whether or not the move from (a) and (b) to the more general (a*) and (b*) can be justified; I think it can be. The move in question can be interpreted as a straightforward instance of universal generalization. In classical predicate logic—and there is no reason at this point to get more complex than that—universal generalizations are valid if and only if they generalize off a term previously universally instantiated. So, our question for Ortega becomes quite simple: Was there a universal instantiation somewhere leading up to line (3)? The answer is yes, and it is implicit in line (1). Ortega begins by inviting any person to reflect on any activity; this invitation is quickly followed by the instantiation of particular people doing particular things (students listening to a lecture, me writing a paper). Following this instantiation we arrived at (a) and (b) and are therefore allowed to generalize to (a*) and (b*). Given all this, we can say for any human being X and any activity Y, X must be (a*) alive and (b*) living in circumstances where Y is possible; the union of (a*) and (b*) is what Ortega means by “life.” The above discussion established three points about Ortegan life. First, life is not to be understood as a simple being alive simpliciter but being alive in certain circumstances; this entails a rejection of many, if not all, transcendental accounts of the ego or self. Second, that we can both speak of life in general as the necessary condition of any human action, and also my life or your life as the precondition of mine or your actions. Finally, that while it is possible to treat of life in general, e.g., in the claim that life is radical reality, life itself is always my life or your life, his life or her life. Life is not a platonic universal, but the life of an individual hic et nunc: “Life is what we do and what happens to us” (ULM 43). When Ortega talks about life in general, he is doing so as a nominalist, using a singular term to refer confusedly to all the particular lives in the world



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(QC 62). He is not referring to a universal or transcendental life that exists independent of the particular lives in the world; we are just being lazy and using shorthand rather than saying “this life and that life and that life …” and so on. Ortega’s nominalism about life is closely connected to his similar rejection of “humanity.” He was fond of recounting an anecdote wherein the great French author Victor Hugo was being honored. During the ceremony, representatives of different countries would step forward to congratulate him, and the author would respond by naming the greatest author that country has produced: Shakespeare for the English, Cervantes for the Spanish, Goethe among the Germans, and so on. Finally, a representative from Mesopotamia came forward, whereupon Hugo was caught up short—he could name no Mesopotamian author. Instead, he simply said “Humanity.” The point of this anecdote, as Ortega tells it, is to emphasize that he does not write for Mesopotamia, for humanity as such: he writes for particular humans, primarily a Spanish and Latin American audience (PA 19–20). The same point is made in Man and People in an anecdote describing a journey by boat from South America to Spain that concludes with the remark: “Señora, I do not know this person you call ‘humanity’ [ser humano]. I only know men and women [hombres y mujeres].”19 Ortega’s point in both cases turns on the irreducible particularity of each person’s life. So Ortega can recognize individual men and women in their particularity, but there is no generalized form of “humanity” that one can appeal to beyond the particularity of each life. While we can speak of (a*) and (b*), these are abstractions; in reality, there is only (a) and (b). This claim is surely contentious, since there are some general features of humanity that one could easily point towards as counter-examples. Perhaps the most obvious are biological: all human beings are mammals. But this objection forgets that Ortegan life is not merely biological. I am my life in a way that I am not merely biological. A complete scan of my body, the identification and labeling of all its parts and functions will not double as a biography, as the story of my life. My life cannot, however, be entirely separated from the biological either. To be a living human being, after all, is to be embodied, and with embodiment comes numerous biological and physiological processes: a good part of my life is dependent upon my physical situation. At the same time, while embodiment is a part of life, it is not the entire or even most important part of life. In fact, embodiment and the biological-physiological processes and requirements that accompany it, are merely two of many circumstances in which I find myself. Recall that life, for Ortega, is neither simply myself alone nor the objects and situations I find myself in. Instead, my life is both myself and my circumstances,

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(a) and (b). Since I am my life, Ortega is able to summarize this in the slogan, Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia [I am myself and my circumstances]. My life is not reducible to myself alone, nor to the objective circumstances I find myself in, but exists in the complex interaction of the two: “Our life, that of each of us, is the dynamic dialogue between yo y sus circunstancias” (PA 43). But is there a priority of one over the other? Which comes first, myself or my circumstances? Good arguments could be given for either—one might argue that without some kind of awareness one could not be meaningfully in a circumstance, and that this shows the priority of the self over circumstances. However, at the same time, one could argue that existence is always located in a particular place and time. The upshot of this is that myself and my circumstances are tied for first place: Neither is one closer to us and the other far away: we do not first reckon ourselves and next our surroundings; instead, living is certainly, from the roots, to confront the world, to be within the world, submerged in its cares, problems, in its random trauma. But also vice versa: the world is composed only of what affects each of us and is inseparable from us. We are born together, world and person are like the pairs of ancient Greek and Roman gods who were born and lived together: the Dioscuri, for example, pairs of gods denominated dii consentes, the unanimous gods. (ULM 48)

The conjoining of myself and my circumstances in life, and the irreducibility of one to the other, means that for Ortega we cannot reduce the plurality to a solitary first principle. Instead, there is always a plurality of principles: myself, and an indefinite number of circumstances. Insofar as this is the case, the term, “life,” contains multitudes of other things within that spill out at our feet when broken apart. Both myself and my circumstances are in life, and, as Ortega is at pains to emphasize, there is nothing outside of life. Life is a prison with no escape (QC 116). This is so because anything that I am aware of, or even unaware of, is included as part of the set of circumstances that surround me. To be sure, some circumstances are more important than others—as of this writing, my lousy chair is more important than the cattle near my house—but there is no minimum level of importance required for being a circumstance. Alpha Centauri is unimportant to me, but its existence and location is part of the circumstances in which I live. Whence, for Ortega, nothing is outside of life: even God, if he exists, is a part of my life. Likewise, the non-existence of God, if God does not exist, is also a part of my life. In either case, those are my circumstances (QC



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116). Everything, then, is immanent after the reduction to life. But note that this is a qualified immanence: it is not the idealist immanence in which everything is imminent to the subject, but rather that the subject and her circumstances are bound together in the immanence of life. In the conclusion of Some Lessons in Metaphysics Ortega writes that: [Life] which is reality is made up of me and of things. Neither the things are I, nor am I the things. We are mutually transcendent, but we are both immanent to that absolute coexistence which is life. (ULM 225–6)

Ortega’s anti-idealist interpretation of phenomenology purports to go beyond the idealist reduction to subjectivity or consciousness whilst respecting the underlying insight motivating it—the insight that that which is given must be given as some kind of immanence. The radical reality of life means, for Ortega, that one should not begin with consciousness, being, givenness or whatever else one might mention, but with life as lived, myself and my circumstances (PA 48).

4 Mesopotamia and Nebuchadnezzar For Ortega, one must distinguish between awareness of something in the usual phenomenological sense of awareness of an intentional object and a kind of pre-conscious or unintentional awareness: Therefore—and this is decisive for what we will say in this course—there are two forms of reckoning with [dar secuenta] something—or, which is to say the same thing, of having something exist for me: one in which I reckon it as something separate, in which, so to speak, I take it before me man to man, giving it a precise and enclosed position where I reckon it. The other form is when the thing exists for me without my noticing it. (ULM 60)

He gets at this distinction by appealing to the difference, in Spanish, between reparar and contar con (ULM 61). The verb reparar normally means “to repair” but in certain contexts (e.g., reparar en algo) can mean to notice something. This noticing is the usual sense of awareness in phenomenology. However, contar con can mean “to count on” or “to possess”; contar con describes a separate and ultimately more important kind of awareness. Introducing these terms, Ortega writes: Let us summarize the investigation we just completed in two new technical terms reparar, which is equivalent to what is traditionally called ‘being conscious

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of something’ and the simple contar con, which expresses the effective presence that all the ingredients of my situation always possess. (ULM 61)

Reparar includes what Husserl and his heirs would call intentionality, but goes a bit further to include what might be called “counter-intentional” experiences as well. By counter-intentional I have in mind the coming of the Other as described by Levinas, the giveness of the saturated phenomenon as described by Jean-Luc Marion, and other similar events. While these do not adhere to the strictures of Husserlian intentionality—indeed, they are of interest to phenomenologists precisely because they break with those accounts—they are still instances of reparar insofar as they include some kind of awareness of the thing or event in question while contar con means to indicate a sort of unnoticed awareness. When the other arrives, one notices her; when saturated phenomena appear, one undergoes saturation, one does not contar con either the other or saturated phenomena. This is because contar con designates the relationship we have with things that we are not aware of; so for Ortega we contar con the stairs as we go down them, without thinking of each step, or contar con the buttons of our shirt as we button them while our attention is elsewhere. Counting on something is quite different from noticing it. I do not notice the individual steps as I run down the stairs, but I expect them to be there. Moreover, of the two, we notice much fewer things than we count on: “in general, we are unaware [no tenemos concienia] of the majority of the things that exist for us, but we count on them” (ULM 61). On the other hand, as soon as I pause to notice them—say because a step is broken—I cease to count on them. The boundary between that which we notice (reparar) and that which we count on (contar con) is fluid. When one is learning to play guitar, one notices the position of the frets, strings, and fingers when attempting to play a chord; after some practice, one no longer notices where the frets are, or the strings, or even one’s fingers; instead, one simply counts on them. The guitarist plays the chords almost on “auto-pilot” and can direct his intentional gaze elsewhere— one can contar con the guitar playing and reparar the child across the room. One might suggest that—given Ortega’s examples, as well as this one—that contar con is a kind of muscle-memory. In the case of guitar playing, or going down stairs, I think it is certainly fair to explain those instances of counting on something as instance of muscle-memory; but the concept is broader than that. Ortega, at one point in Some Lessons on Metaphysics, points out that when the lecture is over, students will leave through the doors, rather than attempting to walk through the wall, without noticing (reparar) the impenetrability of the wall. We simply count on going through doors rather than walls.



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The difference between reparar and contar con points to the limits of phenomenology: insofar as (1) contar con is precisely that which we do not notice, and insofar as (2) phenomenology is concerned with that which we notice—reparar—it follows that (3) phenomenology cannot address that which we count on insofar as we count on it. Instead, phenomenology can—at most—focus on the memory of counting on something and attempt through an analysis of that memory to arrive at an account of that which I count on. I choose the word “memory” intentionally to recall Ortega’s objections to the transcendental reduction wherein (according to Ortega) the phenomenologist does not analyze an experience or a event, but a specter, a memory of that event. Moreover, insofar as the phenomenologist is analyzing the memory of counting on something, she is two steps removed: she (a) notices the (b) memory of what was counted upon. This means, for Ortega, that there is always something in life that escapes or resists the gaze of the phenomenologist; when the phenomenologist fixes her gaze upon it, that which I count on disappears, becoming instead something I notice. One upshot of this is that phenomenology—in principle—cannot explain or interpret everything. Even if one were to posit an omniscient phenomenologist that noticed everything all in one moment, the lived experience of counting on something would simply not appear to the omniscient phenomenologist. In this way, contar con marks the lower limits of classical phenomenology; while phenomenology can certainly discover the difference between reparar and contar con, the discovery reveals a kind of relation that in principle resists analysis. That which I contar con functions as a part of the circumstances in which I live my life: It is not merely the walls but my counting on the walls to be impenetrable that form my circumstances. For Ortega, philosophy is at its most truthful when it is faithful to the circumstances the philosopher finds herself in rather than when it attempts to transcend them. One’s philosophizing must begin with his circumstances, and one must dive into them rather than attempt to bracket or escape them. It is from this set of circumstances that the philosopher thinks and writes; the priority of these circumstances implies, for Ortega, that one philosophizes best when one remains true to them, rather than fleeing from them towards Mesopotamia. Ortega’s rejection of Mesopotamianism is attached to a rejection of Nebuchadnezzarism, the attempt to build an all-embracing system of ideas that lift oneself out of one’s particular circumstance by incorporating all circumstances; this project he associates, above all, with Hegel, but Ortega finds elements of it in phenomenology as well (PA 29). The dual avoidance of Mesopotamia and Nebuchadnezzar is part and parcel of Ortega’s anti-idealist

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interpretation of phenomenology: a phenomenology that eschews transcendental consciousness and system building to focus on life itself, the personal life of each individual as individual. This phenomenology would also realize that only a minor portion of our lives—that which we reparar—is suitable to phenomenological analysis. Life is the basic reality, and knowledge is an internal function of life (HCS 22). His point is that the philosopher’s concrete situation precedes the philosophy and it is these that Ortega believes the philosopher should focus upon: “Circumstances … are the closest to us, the hand the universe extends to each of us, and which we must grab, squeezing enthusiastically, if we want to live with authenticity” (PA 54). One might say that Ortega’s circumstances have only led him to meet individual humans rather than the “gentleman named Humanity” and it is these individual humans and their circumstances that he writes for and about which he wishes to philosophize. Ortega’s anti-idealist interpretation of phenomenology is one of stumbles and surprises, not transcendental (or quasi-transcendental) conditions. It is tied to a nominalistic interpretation of philosophical concepts (i.e., being) as conceptual tools invented by the philosopher to accomplish certain tasks rather than as referring to extra-mental realities. They are neither transcendental nor transcendent, they are tools, to be valued, if at all, for practical reasons: “many theories are equally adequate and, speaking rigorously, the superiority of one over another is founded merely in practical motives. The facts recommend, but they do not impose” (QF 303). Philosophy, likewise, is thought of as an activity developing out of life, rather than determinate of life. It is an art of living but not life itself.20 A philosophy will still only capture a part of life or a particular way of life, and never life as such, because that which we count on cannot, insofar as we count on it, be noticed by philosophy; our life is bigger than philosophy. Ortega’s decision to write for Spain and Latin America rather than Mesopotamia is intimately tied to his anti-idealistic interpretation of phenomenology. The priority of the individual life over thought—where thought is an internal function of life and not separable from it—that manifests itself in the break with classical phenomenology is also manifested in the decision to write from his life, from Spain and Latin America (PA 18–19), rather than from an utopia of deep ontological structures, transcendental conditions, or even quasitranscendental ones.



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Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10

José Ortega y Gasset, Prólogo por Allemanes, in Las Obras Completas de José Ortega y Gasset VIII (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1965), p. 42; henceforth PA. José Ortega y Gasset, Unas Lecciones de Metafísica (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1968), p. 186. G. Harmon, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2011), pp. 104–10; henceforth GM. Julian Marias, Acera de Ortega (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1971), pp. 142–3; henceforth AO. The similarities between Ortega’s view and the position associated with Michel Henry clearly announce themselves, but remain superficial: Ortega would never be able to accept Henry’s insistence that life be understood as primarily auto-affective. Ortega, “Ensayo de Estética a manera de Prólogo,” in Las Obras Completas de José Ortega y Gasset VI (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1964), p. 252; henceforth EEP. Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 25–6; henceforth MP. Readers interested in pursuing this line of inquiry would be advised to look closely at the final chapter of Ortega’s ¿Qué es Filosofía? There he has a brief discussion of “the heart” and argues that in life, affectivity precedes object-awareness. While anticipating some major themes in Henry’s work, Ortega would, I suspect, react harshly to other elements of Henry’s thought. While I will make a few gestures in this direction in this paper, I won’t develop the point: there is great deal of work yet to be done on the proximity and distance between the two men. This is also how Philip W. Silver translates the term in his translation of the essay in Art and Phenomenology (New York: Norton, 1975). José Ortega y Gasset, ¿Qué es Conocimiento?, in Las Obras de José Ortega y Gasset (Madrid: Revista de Occidente en Alianza Editorial, 1984), p. 117; henceforth QC. José Ortega y Gasset, ¿Qué es Filosofía?, in Las Obras Completas de José Ortega y Gasset VII (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1964), pp. 365–73; henceforth QF. Although I can’t get into it here, cuidado is an important term in ULM. He introduces it with reference to Heidegger’s discussion of sorge in Being and Time (ULM 19–20) but offers his own adjustments to the concept: for Ortega, cuidado has to be linked not merely with the Latin cura, as Heidegger does, but opposed to the Spanish seguridad and Latin securitas. For Ortega, there is an element of risk or danger, even daring, implicit in cuidado that is not emphazised in Heidegger’s presentation; the term cuidado appears commonly on warning signs around construction sites and the like. I will return to the points raised in this paragraph in a later part of this essay; for now I only wanted to give prima facie reasons for suspecting the speculative realist reading of Ortega.

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11 José Ortega y Gasset, Ideas y Creencias, in Las Obras Completas de José Ortega y Gasset V (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1964), p. 400; henceforth IC. 12 For a discussion of the history of this approach to Ortega, see Javier San Martín, La Fenomenología de Ortega y Gasset (Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 2012), pp. 23–50; henceforth FOG. 13 In addition to FOG, see the same author’s “Der Lebens begriff bei Ortega y Gasset,” in LebensalsPhänomenon, (eds) Hans Rainer Sepp and Ichirō Yamaguchi (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen and Neumann, 2006), pp. 141–50. 14 J.-L. Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology, trans. T. Carlson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 204–5. 15 This is not the place for a detailed consideration of Ortega vis-à-vis Husserl; for my purposes here I am only using Husserl to position Ortega. For lengthier discussions of Ortega and Husserl, see (of course) FOG, but also Robert O’Connor, “Ortega’s Reformulation of Husserlian Phenomenology,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40 (1) (1979): 53–63; Antonio Rodríguez Huéscar, José Ortega y Gasset’s Metaphysical Innovation: A Critique and Overcoming of Idealism, trans. Jorge García-Gómez (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996); Antonio Gutierrez Pozo, “Vida, Conciencia y Logos: La renovacion de la fenomenologia en la filosofiaraciovitalista de Ortega y Gasset,” Apuntes Filosoficos 21 (2002): 89–105. 16 José Ortega y Gasset, Historia como sistema, in Las Obras Completas de José Ortega y Gasset VI (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1964), p. 26; henceforth HCS. 17 Arguably, while at a distance from Husserl’s transcendental reductions, Ortega’s approach could be seen as sympathetic with Husserl’s later genetic reduction as practiced in The Crisis; this point is developed at length in FOG, pp. 12–13 and 171–5. 18 Ortega’s most detailed treatment of Heidegger is found in the concluding chapters of his last book, La Idea de Principio en Leibniz y la Evolución de la TeoríacDeductiva. For two good treatments, see FOG, pp. 147–54 and Jean-Claude Lèvêque, “Lenguaje y traducción: La lectura orteguiana de Heidegger en La Idea de Principio en Leibniz,” in L. X. Álvarez and J. de Salas Ortueta (eds) La última filosofía de Ortega y Gasset: en torno a “La idea de principio en Leibniz,” (Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 2003), pp. 139–80. Andrew Dobson, An Introduction to the Politics and Philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 119–21, offers a nice overview. To be sure, there are numerous other papers and books that could be mentioned as well. 19 José Ortega y Gasset, El Hombre y La Gente, in Las Obras Completas de de José Ortega y Gasset VII (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1964), p. 166. 20 José Ortega y Gasset, Meditación de la Técnica, in Las Obras Completas de José Ortega y Gasset V (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1964), p. 331.

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Scenes of Disagreement: Nicolai Hartmann between Phenomenological Ontology and Speculative Realism* Keith R. Peterson Colby College

The world is not a correlate of anything.1 First scene: 1922. Nicolai Hartmann, newly occupying Paul Natorp’s chair in philosophy at Marburg, just made known his definitive break with Neo-Kantianism in his Foundations for a Metaphysics of Knowledge (1921), and looks ahead to the full development of a new ontology beyond Neo-Kantian strictures. Eager to find conversation partners with whom to share in this vision, he has heard good things about Edmund Husserl’s young assistant in Freiburg, who wrote a dissertation on Duns Scotus’s doctrine of categories and, like himself, had a keen interest in Aristotle. Hartmann supports the “call” of this young scholar, Martin Heidegger, to Marburg in 1923. Unfortunately, Hartmann’s desire for dialogue was frustrated. There were many reasons for this, one being the simple fact that their “biological clocks” were not in sync. Heidegger rose early to work and teach, so by evenings he was fatigued and unable to carry on into the night, which was precisely when Hartmann was fanning the flame of his intellect for an all-night vigil. Students in Marburg joked that the round-the-clock philosophizing of these two thinkers amounted to a “philosophia perennis.” While Hartmann recognized an astounding intellect in Heidegger, he was disheartened to realize that he could not learn anything from him because their approaches to philosophy were so radically different.2 Despite their incompatible schedules, apparently Hartmann and Heidegger managed to take a stroll together one night in 1923 or 1924. Hartmann was known to be an avid amateur astronomer and had an enormous telescope in his

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modest apartment. They gazed at the stars in a clear night sky, and Hartmann began to tell Heidegger about the constellations. Heidegger stopped him with a wave of his hand. “The stars are only concepts,” he said. It would be easy to underestimate the significance of this seemingly innocuous comment. We could also see encapsulated in it the worldview of an entire philosophical era. While to Heidegger—and likely to many contemporary readers—it expresses the sophisticated stance of the humanist moved beyond naive realism, to Hartmann it evinces a naive conflation of thing and thought. “The stars are concepts.” One might speculate on the thoughts that ran through Hartmann’s mind at this moment. “‘Concepts’? Oh no, another idealist …” From this point on their inability to communicate was assured.3 I imagine that this scene of a failure genuinely to communicate characterizes every exchange between Hartmann and Heidegger from that point forward. Skirmishes in their texts present clear disagreements tinged with misunderstanding because they tend to talk past one another and fail to directly engage. This scene will frame some fundamental disagreements about the nature of the “new ontology.” Heidegger knew Hartmann’s work and framed his own ontology partly in response to it in Being and Time, polemically dismissing Hartmann’s approach but borrowing aspects of it at the same time. Hartmann, after having moved on to Köln in 1925 (engaging in far more fruitful dialogue with Max Scheler), doggedly pursued his own conception of ontology and “struck back” against Heidegger’s critique, minimally but strategically and decisively, in his 1935 Zur Grundlegung der Ontologie.4 The ontological status of the “phenomenon” and the nature of phenomenology as method and as approach were crucial—even if not central—moments in their disagreement. Aspects of this exchange will set the stage for another scene, this time with a new interlocutor and with more promise of engagement despite the more than eight decades between them. One part of Hartmann’s response to Heidegger (and his contemporaries) takes the form of a critique of “correlativism,” which has much in common with the recent critique of “correlationism” developed by French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux. The substantial agreement between them on this issue should make an acquaintance with Hartmann’s work seem imperative for those interested in the new “speculative realism.” But this agreement is alloyed with disagreement in other respects. Hartmann and Meillassoux disagree about how to get beyond correlationism, largely because Meillassoux commits some of the classical errors of which Hartmann claims the old ontology is guilty. These two scenes of disagreement will provide a way to triangulate Hartmann’s location on the map of contemporary Continental philosophy.



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1 Meaning of being or being of meaning? Heidegger famously claimed that the occident has forgotten the “question of the meaning of being.” By asking about the “meaning of being,” Heidegger anchors the question of being in the existential analysis of Dasein. To Hartmann, whose ontological point of departure is the Aristotelian formula “what is insofar as it is” (on he on, Seiende als Seiende), the immediate effect of Heidegger’s starting point is to make the understanding of being relative to human being.5 “The real fallacy in the approach consists overall in bringing being and the understanding of being too close together, being and the givenness of being are virtually conflated.”6 It makes being and the “understanding of being” almost synonymous, conflating being itself with the modes of being’s being-given to us. When we speak of the “meaning of being,” Hartmann urges, we still have to ask: what does “meaning” mean? And what is its mode of being? “So we have to ask just as much about the ‘being of meaning’ as the ‘meaning of being’.”7 Finally, if “meaning” is something that is always “for us,” then “in itself ” being cannot even have a “meaning” since this would be to presuppose a subject’s relation to being rather than explain it. Hartmann insists that “[t]he being of beings remains indifferent to whatever ‘what is’ can be ‘for someone’.”8 Hartmann holds that the Aristotelian formula indicates that “what is insofar as it is” is evidently not what is as posited, intended, or represented; it is not what is as referred to a subject, as object. For “being” itself this means, however, that it does not consist in being-posited, being-intended, or being-represented; in the same way it also does not amount to a relation to the subject, in being-an-object [for a subject].9

In this light, the “meaning of being” would mistake being for its “beingmeaningful,” just as the other Neo-Kantian views Hartmann criticized mistook being for its “being-represented.” In his first major anti-Neo-Kantian work, Hartmann’s phenomenology of knowing revealed that epistemologists deny the experiential point of departure for every theory of knowing, namely, that the whole point of knowledge consists in “knowledge of ‘what is’.” Knowledge is precisely the being-in-relation of a consciousness to somethingthat-is. The theory may very well show that the independently existing thing really does not exist independently. But the phenomenon of the relation is not disposed of on that account. It endures, outlasts any theory which denies it, and in the end stubbornly returns, unremedied and indeed irremediable.10

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This essential reference to “something-that-is,” to something that becomes the content of a thought, representation, concept, image, or meaning, is an irreducible aspect of the phenomenon of knowledge. For Hartmann, in most intentional comportment we are oriented toward a world that transcends the knowing consciousness, and we take the things we come across in the world to have an existence prima facie independent of us. The subject–object relation singled out by epistemologists for treatment is precipitated out of this fuller, richer reality of multiple relations that reveal the everyday embeddedness of the human being in a multifaceted natural and social reality. Heidegger’s description of the life-world of Dasein is an attempt, like that of Scheler before him and Hartmann in the early 1930s, to describe the embeddedness of the knowing subject in non-cognitive relations of many kinds.11 Also like Scheler and Hartmann, he sees the cognitive relation as a derivative and secondary mode of relating to the world. But he goes further than Hartmann to argue that the subject–object distinction is already a way of having given being a meaning, of disclosing beings in a certain (artificial, inauthentic) way.12 In this way the epistemological construct that naively asserts the existence of a world independent of thought can be construed as one inadequate pre-understanding of being among others. With this move Heidegger attempts to pull the rug out from under Hartmann’s new critical ontology by leaving no room for a conception of things existing independently of the subject to which they relate. He establishes a thoroughgoing correlationism. With this step Heidegger, however, like the Neo-Kantians criticized by Hartmann, effectively erases the basic phenomenon of relation to an “independently existing” something, mistaking being for its mode of being-given. This disagreement over the interpretation of what intentionality ‘intends’ is one of the roots of their divergence. For Heidegger there is no difference between the way something is given and the way that it “is.” He eliminates the distinction between phenomenon and thing-in-itself that Hartmann argues must be preserved in order to pursue a truly critical ontology. “That which is given and explicable in the way the phenomenon is encountered is called ‘phenomenal’ … phenomena, as understood phenomenologically, are never anything but what goes to make up being … phenomenology is the science of the being of entities—ontology.”13 This passage demonstrates both Heidegger’s erasure of the distinction and his project to give “phenomenology” a new meaning. It is no longer merely a fruitful method or approach to philosophy, as for Scheler, Hartmann, or the Munich phenomenologists; it is synonymous with ontology itself.14 The stars are concepts (meanings) from this vantage point. Hartmann still insists that we can



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and must make the distinction between the mode of a being’s being-given to us and the being’s own mode of being. Thus the proper starting point for ontology for Hartmann is “what is insofar as it is,” rather than the “meaning of being.” Whether and how this starting point can be maintained is a question that will not concern us here.15

2 One consequence: A disagreement about categories Hartmann argued that the only tools available to ontologists are “categories.” Heidegger apparently does not dispute this, but takes an explicit stand on a distinction between types of categories in Being and Time. Readers will recall that early on Heidegger creates a clear distinction between “existentials,” which apply to Dasein, and “categories,” which apply to things in the world. He argues that we have always oriented our understanding of being with reference to things in the world rather than ourselves, and in our way of addressing (kategoreisthai) entities in the world we have tended to consider everything a “what,” even Dasein, properly considered a “who.”16 In order to counteract this tendency, he reserves the term “existential” for predicates or structural traits that befit human reality (such as being-in, being-in-the-world, concern, care, and worldhood). For example, he characterizes the way in which Dasein exists as “being-in” in opposition to the way that any object is merely “in space.” The claim is that a being exhibits one or the other, but never both. Here, Heidegger is juxtaposing not just two categories but two mutually exclusive classes of categories—possession of any category from one class serving as a kind of ontological metonym for the whole class, implicating all the others. Two assumptions support this distinction. First, one must assume that possession of one distinctive trait indicates that a being possesses all others of the same type. Second, types are assumed to be mutually exclusive and nonrecurring. If I have “being-in” for example, that means for Heidegger that no category applied to the world of objects can appropriately apply to me at all. While Heidegger allows that Dasein could be perceived to have spatiality like a thing, this would be only a function of misinterpretation on the part of the observer, or of a faulty pre-understanding of being. Spatiality simply cannot belong to Dasein itself.17 Hartmann would agree that human beings are beings for which a distinctive set of categories are appropriate, but he refuses to reproduce the obvious Cartesian dualism between Humans and Everything Else that Heidegger’s distinction reestablishes and struggles to legitimate.

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This means that we can accept the first assumption above (that clusters of categories may be implied in a single one, as if in a coherent stratum) without accepting the second (that categories are exclusive and do not recur). This is in fact Hartmann’s position. In order to maintain it, one needs conceptions of categorial recurrence and modification rather than categorial exclusivity, as well as a “law” of coherence or co-implication of categories.18 The fact that Dasein cannot adequately be “explained” through the use of categories appropriate for objects does not mean that physical or biological categories are entirely inapplicable. It just means that for human beings “existence” may be more than and different from present-at-handness, while still including other physical or organic structural features in a manner to be determined. On Hartmann’s “stratified” view we would find the category of “spatiality” at the stratum of the physical and “recurring” with modification (due to co-implication with novel categories) at the stratum of embodied organism as well as of Dasein or the person. We may hold that the richer way of “being-in” space for us is existentially dependent upon our physical being in space and our organic embodiment-in-environment, though is not exhausted by them. We could agree that at the “thicker” person-level, “being-in” is fundamentally different and novel in comparison to spatiality, meaning that using the category of spatiality alone to describe Dasein’s mode of being would be a “category mistake.” This does not mean that our understanding of the spatiality of physical objects is irrelevant to our understanding of Dasein. Spatiality doesn’t explain how human beings are in space, but it is a relevant touchstone for our self-understanding since the “same” category seems to recur, even if with a fundamental difference, in both strata. But admitting this would amount to a rejection of the anthropocentric, Cartesian dualistic symmetry that is reproduced in Heidegger’s contrast between “existentials” and “categories.” It is evidently the case that we have a pre-understanding both of our own and other beings’ being, but there is no irrevocable “horizonal determinism” here. If we begin with an idea of our sameness with things, we could move away from it; and if we have an idea of our too radical difference from things, we can correct this as well. Pre-understandings or assumptions we make can usually be critically evaluated, especially when exposed to standpoints different from our own. It may be that insisting on our absolute difference from other things, while one form of self-understanding, actually limits our understanding of humanity and blocks projects to think anew about the relations between humans and nonhumans, as many environmental philosophers have argued for decades.



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Let’s take another example where we can see Hartmann offering a corrective to Heidegger. The category of “world” is decisive in the 1929–30 lectures, and Heidegger applies it in different ways to inanimate things, animate forms, and human beings. His aim appears to be to resist a view that had become almost conventional in the first quarter of the century. This was the notion that there is a hierarchy of sorts among inanimate beings, animals, and human beings that consists in a mere difference in degree (of complexity, of being, of life) between them. It seems to entail that there can only be a hierarchical relation between things that can be compared in terms of some underlying commonality.19 In contrast to this view, Heidegger advances the thesis that there is genuine difference in kind where others claim mere difference of degree, but he also draws distinctions in terms of the single category of “world.” “[T]he stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, man is world-forming.” While the whole analysis is suggestive, only two of its aspects concern me here: the apparently dualistic framing of these distinctions, and again, the place where Hartmann’s approach may contribute some illumination. The dualism is again evident in Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of animal organs, capabilities, “potentialities for …,” drives, instincts, and “captivation” (a simple adoption of Scheler’s notion of animal “ecstasis”), which owes much to Scheler’s discussions in Man’s Place in Nature.20 A major difference between them here is that wherever Scheler implies that human beings are continuous with animals in terms of mental capacities or life or drives (i.e., are different in degree), Heidegger wants to re-describe these phenomena so as to emphasize a more radical difference in kind, even at the level of “life.” To be sure, in that text and elsewhere Scheler himself establishes a new dualism between “life” and “spirit,” drawing the line between human and animal in a somewhat novel way. In terms of the category of “world,” for instance, Scheler says that the animal’s relations to its surroundings oscillate in a “closed” circuit, while the human being is “open to the world.” Similarly, Heidegger holds that animals “both have and do not have a world”; they have “access” to other beings in the way of an “instinctual being-open” and being “captivated” by beings, but because they are so immersed in their environment they do not see beings as beings, which is the prerequisite for genuinely having world.21 The whole tendency of Heidegger’s discussion is to deny continuity or difference of degree in every case and insist on the radical difference in kind between Dasein and animal. As Heidegger already said in Being and Time, “Dasein is never to be defined ontologically by regarding it as life … plus something else” like spirit.22

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In this example it is even more evident that we could learn something from Hartmann, in two respects. First, Heidegger defines the non-human animal’s poverty of world as a structural capacity to both have and not have a human being “go along with” them, or “transpose” itself into their world.23 Thus it seems that the animal’s “essence” is defined in terms of the way that they are given to us as psychically accessible and inaccessible at once. Here again, like the stars, the animals are “concepts.” The natural Hartmannian response is that the animal’s so-called “essence” is likely totally indifferent to whether we humans can transpose ourselves into it or not. So why would we define its essence in terms of a peculiar kind of relation to human beings?24 Rather than define the difference between non-human and human animal in terms of qualitative types of “access” (which would be to him again defining something in terms of its manner of being-given to us) he would approach it in the same way as the question of spatiality above, i.e., in terms of partially shared and partially divergent categorial principles. Hartmann too appreciates differences in kind, but by treating them in terms of stratification, recurrence, and categorial novelty, he produces a nonhierarchical and nonexclusive concept of difference. Stratification is not synonymous with hierarchy, nor does it entail the mere difference in degree of what occurs among the strata.25 One might even claim that by speaking of the stone’s worldlessness, the animal’s world-poverty, and human world-making, Heidegger is himself moving in the direction of recognizing the recurrence-with-modification of this category. This is not the place to decide whether his articulation gets it right. In both of these brief contrasts, we can see that what underlies the disagreement over the applicability of categories is an implicit conception of the place of the human. Heidegger seems driven to make animals, things, and humans seem as different as possible, without falling back into outmoded spiritualist or Schelerian metaphysics. Hartmann aims to see animals, things, and humans as sharing as many traits as possible, without falling into outmoded materialist or scientistic metaphysics. Hartmann’s conception of categorial relations allows him to preserve our sense that human beings are special beings, but not to indulge in the kind of anthropocentric self-congratulatory move that makes not just the meaning of all things but also the being of things relative to human beings. This distinction is also crucially preserved by the so-called “critique of correlationism.” This takes us to the second scene of partial agreement and disagreement.



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3 Speculative realism Second scene: 2007. A group of four young thinkers calling themselves “speculative realists,” including Quentin Meillassoux, held a workshop at Goldsmith’s in London, which workshop more or less officially kicked off the movement.26 While these philosophers disagree about what a new realism should be like, they are unanimous in their call to go beyond the Kantian legacy of human-centeredness in contemporary philosophy. In 2006 Meillassoux’s Après la Finitude appeared, and in it he developed a critique of “correlationism” in post-Kantian philosophy and argued for a new sort of realism. It struck a nerve. The critique of correlationism asks whether we can conceive a world beyond the allegedly unsurpassable “correlation” between subject and object or mind and world taken to be foundational for Kantian and virtually all post-Kantian philosophy. Put simply, for correlationism “we never grasp an object ‘in-itself ’, in isolation from its relation to the subject …”27 There are many loci in Hartmann’s voluminous output where he deals with this and allied assumptions, including the critique of Heidegger briefly introduced above, his own critique of “correlativism” in the Grundlegung, his treatment of Sosein and Dasein, and many others.28 I’ll only mention two of these below, and leave further exploration of Hartmann’s early twentieth-century development of a post-Kantian, realist ontology for another occasion. Meillassoux claims that the human-centered post-Kantian tradition of philosophy has given up the “great outdoors” and instead occupied itself predominantly with analyzing the way that the world becomes manifest through phenomena, language games, discursive regimes, subjective categories, pragmatic usefulness, etc., all of which necessarily assume the correlation of human and world. The core of the correlationist argument runs: [W]hen you claim to think any X, you must posit this X, which cannot then be separated from this special act of positing, of conception. That is why it is impossible to conceive an absolute X, i.e., an X which would be essentially separate from a subject.

In another formulation, he sums up the correlationist argument by saying that “[w]e can’t know what the reality of the object in itself is because we can’t distinguish between properties which are supposed to belong to the object and properties belonging to the subjective access to the object.”29 Therefore, the correlationist concludes, we have to treat everything in the world as a correlate of consciousness, mind, language, or subject. There are no things-in-themselves

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or absolute reality beyond the correlation.30 But the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Because we often cannot immediately distinguish between our contribution and the object’s to knowledge does not mean that there are no objects existing independently of the mind. This would be to convert an epistemological limitation into an ontological postulate. We saw above, in Hartmann’s brief engagement with Heidegger, that he takes Heidegger’s starting point in the “meaning of being for a subject” to be a serious mistake, a correlativist claim that makes not just the formal conditions of givenness depend upon the relation to Dasein, but the ontological content of the world as well. Hartmann’s response to this and other forms of idealism was to insist on the irreducibility of other-reference in the phenomenon of knowledge, and to retain the distinction between the mode of something’s being-given to a subject and its mode of being. It should be noted that in a recent essay Ray Brassier expresses virtually the same thought: The metaphysical desideratum does not consist in attaining a clearer understanding of what we mean by being or what being means for us (as the entities we happen to be because of our natural and cultural history), but to break out of the circle wherein the meaning of being remains correlated with our being as enquirers about meaning into a properly theoretical understanding of what is real regardless of our allegedly pre-ontological understanding of it—but not, please note, irrespective of our ways of conceiving it.31

This distinction between thing and thought is central to critical philosophy, Hartmann contends, and must be preserved in order to respect the fundamental experience of knowing revealed in the phenomenology of knowledge: that knowledge is of something other than, and independent of, the process of knowing. All positions that speak of the wholesale construction, creation, or determination of the object by thought, subjective categories, language, or practices, disregard this initial experience and deny its significance. This move blurs the distinction between the everyday (ontological) stance and the (epistemological) stance of reflection. This is the source of what Hartmann calls the “correlativist error.” Hartmann both deflates the concept of what is “given” in experience and broadens it—it includes not only what is “phenomenologically given” to a subject, but everything in the world and every aspect of human experience, personal, social, scientific, and historical. This attitude manifests the everyday ontological stance toward the world. The serious mistake of correlationism is to count implicitly or explicitly on the primacy of the “reflective attitude,” where



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attention is turned not toward beings in the world but to the self who attempts to know them. In fact, one speaks of a “correlation” only on the condition that one has already abandoned the natural stance and risen to the level of epistemology. In this stance, “world” must be the correlate of a subject. While it is evident that the knower has some ontological relation with the known, the correlativist exaggerates his contribution to it and misinterprets this relation. The epistemological characterization “makes a correlativistic prejudice out of the relational character of knowledge.” But if, as he would agree with many of our contemporaries, the process of “knowledge first objectifies the entity,” then (and here he would disagree with them) it also “by this deed presupposes its being ‘this side’ of all givenness” for a subject.32 There is something existing or taken to exist, to-be-objectified by the process of knowing, utterly indifferent to being known by a subject, standing in no essential correlation with it. This is true to the original phenomenological claim that knowledge is of something independent of thought. Once we see this, the correlativist prejudice collapses. Moreover, Hartmann also argues that the concept of transobjective “being-initself ” is spawned by the reflective attitude of epistemology, so once we abandon it we no longer need an ontological distinction between the “for-us” and the “in-itself.”33 The fundamental ambiguity cannot, however, be removed. Secondly, Hartmann goes on to reveal the poor reading of Kant adopted by most Neo-Kantians and post-Kantians. On their largely constructivist positions, all determination in the object known stems from the subject, language, discursive regimes, practices, etc., and, when it is grudgingly admitted that subjects do not in fact create wholesale the objects known, this leaves only “bare existence” to the “thing itself.” For them it looks as if all Sosein as such is a mere being-for-us, and conversely that Dasein means being-in-itself … This conclusion is as un-Kantian as can be. That things-in-themselves also have a Sosein is the unspoken but apparently obvious assumption of all Kantian usages that speak of the impossibility of knowing things-in-themselves. The existence of a “what” is not at all in question.34

Knowledge of the “what” is mediated by concepts and determined by ontological categories, themselves independent objects of knowledge, and the historical growth of knowledge of the world shows that knowledge approximates existing objects and structures. We do not only know our own minds when we struggle to know how the world works. Again, Brassier sees this quite clearly: “[O]nce I distinguish the claim that my thoughts cannot exist independently of my mind, which is trivially true, from the claim that what my thoughts are about cannot

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exist independently of my mind, which simply does not follow from such a trivial truth,” then I cannot be deceived by the claim that it is impossible to think of something existing independently of the mind. He adds: “The correlationist conceit is to suppose that formal conditions of ‘experience’ (however broadly construed) suffice to determine material conditions of reality. But that the latter cannot be uncovered independently of the former does not mean that they can be circumscribed by them.”35 The correlationist makes this mistake by treating all determinacy as originating in the subject or in the relation between subject and world (e.g., in language), leaving “bare existence” to the “thing-in-itself.” Hartmann claims we can indeed grasp the “what” of things in the stance of the critical categorial ontologist who rejects the reflective attitude of the epistemologist. In his revision of Kant’s fundamental principle, he holds that both cognizing subjects and cognized objects are determined by at least partially shared ontological principles discerned in experience. While there is agreement in many respects, there is also significant disagreement, specifically with Meillassoux. Hartmann contests dualist metaphysics of all sorts, and would reproach Meillassoux for his explicit dualism, his exaggerated confidence in (and classical conception of) the sciences, and probably most of all, his inadequate understanding of modality.36 One shortcoming of Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism is that it uncritically reifies the terms of the correlation. This same disagreement arose in the case of Heidegger, where existentials are contrasted with categories as if they were poles of a symmetrical relation. Meillassoux’s preservation of the concept of an “absolute” that is independent of human thought is still based on the basic dualism of human and nature that correlationism also assumes. Instead of asserting the “necessary” relation between the two he denies it, but he does not proceed to reject the symmetry of the duality. While Meillassoux takes a step in the direction toward realism, he fails to dissolve completely the polarity on which correlationism is based. Hartmann accomplishes this clearly. “The world is not a correlate of anything,” he claims.37 As many environmentalists like to point out, humans are like a cancer or a virus on the face of the planet, and if so, it is hard to see the relation between human and earth as in any way ontologically symmetrical. Just as the body existed with its own order and organization long before the cancer comes along, humans arose in the biosphere long after its fundamental functions and processes were in operation. Hartmann’s stratified ontology recognizes both the independence or discontinuity and the dependence or continuity of the human with nonhuman nature, and resists both the epistemic (idealist) and evaluative excesses of anthropocentrism.38



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4 Conclusion Let these two scenes of disagreement between Heidegger, Meillassoux, and Hartmann serve to triangulate Hartmann’s position for those interested in Continental ontology and realism. He shared with Heidegger an interest in renewing ontological inquiry, though seriously disagreed with him about the form that this ontology would take. He agrees with Meillassoux in his critique of correlationism, though he disagrees with him about how to get beyond it. I hope that this brief glimpse at these two scenes encourages readers to investigate Hartmann further for themselves. Doing so may lead them to wince or chuckle instead of nodding smugly at Heidegger’s dismissive reply to Hartmann in 1923 that “the stars are concepts.”

Notes *

1 2 3 4

5 6

This essay is a revised combination of papers presented at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy conferences in Chicago, Illinois, 2007 and Rochester, New York, 2012. Nicolai Hartmann, Zur Grundlegung der Ontologie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965), p. 222. Henceforth cited as GO. Anecdotes from Robert Heiss, “Nicolai Hartmann: A Personal Sketch,” The Personalist, XLII 4 (1961): 469–86. “Stars” anecdote from Wolfgang Harich, Nicolai Hartmann: Größe und Grenzen, ed. Martin Morgenstern (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2004), p. 79. I agree with Harich that “one of Heidegger’s chief aims was to battle against Hartmann” in Being and Time. (Nicolai Hartmann: Größe und Grenzen, p. 166.) For example: “Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task.” Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 11. This “rich system of categories” can only refer to Hartmann. None of the figures who may be included under the umbrella of reviving metaphysics in this period, such as the Southwest Neo-Kantian Emil Lask, the Wolff and Meinong scholar Hans Pichler, the theologian-philosopher Günter Jakoby, or any of the Munich Circle phenomenologists (such as Hedwig Conrad-Martius), had created such a system at the time. GO, p. 41. GO, p. 40, my emphasis.

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GO, p. 42. GO, p. 42. GO, p. 39. Hartmann, “How is Critical Ontology Possible? Toward the Foundation of the General Theory of the Categories, Part One,” trans. K. Peterson, Axiomathes, 22 (2012): 316. 11 Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973 [1916]), and “Idealism and Realism,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David Lachterman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973 [1927]), pp. 288–356; Hartmann, Zum Problem der Realitätsgegebenheit (Berlin: Pan-Verlagsgesellschaft M.B.H., 1931), later taken up into part III of GO (1935). 12 Heidegger, Being and Time, Part I, §13. 13 Ibid., 37. Hartmann replies in GO, pp. 72–3. Both “phenomena” as well as items “ready-to-hand” have a being that is not reducible to their “showing themselves” or to “being-ready-to-hand.” 14 On the issue of realism versus idealism, Heidegger himself indicates that his alliances lie with idealism. Being and Time, pp. 207–8. 15 For a more elaborate recent introduction to Hartmann’s critical ontology see the author’s “An Introduction to Nicolai Hartmann’s Critical Ontology,” Axiomathes, 22 (2012): 291–314. 16 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 70–1. Heidegger attempts to soften the distinction between existentials and categories at the end of Being and Time by claiming that it is only a “point of departure for the ontological problematic” (p. 487). One might take this to mean that his “fundamental ontology” is not, in fact, an ontology in any traditional sense of the word. 17 “Spatiality” here means the physicalist sort that belongs to “present-at-hand” entities. See Being and Time, pp. 79–82. It is worth noting that the “presentat-hand” in Heidegger roughly corresponds to what Hartmann calls “object” (Gegenstand), namely, that which is the result of a process of objectification by the knowing consciousness. The “thing itself ” exceeds and overflows what is grasped in knowing, and “what is” remains indifferent to being known. Heidegger ostensibly attempts to replace Hartmann’s notion of transobjective being with his category of the “ready-to-hand.” But we’ve seen above that Hartmann would say that, like objectification, “ready-to-handification” is another mode of being-given to a human being, rather than a name for “what is as such.” Even if “seeing” is always a “seeing as …,” this does not mean that “being” is always a “being as …” 18 Hartmann already conceived and published a paper on these “laws” in 1926. I can only invoke them without explaining them here. For more on these laws, see Peterson, “An Introduction.”



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19 See Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. Will McNeill and Nicolas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 193–4. He is ostensibly referring to Uexkull and Scheler, whom he mentions on p. 192. Hereafter FC. 20 Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). Originally published in 1928, the 15th edition has just been issued: Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, ed. Manfred Frings (Bonn: Bouvier, 2002). 21 FC, pp. 269–70. 22 Being and Time, p. 75. 23 FC, pp. 210–11. 24 Heidegger himself seems to anticipate this at FC 271. In the end Heidegger leaves the question of the animal’s essential world-poverty open and in a sense undecided, and treats the whole analysis as propadeutic to understanding human worldhood, which is what he was after all along. 25 For his own view of human being, see New Ways of Ontology, trans. R. Kuhn (Greenwood Press Reprint, 1975), and “Naturphilosophie und Anthropologie,” in Kleinere Schriften, Vol. I (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1955), pp. 215–44. 26 It was followed by a second workshop in Bristol in 2009. Participants in 2007 included Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux, and Ray Brassier, all of whom had recently published original works. These were Harman’s Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005); Grant’s Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006); Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Meillassoux’s Après la Finitude (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2006), translated into English by Ray Brassier, After Finitude (London: Continuum, 2008). The record of the first workshop, including presentations and subsequent discussion, is published by these authors as “Speculative Realism,” Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development, Vol. III (2007): 307–449. 27 Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 5. 28 In order, GO, pp. 77–9 and 22–2, and 81–138, but especially the sections on Kant and Scheler, pp. 86–93. 29 Collapse III, 408–9. Brassier defines it as “the philosopheme according to which the human and the non-human, society and nature, mind and world, can only be understood as reciprocally correlated, mutually interdependent poles of a fundamental relation” (“Objects and Concepts,” in The Speculative Turn: Speculative Realisms and Materialisms, ed., Harman et al. (Sydney: Re-Press, 2010), p. 54.) I would note that this definition is too broad, as it does not sufficiently characterize the nature of the relation itself. Correlationism entails a relation in which the subject pole (or its analogue) has a determining power over the object pole. The correlationist would never hold that there is a symmetrical

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Early Phenomenology world–mind correlation where the world determines the mind to think. It is not merely the correlation that is in question but the precise type of determinative relation between the poles. Subject is independent of object, object depends on subject, in a complete reversal of the natural attitude. It is an anthropocentric relation. Compare Brassier’s enlightening discussion of Berkeley and “Stove’s gem” in “Objects and Concepts,” as well as arguments against the “ego-centric predicament” by the so-called “New Realists” in Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, ed. R. Chisholm (New York: The Free Press, 1960), pp. 160–1. “Concepts and Objects,” p. 48. His remarks on Heiddeger’s question of the “meaning of being” (pp. 47–8) are also strikingly similar to Hartmann’s. GO, p. 78. GO, pp. 78–9. For Hartmann, Meillassoux’s concept of an “absolute” would be just another term for this reflectively construed being-in-itself. It is an artifact of the epistemological point of departure, and so provides an inadequate response to the correlationist dilemma. GO, pp. 91–2. “Concepts and Objects,” p. 63 Hartmann devoted an entire volume of his ontology to the problem of modality. See Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966). An English translation is forthcoming in 2013. GO, p. 222. From the vantage point of a critical environmental philosophy, correlationism is regarded as a species of the genus anthropocentrism because it is a dualizing form of idealism that explicitly overvalues the human pole. Some of the most philosophically acute critics of anthropocentrism realized this decades ago: “Thus a corollary of the thoroughgoing rejection of human chauvinism, of very considerable philosophical importance, is the rejection of all the usual forms of idealism, i.e., all positions which accord primacy to the human subject and make the existence of a world of things or the nature of things dependent upon such subjects.” Richard and Val Routley, “Human Chauvinism and Environmental Ethics,” in Environmental Philosophy, eds D. S. Mannison, M. A. McRobbie, and R. Routley (Canberra: Australian National University, 1980), p. 189. Val Routley becomes Val Plumwood after 1983.

9

Buber Meets Heidegger Robert Wood

University of Dallas

There are several meeting points between the thought of Martin Buber1 and the thought of Martin Heidegger2 and several points of divergence. Superficially, we might say that while Buber is focused upon the person, Heidegger is focused upon the thing. For Buber, “all real living is meeting”; and the meeting he is talking about is with what he calls Du, originally translated as “Thou” to stress the intimacy involved (IT-GS 11). Central to Heidegger is the character of the thing. From at least Being and Time onward, the thing takes center stage: Dasein’s Being-in-the-World is illuminated by examining things as tools that function and are understood within the human life-world, and by examining things as objects of observation abstracted out of the life-world. “The Origin of the Work of Art” approaches the work of art as a thing among things and asks about the meaning of “thing.” Heidegger has an article called “The Thing” and a book entitled What Is a Thing? We might say that he has a “thing” about the thing. Most readers already know that in Heidegger this is underpinned by his overall concern with the question of Being, for Dasein is the “There” or “Here” of the meaning of Being that encompasses all beings. And Being and Time’s aim is an analysis of Dasein as preparatory to reopening the question of Being. One of his central contentions is that in recent times things have lost their being and have become either mere data-points or “standing reserve” for our projects— where the term “being” exhibits his idiosyncratic meaning. This question of Being surfaced through Heidegger’s experience of Erschrecken or horror at the Seinsvergessenheit pervading the modern world. Buber himself wrote on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, so we will begin the conversation with that. We will follow with a comparison of the description each of them gives of a tree, which played a central role in each of their thoughts, and we will continue to conduct a dialogue on issues central to both of them.

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1 Heidegger according to Buber Buber commented upon Heidegger in a small work written in 1948 called Das Problem des Menschens, translated into English as What Is Man? I mention the German title to emphasize that it is not the work called Was Ist Der Mensch? that Heidegger singled out as not really raising the question. Buber’s piece locates the question of man in relation to Kant’s three basic questions—What can we know? What ought we to do? For what can we hope?—pointing to the question ‘What is man?’ as grounding the critiques corresponding to each of Kant’s questions. In approaching that question, Buber distinguishes between epochés of habitation and epochés of homelessness. In the latter, sensitive thinkers are driven into solitude and the question about man takes on a certain kind of urgency. Buber attends to several previous thinkers in whom the question is experienced in that way: Augustine, Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, and Nietzsche appear in epochés of homelessness; Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx play counterpoint in epochés of habitation. But, Buber notes, until recent times, in spite of cosmic loneliness, one always had a home in a community. For modern man, even that home is crumbling. Today the solitude of the thinker sensitive to this situation is at its greatest. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra claims that he was the first to discover this absolute solitude, even deeper than that of the anchorite for whom solitude was filled with the presence of God (WM 167).3 In the essay that we are here considering, Buber zeroes in on Heidegger and Max Scheler as recent responses to the situation of absolute homelessness. Both thinkers work out a situation in which the experience of the human being is divided. For one thing, the modern world has swung wildly between extreme individualism and extreme collectivism. Scheler experienced modern splintering in the dualism between Geist and Drang.4 Heidegger and Scheler both work out of what Buber calls a fraction of human experience developed historically because of the emergence of anonymous man percolating out of the breakup of community. Buber devotes nineteen pages to Heidegger, in part of which he compares him with Kierkegaard. Buber’s focus here is almost exclusively upon Being and Time. Though he recognized that Heidegger’s concern is not anthropology but fundamental ontology, still, what Heidegger has to say he finds quite relevant to his own anthropological concern in this work. Overall, Buber sees the focus upon Dasein as a kind of abstraction from full human life. He writes: Heidegger’s modified categories disclose a curious partial sphere of life, not a piece of the whole real life as it is actually lived … Real existence, that is, real



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man in his relation to his being, is comprehensible only in connection with the nature of the being to which he stands in relation. (WM 164–5)

Buber’s central idea is that of Feuerbach: human beings are relational beings. There is no I taken in itself, but only the I of I-Thou or of I-It relations. The former relates to the full being of things; the latter to things as objects of experience and use. The distinctions cut across the distinction between relation to persons and relation to things. One can have an I-Thou relation with a tree and one can and does have innumerable I-It relations with persons. The I-Thou relation is a matter of a charged presence, the I-It relation is a matter of an assimilation of the past, being experienced: “been there, done that.” One comes to know one’s way about, how to stereotype and stereotypically respond to circumstances. One relates to things practically, theoretically, and aesthetically in the typical way those in one’s culture or class relate. By contrast to the orientation from the past in the I-It relation, the I-Thou relation is characterized by Presence, an immediacy that cuts through the stereotypes, and the unique individuality of the encountered Other steps forward and takes hold of us. Where the I-It relation involves only an aspect of ourselves in relation to only an aspect of the encountered being correlative to a given disposition, the I-Thou relation involves the whole of oneself in relation to the wholeness of the other, “met,” he says, “but not comprehended.” Though Buber does not use the expression, a long tradition relates human wholeness to the heart, the center in which intellectual, practical, and aesthetic approaches are rooted. And it is the notion of the heart, I contend, that plays a crucial role in Heidegger’s notion of meditative thinking. For Heidegger meditative thinking is thanking, appreciative thinking that allows things to draw near and take hold of one comprehensively (WCT 138–47). “Drawing near” happens when something—a person, a thing, a work of art—steps out of the circle of everyday adjustments, takes hold of us, and places a demand upon us. We “take it to heart”; it becomes part of our operative center. But in the text in question now, Buber sees Heidegger’s Dasein as closed within itself, resolute but isolated. However, Buber does appreciate Heidegger’s focus upon death, for in 1913 he had written: “The script of life is so unspeakably beautiful to read because we know that death looks over our shoulder” (DDR 70). It is interesting that the relation to current living that deepened awareness of one’s mortality affords at any given moment is conceived of here as “aesthetic,” i.e., as appreciative, while Heidegger’s is “pragmatic,” i.e., geared toward resoluteness in taking over the past in the light of projecting one’s future.5 For Buber, Heidegger’s approach

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here is what he calls a kind of “intellectual game” however, one is “not arbitrarily chosen by the player, but … under necessity, it is his fate” (WM 164–5). The conjunction of the two makes odd reading. Calling it a game diminishes its seriousness, but calling it Heidegger’s fate gives it significant weight. For Buber, Heidegger bears witness to one of the great consequences of the contemporary disposition in an era of homelessness. Buber follows this immediately by a focus upon Heidegger’s understanding of guilt as essential to human beings insofar as they remain in the state of das Man, failing in this state to bring their own individual selves to authentic being. In this situation, for Heidegger conscience calls Dasein to itself. Buber grants that there is a primordial guilt in the human being; but it does not consist in failing to heed the call of oneself to authentic existence; it rather consists in remaining with oneself and not heeding the call of the Other. Playing upon the etymology of Heidegger’s Dasein, Buber writes: I am there [da] if I am there [da], and where this “there” [da] is, is always determined less by myself than by the presence of being [Gegenwärtigkeit des Seins] changing its form and appearance. If I am not really there [da] I am guilty. Primordial being-guilty is remaining with oneself. (WM 166, my emphasis)

Buber inserts the intriguingly Heideggerian phrase, Gegenwärtigkeit des Seins, without explanation. It suggests that Sein here means something more than beings, but, as in Heidegger, something that shows itself intermittently through beings. But as far as I know, Buber never explicitly develops in that direction. In coming back to the immediate concern: the deepest call of conscience is the call of the Other. As Buber sees it, Heidegger isolates resolute Dasein from the only place where one can rise above guilt: in response to the Other by entering into the dialogical situation. Consequently, Heidegger’s Dasein is monological. Heidegger is caught in “the sublime illusion of the detached thought that he is a self-contained self; as man he is lost” and “wants to derive the essence of human existence from the experience of an Alpine dream or illusion (Alptraum)” (WM 168).6 Buber qualifies that reading by noting (a) that for Heidegger, Dasein is essentially Being-in-the-World (WM 169) and (b) Heidegger’s claim in Being and Time that “Resoluteness brings the self right into its being together with things at hand, actually taking care of them, and pushes it toward concerned [Fürsorge] being-with the others” (WM 169; BT 274) and “It is from the authentic being a self of resoluteness that authentic being-with-one-another first arises” (WM 169; BT 274).7 Buber’s critique turns upon the term fürsorgende, a word that



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carries the connotation of institutionalized care: Fürsorge is a disposition exhibited by a charity or social worker. The reduction of relation to the Other to Fürsorge amounts, in Buber’s view, to making one’s aid available but not oneself. This misses the essential relation (WM 169). Buber knows whereof he speaks, for he himself had been early absorbed in what he thought was his authentic self, in solitary mystical experience. One day, during such absorption, he had a visitor who took him away from his exalted state. Buber treated him cordially, but was not fully there for him. He later found out that the young man had come to him seeking essential guidance, did not find it, and went away to die in the Great War. Since then [Buber writes in another work] I have given up the “religious” which is nothing but exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy; or it has given me up … The mystery is no longer disclosed, it has escaped or it has made its dwelling here where everything happens as it happens. I know no fullness but each mortal hour’s fullness of claim and responsibility. (D 14)

Here, in his response to Heidegger, he writes: In an essential relation … the barriers of individual being are in fact breached and a new phenomenon appears which can appear only in this way: one life open to another—not steadily, but so to speak attaining its extreme reality only from point to point, yet also able to acquire a form in the continuity of life: the other becomes present not merely in the imagination or feeling, but in the depths of one’s substance, so that one experiences in the mystery of one’s own being the mystery of the other’s being [man im Geheimnis des eigenen Seins das Geheimnis des anderen Seins erfährt]: a factual [faktische], not merely psychic, but ontic participation [ontische Partizipation] in one another. (WM 170)

There are two distinct phenomena here. First, certain unique points of the opening of one person to another occur episodically. Second, through the coming and going between the epiphany of the Thou and working with the It, a transformation occurs “in the depths of one’s substance,” beyond feeling and imagination, that establishes a temporal continuity which, he claims, is not merely psychic but ontic. When Buber describes the relation as something ontic, that term underscores the transcendence of one’s own immanence by the gift of participation. In this situation, one is drawn out to share with the wholeness of one’s being in the wholeness of the other. They meet, not surface-to-surface, as we regularly do, but being-to-being, as fullness-to-fullness. Further, one is brought from situations in which someone or something steps out of the

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ordinary and addresses the depth of one’s being to a situation in which continuity is established in the depths, in spite of moving necessarily in the everyday and experiencing real being addressed only episodically. The notion of Geheimnis here dovetails with Buber’s description of the Thou that is “met but not comprehended.” There is a sense of fullness, but in relation to the hidden Geheimnis. He once said that his position was Kantian since the thing-in-itself is unknown, with one important difference: the thing-in-itself rises up to meet us. Underscoring continuity that comes through the episodic meeting with the Thou is important, for even a careful a reader like Walter Kaufmann misdescribed the center of Buber’s focus as the ongoing life of the everyday punctuated with ecstatic episodes. Although I and Thou does lend itself to such reading, Buber later made clear that: The unity of life, as that which is truly won, is no more torn by any changes, not ripped asunder into the everyday creaturely life and the ‘deified’ exalted hours; the unity of unbroken, raptureless perseverance in concreteness, in which the Word is heard and a stammering answer dared. (D 25)

“Word” is crucial to Buber’s thought in this peculiar sense, that here it is found in “being addressed” by what steps out of the relative superficiality of everyday relations. And here, note, it is not just persons but things and also “works of the spirit”—artworks, written works, sacred works—that can come as personal address directed to the recipient beyond the written word. One is reminded of the concluding line of Rilke’s “The Archaic Torso of Apollo”; when confronted by such a work, one can experience this peculiar imperative: “You must change your life.” What might be simply an aesthetic experience comes to operate at a level that undercuts the distinction between contemplation and action, precisely the realm in which Heidegger in his Letter on Humanism claims that relation to Being operates. It leads to transformation of one’s dispositional basis toward things in the world. Buber goes on to say that this occurs only by a grace and that “the conscious or unconscious lack of it plays an essential part in determining the nature and character of his existence” (WM 170). As Buber sees it, Heidegger’s notion of the freely resolved individual can only be an aspect of life and not the essential relation to the Other that is the deepest aspect of life. For Heidegger, “the individual has the essence of man in himself and brings it to existence by becoming a ‘resolved’ self.” “Heidegger’s self,” Buber says, “is a closed system” (WM 171). We will have something to say about that shortly. He then goes on to compare the Heideggerian self with the Kierkegaardian. Both aim at becoming



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“the single one” [der Einzelne]. For Kierkegaard this is only the presupposition for becoming open to God. In both thinkers, one experiences anxiety; but in Kiekegaard’s case it is not centered upon the growth of self-being, but upon one’s relation to God. Kierkegaard renounced his relation to his fiancée, but at least he had something to renounce. According to Buber, “Heidegger’s man has no essential relation to renounce” (WM 172). Apparently he feels entitled to this judgement because one who presumably had that relation would not write about the human being as Heidegger did. In another regard, for both Heidegger and Kierkegaard there is a move away from the anonymous “one” which Kierkegaard calls “the crowd” that is in “untruth.” Buber finds much value in Kierkegaard’s discussion of the crowd and in Heidegger’s of the anonymous one; such a phenomenon is “like a negative womb from which we have to emerge in order to come into the world as a self ” (WM 178). But whereas Heidegger’s freedom from das Man is aimed at the self, Kierkegaard’s is aimed at relation to God (WM 171–2). At this point, as an aside, Buber introduces the notion of “the essential We” that, he claims, “has hitherto been all too little recognized” (WM 176). The essential We is established as a community among independent persons who have reached self-responsibility. It is rare, but is found in religious groups, even in revolutionary groups. Its transient forms are found in confronting together the death of an important leader, in the face of catastrophe, and even in terrorist regimes (WM 176). It is important to note that this is possible only for those who have reached what Buber calls “self-being” (WM 176–7). There are two modes of this “self-being” that Buber examined in his works. In one mode there is the becoming one of the soul that is often confused with becoming one with the divine. It is arrived at through asceticism and the practice of extended concentration. Even the term “concentration,” being at the center with, suggests unification. Buber has argued that such becoming one is essential to the works of the Spirit in religion, art, and philosophy. And it seems to have a parallel in Heidegger’s understanding of resoluteness. However, for Buber there is a more significant self-being derived from openness to the Other. It is such a self-being that is prerequisite for establishing the essential We. In his further comparison of Heidegger with Kierkegaard, Buber recalls the three regions in which essential relation to the Thou is possible: relation to things, to men, and to what he calls in this work das Geheimnis des Seins, the mystery of Being. In I and Thou he spoke of the latter involved in encounter with geistige Wesenheiten, spiritual beings in the areas of art, religion, and philosophy (IT 57). The choice of words in the text we are considering is interesting because, as

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we well know, the Mystery of Being is the center of Heidegger’s turning from the preliminary analysis of Dasein to pondering Being as the Mystery.8 Buber did know of Heidegger’s turn toward Hölderlin but merely mentions it and passes it by; he thus misses what would have to significantly qualify his assessment of Heidegger’s alleged closure; instead, Buber goes on to consider the three regions of relation in the Kierkegaard and Heidegger. First, in Buber’s view, in Kierkegaard’s thought relation to things is missing and in Heidegger there is only a technical, purposive relation (WM 177–9). Of course, this is the focus in Being and Time. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” we see how for Heidegger subsequently the true thing is revealed in the work of art that opens up a World for dwelling and sets it upon the Earth of sensuousness that becomes thereby native soil. And in Heidegger’s discussion of Nietzsche’s aesthetics, which focuses upon what he calls “masculine” rather than “feminine” aesthetics—that is, giving primary focus to the artist’s making instead of, as in the aesthetic tradition, upon the subject receiving—Heidegger claims that both forms of subjectivity are transcended in being drawn precisely beyond oneself by the work of art. In the light of such being-drawn, one’s disposition is so transformed by that work that “even the ordinary becomes extraordinary.” This is hardly a matter of the self as a closed system. Secondly, continuing the three regions of relation, relation to individual men in Kierkegaard is doubtful because Kierkegaard understood the relation to God as obstructed by human companionship. In the case of Heidegger, as we saw, for Buber there is mere solicitude for the human other. Further, for Buber, “a genuine and adequate self also draws out the spark of self-being wherever it touches the crowd … shaping the form of community in the stuff of social life” (WM 178). Thirdly, relation to God or to the Absolute or to the Mystery is the sole essential relation in Kierkegaard, while, Buber claimed, it is completely lacking in Heidegger. But even Kierkeaard’s relation to God is lacking if it does not include relation to creatures. Buber here sees Heidegger’s thought as a philosophical secularization of Kierkegaard (WM 179). As I mentioned, Buber does recognize that Heidegger was influenced by Hölderlin, whom Buber calls “the great poet of this mystery.” But Buber at this point inexplicably waffles: on one page he says, as I noted, that relation to the mystery “is completely lacking in Heidegger” [bei Heidegger völlig verfällt]. If he would have read further in Heidegger’s subsequent work, he would have found that Entschlossenheit or resoluteness involves Entschliessenheit or disclosure of Being. Buber seems to have a sense of that since, on the very next page,



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he says that Heidegger “has undoubtedly had a profound experience of the mystery of being [zweifellos tief erfahren], but [this is the decisive qualification] not as that which challenges us to breach the barriers of the self and to come out from ourselves to meet with essential otherness” (WM 177 and 179). This must mean that he sees Heidegger’s experience of the Mystery on a par with his own earlier self-absorbed mysticism. Buber also claimed that Dasein is “an almost ghostly being … which has nothing to do with the body” (WM 180). That certainly seems to be the case in Being and Time. In his subsequent thought, Heidegger has a central place for earth as the place of the humanum; but even in Being and Time, it seems only Being-toward-Death underscores our embodiment. Heidegger does little to pursue the essential embodiment theme; phenomenology had to wait for Merleau-Ponty for more careful attention to the phenomena of embodied existence in dialogue with natural science. Buber concludes his treatment of Heidegger in this way: Man is to be understood as the being who is capable of the threefold living relation [to nature, to human beings, and to “spiritual beings”] and can raise every form of it to essentiality … Heidegger teaches, not what man is, but only what the edge of man [der Rand des Menschen] is. One can also say, one learns what man is on the edge—the man who has reached the edge of being [den Rand des Seins]. (WM 181)

Heidegger’s man, he says, is a step “in the direction of the edge where nothing begins” (WM 181). One wonders what to make of these comments, and especially the last comment. What exactly is this “edge of being” that is linked to “the edge of man”? As we know, Heidegger made much ado about nothing in his inaugural lecture, “What Is Metaphysics?” Das Nichts indicates what is beyond beings that are dealt with in the various disciplines, a beyond that is no thing but the condition for the meaningful manifestness of all things. Das Nicht, for Heidegger, is “the veil of Being” (PWM 238). Buber’s “edge of being” sounds very much like the threshold of beings beyond which is Sein, but he does nothing to explain this tantalizingly obscure claim, one that might seem to bring him quite close to Heidegger in this regard. This takes us to the end of Buber’s explicit encounter with Heidegger’s thought. At this point I want to turn to two parallel texts dealing with the phenomenon of the tree that we can put into a dialogical relation. One appears in Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking? and the other in Buber’s I and Thou.

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2 Buber, Heidegger, and Trees First Heidegger in What Is Called Thinking? We stand outside science. Instead we stand before a tree in bloom … and the tree stands before us. The tree faces us. The tree and we meet one another, as the tree stands there and we stand face-to-face with it. As we are in this relation of one to the other and before the other, the tree and we are. This face-to-face meeting is not, then, one of these “ideas” buzzing about in our heads … While science records the brain currents, what becomes of the tree in bloom? What becomes of the meadow? What becomes of the man—not of the brain but of the man, who may die under our hands tomorrow and be lost to us, and who at one time came to our encounter? What becomes of the face-to-face, the meeting, the seeing, the forming of the idea in which the tree presents itself and man comes to stand face-to-face with the tree? (WCT 41–2, my emphasis)

Though neuroscience may attempt to understand human awareness in terms of inner brain states where we attend to images produced by the physicalphysiological causal network, nonetheless, scientists would not have access to such data unless they were presented “outside” the inside of their brains. The reductionist program is indeed such that, as Heidegger cryptically remarked, things lose their being and become data; this is something that we will return to as common ground between Buber and Heidegger. In our being “out there” with the things of which we are daily aware, something of their ontological weight is restored: as Heidegger says, “the tree and we are.” The underscoring of being here is crucial. Note that Heidegger employs the language of meeting and encounter, terms central to Buber’s thought for whom, as we said, “all real living is meeting.” Also focused on the tree, in Buber’s I and Thou, we find a somewhat more elaborate set of observations: I contemplate a tree. I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground. I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air—and the growing itself in its darkness. I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its way of life. I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as an expression of the law—those laws according to which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or those laws according to which the elements



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mix and separate. I can dissolve it into number, into a pure relation between numbers, and eternalize it. Throughout all this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind of condition. But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me. There is nothing that I must not see in order to see, and there is no knowledge that I must forget. Rather is everything, [and here he summarizes the aspects involves] picture and movement, species and instance, law and number included and inseparably fused. … The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it—only differently. One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is receptivity … What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself. (IT 57–8, my emphasis)

In this text, Buber gives a kind of quick phenomenological inventory of the ways in which one might relate to a tree: first, aesthetically, appreciating its display of color and form, or empathetically, by gaining a sense of its inner movements drawing nourishment from the earth and reaching toward the sky; then scientifically, in terms of the structure and function of the species, or in terms of the law-like regularities exhibited by the tree, or mathematically subjecting it to measurement. Buber does not treat of it, as well he might have, as capable of being used in various ways: as providing shade from the sun, as a height from which one might see in the distance, as providing fruit for consumption, as firewood, or as lumber for building. In all these ways the tree is my object. In Buber’s way of speaking in I and Thou, the tree in all these relations is an It: “object of experience and use” (IT 88). At the extreme end of the I-It relation, the thing is represented by an image within my brain. Against all this, in the I-Thou relation, a real encounter occurs with the being, that is, the hidden fullness jutting into our sensory field. That requires a meeting of will and grace, of disposition and gift. A certain receptivity is required that moves beyond but also through all the other ways one might consider a tree. Now, although Buber’s description is more detailed, covering many possible ways in which a tree might be considered, what is focused in both his and Heidegger’s account is the tree itself, outside one’s brain, outside scientific description, confronting us in itself. Heidegger uses some terms central to Buber’s thought: encounter, meeting with the tree, the meadow, the man.

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However, what Heidegger is describing here might be seen to cover our everyday experience in which we live “out there” with the things themselves. He underscores the fact that in the encounter, oneself and the tree are. As we know, it is the are, the sind as an inflection of Sein that is the center of his thought. Buber is going beyond that to describe the special way in which a particular tree, at a particular time, steps out of the everyday and addresses us, draws out our whole being and relates us for a time not as surface-to-surface, but as being-tobeing, fullness-to-fullness. That kind of experience Heidegger seems to reserve for a work of art. For Heidegger, van Gogh’s painting “Mulberry Tree” might be the focus of the experience Buber describes as an I-Thou relation. Both Heidegger and Buber employ the notion of presence to speak of the peculiarity of what they describe as a relation to the being of things. As Heidegger noted, the Western tradition is dominated by the notion of Being as standing presence exemplified by Plato’s eternal Forms. For Buber, what comes across in the relation of being-to-being is a distinctive coming to presence, though in a fleeting now and in relation to a unique individual. The tradition’s standing now gives way to a coming to presence that seems directly parallel to Heidegger’s rejection of the permanently present in favor of a special coming to presence. Now in describing such a coming to presence in the I-Thou relation, it may seem strange that Buber would consider encounter with a tree as a prime example of that relation. But the first epiphany of such relation in Buber’s life was not a relation to another person; it was his being taken by a glittering piece of mica along a mountain trail (IT 146–7). He illumines it further by an encounter with his horse and with a Doric pillar (D 22–3; IT 175). One reason for this non-human focus is that interpersonal relations are permeated by so many less-than-full relations, in sexual matters especially, such that many forms of relation between people are ambiguous. As Augustine said, in his past life he was in love with love rather than persons. Buber claims that the Thou in nature is the source of the experience of the gods of the grove, the brook, the mountain, the stone. Buber calls these “moment gods” (D 15). They are the sources of the feeling of being addressed when such things jut out of the everyday relations, take hold of us as charged presences, and call for a response. Verantwortung, responsibility, is the ability to respond. As Buber, translator of the Hebrew Bible into modern German, understands it, Hebrew revelation is rooted in hearing all these moment gods as addresses spoken by one Voice announcing that it is God’s speech that grounds the world and constantly addresses us through what we encounter. In this



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peculiar experience of faith, every Thou-meeting is an opening to the Eternal Thou (IT 123–4). The Doric pillar is a remnant of one of the forms of the Spirit that arise from being addressed by geistige Wesenheiten, “spiritual beings,” the Muses or the Angels as messengers of the Most High. The equivalent in Heidegger is the notion of the Immortals as “Messengers of the Most High.” For Buber, the task of one gifted with such encounter is to bring it into the inter-human realm by producing a communally available work, translating it into an intersubjectively available form. Such works announce a relation to the Eternal and Encompassing in three differing regions: in art as fulfilled relation to nature, in philosophy as fulfilled relation to one’s fellow humans, and in religion as fulfilled relation to God. We thus find an external artwork (like a Doric pillar), a system of thought presented in writing or in speech, and a form of life displayed in word and deed. For Buber, the exemplars in these three regions are Goethe, Socrates, and Jesus respectively (IT 115–17). Whence, the basis for the relation to spiritual beings lies in Spirit as a relation to that which transcends the world; it provides Urdistanz or primordial distance from our everyday relations (DR 50–1). It establishes the articulation of the Between as the communal life-world whose central relation is that of person-toperson, but which is grounded in nature and reaches toward the Transcendent. The Between is where we live our lives together. It is in this context that Buber might have attended to the Greek and Latin traditions that he neglected, to the notion of Being from Parmenides through Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas and on to Hegel and from there on to Heidegger. In fact, it is the notion of Being as all-encompassing that provides primordial distance and relation to what transcends the world. As central to Heidegger, “the single star” around which all his questioning pivots, the notion of Being makes it to be the case that the human being is the place where the question of the Whole and the place of humankind within the Whole occurs. Placing us at a distance even from ourselves as currently constituted, it gives us over to ourselves to take responsibility for what we become. It directs us toward the transcendent pole of the Between. For Buber, the newly fashioned work of the Spirit articulates the Between, giving it a distinctive form. Form is neither Thou nor It, but stands between Thou and It, between Presence and Object. Produced form contains the Thou like a chrysalis contains the butterfly (IT 69, 165). Through intellectual and volitional activities, human relationships to things and to each other develop into institutional structures that operate in the Between. However, the produced

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forms can be approached in such a way as to ignore the meeting that is their generative source. Form becomes Object when we lose the ability of allowing the form to address us as Thou, to take hold of us and transform us. There is a deflection of attention from presence and its forms to objects. Religion is reduced to creed, code, and cult; philosophy to a set of arguments and the history of opinions; art to subject-matter for students of styles, techniques, and periods, and each region becomes material for biographers, historians, and sociologists. We even reach a state where “just as nothing can hide from us the face of our fellow man as ‘morality’ can, so there is nothing that can hide from us the face of God as ‘religion’ can” (D 18). In a significant parallel to Buber, there is for Heidegger a distinction between the art product and the work of art. Buber’s three regions of form become what Heidegger calls “works that were,” for transformation is bypassed. They become objects in a museum to be cleaned and preserved or subject matter for scholarly work. Their work-being is lost. It is in relation to their work-being that Heidegger’s notion of Ereignis seems to bear witness to the kind of unique encounter Buber intends with his I-Thou relation. Heidegger’s Ereignis is the event that appropriates the human being. In his commentary on select passages from Parmenides, he considers noein, usually translated as thinking or intellection, as “the appropriation that has man.” It is a being possessed, being drawn out of oneself. The disposition preparatory to such event is Gelassenheit, “letting things be,” where the “be” is crucial, where the thing encountered regains its being for us from out of its having been reduced for us to merely a set of data or standing reserve for someone’s projects. Requisite is the disposition of besinnliche Nachdenken, translated as “meditative thinking.” Nachdenken, literally “thinking after,” is a kind of retrieval, a treasuring in one’s heart of the thing previously encountered, about which one meditates. Besinnliche has the significance of endowing with Sinn, with meaning, although the endowment does not come from us. We are the locus through which it comes when and if it comes as a kind of serendipity. In Buber’s terms, it requires a meeting of will and grace. For Buber, the meeting with a Thou involves mission to the world. The development of the realm of It is a necessity task for what Buber calls “the Becoming of the World” (IT 88). In the life-history of a people, there is a necessary alternation between meeting and mission, between encounter with a Thou and work for a community. But every Thou is fated to become an It. In addition, all the practices and institutions that support them belong to the realm of It. Furthermore, in the life-history of the West the realm of It has become increasingly complex through the development of modern science in tandem



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with technology, politics, and economics. With increased competence in these realms, it becomes more and more difficult to turn to the Thou. In contrast to the Becoming of the World as our task, turning to the Thou is working at the return of what has become to the Being as distinct from the Becoming of the World. Without such turning, we have reached the age of what Nietzsche called “the death of God.” Buber, who was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, spoke of it rather as “the eclipse of God.” Our own products have come between us and the Eternal Thou (EG 23–4). Also in the wake of Nietzsche, Heidegger spoke of “the flight of the gods” in the omnivorousness of the epoché of the Gestell. But he also spoke of “the saving grace” through the arts. For Buber, in the emergence of new forms the turning back to Being, to the source is accomplished, something that has to be re-established again and again over against the inevitable move from form to object. As we said above, Buber noted that, through Hölderlin, Heidegger came to speak of the mystery of Being that stands at the background of all encounter with beings. In his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger presents a kind of calculative ordering of a series of steps: first the thinker’s pondering the Mystery of Being, then on to the Holy as the realm of the poetic, then the Gottheit, and then finally the consideration of what Gott might be (LH 253). For Buber, through Hebrew revelation, the sense of being-addressed by beings in unique situations of encounter is likewise encompassed by a background that announces itself as the single Voice speaking out of all the “moment gods”: Yahweh speaks and things are. For Buber, every encounter with a Thou opens a way to the Eternal Thou. “A streak of sunshine on a maple twig and an intimation of the eternal Thou” is worth more than all mysticism that takes place on that ambiguous place at the edge of beings (IT 135–6). For Heidegger, a turn in the directions of the arts with meditative thinking opens one to the mystery of Being. For Buber, heeding the epiphany of the Thou and responding in whatever way is called for opens up the possibility of the epiphany of the Eternal Thou. What is crucial for Buber is the character of personal address and of the mystery itself as the divine Thou—but the central focus of such being addressed is the human Thou. Perhaps Heidegger had no such experience and saw his thought better reflected in the impersonal Tao, for his central focus was upon things.

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3 Concluding remarks By way of a kind of summing up, let me make a few observations concerning similarities and differences. In spite of Buber’s early view of Heidegger’s thought as locked within the self, Heidegger’s Kehre from considering Dasein to the pondering of Being shows his essential openness to things in and through the work of art and, at the same time, to the Mystery of Being as the essentially concealed that is partially revealed in whatever is disclosed. Buber and Heidegger have a similar view of the way in which the very successes of modern history have led to what Heidegger calls the reduction of things to mere data or standing reserve for our projects that involves Seinsvergessenheit. Buber calls the latter the advancement of the I-It relation that fails to turn the world back from Becoming to Being, from development to a kind of return to the Ground. In the background of each stands Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God. For Heidegger there is “the flight of the gods,” but even more proximately there is Seinsvergessenheit whose overcoming is required for even approaching the question of God. For Buber, our era is rather that of “the eclipse of God” following from our necessarily working at the becoming of the world; turning to the Thou wherever it announces itself works at the return of the world to Being. Both have a similar view of the role of the arts in overcoming the negative situation. For Heidegger, the arts are “the saving grace” in our epoch; for Buber, they are the essential mediators in our relation to the Eternal Thou. Heidegger’s distinction between the art piece that has lost its world and has become a work that was and the restorers that permit the art to work upon them is paralleled by Buber’s turning of form into object on the one hand, and learning to respond to its formative ability on the other. For both Heidegger and Buber, this moves us from surface relation to a relation to the partly revealed, but most concealed being of things, against the background of the revealing/concealing relation to the Mystery of Being. The difference is what Buber calls “an experience of faith” when things are heard as words spoken from out of that Mystery by a Single Voice, that of the Eternal Thou. Short of that, one remains, like the Taoist, open to things and the sense of the Mystery that surrounds all. I think Buber’s centralization of relation to persons is reciprocally linked to his experience of the divine as Thou, as the Eternal Thou. But as we noted in the beginning, Heidegger has almost exclusive focus upon things in a move to re-establish their integrity, an integrity that belongs to our own integrity. He pays very little sustained attention to the



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human Other. For Buber, relation to the human Other is central, and all other relations feed into the relation between persons. When one considers these basic parallel directions of thought, one could only wish that Buber and Heidegger could have met in person instead of in this very indirect presentation.

Notes 1 The following abbreviations will be used to refer to Buber in this text: D = “Dialogue,” trans R. G. Smith, in Between Man and Man (New York: Collier, 1965), pp. 1–39. DDR = Daniel: Dialogues on Realization, trans. M. Friedman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965). DR = “Distance and Relation,” trans. R. G. Smith, in The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1988). EG = Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God, trans. M. Friedman (New York: Harper and Row, 1952). IT = I and Thou, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Scribners, 1970). IT-GS = I and Thou, trans. R. G. Smith (New York: Collier Books, 1987). WM = “What is Man,” trans R. G. Smith, in Between Man and Man (New York: Collier, 1965), pp. 118–205. References to the German texts are based on those printed in Martin Buber, Werke, 3 vols (Munich: Kösel Verlag and Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1962). 2 The following abbreviations will be used to refer to Heidegger’s works: BT = Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). LH = “Letter on Humanism,” trans. F. Capuzzi in Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper, 2008), pp. 217–65. OWA = “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. D. Krell, in Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper, 2008), pp. 139–212. PWM = “Postscript to ‘What is Metaphysics’,” trans. D. F. Krell, in Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 82–96. WCT = What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968). References to the German texts are to the appropriate Gesamtausgabe editions. 3 Buber is alluding to Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125; Buber’s first work was the translation of Zarathustra into Polish. 4 One might see this as a projection from his own experience, for he had an overweening sexual drive that led him to the brothels. Once some students found his briefcase in a brothel and presented it to the dean of the department within which Scheler taught. When the dean told him that such conduct was

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Early Phenomenology incompatible with his position as professor of ethics, Scheler remarked something to the effect that “The street-sign does not have to go in the direction to which it points.” One should note that this appears in Daniel, a work on the way towards I and Thou, but focused upon the human individual’s experience. The key distinction here is between orientation that corresponds to the later I-It relation and realization that corresponds to the later I-Thou relation. The difference is that the focus here is upon the individual self rather than upon the other. The translation has been slightly modified: although Alptraum can take that meaning, the translation of Alptraum in WM as “nightmare” is too extreme. In both cases we quote the translation in BT, not in WM. It is interesting to note that the term “Geheimnis” contains Heim as home. The Ge-refers to an essential linkage, as in das Ge-Stell or das Ge-birge.

Part Four

Early Phenomenology of Religion

10

Edith Stein and the Carmelites Jonna Bornemark

Södertörn University, Sweden

At the age of forty-two, Edith Stein entered the Carmelite convent and became Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She was deeply influenced by two earlier Carmelites: Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross. In this essay I will to discuss Stein’s readings of the earlier Carmelites in a phenomenological framework, and also relate her readings to later phenomenological readings within the so-called “turn to religion.”

1 Edith Stein between phenomenology and religion: A short introduction Within phenomenology Edith Stein (1891–1942) is mostly known for her dissertation Zum Problem der Einfühlung (On Empathy) from 1917. As a student she worked with Edmund Husserl and wanted to fill a gap in Husserl’s investigations, i.e., the gap between the egological investigation of Ideas I and the constitution of the world we share.1 The phenomenon of empathy explains how we gain knowledge of the experiences of the other person. But after her dissertation, Stein’s career as a philosopher was not easy. She was obviously brilliant, but born of the wrong sex and was of the wrong religion at the wrong time in the wrong country. In Germany during the 1910s women were not allowed to present their habilitation treatise (or at least it was allowed only very rarely) and she did not get the support she needed from Husserl. Finally, in 1932, she got a position as docent at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster, but in the following year Hitler was elected and as a person of Jewish descent, she was forced out of her job.

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Stein was deeply involved in the phenomenological movement and wanted to continue working with it on an advanced academic level after her dissertation. But parallel to her philosophical work, she had a growing interest in religion. After reading the autobiography of Theresa of Avila in 1922, Stein converted to Catholicism. When she could not get an academic position during the 1920s, she worked at a Catholic teacher training college. And when all roads to an academic life were closed in 1933, she entered the Carmelite Monastery of Cologne. As a nun she wrote her last book, called The Science of the Cross (Kreuzeswissenschaft), on John of the Cross, as a celebration of the 400th anniversary of his birth (1542). She was still working on it in August 1942 when the Gestapo brought her to Auschwitz, where she was put to death. In 1998 she was canonized by Pope John Paul II (who was also deeply inspired by phenomenology and wrote his dissertation on John of the Cross). On the basis of brief biography, Stein’s writings can roughly be divided into three periods.2 The first one is phenomenological, including not only her dissertation, but also some of her writings as a pedagogue, for example Einführung in die Philosophie. The transition to her second phase, which can be called a Christian philosophy, is marked by her Potenz und Akt—Studien zu einer Philosophie des Seins, which she finalized in 1931 and wanted to present as her habilitation treatise. In Potenz und Akt she wanted to fuse Thomas Aquinas’s Christian philosophy with phenomenology, and in Endliches und ewiges Sein from 1936, she transformed this project into a systematic Christian ontology. Her third and last phase has been called a mystical phase, and its main work is The Science of the Cross and the article on Dionysius Areopagita from 1941, “Wege der Gotteserkenntnis. Die ‘symbolische Theologie’ des Areopagiten und ihre sachliche Voraussetzungen.” Arguably, this phase is initiated in the appendix of Endliches und ewiges Sein, which includes a reading of Theresa of Avila. Even if Stein in her second and third phases turns to religious questions and to a religious audience, it could be argued that she never really leaves phenomenology, and that it continues to be her foundational way of grasping life and being. At the same time as phenomenology opened up for her, and gave her tools to examine, religion, many phenomenologists of Stein’s generation cultivated a religious spirit. During this period there was a widely spread criticism against what was understood as Husserl’s idealism and egological starting point, and Husserl was therefore accused of being stuck in individualism and anthropocentricism. One reason for the interest in religion that we find in early phenomenology might be exactly the feeling that religion, with its firm ground



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outside of the human being, provided a necessary complement to egological phenomenology. In her later phases Stein explicitly formulated such a position.3 In her second and third phases Stein investigates two different paths where phenomenology and religion were combined in different ways. The second phase could be described as a positive path, the third as a negative path. With the scholastic thinker Thomas Aquinas, Stein, during her second phase, is in search of ultimate forms, the unchanging within the stream of change. These forms shows themselves through an eidetic analysis (Wesensschau). The most general forms, applying to all beings, are characterized as transcendentals in the Thomistic tradition. Thus, the investigation has a formal or logical character and is performed at a distance from being, letting the observing eye move across all of experience. Here the method of phenomenology and Thomism are not far from each other in their eidetic vision. The third phase is inspired by a negative theology that, as we will see, rather operates by negating every category and emphasizing the streaming character of experience. Every form and category, even the categories of the transcendental, is here understood as an attempt to arrest the stream, and thus as a result objectifies it, negating its innermost character. The negative road therefore has to be lived rather than theorized, and Stein consequently understands the writings of John of the Cross not as a theory but as the testimony of life where the only continual is discontinuity. Philosophy, on the other hand, is seen as conceptual, and thus not suited to go beyond categorization. The negative road cannot stay within a pure intellectual sphere, but has to move into other dimensions of life. So does this mean that there is a greater difference between philosophy and Christianity in negative theology? No, even if Stein might have thought so, phenomenology is not condemned to prioritize an intellectual intentionality. Already Husserl’s phenomenological contemporaries criticized him for his intellectualism: Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger, for example, emphasized other forms of intentionality; Scheler developed an intentionality of love, and in Heidegger anxiety plays a role similar to Husserl’s intellectual reduction, as the attunement through which the world shows itself anew.4 As we will see, there is also a close kinship between negative theology and recent phenomenology, as they both work within experience and focus on experience as overflowing object intentionality (i.e., intentionality with a subject pole directed toward an object pole). Both the positive way and the negative way search for that which is common in all experience and in all being, but whereas the first one focuses on the possibility of formulating and categorizing what is common, the negative way

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focuses on its overflowing character. This indifference can be understood as the reason why a concept such as transcendere is developed into both “transcendental” and “transcendence”; on the one hand as the positive search for transcendentals, on the other hand as a negative way that tries to point toward overflowing transcendence. Such a description goes for phenomenology as well as for Christianity. In phenomenology it could be connected to a static and genetic phenomenology, in Christianity to Scholasticism and what has been called the mystical tradition.5 These two ways are also often interconnected and intertwined. Scholarly work on Stein has been divided between theological and phenomenological readings: her phenomenological phase has mostly been read by phenomenologists, and her Christian phases have tended to be read by theologians within a purely Christian framework. This is of course not surprising, but Stein’s religious phases should also be seen within the broader relation between phenomenology and religion, as it came to be developed, mostly within French phenomenology, as “the turn to religion.” Such a reading needs to be done with and against Stein’s own language. Especially in her later mystical writings, composed when she was a nun, her language is more purely Christian and close to the original language of John of the Cross. But nevertheless, phenomenological elements are included, as I will emphasize in the following.

2 Stein’s reading of Theresa of Avila As discussed above, Stein had a strong relation to Theresa of Avila; her autobiography played a central role in Stein’s conversion and Theresa of Avila was the first mystic that Stein wrote on. The appendix in Endliches und ewiges Sein discusses Theresa’s main work Moradas del Castillo Interior, and Stein wants to show (a) how her theoretical analysis is inspired by Theresa and (b) that the theoretical investigation is dependent upon a certain type of experience. As in Stein’s reading of John of the Cross, her reading of Theresa is deeply Christian. In this way these texts differ from purely phenomenological texts. In Endliches und ewiges Sein the soul is understood through the metaphor of a castle; it is in the soul that all experiences are gathered together and ordered. This understanding of the soul includes both what Husserl formulates as retentions (past experiences in their character of still being present, i.e., as non-thematized memories) and protentions (future experiences present as expectations and apprehensions), as well as intellectual capacities for ordering



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and structuring. In this castle the pure self can move around as it brings different parts to attention. The pure self is thus the now and here of consciousness as a beam of attention. When the pure self moves into an area in which retentions from last week are “stored,” what we call a memory of the past week arises. In such a castle also retentions from the culture I grew up in are present. Stein wants to investigate this castle with Theresa’s help. But we cannot enter it through focusing on the image of ourselves that is given to us from the other person. Since we to a large extent look at ourselves through the eyes of the other person, we mostly relate to ourselves from the outside. But Stein claims that this does not really help us understand ourselves. In a similar way, scientific research on the human being, such as psychology, does not provides us with any deeper knowledge, since it objectifies what is not essentially an object but a flowing stream of attention. In this way, spirit, meaning, and life become inaccessible,6 and Stein turns to Theresa in order to gain access to another approach to the human soul. It is here the metaphor of the castle provides an alternative. Following Theresa, Stein describes the ring wall as the living body and the senses as its vassals. The soul includes seven floors and God resides in the chamber on the top floor, in the innermost center of the soul. The journey through these seven floors involves an investigation of the experiencing self in order to reach the basis and starting point of every experience. The metaphor of the castle is of course a kind of objectivation, but the journey through the castle also include a deconstruction of the experiencing self through which it can go beyond objectifications as such. Theresa leaves floor after floor in her search for the heart and most intimate chamber of the castle. “God” here becomes the name for the uttermost transcendental foundation, which is unreachable through everyday intentionality and thus transcendent in relation to all cognitive knowledge. The first floor contains the Augustinian insight that one has to turn away from outer images (as well as modern science), as God is reached only through self-knowledge. At the second floor she understands that the turn away from an objectifying gaze from others does not include a turn away from listening to others. Here, the soul instead learns to benefit from tradition and let it lead her search. At the third floor the turn to self-knowledge and the listening to the tradition are combined when one’s own experiencing is connected to the abstractions of tradition. At the fourth floor the preparations of the earlier floors show themselves fruitful as a spiritual world becomes apparent beyond (or within) the world experienced by the senses. At the fifth floor the passivity and reception of the spiritual world is increased. But at this floor there is a

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concurrent passivity and activity. Here, there is a love for beings as well as for God, which mean that the traveler is guided in two directions. As active, the human is always directed toward something and thus always involved in a process of objectification. In order to leave such objectifications, and in search for their presuppositions, she needs to develop her passivity. In this way her world does not come forth through an intentionality governed through her desires. Instead, whatever shows itself in the stream is accepted as loved by God. At the sixth floor the passivity of the pure ego means that she follows the flowing divine being in what Theresa calls an engagement. And at the last, seventh floor a worldless unification takes place (EES 501ff.). In this way the pure self, i.e., the living, flowing now and here of consciousness, finds itself and its own origin within the divine. Despite its movability, the pure self is really at home only in the central and unmovable center of the castle. The reason is that this unmovable center is its origin, out of which the whole castle has been developed, a center that later on can easily be forgotten. Stein also locates the voice of conscience, as the place of free personal decision making, in this center. Stein here implicitly argues against Heidegger and wants to understand the conscience as coming from a place beyond the person. It is important for her that the loving union with God includes both a free devotion and attention to what goes beyond her. The place for human freedom and deep passivity in the union with God is one and the same (EES 524f). This journey of the soul can be understood as a journey of self-understanding as well as toward the transcending depth of the soul. But this movement toward the innermost chambers of the soul also includes the possibility to come closer to the world. It is a road to deeper knowledge of the world and in the end the soul can go back to her natural abilities in order to experience and once again be active in the world (EES 520). But this return is not something that Stein develops further. While this reading of Theresa has its benefits, and I do think that the metaphor of the soul as a castle and the pure self as the possibility to move around in the soul provides us with good material for thought, the whole appendix nevertheless tends to be a theoretical construction in traditional Christian terminology. The reading of John of the Cross is written six years later and provides us with a much more vigorous understanding of a mystic text. One reason for this might be that during the years that she wrote on John of the Cross, she lived a religious life as a nun in which earlier theories become living reality.



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3 Stein’s reading of John of the Cross In the following I will focus on some phenomenological aspects of Stein’s reading of John of the Cross and read The Science of the Cross as a philosophical text.7 But maybe the difference between a philosophical and religious text in this context is more a question of tone than of content. There might also be a highly relevant difference between Stein and later phenomenologists on the question of the reach of philosophy. In Endliches und ewiges Sein Stein states that philosophy is built upon inference and what she calls “sharp concepts” (scharfe Begriffe) (EES 61). Philosophy can therefore only work through object intentionality, and never through other kinds of intentionalities. Instead of philosophy, Stein argues, it is only through faith that we can relate to those areas that exceed all object intentionalities: faith points toward that which cannot be grasped and which overflows experience and shows itself as a “beyond.” It is clear that later phenomenologists have a different understanding of the reach of philosophy, and key concepts within phenomenology the last fifty years include “radical alterity,” “passivity,” “beyond,” and “overflowing horizons.” There is nevertheless another important difference between the religious attitude of the mystics and phenomenologists: the mystics live their reduction and investigation of the world. Their deconstruction of the self is not only undertaken in order to see how it is constructed, but also in order for them to have a wholly different kind of experience. At this point I still consider it relevant to distinguish between the theoretical attitude of the philosophers and the experience of John of the Cross. Stein’s work, which is an explication of John of the Cross rather than a religious experience of her own, could however be considered to differ from a philosophical text only in tone. Because of this difference in tone I will use a more phenomenological language than Stein has in her text. Stein’s reading of John takes its starting point in his most famous works: Dark Night of the Soul, Spiritual Canticle, Ascent of Mount Carmel and Sayings of Light and Love, and she stays very close to his texts. Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross worked together to reform the Carmelite order, and Stein shows how John’s work is connected to Theresa’s seven floors and the castle of the soul. The possibility to freely move around, i.e., the power of the spirit, is closely connected to knowledge of the senses, but not necessarily tied to it. In the ordinary perception of the world, the spirit is bound to the senses, but through an investigation of the spirit itself, the presuppositions for the senses and for sense knowledge, i.e., God, can be explored. The spirit experiences, preserves, and is able both to recall

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earlier experiences and relate them to other experiences. It can compare, generalize, form concepts, pass judgements, draw conclusions, etc.—the activities of reason. The spirit also has even greater possibilities, but in order to reach them it has to go beyond objectivating intentionality. In order to relate to the presuppositions and possibilities of reason, intentionality has to find a different direction through following the heart. Reason separates, defines, and contrasts, but these skills are no longer of any use when it comes to God as the uttermost presupposition for subjectivity. The spirit has to change direction and in order to do that it needs to be educated and deprived (Erzogen and Entzogen) (KSJ 101, SC 84). The task is not to believe in God, credere Deum, but as a believer go into the divine: credere in Deum (sich gläubig in Ihn hineinbegeben) (KSJ 104, SC 86). Through a loving intentionality the presuppositions are not put at a distance and experienced as thematizable objects, but the intentionality rather tries to direct itself in accordance with the presuppositions. Stein understands this as the move from a natural attitude to a supernatural (KSJ 98f., SC 82). The supernatural is thus not something that comes to the human being from another world or another order of being and it could never be experienced through the ordinary senses, since it is the move beyond the senses into their presuppositions. In contrast to the transcendentals, it is here not what is standing in the streaming that is brought to attention, but its transcending character. In order to relate to this transcending character, the night is a central symbol. The night is an image that tries to depict its origin, but since the origin does not have a visible shape, it is a strange kind of image. For the Night is invisible and formless. Yet we perceive it; indeed it is much closer to us than all objects and forms, it is much more closely related to our being. Just as the light makes the things and their visible character stand out, so the night swallows them up and threatens to swallow us up, too. What is drowned in it is not just nothing; it continues to exist, but indistinctly, invisible and without form, as the night itself, or like a shadow or a ghost, hence it is threatening. (KSJ 33, SC 25f.)

The night is without form, and therefore closer to our being than to perceived objects. To see in the night does not extinguish the beings, but it shows itself in a new modus. The night here becomes an image of the radically ungraspable character of the human being, of reason and of sense perception. The origin can only be experienced as a different kind of presence, but a presence that is an abyss. In this way the flowing character of experience and of the human being can only be related to in a very different meaning. But the road there is difficult.



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3.1 The night of the senses The quotation above continues: At the same time our own being is not only outwardly imperiled by the dangers hidden in the night, it is also inwardly affected by it. The night deprives us of the use of the senses, it impedes our movements, paralyses our faculties; it condemns us to solitude and makes our own selves shadowy and ghostlike. It is a foretaste of death. (KSJ 33, SC 26)

The night is here not something around the human, but within her very own being as it forces her away from ordinary experiencing. This night becomes reality to John of the Cross as he tries to get close to God, i.e., withdrawing presuppositions. Just as in Theresa of Avila’s text, it is the sensory part of the soul that has to be left first, together with the strive toward worldly goods. This “leaving” is an activity that the human being actively can perform. But it has to be complemented with the passive reception of the night through an acceptance of her own passivity and not-knowing: It is a difficult task to leave all the existing beings of this world and when it is performed the dark night of the soul enters. The world of sense perception is the world in which the soul is at home, which nurtures her and provides for her. When the soul leaves this familiar house and follows the road of faith it is a nightly way and in comparison with the clear insights of the natural knowledge, there is only a dim knowing: it makes the soul familiar with something that it cannot see. (KSJ 38, SC 30)

This negative road could be formulated as carrying a givenness of the non-given. The wonder is that a non-givenness at all can be given, that the human being actually can experience the limit of its own experiences. Also the goal of the journey, God, must here be understood as a night, since it is characterized by a blinding light (überhelles Licht), to which the spiritual eye is not adapted. This light is blinding, but it is not only darkness. Or rather, it is both darkness, to the extent that we cannot see, and light, to the extent that it is the origin of all comprehension (KSJ 38f, SC 30f.). But there are also degrees of darkness: when the senses slowly subside, there is an increasing dusk. When there finally only is faith left, the natural capacity for knowledge is fully suspended. But this does not mean that the senses are completely shut down, but that they perceive in a different way as they see and hear as if they did not see or hear anything (KSJ 40, SC 31). There are also other modes of the night: it could for example be a moonlit night, in which everything stands out in a different way and in which

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you see other things than in the daylight (KSJ 34, SC 26). In this moonlit night of the senses, things do not stand out as clearly defined objects, but rather in their character of flowing through the stream of experience. And when in the darkest of nights things do not stand out at all, there is still a streaming experiencing. It is this streaming experiencing that the mystic turn to. From a phenomenological point of view, this process can be understood as an attempt at transcendental philosophy, since it is an attempt to see the origin of experience. But it is a genetic attempt that takes the movement of time into serious consideration, in contrast to the static analysis of transcendentals. As a genetic attempt it tries to experience the movement of intentionality, the streaming and the standing. It tries not to get caught up in the manifestation of things, and step by step peels off different layers of experiences that have taken shape in the stream, thereby reaching the stream itself. It is object intentionality that is blinded since it always needs to see something, and in this journey every some-thing has to be left. The night is also a something within the stream; it can therefore only be an image of the stream. But in its character of negativity it also names an experience of non-givenness. In this transformation of intentionality it is also obvious that the will, i.e., the activity of consciousness as a will towards something, is a hindrance in order to experience the stream as streaming. Stein shows how John strives toward passivity and toward God’s will. God’s will might here be understood as the stream that precedes one’s own life and that one’s own life is part of as well. This means to perceive in a new way, following the stream without trying to control it or organize it, which would also lead to a deep peace of mind (KSJ 47f., SC 37f.).

3.2 The active night of the spirit After the night of the senses, there is the night of the spirit. This night is darker than the first one and does not only concern outer experience, but also inner experience such as organizing and creative capacities (KSJ 49f., 58; SC 38f., 47). The memory too has to be emptied. Through the memory, experiences are categorized and influence later experiences, including the experiencing of the stream itself. In the light of earlier experiences, later experiences becomes graspable, and the changing and graspable has to be left for the unchanging and unintelligible (KSJ 71ff, SC 57ff). As such the journey includes an emptying of the self (Selbstentäußerung) and a spiritual as well as bodily poverty (KSJ 76, SC 62).



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By removing the separating light, one finds a larger and more pervasive light, which is the origin of the separating light. Stein calls this light supernatural since it is beyond time and space. But this light is not something new, but was always already there, and the light of reason was part of it. Before the blinding divine light fully can come forth, participation in the divine light provides us with the opportunity to see essences. The light of reason cannot see itself, but it provides us with the capacity to understand experience through categories. It is on this level that transcendentals, as the categories of being, can arise. In her reading of John of the Cross, Stein emphasizes that faith is the only means to get close to the divine presuppositions. Only faith can bring us to an experience of God. Likewise, faith is darkness for reason. The more the soul is united with this blinding darkness, the more it is filled with faith. And any perception distracts the soul descending into the abyss of faith. This leads Stein to the radical claim that perception in John of the Cross has no relation to God and therefore cannot be any means to unite with the divine (KSJ 74, SC 60).8 Intentionality should therefore not be directed toward outer perception nor categories, but towards divine love. This love could be understood as naming the close connection between the stream and the streaming beings. When John of the Cross turns away from the beings towards the interrelatedness of the beings, Stein claims that he only can be led by the cohesive power of love. Love means to be open to a direction by one other than oneself: the direction of another person, or, as in this case, of a streaming beyond persons. Love for God as the stream here also implies loving a direction that you do not know where it is heading (KSJ 60, SC 48). This loving direction can be understood as a pure “more” beyond every graspable being, i.e., the ungraspable “more” that is experienced within every being. But John of the Cross sees a danger in a pure enjoyment of this love. To fixate on the enjoyment would be to cling to something passing. In order to develop a loving relationship to God, images are often used. God needs to be understood as “something” in order for us to love it. But such a strategy also has its risks and even if John recommends using images, he also warns against them. Images should only be used in order to remind you of the love, and only as a help to point toward a “more.” So what kind of images of the divine should be used? Here it is clear that they should not be images of an imagined foreign being, and the love should thus not be understood as something in the world that comes to us from “the outside.” It is rather mirror images that should be used, which mirror the inner most living of oneself (KSJ

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77, SC 63). Another kind of image is the church service, but such images can be even more dangerous than images of the world, since they can easily lead you to think that your path to the divine is secured (KSJ 81, 93, SC 67, 77). Instead of putting all your faith into the image, images should be used wisely. The image is something comprehensible that points beyond comprehensibility, and the goal is therefore to step by step let these images move from being something seen to a fusion with the seeing. In the end, the seeing and the seen are fused so that the image departs from the seen. The journey of the mystic starts out with an image of the divine that is separated from the one seeing the image, but during the journey it is realized that the image depicts one’s own seeing. The image is no longer in front of the seer, but the seer enters the image, and the image enters the seer. The risk that is always inherent in the image is its tendency of freezing what is moving. Stein therefore stresses that faith never should solidify in fixed definitions: For since spiritual being implies life and change, its knowledge cannot be pressed into rigid definitions but must itself be a forward movement seeking a supple mode of expression. The same is true of faith. For this, too, is spiritual being and hence movement, ascending into increasingly incomprehensible heights and descending into ever more mysterious depths. Thus, if the understanding would grasp it as far as this is at all possible, it must do so by means of manifold expressions. (KSJ 99, SC 82)

Faith does not lead to a nunc stans, but to a movement. Definitions, knowledge, and images here find their tasks and limitations. If the first night, the night of the senses, changed the relation to the outer perceptions, the active night of the spirit change the relation to inner perceptions. But there is also a passive night of the spirit; a night that goes even further.

3.3 The passive night of the spirit: The night of faith In the active night of the spirit, a love and will beyond every personal love and will was sought. But during the passive night of the spirit, every active direction is abandoned. Even the desire for God is abandoned there. But when every desire and love has been erased, God is no longer visible (KSJ 109f, SC 91f.). At first there is only despair in this night. But in this state of total night, the spirit comes upon what John calls a spiritual knowledge of perfection (KSJ 114, SC 95f.). In, for example, Heidegger, this is the experience of anxiety through



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which a whole comes forth: when every being and meaningful direction disappears, the whole within which everything took place suddenly becomes visible.9 In Stein’s reading of John, this whole instead comes forth as a burning love (KSJ 117f., SC 98f.). Through a living investigation of all layers of experience, Stein claims that John in the innermost layer, beyond the split being of object intentionality and the direction of love, does not find Nothingness, but a pure affirmation. This journey leads from an image of God outside of the soul to God within the soul. In the beginning God is loved by the soul, but in the end the love for God can only go through God, since God is the soul’s most innermost capacity to love. In a similar way the soul after the journey knows the things through God, and not God through the things. But in order to reach this insight, the soul has to commit itself and reach the outermost passivity (KSJ 189ff., 160ff.). The process involves a removing of all images in order to let the streaming itself flow. Only through a leaving of oneself can the I find itself: In its ascent to God the soul rises above itself or is raised above itself. Yet thus it actually reaches its own interior. This sounds contradictory, but it corresponds to the facts and is based on the relation between the realm of the spirit and God. (KSJ 136, SC 114)

This paradox originates from the kenotic self-emptying of the stream, everything that comes forth comes from this productive “going-out-of-oneself ” (Aus-sich-Herausgehen) (KSJ 138, SC 116). The ego with its soul and body comes forth through a streaming transcending. And in order to reach the pure streaming, the I has to leave every exteriorization and ex-pression. But this is also possible since the I, just as God, is pure spirit: God is pure spirit and the archetype of all spiritual being. Hence spirit can be properly understood only in relation to God; this means it is a mystery that attracts us constantly, because it is the mystery of our own being. (KSJ 136, SC 114f.)

3.4 Beyond the world or into the world? Both Carmel and the Night of the Soul lack those parts where the union should be described, and Stein asks herself whether these parts were never written or if they have been suppressed by the tradition (KSJ 156, SC 131). John ends in a lack of words, with which Stein does not feel fully satisfied. I would like to emphasize another ending of the journey, which is to be found in her reading

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of Theresa, but also in her reading of John. The end of the journey is not the unification with God, but the return to the ex-pressed and multiple lives. “God” is thus not a goal to reach, but a change of perspective that characterizes the return after the journey. After the return one no longer tries to understand God through the beings, but understands beings through God. After the unity, image and origin change place (KSJ 214, SC 183). John no longer experiences every word and image as insufficient for talking about God since he now experiences the divine origin of every being. Images of the divine are no longer metaphors expressing something hidden; instead the experience of pure affirmation means that every singular being and every singular experience is experienced as pure affirmation of God. After the conversion, the exteriorized is experienced in terms of the streaming, rather than the streaming in terms of exteriorized images and concepts. The lack of words to name the streaming is reversed and it is possible to see how every word is streaming. Such a turn is present in Stein’s text, but it is not what she wants to emphasize. Instead, the text tends to formulate God as a goal and the task of the self to leave oneself as one among many, as a body and as an ex-pression, in order to find a true self and life in God as a nunc stans. In this way Stein in her latest work tends toward the onto-theology present in the Christian tradition. Finally, we can summarize the journey of John through a series of nights, as it is described by Stein, in the following way. The night of the senses implies a turn away from an objectifying intentionality, directed toward the stream of outer experiences. The active night of the spirit involves a turn away from all inner memories, concepts, images, structures, and definitions. The passive night of faith is finally a break with intentionality itself, which does not lead to Nothingness, but to an overflowing affirmation and forth-bringing love.

4 Contemporary discussions There are not many phenomenological readings of Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross. But in order to bring forth a few discussions on Christian mystics and phenomenology we can take a closer look at two phenomenological readings of the Carmelites. Anthony Steinbock dedicates one chapter of his Phenomenology and Mysticism (PM) to Theresa of Avila, and John of the Cross has been compared with Michel Henry by Ruud Welten.10



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4.1 Anthony Steinbock’s reading of Theresa of Avila In his book, Steinbock investigates vertical intentionality, which he considers to be a forgotten kind of givenness in phenomenology with its focus on object intentionality. Verticality takes us beyond ourselves and Steinbock includes three kinds: the holy, the moral (including the relation to the other person), and the ecological relation to the earth. These areas are present in human life but cannot be transformed into objects, cannot be controlled or fully grasped. The vertical is therefore unpredictable and can be dangerous, and in order to get in contact with it one cannot only rely on one’s own activity. There is a strong emphasis on passivity here. Epiphany is one kind of vertical givenness, the one given in religion and especially in monistic mystic experience. It includes an experience of “ultimate reality” and of dependency. To Steinbock, what has been called mystical experience is mainly inter-personal, including an intimate, personal presence of Otherness. The inter-personal dimension is emphasized in the Abrahamic tradition with its focus on the person, both when it comes to the human being and when it comes to “the oneness of God.” Union between the two is a logical step in the relation between the two (PM 18–19). In Theresa of Avila’s writings and practices, Steinbock focuses upon prayer as central for the inter-personal relationship to the divine. Through prayer she moves in an upwards spiral within the interior castle to its center where God abides. This image depicts how God, and thus the vertical experience is at the center of human experience, but Steinbock nevertheless finds Theresa’s castle too individual and her concept of God too static: God tends to be locked up in a fixed room in the castle. Instead, he focuses on Theresa’s image of water to depict the giving love of God, which he finds more dynamic. Through different levels of prayer Theresa go from activity to an increasing passivity (PM 58–60). Steinbock’s purpose is to “give a broader account of the sphere of evidence in order to do justice to this dimension of human experiencing” (PM 29). The vertical that is experienced through Theresa’s prayer shows an important aspect of human experience. This aspect is not just one aspect among many, but the mystical experiences “constitute a witnessing to givenness and therefore do not originate in a subjective mental state” (PM 29). The vertical is present within the everyday, and even explains the experience of the everyday, but needs to be liberated in order to fully come forth. Here there is a tension between the mystical experience as a specific kind of experience and as a more foundational, but hidden, experience. In his discussion of Theresa, Steinbock does not mention Stein’s interpretation. Stein’s reading provides us with a richer

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phenomenological material than Steinbock’s insofar as it connects to different layers of human constitution. Stein thereby connects it to a broader phenomenological analysis, whereas Steinbock’s focuses on the vertical experience as a specific kind of experience separated from other parts of the phenomenological analysis.

4.2 Michel Henry and John of the Cross In his article on John of the Cross, Ruud Welten briefly discusses Stein’s text, which he considers influenced by phenomenology if not a proper phenomenological work.11 But instead of analyzing Stein’s reading, he wants to read John of the Cross from the point of view of Michel Henry’s phenomenology. Experience is also here the central starting point for both phenomenologists and mystics, and it is what makes the comparison rewarding. Even if the mystic and the phenomenologist relate differently to experience as they discuss it in different contexts and vocabulary, they both have a broad understanding of it and focus upon the night and what is not directly visible, but nevertheless possible to experience. Welten, following Henry, gives this other kind of experience, beyond object intentionality, the highest possible relevance for phenomenology; it is even the essence and underlying structure of experience as such (JCMH 214). Just as in John of the Cross, radical passivity and a move beyond every intentionality becomes central in Henry. On this point we might find a similar critique against Husserl in Stein as well as in Henry. Going beyond intentionality, both Henry’s and Stein’s inner ways take us into the ego in order to go beyond the ego. In Henry this means that in order for there to be object intentionality there need to be a certain kind of self-affection: an awareness of life that comes before being directed outward. This power or unfolding of the seeing and the feeling is what Henry calls immanence. As such it is also that which makes the seen and the felt (i.e., objects) possible. The independence of the immanent structure derives from the fact that the self receives itself without making itself transcendent. Immanence is a self-receptivity and a kind of manifestation that does not separate its manifestation from the manifesting power. In relation to Steinbock’s verticality, Henry’s immanence is transcendental in Husserl’s sense: i.e., it is the necessary presupposition for any kind of experience.12 Welten understands John’s journey through the series of nights as a journey into the immanent sphere that Henry describes. This starting point makes it possible to understand why any outer intentionality needs to be abandoned,



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in order to reach the presuppositions. It also shows the presuppositions as an intimate light at the heart of every living being (even if not every living being is aware of it). We also understand why the inner structure is invisible: the seeing of the seeing eye cannot be seen—only be experienced immanently. This means that John of the Cross and other mystics investigate the structure of the human being, their writings are in essence phenomenological. I believe that Stein would have approved of such a reading of John of the Cross and that she might have changed her understanding of what lies within the limits of phenomenological investigation. Nevertheless, in comparison to Stein’s reading of John of the Cross, Henry’s philosophy describes an immanence without levels, whereas John gives it different steps. This difference is probably due to John’s mystic practice, which is lacking in the philosopher.

5 Conclusion As we have seen, Stein understands philosophy as necessarily built upon inference and well-defined concepts. But concepts such as Steinbock’s verticality and Henry’s immanence point toward the expansion of phenomenology in its later development. Nevertheless, in her Christian terminology Stein anticipates many of those steps that were to be taken later on. One example could be her development from a more static phenomenology in her reading of Theresa of Avila towards a more genetic phenomenology in her reading of John of the Cross. The turn to genetic phenomenology has proved to be necessary in the later so-called “turn to religion,” and with his focus on watery images, Steinbock highlights a genetic phenomenology in his analyses of Theresa. An eidetic and static account demands a higher degree of control and overview than the genetic account with its focus on overflowing horizons. Connected to such a move is also the broadening of intentionality and criticism of Husserlian intellectualism, but such a criticism has been present in the phenomenological movement all along and was maybe an important element in the shift to genetic phenomenology. In the mystic tradition we can find God as a goal where the journey to the divine ends in the extinction of the specificity of being and where there is only one life in God. Death is then understood as the Life of life and hostility towards the world becomes present when the world is negated and Life is met beyond it. Phenomenology is not immune toward such a conclusion, as is apparent in Michel Henry’s late work I am the Truth.13 But as we have seen, Stein’s reading

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of John offers an alternative: where the journey ends in a reversal between image and origin and God no longer is experienced through metaphors, but the beings through God. Such a reversal and return to the world has, to my mind, been to absent in the “return to religion.” Maybe also the pure affirmation at the end of John’s journey could be investigated further in relation to the manifold world.14

Notes 1 Klaus Hedwig, “Über den Begriff Einfühlung in der Dissertationsschrift Edith Steins,” in Edith Stein: Leben, Philosophie, Vollendung, ed. Leo Elders (Würzburg: Verlag Johann Wilhelm Naumann, 1991), pp. 241f. 2 Karl-Heinz Lembeck, “Glaube im Wissen,” in Denken im Dialog: Zur Philosophie Edith Steins, ed. Waltraud Herbstrith (Tübingen: Attempto Verlag, 1991), p. 160. 3 See for example “Was ist Philosophie? Ein Gespräch zwischen Edmund Husserl und Thomas von Aquino,” in Erkenntnis und Glaube (Freiburg, Basel, Vienna: Herder, 1993 [1939]), pp. 26f. 4 Other forms of intentionality in early phenomenology are discussed in Jan H. Nota, “Edith Stein—Max Scheler—Martin Heidegger,” in Edith Stein: Leben, Philosophie, Vollendung, p. 229. 5 “The mystical” is of course a debated category. “Mystic” was only very late used as a noun, even if it has a long tradition as an adverb. Those called mystics belonged to the monastic tradition and they still constitute a common tradition to such an extent that I will continue using the concept. 6 Edith Stein, Endliches und ewiges Sein—Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins, (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 2006), p. 521; henceforth EES. 7 Edith Stein, Kreuzeswissenschaft, Studie über Johannes a Cruce (Edith Stein Werke 1, Louvain: E. Nauwelaerts, 1954); The Science of the Cross: A Study of St. John of the Cross, trans. Hilda Graef (London: Burns and Oates, 1960). In the following the German edition is referred to as KSJ and the English translation as SC. 8 On this point there are also opposite interpretations of John of the Cross, which emphasize the sensible character of his text. See for example Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), esp. p. 53. See also the queer reading of John of the Cross in Christopher Hinkle, “Love’s Urgent Longings: St John of the Cross,” in Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body, ed. Gerard Loughlin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 188–99. 9 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001), §40, p. 187. 10 Anthony Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism, The Verticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); henceforth PM.



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11 Ruud Welten, “The night in John of the Cross and Michel Henry: A Phenomenological Interpretation,” Studies in Spirituality, 13 (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), pp. 214–33; henceforth JCMH. 12 Michel Henry, Essence of Manifestation, trans. G. Etzkorn (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973). 13 Michel Henry, I am the Truth: Towards a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. S. Emanuel (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 38. 14 I have tried to develop such a reading of the Christian mystic tradition by reading the beguine Mechthild von Magdeburg: comparing her with Michel Henry in “Immanence and Transcendence in Michel Henry and Mechthild von Magdeburg,” in L’Orient des dieux, 8–9 (2008–9), pp. 75–90; and discussing her understanding of embodiment in “Ambiguities of the Human Body in Phenomenology and Christian Mysticism,” in The Body Unbound: Philosophical Perspectives on Religion, Embodiment and Politics, ed. Ola Sigurdson, Marius Timmann Mjaaland and Sigridur Torgeirsdottir (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010).

11

The Transcendence of the Person: Bonhoeffer as a Resource for Phenomenology of Religion and Ethics Brian Gregor

California State University—Dominguez Hills

Part I Readers of this volume might be surprised to see a chapter on Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45),1 a German theologian who is most widely known for his role in the anti-Nazi resistance. Those familiar with something of Bonhoeffer’s books might likely know The Cost of Discipleship, Life Together as contemporary classics of Christian spirituality. Some might also know Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, perhaps because of its (in)famous suggestions regarding “religionless Christianity,” which was cited as a touchstone by the secular death of God theologies of the 1960s.2 What is less known, however, is that Bonhoeffer’s works also reflect a deeply philosophical orientation. This is particularly true of his early academic works, Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being, both of which exhibit his investment in phenomenology, as he engages such phenomenological thinkers as Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Martin Heidegger. The reason Bonhoeffer finds phenomenology particularly valuable is because of its attention to concrete, historical existence rather than the abstractions by which philosophy (especially in its idealist versions) is tempted.3 It might be a stretch to present Bonhoeffer as an “early phenomenologist,” to allude to the title of this volume, since Bonhoeffer does not bind himself to the methodology of phenomenology in a strict way. Phenomenology is one tool in his kit, and he uses it in an ad hoc way to enrich his theological work. Nevertheless, he makes very interesting and fruitful use of phenomenology, resulting at times in a phenomenological theology that offers rich resources

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for phenomenology of religion and phenomenological ethics. Scholars are increasingly becoming attuned to this aspect of Bonhoeffer’s thought, as several recent publications suggest.4 In the present essay I would like to focus specifically on Bonhoeffer’s phenomenology of the person. Part 1 will examine the phenomenological aspects of Bonhoeffer’s ethics, particularly his description of how personhood is constituted in the moment of ethical responsibility—a theme that has received considerable attention in phenomenology. Part 2 will then examine Bonhoeffer’s attempt to find a philosophical position that is best suited to the unique epistemological and ontological problems concerning divine revelation. Here, too, Bonhoeffer’s phenomenology of the person proves instructive, since the personal nature of revelation allows for a coordination of the act and being of revelation. Before moving forward, it will assist the reader to note that the phrase, “transcendence of the person,” encompasses three related points: first, I use the phrase to describe Bonhoeffer’s view that personhood is ontologically primary in the sense that it is irreducible to impersonal, objective causes or conditions; second, the other person transcends the immanence of my own thinking consciousness; third, for Bonhoeffer, transcendence is essentially personal in nature. This point will prove decisive in his attempt to find a philosophy appropriate for divine revelation.

1 Person, ethics, and God Bonhoeffer developed his first book, Sanctorum Communio, from his 1927 doctoral dissertation of the same name. As the book’s subtitle indicates, Bonhoeffer undertakes a “theological study of the sociology of the church.” And as the preface clarifies, the adjective “theological” deserves emphasis, since Bonhoeffer does not undertake a sociology of religious community in general but of the Christian community in particular (SC 21). Bonhoeffer explicitly presents this inquiry as phenomenological research into “the structural distinctiveness of religious communities” (SC 31). The phenomenological approach is invaluable for Bonhoeffer because it attends to phenomena as they are given, and Bonhoeffer wants to understand the “given reality” of the Christian church. The challenge of such a task is that the church, qua sanctorum communio, is constituted by divine revelation in the person of Christ. Any inquiry that does not take this revelation seriously will relativize it in relation to the rationality of the researcher, or in relation to other seemingly



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similar claims, so that the church is classified as an instance of the general category of “religious community.” Such a classification is of course possible, but it fails to understand the given reality of the church, which “can only be understood from within” (SC 33). One of the major tasks of the book, then, is to describe the distinctive structure of the Christian community as it is given concretely. Just as Bonhoeffer takes phenomenology as a promising approach to sociology, there is also a strongly phenomenological orientation in his approach to social philosophy, which is “the study of the primordial mode-of-being of sociality per se” and thus the normative guide for sociology as it forms its theoretical constructs (SC 29–30). Bonhoeffer’s first major task in this book is, therefore, to develop a distinctly Christian social philosophy, which consists of Christian concepts of person, community, and God, as well as the “social basic relation” of the I and the You. I shall discuss this position momentarily. First, however, I shall discuss Bonhoeffer’s account of the basic phenomenological structure of the person as spirit, which is presupposed by his Christian social philosophy. This structure consists of two main features: personal being as structurally open, and personal being as structurally closed, and these features are present in both individual persons as well as collective persons.

2 The general structure of person as spirit Bonhoeffer defines person in terms of spirit, which he in turn defines as “the bond of self-consciousness and self-determination that documents its structural unity; this spirit can be formally defined as the principle of receptivity and activity” (SC 67). In terms of their function, persons can be defined at a formal level as “active centers” of intellect, will, and feeling (SC 62, 67). The first point Bonhoeffer makes is that persons are structurally open. Their self-consciousness and self-determination are essentially social, insofar as these acts of thinking, willing, and feeling “arise simultaneously from, with, and in” sociality (SC 66). Sociality does not follow after the acts of the person, because these acts are already social in their very structure. Consequently, personhood is inseparable from sociality. The sociality of intellectual acts is evident in the experience of knowing that one understands, that one expresses oneself, and that one is understood. Self-conscious thinking is only possible and meaningful “in reciprocal interaction with other minds” (SC 68–9), particularly because it is language—a social phenomenon itself—that makes thought possible. Bonhoeffer explicitly

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follows Johann Georg Hamann in ordering language before thought and word before spirit (SC 69). He also cites Husserl on meaning-intention and meaningfulfillment: each word is correlated to the potential understanding of the listener or reader (SC 70). Just as intellect is essentially social, so too will is also essentially social. “Will is the unified activation of self-determination and self-consciousness” (SC 70). This self-consciousness only arises within community. Bonhoeffer notes that this is a frequent theme in modern philosophy, but specifically cites Paul Natorp, who writes that that “there is no self-consciousness and there can be none without opposition and, at the same time, positive relationship to another consciousness.”5 We shall return to this point in the next section, since Bonhoeffer develops it further in describing the ethical address of the You. Will is also essentially social because it is “oriented toward other wills” (SC 70). As self-conscious activity, will comes into being in community, since will only “comes into being where there is resistance.” The resistance in question is not merely the resistance of objects or natural barriers, since presumably all animals encounter resistance of some sort; instead, it is the resistance of another person willing something different from us. Only in the struggle of wills does the “strength and richness” of will develop. Hence, Bonhoeffer’s claim that “[w]ill as an isolated phenomenon is absurd” (SC 72). Third, feeling is also social in nature. This is true of shared acts of feeling, experience, and rejoicing, as well as “intentional-social acts” of pleasure, affection, and erotic love. But even in the case of isolated individuals feeling has a certain teleological structure, oriented toward expression and understanding by others (SC 73). Often the isolation leads to the experience of frustration at being unable to express and make one’s feelings understood. According to Bonhoeffer, then, intellect, will, and feeling are all essentially social, and this sociality is evidence of the structural openness of human spirit— openness, that is, to others. “In infinite closeness, in mutual penetration, I and You are joined together, inseparable from one another forever, resting in one another, intimately participating in one another, empathizing, sharing experiences, bearing together the general stream of interactions of spirit” (SC 73). Yet at the same time, we must not overlook the ways in which human spirit is also structurally closed. The individual person is a unified, self-conscious, self-determining center of activity, and is not merely awash in a sea of apersonal spirit. Personal being would be lost entirely in such a view. If individuals were “only reservoirs or receptive organs for a certain quantity of objective spirit,” then “there would be no I-You relation at all, and thus in turn no spirit” (SC 73–4).



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Without a certain degree of individuation and structural unity as persons, there would be neither an I nor a You to encounter each other. How, then, are we to understand the relation between the structural openness and closedness of human spirit? Are they simply different aspects of spirit? Do they exist in paradoxical tension? According to Bonhoeffer, they exist in a relation of mutual dependence and enrichment. Thus “the more individual spirit develops, the more it plunges into the stream of objective spirit,” and “the more it becomes a bearer of objective spirit,” the more it is strengthened as individual spirit (SC 74). It would be a mistake, therefore, to envision the closed/open distinction along the lines of an inner/outer distinction, as though there is “an inaccessible, utterly isolated core of the person” and “a completely open layer surrounding it” (SC 75). The inner and outer intertwine, to borrow Merleau-Ponty’s term, such that individuality depends on sociality, and vice versa. Closedness depends on openness, and vice versa. The advantage of this conception of spirit is that it avoids both social atomism in which individuals are all that exists and social collectivism in which individuality is lost. The former is a failing of empiricism, while the latter is a failing of idealism, and both fall short of a true conception of spirit. Bonhoeffer argues that the “tragedy of all idealist philosophy was that it never ultimately broke through to personal spirit.” Hegel brilliantly perceived that spirit is an objective reality that extends beyond individual subjectivity, but he lost the reality of the individual in the process. Bonhoeffer thus aims to affirm and retain Hegel’s insight while avoiding his error (SC 74). How, then, should we understand community in order to maintain its reality as objective spirit and the subjectivity of individual persons? Bonhoeffer argues that we need to understand person as an individual as well as a corporate (as in a social body) reality, and to this end he adapts Scheler’s concept of a “collective person.”6 A collective person (e.g., family, nation, church, or even humanity) is a center of experience and action, and has the same structure as individual person—both openness and closedness. Individuals participate in the collective person, which transcends all individuals but is simultaneously “incomprehensible without the correlate of personal, individual being” (SC 77). Further, the community is a “concrete unity”: “Its members must not be viewed as separate individuals, for the center of activity lies not in each member, but in all of them together. This unity must be the starting point for a concept of community, for these is no way from the many to the one” (SC 78). As Scheler argues, collective personality is not a synthesis, an artificial construct, or an abstraction, but an experienced reality of the concrete person.7

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The merit of this understanding of community is that it maintains the irreducible reality of both individual subjectivity and objective spirit. In Bonhoeffer’s words, “the person comes into being only when embedded in sociality, and the collective person comes into being together with the individual person. It is neither prior to, nor a consequence of, the individual” (SC 78). Individual and community are mutually dependent and mutually enriching. This will prove to be an important insight in Bonhoeffer’s account of ethical responsibility, since it allows him to show how communities (and not merely individual agents) can be responsible. Thus it is the topic of ethical responsibility to which we now turn.

3 A Christian philosophy of sociality In the previous section, we saw the basic points in Bonhoeffer’s general phenomenology of the person. As spirit, the human person is characterized by a structural openness, which is evident in the essential sociality of acts of intellect, will, and feeling; the person is also characterized by a structural closedness, insofar as there is an individuality and unity to persons that cannot be dissolved in sociality. However, Bonhoeffer is also clear about the limitations of this purely formal phenomenology. First of all, it does not deal with the historical reality of the person, particularly in terms of sin and redemption.8 Second, Bonhoeffer argues at the outset that the person is more than a center of acts, and to understand the person this way “does not touch the sphere of reality [Wirklichkeit] at all” (SC 63). The full reality or actuality of person as spirit lies at the concrete, historical, existential level of ethics. I only become a “real” person in the concrete, ethical encounter with the You, who marks an essential boundary for me by addressing me and calling me to responsibility. Only then is the I constituted as a person. Bonhoeffer thus maintains that the purely formal account must be filled in with this ethical content in order to develop a specifically Christian concept of the person. We are now in a position to appreciate the way Bonhoeffer develops his Christian philosophy of sociality, which is also decidedly phenomenological in nature. Bonhoeffer considers four philosophical models of personhood, which he finds in Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and Descartes. Bonhoeffer rejects the first three models, arguing that they all involve metaphysical distortions of person and sociality. Bonhoeffer gives a different critique of Descartes,



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who makes epistemology rather than metaphysics primary. This move was more fully realized by Kant, who made that “the knowing I becomes the starting point of all philosophy” (SC 40). Whatever its merits might be, the epistemological model fails to advance beyond the metaphysical models. By making cognition the dominant feature of the I, the epistemological model makes the subject– object relation primary. But a Christian social philosophy must not subsume the concept of person under the category of knowing subject. On the contrary, it must preserve “the individual, concrete character of the person as absolute and intended by God” (SC 45). The category of person is “absolute” in the sense that personhood is a reality irreducible to some more basic reality that is impersonal. The absolute character of personhood also means that sociality cannot be reduced to an impersonal relation. The social-basic relation is the relation between the I and the You, which is qualitatively different from the subject– object relation of epistemology (SC 45). The I-You relation is an ethical rather than epistemological relation. Bonhoeffer argues that the person is constituted in the moment of ethical responsibility, when the I is addressed by the You. The You places me before an ethical decision, and only in this moment of responsibility do I exist as a person (SC 48, 52). As Bonhoeffer writes, “The I comes into being only in relation to the You; only in response to a demand does responsibility arise. ‘You’ says nothing about its own being, only about its demand. This demand is absolute … The whole person, who is totally claimless, is claimed by this absolute demand” (SC 54).9 For Bonhoeffer it is crucial that the You is the concrete, other person, who sets a fundamental barrier, an insurmountable limit for the I (SC 45, 51). It is not enough to develop a critical philosophy that affirms the limits of cognition, because the epistemological transcendence of the object is not the ethical transcendence of the You (SC 52). The point is that I can never know the You as an object. Insofar as I approach the other as an object to be cognized, I do not truly encounter the other. Nor can I know the other as another I. I can never fully exchange places with the other: “I can only encounter the other as a You” (SC 52). The other person is a concrete ethical barrier (SC 50), and in order to encounter the other qua person, ethics must take priority over epistemology. One might argue that Bonhoeffer is unfair to Kant by including him in this epistemological model. Kant does, after all, make an important distinction between things and persons.10 Unlike things, persons are ends in themselves and deserve unconditional respect—with respect being “the representation of a worth that infringes on my self love,”11 i.e., a limit. Bonhoeffer acknowledges his agreement with Kant (and Fichte) in “emphasizing the absoluteness of the

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ethical demand” and relating it to the person confronted by it. But according to Bonhoeffer, Kant’s ethical formalism focuses solely on reason and its capacity to discern the universally valid moral law (SC 42–3). This sort of ethics always knows what ought to be done and is always able to do it because ought implies can. From a phenomenological perspective, however, this is a profoundly unsatisfying picture of how we experience the moment of responsibility in real life: “Where is there room, then, for distress of conscience, for infinite anxiety [Angst] in the face of decisions?” (SC 49). For Kant, the other person deserves unconditional respect, but the encounter with the other is subsumed under a purely formal, universally valid reason. Bonhoeffer makes much the same criticism of Fichte, who adopts Kant’s definition of person: “When a person’s task or duty has been accomplished, the purpose of reason is fulfilled. One I is like the other. Only on the basis of this likeness is a relation of persons conceivable at all” (SC 42). Bonhoeffer also critiques Fichte’s argument that the I originates in the Not-I. Fichte’s “Not-I is not another I”—i.e., another person, “but an object,” and ultimately the relation between I and Not-I is “resolved in the unity of the I” (SC 42). One might suggest that Hegel provides a more promising account of sociality, since his concept of mutual recognition is the realization (in social-relational form) of both individuals as free subjects. However, this relationship is mediated by the structures of objective spirit, which then returns to absolute spirit—“a move that also overcomes in principle the limit of the individual person” (SC 42). Bonhoeffer’s criticism is that Kant, Fichte, and Hegel all work with a concept of spirit as immanent, which ends up subsuming the individual person under the rubric of the same, which cannot lead to a genuine concept of community (SC 43). In brief, genuine personhood and sociality are not grounded in an immanent concept of spirit, which cannot preserve the uniqueness, individuality, and difference of the other person. The transcendence of the other depends on something beyond the immanent operations and orders of human spirit. According to Bonhoeffer, genuine personhood and sociality depend on divine transcendence. As he puts it, “The claim of the other rests in God alone; for this very reason, it remains the claim of the other” (SC 55). This means the efficacy of the You to constitute the I as person is independent of the You. In other words: “One human being cannot of its own accord make another into an I, an ethical person conscious of responsibility” (SC 54). This is not a power the You wields, as though he or she can simply decide to address someone and summon them



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to responsibility. Instead, this address depends on the active working of God, or the Holy Spirit. This also means “that every human You is an image of the divine You” (SC 54–5). The divine You “becomes visible in the concrete You of social life” (SC 55). This claim is both startling and intriguing from a phenomenological perspective: the divine You becomes visible, shows himself, in the social relation with the human other. What sort of phenomenological warrant is there for such a claim? Is the divine really given in the face of the other? Here, it is instructive to contrast Bonhoeffer with Emmanuel Levinas, who would later offer an ethics that has certain parallels with Bonhoeffer’s ethics. Both thinkers insist on the transcendence of the other, which cannot be captured within the immanence of thinking consciousness. Levinas describes this transcendence in terms of the face of the other, which enters my awareness without being thematized, conceptualized. The face “disturbs immanence without settling into the horizons of the World.”12 It comes from beyond Being and “goes toward those beings but does not compromise itself with them, withdraws from them, ab-solves itself.”13 The face is absolute, “presenting itself in its nudity,”14 immediately, insofar as it cannot be mediated. Thus, the face is a unique signification, since it signifies only as a trace. The trace is not like other signs, since “it signifies outside of every intention of signaling and outside of every project of which it would be the aim.”15 For Levinas, the face of the other is the key to understanding the imago Dei. Referring to Exodus 33.18-23, where God passes by Moses in order to reveal his back alone, Levinas writes: The God who passed is not the model of which the face would be an image. To be in the image of God does not mean to be an icon of God but to find oneself in his trace. The revealed God of our Judeo-Christian spirituality maintains all the infinity of his absence, which is in the personal “order” itself. He shows himself only by his trace, as is said in Exodus 33.16

The face is not an image or icon of God. The face is not God incarnate, nor God present with us. Levinas presents a “disincarnate God,” a God who withdraws from presence, leaving behind only a trace.17 And for Levinas, to “go toward Him is not to follow this trace, which is not a sign; it is to go toward the Others who stand in the trace of illeity.”18 True religious faith, for Levinas, is thus a religion of ethical responsibility for the other. Bonhoeffer presents a rather different description of the encounter with the other, offering a thoroughly incarnational account of the transcendence of the other person, who is God present, visible in concrete existence. This does not

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mean the other is present as an object for the thinking subject. Instead, the other is present as person, which is a genuine transcendence. There is no need to reduce transcendence to a mere trace in order to preserve transcendence. Granted, Levinas may believe this is the only way to elude the ingenuity of Hegel. As Hans-Georg Gadamer observes, dialogical-personalist philosophy ultimately falls within the power of Hegelian reflection. In his words, “The formal superiority of reflective philosophy is precisely that every possible position is drawn into the reflective movement of consciousness coming to itself.” Thus, the appeal to a supposed immediacy such as “the Thou making claims on us” is “selfrefuting,” since “it is not itself an immediate relation, but a reflective activity.”19 The transcendence of the other is always mediated. Bonhoeffer would agree with Hegel and Gadamer on this point. But the question is, must this mediation be an immanent mediation? Bonhoeffer helps to show that not all mediation is a self-mediation in which I determine the meaning of the other. Instead, Bonhoeffer argues for a Christological mediation. This is a hermeneutical mediation, much like the way beliefs, images, and prejudices mediate our encounter with phenomena.20 For Bonhoeffer, Christ stands between the I and the You. This claim obviously presupposes a hermeneutic of Christian faith, such that the encounter with the other has a distinctive as-structure. The other is given to me through the mediation of Christ, and even in some way as Christ, so that “one person becomes Christ for the other” (SC 55). In Act and Being, Bonhoeffer writes that we encounter Christ in other persons, who “become Christ for us in demand and promise, in the existential limits they place on us from outside” (AB 114). Through the mediation of Christ, I encounter my neighbor as someone who claims me from outside of my own existence (AB 127). This mediation is important as the condition for a genuine encounter with the other as truly other: Only through Christ does my neighbor meet me as one who claims me in an absolute way from a position outside my existence … Without Christ, even my neighbor is for me no more than a possibility of self-assertion through “bearing the claim of the other.” (AB 127)

The mediation of Christ, then, becomes the condition of possibility for true community with the other—not, nota bene, as intimate union or fusion but as an encounter of I and You mediated by Christ. It is important to grasp the importance of the communal, ecclesial context



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for Bonhoeffer’s description of ethical responsibility. The church is the body of Christ, present in the world. Church is the collective person of Christ—Christ existing as church community. The being of Christ is that of being-there for others: Dasein-für-Andere.21 Christ stands in the place of others. Bonhoeffer’s term here is Stellvertretung, “substitution.” But the German has spatial connotations that “substitution” lacks. Christ is Dasein, being-there, standing in my place, where I should be standing but cannot. Christ stands between me and God, between me and myself, and between me and my neighbor. Bonhoeffer argues that this is an ontological structure, and not merely psychological, historical, factual, or ontic. The “very core” of Christ’s personhood “is the ‘pro-me’ structure. The being of Christ’s person is essentially relatedness to me. His being-Christ is his being-for-me” (C 314, 324). Just as Christ is Dasein-forothers, so the church—Christ existing as community—is also Dasein-for-others. This last point marks an important divergence from most thinkers who focus on the I-You, self–other relation. The ethical encounter with the other person calls me to responsibility and constitutes me as a concrete person. For Bonhoeffer, the I-You encounter not only occurs on the individual level. It also happens at the level of communities, as collective persons.22 This is an important corrective to a lot of discussion in alterity ethics, which tends to focus on responsibility between an individual self and other. The ethics of individual responsibility is no doubt important, as thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Levinas have shown. But it would be a mistake to overlook the ways in which communities are also summoned to responsibility—both for individuals and other communities.

4 Ethical responsibility and ontological continuity One of the questions that arises from Bonhoeffer’s early phenomenology of the person is that of ontological continuity. In Sanctorum Communio he emphasizes the dynamic rather than static temporality of ethical responsibility, writing that “the person ever and again arises and passes away in time … The person exists always and only in ethical responsibility; the person is re-created again and again in the perpetual flux of life” (SC 48).23 The Christian person comes into being in the moment of ethical responsibility and “exists in ever renewed coming-into-being” (SC 57). This is true for the ethically responsible Christian individual, as well as the collective person of the Christian church. Bonhoeffer writes that the sanctorum communion encounters others who make demands

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and call it to ethical responsibility, and it “comes into being anew, passes away, and comes into being once more” (SC 213). Bonhoeffer would soon recognize, however, that this actualistic conception of the person is problematic, since ethics requires a person with a certain ontological continuity and identity. Bonhoeffer’s correspondence shows that he was reflecting on these questions on a personal level as well as an academic level. In a letter from August, 1929, at the end of a summer in which he was working on Act and Being, he writes to his friend Detlef Albers: All of us are searching for this. But wherever we seek it, whether in the tasks of our daily lives, in educational ideals of this or that sort, or wherever—one thing remains clear or at least sensed: doubt and temptation [Anfechtung] about the meaningfulness of being cast to and fro, of being at the mercy of things, will not cease as long as we remain focused on ourselves, as long as in one form or another “the other” does not step into our lives. Only then, in panta rei, in the flux of everything, do we find the stability that receives its potential and its strength from elsewhere. (DBWE 10, 189–90)

We need for the other to interrupt our self-enclosed lives, to pull us out of ourselves. What is striking is that the other does not merely interrupt our selffocused world; Bonhoeffer goes further to write that only the other can pull us out of the Heraclitean flux of life and give us a place to stand. Bonhoeffer notes how friendship does this, writing, “I have always seen something in friendship that transcends the normal course of events; and so probably every form of community is in some way like the request to the other: dos moi pou sto” (DBWE 190). Give me a place to stand. Bonhoeffer cites Archimedes’ famous words because he seeks not to move the whole world, but, somewhat more modestly, existential continuity and stability. One thinks also of Descartes, who alludes to Archimedes in his second Meditation, seeking “just one thing, however slight, that is certain and unshaken.”24 But where Descartes finds this point in the self-conscious act of the cogito, Bonhoeffer argues that only the other—the friend—provides this stability. This insight regarding friendship marks a significant development and departure from Sanctorum Communio, where the appearance of the other is a disruptive event. In that text the emphasis is on discontinuity. This description of ethical responsibility results in a punctual, actualistic conception of the person in which there is no ontological continuity through time— just moments, calls, addresses that disrupt and punctuate consciousness. But does ethical responsibility not also require some form of continuity? This is



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a question Bonhoeffer addresses in his later work, Ethics. There, he present a “general phenomenology of the ethical” (E 376), beginning with a description of the “ethical phenomenon,” which he characterizes as the concrete experience of the ought, the decision between good and evil, the orientation toward norms, or ethical conflict and resolution (E 366). The ethical phenomenon is a “boundary event” [Grenzereignis], since the ought concerns something that is not (E 367). The ought arises when the community disintegrates or order is endangered. In a certain sense, this threat is constant; things are always falling apart. This is the “secular analogy of the doctrine of original sin.” In this regard the ought remains a permanent companion in human life, as an awareness of our own boundaries, as self-restraint, resignation, and humility (E 367). But the ethical phenomenon also presents itself in a more acute form; the boundary emerges in a moment of disturbance and disruption (E 370). The ought is an eschatological word that punctuates the flow of daily life. There is compelling phenomenological warrant for thinking about the ethical as a disturbance, a disruptive moment, a transcendent intrusion on the immanence of consciousness. Levinas spent decades writing about ethics as a disturbance so radical that it has no extension within the horizon of the world. But while Bonhoeffer himself describes the ethical phenomenon as a disruptive moment, he also insists that this moment must find some sort of continuity within the context of human life. Whenever the ethical is construed as apart from any determination by time or place, apart from the question of authorization, and apart from anything concrete, there life disintegrates into an infinite number of unrelated atoms of time, just as human community disintegrates into discrete atoms of reason. (E 373)

This is true of purely formal ethics such as Kant’s, with its immense trust in the powers of autonomous reason to discern a universally valid moral law, as well as in an existentialist ethics that prioritize the decision of the individual, who must choose “ever and again, entirely anew in each moment” (E 373–4). The same would be true of Levinasian ethics. Consider, for instance, how Levinas describes the visitation of the other as “an incision that does not bleed.”25 The other is so transcendent that there is no lasting impact in consciousness, culture, or the world—only a trace. For Levinas, as for Kant and existentialism, the ethical is detached from its concrete determination (E 374). But “[t]he ethical is not a principle that levels, invalidates, and shatters all human order.” Instead, it “inherently involves a certain order of human community and entails certain sociological relationships of authority. Only in their context does the ethical

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manifest itself and receive the concrete authorization that is essential to it” (E 373). Ethics, Bonhoeffer argues, cannot merely consist of punctual moments because ethics “needs repetition and continuity, it demands time” (E 375). This is an important insight for phenomenological ethics: disruptive event and ontological continuity are both vital aspects of responsibility. The encounter with the other must often be disruptive to open the I to the You; but without some form of ontological continuity and identity, there is no I to respond to the other.26

Part II: Revelation as act and being Bonhoeffer makes a very similar point regarding the encounter with divine revelation, which also has the status of a disruptive event. How does the event of revelation impact the human being at the level of concrete, historical existence? Bonhoeffer’s second book, Act and Being, takes up these questions, resulting in a densely argued examination of the epistemology and ontology of divine revelation. Bonhoeffer’s task is to develop an epistemology suited to the Christian conception of revelation, which cannot simply conform to a general philosophical account of human cognition. Revelation must “yield an epistemology of its own” (AB 31). Bonhoeffer frames this as “the problem of act and being,” which is a complex of intersecting problems regarding the relation between: the act of faith and the transcendent being of God; the act of faith and the being of the believer; the being of God and divine action (particularly the act revelation); the act of revelation and the being of that revelation within concrete, human existence.27 Regarding each problematic, there are philosophical and theological tendencies to emphasize either act or being to the detriment of the other.28 For instance, an emphasis on act stresses contingency, freedom, existential encounter, the event, while an emphasis on being stresses ontological continuity, stability, and identity. Bonhoeffer’s task is to coordinate act and being in each of these cases. Transcendence was a vital concern in Bonhoeffer’s Sanctorum Communio, and it remains so in Act and Being, most prominently with regard to divine revelation. Bonhoeffer argues that the person only acquires true self-understanding (Selbstverständnis) in being encountered “from outside,” in the encounter with a transcendent other. The autonomous human being does not have the immanent capacity to place itself into the truth about itself. In his inaugural lecture at the University of Berlin in 1930, Bonhoeffer argues that self-understanding requires a point of unity (Einheitspunkt) in the sense that



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one must be addressed from an external point (a ground, a source, a principle, an essence) that both discloses the truth about the self and establishes a certain continuity of self-understanding through the vicissitudes of temporal experience.29 In reference to my point of unity, I know who I am. Bonhoeffer argues that only divine revelation provides a genuinely exterior point of unity, which is irreducible to one’s own self-mediating reflection and immanent possibilities (AB 109). In order that revelation truly comes “from outside,” it must take the form of an existential encounter in the sense that God decides for the I and the I then decides for God. In the genuine encounter, I am placed into the truth about myself not in an abstract, objective sense, but so that it is truth for me (AB 96). Revelation thus has the status of a divine act, an event, an existential encounter rather than being a mere object—an ontic thing, “something that exists.” The danger of being-oriented concepts of revelation is that if revelation is a mere object, it poses no genuine boundary. The thinking subject can draw the object into itself (AB 91, 105). Being-concepts of revelation do not do justice to the event or act-status of revelation: they turn “the ‘coming’ God into one who ‘is there’” (AB 86). Bonhoeffer describes three main ways in which revelation is interpreted in this way: (1) As doctrine, which has its place in theology but in itself falls short of existential encounter. Doctrine can be treated as mere information, as a manipulable moment within a system of thought (AB 103). (2) As consciousness, particularly in religious experience. “Here God is found in my experience, understandable and subject to classification within the human system of experiences. Thus, here too, existence remains without encounter” (AB 104). (3) As institution, whether in the Catholic model of the church (such that being in the institution is being in God) or in certain Protestant conceptions of the Bible as verbally inspired (such that one has God’s word as a static object) (AB 104). Instead of thinking of revelation as an ontic object, another approach is to think of revelation in terms of “nonobjectivity.” Revelation is not an object for the human subject to grasp. Instead, God is the subject of divine revelation, and “God always remains subject and always evades humanity’s cognitive clutches” (AB 91–2). Bonhoeffer finds this view in Karl Barth’s famous commentary, The Epistle to the Romans, which provides a striking example of act-oriented theology. Revelation is an eschatological event, a moment (Augenblick) that comes from beyond the closed world of human consciousness. It is a Krisis—radically disruptive and discontinuous. Thus Barth approvingly cites Kierkegaard on the “‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between time and eternity.”30 The moment is a

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divine act with no ontological continuity within historical existence; eternity touches time the way a tangent touches a circle, namely, without touching it.31 At most, the moment is like a “crater made at the percussion point of an exploding shell.”32 Human spirit has no capacity for divine revelation. Finitum non capax infiniti. There is no point of contact between the event of revelation and the immanent horizon of the human being. This means that revelation cannot be reduced and explained away in any historicist, psychologistic, or naturalistic account of religious consciousness. It also means—crucially—that revelation cannot be captured as a manipulable object. God remains free from our cognitive grasp. Bonhoeffer agrees with Barth that revelation is a contingent event, which owes nothing to historical process or teleology and is not necessitated by any immanent worldly logic but is a free gift of God’s grace. Divine revelation is only in the event of revelation. This purely actualist approach may avoid objectifying revelation, but then the question is how revelation might enter the horizon of human consciousness at all. Moreover, if “no historical moment is capax infiniti”—in other words, if the finite is utterly incapable of bearing the infinite—then it becomes unclear how revelation might have any extension or thickness within concrete, historical existence (AB 84). Thus arises the problem of act and being. How is it possible to coordinate the status of revelation as contingent event with the ontological continuity of revelation within concrete historical existence? What sort of a philosophical model will help to coordinate act and being in the concept of revelation? Once again Bonhoeffer will appeal to the transcendence of the person as a key to resolving this problem.

5 The transcendental attempt Similar to Sanctorum Communio, where Bonhoeffer sought philosophical resources to develop a Christian philosophy of the person, in Act and Being he is seeking philosophical resources for a Christian philosophy of revelation. Bonhoeffer considers two main types of philosophy: philosophies of act and philosophies of being. The first he discusses in terms of the “transcendental attempt,” which includes Kantian transcendental philosophy as well as postKantian idealism. Bonhoeffer rejects idealism, since it resolves the concept of being “entirely into the concept of act.” Idealism “radicalized Kant’s discovery” that there is no dogmatic cognition of “being pure and simple.” In other words, for Kant “being ‘is’ only in reference to act.” But idealism replaced the in



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reference to with through, so that “to be is to be comprehended by the I in the a prior synthesis. Without the I, there is no being. The I is creative; it alone is efficacious, going out of and returning to itself ” (AB 40–1).33 This perspective threatens the transcendent being of divine revelation. For idealism, God is only in Geist coming to self-consciousness (AB 50–1). Revelation was always already immanent within Geist, but only needed to be realized by thinking consciousness. Thus there is no genuine outside. Thinking consciousness becomes a closed system, and revelation turns out to be a domestic product. Bonhoeffer recognizes the vital difference between post-Kantian idealism and Kant’s critical philosophy, which he describes as “genuine” transcendental philosophy insofar as it maintains “the resistance of transcendence to thinking.” The human being is suspended between two transcendent poles—the thingin-itself and transcendental apperception—neither of which can be resolved in the act of thinking consciousness (AB 35). Bonhoeffer is highly sympathetic to Kant’s critical philosophy and even begins by asking whether Kant may have succeeded in defining the limits of reason and thus placing it within its true rights—thereby earning the title of the “epistemologist par excellence of Protestantism” (AB 34). Transcendental philosophy maintains the nonobject­ ivity of God, as something that cannot be known but only postulated by practical reason. But if the transcendent is objectively unknowable, “how can reason fix its limits over against” it? Reason has thus set its own limits, and these are not genuine limits. Thus reason “gets entangled in itself. … A genuine belief in God finds that the ground seems to crumble beneath its desire to be able to assert the being of God outside the I, for there is only reason alone with itself.” The thinking I cannot encounter transcendence on its own. Thus the I “is imprisoned in itself, it sees only itself, even when it sees another, even when it wants to see God.” The I only encounters a genuine limit in the encounter with an other—most specifically, the person of Christ (AB 45). In the end, then, the Kantian-transcendental attempt fails to provide a true coordination of act and being.

6 The ontological attempt Bonhoeffer discusses philosophies of being in terms of the “ontological attempt,” which affirms the primacy of being over consciousness. He includes the phenomenologies of Husserl and Scheler, as well as the ontology of Heidegger, within this category.

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For Husserl, phenomenology is the science of “pure consciousness in its own absolute being,” concerning itself with phenomena as they are given to consciousness, rather than with their reality.34 In the interest of intuiting essences, the phenomenological reduction brackets question of existence— “the whole world with all physical things, living beings, and humans, ourselves included.” Husserl notes, however, that “[s]trictly speaking, we have not lost anything but rather have gained the whole of absolute being which, rightly understood, contains within itself, ‘constitutes’ within itself, all worldly transcendencies.”35 Bonhoeffer finds this phenomenological approach untenable for thinking about revelation. He does discern a certain “transcendental realism” in Husserl’s desire to affirm (contra psychologism) the reality of eidos—that intuited essences are not a mere product of consciousness. Yet this realism is in tension with Husserl’s idealist tendencies in his Ideas, which insists “on the immanence of all being in consciousness” (AB 63). Transcendence only enters as “a rule that consciousness projects beyond itself so as to order reality within it.” Here, Bonhoeffer cites Husserl’s statement that “Nature is only as being constituted in regular concatenations of consciousness.”36 Bonhoeffer does not find this to be a promising approach for divine revelation, especially since Husserl also excludes God from the field of pure consciousness. After bracketing the natural world, Husserl brings up “yet another transcendency which is not given, like the pure Ego, immediately in union with reduced consciousness but becomes cognized in a highly mediated fashion,” namely, the transcendence of God.37 From Husserl’s perspective it would seem there can be no phenomenology of revelation qua divine revelation. Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer mentions Husserl’s note to Ideas §51, which hints at other modes or “intuitional manifestations” in which transcendence might appear.38 Much as we might wish, Husserl does not clarify or pursue these comments. However, even if he did, it is unlikely Bonhoeffer would embrace a Husserlian phenomenology of revelation unless it made a radical departure from Husserl’s general methodology. Bonhoeffer rejects Husserl’s phenomenology as resting “on the belief in the possibility of grasping intellectually, out of pure consciousness, the absolute as something given,” which installs the I in the place of God (AB 64). Hence his verdict that Husserl is “still under the spell of idealism” (AB 62). Bonhoeffer initially sees more promise in Scheler’s phenomenology, which sought to rid phenomenology of its idealist tendencies and develop it in the domain of ethics and religion. Scheler sought to give being priority over consciousness by transferring the a priori from the formal (i.e., consciousness)



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to the material—to values as given predicates of being (AB 64–5). In his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, Scheler makes a similar argument regarding God—that there is “an a priori value-idea of the ‘divine’,” which is not an abstraction from positive religions and is not founded in the world or in the ego.39 Scheler wants to affirm what is true in “ontologism,” which is the view (dating back to Augustine) that what is “immediately intuitively given” is “not only the ‘quality’ of the divine but also the existence of God as a specific ‘substance’.”40 Scheler objects that the existence of God is only given through specific and positive revelation, but he agrees that “all religious objectideas” contain an “immediate and intuitable nature”—an “evidentially highest value-quality, which is precisely the value of the infinitely holy.” One’s ideas and concepts of God, then, take specific shape in response to the different nuances of divine value-qualities that are given in religious feeling and “the intentionality of love for God.” Scheler thus alludes to Pascal’s variation of the Meno paradox: “I would not seek Thee, had I not already found Thee.” On Scheler’s reading, “This ‘found’ refers precisely to the possession of the value-being of God through the spiritual eyes of one’s heart and love; it refers to the flashing out of this quality in the execution of these emotive acts.”41 To his credit, Scheler distances himself from the romantic-subjectivist approach of Schleiermacher, who proposes that religious dogmas are “descriptions of religious feelings.” Scheler instead describes piety as “subjective comportment to a positively represented or thought divine object.”42 Piety is thus in reference to a transcendent reality. Nonetheless, Bonhoeffer objects that while Scheler is ready to posit reality, he follows Husserl in making everything rest on the transcendence of essentia over consciousness “without doing the same for existentia; the consequence is that now Scheler cannot find his way back to the latter” (AB 66). Bonhoeffer’s second objection is that despite the priority of value over consciousness, Scheler’s phenomenology results in a system of immanence: in this “feeling of values” the beholding I is capable of taking into itself the whole world, the fullness of life, the good and the very deity; being person, the I bears within itself that which enables it to behold the highest value, to understand God and itself. (AB 66)

Whereas Husserl at least tries to allow for divine transcendence, Scheler’s thinking ends up doing “violence to God, first ascending to God in love and then pulling God down to its level” (AB 66). As such, his phenomenology is not suitable for thinking about divine revelation.

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Bonhoeffer finds a very different approach in the ontology of Martin Heidegger, which radically reverses previous phenomenology: Precisely where Husserl “brackets,” Heidegger discloses being itself. Correspondingly, where Husserl and Scheler speak of timeless essences and values as the being of what exists (insofar as this distinction is made at all!), Heidegger interprets being essentially in terms of temporality. (AB 67–8)

Heidegger does not understand being as substance or in terms of objects (“what exists”) but instead seeks to understand the being of those beings. This requires a hermeneutic of Dasein, since Dasein is that being which understands being. Being is not an inert substratum or object; being is in Dasein’s understanding of being (AB 71). Bonhoeffer argues that Heidegger’s Daseinanalytik brings about a “genuine coordination” of act and being (AB 71), insofar as it gives both receive their due. As Michael DeJonge points out, Heidegger overcomes the epistemological problems of the other positions by treating epistemology in the context of anthropology, i.e., the Daseinanalytik, “insisting that being is given in the thinking act only if thinking is the thinking of existing beings.”43 For Heidegger, being has priority over act, insofar as Dasein is always already there in the world, in its existential thrownness, prior to its acts and decisions.44 Yet at the same time, being does not subsume act, since Dasein’s being is its decisions, its choices regarding its own being. Thus Bonhoeffer writes: “Dasein is neither a discontinuous succession of individual acts nor the continuity of a being that transcends time” (AB 71). Dasein is being in time. This Heideggerian insight influences Bonhoeffer’s solution to the problem of act and being. Just as Dasein is the unity of act and being, so the act and being of revelation are only truly coordinated in person—specifically, the person of Christ.45 However, it must also be said that Bonhoeffer is also sharply critical of Heidegger, arguing that Heideggerian Dasein is not open to divine revelation. Dasein has the possibility of authentic self-understanding within itself and has its understanding of being as an immanent possession at its disposal (AB 72). Dasein’s self-understanding remains “confined within its existential-ontological possibilities” (AB 98), but revelation comes from outside such possibilities, as a thoroughly contingent divine act. Bonhoeffer’s depiction of Heidegger at times resembles that of Levinas’s, insofar as both thinkers criticize Heideggerian ontology as a totality that excludes transcendence. According to Bonhoeffer, Heidegger offers “a consciously atheistic philosophy of finitude. Everything in it is related to the fact that finitude is enclosed in itself through Dasein” (AB 72).



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Heidegger leaves no room for revelation, and thus Heidegger’s ontology, “despite its enormous expansion through the discovery of the existential sphere, remains unsuitable for theology” (AB 73). Perhaps one might argue that if revelation is a contingent event, then one should not fault Heidegger for excluding revelation from his ontology. As a hermeneutical phenomenology of Dasein, perhaps it is appropriate to attend to Dasein’s being without God in the world, rather than seeking to find some sort of a priori receptivity for revelation—a religious a priori—in Dasein. Jean-Yves Lacoste presents the merits of this approach in Experience and the Absolute, which is (not coincidentally) influenced by Bonhoeffer,46 since Bonhoeffer himself is highly critical of such an approach.47 Moreover, Bonhoeffer also argues that philosophy can only make room for revelation a posteriori— after the fact of revelation (AB 76–8). But Heidegger’s hermeneutic of Dasein is not religiously neutral in the manner of Bonhoeffer’s structural phenomenology of the person in Sanctorum Communio. For Heidegger, self-understanding is an immanent possibility for Dasein, made possible by authentic being-towardsdeath. This is not merely a formal description to be colored in with specific religious content, but a rival ontology.48 Moreover, we ought to question Heidegger’s account of the ontological difference, since he insists that theology is an ontic discourse whose concepts of being are subject to correction by philosophy—the only genuinely ontological science. Heidegger presumes that his ontology is more fundamental than such theological phenomena as revelation, sin, and faith, but Bonhoeffer argues that these phenomena penetrate all the way to the ontological level, such that “all concepts of being must be formed anew” in the light of them (AB 73).49 Jean-Luc Marion makes a similar criticism of Heidegger in his 1992 essay “The Possible and Revelation,” arguing that for Heidegger, God cannot reveal himself, “cannot appear (ins Scheinen kommen), that is to say ‘become phenomenon,’ except by entering into a Wesensraum, a ‘space of manifestation,’ which is measured by the dimensions of Being and not those of God.” Being is prior to God, who “can no longer reveal himself freely, but must manifest himself according to the conditions superimposed by the whole, the sacred, and the divine, thus finally by Being.50 As such, divine revelation must be cut to the measure of Dasein. Transcendence is lost within immanence.

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7 A phenomenology of the counter-Logos Although their terminology differs, both Bonhoeffer and Marion want to liberate revelation from the immanent conditions of the subject, or Dasein. Marion’s response has been to develop a phenomenology that is attentive to a type of phenomenality that is not at the mercy of the immanent limits and conditions of possibilities of the transcendental I, or Dasein. Revelation would be an instance of the saturated phenomenon—a sort of phenomenality saturated with a givenness (Gegebenheit) that exceeds as well as inverts the aims of intentional consciousness. The constituting subject thus finds herself constituted by a counter-intentionality that is prior to her own intentional acts. I will not digress further into Marion’s phenomenology, which has received considerable scholarly attention.51 However, I mention the theme of counter-intentionality because it plays a central part in Bonhoeffer’s phenomenology of the encounter with Christ. Where Marion pursues the theme of saturated phenomenality, Bonhoeffer argues that revelation must be understood in terms of persons:52 In the social relation of persons the static concept of being that pertains to the “there is” begins to move. There is no God who “is there” [Einen Gott, den “es gibt”, gibt es nicht]; God “is” in the relation of persons, and being is God’s being person [das Sein ist sein Personsein]. (AB 115)

For Bonhoeffer, divine revelation is God’s self-disclosure in the person of Christ, who is the unity of act and being. Since Christ is person, this means that revelation is not a mere object, a manipulable entity, or information at my disposal. Christ is an other who confronts me as a genuine limit, who calls me to accountability—who do you say that I am?—and calls me to take up the cross and follow after him. Bonhoeffer presents a striking description of the encounter in his 1933 lectures on Christology.53 There he offers a phenomenology of the encounter between the human logos and Jesus Christ, the divine Logos. How should the human logos understand this Logos, incarnate in history? Typically the human logos seeks to classify and explain, so it asks the questions What? and How? But the basic Christological question is not What?, or How?, but Who? (C 302–4). The Who? question presents a limit to the human logos, which wants to grasp phenomena by asking What? and How? These questions objectify the phenomenon, thus ensuring the autonomy of the logos and the finality of its judgements. The problem is that the divine Logos is a living person and cannot



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be grasped as an object of cognition. A genuine encounter with Christ revolves around the question Who? I am called into question by the living person of Christ: Who do you say that I am? Bonhoeffer argues that this question is ontological, since it concerns “the being of Christ’s person as clearly being the revealed Logos of God.” It is a matter of bringing out “the ontological structure of the who,” which requires that we engage the Logos as irreducibly personal in its being (C 304). This question breaks us out of the subject–object relation. It also pulls us out of the third-person, theoretical perspective, since its truth depends on the encounter between the first and second person. The Christological question—Who do you say that I am?—also suggests that the fundamental ontological question is the Christological question. We would like to “get behind Christ’s claim, and to ground it on our own” (C 304), but there is no such ground to be found. This means that personhood is ontologically primary; this particular person claims to be the Logos—the center of human existence, history, and nature (C 324). Such a claim is offensive to the human logos, and presents an insurmountable limit. “The logos sees that is autonomy is being threatened from outside” (C 302). Christ is the counterLogos (Gegenlogos), who inverts the objectifying gaze of the human logos. The transcendent Logos has appeared, entered the horizon of the immanent human logos, which now finds its authority challenged by a claim that it cannot resolve according to its own objectifying categories. The transcendent Logos calls the human being into question. What is the truth of your existence? Confronted by the challenge of the counter-Logos, the human logos seeks to overcome this otherness. “The logos cannot bear the presence of the counter-Logos, because it knows that one of them must die.” This confrontation leads to the cross, and either the incarnate Logos of God must be crucified by the human logos or the human logos must be crucified. The human logos hangs the divine Logos on the cross. “Then the person who was causing the worry has been killed, and along with that person, the question.” But the counter-Logos raises itself from the dead. Now our question has been turned around. The question we have put to the person of Christ, “Who are you?” comes back at us: who are you, that you ask this question? Do you live in the truth, so you can ask it? (C 305)

In the transcendent person of Christ, the human logos finds itself facing a question it cannot ultimately evade, a limit it cannot overcome.

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8 The church as the unity of act and being Bonhoeffer’s description of the encounter with Christ is fascinating from a phenomenological perspective. It also raises another phenomenological question: in what manner is the personal being of Christ given? Where do we encounter Christ? Related to this, in light of Bonhoeffer’s actualism in Sanctorum Communio, we might wonder what concept of personhood Bonhoeffer has in mind. Is this an actualistic personhood, such that Christ is—at least in the worldly level—in disruptive, punctual events of revelation? Or do we encounter Christ as present with us in some sort of ontologically continuous way? The core of Bonhoeffer response to these questions is his phenomenology of church community. He argues that revelation, as the person of Christ, has its ontological continuity in the church community. Bonhoeffer uses Scheler’s notion of collective person to describe the church as the collective person of Christ—the body of Christ. Adapting a phrase from Hegel,54 Bonhoeffer describes the church as “Christ existing as community” (AB 111). Christ is in the church, but this ontological continuity is not reducible to individual human beings, but is grounded “suprapersonally [überpersönlich] through a community of persons” (AB 114). That said, this revelation does affect the existence of individual human beings, who encounter the person of Christ, are “placed into the truth, and transposed into a new manner of existence.” We encounter Christ in the word, which is not merely the biblical text as a static document, but the living word proclaimed in the sermon (AB 115). We also encounter Christ in the sacraments, in the body and blood of Christ. And we encounter Christ in the faces of other persons, who “become Christ for us in demand and promise, in the existential limits they place on us from outside” (AB 114). Through the mediation of Christ, I encounter my neighbor as someone who claims me from outside of my own existence (AB 127). Bonhoeffer also argues that others in the church are bearers of revelation. I encounter others in the church as those who hear the word, believe, and love others (AB 114–15). My participation in this body—Christ existing as church community—provides the ontological continuity of my own being in faith. Bonhoeffer describes it in these words: I hear another human being truly tell me the gospel. Someone offers me the sacrament: you are forgiven. Someone along with the community of faith prays for me. And I hear the gospel, join in the prayer, and know myself bound up in the word, sacrament, and prayer of Christ’s community of faith, the new



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humanity, whether it is here or elsewhere. Bearing it, I am borne by it. Here I, the historically whole human being—individual and humanity—am encountered, and I believe, that is, know myself borne. I am borne (pati), therefore I am (esse), therefore I believe (agere) (AB 121).

My being in faith is not reducible to my own act of faith, but is a participation in the social reality of the church. Here, too, the transcendence of the other person is vital. I encounter the other as a concrete bearer of revelation, and I discover that my own being in faith is not first and foremost a matter of my own intentional act but my ontological participation in this community of faith. To be in Christ is to be in the church not as a mere institution, but as the community of faith, the concrete body of Christ.

9 Concluding remarks No single essay can cover every phenomenologically interesting aspect of Bonhoeffer’s thought. My hope, however, is that this essay will spark further phenomenological interest in Bonhoeffer by showing that he can be both helpful and provocative for phenomenology. This is true for debates about phenomenological method and the prospects of phenomenology. But perhaps most importantly of all, Bonhoeffer provides rich resources for actually doing phenomenology. What sort of new directions might Bonhoeffer suggest for contemporary phenomenological debate? I will close by highlighting just a few. In phenomenological ethics, Bonhoeffer’s appeal to Christological mediation warrants further consideration, as does his suggestion that the divine You is visible in the concrete, human You. Bonhoeffer’s claim that ethical responsibility pertains to individuals as well as collective persons also needs further phenomenological attention, along with his argument that responsibility involves both disruptive events and ontological continuity. Bonhoeffer also suggests a potential starting point for “a distinctly Christian philosophy of time” in the way Christian revelation is oriented toward the future, which certainly an intriguing possibility for phenomenology of religion.55 Bonhoeffer’s attempt to coordinate the act and being of divine revelation also deserves consideration in the phenomenology of religion. Bonhoeffer’s later discussion of the ultimate and penultimate, which we did not discuss here, is a very helpful resource for thinking about transcendence and immanence.56 Moreover, Bonhoeffer gives highly attentive descriptions of what is given in the life of Christian faith. If the

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task of phenomenology of religion is to attend, as Paul Ricoeur noted, to “the motivations and intentions of the believing soul,”57 then Bonhoeffer’s authorship is an eloquent resource that contemporary phenomenologists ought to hear.

Notes 1 I will use the following abbreviations to cite Bonhoeffer in the text: AB = Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology, trans. H. Martin Rumscheidt (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996). C = Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, “Lectures on Christology,” in Berlin: 1932–1933, ed. Larry L. Rasmussen, trans. Carsten Nicolaisen and Ernst-Albert Scharffenorth (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), pp. 299–360. E = Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Ethics, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005). SC = Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998). 2 It has been widely shown, however, that this use of Bonhoeffer was a serious misappropriation, since these theologians ignored the serious Christological and ecclesiological commitments that informed Bonhoeffer’s reflections on a possible non-religious interpretation of Christianity. 3 This insistence of the concrete rather than the abstract is a constant theme throughout Bonhoeffer’s authorship. It is also likely the reason why he found the pragmatism of William James “uncommonly fascinating.” Having finished his dissertation and habilitation thesis in Berlin, Bonhoeffer spent 1930–1 at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he read almost everything James wrote and also studied Dewey and Perry. Bonhoeffer found pragmatism so remarkable that he planned to write a book on its influence in American philosophy and theology. Bethge, Eberhard, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, rev. edn, rev. and ed. Victoria Barnett (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), pp. 161, 168. What fascinated Bonhoeffer about the pragmatists was their commitment to the concrete: “Questions such as that of Kantian epistemology are ‘nonsense,’ and no problem to them, because they take life no further. It is not truth, but ‘works’ that is ‘valid,’ and that is their criterion” (Ibid., p. 161). The pragmatist rejection of Kantian epistemology would have struck Bonhoeffer as particularly noteworthy, since his own work up to this point had been in critical dialogue with transcendental philosophy, evaluating its prospects and limitations as a guide for theology. 4 For example, see the essays in Bonhoeffer and Continental Thought: Cruciform



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Philosophy, ed. Brian Gregor and Jens Zimmermann (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009); Charles Marsh, Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Promise of His Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Paul D. Janz, God, the Mind’s Desire: Reason, Reference, and Christian Thinking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); also the essays in Ontology and Ethics: Bonhoeffer and Contemporary Scholarship, ed. Adam Clark and Michael Mawson (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013). Two recent essays on Bonhoeffer and Heidegger are Michael P. DeJonge’s “God’s Being is in Time: Bonhoeffer’s Theological Appropriation of Heidegger” and Nicholas Byle’s “Heidegger’s Adam and Bonhoeffer’s Christ: Evaluating Bonhoeffer’s Appraisals of Heidegger,” both of which appear in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Yearbook 5 (2011/12), ed. Clifford J. Green, Kirsten Busch Nielsen, and Christiane Tietz (München: Gütersloher Verlaghaus, 2012.) SC 70 n.30. Bonhoeffer contends that the introductory chapters of Natorp’s Sozialpädogogik, specifically the discussion of the three stages of will, slips out of its neo-Kantian schema and “delves deep into a phenomenology of the will and of social being in general” (SC 70 n.6). Scheler argues that every individual belongs essentially to a social unit, which is “a totality of interconnections of experience,” and every social unit is “a partial manifestation of a concrete collective person.” Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 520. This means that moral subjectivity is not given in a solely individual form. Instead, every concrete, finite person consists of an individual and collective person. Both factors (individual and collective personality) belong to the concrete finite person, and they are reciprocally related (Ibid., p. 522). Ibid., p. 522. As Bonhoeffer observes, the reality of sin “infinitely alters the essence of things” (SC 62). In addition to stressing the absoluteness of the demand, Bonhoeffer also writes about loving the neighbor instead of oneself (SC 170–1). Bonhoeffer will later recognize the dangers of talking about the responsibility in this way. See my essay, “Bonhoeffer’s Christian Social Philosophy: Conscience, Alterity, and the Moment of Ethical Responsibility,” in Bonhoeffer and Continental Thought, pp. 201–25. See, for instance, the second section of Kant’s Groundwork: “Beings whose existence rests not indeed on our will but on nature, if they are non-rational beings, still have only a relative worth, as means, and are therefore called things, whereas rational beings are called persons, because their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves, i.e. as something that may not be used merely as

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Early Phenomenology a means, and hence to that extent limits all choice (and is an object of respect).” Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, rev. edn, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 40. Kant, Groundwork, p. 17. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 59. Ibid., pp. 59–60. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 61. Ibid., p. 64. Robert Gibbs, “The Disincarnation of the Word: The Trace of God in Reading Scripture,” in The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas Between Jews and Christians, ed. Kevin Hart and Michael Alan Signer (Fordham University Press, 2010), p. 44. See Levinas’s remark in Totality and Infinity: “The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed.” Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 79. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” p. 64. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), p. 344. “That the other must be experienced not as the other of myself grasped by pure self-consciousness, but as a Thou—this prototype of all objections to the infiniteness of Hegel’s dialectic—does not seriously challenge him” (p. 343). Clifford Green, “Human Sociality and Christian Community,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. John W. de Gruchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 126. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Isabel Best, Lisa Dahill, Reinhard Krauss, and Nancy Lukens (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), p. 501; cf. Widerstand und Ergebung. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, ed., Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge et al. (Gütersloh: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1998), p. 558. Clifford J. Green. Bonhoeffer: A Theology of Sociality, rev. edn (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1972/1999), pp. 29–30. Likewise: “The individual becomes a person ever and again, through the other, in the ‘moment’” (SC 55–6). Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 3rd edn, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), p. 17. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” p. 59. Here there is a significant convergence between Bonhoeffer and Paul Ricoeur,



27

28 29

30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38

40 41

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who makes a similar criticism of Levinas in Oneself as Another. For a discussion of Bonhoeffer and Ricoeur, see my comments in “Bonhoeffer’s Christian Social Philosophy.” Since the problem of act and being is multifaceted, it can be challenging to keep track of Bonhoeffer’s argument throughout the book. Michael DeJonge offers a helpful key to understanding Bonhoeffer’s argument, noting that the problematic of act and being concerns three conceptual levels: theology, which concerns “the contingency (act) and stability (being) of God and revelation”; anthropology, which concerns “human existence in God”; and epistemology, which concerns “human knowledge of God.” DeJonge, “God’s Being is in Time,” p. 125. Ibid., p. 124. Bonhoeffer, “The Anthropological Question in Contemporary Philosophy and Theology,” in Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928–1931, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008), p. 389. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 10. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 29. Cf. AB 44: “It is a transcendental judgment to say that the objects of my knowledge, the world, are ‘in reference to me’, whereas in idealism the world comes about ‘through me’.” Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), §50, p. 94/113. Ibid. Ibid., §51, p. 96/116. Quoted in AB 63 n. 45. Husserl, Ideas §58, pp. 110–11/133–4. “In other words, since a worldly God is evidently impossible and since, on the other hand, the immanence of God in absolute consciousness cannot be taken as immanence in the sense of being as a mental process (which would be no less countersensical), there must be, therefore, within the absolute stream of consciousness and its infinities, modes in which transcendencies are made known other than the constituting of physical realities as unities of harmonious appearances; and ultimately there would also have to be intuitional manifestations to which a theoretical thinking might conform, so that, by following them rationally, it might make intelligible the unitary rule of the supposed theological principle.” Ideas §51, pp. 96–7/116–17. 39 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, pp. 292–3. Ibid., p. 293. Ibid., p. 294.

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42 Ibid., p. 295, emphasis mine. 43 DeJonge, “God’s Being is in Time,” p. 127. 44 On decision, see for instance Being and Time §9, where Heidegger writes that “Dasein has always made some sort of decision as to the way in which it is in each case mine [je meines].” Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 42/68. 45 DeJonge, “God’s Being is in Time,” pp. 135–6. Of course, there is a lingering question of whether Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein gives us a phenomenology of personhood, especially since it lacks an account of the ethical encounter with the other person. 46 In particular Lacoste draws on Bonhoeffer’s account of the penultimate. See Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 2–3, 137–40. For more on Lacoste and Bonhoeffer, see Kendall Cox’s essay “Liturgy, Kenosis, and Creation: Bonhoeffer and Lacoste on Being before God without God in the World,” in Ontology and Ethics: Bonhoeffer and Contemporary Scholarship. 47 See especially his comments in his Letters and Papers from Prison. 48 Levinas cites a comment, attributed to Scheler, to the effect that Being and Time was a mixture of brilliance and a Sunday sermon. See the discussion following “Transcendence and Height,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 23. 49 See my discussion of this issue in “Formal Indication, Philosophy, and Theology: Bonhoeffer’s Critique of Heidegger,” Faith and Philosophy, 24 (2) (April 2007): 185–202. 50 Jean-Luc Marion, “The Possible and Revelation,” in The Visible and the Revealed, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 11. 51 For an excellent summary that locates Marion’s project within the phenomenological tradition, see Kevin Hart’s introduction to Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 52 These approaches are by no means in conflict, since person is a saturated phenomenon. John Manoussakis, “The Phenomenon of God: From Husserl to Marion,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 78 (1) (2004): 66–7. 53 This discussion of Christ as the counter-Logos is adapted from Chapter 5 of my book, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013). 54 In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel writes that “the community itself is the existing Spirit, the Spirit in its existence [Existenz], God existing as



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community.” Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Volume III: The Consummate Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, with H. S. Harris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), p. 331. 55 Bonhoeffer began to sketch out a project on “the sense of time” while he was in prison, but due to his execution was obviously unable to pursue this further. Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 98. 56 See Lacoste’s Experience and the Absolute, as noted above, and Chapters 6–10 of A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self, where I make extensive use of Bonhoeffer’s category of the penultimate. 57 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 19.

12

Rudolf Otto as Postmodern Phenomenologist: In Dialogue with Marion, Derrida, and Kierkegaard Merold Westphal

Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Fordham University; Honorary Professor, Australian Catholic University

Rudolf Otto deserves a significant role in discussions related to the so-called “theological turn in French phenomenology” or, more broadly speaking, “continental philosophy of religion.”1 The first reason for this is that The Idea of the Holy (1917) is best read as a work in phenomenology. We have it on the authority of no less a figure than Edmund Husserl himself that Otto’s bestknown book is a contribution to phenomenology. In a famous letter to Otto, he writes: I became aware last summer of your book, Das Heilige [The Idea of the Holy], and it has had a strong effect on me as hardly no other book in years … It is a first beginning for a phenomenology of religion at least with regard to everything that does not go beyond a pure description and analysis of the phenomena themselves … this book will hold an abiding place in the history of genuine philosophy of religion or phenomenology of religion. It is a beginning and its significance is that it goes back to the “beginning,” the “origins,” and thus, in the most beautiful sense of the word, is “original.”2

Otto’s training was in theology and his academic appointments were as a systematic theologian,3 and he does not appear to have seriously engaged with Husserl’s project. In a way, this makes sense. In works such as “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” (1911) and Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book (1913), Husserl was a “modern” phenomenologist seeking to clarify and to (re)establish the domain of reason, while Otto was a “postmodern” phenomenologist, exploring the limits of reason

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and that which lies beyond rather than “within the boundaries of mere reason.”4 But this is not the reason for Husserl’s reservations about the book: I cannot share in the additional philosophical [theological?] theorizing; and it is quite non-essential for the specific task and particular subject matter of this book, and it would be better left out … It seems to me that the metaphysician (theologian) in Herr Otto has carried away on his wings Otto the phenomenologist.5

Reasons for this concern are not hard to find. Otto tells us that he is working within a “theistic conception of God” and alludes to Christianity’s “superiority over religions of other forms and at other levels.”6 Moreover, Chapters X through XII are entitled, respectively, “The Numinous in the Old Testament,” “The Numinous in the New Testament,” and “The Numinous in Luther.” However, two things must be said in defense of Husserl’s claim that Das Heilige is first and foremost a work of phenomenology. First, Otto writes, “There is no religion in which [the Holy, the numinous] does not live as the real innermost core, and without it no religion would be worthy of the name” (IH 6). He clearly intends his descriptions to have a significance beyond the Christian and even the Abrahamic, monotheistic religions. Before he wrote Das Heilige, Otto had traveled to North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, India, China, and Japan and: was able to realize at firsthand what in the religious experience which they enshrine is specific and unique and what on the other hand is common to all genuine religions, however diversely expressed in sacred writings, ritual, or art.7

In explicating the Holy as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, he will draw on examples from Hinduism and Buddhism (IH 18, 30, 38–9). Second, even when he is working within the confines of biblical religion and Christian tradition, he works as and surely can be read as a phenomenologist. He does not present metaphysical and moral truth claims to be accepted on the basis of Scripture (as interpreted by tradition);8 he rather presents us with a type of possible experience carefully described and distinguished from other kinds of possible experience. The theme of a phenomenological analysis can just as easily be theistic religion or Christian religion as religion in general, if there is such a thing. So Otto is a phenomenologist. There is a second reason why he deserves to be part of the conversations that constitute continental philosophy of religion. Like the other participants in the so-called “theological turn,” whether European or



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American,9 he is a postmodern rather than a modern thinker. Just as he is a phenomenologist without roots in Husserl, so he is postmodern without (anachronistic) roots in French post-structuralism, deconstruction, and so forth. He operates beyond rather than within the limits of pure, theoretical reason. Just as American pragmatists showed us that there is more to experience than sense data, he shows us that there is more to religious life than concepts, theories, and proofs (however orthodox by some theological criteria or compelling by some philosophical criteria). If deconstruction shows us the fragility of conceptual thinking in general due to the radical contextuality of language and its concepts,10 so Otto shows us the frailty of theological thinking due to its inability to comprehend (grasp, capture, encompass) without remainder the meaning of what it intends.11 Does Otto’s refusal to keep religion “within the boundaries of mere reason” signify some sort of irrationalism? After all, is not the subtitle of his book “über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhäaltnis zum Rationalen” [On the Irrational in the Idea of the Divine and its Connection to the Rational]? Is it not about the relation of the irrational to the rational? Does not Otto’s synonym for the Holy, in his sense, namely ‘numinous’, signify a feeling? Is not William Alston right to worry that Otto (along with Friedich Schleiermacher and William James) sometimes “characterize[s] religious experience as cognitive of objective realities in ways that seem incompatible with the classification as affective”?12 As if the cognitive and the affective were mutually exclusive, so that if the deepest core of religion is numinous feeling, the essence of religion is non-cognitive and all associated cognitions are superficial and accidental! Does not Otto himself point us in this direction when he says that the Holy is “ineffable—in the sense that it completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts” (IH 5)? In a word, No. Otto himself works hard to preclude such a reading. First, he tells us what he means by “rational.” In his Foreword to the first English edition, he makes clear that the contrast is between reason and the “non-rational” or the “supra-rational” and not the “irrational.” He seeks to analyze “the feeling which remains when the concept fails … And I feel that no one ought to concern himself with the ‘Numen ineffable’ who has not already devoted assiduous and serious study to the ‘Ratio aeterna’” (IH, before p. 1). So Harvey is right to translate the subtitle in terms of the relation of the “Non-rational” to the “Rational.” For Otto, the rational is the realm of concepts, beliefs, and knowledge, including “the knowledge that comes by faith” (IH 1). This means that a familiar

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and traditional distinction between reason and faith is not in play here. In that context reason signifies the powers of the unaided human intellect and faith the understanding that depends on the reception of a divine revelation that goes beyond or even against human reason.13 The distinction between philosophy and theology has often been put in terms of this distinction. But where the rational is defined as the realm of concepts and beliefs, theology is as much a rational enterprise as philosophy. In fact, Otto says, “orthodoxy itself has been the mother of rationalism” (IH 3). The rationalism he opposes is not the attempt to immunize reason from revelation or to give the former hegemony over the latter.14 It is the assumption that the conceptual and cognitive dimension of religion is the whole story, that “the essence of the deity can be given completely and exhaustively” in these terms, a view he labels “one-sided.” He insists, rather, that “religion is not exclusively contained and exhaustively comprised in any series of ‘rational’ assertions” (IH 1–4). That the divine and the religious cannot be grasped “completely and exhaustively” in the rational, that is, in conceptual, linguistic terms, means that the rational is not to be excluded but only denied exclusive rights. Hegel would call this an Aufhebung, Kierkegaard a teleological suspension. Reason is not to be abolished or exiled; it is rather to be relativized and dethroned. So far from suggesting that to speak of numinous feeling is to reduce religion to the subjective and religious language to the expressive, as the positivists would have it, Otto suggests that this feeling, like concepts, is intentional, that it points to something other than itself. “For so far are these ‘rational’ attributes from exhausting the idea of deity, that they in fact imply a non-rational or suprarational Subject of which they are the predicates” (IH 2). The theologian might say that revelation reveals the incomprehensibility of God. These “‘rational’ attributes” are the predicates of a subject which they qualify, but which in its deeper essence is not, nor indeed can be, comprehended in them; which rather requires comprehension of a quite different sort. Yet, though it eludes the conceptual way of understanding, it must be in some way or other within our grasp, else absolutely nothing could be asserted of it. (IH 2, emphasis added)

In other words, the numinous feeling, the dimension of religious consciousness that goes beyond, that exceeds the conceptual, linguistic, theoretical dimensions, refers beyond itself. Indeed, it refers to the same “non-rational or supra-rational Subject” to which the concepts and theories (theological and philosophical) refer.15 It refers differently, to be sure, but in the language of



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Husserlian phenomenology, the numinous signifies both an intentional act (noesis) and an intentional object (noema). In Chapter II Otto tells us that by ‘the Holy’ he does not mean moral perfection but that dimension of the divine that is left over after we subtract the “rational” and the “moral” aspects. For this he coins the term “numinous,” derived from the Latin numen. It is a “perfectly sui generis” state of mind that, by virtue of its distinction from the rational, “cannot be strictly defined” (IH 7). As we have seen, it is “ineffable—in the sense that it completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts” (IH 5). Technically speaking, this is true, since it has been defined as the dimension that falls outside the realm of the rational. But Otto himself shows us why this “completely eludes” can be misleading. He has already pointed out that if we thought this dimension occurred all by itself, we would have to say nothing about it, and even the mystics are famous for having a great deal to say about the incomprehensible (IH 2). But the numinous feeling is not a self-sufficient immediacy; it occurs as part of a larger, complex whole that includes the rational and shares an intentional structure with it. To treat it in isolation would be as one-sided as the rationalist reduction of religion to the merely conceptual/linguistic. In Chapter III, he offers a twofold critique of Schleiermacher’s account of religion as the feeling of absolute dependence: The common element in all howsoever diverse expressions of piety, by which these are conjointly distinguished from other feelings, or, in other words, the self-identical essence of piety, is this: the consciousness of being absolutely dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in relation with God.16

Both parts of Otto’s critique strike me as unfair to Schleiermacher. First, he complains that the distinction between absolute and relative dependence expresses “a difference of degree and not of intrinsic quality” (IH 9). It seems to me that differences of degree would fall within the realm of relative dependence and that absolute dependence would signify precisely the qualitative difference that Otto requires. But it is the second critique that especially concerns us here. To be sure, Schleiermacher equates this feeling with a consciousness of being in relation with God. But since he refers to this feeling as a mode of “self-consciousness,” Otto complains that “I can come upon the very fact of God [only] as the result of an inference, that is, by reasoning to a cause beyond myself to account for my ‘feeling of dependence’” (IH 10). This is quite surely unfair to Schleiermacher. A more charitable reading is that of Robert R. Williams, who “argues that

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Schleiermacher anticipates Husserl, and that the feeling he is describing is ‘a direct, prereflective apprehension of reality’.”17 Otto’s own view of the matter, which is our concern, is closer to Williams’s view of Schleiermacher than to Otto’s. He proposes to rename the feeling of absolute dependence “creature-consciousness” or “creature-feeling.” This feeling: is itself a first subjective concomitant and effect of another feeling-element, which casts it like a shadow, but which in itself indubitably has immediate and primary reference to an object outside the self. Now this object is just what we have already spoken of as “the numinous.” For the “creature-feeling” and the sense of dependence to arise in the mind the “numen” must be experienced as present, a numen praesens … There must be felt a something “numinous,” something bearing the character of a “numen,” to which the mind turns spontaneously … The numinous is thus felt as an objective and outside the self. (IH 10–11)

In other words, “numinous” as an adjective has a double significance. It describes the feeling and it describes the object that is intended by that feeling and that is experienced as present in that feeling in analogy with the way an object of perception is present in the perception.18 The Husserlian correlation between noesis (intentional act) and noema (intentional object) fits this situation quite nicely. The object is given in the mode in which it is taken (intended). For example, the same object can be given in perception, memory, or imagination. Or, to get back to the case at hand, the same “object” can be intended by concepts or by feelings. Obviously, the “object” is given differently when the mode of intentionality is changed. In the Translator’s Preface, John Harvey goes so far as to suggest that Otto’s book is a “valuable corrective” to the tendency to become “so far absorbed in the subjective states of mind manifested in religious experience” as to ignore or half-ignore the objective significance of them. For this reason he suggests that Otto would have expressed himself better if instead of speaking of “the numinous feeling” he spoke of “the feeling of the numinous.” So far, then, from stressing the place of the subjective state of mind in the religious experience, Otto’s emphasis is always on the objective reference, and upon subjective feelings only as the indispensable clues to this … The two elements, the rational and the non-rational, have to be regarded (in his favourite simile) as the warp and the woof of the complete fabric, neither of which can dispense with the other. (IH xv–xvii).



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Proudfoot refers to the view “that religious statements neither represent nor assert but are used to express a dimension of experience which is immediate and primitive has been influential in the comparative study of religion, in part through the work of two Schleiermacher scholars, Rudolf Otto and Joachim Wach.”19 Proudfoot does not quite attribute to Otto this crude either/or of the cognitive and the expressive, all too familiar from the work of the logical positivists. On this view, metaphysical statements, including theological assertions “have no literal meaning [and] they are not subject to any criteria of truth or falsehood: but they may still serve to express or arouse, emotion.”20 The phenomenological way of saying this would be that emotions and the statements that express them are non-intentional and, since they do not refer to any objective reality, cannot disclose such a reality or be evaluated in terms of how well they correspond to it. Proudfoot himself shows us why we need not attribute such a view to Otto. Unsurprisingly, he sees Hume as the source of such a view, and contrasts to it Aristotle’s understanding of emotions: In contrast to Hume, Aristotle holds that an emotion cannot be discriminated from other mental states without attention to the appropriate object and the beliefs that provide relevant grounds for the emotion. Reference to concepts and thoughts is required for the specification of an emotional state … The relation between an emotion and its object is a conceptual or logical one. It is not a contingent or causal relation, as Hume supposed it was … We would think it odd for someone to declare that he was proud of the sky or the sea … [or for] a person to profess to be ashamed of the rain … We can sometimes recognize an emotion without knowing what its object is, but we must know what type of object it takes … Emotions are identified by the specification of their objects … According to [Aristotle], emotions are not to be defined in contrast to intellect and will.21

The text of Otto and the commentary of his translator strongly suggest that Otto sides with Aristotle against Hume. The distinction we need is not that between the conceptual, rational, and intentional as objective, on the one hand, and the emotional as something merely subjective, on the other. It is between those feelings that are intentional and those that are not. Emotions such as anger, fear, and gratitude belong in the first category. Feelings such as an ache, an itch, or nausea, sometimes called “raw feels,” belong in the second. Unlike emotions proper, they just are; they do not refer beyond themselves to, for example, who I am angry at, what I am afraid of, or to whom I am grateful. Nor can changed beliefs about the world change the affective response, as when, by contrast in

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the case of emotions, I cease to be angry or afraid when I learn that she did not say that or that he is not mad at me. Otto makes it abundantly clear that he takes numinous feeling to be experienced as feelings of the numen in all of its numinosity. That which is holy is present to religious awareness, though in a way that exceeds rational, conceptual, linguistic thought. Otto’s phenomenon is “the feeling which remains where the concept fails” (IH before p. 1), but it is important to him as a clue to the reality it intends. From the nature of the feeling he hopes to learn something about the nature of the felt. William Wainwright also affirms that numinous feelings are cognitive. “First, the feelings are the source of the concept of the numinous—the concept of something which is both a value and an objective reality.” Of course, aches and itches are the source of the concepts of aches and itches, but not in this sense. They do not refer to some objective reality or value beyond themselves. Wainwright continues: The numinous feelings are also cognitive in the sense that they are like visual experiences. They have “immediate and primary reference to an object outside the self ”—the numinous quality or object, which is an object of numinous feelings in somewhat the same way that visible objects and qualities might be said to be the object of visual experiences.22

So it is that the title of Otto’s book is Das Heilige, The Holy, not The Idea of the Holy, or even The Feeling of the Holy. His target is the “object” of religious experience by means of the subjective mode of its givenness. And so it is that he famously describes (defines?) the Holy as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the aweful but attractive mystery. This now classical phrase is meant to describe not the feeling of the Holy but the Holy that is felt. Since mysterium is the noun, tremendum and fascinans the adjectives, we can infer that the first thing Otto wants to say about the Holy is that it is mysterious. Indeed, he has already done so by telling us that numinous, the Holy exceeds the rational, the capacity of our language and its concepts to exhaust its meaning. To call it a mystery is to say nothing new. He employs many glosses on this term: inexpressible, hidden, esoteric, beyond conception, extraordinary, unfamiliar, stupor, blank wonder, astonishment that strikes us dumb, amazement absolute, supernatural, and transcendent (IH 13, 26, 30). He quotes from Augustine: “What is that which gleams through me and smites my heart without wounding it? I am both a-shudder and a-glow. A-shudder insofar as I am unlike it, a-glow in so far as I am like it.”23 But the most familiar gloss on the mysterium is that it is the “Wholly Other.”



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The term is not merely negative, but also positive, not merely epistemic, but also ontological. Otto says we might see the mysterious as “something which is and remains absolutely and invariably beyond our understanding, whereas that which merely eludes our understanding for a time but is perfectly intelligible in principle should be called, not a ‘mystery’ but merely a ‘problem’.”24 So far, so good. But Otto thinks this is too weak a formulation: The truly “mysterious” object is beyond our apprehension and comprehension, not only because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we come upon something inherently “Wholly Other,” whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil in a wonder that strikes us chill and numb. (IH 28)

It is sometimes objected that anything so totally, absolutely, and qualitatively other than ourselves and what we can grasp would be so utterly unintelligible that we could say nothing at all about it and would have to remain mute. It couldn’t enter our experience any more than a blow that knocked us instantly unconscious. But that would be to assume an absolute mutual exclusiveness between the linguistic and the affective, that whatever gives itself through our emotions cannot also give itself through concepts, that there can be no commerce between the two. But we have seen that this is what Otto denies, and we have already heard him say, “Yet, though [the Holy] eludes the conceptual way of understanding, it must be in some way or other within our grasp, else absolutely nothing could be asserted of it” (IH 2). Harvey expresses this nicely when he suggests that for Otto the Wholly Other is “not, so to speak wholly ‘wholly other’” (IH xviii). So Otto has more to say about the mysterium, noting that this designation “does not define the object more positively in its qualitative character” (IH 13; cf. 25). No doubt many things are mysterious in Otto’s sense. He gives the beautiful, the sublime, and sexual ecstasy as examples (IH 5, 41, 46).25 What are the distinctive marks of this particular mysterium? His answer comes in the two adjectival qualifiers: tremendum and fascinans. Without exactly developing a Thomistic metaphysics of analogy, Otto says that the ineffable can be described by way of analogy, metaphor, and symbol (IH 12, 23). Some philosophers and theologians would find it necessary to delineate the differences among these three tropes. Otto does not. But he suggests, perhaps following the Augustine passage he cites, something like this: the Holy is not only unlike ourselves and everything else we experience, it is also somehow similar. The Wholly Other is not wholly, wholly other. So we can describe it, however inadequately.26

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“Tremendum” obviously relates to “tremendous,” but it isn’t a matter of size. It is closer to “tremor.” Otto gives us three perhaps partial synonyms: awefulness, overpoweringness (majesty), and energy or urgency. His glosses on awefulness include fear, shudder, terror, dread, eerie, weird, uncanny, and horror (IH 13–16). In trying to convey this theme to students, I once found myself saying, without having planned to do so, “If it isn’t scary, it isn’t God.” Drawing on biblical (and Indian) texts, Otto links this aspect of the tremendum to the wrath and jealousy of God or the gods (IH 18–19). In the middle of the Ten Commandments, we read: “for I the LORD your God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20.5 NRSV); and in the New Testament we read: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10.31 NRSV). The sentimental attempt to exempt Jesus from this view of God requires one to ignore his parables and prophecies of judgement. Hymnody echoes this theme in terms of storm imagery: His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form And dark is His path on the wings of the storm.27

By equating overpoweringness with majesty Otto indicates that it is not just a matter of awesome power. It is a matter of “absolute unapproachability” (IH 20). It is also a matter of dependence that is not merely a matter of causal origin, not so much a “consciousness of createdness” as a: consciousness of creaturehood. In the one case you have the creature as the work of the divine creative act; in the other, impotence and general nothingness as against overpowering might, dust and ashes as against “majesty.” In the one case you have the fact of having been created; in the other, the status of the creature. (IH 20–1)

This consciousness embodies a “self-depreciation” that can even be understood as an “annihilation of the self ” (IH 21). If one nevertheless speaks to the “absolutely unapproachable” one, one speaks with Abraham, who says: “Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes” (Genesis 18.27 NRSV; IH 20–1). Otto quotes from William James: The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that He was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two. (IH 22–3)28

Finally, Otto seeks to illuminate the tremendum in terms of energy or urgency. This is a way of talking about the “living God” as distinct from the God of the philosophers, who can be defined. Here, once again, Otto brings the wrath of



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God into the picture, along with theological voluntarism, as found, for example, in Luther’s controversy with Erasmus.29 In response to philosophical critiques of attempts to think of God as living and personal as “sheer anthropomorphism,” Otto replies that the critique is sound whenever it is forgotten that terms: borrowed from the sphere of human conative and affective life have value only as analogies … but [the opponents] are wrong, in so far as, this error not withstanding, these terms stood for a genuine aspect of the divine nature—its non-rational aspect—a due consciousness of which served to protect religion itself from being “rationalized” away. (IH 23)

When Otto turns to the fascinans, he posits a genuine dialectical tension: The Holy may appear to the mind [as] an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it somehow his own. (IH 31, emphasis added)

We have just noted how God self-identifies as a jealous God. But the statement as a whole reads this way: for I the LORD [Yahweh] your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Exodus 20.5-6 NRSV)

Right after the tremendum comes the fascinans; they are two sides of the same coin. Jealousy and love are often inextricably linked in human experience. Otto is suggesting that something analogous comes to light in the self-revelation of Yahweh.30 Similarly in the gospels, the Jesus who is a prophet of divine judgement is the one who says: “For God so loved the world …” (John 3.16). And the hymn cited above concludes, not with the tremendum but with the fascinans: Thy mercies how tender, how firm to the end, Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend.

Insofar as the numinous feeling has as its intentional object the God who is at once fearful and fascinating, awesome and attractive, I find myself thinking of the toddler in the presence of a very big dog. Doggies are so much fun to pet, or even hug, but this one is soooo big, it’s downright scary. So the hand that reaches

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out to pet the dog is of two minds: it seems to want to reach out and draw back at the same time.31 Otto notes that in relation to the tremendum, worship will consist largely in “expiation and propitiation, the averting or the appeasement of the ‘wrath’ of the numen.” He might well have added repentance, confession, and conversion. But it is only the fascinans that can explain: how it is that “the numinous” is the object of search and desire and yearning, and that too for its own sake and not only for the sake of the aid and backing that men expect from it in the natural sphere. (IH 32)32

To speak not only of expiation and propitiation but also of repentance, confession, and conversion is to anticipate what Otto calls “the Holy as a category of value.” In the presence of the Holy there occurs “another sort of selfdisvaluation,” different from the self-depreciation mentioned above. He cites the examples of Isaiah and Peter: “I am a man of unclean lips and dwell among a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6.5, as in IH 50); and “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5.8, as in IH 50). Liturgically expressed, this experience comes out as: “Tu solus sanctus”.33 This sanctus is not merely “perfect” or “beautiful” or “sublime” or “good”, though, being like these concepts also a value, objective and ultimate, it has a definite, perceptible analogy with them. It is the positive numinous value or worth, and to it, and to it corresponds on the side of the creature a numinous disvalue or “unworthy”… The object of such praise is not simply absolute might, making its claims and compelling their fulfillment, but a might that has at the same time the supremest right to make the highest claim “Thou art worthy to receive praise and honour and power” (Rev iv 11). (IH 51–2)

This dimension of numinous feeling might lead one, with Matthew Arnold, to define religion as “morality tinged with emotion.” But Otto wants to avoid any hint of reducing religion to morality; he is closer to saying that the core of religion is a certain feeling tinged with morality. The Holy has a transformative significance for any would-be autonomous morality, but it is not derived therefrom nor subordinated to it.34 The self-depreciation of Isaiah and Peter does not spring from the consciousness of some committed transgression, but rather is an immediate datum given with the feeling of the numen: it proceeds to “disvalue” together with the self the tribe to which the person belongs, and indeed, together with that, all existence in general … these outbursts of feeling are not simply, and probably at first not at all, moral depreciations. (IH 50–1)



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It follows that: “sin” is not understood by the “natural”, or even by the merely moral, man … Mere morality is not the soil from which grows either the need of “redemption” and deliverance or the need for that other unique good which is likewise altogether and specifically numinous in character, “covering”, and “atonement.” (IH 52–3)

This means that the feelings of guilt and remorse that arise from moral transgression are but analogs of genuinely religious correlates, a sense of pollution or defilement, even of self-loathing, along with a need for washing and cleansing. “The two kinds of self-depreciation proceed on parallel lines and may be related to the same action, but none the less it is obvious that they are, inwardly and in their essence, determinately different” (IH 55–6). Otto speaks regularly of atonement or expiation but, surprisingly, not of forgiveness. He should have, for while he links the need for atonement with the tremendum aspect of the Holy as a category of value, he links the offer of atonement and thereby forgiveness with the fascinans. “That God none the less admits access to Himself and intimacy with Himself is not a mere matter of course; it is a grace beyond our power to apprehend, a prodigious paradox” (IH 56). In other words, in the realm of sin, atonement, and forgiveness (the restoration of intimate access) we remain within the domain of the non-rational. Morality can fit itself within the realm of the rational;35 religion cannot.

****** I have suggested that Otto is a postmodern phenomenologist and given a brief sketch and interpretation of his descriptions of the numinous, both as a distinctive feeling and as the “object” of that feeling (noesis–noema correlation). Now I want to bring him into conversation, however briefly, with thinkers with whom valuable cross-fertilization is possible and whose relation to Otto is worthy of further exploration. First, there is Jean-Luc Marion. Like Otto, he claims to be a phenomenologist but often speaks as a theologian. Moreover, he helps us to draw the line between the two. What the theologian affirms by faith as actual fact, the phenomenologist describes only as possible experience. “Between phenomenology and theology the frontier passes between revelation as possibility and revelation as historicity. Between these two domains there is no possible danger of confusion.”36 This

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means that the very same accounts can be read either as theology or phenomenology. The believer can read Otto’s accounts of the numinous as descriptions of the veridical experience of the actual presence of the God of the Abrahamic monotheisms (or of the Hindu oneness with Atman or the Buddhist emptiness); while the phenomenologist, whether a believer or not, can read the same descriptions as an account of the correlation of an intentional act (noesis) with its intentional “object” (noema) under the bracketing of independent reality that Husserl calls the epoché or the phenomenological reduction. But Marion has a more substantive relation to Otto. At the heart of his phenomenology of religion is the notion of the saturated phenomenon. It can be read as a commentary on the holy as mysterium, as that which exceeds our concepts and our language.37 Husserl defines truth in terms of adequation, the fulfillment in intuition of what our intentions intend.38 Common phenomena are poor in intuition; they give less than is intended by our perceptions and the concepts we use to describe or identify them. Thus, when I see a barn and call it a barn I intend far more than is given to visual intuition, such as the back side and the inside of the barn. The perceptual and verbal intentions are only partially fulfilled, are inadequate to their intended object. Just the opposite imbalance occurs in the saturated phenomenon, and adequation or fulfillment will again be an ideal never fully realized, but this time because of an excess or surplus of intuition rather than a shortfall. More is given than can be taken in, com-prehended: To the phenomenon supposedly poor in intuition, can’t we oppose a phenomenon saturated with intuition? To the phenomenon characterized most often by lack or poverty of intuition [relative to what is intended] … why wouldn’t there correspond the possibility of a phenomenon where intuition would give more, indeed immeasurably more, than the intention would ever have aimed at or foreseen? (BG 197)

Marion claims that acts of revelation in which the divine appears and thus becomes phenomenal are just such saturated phenomena. Examples of what he has in mind are “the manifestation of Jesus Christ, as it is described in the New Testament (and … the theophanies of the Old)” (BG 236). To refute the all but inevitable charge that by focusing on such specifically religious content (like Otto) he has abandoned phenomenology for theology, Marion immediately precedes this reference with his standard disclaimer: I am obliged here—in phenomenology, where possibility remains the norm, and not actuality—only to describe it in its pure possibility and in the



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reduced immanence of givenness. I do not here have to judge its actual manifestation or ontic status, which remain the business proper to revealed theology. (BG 236)

Thus, for example, one can describe the noetic–noematic structure of Moses’ experience at the burning bush (Exodus 3) without affirming that God spoke to Moses there or even that there is a God.39 It is obvious that the saturated phenomenon belongs to the domain of the non-rational in Otto’s sense. By definition it overwhelms the boundaries of our concepts and language. In that sense we are dealing with the mysterium. But, like Otto, Marion does not think this involves any mystery mongering or irrationality. He seeks to show this by calling our attention in two ways to various non-religious phenomena that we take for granted but which are also saturated with an excess of intuition to which no concepts are adequate. In the first case, like Otto, he points to the sublime and the beautiful as delineated by Kant, who contrasts “the aesthetic idea” with “the rational idea.” There are three of the latter: God, soul, and world,40 or, perhaps, God, freedom, and immortality: No actual experience has ever been completely adequate to [the rational idea], yet to it every actual experience belongs … If the concepts of reason contain the unconditioned, they are concerned with something to which all experience is subordinate, but which is never itself an object of experience … But only the totality of things, in their interconnection as constituting the universe, is completely adequate to the [rational] idea.41

Here, experience falls short of the concept since the object that would be adequate to the concept—the unconditioned, the totality—is not given in intuition, and “neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.”42 The rational idea falls short of adequation and thereby of knowledge in the first of these ways. The aesthetic idea, the sublime and the beautiful, fail in the second way. Kant writes, “[The aesthetic idea] is an intuition (of the imagination) for which a concept can never be found adequate … [It] occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it.”43 As he famously puts it more generally, “intuitions without concepts are blind.”44 Of course, the aesthetic idea and the saturated phenomenon are not entirely without concepts. We can and do talk about them and their intended “objects.” But our concepts and our language are never adequate, never

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capture their noematic correlate without remainder or in full transparency. So, where Kant denies knowledge, Otto declares mystery, and Marion speaks of paradox (BG 225). For like the feeling of the numinous, the experience of divine revelation is analogous to, that is, both like and unlike, aesthetic experience. The second way in which Marion points to ordinary, non-religious saturated phenomena is to list four different types, one of which overlaps with the discussion of the sublime and the beautiful. They are the event, the idol, the flesh, and the icon (BG 228–33).45 By the event he means ordinary historical events such as the reign of Henry VIII or the French Revolution. No theories about or narrative descriptions of such an event can ever exhaust the data that are available (or answer questions for which there is little or no data). The historian is exhausted long before historical writing exhausts or adequately accounts for all the evidence “given” to the historian’s “intuition.” By the idol Marion means the work of art. He focuses on the painting, but he could just as well have included other kinds of artwork, including literary works of art. Just as no art critic can exhaust the meaning of Monet’s Japanese footbridge paintings, or Michelangelo’s David, or the buildings and gardens of the Alhambra, so no literary critic can exhaust Shakespeare’s plays or sonnets, or the novels of Dostoyevsky. By the flesh Marion means our bodies as we experience them from “inside.”46 To say that strawberries are sweet or that lemons are sour is hardly to give an adequate account of how they taste. What are sometimes called “raw feels” such as tickles, itches, and aches are even less open to capture by language. By the icon Marion means the face of the other, especially as described by Levinas.47 The face and the discourse of the other is ethically significant insofar as they intend me with a gaze or an address that interrupts and challenges my intendings and interpretations, calling me to a responsibility I do not give to myself. This experience is not adequately expressed in the rational ethics of Kant or Mill. Thus the phenomena of revelation are not unique insofar as they are saturated phenomena that overflow the capacities of our concepts and language. They represent a special case of a very familiar structure. This fifth type of saturation is very special indeed for Marion. It: concentrates the four types of saturated phenomena and is given at once as historic event, idol, flesh, and icon (face) … [it is] the ultimate variation on



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saturation … the paradox to the second degree and par excellence, which encompasses all types of paradox. (BG 235).48

How so? Take Moses at the burning bush. We have an historical event that is idol (immersed in images and language), flesh (evocative of unique and inexpressible affect), and icon (a call to responsibility that comes from beyond the human person caught up in the event). Two comparisons with Otto, ever so briefly and (is it not fitting?) inadequately. First, Marion focuses all but entirely on the epistemic aspect of religious experience and thus on Otto’s mysterium. He does little to develop either the tremendum or the fascinans. But in this way he links his analysis more closely to the apophatic traditions in theology and gives them a phenomenological correlate. Second, by engaging directly with the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger,49 he invokes “an intentionality of a wholly different type.”50 I call it inverted intentionality; Marion calls it “counter-experience.”51 The idea is that the experience of the other, including that of the Wholly Other, is not merely intentional, as Otto insists, but one in which our intentions are relativized by an intentionality that comes toward us from beyond rather than from within us. We are seen; we are addressed. Our ego and its horizons of expectation are breached, surprised, and overwhelmed by what they could not, in principle, anticipate. There is a passivity in which we no longer have the initiative (BG 215–19). In this way, Marion develops the phenomenological character of his work more fully than does Otto, making it more explicit in the process. Jacques Derrida is also very interested in the mysterium tremendum, the “secret” or the “mystery of the sacred.”52 He links the mysterium tremendum as the “wholly and infinite other” with “an intentionality of a wholly different type,” an “inverted intentionality,” a “counter-experience”: being seen without being able to see the seer (GD 2, 6, 24–5, 31–3, 40, 56, 91, 93). The fundamental structure of intentionality, consciousness of …, is not the intending of an object by a subject but the awareness of a subject being seen by another. In this experience, “my gaze … is no longer the measure of all things” (GD 27). Derrida makes an epistemic, an ontological, and an ethical statement about our encounter with the mystery of the sacred. The epistemic point is obvious enough: we are in the realm of mystery, of the non-rational, of inadequate thematization (GD 25). Any seeing, thinking, or speaking about the other that sees us will fail the adequation test. Discourse will be qualified by the apophatic.53 The ontological point comes in the use of “transcendence” to describe the unseen seer who sees me (GD 25, 33, 40, 67, 73, 77–8). In terms of

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inadequate thematization there is, of course, an epistemic transcendence. But it is ontological as well. Transcendence is redefined, not in cosmological terms about the relation of God to the world, but in terms of inverted intentionality. The other transcends me by seeing me and addressing me. The ontological alterity of the other is the ground of the epistemic limitation. Counter-experience also has ontological significance for the self. Derrida speaks of “the terrifying mystery, the dread, the fear and trembling” in the presence of the mysterium tremendum: This trembling seizes one at the moment of becoming a person, and the person can become what it is only in being paralyzed, in its very singularity, by the gaze of God Then it sees itself seen by the gaze of another.

In other words, this experience involves “a genealogy of the subject” (GD 6, 3).54 This (very Levinasian) ethical point speaks of “a gaze that I don’t see and that remains secret from me although it commands me.” The mysterium tremendum comes as a gift, but “it is a goodness whose inaccessibility acts as a command to the donee. It subjects its receivers, giving itself to them as goodness itself but also as the law … the new figure of responsibility” (GD 27, 41). These three dimensions are intertwined as, well, just that: three dimensions of one space. The ontological theme is the ground of the epistemic limitation, and it expresses itself in an alterity that is ethical and not merely ontological. We might say that Derrida sums up his threefold (postmodern) analysis of the Wholly Other by saying that we have left behind the world of Kantian autonomy for the heteronomy of an “it’s my lookout” even when I can’t see anything and can take no initiative, there where I cannot preempt by my own initiative whatever is commanding me to make decisions, decisions that will nevertheless be mine and which I along will have to answer for. (GD 91)55

The threefold alterity of the Wholly Other has its telos, not in epistemology or in ontology but in an ethics of responsibility. This analysis takes place in the theistic-Christian context set by Derrida’s interlocutor, Patočka. But Derrida does not leave it there. He is interested in “religion without religion,” without “institutional dogma” and any “article of faith” (GD 49). Also, it appears, without God. For the final chapter of his book is entitled Tout Autre Est Tout Autre, every other is wholly other. What if one says, with Levinas, that “each man and woman” is wholly other? “If every human is wholly other … then one can no longer distinguish a claimed generality



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of ethics … and the faith that turns toward God alone.” This applies to both Kierkegaard and Levinas: [Kierkegaard] cannot therefore distinguish so conveniently between the ethical and the religious … Levinas is no longer able to distinguish the infinite alterity of God and that of every human. His ethics is already a religious one. In the two cases the border between the ethical and the religious becomes more than problematic. (GD 84)56

Derrida seems to want to leave it undecidable whether tout autre est tout autre signifies a reduction of religion to ethics in a kind of Feuerbachian atheism in which talk about God is really a misunderstood discourse about human persons—or whether it signifies a move in the direction of the so-called moral argument for the existence of God in the sense that the moral dimension of human persons points in the direction of God as its source.57 But, for Derrida, objective undecidability calls for subjective decision, and his “religion without religion” seems to be quite explicitly non-theistic: We should stop thinking about God as someone, over there, way up there, transcendent, and, what is more—into the bargain, precisely—capable, more than any satellite orbiting in space, of seeing into the most secret of the most interior places.

Over against this “idolatrous stereotyping … we might say: God is the name for the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior” (GD 108). Again, all too briefly, Kierkegaard.58 In telling the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac from Genesis 22, the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio speaks of the “shudder” he experienced, of his being “repelled” and “shattered” by the “terrifying,” of the “horror religiosis,” of “distress and anxiety,” “sleeplessness,” and “dreadfulness.”59 Perhaps he has been reading Otto on the tremendum. And when Kierkegaard speaks here and elsewhere of paradox, the absurd, and madness in connection with faith, it is clear he knows something about the mysterium. But it is another Kierkegaardian locution that interests me here. Another pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, coins the phrase with which Karl Barth will later shake up the world of liberal Protestant theology.60 There is an “infinite qualitative difference between God and man.”61 In a penetrating study of Kierkegaard’s writings, Simon Podmore relates this language to Otto’s. He begins by saying that his project began with the

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assumption that the dramatic difference between God and humanity “was essentially sin.”62 Not without reason. The pseudonymous author of Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus, says as much: But if the god is to be absolutely different from a human being, this can have its basis not in that which man owes to the god (for to that extent they are akin) but in that which he owes to himself or in that which he himself has committed. What, then, is the difference? Indeed, what else but sin.

But Climacus goes right on to say that the paradox of the Incarnation is absolute but two-sided—“negatively, by bringing into prominence the absolute difference of sin and, positively, by wanting to annul this absolute difference in the absolute equality.”63 It is as if Podmore takes his cue from this second passage, for he continues his opening statement: Mercifully, [my project] concluded with the conviction that the true meaning of the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity is expressed through forgiveness … There is a mystery in this abyss, and the great mysterium of the abyss is divine forgiveness.64

Just as Otto’s discussion of the wrath of God and of atonement can be correlated with the tremendum and the fascinans, respectively, so Podmore’s reflections on sin and forgiveness express this dialectical tension. Podmore draws an interesting and challenging conclusion: God remains other—albeit, this work argues, the Holy Other that is revealed in forgiveness, rather than the Wholly Other that is primarily discerned through the consciousness of sin and despair … I explore the proposition that the Wholly Otherness of God is best expressed through a theology of the forgiveness of sins, rather than being articulated solely by way of self-accusation and the consciousness of sin In this sense, I question the assumption that the “Wholly Other” is appropriate as a final designation for God in Kierkegaard’s writings … When the name of the “Wholly Other” is applied to God solely from the perspective of sin, we risk being left with the remote God of despair rather than the intimate God of faith.65

But if we read Kierkegaard carefully, we will not rest with a simple contrast between sin, tremendum, and Wholly Other on the one hand and forgiveness, fascinans, and Holy Other on the other. The dialectical tension is tighter than that, and the fascinans itself partakes of the tremendum. Podmore hints at this tension with a notion of inverted intentionality but does not quite cash it in.



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“The self ’s own self-searching gaze is lost in the swarming darkness of the abyss; and so the self must see itself through the gaze of the Other … through the forgiving gaze of the divine.”66 There are two obstacles to a pure fascinans here. First, the necessity of seeing oneself through the eyes of another, even friendly eyes, is a challenge to my autonomy, my desire to define myself, my world, and even God, for that matter.67 In the language of Anti-Climacus I may well be offended. Second, to be seen through God’s eyes is to be seen not merely as forgiven but as a sinner needing forgiveness. As Luther puts it, believers know themselves to be simul justus et peccator, simultaneously justified or forgiven and a sinner. Once again, I may be offended and find the offer of forgiveness repelling rather than attractive, more tremendum than fascinans. Anti-Climacus exhibits this structure. He begins Practice in Christianity with the good news of a beautiful invitation from Matthew 11.28, “COME HERE, ALL YOU WHO LABOR AND ARE BURDENED, AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST.” But then he notices that many who are contemporary with Jesus, among whom he numbers himself and his readers, flee and, either early or late, become hostile—in short, offended.68 So at what he calls the crossroad, there are always the two alternatives: offense or faith. There is much more to be said about Otto’s possible relation to contemporary continental philosophy and about his relation to each of the three thinkers discussed here. I hope that others will find the connections suggested here illuminating and that some will explore them further.

Notes 1 See Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak, Jeffrey L. Kosky, and Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). For a splendid overview that focuses on the French but also includes Heidegger and several American contributors to the discussion, see Christina M. Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics: Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 2 Included in Thomas Sheehan (ed.), Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981), p. 23. 3 Husserl and Otto were colleagues, in different departments of course, at Göttingen University from 1904 to 1914. 4 The phrase is from the title of Kant’s “fourth critique,” Religion Within the

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Early Phenomenology Boundaries of Mere Reason: And Other Writings, trans. Allen Wood et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See Sheehan, Heidegger, p. 25. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 1. Henceforth cited as IH in notes and text. Cf. pp. 56, 142, 173. John W. Harvey in the Translator’s Preface to IH, p. x. Regardless of their theory of the relation between Scripture and tradition, theologians regularly draw on both in the construction of their systems. See, for example, the two volumes mention in note 1 above. apophatics,” The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 28, 32, 41, 46, 55, 106. Thus John D. Caputo tells us that Derrida’s philosophy of language is a “generalized apophatics.” The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, pp. 28, 32, 41, 46, 55, 106. In much the same way, Jean-Luc Marion speaks of saturated phenomena, of which religious phenomena are an important, special case, in terms of “excess.” In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002); and Jean-Louis Chrétien speaks of prayer in terms of “the wounded word.” See Janicaud, Phenomenology, pp. 147–75. William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 16 n. Augustine and Aquinas are classical representatives of this distinction, as is the distinction between recollection and revelation in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. The best illustrations of the hegemony strategy in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, respectively, are found in the philosophies of religion of Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel. Theologies grounded in biblical revelation are reinterpreted in terms of “rational” criteria derived from a reason not dependent on revelation. Once again there is an analogy with Derrida. “Deconstruction means to complicate reference, not to deny it.” See John Caputo, Prayers and Tears, pp. 15–17. See note 10 above. See Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, eds, H. R. Mackintosh and J. .S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928), p. 12. Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 22. The interior quotation is from Robert R. Williams, Schleiermacher the Theologian (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), p. 23. Otto quotes William James from his discussion of Greek religion, “It is as if there



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were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed” (IH 10 n.). See The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: New American Library, 1958), p. 61. Italics are James’s. This brings to mind the oft-quoted saying of Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellendorff, “Die Götter sind da”—The gods are there. Der Glaube der Hellenen (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1931–2), I, 17. Proudfoot, Religious Experience, p. 27. Alfred Jules Ayer, Logic, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover, n.d.), p. 44. Cf. Chapter 6, “Critique of Ethics and Theology.” Proudfoot, Religious Experience, pp. 85–9. Proudfoot appeals here to the analysis of Anthony Kenney, Action, Emotion, and Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963). For more recent defenses of the intentional character (objective reference) of emotions, see Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals in Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Robert C. Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). William J. Wainwright, “Otto, Rudolf,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press, 1967), VI, 14a. The interior quotation is from IH 10. Augustine, Confessions, XI, 9. Rex Warner translates: “What is that light that shines through me and strikes my heart without hurting it? I am both terrified and set on fire. Terrified insofar as I am unlike it, on fire insofar as I am akin to it.” The Confessions of St. Augustine (New York: New American Library, 1963). Gabriel Marcel distinguishes between a mystery and a problem in a similar fashion. See, for example, Creative Fidelity, trans. Robert Rosthal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 23–4, 56, 68, 78–80; The Mystery of Being, trans. G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960), vol. 1, Ch. X; and “On the Ontological Mystery,” in The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), especially p. 22. Also see the discussion in Brian Treanor, Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel, and the Contemporary Debate, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), pp. 62–5. One of Marcel’s favorite examples is our body, or perhaps our embodiment, for he doesn’t mean the body as an object of observation. See previous note. Truth has classically been defined as the adequatio rei et intellectus or adequatio intellectus ad rem, the correspondence between the intellect and the thing, its object. The realist claim is not only that the world is and is what it is independently of what we may think or say about it, but also that what we think or say can pass the adequation test. The term “adequation” has “equation” in it.

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Early Phenomenology Just as in an equation such as A2 + B2 = C2 one side is equal to the other, so in truth as correspondence or adequation, what is in the mind is exactly the same as what is in the world. That our descriptions of the Holy are inadequate for Otto shows that he is an anti-realist, in good postmodern fashion, for the realist claim is that our beliefs, judgements, statements, etc., can be adequate to their intended object. Otherwise we are back with Kant, the paradigmatic anti-realist. From the hymn, “O Worship the King,” by Robert Grant. I write this just weeks after hurricane Sandy devastated the area in which I live. See James, Varieties, p. 67. See The Bondage of the Will in Luther’s Works, vol. 33, ed. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972). For a reminder of the limits of analogical predication, see IH 32. ‘On this ambivalence in relation to the Holy, see my analysis in God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), Chs 2–3. With reference to the “for its own sake,” see God, Guilt, and Death, Ch. 7, “Religion as Means and as End” and Ch. 8, “Prayer and Sacrifice as Useless Self-Transcendence.” “You alone are the Holy One,” from the Gloria of the Mass or traditional Eucharistic liturgy. Here Otto differs sharply from Kant and Levinas. See next note. According to Kant and Otto, but not according to Kierkegaard in Works of Love or Levinas. For the latter pair morality and religion are more closely linked, though differently. See previous note and my Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) and Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion, ed., J. Aaron Simmons and David Wood (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). Jean-Luc Marion, Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Summary for Theologians, in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. Graham Ward, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 293, cf. 280. See also “In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of ‘Negative Theology’,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 39; and Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 5, 234–6, 242. Henceforth cited as BG in notes and text. It is no accident that Marion pays major attention to the apophatic traditions in theology, sometimes referred to as “negative theology.” See “In the Name” (as per previous note) and “The Distance of the Requisite and the Discourse of Praise: Denys,” in The Idol and Distance, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), pp. 139–97. For a superb analysis of this dimension of



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his thought, see Tamsin Jones, A Genealogy of Marion’s Philosophy of Religion: Apparent Darkness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). See note 26 above. Marion quotes Husserl to this effect from Logical Investigations in BG 190. For the sake of simplicity I shall draw on his account of the saturated phenomenon in this text. Marion’s earlier introduction of the notion is the essay, “The Saturated Phenomenon,” found in three places: Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”; Philosophy Today, 40 (1) (Spring, 1996); and Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). For an analogous example, see my “Transfiguration as Saturated Phenomenon,” Between Description and Interpretation: The Hermeneutic Turn in Phenomenology, ed. Andrzej Wiercinski (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2005), pp. 501–12. An earlier, shorter version of this essay is found in Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, 1 (1) (2003) www.philosophyandscripture.org Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A334–5 = B391–2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A311 = B367 and A318 = B374–5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A50 = B74. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 218, 192 (§§57, 49), respectively. Marion cites these passages at Being Given, p. 198. Critique of Pure Reason, A51 = B75. In Excess is a more detailed study of these four types of saturated phenomena. See note 25 above. The distinction between idol and icon that is at work here is different from that distinction as drawn earlier in God Without Being, trans. Thomas C. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Chs 1–2. There, “idol” has a negative connotation that it does not have in Being Given. Cf. p. 245, where this phenomenon is “the paradox of paradoxes.” For extended critique of their phenomenologies, see Marion’s Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). The phrase comes from Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 23. See my “Inverted Intentionality: On Being Seen and Being Addressed,” Faith and Philosophy, 26(3) (2009), pp. 233–52; and Being Given, p. 215. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 1. Henceforth cited as GD in notes and text. Unfortunately and inexcusably, the pagination of the second edition (2007) is different. Most of the discussion of this theme is in dialogue with Jan Patocka, and

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Early Phenomenology it is not always clear where Derrida is summarizing him and where he is giving his own analysis. See notes 10 and 37 above. This account, drawing as it does on Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Patocka, offers one rather clear answer to the question posed by the volume, Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), which is a fine introduction to postmodern departures from Cartesian, Kantian, Hegelian, and Husserlian views of the subject. For another Derridean affirmation of heteronomy, see “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 99. On my reading, Levinas does distinguish between the two and ends up reducing religion to ethics as a kind of Feuerbachian atheist. See Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue, especially Chs 3–4. The Kierkegaard reference is to Fear and Trembling, and the “generality of ethics” is Hegelian, though the point applies with important modifications to Kantian ethics as well. For Feuerbach, see The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957). A popular version of the moral argument for theism is found in C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Collins, 1952). For contemporary philosophical analysis, see C. Stephen Evans, “Moral Arguments,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, 2nd edn, ed. Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper, and Philip L. Quinn (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 385–91; Paul Copan, “The Moral Argument,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. Chad Meister and Paul Copan (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 362–72. On the possibility of reading Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist, see the essays in Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment, ed. Jeffrey Hanson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010). Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 9, 33, 61, 65, 72, 75, 77–8, 114. In The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933/68). Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 99, 117, 121–2, 126–7, 129, 175; and Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 28, 30–2, 63, 128, 131. Variations include: “deep gulf of qualitative difference,” simply “qualitative difference,” “most chasmal qualitative abyss,” “infinite, chasmal, qualitative abyss,”



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“infinitely extraordinary,” “infinite qualitative distance,” and “infinite qualitative contradiction” between God and human persons. Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. xi. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 46–7. Podmore, Abyss, pp. xi–xii. Cf. pp. xvi, 7. Podmore, Abyss, pp. xiv–xv, xvii–xviii. Kierkegaard’s reflections on forgiveness as the fascinans are perhaps best found in his communion discourses. See Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). See also George Pattison’s discussion of the Christian experience of being “ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,” especially in relation to the two communion discourses on the woman who was a sinner (Luke 7.36-49). Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 205–10. The quoted phrase is from the hymn version of Psalm 103 by Henry F. Lyte, “Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven.” The discourses are the tenth and twelfth communion discourses in Walsh. Podmore, Abyss, pp. xii–xiii. Cf. xv. See my analysis of Sartre in “Inverted Intentionality,” pp. 238–42. Kierkegaard, Practice, nos I and II.

Index Abraham/Abrahamic 41, 175, 214, 222, 225, 231 aesthetics 17, 84, 92, 143–8, 151, 227–8 anti-idealism 9, 107–8 Aquinas, Thomas 153, 162–3 Aristotle 43, 55,57, 125, 142, 153, 186, 219 art/artwork 17, 141, 143, 146–8, 152–6, 214, 228 Augustine 41, 59, 142, 152, 199, 219, 221 Bonhoeffer, Deitrich 9, 181–212 brain 150–2 Buber, Martin 8, 39, 141–60 Cairns, Dorian 4, 13–15, 18, 19–21 Carmelites 9, 162, 174 contar con 111, 119–21 Dasein 8, 84, 127–8, 129–31, 135, 141–2, 142–4, 148–59, 156, 200–1, 202 death of God 155, 156, 181 Derrida, Jacques 9, 229–31 Descartes, René 16, 110, 186, 192 dread 72, 77, 222–3, 230, 231 emotions 6, 49–52, 54–5, 58, 59, 72–4, 219–21 epoché 21, 94, 226 see also reduction faith 33, 38, 41, 43, 79, 153, 156, 167, 169, 171–4, 189–90, 194, 201, 204–5, 215–16, 230–3 feelings, 49, 51, 55–9, 75, 184, 199, 217–20, 225 Feuerbach, Ludwig 142, 143, 231 Freiburg (school of phenomenology) 5, 13, 16, 18–22, 90 Geiger, Moritz 17, 31, 88, 92–3, 95, 98 God 38, 41–2, 43, 45–6, 78–82, 118, 142, 147–8, 152, 153–4, 156, 165–70, 171, 172–3, 174–8, 181, 182–3, 187,

188, 189, 191, 194–7, 198–9, 201–3, 214, 216–17, 222–5, 227, 229–33 Göttingen (school of phenomenology) 5, 13–16, 18, 20, 22, 31, 87, 92 grace 146, 151, 154–6, 196, 225 guilt 144, 225 Harman, Graham 108–11, 113 Hartmann, Nicolai 7–8, 125–37 Hegel, G. W. F. 121, 142, 153, 185, 188, 190, 204, 216 Heidegger, Martin 1–3, 7–10, 18, 90, 108, 111, 114–15, 125–37, 141–57, 163, 166, 172, 181, 197, 200–1, 229 Henry, Michel 108–9, 174, 176–177 heteronomy 230 Hildebrand, Deitrich von 2, 5–6, 8–9, 17–18, 31–48 Holy (The) 8–9, 155, 175, 199, 213–33 homeless(ness) 142, 144 Hume, David 72, 219 Husserl, Edmund 1–3, 7–10, 13–22, 26, 31, 71, 81, 87, 88–98, 107–8, 110–14, 120, 125, 161–4, 176–7, 181, 197–200, 213–15, 217–18, 226, 229 Ingarden, Roman 5, 10, 18, 91 Intentionality 51, 55, 108–9, 120, 128, 163, 165–8, 170–7, 199, 202, 218, 229, 232 James, Williams 13, 215, 222 jealousy 50 jealousy, God 222 John of the Cross 161–4, 166–9, 171, 174, 176–7 Kant, Immanuel 16, 135, 172, 187–8, 193, 196–7, 227–8 Kierkegaard, Soren 9, 142, 147–8, 191, 195, 216, 230–2

242 Index Lacoste, Jean-Yves 201 Levinas, Emmanuel 8, 18, 31, 120, 189–90, 193, 200, 228, 230 Lipps, Theodor 18, 74, 89–91, 92–3, 95, 96,98 love/loving 6, 31–47, 72,80, 108, 152, 163, 166–8, 171–5, 184, 187, 199, 204, 223 Marias, Julian 108–10 Marion, Jean-Luc 6, 8–9, 31, 44, 111, 120, 201–2, 225–9 meditative thinking 143, 154–5 Meillassoux, Quentin 7, 126, 133, 136–7 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1, 2, 13, 149, 185 Moses 189, 227–8 mysterium tremendum 214, 220–1, 226–7, 229, 230–2 mystery (of being) 147–9, 155–6 Neo-Kantian(ism) 4, 16, 125, 127–8, 135 neuroscience 22, 150 Nietzsche, Friedrich 54, 89, 142, 148, 155–6 noesis/noema 26, 217–18, 225–7 Ortega y Gasset, Jose 2, 7, 18, 87, 107–24 Otto, Rudolf 2, 8, 9, 213–39 Parmenides 153–4 Pfländer, Alexander 5, 7, 15, 17–18, 87–103 Plato 34, 152–3 realism 95, 108–10 non-transendental 17 phenomenological or transcendental 17, 198 speculative 108–11, 125, 126, 133–6 reduction eidetic 21 phenomenological (epoché) 7, 94, 95, 109–10, 112–15, 198, 226 transcendental 16–17, 71, 121

Reinach, Adolf 5, 6, 17–19, 31 remorse 225 reparar 111, 119–22 repentance 224 resoluteness 143–4, 147–8 Ritzel, Hermann 17–18 San Martín, Javier 111–12 Sartre, Jean-Paul 1, 2, 13, 60 saturated phenomenon 120, 202, 226–7 Scheler, Max 2–3, 5–6, 10, 14, 18, 31, 37, 38, 49–66, 126, 128, 131–2, 142, 163, 181, 188, 197–200, 204 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 199, 215, 217–19 Schutz, Alfred 5, 13, 14, 17–18, 20 self-emptying 170, 173 self-loathing 225 soul 97, 147, 151, 164–7, 169, 171, 173, 206, 227 specualitve realism see realism, speculative Spiegelberg, Herbert 15, 17, 18, 22, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94 Spinoza, Benedict 144 standing reserve 141, 154, 156 Stein, Edith 2–3, 8–9, 14, 18–19, 67, 81, 161–80 Steinbock, Anthony 174–6, 177 the anyone (crowd, masses) 144, 147 The Numinous 214–18, 220, 223–5, 227 theological turn 8, 213–14 Theresa of Avila 9, 161–2, 164–7, 169, 174–5, 177–8 thing-in-itself 128, 136, 146 Thou 39, 141, 143, 145–7, 149–56, 184, 190 tree(s) 141, 143, 149–52 voice 152, 155, 166 Yahweh 155, 223 Zizioulas, John 6, 31–48